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Our 4th most-read article of 2023.

Originally published May 25, 2023.

The alarm blares, and I wake up with a renewed vigor to indoctrinate America’s youth.

I ride my bike to work, smugly turning up my nose at real Americans who drive trucks. As I pedal, my thoughts are preoccupied with how I will infect children with my liberal agenda. No other ideas flow in and out of my mind on my commute, like wondering if I should donate plasma this weekend to make some extra cash to pay rent.

I pull into the parking lot and say hello to the drag queen we recently hired as the school librarian. As we walk into Socialist Snowflake Learning Center (previously called Robert E. Lee Elementary), we schedule a time for her to visit my class and expose my students to sexually explicit material.

So, if at first, or second, or third, or tenth you don’t succeed, try try again. The Netherlands, under heavy pressure, has canceled already approved sales of ASML lithography machines to China.

The leadership of ASML had resisted these sanctions because they said it wouldn’t work: what would happen is that China would learn how to make the machines themselves.

Labour needs to make bold moves if it is to achieve a victory worth having, argues AC Grayling

Andrew Kersley speaks to those who have experienced inappropriate and degrading behaviour at the hands of police officers – with few consequences

In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Aaron Rodgers/Jimmy Kimmel, Jesse Watters, Daredevil, Doctor Who, Teen Titans, Star Trek: Prodigy, and more!

The Labour leader's decision to make restoring trust in public life the centre piece of his election campaign, raises questions about his own record

The Intercept’s Ryan Grim explores how crises during the Obama administration formed the politics of the Squad.

In a recent post about unfair epistemic authority, Macarena Marey suggests that In political philosophy, the centre is composed of the Anglophone world and three European countries… One can think of “the center” in terms of people or of topics. Although Marey’s post is clearly about philosophers not philosophies, and I agree with her, one […]

I’ve written for UnHerd about the 25th anniversary of the euro — and how the latter should be understood first and foremost as a political project aimed at consolidating elite power and advancing a neoliberal agenda. Thus, even though, 25 years on, the euro has failed miserably by virtually all economic metrics, it would be a mistake to …

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I’ve written for UnHerd about the legacy of Jacques Delors, the former President of the European Commission who passed away on Wednesday. Delors is often eulogised as the “founding father of modern Europe” — as if that were a good thing. A more apt description would be “founding father of the techno-authoritarian and anti-democratic juggernaut that is the …

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How Bernini’s dynamic sculptures captured the passionate, theatrical mood of the Baroque era, and made all of Rome a stage

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Western public has been sold the story of a Ukrainian front united in its unwavering commitment to a total military victory over Russia. Over the past few weeks, however, this narrative has started to crumble. Despite the failure of Ukraine’s Nato-backed counteroffensive, which is now universally accepted, Zelensky continues to …

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Once a centre of Afghan culture, Sufism seems to have disappeared in the maelstrom of war and upheaval. But still it survives

- by Annika Schmeding

Read at Aeon

Extended daydreams were a much-needed escape, but turned into a compulsion that crowded out my waking activities

- by Zainab Al-Hassani

Read at Psyche

When we talk of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we tend to focus on the latter’s political, social and humanitarian dimensions. But often this comes at the expense of considering an important economic dimension — one which recent events in Gaza have brought into stark relief. Continue reading here.

The Supreme Court’s ruling against the Government’s Rwanda plan may have been a foregone conclusion, but the broader political fall-out was not. Even though the Supreme Court struck down the migrant bill without relying on the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) or the Human Rights Act, the decision is nonetheless bound to reignite the …

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Since Hamas’s attack, the reduced coverage of the Ukraine war has been a mixed blessing for Zelensky and his international backers. Perhaps most obviously, it has caused Ukraine to plummet among the West’s priorities, at a time when political support for continued military aid was already waning. But it has also concealed an uncomfortable truth …

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As Israel continues to mourn and Gaza continues to be turned into rubble, many in the Middle East are coming to a grim realisation: that things could soon become much, much worse. Huge tectonic shifts now threaten to rupture the status quo — and even spark a global war. Continue reading here.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords, a landmark moment in the pursuit of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. And yet peace in the region has never been more elusive, as events in Gaza makes dramatically clear. Why have all attempts to bring an end to one of …

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I’ve written about Donald Tusk’s victory in the recent Polish elections and its momentous consequences — for Poland, the EU and NATO. Long story short: it’s clearly a big win for pro-EU forces, but attempts to use the result to justify a new integrationist power grab will backfire. 

To speak of the ‘modernisers’ in the context of British Labour Party in the years culminating in the landslide election victory of 1997 has become synonymous with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and their immediate circle. They believed that Labour needed to ruthlessly centralise power inside the party to minimise the power of members, ditch Clause […]

Or, as the kids say these days, get gud noob. Douglas Muir here, aka Doug M. Long time commenter, now given the keys. Native New Yorker, trained as a lawyer, work in development — USAID, UNDP, yadda yadda. Married to a German, so living in rural northern Bavaria.  Four kids aged high school / uni, […]