Challenging the herd with bold thinking in philosophy, politics and culture. Subscribe to UnHerd here: https://xitter.cf/t.co/zUxzdsSoTQ
London, United Kingdom
Joined March 2017
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For years, Latin America has elected waves of Washington-backed candidates.
But President Lula’s shock re-election victory has halted the continent’s Rightward turn, argues @NickBurns 👇
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After losing in the first round, Brazil’s President Lula has won a shocking runoff election victory.
His triumph halts a string of successes for Trump-aligned candidates across Latin America, writes @NickBurns 👇
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I for one am optimistic about Britain's future. Our country has the capability not just to survive in our radically changing world, but to thrive in it. It has endured seven shocks in 18 years — two of which were self-inflicted — and yet it is still standing. Britain’s economy is clearly resilient. The question now facing John Healey is how to grow it.
The answer is AI. Love it or hate it, it doesn’t matter: because AI is “the thing” and trillions of dollars are being poured into it for good reason. It’s a transformative technology that is here to stay, whether or not the bubble surrounding it bursts, just as the railways and the internet outlived the bubbles that built them.
Read more from @ryan_wain
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Britain voted to take back control of its borders.
Restoring EU freedom of movement would undo that very promise, writes @peterfranklin_ 👇
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Many Israelis regard the upcoming election as critical, perhaps the most consequential in the country's history. Arab voters, whose theoretical electoral weight exceeds 20 seats in the 120-member Knesset, largely share the goal of the Jewish opposition's so-called “change bloc”: to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and bring down the most Right-wing government in Israel's history.
With the polls suggesting a closely fought election, Arab voters could emerge as the Jewish State’s ultimate kingmakers — with consequences that could transform not just the Knesset, but Israeli society as a whole.
Read more from Florit Shoihet:
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Labour says it has learnt the lessons of Brexit.
So why is Andy Burnham floating a return to the very policy that helped make Brexit happen? @peterfranklin_ 👇
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France is in the grip of social breakdown, with financial chaos looming. The urgent question now is: could it spread? A leading expert on Europe and its discontents, @EuroBriefing explores how the next debt crisis might start — and how it could both destroy the eurozone and scar Britain’s economy.
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UnHerd retweeted
over at @unherd, I wrote about how nobody can resist that prediction market money, not even middle-America chroniclers Danny McBride and Shane Gillis. The ad is amusing, but the cost of their grabbing that bag falls on the rest of us unherd.com/newsroom/shane-gi…
Celebrity endorsements have helped make sports betting part of everyday American life.
Now the industry wants to make betting on almost anything just as normal, writes @moustacheclubus 👇
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In the clashes on Durrës Street, I bumped into the Canadian-Albanian revolutionary activist Bora Mitrovica, who I had interviewed in the summer. You were right, I said to her, that the Flamingo protests would soon turn violent. “I know my people,” she replied, “I’m just surprised it took so long.” But whether the protests will really force Rama to resign seems doubtful. Sources in the Socialist Party willing to criticise Rama have gone silent, waiting on events.
Seemingly wavering last weekend, the state’s use of coercive power has since become stronger and more confident, hampering the ability of the protestors to gather or hold their ground. The protestors’ appeals to claimed European norms on humane crowd control also suffer from comparison to the riots, and robust policing methods, now seen in France and Italy.
With Rama directly linking the violence in Tirana with the riots in Western Europe, it is perhaps unfortunate timing for anti-government Albanian activists that their uprising has been overshadowed by events in the EU’s heartlands.
Read more from @arisroussinos:
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Once upon a time, comedians worried about selling out.
Now Shane Gillis and Danny McBride are selling prediction markets to the masses, writes @moustacheclubus 👇
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Once you recognise the phenomenon of “virtue hoarding”, countless political stories make sense. In the aftermath of the recent Green Party conference, for instance, some wondered whether passing a motion that “Zionism is racism” (which won by only a few hundred votes) was a smart strategy: not least because the Greens are struggling to deal with a Labour government now led by Andy Burnham. Just when the Greens needed to address the country with bold, broadly popular policies, critics argued, they had turned inward to debate the meaning of words.
And yet, once again, it was these same people — who are on the whole entirely sympathetic to the claim that Zionism is premised on ideas of racial superiority — who stood accused of being Zionists themselves.
I myself was called a Zionist! I had said I understood why some European Jews, in 1945, were attracted to the Israeli cause in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But for the virtue hoarders, of course, that signalled little more than my own moral depravity.
Read more from @AaronBastani
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Chocolate rewards patience, while sour sweets demand an instant reaction.
Our increasingly online culture seems to favour the latter, writes @TheGreedyDick 👇
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As chocolate prices soar, Gen Z is turning to sour candy.
The more violently a flavour attacks the senses, the better, writes @TheGreedyDick 👇
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All the famous Hemingway rough-and-tumble is explicable in basically compensatory, Freudian terms. And yet for anyone familiar with Hemingway’s later trajectory, these affinities might seem rather surprising.
By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, he was regularly exploding in print at any journalist or biographer who dared mention the word “psychology” and “Hemingway” in the same sentence: “How would you like it if someone said that everything you’ve done in your life was done because of some trauma?”, he complained in Time Magazine.
In the academy, he became a kind of anti-Freudian bogeyman, a monster of male repression, and that task of critics was to do what he, in his own life, never could: understand himself.
Read more from @peermohambert
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New Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCAs) signed with Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark have given the US armed forces “unimpeded access” to 47 military bases across the region, some of them perilously close to the Russian border. Sweden and Finland are even weakening their long-standing taboo on nuclear weapons.
As the region’s security order has undergone an accelerated Americanisation, Nordic societies have also increasingly been remade in America’s image. They have become more militarised, more hawkish and more hostile to diplomacy, while their once-robust social welfare states have been gutted and inequality has soared. In Finland, there has even been a marked increase in homelessness.
Many say the deteriorating quality of life is a small price to pay in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But others warn that the Nordic countries have surrendered their sovereignty to an unpredictable United States, which has left them weaker and more exposed — rather than more secure.
Read more from @lilyslynch
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Why is the Met responsible for protecting royals across the UK?
The Markle affair raises questions about whether this costly arrangement makes sense, writes @DomAdlerUK 👇
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The Met failed to pass on allegations against Meghan Markle’s father to US authorities.
How did such a sensitive case slip through the cracks? @DomAdlerUK 👇
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UnHerd retweeted
JD Vance fears, above all, the Blade Runner scenario: demographic churn so high that majority-minority distinctions completely break down and society becomes an agglomeration of hostile strangers.
Me, on what the VP sees in Europe. unherd.com/2026/10/france-an…
Labour says it wants businesses to make a profit.
So why is it still so expensive to do business in Britain? @ADOBrien88 👇
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