Ownership and control of social media platforms is a first-order concern for both domestic politics and international conflict. The most important battleground in the Russia-Ukraine war is elections in NATO member states. And there, Russia is clearly winning. Trump, obviously, but yesterday saw the stunning success of formerly fringe right-wing candidate C?lin Georgescu. In an […]
Academia
by Rutger Claassen and Ingrid Robeyns Let’s establish an upper limit on the personal wealth any individual can possess. This is the core principle behind ‘limitarianism’. Limitarianism represents one of the more radical proposals in the debate on wealth inequality. Over the past few years, one of us has developed the philosophy of limitarianism (first […]
Kitchy and quasi-totalitarian ghastliness, USA (from 2008)
A few weeks ago, I drew up a flowchart to estimate the probability that Trump would establish a dictatorship in the US, which looked, at the time, like an even money bet. We don’t need to speculate any more. Trump has announced the dictatorship, and there is no sign of effective resistance. The key elements […]
After Trump’s second election victory, lots of Americans are talking about emigrating, most commonly to Canada. This happens with every rightwing election win[1], but nothing ever comes of it. With the real prospect of indefinite Trumpist rule, the issues are more serious, but it seems unlikely that much will happen. But why not? It’s fairly […]
One of my favorite metasciences lines is: “Does anyone look around and say…things are going great, I just think we need MORE PAPERS?” Obviously, we all want more scientific progress, better evidence, broader scope — but I don’t think that this is best accomplished by churning out more of these fancy peer-reviewed pdfs. Indeed, our systems […]
Together with many other academics in the Netherlands, I have been very busy in organizing a nation-wide demonstration next Thursday against the 1 billion budget cuts to higher education that our very-right-wing government has announced. (For background explanation, see this earlier post). Today, I have a long opinion piece in the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad […]
Obviously people are shocked, and particularly shocked at the rejection of normal sensible politics by the rubes who have elected an oaf, a criminal and a rapist to the White House, again. But the trouble is that this kind of thing keeps happening, or nearly happening, and not just in the United States. And it […]