Jonathan Portes reviews David Goodhart. A sample: ‘Bradford has just opened two more schools for children with Special Educational Needs,’ he writes. ‘On some measures nearly half of all children in the area qualify for special help.’ No source. However, the Department for Education publishes the statistics, and it turns out that in Bradford, the…
Read More Goodhart: majority of Bradfordians are twisted mutantsThis post on Abou Djaffar‘s fine blog expresses something that the Woolwich murder made me feel. It was a perfect demonstration of the dreadful way availability entrepreneurs come out of the woodwork, the spirit of Why the Bombings Mean You Should Support My Politics, a text that looking back accurately predicted the tone of our…
Read More Demonise the availability entrepreneurs, an occasional seriesSo, the urban development that kicked off all the protests in Turkey. “This is the only place to hang out here,” says Yavuz Selim, 17. “And everything is very expensive. As students we cannot afford it.” His friends agree. “We are quite bored here. There is nothing to do for us.”… While the municipality has…
Read More Here’s something about Turkey, and everyone elseI started a blog. Alternative title: I gave my youth to this project and all I got was this lousy Tory government.
Read More 10 years ago today…This Aeon piece makes the case that we are living in a golden age of mass literacy. I said as much in this thread from 2010, swinging off this IEEE Spectrum post, which argues that no media category grew as much since the 80s as text. Interestingly, DuckDuckGo finds all sorts of stuff but it…
Read More InterestingWell, this sums it up pretty well… Yes, I was there, having cried off last year on the grounds of not wanting to roll in nostalgia or spend money. And they played Elephant Stone. Also Going Down, Standing Here…so how well do you know the words? It was pretty much a multi-sensory definition of the…
Read More Music!I think it is probably important to direct attention to this post, which contains the only convincing explanation of PRISM I’ve yet seen, including the tiny budget (if it only cost $20m to process everything in Apple, Google, Facebook etc, what do they need all those data centres for), the overt denials, and the denial…
Read More PRISM. Sometimes it’s easier to solve these things in LYes, this is funny. But oh, for fucksake. Put council houses on EBay. I am not kidding. This is the pitifully vacuous snackthinking the mother of parliaments has to offer. Meanwhile, remember all that tebbly tebbly serious chinstroking about party financing and the difficult position of Labour’s link to the trade unions? Here’s random Twitter…
Read More internet commenters > parliamentOK, so there was a way of making buildings called modernism and it was great and then it wasn’t, and in fact it was Hitler! and Stalin! and bureaucracy! and groundnuts! and the fundamental illegitimacy of the state! and there was that block of flats they blew up! and let’s all laugh along with James…
Read More Space that can be defended, but against who?I don’t read Hopi Sen but apparently he reads me, as evidenced by this blog post regarding the idea of a “fiscal policy council” analogous to the monetary policy committee, but with a substantially wider remit and membership. I can remember when this was floated in the late 90s in a wave of cheer about…
Read More The troika in one country