I’ve already said all I plan to (for now) about what’s happening in the US. But if others want to discuss it, here’s an open thread.

Inspired by Chris’s recent photo-blogging post, I thought I’d share a less well known little gem about (the original) Ravenna: not a byzantine church interior full of mosaics, but the submerged crypt of an early medieval Church (the Basilica of San Francesco), populated by goldfish (and the inevitable coins thrown in for good luck).

Incidentally, it’s also the church where Dante Alighieri’s funeral was celebrated (he was exiled in Ravenna).

There’s been a recent fuss in various media arising from a tweet from economist Ben Golub regarding astonishment that economists haven’t “worked through” Smith and Marx. English professor Alex Moskowitz chimed in with a claim that economics can’t be a real discipline because economists don’t know the history of their own discipline. {long and somewhat wonkish response follows}
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Those of us who live in Europe have reason to be very pessimistic about the next four years. The state that Europeans have relied upon as their security guarantee is now in the hands of the nationalist extreme right and the information space is saturated by the output of tech oligarchs such as Elon Musk who are either aligned with or beholden to that nationalist right and who openly fantasize about replacing elected European governments. These pressures come on top of military aggression from Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere, austerity in public services, increased energy costs, stagnant living standards, a difficult green transition, demographic decline, and anxiety about immigration and cultural diversity. Most of these pressures are likely to be deliberately worsened by the incoming Trump regime in the hope of having its ideological allies come to power in European countries. In fact the very same figures who vaunted the importance of national sovereignty are salivating at the prospect of a great power interfering to their benefit in domesic affairs: so much for patriotism!

Resistance will be hampered on several fronts. First, the left and the labour movement, a popular bastion against fascism during earlier waves of ultra-nationalism, is weak and divided with its institutions such as parties and trade unions shells of what they once were as the result of changes in the class structure. Second, liberal and democratic values, tolerance and human rights, that might form some kind of principled rallying point have been badly compromised by mainstream parties’ desire to accomodate the so-called “legitimate concerns” of voters around migration and security, Widespread discrimination against minorities and growing toleration of mass death among irregular migrants as well as deals with dictatorships at Europe’s margins to contain would-be migrants exacerbate the abandonment of any pretence at humanitarian univeralism. European governments have been reluctant (or worse) to resist Israel’s actions in Palestine and the wider Middle East, again making a joke of Europe’s claimed values. Third, European leaders will be prevented from mounting any kind of principled resistance to US attack by the fact that, in the face of Russian aggression, they will feel the need to carry on pretending that the American enemy is in fact their friend and ally. The parallels with a toxic relationship with an abuser are obvious.
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Commentators in Europe are understandably agog about Trump’s rumblings that the US might somehow, possibly, annex Greenland at some point in the future. One would think asking Greenlanders how they see their future might have been a better idea. But I’m curious about how we should take these rumblings. Several possibilities suggest themselves, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

1. Trump lives in a fugue state. Today it’s Greenland, tomorrow it will be communists putting red stripes in our toothpaste. Or maybe it’s just a plea for attention. Move on.
2. Trump’s modus operandi is always to make outrageous demands in the hope of getting something much smaller. So perhaps he wants a somewhat bigger US military presence in Greenland, or a stake in its minerals. This is his way of getting there.
3. Trump is seriously worried about Chinese and Russian power. This is another example of his tendency to say the quiet (realist) part out loud: Greenland is going to fall into someone’s orbit; so it had better be ours.
4. Trump has a bad case of dictator envy. He thinks (all facts aside) that it’s unfair Putin and Xi Jinping have empires while he doesn’t.
5. Something else entirely.

Speculate away!

A curious one, this. We were looking through some old postcards (from the 1930s) and came across one with a picture of this church interior. Where’s that? Well, it turns out that it is just off the motorway on our journey between Bristol and Liverpool. A remarkable mosaic interior from the 1920s, modelled on originals in Ravenna. I don’t think it is widely known, and Droitwich isn’t known for anything much. I took a bunch of pictures, so scroll on Flickr for the others.

Here’s a virtual toast to your flourishing in 2025. But more so than any other year, our wishes should not just be from person to person, but rather wishes for societies – and the society of societies, global humanity. I haven’t felt so gloomy about politics, broadly defined, in a very long time. A genocide is happening while all of us can see it, and mainstream politics and society tries every trick possible to rationalize and justify what is happening. Our politicians are failing to get us off the path to the deadly collapse of Earth’s ecosystems. The rise of autocracy and fascist policies has now reached such levels that we may start to wonder why so many in the generations of our parents and grandparents risked, and often sacrificed, their lives to free us from fascism – only to give us the freedom to vote the authoritarians and the fascists back into power.

(I deleted all the swear words I included when I wrote the first draft of this post. But I confess, these days I swear a lot when I think and write about politics).

So what to do? There are at least three options: Fight, flee, or freeze. The last one would amount to just let it happen, and hope for the best – that technologies will save us, that democracies are resilient, that we are exaggerating the dangers. Well, I am not sure… is this position supported by the facts? I doubt it, and the risks of being too optimistic or naïve are too large, in my view.

The second, flee, would be to acknowledge the dangers but stop being politically engaged, or not take up the opportunity to become politically engaged, because one doesn’t want to be involved – too risky, too burdensome, too much of a hassle. One can flee into the the world of shopping-malls and consumerism, or the world of yoga and meditation retreats, or just go off-grid and live a simple life in Walden. Or become obsessed with money and one’s own social status. Fleeing certainly has its attractive features – to avoid having to be stressed and risk activists’ exhaustion, and just simply to have an easier life. But except if one does not care that something similar to Apartheid or genocides could reoccur, or that Russian-type “democracy” might spread over the world, it is a position whereby one freerides on the efforts of others to engage in the resistance to evil. [click to continue…]

I’ve avoided post-mortems on the US election disaster for two reasons.

First, they are useless as a guide to the future. The next US election, if there is one [1], will be a referendum on the Trump regime. Campaign strategies that might have gained the Democrats a few percentage points in November 2024 won’t be at all relevant in 2026 or 2028, let alone in the aftermath of a regime collapse further in the future.

Second, by focusing on the marginal shifts between 2020 (or even 2012) and 2024, these post-mortems miss the crucial fact that the divisions in US politics have been more or less constant[2] for the last 30 years, as this graph from the Pew Foundation shows.

Throughout this period the Republican Party has been competitive only because, it has received the consistent support of 60 per cent of white men.

Of course, that wouldn’t be enough without some votes from non-whites and women. But there is no group other than white men where the Republicans have had a reliable majority over the past 30 years.

More precisely the Republicans represent, and depend on, angry white men. I first heard the term “angry white men” in relation to the 1994 mid-term election when the proto-Trump Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to their first House of Representatives majority in 40 years. The 1994 outcome was the culmination of Nixon’s Southern strategy, bringing Southern whites, angry about their loss of social dominance in the Civil Rights ere, into the Republican camp.

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Cabo Verde is not a rich country. To have an idea, the minimum wage is €130 a month and a meal in a restaurant costs around €10. The IMF classifies Cabo Verde as a developing country.

Development has long ceased to be defined in exclusively economic terms. In 1990, a “human development index” was introduced, and other indicators have followed. Yet, there is one dimension still missing from all international comparisons: the moral development of a society. On this dimension, Cabo Verde seems to be among the most advanced. Here’s why. [click to continue…]

Curtis Yarvin, darling authoritarian ideologue of many tech billionaires, is back in the news, along with his deep links to J.D. Vance, via Peter Thiel. It’s no secret that plutocrats tend to be off-the-charts economic libertarians, with extreme hostility even to wildly popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which cost them nothing. So, if they were principled thinkers, it would seem logical for them to oppose dictators and wannabe dictators. But no, more and more tech bros are fans of Trump and Yarvin’s very Trumpy brand of authoritarianism. Elon Musk is the most visible tech bro fan; there are many more. What gives?

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