@ilotem
Looks like I’m a historian. Senior Lecturer at UWestminster: wrote a book about the memory of colonialism in Britain and France, and another one about the pitfalls of memory politics in post-WWII Europe. Dogs are better.
This is the time to remind the obvious: Targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime, whether desalination plants in Iran that address water scarcity or energy plants in Ukraine in sub-zero temperatures.
In all that back-and-forth about AI and academia, this blog post is actually very good and worth reflecting on
davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...
The easiest analytical assumption to make whenever Trump does something is that he hasn't thought it through at all. And yet everytime commentators contort themselves into believing there's some kind of strategy.
Russia should not have been allowed by the world to massacre Ukrainians for four years -- let alone twelve, which is how long this was has actually gone on for. 🌻 1/2
Has anyone asked Goodwin or Farage about this yet?
Astonishing it wasn't raised at Farage's press conference..
www.thejc.com/news/uk/matt...
Apropos fiese #Identitätspolitik: Ich könnte sehr gut auf so viele Elemente meiner Identität verzichten, bspw. #Hoyerswerda #RostockLichtenhagen #Mölln #Solingen #Halle & #Hanau... Kann ich aber nicht, denn #Rassismus ist kein therapeutisches Problem. #HanauIstUeberall #BlackHistoryMonth
Let's not let British voters off the hook. When May made some sense over social care, she got trashed. If Starmer had been honest about the need for income tax raises, he would have lost. The charlatans who brought you 10 years of decline - Johnson and Farage - did so with the backing of the public.
And I really just can’t stomach idiots spewing how being English is supposedly some kind of an ethnicity. No. You’re drunk. Go home.
I remember pretty clearly this moment in 2008 when, back in Birmingham, I had this odd late night chat over curry with a group of girls going on about how being English meant being truly diverse without “all this Braveheart bollocks,” and we’re all really mongrels and that’s the beauty of it.
The latest iteration of the Britishness/Englishness debate just seems even more useless and egregious than before. But also - these ideas have always changed.
I grew up thinking “English” felt too home counties and “British” vague enough to be inclusive. But then around the mid-2000s it flipped.
Warum dürfen wir eigentlich keinen Klassenkampf machen aber die CDU schon?
(And yes, I did love pulling that wire as a kid).
I think I got radicalised through seeing videos from the NYT cooking section and thinking “any country that calls that food and churns out smug videos that celebrate that type of horror as culture should take a good look in the mirror”. And it’s been a downward spiral ever since.
I mean, it was really a “you still have that in the US? So cute. It reminds me of that time when people still smoked on public transport” kinda reaction (I do have to come clean on my not-very-wholesome joy in pointing out all 50 shades of wrongness in the US).
Hmmm? On buses? Last saw one there around 20 years ago?
Pull a wire though? I think I last saw that as a child in the 80s and back then my mum would pull me up for me to reach that wire? Where do you still have wires?
L’islamidation de Marseille. Ahem. Ugh. Le monde me fatigue.
Fascinating how tone deaf US political elites have been towards European anger.
From Newsom among Dems who failed to beat Trump berating Euro diplomacy, Schumer rattling out domestic guff to Graham and Bessent telling Euros to stop being hysterical. Just speeds up European rejection of America
True. And for all that mess you can’t even do the Flake innuendo to make it worthwhile (also it’s not as tasty as an actual Flake).
I think we got here partly because Americans of all shades and hues don’t do embarrassment 🤷🏻♂️
So much more profound than the weather though!
What does it say about me that I’m only really proud of being British when I get to partake in the aftermath of Brooklyn Beckham going nuclear on his parents or Coleen Rooney revealing Rebekah Vardy’s treacherous ways?
Also obviously “sending a special force to Greenland to take over the place without thinking about the day after” might not be “gaining Greenland”, but that’s another question.
Are the two mutually exclusive though?
Officially there is no word count minimum (also to include “diverse outputs”), BUT it then kinda depends on what pieces we’re talking about. For anything that smells of “traditional” writing it’s probably best to think of 6000 words as a good minimum.
Ce mardi (13 janvier), j’organise une petite journée d’études à l’Iméra avec le but de faire un petit état des lieux sur les débats publics autour de la race en France. Si jamais vous étiez à Marseille, venez nous voir !
www.imera.fr/agenda/race-...
And probably by now we should kinda realise that the mere use of the F word probably doesn’t actually do that much to dissuade people from actually supporting far right authoritarians today? And that terminology is not going to save us…?
I think the Americans aren’t going to understand the parish ward 😉 again, same issue. I think it’s sometimes just better to stick to original definitions sometimes and explain why we do that (we do it with more “consequential” words, so why not that?).
You can’t really switch departmental to anything else, as it’s just so intertwined with an administrative system that doesn’t exist in the Anglo world. So translating it to something else changes the meaning. Best to just use a footnote at first.
People who first saw me at the Copenhagen Memory Studies conference as the weird guy who needed to access the first plenary from behind the speaker with a big boot and crutches and crossed the stage painfully slowly and made everyone wait for the opening speech? That was the reason.