Marc Hudson
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marchudson.bsky.social
Marc Hudson
@marchudson.bsky.social
4.1K followers 1.7K following 2.5K posts
Academic (socio-technical transitions), climate historian, writer, video maker. Most days I think we're toast. #envhist See also allouryesterdays.info
@allouryesterdays.bsky.social
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marchudson.bsky.social
John Crace, holding back...

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Sometimes what you see is what you get. Usually in Westminster things happen for a reason. The logic may not be obvious but if you use your imagination you can come up with some logic for someone doing something that appears to be batshit crazy. But just occasionally, you reach a singularity on the space-time continuum where the laws of physics break down and nothing makes sense. A state of Platonic batshitness. Unadulterated madness. Where things seem crazy merely because they are. Put simply: for no good reason, Keir Starmer and his team in Downing Street have chosen this week to mount a leadership challenge to himself. As if everyone inside No 10 has simultaneously had a collective breakdown. It’s an act of self-harm on an almost unimaginable scale. One that would leave lemmings gawping in amazement. Wondering why their destructive tendencies were so unambitiou
November 12, 2025 at 8:14 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
Bloody cat
November 10, 2025 at 7:46 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
I have a spreadsheet of quotes I use all the time (of course I do)...

Here's EP Thompson...
The foulest damage to our political life comes not from the 'secrets' which they hide from us, but from the little bits of half-truth and disinformation which they do tell us. These are already pre-digested, and then are sicked up as little gobbits of authorised spew. The columns of defense correspondents in the establishment sheets serve as the spittoons.
November 10, 2025 at 2:12 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
The link below is Seamus Heaney, writing in 2003 about the (bloody brilliant) collection of poems he and Ted Hughes edited "The Rattle Bag"- I've been reading 10 poems a day, am almost done.
The photo is the preface.

www.theguardian.com/books/2003/o...
This anthology amassed itself like a cairn. Most of the poems lay about for the taking in places already well known to people, younger or older, who read verse; only a few came from the by-ways. They were picked up one by one and left in situ without much initial thought being given tot he stuff already in the pile or the position that they might occupy in the final shape. Indeed, the thought of shaping did not arise until the hunt for individual poems had lost its excitement, and then we decided to arrange the material in alphabetical order according to titles or first lines rather than thematically or chronologically or according to author. To have arranged it according to author would have robbed the order of the poems of an unexpectedness which we think it now possesses and would perhaps have encouraged readers to think of the book as an attempt to set up an exclusive list of poets suitable for younger people. To have done it thematically would have made it feel too much like a textbook. To have done it chronologically would have left whole centuries unrepresented and made the think look a botched historical survey. We hope that our decision to impose an arbitrary alphabetical order allows the contents to discover themselves as we ourselves discovered them - each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big, voluble world.
November 9, 2025 at 7:47 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
Oh, this is good.

From the preface to Eric Zencey's Virgin Forest...
How can we make ourselves a place—politically, morally, practically—in the world as it is, a world suffering the ecological and temporal dislocations of modernity, a world in which civilization threatens its own material roots in nature? How can we be truly at home in such a world, in post-Nature nature? What will ground us? What will guide us? The answer I’ve come to is “history.” Over time I’ve come to realize that our ecological crisis is also a historical crisis. By this I mean not that the moral and ecological problems that result from our technological, industrial domination of nature have become manifest at a particular historical moment (although, of course, they have) or that our ecological problems are serious enough that they have to be mentioned in any narrative account of our culture that tries to be complete (although I believe they are). What I mean is this: the cultural attitudes toward nature that produced our ecological crisis have symptomatic and consequent parallels in our cultural attitudes toward history. If we are out of place in nature, we are also out of place in time, and the two kinds of exile are related.
November 9, 2025 at 2:47 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
The Panama Canal scandal of the early 1890s. Shades of The Torygraph drip-feeding out details of the MPs expenses scandal back in 2010...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_...
However, before his death Reinach gave a list of the suborned members of Parliament to the Libre Parole, Edouard Drumont's antisemitic daily, in exchange for the paper covering up Reinach's own role. Overnight, the story transformed La Libre Parole from an obscure sheet into one of the most influential papers in the country. The list of culprits was published morning by morning in small installments, so that hundreds of politicians had to live on tenterhooks for months. The scandal showed, in Arendt's view, that the middlemen between the business sector and the state were almost exclusively Jews, thus helping to pave the road for the Dreyfus Affair.[2]
November 9, 2025 at 1:10 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
It keeps getting better.
Then too there was a whole other set of incentives. It’s fair to say that, former student of mine or not, I’ve loved Mamdani’s campaign, and loved in particular the glad-hearted and admirably steady way he’s brought what not that long ago would have been absolutely ordinary social-democratic priorities (in respect to affordability, housing, health, food, education) back into the realm of mainstream political discourse. For some time I’ve been saying that the storied choice between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely clear a good many years ago in the United States, and both major parties chose barbarism. They are obviously and consequentially different barbarisms—one had reproductive freedom, vaccines, and trans health care in it, at least for a while—and I can tell you why I have sincerely preferred one to the other. But we oughtn’t to kid ourselves. From the perspective of a world of increasingly unimaginable maldistribution of resources, cascading ecological collapse, a genocide cheered on by a putatively liberal order, both are barbarisms. Mamdani seemed to me a small glimmering break in the wall of all that. A part of me wanted to do him a solid.
November 8, 2025 at 7:24 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
THIS IS BRILLIANT. READ, SHARE, PLS

lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...
The first few messages wondered if I knew him (I don’t think I did, though I certainly had students who did, and do), if I taught him (possibly? but in truth not that I remembered), but mostly if I could say something about what he might have been reading and doing and studying, there in his time at this little college on the coast of Maine. More than once, the name “Frantz Fanon” was broached—which had the virtue of certain hand-showing clarity. It gives me no joy to admit that there are certain kinds of professors who love little more than seeing their names in the paper. It’s not great, but there it is. (These are often the same sorts of people who will drop into an otherwise ordinaryish conversation phrases like, “No sure it’s like when I was teaching that big lecture class, to my students at Yale University…”) But I like to think even they would’ve been able to spot the coiled wires and rusty springs of this particular trap. Beneath its humdrum requests, every email said more or less the same thing: Can you explain how reading certain things can turn a person into a socialist—and, possibly, a terrorist-sympathizing antisemite? It’s a storied gambit of the right at its most grimly predictable. “People read Foucault,” the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in an actual column that I’ve all but committed to memory, “and develop an alienated view of the world.” God, did I love this. An “alienated view of the world”! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied—no, no, it was probably the Foucault you read in 2003. Anyway, it was clearly time to get the elaborate machinery of manufactured bewilderment and sour indignation up and running again.
November 8, 2025 at 7:20 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
If you know your history, you will ... not be surprised by Your Party...

Piss-ups in breweries, etc etc

www.theguardian.com/politics/198...
SLD Sketch: 2,000 delegates in search of a party This article is more than 37 years old Andrew Rawnsley Mon 26 Sep 1988 16.03 BST Share On the first day of the inaugural conference of Britain's newest political movement, the party placed itself firmly in one of Britains' oldest political traditions - complete confusion. 'It's total chaos back here,' cried a voice from the back of Blackpool's Winter Gardens mid-way through the morning's debate. There were cheers. Here, at least, was something they could all agree on. Otherwise, the simplest things - like what they are called - still eluded them. The 2,000 delegates wandered around like people emerging from a deep coma, struggling to remember who they were and what they were here for. Some can dimly remember the terrible accident - the last election - which brought them here. 'We are down to 8 per cent in the opinion polls,' one delegate told them. 'We have disappeared from the face of the earth.' Not that everybody was that optimistic.
November 8, 2025 at 3:33 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
Bob Hawke being severely butt-hurt that he wasn't invited to the G7 meeting in London in 1984.
Letter from Foreign Office to Thatcher about how butt-hurt Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke was to not get an invite to the G7...
November 7, 2025 at 1:47 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
Gonna have to steal this

(from a 1988 briefing note to That Woman).
We must therefore beware that the present vogue for reorganisation of funding mechanisms and restructuring research councils with enhanced participation by industry, is not the start of a great new winner picking game masquerading as a new dawn. In Plato's Republic Socrates asks Glaucon if money should be spent on astronomy and Glaucon replies that it ought to because of its military and navigational value. Socrates replies that he is amused to see such fear of recommending useless studies. The debate is therefore over 2000 years old and still unresolved in the papers we have today.
November 6, 2025 at 12:24 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
FOIAed.
Screengrab of The National Archives - "Closed Extract: Letter dated 7 July 1989"
November 5, 2025 at 12:17 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
Academics as obsessed with titles, status and all that? Whatever gave you that idea...
At our first dinner in the Wijk dining hall Carroll made a characteristically gracious welcoming speech to the distinguished scientists gathered from many parts of the world, and he announced that one of the policies that would be followed for the next three weeks was that everyone should adopt the indelicate American habit of calling people by their first names. I know this came as a bit of a shock to some of the scientists there, who would never have stood for such a thing in their home institutions. By the same token, their first names or nicknames were often well-kept secrets, so Carroll asked each participant to jot down his or her preferred appelation. (As I recall, only one scientist could not adapt to this breach of academic etiquette, and we had to be careful to address him alone as 'Professor '.)
November 5, 2025 at 11:31 AM
marchudson.bsky.social
What?!
A tanuki in the snow.
November 3, 2025 at 4:06 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
These morays?
Moray eel alongside text Underwater no one can hear you scream"
October 29, 2025 at 9:46 AM
marchudson.bsky.social
Proposed rebranding of mobile phones as "id portals"

***

(screengrab below is from an interview with Will Stancil, by the Renewal ppl)

marchudson.net/2025/10/27/m...
One of the things that social media does, and that I think is really striking, is shape our perception of other people’s opinions. Frankly, based on my experience, I suspect that most people’s political opinions are essentially the same as what they perceive their friends political opinions to be. If they see all their friends believe in something, or think that all their friends believe in something, they’ll likely believe it too. That’s why so much political discussion centres on this idea of ‘well everyone is saying it’ or ‘everyone knows it’. I think that one of the things that social media does is that it gives us an inaccurate sense of what the consensus opinion is, while giving us a perception that we know what the consensus is. I can go on Twitter and see 1000 posts from 1000 people. And human beings are very in tune – it’s just part of our social wiring! We like to, you know, vibe out what the consensus view is on this, that, or the other. And social media creates these sorts of artificial social consensuses that really help drive opinion.
October 27, 2025 at 1:33 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
Screengrab of Leon Simons twitter post May 18 2025, with table of what each model is showing for when we hit .5 Celsius temperatures
October 26, 2025 at 4:44 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
Loved the novel Vineland (Thomas Pynchon, 1990 or so). "One Battle After Another" is inspired by it, but you absolutely do not need to have read the novel to enjoy

Imho, it's v. v. v. good indeed. Funny, clever, gripping, etc. Doesn't feel like 2hr 40mins...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Bat...
One battle after another
October 21, 2025 at 3:36 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
For £1 I bought a collection of 1930/31 radio broadcasts by Harold Nicholson (interesting chap). I'm read and microblogging abt each on its anniversary. Because I am OtD. Sorry, OCD.

The first is abt him going to Oxford to collect 2 degrees.
Next time: Palestine...

marchudson.net/2025/10/17/o...
Harold NIcholson
October 17, 2025 at 6:12 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
Here is a cartoon of me
Old man yells at cloud
October 17, 2025 at 10:39 AM
marchudson.bsky.social
"A sex-linked disease kills potent men and engenders a world in which women are the masters and movers. The time: the 1970's. The place: the U.S.A virulent epidemic, Encephalitis 16, menaces the country"
archive.org/details/viri...
(cf The White Plague by Frank Herbert: 1970s male panic).
October 13, 2025 at 1:33 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
Entertaining life.
As long as you're not on the receiving end of his hitmen, I am sure he was great fun...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_B...
World War II In 1936, Berman and his crew had violently disrupted meetings of the Silver Shirts, an American fascist and pro-Nazi organization, at a Minneapolis Elks Club and elsewhere.[11] Susan Berman later learned that the Nuremberg Laws and the Holocaust enraged her father so intensely that he enlisted in the Canadian Army. Berman had, in fact, previously been turned away by the United States military for being a convicted felon. In addition, the attack on Pearl Harbor had not yet brought the United States into World War II. Berman and his Minnesota friend Nathan Gittlewich both fought in the European Theater as soldiers with the 18th Armoured Car Regiment, 12th Manitoba Dragoons, II Canadian Corps, which first experienced combat during the Normandy Landings. Berman was well-liked, and his fellow soldiers did not know that he was a major figure in Jewish-American organized crime. After being severely wounded by enemy fire, briefly presumed dead, and declared unfit for further active service, Berman returned to the Twin Cities.
October 12, 2025 at 8:16 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
Rueful MAO (as opposed to ROFLMAO)

ruthlessculture.com/2012/01/24/w...
3. You are not the Person You were when You bought that Book What were you thinking when you spent your time screaming and shitting yourself? Why would you just lie there while your parents changed your filthy undergarments? What were you thinking when you spent four hours sucking face with a thirteen-year old girl or gave a blowjob to the guy in the letterman jacket who said he liked your hair? The answer to all of these questions is that we are not the people we were as infants and teenagers and so should probably not be held to account for our actions at the time. Why did you spend an hour laughing uproariously at your own jokes before puking your guts out? Why did you lie in bed for an entire week without eating properly? What kind of person believes that they are a golden god and decides to jump off a roof? Again, the answer to all of these questions is that we were ill, drunk or high when we did those things and so should probably not be judged by the
October 12, 2025 at 3:27 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
Just got this
Thank you for your email. Peerages are not a part of the UK honours system. Removing that title requires an Act of Parliament. You should therefore write to your MP to pursue this complaint. However, Michelle Mone does hold an OBE. An honour can be revoked on the approval of the sovereign following advice from the Forfeiture Committee. The Committee is able to consider cases where individuals are deemed to have brought the honours system into disrepute. Examples of this might include where that person has been sentenced to a term of imprisonment exceeding three months, or where they have been censured/struck off etc by the relevant regulatory authority or professional body for actions or failures to act which are directly relevant to the granting of the honour. It is important to note that the committee is not an investigative body and is only able to reflect official findings by those bodies which do have that power. We are aware that there is an ongoing criminal investigation into Ms Mone, which is separate from the civil case on which the High Court ruled on 1st October. Once that investigation concludes, the Forfeiture Committee will then be able to consider whether to recommend that her OBE be revoked. Kind regards Alex Morrow
October 3, 2025 at 1:34 PM
marchudson.bsky.social
This is almost 40 years ago. Could be 40 minutes...
The toughtest job, though, will be to foster plain language within government (another main goal). Ordering bureaucrats to say what they really mean is like commanding the wind to stop blowing. Careers are built not on clarity, but on the ability to hedge, retreat, and cover tracks. The only thing most bureaucrats can say with real clarity is "no." The politicians are no example, and they proved it as recently as last Friday when they announced funding for cities, towns, schools and hospitals. As usual ministers competed to see who could provide the least meaning in the most words.
October 2, 2025 at 9:31 AM