Niall Ferguson
@nfergus
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International man of history. Author, @HooverInst senior fellow, @bopinion columnist. Latest book, DOOM: The Politics of Catastrophe (Penguin). Opinions my own.
Stanford, CA
Joined June 2009
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As I said last week, the Biden administration has apparently decided to instrumentalize the war in Ukraine to bring about regime change in Russia, rather than trying to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible. Biden just said it out loud. This is a highly risky strategy.
After President Joe Biden declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power," a White House official asserted that the U.S. leader was "not discussing Putin’s power in Russia or regime change."
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Are we unable to imagine defeat? It seems clear to me that, if the US allows Ukraine, Israel and/or Taiwan to be overrun by their adversaries, there will be dire consequences for Americans, too. But few people agree. 1/8
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Reminder: “Keep Calm and Carry On” was never used during the war. Though millions of copies were printed in 1939, it was decided not to distribute them and the slogan was exhumed and popularized only in 2000. Instead, the government went for this.
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The President & Corporation of
@Harvard
must go. Claudine Gay's responses to the aftermath of Oct. 7 confirmed her unsuitability for the job. But her serial plagiarism & the attempts to deny or to justify it disqualify all concerned:
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When is
@GretaThunberg
going to acknowledge explicitly that by far the biggest culprit is China, which signed up for Paris but continues to build one coal-burning power station a week? China is responsible for 60% of the increase in global emissions of CO2 since Greta was born.
"Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour."
Read Greta Thunberg's full speech from the World Economic Forum in Davos:
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“Ilhan Omar seems to have learned the same anti-Semitism I was once taught as a young girl in Somalia. I hope she can unlearn it too,” writes
@Ayaan
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Writing in 2003, I was not in principle against a pax americana in succession to the pax britannica of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I took (and still hold) the now heretical position that most history is the history of empires; that no empire is without its injustices and…
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This is the central issue of the climate change debate. Until someone tells me how exactly the rest of us are going to constrain China and India, it's all virtue signaling.
The rise of China and India, with their associated energy demands, has overwhelmed the emissions reductions chalked up by richer nations
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Liberals 2 years ago: The tyrant Trump will destroy the constitution!
Liberals now: It’s all the fault of the constitution. Let’s destroy it!
If by “failed” you mean governed and shaped the most powerful country in world history while enshrining eternal and fundamental values, spot on
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Today we launch a new university:
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The most depressing finding of this report is how deeply illiberal the American students are who describe themselves as liberal. The worst of it is their disgusting enthusiasm for informing on professors and one another.
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In about 20 years (if there is anyone sane left in academia by then), someone will work out just how much damage was done by all the crazy campaigns of character assassination that followed the Great Awokening. The case described here is only one of many:
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The problem has been that any academic who did challenge the anti-colonial ideology did not get hired or tenured. You had to be inside a university to see how quickly overt political discrimination became normal.
The anti-colonial’ ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, applies a toxic but historically nonsensical mix of Soviet propaganda, US anti-racist jargon & traditional anti-semitism to a complex history.
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"There is a chance that the academic Left's deranged response to the October 7 attacks on Israel—their reckless jumping of the shark with overt celebrations of terrorism and anti-Semitism—may finally have roused the complacent from their torpor."
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We're with you,
@bariweiss
, all the way.
This was scrawled outside of our offices this week.
If the antisemites who did this think it will intimidate me and the journalists of
@TheFP
, they don’t know me, they don’t know us, and they have no idea what we stand for.
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"Those who see the conflict as a simple territorial dispute between a colonial state and a dispossessed minority fail to see Hamas for what it really is: a gang of genocidal Islamist thugs backed by a theocratic, anti-Semitic regime in Iran." By
@Ayaan
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“Cambridge University Rescinds my Fellowship | Jordan Peterson.” Having taught at Cambridge for three happy years, I am dismayed at the shabby treatment of
@jordanbpeterson
. All concerned should read this and hang their heads in shame.
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Future historians will marvel at all this. It will seem obvious by 2033, if not sooner, that the pax americana faced a well-coordinated challenge from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea in the early 2020s. The first move was the invasion of Ukraine. The second was the war of…
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"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the
equal sharing of miseries." -- Winston Churchill, 1945. (From Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 892.)
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A devastating letter of resignation by
@peterboghossian
. His treatment by the administration of
@Portland_State
has been disgraceful.
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We are living through a monetary revolution so multifaceted that few of us comprehend its full extent. And Bitcoin is winning it:
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In a highly competitive field, this is the most insane Cancel Culture story of the month.
Toronto District School Board superintendent vetoes student book event with Yazidi activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad because her memoir about being captured and sexually enslaved by Islamic State terrorists “would foster Islamophobia.”
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Future historians will note with incredulity that, in the midst of a pandemic -- when there should have been a premium on critical thinking and academic freedom -- a concerted effort was made to cancel
@MartinKulldorff
and discredit the Great Barrington Declaration.
I am no longer a professor of medicine at
@Harvard
. Here is the story of my Harvard experience until I was fired for clinging to the truth.
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This person is beneath contempt.
What if I told you Europe is not a continent by defintion, but a geopolitical fiction to separate it from Asia and so the alarm about a European, or civilized, or First World nation being invaded is a dog whistle to tell us we should care because they are like us.
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"Harvard humiliated itself for the sake of an ideology. Until that ideology is extirpated not just from one university but from American education as a whole, the mafia of mediocrity will continue to march on — and produce many more Claudine Gays along the way."
@Ayaan
…
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This is correct.
Musk is not an anti-Semite. Neither is Trump. Neither are most of the other conservatives who have been falsely accused of anti-Semitism by lefty organizations in America and Britain since 2016.
These claims that major figures on the right are anti-Semites is a transparent…
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A powerful open letter to
@Harvard
President Gay by
@BillAckman
. I recall no incidents of anti-Semitism during my 12 years on the faculty. However, the illiberal tendencies on campus, and in particular the undermining of free speech, were already apparent when we left in 2016.
Please see my below letter to the President of Harvard University sent today:
November 4, 2023
Dear President Gay,
I am writing this letter to you regretfully. Never did I think I would have to write a letter to the president of my alma mater about the impact of her actions…
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Niall Ferguson: The Treason of the Intellectuals - Ivy League edition | The Free Press
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NIALL FERGUSON: Biden's fear of Putin and appeasement of Iran are making World War III more, not less, likely. We have perhaps 12 months to grasp the big lesson of history: If you do not prepare for war you shall not have peace | Daily Mail Online
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I don't know who you are, Mat Krahn, or whether you're alive or dead or both, but for me you win the Internet this week.
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This is simply superb. “We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage.”
@bariweiss
in
@Commentary
.
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Six questions for Xi Jinping, US edition: 1. What exactly was going on in Wuhan that led to the initial emergence of SARS-CoV-2?
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A remarkable commentary by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the perils of teaching the current generation of students, which appears to apply from Nigeria to California:
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"We no longer live in a democracy. We live in an 'emocracy', where emotions rather than majorities rule and feelings matter more than reason."
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Attention, fellow Californians: You need to vote for
@ShellenbergerMD
for Governor on June 7. Good, detailed interview with him here:
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I lack the patience to listen regularly to podcasts, even the best ones (like
@SamHarrisOrg
's), but his latest is a genuine masterpiece: And if, like me, you prefer reading, it is also available and works just as well as an essay:
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Every time I walk through a major airport, I ask myself: How long before the rest of the world sees the ghastly products of French and Italian luxury brands for what they are? "A very remunerative joke on the world," is how
@JGaneshEsq
nicely puts it:
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It’s always a thrilling moment when the first finished copy arrives. This is the UK edition.
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You. Must. Read. This.
@coldxman
“Stories and Data,” and how they changed his mind about Black Lives Matter. What a clear-sighted and courageous piece of writing.
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"When she leaked 750,000 secret military records, she put an untold number of innocent people’s lives in danger."
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"Apparently it still needs saying that Zionism is not the cause, but the consequence, of perennial, dehumanising, antisemitism." Essential reading by
@simon_schama
:
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"If the terrorists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad took to butchering British men, women, and children, would their youthful apologists in the Anglosphere reconsider their position? It is a hard question to answer with confidence."
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You must read
@DouglasKMurray
's demolition of the appalling
@nytimes
review of
@Ayaan
's book, Prey: There should be a special place in hell reserved for reviewers who don't read or knowingly misrepresent the books they review.
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This moved me to tears. May God help them, for we have not:
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The pax americana seems to be ending. The fate of Ukraine — of Israel and Taiwan, too — hangs in the balance. I cannot say I am surprised. It was always very likely that the overreach of the Global War on Terror would be requited in this way: with a resurgence of isolationism.…
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Free speech on the internet is in free fall. George Orwell’s vision of the future was “a boot stamping on a human face — for ever”. In 2019, it turns out to be a geek hitting “delete” on a keyboard for ever.
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This remains the most illuminating and memorable article ever written about Boris Johnson:
via
@spectator
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If you had told me when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s that American universities would be like this in 2020, I would not have believed you: Actually, I wouldn't have believed you in 2002, when I moved from Oxford to NYU.
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For the record, I think the illiberal left is the most pressing threat. One important reason for that is that real liberals like
@Yascha_Mounk
worry too much about the rapidly fading populist right and not enough about the Red Guards' takeover of education (and much else).
The most pressing threat to liberal democracy comes from the populist right.
From Brasilia to Washington, authoritarian populists are muzzling dissent, stoking racism, and concentrating power in their own hands.
We’re facing the fight of a lifetime.
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"Never before has such a small number of firms been able to control what billions can say and see." This is neither a defensible nor a sustainable state of affairs:
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"The entire Western world has been living in a fool’s paradise, imagining that the post-Cold War era would never end. We have been living in the age of butter not guns, ploughshares not swords."
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Your weekly reminder that I,
@nfergus
, am not
@neil_ferguson
. My parents went to the trouble of giving me the Gaelic spelling Niall so that numpties on the Internet would be able to tell me apart from any epidemiologists that might later be born and christened Neil. But in vain.
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Bravo to
@MrAndyNgo
for his tireless work in exposing this kind of fraudulent story.
Right after Donald Trump’s election, the SPLC really stoked panic. A pro-gay Episcopal church in Indiana was vandalized w/“Heil Trump,” a swastika, & an anti-gay slur. Turns out it was the gay organ player who did it. He was only charged w/a misdemeanor.
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As with London buses, you can wait ages for one war and then several come along. I've spent a lot of time in the past year and a half warning of a cascade of conflict and its likely consequences. A quick review:
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A striking feature of polling is the generational divide, with younger people far more likely to be hostile to Israel than older people. This is true from the U.S. to France. If you are wondering why, I have a piece you might want to read:
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This is very revealing.
That moment when the young woman has to ask her friend: "Why are we protesting here?"
And the friends says: "I wish I was more educated"
They're all in...but have no idea what they're in (answer: a pro-terror street party).
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We used to imagine humanity populating the galaxy. No longer. The end is now in sight for the great human population explosion: 1/9
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If you didn't understand why we set out to establish a new university two years ago, now maybe you do. If you still don't, read this by our provost:
@uaustinorg
@bariweiss
@JTLonsdale
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The number of cases of this sort in American academia is a disgrace. I'll believe Harvard is serious about reforming itself when
@hoovlet
receives a full apology for the way she was treated and an invitation to return to her role as a lecturer.
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The more deranged the cults our time become -- from wokeism to QAnon -- the more I think of Raskolnikov's prophetic dream from the Epilogue of Crime and Punishment.
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Today's scenes in the Capitol are a disgrace. The organizers and perpetrators of this banana republic coup attempt must be prosecuted and punished. Any politician who does not unequivocally condemn what happened should have no future in democratic politics.
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This remains the best profile yet of
@BorisJohnson
, which I recommend to everyone, regardless of how they voted yesterday:
@sullydish
's key insight comes at the end.
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This is essential reading on why drastic suppression now is the only sane option for fighting COVID-19. It is vital that policymakers (in the US and UK especially) get this message. Parts of both countries are perilously close to the Italian scenario.
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The case of Joshua Katz's treatment by
@Princeton
is one of the worst, if not the worst, of recent years. It illustrates how once illustrious institutions have abandoned their commitment to academic freedom and are now in the hands of ideological zealots and their appeasers.
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Traveling in Europe after a year and a half, I am struck by the fact that the soft totalitarianism of "wokeism" does not seem to be nearly as big a problem at continental universities as it is in the U.S. and the Anglosphere more generally.
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"TikTok is not just China’s revenge for the century of humiliation between the Opium Wars and Mao’s revolution. It is the opium — a digital fentanyl, to get our kids stoked for the coming Chinese imperium."
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Be afraid, Xi Jinping. Be very afraid.
September 5, 2021: A black swan appeared on Tiananmen Square...
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3. After it became clear that there was a full-blown epidemic spreading from Wuhan to the rest of Hubei province, why did you cut off travel from Hubei to the rest of China — on Jan. 23 — but not from Hubei to the rest of the world?
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To me, the most depressing thing is simply that jihad is becoming routine in Europe, and we are in danger of becoming accustomed to it.
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.
@NigelBiggar
is of course right and
@KemiBadenoch
knows her history. For some odd reason, my old but erroneous friend
@DalrympleWill
appears not to be familiar with the recent historiography of a) the British industrial revolution and b) the economics of the British Empire.…
The historian William Dalrymple pompously suggested Kemi Badenoch should "learn some history" after she denied Britain's economic success was due to white privilege. The historian of empire, Nigel Biggar, begs to differ.
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"Having converted their own republic into a borderless credit union, Americans have to borrow other people’s national pride." Michael Lind on very good form in
@tabletmag
:
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Israel—and America—Have No Choice but to Act | The Free Press
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A hero of our time.
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The inexcusable decline of military history and war studies at elite American universities is part of a wider degeneration of historical pedagogy I have observed, with mounting gloom, over the past decade or so. Max Hastings is quite right:
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Stunning. This brilliantly and terrifyingly illustrates how social networks in a highly mobile population can spread a contagious virus. From a Fort Lauderdale beach to half of America. In days.
This shows the location data of phones that were on a Florida beach during Spring Break. It then shows where those phones traveled.
First thing you should note is the importance of social distancing. The second is how much data your phone gives off.
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"There is a general opinion in the West that if you help us too much, that will provoke Putin to start World War III. The truth is that World War III has already been started by Putin, and now Ukraine is just an avant-garde of this war."
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This is the most insightful commentary I have read tonight on the horrific massacre in El Paso: “The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror” - bellingcat
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The courage of the Ukrainian people and the inspired leadership of
@ZelenskyyUa
is creating an opportunity for the world's democracies to awaken from their torpor and break the odious tyranny of Vladimir Putin.
Zelensky's briefing: "We survived (the night). And we are successfully fighting off the enemy attacks."
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If, in the course of 2024, Ukraine’s position becomes so vulnerable that its forces must withdraw from some contested territory, three immediate consequences will follow. First, more refugees will flow from Ukraine to Europe ... Second, private investors will be even less likely…
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This is one of the most detailed stories I've yet read on the origins of the pandemic and the Chinese government's disastrous cover-up:
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"Americans and Europeans truly have the blindfolds on if they think they can raise their glasses to a happy new year while missiles rain down on Kyiv."
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"When some leaders ask me what weapons I need, I need a moment to calm myself, because I already told them the week before. It’s Groundhog Day. I feel like Bill Murray." We are receiving a masterclass in 21st-century leadership. And this is what he needs.
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I sometimes hear that I'm too confrontational or negative when discussing the assault on academic freedom we have witnessed in recent years. But I didn't find much disagree with in
@jordanbpeterson
's coruscating farewell to the U. of Toronto:
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Thoughts on the crisis in Iraq, with some historical analogies. No, Soleimani wasn't the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. More like Reinhard Heydrich:
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A reassuringly large proportion of Americans think that identity politics is nuts:
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I have argued since Biden’s election that we risked re-running the 1970s. Today, I increasingly fear we may be re-running the 1930s:
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Silliest justification ever for rescinding an invitation: God knows what absurd T-shirts I've stood next to over the years. When fans asks for photos at a book-signing, what author vets their apparel for non-PC messages?
@jordanbpeterson
@Cambridge_Uni
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A great many bad takes on the war in Gaza are based on a) uncritically believing Hamas's casualty figures and b) wholly lacking any historical perspective. I recommend Azar Gat's expert analysis in
@haaretzcom
:
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