may or may not be possible to keep iteratively improving until need for prisons drops to almost nil or diminishing returns kick in much sooner, but wherever it stops would be a better place to stop than either status quo or lynch mobs

it's definitely possible to put fewer people in prison, for shorter average sentences, with better treatment and lower re-offending rates

make prisons less abusive plus
- make prisons more actively rehabilitative + improve support for prisoners in e.g. finding legitimate jobs/housing after release
- noncustodial sentences for a wider range of offences
- decriminalisation of e.g. sex work, drugs
- improve overall material conditions

anyway, highly recommend the book

do not recommend this train 😂

probably because policy exchange's registered charitable objects say they're "non-partisan" and "objective". sex matters specifically have objects of commenting on/raising awareness on rights and 'biological sex' & never actually claim to be nonpartisan

PLEASE

yeah I think it would be more accurate to say that there are characteristic 'extra-economic modes' of extracting unfree labour under feudalism, and that the modality is significant

and the ones that do generally have to eventually consider that at some point they'll have to find something else to do with themselves once they're too old or too injured to be peak Good At Sports

(and tbh I like that a lot but I am capable of recognising that even if 'you can construct a lot of nuanced reads on character dynamics by reading a fuckton of tie-in novels' is a model that is 100% my personal media consumption jam it's not good craftwork if the bonus content is too structural)

yeah, novels in both the old expanded universe continuity and the current one have gone in on portraying Obi-Wan as a younger padawan being much more impulsive than he is by TPM and that does feel like it's trying to create this vibe where TPM didn't

she's a smart kid

we asked one of the people benefiting most from capitalism and he told us that socialism couldn't possibly be a good idea

comparing his views to his mother's seems like a pretty sharp illustration of how far "mainline" has moved in the last few years, even if that's not exactly news.

overthinking is the best and only kind of thinking and skuld is a buzzkill 😂

Yeah, what amazes me is that Röhm didn't have the advantage of being able to check a biography of Ernst Röhm out from the library to see what happens next, but these guys do, so what is their excuse?

And, I mean, they're all deeply incurious, arrogant people, that's it, but still.

the traditional custodians of oxford are both town and gown, and the culture they're advocating a continued connection to is fighting in the streets about it -

like a lot of the contradictory implications seem partly explained by Tolkien *not* consciously prioritising trying to advance a very definite racist *or* anti-racist thesis and so not going out of his way to interrogate whether he's handling those themes consistently when his focus is elsewhere

it's partly looking for a *clear* thesis on race in it that makes it harder, I think: fundamentally, any fantasy world designed by a white English Christian man born in the late 19th century, however well-intentioned, will inevitably come marinated in a lot of problematic background noise