Julian Hartley

I love Yeats, Blake, Eliot, Orwell and Bulgakov.

I am interested in political phenomenology and ontology

[Julian Hartley @JulianHartley5]

@pensandpoison Not sure I'm too fond of either of these.

[Bovril-Gesellschaft @BovrilG]

I think it was Salinger, in one of his rare late-life interviews, who noted that the protagonists of M*A*S*H are scum and that the authority figures they’re undermining are vastly morally superior. He touched on something extremely important, which is that the purpose of the Jester today is to speak Power to Truth.

[Stokeman🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @anglopjdst]

Thank you Daron Acemoglu of Why Nations Fail, it really is the sensible position to oppose the mass immigration that the Western states impose on their own people. In addition to most of the time not being fiscally positive anyway, it totally blunts the incentive to automate

[Lee Harris @LeeHarris]

Just so everyone is aware. There is a dangerous murderer on the run, police have him on CCTV, but they have decided to not release the CCTV so the public can't help identify him.

Okaaaaaaay. This doesn't sound weird at all.

[Julian Hartley @JulianHartley5]

@moveincircles The whole deportation thing is displacement activity. He needs to be executed.

[Seóirse Duffy @Seoirse_]

A wonderful example of how marketing is just how you tell a story: if this figure is correct, it suggests that the 20% of London housing that is council/social housing contributes just 3% of London's economy. I.e. without it, you'd expect to generate £158bn

[Julian Hartley @JulianHartley5]

@alexanderrX_ @harderthanfire Rather repellently, it's always cheaper and often quicker to fly to Edinburgh.

[Julian Hartley @JulianHartley5]

@CptHastings1916 Most of what is called hatred is actually grief or fear.

[Joanna 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @FemaleScotlandV]

“Groups of men repeatedly turned up at her front door and her car was rammed off the road twice.

Mandy is one of 24 Trading Standards officers who have shared details of the daily intimidation and violence they face from criminal gangs running mini-marts and vape shops, as they try to investigate unfair trading, illegal business activity and enforce consumer protection laws …”
https://t.co/43sr6SKNkE

[Mike Jones @technopopulist]

The police probably had a good reason to do this. But the optics are awful. They ran away from Moroccans in Edgware just as they ran away from Romanians in Harehills. And remember what the Southport protesters chanted to taunt the police?

“YOU RAN AWAY IN LEEDS!”

[max tempers @maxtempers]

Strong.

[Lisa Mckenzie @redrumlisa]

We are a joke country- BBC does all the legwork investigates & finds a people smuggler imprisoned in France now claiming asylum here with a business empire in Leicester 1 shop literally next door to the Mps office - council shuts down the shops - they are immediately signed over to another company name & open. Why? Why cant we do anything. We seem to have lost the plot.

https://t.co/ZUtgfFXKko

[Mary Harrington @moveincircles]

The solution to this is the same as the solution to the rape gangs, because it's fundamentally the same problem: ethnic mafias

The USA pretended for years there was no Sicilian mafia, before finally cracking down. We need their playbook now, in Britain

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

Everyone is piling on to @garyseconomics - his wealth tax documentary has bombed. Even the Guardian has given it a 2-star review and watched in horror as experts and onlookers alike call his ideas a car wreck.

It’s disappointing that he stuck to the same scripted lines that he said to me over a year ago. I raised the core issues with him back then and he did nothing to evolve his thinking.

Now with all of that said, I want to urge that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Wealth Taxes won’t work but that doesn’t mean we can’t look for ways to improve things for people who are struggling.

Gary’s popularity stems from a real issue. Millions of people see no way of keeping up with the costs of living. For millions of people in the UK their living standards are getting worse year on year and it needs to be addressed.

Here’s my thinking:

THE CAUSE:
- technology is devaluing jobs by making them easy to automate, outsource or simplify.
- we’ve had an un-targeted immigration policy that has flooded the UK labour market with millions of additional low skilled workers who compete with local entry-level workers.
- we have a UK government that has exploded debt and spending. Government spending that doesn’t result in productivity gains creates inflation.
- We have massive global businesses who do business in the UK but don’t contribute anything in tax revenue. They put local retailers, code shops and publishers out of business and move their profits to low tax zones.

SOLUTIONS TO EXPLORE:
- Special economic zones that offer lower taxes for small businesses that set up in parts of the country that need economic activity.
- Broadcast licenses for social media giants.
- IP licensing taxes for companies that take the piss with profit shifting.
- Lower taxes for startups. Reinstate the Entrepreneurs Relief. Expand SEIS/EIS.
- Allow home based businesses to claim childcare, cleaners, company car etc so they can run a better business.
- Allow tax deductions for home renovations (other countries have seen massive stimulus from this).
- Set up a British Sovereign wealth fund using oil and gas reserves.
- Reduce regulations and get builders building homes.
- Full support for the British farmers who create jobs and provide domestic food security.
- Entrepreneurial apprenticeships.
- Financial literacy and business skills taught in schools.

What would you add to the list?

[Mr. S.T.A.R. @favelaoverlord]

Lovecraft’s entire corpus is built around two themes that foretold most modern sociological phenomenon:

The first one is the theme of globalization-as-cultural-alienation. This is about how increasing interface between cultures ultimately results in the creation of hybridized, alienating cultures with symbology and values that are increasingly indecipherable. For the greatest example of this see @kunley_drukpa concept of the “Yookay” - Lovecraft understood what ‘modern cultural products’ inherently evolve into from the early 1900s! See the corporate memphis style or modern architecture for further examples.

The second one is the theme of modern technosocial arrangements as a *regressive* force. Lovecraft understood implicitly that the high minded culture of the Anglos of the Victorian era was the peak of the human condition (almost everyone agrees with this implicitly even if they verbally disagree) - and that everything since then has been downhill. That the then-evolving modern condition actually represented a return to prehistoric paganism. That the “Anglo rationalism” of the time was a candle in the dark of the normal irrational, violence of humanity. Recent conversations about declining literacy is the perfect example of this! Lovecraft understood that increasing technological progress had already begun to result in regression to base states - he was probably the first man to perceive this and to lay it out in metaphor the way he did.

In other words: Lovecraft’s stories are grand commentaries on the ultimate destructive and alienating nature of globalization and the modern technology that facilitates it.

‘Liberal culture commentators’ reduce all of this commentary down to “racism” because they’re incapable of seriously engaging with his work. Instead people like Kafka (who’s a 2-bit in terms of metaphor compared to Lovecraft) get heaps of praise and get taught in high schools.

So much of Lovecraft’s horror is aquatic in nature because the sea represented the frontier of globalization. The denizens of Innsmouth are traders who bring corruption back from Polynesia, the uncle-killer in Call of Cthulhu is a “nautical looking negro”, etc. etc.

Tl;dr: Lovecraft’s entire corpus is metacommentary on globalization and he’s a radically underappreciated genius.

[NPRG @CptHastings1916]

One of the best critiques of the EU I have ever read was by Perry Anderson in the LRB years ago; he argued that the EU was by its nature an anti-political project, in the sense that it sought / seeks to place numerous issues beyond the control of mere voters.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Aristotle’s insight about the middle class is not sentimental. It is structural. The middle class is the only group whose prosperity is directly tied to the prosperity of the whole, which makes it the only group with genuinely aligned incentives.

The poor are dependent. Not by moral failing but by position – their survival depends on transfers, on the state, on someone above them making decisions on their behalf. They vote for whoever promises more, which is rational given their situation. They cannot be the foundation of a republic because their interest is not in the republic’s success but in their own extraction from it.

The oligarchy is captured. Their wealth is large enough to seek advantages unavailable to others – regulatory protection, subsidies, privileged access, barriers to competition. They do not need the market to work fairly. They need it to work in their favor, which is a different thing entirely. The oligarch’s rational strategy is not to improve the system but to carve himself an exception within it.

The middle class has nowhere to hide. Too prosperous to depend on transfers, too broad and exposed to need special favors, their entire position rests on a society where contracts are enforced, courts function, markets are fair, schools work, streets are safe, and the currency holds its value. They cannot buy their way out of dysfunction the way the oligarchy can, and they have too much to lose to wait for redistribution the way the poor must. They need the whole thing to work – which makes them, structurally, the only class that wants it to.

This is why destroying the middle class is not just an economic event. It is a political event. When it shrinks, the ballast disappears and the ship tips – toward oligarchy above demanding favors, or toward dependency below demanding transfers, or toward both simultaneously, which is precisely where most Western democracies currently find themselves.

[Tim Newman @whitesundesert]

Signs of decline I would never have believed 20 years ago: children and parents being warned about foreign knifemen in comic sans.

[Dr Francis Young @DrFrancisYoung]

Let’s not forget that even if England win against Norway on Saturday they will then immediately have to march 200 miles south and play France without so much as a hydration break

[Chris Bayliss @baylissbaghdad]

Britain has trading standards officers from the local council doing the kind of work that in America would be led by the FBI. Small businesses being used as fronts for money laundering is not a trading standards matter - it is serious organised crime.