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John Cotter

@drjohncotter.bsky.social

2K followers 1.5K following 1.1K posts

Senior Lecturer in Law at Keele University, England. Research in EU constitutional law, especially defence of democracy, and impeachment. Irishman living in Cheshire. Views are my own.

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · Sep 8

Last mention of my most recent article on how - as a last resort - EU law can be (re-)-interpreted to protect the democratic legitimacy of its legislature in the face of Member State autocratisation.

John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · Aug 28

My latest article ‘Democracy Manifest? Ensuring the EU Legislature’s Democratic Legitimacy
in the Face of National-Level Autocratisation’ has just been published online and open access in European Papers: www.europeanpapers.eu/en/system/fi...

www.europeanpapers.eu

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 1d

I was kind of ahead of the curve on this, if I may say so myself.

John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 9d

This is what happens when you stop reading books and published articles and are exposed only to X posts by Crusader1488 and the like.

Reposted by John Cotter

Jakub Jaraczewski @jakubjaraczewski.bsky.social · 1d

🇪🇺⚖️🇵🇱 I keep thinking about this story, how the rule of law gladiator @profpech.bsky.social pushed back against the composition of a rule of law seminar organised by AFCO and, in the end, in a very Laurent Pech fashion, withdrew entirely. What kind of "bad people" do we want to talk to? 1/

Alberto Alemanno @alemanno.bsky.social · 6d

How is the EU Parliament selecting experts to its public hearings and seminars?

AFCO first disinvited me from a public hearing on EU electoral law, and then created the conditions for @profpech.bsky.social to step back seminar thegoodlobby.eu/how-the-eu-p...

How the EU Parliament Selects its Experts? | The Good Lobby

Recent incidents involving the EU Parliament's AFCO Committee have raised questions about the instrumentalisation of parliamentary procedures.

thegoodlobby.eu

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 3d

Scraping that tacky crap off the wall will be the most therapeutic job in the world once Trump is out of office.

Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 3d

Just a little more gold and it will be perfect

Trump in the Oval Office of the White House with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The walls are decorated with tacky gold bullshit

https://flic.kr/p/2rE6s9j

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 5d

In the David Frost biopic, the next part would be a cheesy montage in which Frost leafs through library books at night, skips stones across a canal, types frantically, stares at an ideas board, before bursting into a meeting out of breath and saying, “we need to rejoin the European Single Market.”

Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 5d

He's going to 'make the case for markets' despite screwing up Britain's place in a very large one, and putting up trade barriers.

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 7d

The second half was torture though. Watched it through my hands.

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 7d

FC Bayern just beat the European champions in Paris, while down to ten men for half of the game. Incredible stuff.

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 9d

It’s a fair point. It seems to be from Rogan. Longer versions are on YouTube. But yes, it is difficult to trust anything anymore.

John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 9d

This is what happens when you stop reading books and published articles and are exposed only to X posts by Crusader1488 and the like.

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 9d

They used to warn about believing your own press; now they need to warn about believing the replies to your posts on the social media platform you bought. The man’s brain is fried.

Farrukh @implausibleblog.bsky.social · 9d

Elon Musk, "These lovely small towns in England, Scotland and Ireland, they've been living their lives quietly. They're like hobbits"

"And so one day, 1,000 people show up in your village of 500 and start raping the kids"

"This has now happened, God knows how many times in Britain"

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 9d

Pep Guardiola finally recognising Graham Taylor for the visionary he was with this beautiful Christmas tree formation.

John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 10d

The people have failed Brexit; it is time to dissolve the people and elect a new one.

Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 10d

A Brexiter writes...

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 11d

Obviously, you’d have to keep notifications switched on to make sure you knew which party you were in at a given moment: “oh sh*t, I’ve joined Reform again”, etc.

John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 11d

Business idea: subscription app for politicians which does live comparisons of how performatively evil their party and others are being and automatically switches membership to the most evil. Would take care of correspondence, direct debits, social media posts, comms, etc. Called ‘direct defect’.

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 12d

If history had gone differently, he’d just be plain old Mr Battenberg Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 12d

In my experience when someone says “no pun intended”, the pun was almost certainly intended.

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 14d

Impact is certainly a problematic idea if that impact is facilitating destructive designs like the Rwanda plan or leaving the ECHR.

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Reposted by John Cotter

Paolo Sandro @paolosandro.bsky.social · 14d

I'm saddened to learn that the reactionary legal project launched by Adrian Vermeule overseas has now found an official home in the UK at Surrey Law School (as if some of the stuff coming out of Oxford Law wasn't enough). Unsurprisingly, their first 'research project' is to attack the ECHR system /1

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 14d

If a lot of people thought of rights as the justice they are owed, the world would be a better place.

John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 14d

That sentence sounds like Tommy Wiseau from the movie The Room fed through an AI tool drawing solely on Policy Exchange reports.

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 14d

Could be Trump’s cabinet.

David KC @davidmuttering.bsky.social · 14d

Tonight's classic documentary is The World at War, and the talking head descriptions are something else

John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 15d

I don’t think I’ve ever heard Nigel Farage say anything that wasn’t intended to imply something even worse while providing a measure of room to weasel out. If that’s straight talking, I’m not sure I understand what the term means.

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 15d

It’s a sign of the unseriousness of our times that men like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson can get reputations as straight talkers while rarely saying anything sufficiently specific to pin down while winking at their audience.

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Reposted by John Cotter

Zoe Gardner @zoejardiniere.bsky.social · 15d

Asylum seekers, housed in hotels in Manchester, are reaching out in their own words to address the concerns of the local community.

Please take a minute to read their letter, & share it with the people in your life who need to hear the truth about the people they are protesting.

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John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 16d

Unfortunately, this is quite fitting in an age in which entertainment has become more important than the business of governing. Or perhaps, government has become entertainment, would be to put it better. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

How Trump’s ballroom will dwarf the White House

Trump’s new 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom would be almost as large as the rest of the complex.

www.washingtonpost.com

John Cotter @drjohncotter.bsky.social · 18d

But listening to it recently on headphones, I was completely floored at how good it was: the variety, the recordings, the invention, the brevity of the songs, one after another. Hard to beat.