Making my way in the world of ideas. dcfc fan https://teapawt.net/t.co/gOyhRmm5iO
Horsley Woodhouse
Joined September 2009
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Sam Mace retweeted
Mindblowing chart from OBR. In 2029 real household disposable income per person expected to be just 1% higher than in 2019. What an unbelievably awful decade. It used to grow by 2%+ every year, not 1% in 10 years.
Sam Mace retweeted
A great opportunity to discuss Europe’s internal and external challenges with @DimitarBechev - one of the shrewdest observers of the continent’s geopolitics:
🎧The EI Podcast – Europe: can the centre hold?
@DimitarBechev and @jackfdickens discuss the continent’s volatile future and how it might recover some of its former strength.
engelsbergideas.com/podcast/…
Sam Mace retweeted
It’s the most brutal class at Harvard—and suddenly everyone wants in. No AI, no finance. It's a big dose of western civ and classics.
Great to see.
wsj.com/lifestyle/harvard-cl… via @WSJ
Sam Mace retweeted
One thing that’s important to remember in this Mbappé controversy is that this is *not* just about “offense.” That sanitizes the truth. People are jailed for criticizing Mao.
Some issue groveling apologies for financial gain. Others suffer in prison.
bbc.com/news/articles/c07lng…
Sam Mace retweeted
I love great writing and hate how it's treated on the internet. So I built something to try to fix that.
If you wish there were a better place to share your writing, to discover new work, to talk culture and books, then I invite you to read—and to join me.
Sam Mace retweeted
Fancy a Cambridge professor who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
China’s path to global significance actually started when Deng Xiaoping DITCHED Maoist policy settings by gradually dismantling collectivisation, encouraging private enterprise, easing political repression (1989 aside), and adopting a more Western-friendly attitude (which culminated in China joining the WTO under Deng’s successors, and that in turn gave China Western market access which set it on the path to economic strength). And while not even Xi completely reverted to Maoism, his partial reversal of Deng’s pro-market, pro-Western settings coincided with China’s current “Japan on steroids” unceasing economic doldrums.
For once, the community note is actually useful. Millions of people did indeed die under Mao's reign. It was a tragedy.
But, for some reason, the Western mind seems incapable of grasping the complex impact of Mao. In the West, we refuse to acknowledge that Mao is actually respected and admired in China.
I've listed a few reasons in my original post. Unity and sovereignty are big ones. After a century of being carved up and subjected to imperialism, Mao unified China into a single central state. He removed foreign influence. He stood up to the US.
China’s status as a major power today rests on foundations built by Mao.
Sam Mace retweeted
The potential emergence of neo-Luddism as a political force may be underestimated. If enough people dislike AI - and many people already hate it - there will be significant calls to ban the technology. Given that we still live in human democracies, political action may follow!
Sam Mace retweeted
An important essay by David Armitage, reflecting on the intellectual roots of his landmark book, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), published 25 years ago. He reconstructs and reconsiders his own contribution and arguments and the scholarship that was produced on the subject since its original publication. It was an inspirational book for me when I started to work on imperial ideologies in the history and theory of International law in the Americas back in 2007. Really worth reading!
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…
Sam Mace retweeted
China’s secret police can hold you for six months at a location nobody will tell your family.
The legal name is “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location.” The reality: no clocks, constant light, two guards in the cell at all times, watching you sleep and shower. In state security cases, lawyer access can be denied.
UN standards prohibit solitary confinement beyond 15 consecutive days. Beijing’s version runs up to six months, usually followed by years of detention.
thewirechina.com/2026/10/25/…
Sam Mace retweeted
Please take a little time to read former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig's account of torture in Chinese prison.
His case, like so many others, underscores the chasm separating rule-of-law and Party-State penal systems.
This is the true face of the CCP.
China's secret police have detained you.
You are hooded or blindfolded, handcuffed, abducted to a secret location, locked in a padded cell, and threatened with severe punishment for "harming China".
My cover story in @thewirechina: thewirechina.com/2026/10/25/… 1/7
Sam Mace retweeted
Alastair Campbell is right (not words I think I've said before!). Burnham isn't a "nice guy". He's not a genial, affable, professional Northerner. It's a facade covering up a deeply cynical, machiavellian, hyper-ambitious politician who will say anything to manipualte & for power
“He ousted a PM and Labour Leader who won a three figure landslide two years earlier, in part by people saying he’s a much nicer guy.”
Alastair Campbell, author of 'Persevilience', discusses Andy Burnham’s “ruthless” streak and political “killer instinct”.
#Newsnight
Sam Mace retweeted
Cuba has completely fallen to pieces. A bleak, but important, story about economic collapse.
By Robert Worth. With astonishing photos by Moises Saman.
theatlantic.com/magazine/202…
Sam Mace retweeted
What a sorry state of affairs.
Apologising for a statement of fact.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The CCP's 1981 resolution documents Mao's arbitrary rule, concentration of power, undermining of collective leadership, and personality cult (Sections 18, 20, 24)
characteristics associated with dictatorship.
china.usc.edu/node/20941
Sam Mace retweeted
People usually say that the pill caused the sexual revolution but a) people started having premarital sex in the 1950s, a decade before the pill and b) contraception is widely used by people who don't live very post-sexual-revolution lives (like in Asia). I think the sexual revolution, i.e. more permissive attitudes about sex, caused the pill to be invented and not the other way round.
But then, why did the sexual revolution happen? I have cooked up a theory. Just as how women have more casual sex on college campuses with fewer men, I think women, as a collective, responded to the male shortage caused by the Second World War by shortening their hemlines and having premarital sex.
Read my column here: worksinprogress.co/issue/you…
Sam Mace retweeted
🚨🚨 DCers: This Wednesday, Oct 28 at 5pm.
FREE and open to the public. Reception to follow.
@matthewkaemingk and I will be in conversation with the great @AkyolinEnglish to discuss Islam and Christianity's relationship to democracy.
RSVP: berkleycenter.georgetown.edu…
Sam Mace retweeted
We must study the Alan Macfarlane effect. Years toiling in relative obscurity, now he’s a star on Chinese social media and the British right are obsessing over his work on English individualism.
“In April, a picture of him chatting with two other people while holding packs of chips on the King’s College lawn went viral on Xiaohongshu, with more than 15,000 likes.” bloomberg.com/news/features/…
Sam Mace retweeted
"Foucault in Iran: The archaeology of an illusion"
Previously unpublished texts shed new light on how Michel Foucault misjudged the Islamic Revolution.
lemonde.fr/en/books/article/…
