Hard to concentrate on academic work when war rages and spreads, and all my thoughts are with the innocent people who die, are wounded, or are made homeless.
02.03.2026 12:10
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Hard to concentrate on academic work when war rages and spreads, and all my thoughts are with the innocent people who die, are wounded, or are made homeless.
Adam Parsons: "In the eyes of many people this is an illegal attack"
No, according to international law it is an illegal attack. Do your job, look out of the window and tell us if its raining.
Really looking forward to joining fellow speakers for the #WorldBipolarDay webinar.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled viruses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the bacteria, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Reports now that this has been revised up to 85 dead, with even more injured
“The home secretary will warn Labour MPs that the party will lose the next election unless they speed ahead with her hardline immigration reforms”
Heaven help us
www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...
Remember: Donald Trump created this crisis. He walked away from the Iran nuclear deal that was working, promising a "better deal." He didn't deliver. He escalated, abandoned real diplomacy, and has now led us into a conflict that puts us all at risk.
This is causing despair in academe. (1) We were forced to close during Covid. We had no choice! (2) We're not service providers like a restaurant, we are institutions of state. (3) We did everything we could. (4) This will cripple current students' education.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
UCL didn’t teach them about the greater good then. This amid what is happening in HE anyway is a terrible outcome especially for those universities who look after the least advantaged and are needed the most.
What links Jeffrey Epstein and Keir Starmer’s government? A thick seam of contempt | Nesrine Malik
“Female victims, the law, the public, are all remote and potentially treacherous things that need to be kept as far as possible from infringing on this vast, self-contained and sophisticated reciprocal system of power.” Brilliant. And the truth.
I've been singing this to myself all day
How do you legislate to make those with power respect those without it? The reporting of the Epstein scandal has given the women no voice. Try the small remedies. Listen to others (don’t just wait your turn). Censure those who interrupt. Call out the use of physical presence to establish power…
Will Starmer and McSweeney really survive this? And the 'one rotten apple/we didn't know much' is a rotten, empty defence in face of the extensive networks of so many in or with power selling their souls (if they had any) for girls, women, money, trips. So shallow
www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Bigger things going on today i know but watching Bezos buy, wreck, and now basically gut a media institution at a time when America really needs a free press is just such a grotesque waste. If you don’t know how to run it, sell it to someone who can www.theguardian.com/media/2026/f...
This.
Don't think I've ever felt as sick reading a newspaper story as I have looking at this morning's Epstein coverage. Just the open amorality of all the powerful people involved for so long.
Lebedev is still a Lord...
I think there is a long shopping list of small things like these which might change the position of victims in ways that matter, in a timescale that is not trivial. Talking more about it, even on BlueSky! , makes a tiny difference. Perhaps. As I say, happy to talk more in real life!
You may think this is too ‘soft’ and you may be right. But calling out abuses of power as they occur in public is a beginning. Ditto repudiating the currency of complicit gossip in institutions. The casual violence of inappropriate touching often goes unremarked by the men in the room: call it.
Yes agreed. If what you have in mind is ways to change the situation in law, I am not sure I can offer anything at all (the present difficulties of the CJS cause agonies all over the place as I have seen). But there are ways to change the conversation, and doing that may change a good deal.
I completely agree! The obligation to stand up and be counted is vital; we just disagree about how… I worry that creating victims out of the perpetrators just may make things worse. But I concede that standing up and being counted *alone* is terrifying, and often power wins anyway.
It is horribly slow and cruel for individuals. And shameful, I regret to say. Giselle Pelicot had it right, I think — shame needs to change sides. There are perhaps ways to do that that do not allow putative offenders to claim victimhood, nor allow genuine victims to be created anew.
What means would those be? In universities things are better than they were, but still, as everywhere, power exploits. And the powerful are adept at creating themselves as victims. But perhaps publishing gives them too much of a pretext? Then the silencing starts up all over again.
The formal — institutional or legal — means for redress are so lamentably either missing or impossibly slow. I am not at all sure that publication is the way round that ( although I do see the argument to do so) rather than other ways of fixing what I called the silencing of putative victims.
Thanks: and very happy to talk about this further in discussion. Yes of course in good faith. And yes you did only talk about guilty men in one context. My intervention was simply to draw attention to the problems with that, and then to reflect further on how to deal with the dismal fact that …
The point here is about the language in which truths are expressed. Silencing is an injustice. It is important, in giving those who suffer a voice, not to give those who do the silencing *any* ammunition against them or their advocates, including the measures of counter-suing. End.
But then it becomes more and more important that the language we use to discover what has happened be as careful as possible. Blurring those outlines does not help the silenced. Happy to talk about truth any time, including the strange legal notion that truth is exactly what a court has said, but …
…a process which itself makes heard the voices of those silenced. Bullies work in the grey areas, and it is important that they do not find refuge in language which is *in the context* falsifiable. You are right that most of these cases are rushed out of sight. That in itself does the silencing 3/?
Further— as I have implied — I suffered (long ago!) from such men. And the silencing that went with it is still familiar. I know how hard that is, and how having the names of such men made public would have helped me then. My concern is that using the expression ‘guilty’ preempts a process….2/?
