Samuel Harrison

An extract from a piece in the Guardian about Larry the Downing Street cat that reads: “Larry gives the public some much-needed continuity and nonpartisan continuity at that.”

Enjoying the suggestion in this piece that Larry is now fulfilling the traditional function of the constitutional monarch www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

How universalist was Enlightenment thought? In our 2025 Besterman Lecture, Antoine Lilti (Collège de France) discusses 'The three languages of universalism: thinking globally in the Enlightenment’. Thursday 13 Nov, 5pm @magdalenoxford.bsky.social:
voltaire.ox.ac.uk/event/bester...

Other news from this trip: I wore my Wedgwood Benn for Pope! t-shirt to the Vatican and a carabiniere stopped me and asked for my ID

There are adverts on the Rome metro to remind drivers that however much pedestrians might annoy them, it is always wrong to run them over

Photo sur les quais de Seine à Paris du slogan peint "Ici on noie les Algériens".

Il y a soixante-quatre ans, le 17 octobre 1961, la police française massacrait des Algérien·nes qui manifestaient pacifiquement pour leur dignité.

Honestly don't know how Starmer is so bad at this. The choice is between a few isolated criticisms now or a massive violent blow-up in two weeks' time that dominates the front pages and obviously benefits the far right. Completely incapable of thinking ahead

There are groups that do in fact choose to live in deserts, though. The Bedouin have resisted stringent efforts to sedentarise them for some 200 years. There's a story of a C19 Syrian administrator trying to entice some Bedouin to settle and their leader replying that if they do so then they'll die

Al Jazeera is doing videos of the Palestinian releases and they're heart wrenching. One man was detained for over a year and was released to find out that Israel had killed his two kids. The youngest was three. Her birthday would've been on Saturday. He'd made a small bracelet for her in prison.

The British party stays on 20% of the vote and the US party wins a majority of the seats in a gerrymandered state on 40% of the vote

British politics: if we can just prove we're delivering on the economy and public services we might be able to inch our way back up towards 25% of the vote

American politics: our record speaks for itself. beer no longer woke. Retired football player mostly standing

Also, a significant slice of French political opinion is increasingly turning towards a more British-style model of integration (witness Mélenchon's conversion from extreme laïcité to créolisation in the space of a decade) -- the model they want to draw on is much less stable than they think it is

A labour government wants to make amendments to our laws to bring in conditions, and possible outright ban on protests in the UK because the Palestine movement got too big for them to continue to ignore.

A Labour government. Not Tory, not reform, but Labour.

It's an unfortunate reality that it's-for-your-own-good authoritarianism is a component of Labour's political DNA, and when you put people like Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid, Jacqui Smith et al in the Home Office, you get plain old you-can't-do-that authoritarianism on top...

I'll say it again. Our horror at the Gaza genocide and at the atrocity in Manchester comes in both cases from the same, inherent part of our shared humanity. We need to assert that shared humanity in the face of both these evils as loudly as possible, and in as many practical ways as we can.

In fact, if this New Yorker story is anything to go by, the generals probably largely agreed with this section of Hegseth's speech. That's what happens when one chooses selective outrage over war crimes
www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Yolande Knell reports that Israel bombed a school sheltering displaced people "& then when civil defence workers went to the scene there was another attack"

'double tap' strikes are designed to deliberately kill rescue workers & other civilians. This is what Israel does.

Trump controversially endorses traditional Marxist historiography on the Gracchi brothers

After more than a decade of war, Aleppo’s historic citadel has reopened its gates to visitors, symbolizing resilience and recovery for the war-torn city.

Call me a cynic but I just don't buy that this is Klein being too good-hearted to recognise a bad-faith actor. He portrays Kirk like this because his own liberal programme can only be sustained if one assumes there are good-faith actors on the other side; it's a psychological and political necessity

HUGE HUGE NEWS FROM EGYPT!!

Egyptian President Sisi has issued a presidential pardon for activist and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah.

A last resister passes aged 99. Son of Italian refugees from fascism, "raised on red milk", only 14 at the Fall of France, his first resistance was pasting anti-Pétain messages on postboxes. By 16, he was in armed conflict. Captured in July 1944, tortured, escaping prison...

Lifelong Communist.

Likewise, people are fond of saying Arafat rejected a Palestinian "state" at Camp David, when said state was under US proposals going to be demilitarised, territorially non-continguous, and deprived of control of its own foreign policy, airspace, and even water -- i.e. not a state

And Reform's attempts to create local DOGEs as well of course

Despite endless scolding about the British left being too America-brained, it's the two parties of the right that believe they can essentially just do what the US did and get the same results in Britain, ignoring basic local economic, social, and indeed geological facts. See also: fracking

'Anti-Palestiniaism is so difficult to refute because the psychic economy of innumerable people needs it. I was told the story of a woman who, upset after seeing a dramatization of the "Voice of Hind Rajab," said: “Yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live.”'

In essence, this really is just liberal campism

Targeting radio and TV stations. To date, most of the Israeli attacks on Palestinian Authority targets have struck me as utterly pointless. I understand their logic, as far as it goes....

For her views on the principle of states of using deadly violence to suppress unwelcome information, see below
slate.com/news-and-pol...

"Reorientating"? The US has never had a problem with autocracies that suppress access to information. Egypt, UAE, Saudi, and Israel constantly arrest, assault, or kill journalists. Applebaum just doesn't want this principle extended to the *anti-American* autocracies

Again, I don't think Klein and the other purveyors of this idea are ignorant of the below, they just think it furthers liberal aims to co-opt Kirk as an honourable political opponent. Unfortunately, this is stupid, insofar as it relies on the idea their own audiences are stupid