@andrewdoyle_com @TheCriticMag Well, apologies for the confusion. Happy to clarify things
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Jimmy Nicholls
14.3K posts
Jimmy Nicholls
@jdenicholls
Politics punditry. Podcast @RightDishonour. Contributions @spectator @unherd @TheCriticMag @CapX
London Beigetreten Şubat 2009
726 Folgt893 Follower
@jdenicholls @TheCriticMag Oh, I see. It read as though you were claiming I was gloating over the death of woke, rather than warning than it hadn’t yet gone away and would in any case likely recur in another form…
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Jimmy Nicholls retweetet
Woke politics have not just been annoying, writes @jdenicholls. They have done actual harm
thecritic.co.uk/woke-politics-…
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@andrewdoyle_com @TheCriticMag Hi Andrew. I was quoting Lynskey's point about the title of your book rather than the contents, though I can see why it may have been unclear what I meant. I've contacted the editor and he's removed the reference to your book to clarify things.
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@TheCriticMag @jdenicholls Good piece. But I wonder why @jdenicholls didn’t read my book before making false claims about it?
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The major flaw in such criticisms of the bullshit jobs thesis is in assuming that because such roles might conceivably be necessary that they are necessary. Much compliance for the sake of compliance
Chasing Ennui@rwlesq
A major flaw in the “Bullshit Jobs” thesis is confusing “adversarial” with “unnecessary.” Many adversarial roles appear zero- or even negative-sum at the micro level, but are positive-sum at the macro level. Litigation, compliance, auditing, and other apparently zero-sum activities often provide the enforcement, information, and deterrence that make rule-of-law and market institutions possible. A breach-of-contract suit is usually negative-sum for the parties in that one case. But a world in which contracts cannot be credibly enforced is far worse. The same is true of many forms of institutional friction: they look like deadweight if you isolate the transaction, but they are part of the scaffolding that lets the larger system function. Adversarial systems generate information, constrain discretion, and reduce corruption in ways that are easy to miss if you look only at the immediate transaction. Central planning rested in part on the assumption that many such adversarial processes were wasteful and could be replaced by administrative decision-making. That proved disastrous: you lose the information generated by decentralized contestation and create enormous room for corruption by the people making the decisions. Graeber’s mistake was often Chesterton’s Fence: seeing a role whose purpose was not immediately obvious to him and inferring that it therefore had no purpose. Maybe some jobs really are padded or performative, but many others exist because they form the scaffolding that keeps the systems running.
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@MichaelMcGough3 Haha, yes. I probably read too much news so some of these stand out to me too, but it is certainly easier when you're not committed to a side
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@jdenicholls I think if you don’t care about the pros and cons of the Iran war you might more easily pick up on rhetorical gimmicks like “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that the ayatollah is gone.”
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Much as comedians can capture the sound of a language they don't speak, readers who are indifferent to the issues discussed in opinion pieces are better able to discern the author's rhetorical tics.
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Quite an overlap in skillsets between dealing with these people and dealing with toddlers who don't want to go to bed
Heidi Bachram@HeidiBachram
💥 Three Palestine Action wannabes have just smashed up another defence firm called Keysight in Hampshire but got arrested very quickly. Good to see them caught. Watch them moan and complain like the cry-bullies they are.
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The idea that only working class people can produce interesting art is stupid
KPMG dad@jenuflexion
Since the early 2010s nearly every working class voice has been excised out of the media, so this beige chummy middle-class bakeoff-ification is the end result.
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@HenryGJeffreys I found it quite boring at the time, but I may give it another go
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Someone has just waded into the Patrick O'Brian Facebook group saying how terrible the Master & Commander film is. It's not going well.
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There's a respect for empiricism and then there's refusing to believe there's a correlation between hand-eye co-ordination and being good at darts
George Simms@GeorgeRSimms
@soag_69 Part of my point is that we have no real understanding of the correlation between hand-eye and darting success. It’s far more about psychology than physiology to my mind.
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Jimmy Nicholls retweetet
Wokeness was a lot more, and a lot worse, than a passing online fad, argues @jdenicholls
thecritic.co.uk/woke-politics-…
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@TomABacon @NadimJBaba I do believe that there should be safe routes for refugees, but I don't think that number should be unlimited, and if you're prioritising need you're hardly going to take people who have already made it to France. So boats will keep coming unless physically stopped
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@jdenicholls @NadimJBaba Tell you what, create safe routes for refugees then. That way small boats will drop to near-zero and the problem will be solved.
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Why would it matter that small boats only made up 5% of immigration to the UK? Would it matter if it was 20%? 50%? Seems disingenuous if your preference is close to open borders anyway
Zoe Gardner@ZoeJardiniere
Fun fact
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@WaistcoatDave @ZoeJardiniere It was a £350 million pledge made by Vote Leave, so Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. If we're being rigorous about facts, of course
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@jdenicholls @ZoeJardiniere Oh it's undoubtable that people are talking about it.
But the promises that parties are making off the back of that concern is where the problem is
It's like the whole "250 million to the NHS" promise Farage made around Brexit... Lies & misdirects they later deny
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@NadimJBaba @TomABacon The answer is that irregular arrivals by small boats are undesirable whatever percentage of migration they account for
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@TomABacon @jdenicholls I reckon Jimmy knew the answer to his question. I mean, the other explanation is he's usually thick, but I actually think he knew.
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@WaistcoatDave @ZoeJardiniere If the Labour cabinet are talking about the issue, it's quite likely that people are really concerned about it, even if you don't think they should be
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@jdenicholls Of course it matters, for the simple reason that the promises being made by most UK parties, spurred on by the far right, will actually have a limited impact on markers that are really concerning citizens - cost of living, funding of NHS, housing.
@ZoeJardiniere is spot on
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@Itmustbetues As a matter of fact, the press do not spend 95% of their time talking about small boats
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@jdenicholls It matters because facts matter, and it’s important that people know actual facts
And you’d never know this particular fact from listening to press and pundits who seem to spend 95% of their time talking about small boats as if it’s the biggest problem in UK today
It’s not
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@ZoeJardiniere I don't worry about it much, to be honest, but it does seem undesirable from any angle
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@jdenicholls Might just be an idea to unbunch your knickers and keep things in perspective, I duno 🤷♀️
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Not an endorsement of the Greens or this guy in particular, but it is indeed a good ad
Aaron Bastani@AaronBastani
Superb political ad. One of the best you’ll see. This is better, and resonates more, than anything coming from Labour or the Tories.
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@HenryGJeffreys @fitzfromdublin Men do care how they are thought of, but more in a "fuck you" kind of way, so negativity is likelier to spur them to lose weight. And of course men bond by insulting each other, which is less true of women
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@HenryGJeffreys @fitzfromdublin Reminds me of the fat guy at an old publication of mine who took issue with Kate Moss's "infamous" remark that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Part of this is that some (most?) people, and more often women, struggle with being negatively judged by randos
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