oldnorthroad.bsky.social
English Lit prof based in Edinburgh. Bisexual English Scot - volatile organic compound - he/they. Roundhead in politics, Cavalier in spirit. Small room dj.
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Which isn’t to say things don’t get worse (or better), just that it’s rarely as simple as that and the picture is usually bigger than such narratives make it look.
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Yeah that’s what I understood him to be saying too. I just don’t think it’s historically accurate, in the sense that a) those institutions didn’t really function as advertised, and b) there wasn’t genuine agreement about the premises or foundations. I’m generally suspicious of narratives of decline!
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The printing press empowered authority as much as it did anyone else, I think. Gen AI is not a technology of proven utility for anyone’s purposes yet, if it ever will be. The power of wealth in the information ecosystem is not a new problem, even if it takes a new form.
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Of, obvs
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A fantasy if Athens, it seems.
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The ‘information ecosystem’ has always been subject to dissensus and the play of force relations. To acknowledge that doesn’t make you a nihilist. It’s precisely why we have this thing called politics. The public sphere is fundamentally political in exactly this sense.
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There were good reasons why thinkers like Orwell (not much of a thinker, tbh) and Habermas sought either to sound the alarm or find a rational basis to define what the public sphere should be. And the fact that they did shows that they had absolutely no confidence in how it worked in actuality.
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I mean they didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. William was coming anyway, invite or no.
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I’ve had two teeth suddenly go to pieces on contact with an inoffensive comestible. I blame the drill-happy 80s dentists who got paid per filling and left my molars mostly amalgam.
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I forgot Kenny Farquaad existed. Doesn’t seem like I’ve missed much.
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Yep. I’m in the same boat. Tying those concerns to independence was what made independence attractive - a chance to start again without the vested interests that dominate UK government having the whip hand. But if independence is not something we can achieve via electoral means, what do we do?
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The strategic problem is that after the Supreme Court ruling on indyref2 there’s no obvious legal way to translate electoral support into implementation. No one has yet come up with a meaningful way to address that problem, even as notional support for independence rises. We’re a bit stuck.
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Didn’t use quotation marks? Citation very much needed.
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Seeing that precipitous drop in SNP support when Nicola Sturgeon stood down is very stark. I’m sure the financial shenanigans had an impact, but it seems she was able to mobilise the anti-system vote for progressive ends in a way that her successors have not been able to do.
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Addendum: That explains why the Holyrood constituency vote chart on the BBS website looks like this, with very little impact on SNP following Reform's rise but huge damage to Labour. The SNP already lost that support, Labour are losing it afresh. ballotbox.scot/scottish-par...
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Meanwhile, cis women alone may enter the holy sanctuary on the right, access to which is denied to the unclean, the fallen and the bestial. Not for such lowly types an encounter with the godhead! Not for them the embrace of the eternal feminine! Not for them a convenient wee halfway along the M4!
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Or, parsing that sign another way, no man may change a child unaccompanied by a woman, because all women have the sacred gift of motherhood which alone makes them special and valuable. It’s all stacking up.
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He has, but only because of this skeet! Not much of an answer, just the usual platitudes about mutual respect blah blah blah. I’ll be writing again…
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He should lay off the stuff, it’s put years on him.
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Scottish politics current status: still fucked