Harry Readhead

Essayist on philosophy, science and religion. Co-founder of Sonder. Adviser to space and defence executives. Seen in @thetls, @spectator, @thecriticmag, etc.

[Dr. Dan Lomas @Sandbagger_01]

NATO conscripts industry to fight Russia’s hybrid aggression https://t.co/RJoAErAmg4

[Engelsberg Ideas @EngelsbergIdeas]

Ukraine's resistance to Russian maritime coercion offers a template for how states committed to freedom of navigation can deter those who threaten it.

Ukraine and the fight for freedom of navigation | Oleksii Reznikov
(@oleksiireznikov) and Dalibor Rohac (@DaliborRohac)

https://t.co/hTZAQmNbpF

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

Steven Spielberg’s new film, “Disclosure Day,” suggests that aliens would be a threat to religious faith. But, @LuisParrales_ writes, Catholic theologians have been contemplating extraterrestrial life for centuries—and haven’t found it threatening: https://t.co/c17MatXzsY

[Dominic Hauschild @domhauschild]

Ukraine has just done something astonishing.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence has just launched TrophyLab - essentially making access to all captured Russian weapon technologies free for foreign governments, research institutions and the defence industry.

They will even send physical hardware to allies for examination and to rip it apart to discover Russian military secrets. As well as technical specifications, blueprints and research results.

The website includes listings for armoured vehicles, missiles, aircraft, UAVs, EW assets, UGVs, cruise missiles etc.

Governments usually want to keep this kind of captured tech a secret for its own advantage. Ukraine has decided to make it (relatively, I think) open access for the benefit of the West.

[Fraser Nelson @FraserNelson]

In Makerfield, Tories voted Labour to stop Reform UK
In Aberdeen, Labour supporters back Tories to stop SNP

Result? Two stonking victories

Elections are being increasingly decided by who voters want to stop - and it changes everything

My column:-

https://t.co/Lh1OrwrfIs

[The New Criterion @newcriterion]

“Perhaps, a friend observed, if William F. Buckley Jr. were writing his famous book about New Haven today, he would call it not ‘God and Man at Yale’ but ‘Man at Yale.’”

Read “On the third day.”

https://t.co/Mc5T2VLnlD

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

The government cannot avoid hard choices for ever https://t.co/IMTHKM2XPM

[The Critic @TheCriticMag]

Russia insists Ukrainians are brothers.

What do we call four years of killing brothers, burning their schools and burying them beneath the ruins of their homes, asks Sergey Maidukov
https://t.co/ayhBpOVhHq

[The Spectator @spectator]

Sir Keir Starmer came to office in July 2024 on a manifesto which played heavily on defence. The Labour party, it proclaimed, had an absolute commitment to the UK's independent nuclear deterrent and, ‘as the party that founded Nato… [would] maintain our unshakeable commitment to the alliance’. It would also ‘apply a Nato test to major defence programmes to ensure we meet our obligations in full’. The party would conduct a Strategic Defence Review (SDR) within its first year of office, ‘set out the path to spending’ 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence and publish a Defence Industrial Strategy.

It is hard to overstate the degree to which Starmer’s government has fallen short of its lavish and tough-talking promises. The resignations of former defence secretary John Healey and armed forces minister Al Carns last Thursday over the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) brought what had been an increasingly tense and indefensible situation to a head. Although the DIP still has not been made public, it is very clear that the resources HM Treasury was willing to offer for defence are hopelessly inadequate in scale.

✍️ Eliot Wilson

Article | https://t.co/11OsS2AHsD

[Francis Harris @fharris2011]

"The UK is a sleeping superpower .. the world looks with mystification at our paralysis and unseriousness. They know only too well what we seem to have forgotten: we are in as favourable a position today as before the industrial revolution"
@matthewsyed
https://t.co/Osad9t0f4X

[Foreign Policy @ForeignPolicy]

Neoliberal globalization was driven by two ideas: cosmopolitanism and competition. These same features have now led to its undoing. https://t.co/0liNNobvVb

[Greg R. Lawson @ConservaWonk]

A fascinating @EngelsbergIdeas piece on the #history of steppe based #diplomacy & its ongoing influence in Central Asia & #Russia.

#Eurasia
https://t.co/ajrjomLixm

Excerpt,

"Steppe statecraft is a defining feature of Eurasia, Russia and China, in particular. They have long dealt with the rough-and-tumble of their steppe frontiers, through formal diplomacy, treaties and conventions, as well as the more opportunistic, un-Kantian diplomacy of the steppe. Kant argued one should not pursue a given policy unless it applied to everyone; the khans of the steppe did whatever they could get away with. They broke treaties, launched deniable raids, changed sides in the midst of battle, and carried out indiscriminate, terroristic massacres. They did so because these means were the only way to assert power on the open steppe. With no boundaries, with the only property being livestock, which could easily be stolen, with no fixed cities to defend or protect, only fear, rather than trust, kept rivals at bay. There are many aspects of Russia’s and China’s behaviour today which can be traced back to this tradition.

Take stealing. The horse breeders of the steppe could hardly guard their herds from rustlers. They simply raided tit-for-tat. Stealing was considered something daring and admirable. Yigits (braves) rode off on rustling expeditions to win praise in their encampment. Very successful thieves went on to become, as in the case of Tamerlane, supreme rulers. When the Russians began to rule these unruly borderlands, they tried in vain to suppress cattle rustling. They also tried to outlaw bride kidnapping, an even more culturally unique feature of the steppe dwellers’ society. Bride kidnapping could actually contribute more to keeping the peace between two clans than a formal agreement. By creating a kinship relationship between them, it reduced the chances of bloody conflict. Neither the Russians nor the Soviets ever managed to end the practice, which survives today in the independent states of Central Asia, though modern social mores are gradually changing the perception of this practice."

[The New Criterion @newcriterion]

“We discover that rapid, repetitive drawing of the general composition, and sometimes considerable changes, underlie the meticulous modeling and subtle shading of the finished works.”

Read “The prodigious Raphael,” by Karen Wilkin. @metmuseum

https://t.co/4qCLltzw3w

[The Daily T @DailyTPodcast]

Former armed forces minister: 'I met Starmer once in two years'

On today's Daily T, @CamillaTominey and @timothy_stanley are joined by @AlistairCarns the former armed forces minister who followed his boss John Healey in resigning last week over Keir Starmer’s inadequate Defence Investment Plan...

👇 Let us know your thoughts below

🎧 Listen to the full episode now through the link in our bio

[The Spectator @spectator]

"This is not about competing against 100 million Russians. It is about a very, very specific metric."

Ukraine says it needs to kill more than 50,000 Russians each month to force Putin into submission. Francis Dearnly explains why this number would force the Russian president to embark on another round of forced mobilisation which he cannot afford. @FrancisDearnley

[The Critic @TheCriticMag]

Before there were historians, there was Herodotus, writes David Butterfield — a wandering Greek determined to discover why civilisations rise and fall
https://t.co/5MtSyAlawY

[Louise Perry @Louise_m_perry]

‘I know what the dark green environmentalists are proposing. They want us to deindustrialize deliberately and go back to the premodern era, adopting a radically techno-pessimist position. “The existing political and economic system is set to destroy civilisation and much if not all life on earth if allowed to continue” says Gail Bradbrook, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. The radical environmentalist and philosopher Derrick Jensen puts it still more plainly: “I want to bring down civilization.”

‘They will never find popular support for such a proposal. Some of us might be willing to abandon the more garish baubles made available by modernity, but almost no one truly wants to abandon the fundamentals: safe drinking water, antibiotics, electric lighting, plentiful food, obstetrics and the rest. No one wants to return to the Malthusian trap, not even antimodern groups like the Amish. You can tell, because when their children are gravely ill, they abandon the old ways and take them to modern hospitals. So do the dark green environmentalists. The revealed preference among humans is that we desperately want to live in technological societies.’

I wrote for @WSJFreeEx about the drive towards techno-optimism.

https://t.co/07RSatgMDB

[Foreign Policy @ForeignPolicy]

For Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea, the alliance with the United States cannot be replaced: There is no Plan B. https://t.co/O99avn0DXl

[The Times and Sunday Times @thetimes]

UK’s military unprepared for Russian threat on land, air and sea https://t.co/5mliTWAZ4n

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

We owe those who serve the UK the kit to do the job and the loyalty to stand by them when it's done. We are failing on both.

I’ve spent my whole time in government making that case. Number 10 will not listen, so I am resigning as Minister for the Armed Forces.

Letter to the PM below.🫡🫡🫡⬇️⬇️