This is a cracking piece of work from the Bellingcat gang. It’s also quite possibly the most grimly 2016 thing of 2016 – having to do OSINT verification on a 7-year old girl’s Twitter from the siege of Aleppo, because the trolls are denying she ever existed.
Read More 2016 in a linkOK, so an interesting point came up on twitter regarding former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt, aka Europe’s Mr Brexit Except For The Other One. Isn’t one of the problems here that British politicians are socialised into a relatively simple kind of state? Basically unitary, usually with a strong executive government, powerful party whips, and unambiguous…
Read More The turn to neo-Edwardian politicsSo, on Monday, the Daily Telegraph ran this story on how you too can incorporate your BTL portfolio as a limited company and dodge tax. You’ll note that the story only exists because mortgage broker Kent Reliance pushed a report at the paper. And yes, it’s totally about tax. Kent Reliance, the buy-to-let lender who…
Read More The Daily Telegraph’s personal finance page is depravedHere’s a long read on Peter Thiel’s brilliant scheme to pull brilliant young people out of boring old university and get them to take risks! with skin in the game! on the big technologies of the future. And what have they delivered? The short answer would be the square root of fuck-all. The slightly longer…
Read More Everyone else is whining about Peter Thiel so why can’t I?It’s that time of year again! It seems quite odd that we’re actually having one, given the utterly unrecognisable swirling madness of 2016, but the public finances are one of those things that keeps going under the most unlikely of circumstances. So let’s pretend everything is normal. Here are my considered predictions for the 2016…
Read More predictions for the #autumnstatementSo my copy of Norman Ohler’s splendidly-titled Blitzed showed up. This could have been a really disappointing book – in the acknowledgments, Ohler mentions a Berlin DJ friend who told him Nazis took masses of drugs, and I can well imagine going from that beginning to lurid Hitler Channel kitsch. But Ohler has achieved so…
Read More Blitzed: the Third Reich as a society on drugsA thought: every political party contains what Karl Popper would call a closed system of knowledge, rather as Lloyd George said each man has a House of Lords in his own head. This system incorporates the symbols of its identity and the tropes of its internal culture. The party also, however, must needs contain an…
Read More The closed systemSo here’s the disgraced Liam Fox being all rah-rah about globalisation and free trade. You’d think in that case he’d be pretty keen on: A single market without barriers—visible or invisible—giving you direct and unhindered access to the purchasing power of over 300 million of the world’s wealthiest and most prosperous people. Bigger than Japan.…
Read More I know, let’s put the Work Programme in charge of BrexitTurned down by Politico Europe for being too local The populist threat is on everyone’s mind, whether from Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, or the AfD. In the UK, it’s been argued in a classic twitterstorm that Labour’s Northern heartlands are especially threatened, precisely because they’re “the heartlands” – ultra-safe parliamentary seats and city councils where…
Read More Bradford: Populism And AfterSo I should have done this almost a year ago, but I’m going back to the notes I made because I promised Owen Hatherley I’d eventually write it. Owen Hatherley, I hereby collect your TYR cookie and return you one unit of blog. Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries is probably the definitive history of Project Cybersyn,…
Read More Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Belated Review