ProfAFinlayson

Annie Kelly has a new miniseries about Trad wives, and the first two episodes dropped today on our new network cursedmedia.net

Check it out!! And peep this trailer I made for the occasion!

Jean Finlayson obituary Other lives: Campaigning journalist who wrote for the Guardian and the Times

My sister has written and published a fine obituary for our mother who died in August. She really had a particular sort of quintessential 20th century life. www.theguardian.com/media/2025/o...

2025: Decadent Politics — BADS BADS Jeudis 2025

Is our politics sliding into decadence or is the discourse of decadence to blame?

I'll be talking about all that on Nov. 6th at Goldsmiths with people from Classics, Ancient History, Literature & Theatre. Sadly, practical dimension but the talk will be good. bads.gold.ac.uk/decadent-pol...

Divided we stand? Part of the Festival of Economics 2025

I am heading back to my Somerset-ish homelands on 18th Nov. to take part in the (impressive) Bristol Festival of Economics. I am part of a panel on polarisation alongside people much more expert than I, who will make it well worth attending.

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/divided-we...

From the ABoringDystopia community on Reddit: Ragebaiters are using AI to create videos of black women screaming at people and being public nuisances, in order to divide people. Explore this post and more from the ABoringDystopia community

It's too late to worry about what will happen when AI slop deepfakes are deployed by ideological entrepreneurs to promote internecine conflict, poison public discourse and disable the functioning of democratic deliberation.

That's what's happening now.

www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDys...

1. Prison and Probation Service (and CJS generally) brought to its knees by cuts, subcontracting, & endless 'efficiency reforms'.

2. Bad consequences follow.

3. Outrage from those who brought the service to its knees.

NEW EPISODE OUT NOW!

In today’s episode David & @dmk1793.bsky.social try to answer some of the hundreds of questions, comments and suggestions we have had about this series. How do we know if democracy is broken? Have we ever had a real democracy anyway?

Find us at...🎧 ppfideas.com

Highlighted quotation: “As an economist, Low searched for a more precise term to describe how she and other working moms often find themselves stretched for time and energy. She came up with “the squeeze”, and it’s backed by data that shows how women often get burnt out trying to manage competing demands at home and work, especially when they are parenting young children.”

BREAKING: economist discovers “second shift,” a concept coined by sociologists almost 50 years ago; gives it new, stupider, and less explicitly labor-oriented name

They’re giving headline space to remarks made by the losing candidate in another nation’s election a year ago - because the interview is on their ‘flagship’ Sunday morning TV show. The Pochin story gets spiked because they don’t want to plug LBC, a rival broadcaster. Political judgement is nowhere.

That’s absolutely right. Both party and ‘national’ media assume some voters ‘naturally’ want Labour, so analysis has to explain why voters didn’t do what they were supposed to. Lab can’t understand UK politics because they can’t see it’s Labour that is the aberration now.

Another - quite different - kind of reasoning is:

I oppose party y.
I think party x is soft on party y. I think party z is better at opposing party.

The term for this is ‘voting’.

The explanation of the result in Caerphilly is that people voted.

An observation on language and the Caerphilly by-election result.

I’ve read that the result is the outcome of ‘tactical voting’.

I define tactical voting as this reasoning.

I support party x.
I oppose party y.
In order to achieve the latter I will vote party z (1/2)

Not quite sure why the media is presenting the Caerphilly result as a disaster for Labour, rather than as a perfect execution of its electoral strategy.

That strategy for *months* now has been to tell everybody who might otherwise be inclined to vote for them to fuck off.

And off they have fucked.

The underlying problem is that institutions lack - for many reasons - a stable/clear measure of the cost & value of activities. So they keep making them up. Behaviour adapts & the gap between reality and what the system sees widens. That gap is filled with mutual resentment of staff/administrators.

I once had a person with research management responsibility over my team, insisting that we must each apply for a certain amount of funding per year, get cross when I pointed out that we’d be applying for more than the relevant council awarded in total over a year, and that this was irrational (2/3)

Is this the result of under-awarding or over-applying? It’s both of course but it’s a particular problem that institutions require evidence of applying as part of promotions: they incentivise activity which cannot in all cases pay off, using up resources in performative performance review (1/3).

@gabrielmilland.bsky.social @colmpm.bsky.social People/classes pursue their interests in circumstances not of their own making. One’s interests can be unclear & as the time-horizon of business & govt, shrinks to quarterly returns or polls the pursuit of short term interest contradicts the long-term.

Labour is not sure how to respond, partly because its own policy is ambiguous

I suspect some percentage of people are angry at modernity because they realise that ‘great men’s’ contribution to reshaping life is nothing compared to, say, the Pill, beta blockers or the achievements of millions of indoor plumbers. I also suspect that Ganesh is one of them.

NEW EPISODE OUT NOW!

For the final in this series David talks to historian @aysezarakol.bsky.social about the prospects for democracy in the age of strongman politics, from Trump to Erdogan, from Orban to Modi. Does democracy have the wherewithal to resist its pull?

Find us at...🎧 ppfideas.com

I remember these from first time around. Who knows what influence they had? Incalculable. And as balance (!) there was Stuart Hall on C4.

Morgan Jones | Starmer mixes it up Global Progress Action was in London at the end of last month, filling Methodist Central Hall with politicians and think...

‘What Lasse Ryberg and Diego Rubio have in common, which the Labour leadership lacks, is confidence. They appear to believe that their idea of the world is good, popular and effective.’

@morganj0nes.bsky.social at Global Progress Action in London, from the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...

I’m growing concerned that my planned Little Book of Starmer Rhetoric isn’t going to pay for my pension.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...

Great summation by @morganj0nes.bsky.social of the vibes at last month's Global Progressive Jamboree: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...

Has to be seen to be believed but then it’s totally believable of political culture today. Why wouldn’t we judge potential leaders on the non-existent things they might want to not exist?

"The future is already here, its just not evenly distributed" William Gibson

Podcast: Alan Finlayson and James Butler · On Politics: The Online Right (and Left)

www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

Paxos accidentally mints more than twice the global GDP in PayPal stablecoins Paxos, the issuer of PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin, accidentally minted 300 trillion of the supposedly dollar-pegged token. For context, this is approximately 2.5x the global GDP, and around 125x the tota...

Oh, look. The cleverest most innovative and risk-taking people in the world have gone and fu***d up their nonsense again.

www.web3isgoinggreat.com?id=paxos-acc...

The key thing about online political persuasion is that it’s not short videos. It’s long, very long, dissuading, debating and explaining (which is then recirculated and repeated in shorter form by others).