A glimpse of my selection process – a typical week’s Links

As I approach the 100^th post of the year, I thought it might be interesting for my readers to get a sense of how I identify topics for the blog.

The mail I open each morning comes almost exclusively from sites I subscribe to - which you’ll find by scrolling down to the blogroll called “Insights from Other Worlds” and lists 50 plus blogs. Twitter, since I joined earlier this year, has also become a useful source of links I archive in a dedicated file.

I have simply extracted from that file the last week’s links I thought worthy of being retained.

today

• a UK economist’s analysis of the latest stage of the debate about a second referendum for Scottish independence in view of the Brexit vote; and one of the first to argue that a lot depends on the attitude taken by a future Labour government.

• The latest newsletter from the Extinction rebels

I subscribe to the New Statesman and was intrigued with this article and audio about some academics moving to substack

• https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/10/bruno-latour-rise-substackademic

• https://www.newstatesman.com/podcasts/audio-long-reads/2022/11/are-substackademics-the-new-public-intellectuals-audio-long-reads

• https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/populism-without-the-people/

29 November

Owen Jones is a thorn in the Labour Party flesh and here, quite correctly, challenges the ruthless way it is pursuing a right-wing agenda

28 November

Chris Grey publishes every week the Brexit Blog which ruthlessly analyses the nonsense of the Brexiteers. This week he argues that four factors are coming together.

• First, the Liz Truss mini-budget had tested almost to destruction the theocratic Brexiter idea that belief could trump reality and the nationalist Brexiter idea that the UK was strong enough to buck what they call ‘the global Establishment’. At the same time, it made economic growth central to defining what Brexit was supposed to deliver.

• Second, the disastrous collapse of the mini-budget and, with it, the Truss premiership, brought Rishi Sunak to power on the sole basis of his supposed economic competence and realism.

• Third, this happened against a background where opinion polls show ‘the economy’ to be by far the biggest issue of concern to the public.

• Fourth, it happened against the background of opinion polls which for many months have shown a growing majority for the view that Brexit was a mistake (56-32), and a majority view that Brexit has been economically damaging.

This site exposes how the UK Navy is dumping radioactive waste in the River Clyde – my hometown As I contemplate returning home after 3 decades, I muse on how to square a solitary life with some solidarity

26 November

“Change the World without taking power” was an interesting book produced in 2002 by British philosopher and activist - with a fuller version in 2005. He’s interviewed here – with a more recent podcast “Hope in Hopeless Times” here

The book is from Pluto Press who have a sizeable list of Open Access books one of which was “Anthropology’s World – life in a 21^st century discipline”. I’ve been long fascinated by the application of anthropological method to the modern world (see Gillian Tett on the world of finance or Chris Shore on the EU). Somehow its practitioners are able to be much more critical..

The OECD of all people seems interested in deliberative democracy

• https://twitter.com/ClaudiaChwalisz/status/1596105285634260992

• https://www.oecd.org/governance/innovative-citizen-participation/

25 November

A good take on the issues surrounding Scottish independence from a disputatious Scot

I had 2 recent posts about psychological books – and these were some of the references I had skimmed

• https://theconversation.com/the-rise-of-pop-psychology-can-it-make-your-life-better-or-is-it-all-snake-oil-158709

• https://drb.ie/articles/hugging-stalin/?fbclid=IwAR2hfYHt7nD3L4dKgx-TqsLKnmnv8D_SOMmUa6B387gSTyNkif2jwiXwOlQ Michael Foley

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Phillips_(psychologist)

• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/08/on-wanting-to-change-review-an-inspiring-vision-of-psychoanalysis

• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/01/adam-phillips-life-in-writing

24 November

One of the posts referred to “The Act of Living” with google offering excerpts here. The author offers a very personal tour of modern psychology and is particularly fascinated by the loneliness expressed by the American artist Edward Hopper

This link offers an expose of how US money has cultivated the British Left

23 November

The Worm at the Core - on the Role of Death in Life S Solomon et al (2015)

“Chasing Steel” a tribute to Ian Jack – a great UK journalist RIP