Drawing from the work of Musa al-Gharbi and Andrew Mara, this blog is about symbolic capital, performative politics, and how institutions lose their substance long before they fall. Not everything we do is useless—but a lot of it is. 📚🏛️💬🎯 Read the full piece here:

Genuine question about PM Mark Carney’s victory speech: he quoted, “Virtue is like a muscle… we become just by doing just acts,” echoing Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics II.1). Is this a passing flourish—or does it signal a deeper virtue-ethics vision of citizenship and the state?

You see, this is an actual newspaper.

“One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.” #HannahArendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The collapse of USAID isn’t justice—it’s abandonment. Millions lost access to care, food, and medicine. This isn’t the end of empire. It’s the end of responsibility. 🌍💉🥣 My latest: open.substack.com/pub/drleechngo… #USAID #foreignpolicy #globalhealth #Substack

Happy VE Day to everyone (except fascists).

If I were elected head of the Catholic Church, my new name would be "Pope Nope".

I've never been a fan. But he was better than this. And, apparently, knows better than this.

Stop trying to be Reform-lite. It’s pathetic and it won’t work. Stand up for some actual values.

“For more than seventy-five years, credible voices have warned what would happen if these conditions endured. … the denial of justice will not produce peace. But it will produce despair, resistance, and, eventually it would lead us here, to mass atrocity.”

This shouldn’t be a backbench-only Labour view… Where is the front bench? Your silence is deafening Thank you Richard Burgon MP for speaking for so many of us.

Her expressionless face.. The tapping of her ear How lost she looks Her little feet on the rubble Is she, as Netanyahu puts it: “A murderous Islamist terrorist organization”? Can we be real about this FFS?

🤣🤣🤣

Quite! I couldn’t understand why the biggest event in London that day never made it to my BBC News (UK) feed / website & had to find out via X…

“My brother is a doctor. His wife is a doctor. Their children are just kids. All underage” The brother-in-law of Dr. Alaa al-Najjar speaks of the horror of the bombing of her 10 beautiful children and her husband.

How many children? When are we going to stop enabling this? theguardian.com/world/2025/may…

“Israel’s brutalization of the Palestinian population in Gaza has gone on too long. These are unspeakable — and, more important, indefensible — crimes. We cannot be complicit in minimizing them or pretending that they are not happening. Because they are. Enough.”

Canada opposes Israel’s approval of 22 new settlements in the West Bank and calls on Israel to reverse this decision. Israeli settlements in the occupied territories violate international law and undermine prospects for lasting peace and security via the two-state solution.

I’m pointing out the flaws in media coverage because I’m forced to overcompensate for you all getting high on a dose of validation from licking 'media shift' breadcrumbs. If basic recognition of atrocities satisfies you, that’s exactly why we’re stuck here.

Amen.