Academia

Back in 2022, after my first encounter with ChatGPT, I suggested that it was likely to wipe out large categories of “bullshit jobs”, but unlikely to create mass unemployment. In retrospect, that was probably an overestimate of the likely impact. But three years later, it seems as if an update might be appropriate. In the last […]

I posted this on my (private) Facebook page a few weeks back, just to vent. Since it resonated with quite a few people, I am reposting it here. I thought it was a platitude, but given the sea of self-congratulatory discourse about Europe (here’s an example for those who read Italian, but there are plenty) […]

Here is a joke. A philosopher goes to a policy committee. Got it? Okay, okay, it’s probably a bad joke. It’s also outdated: these days, many philosophers do go to policy committees. The cliché is that a philosopher sits in the academic ivory tower, thinks long and hard about a problem, then writes a theory […]

Political philosophers are criticised for their idealism, but when it comes to immigration they try to be ‘realistic’. Their aspiration to ‘realism’ often leads to nationalism (which I have analysed elsewhere as an implicit but heavy bias), but I still don’t understand why they aspire to realism on this issue. Philosophers have neither voters to […]

Up at the French-Spanish border in Catalonia

Update The Trump regime has been stopped, or at least stalled, on all three fronts discussed below. In particular, the Hegseth-Noem report on the Insurrection Act seems to have been quietly buried. That doesn’t mean US democracy is safe by any means, but at least it has some chance of survival. More on this at […]

Thanks to James Wimberley for prompting me to write this, and alerting me to the data on China’s emissions Most of the news these days is bad, and that’s true of the climate. Even as climatic disasters worsen, the Trump regime is doing its best to dismantle US and global efforts to decarbonize our energy […]

With collapsing stock markets, retirement portfolios, and consumer confidence, there is an all-too-human tendency to focus on the economic effects of tariffs by their critics: they are a tax on consumption, they will raise inflation, reduce efficiency, and reduce take-home income, etc. This is familiar. But this mistakes the full significance of a tariff-centric public […]