therefractory

[therefractory]

Three years ago, a Wealth Tax Commission brought together scores of economists, legal experts and tax advisers to design a one-off wealth tax. They concluded that if the government introduced a 5% wealth tax on all individual wealth above £500,000 then it could raise a staggering £260bn. It incorporated important caveats: it would only be levied after mortgages and other debts were accounted for, and it would be payable in instalments over five years.

Abandoning a wealth tax is a ruinous Labour strategy. It’s ‘Blairism without the cash’ | Owen Jones | The Guardian

[therefractory]

There are usually 50 or so at any one time, he says. Among Bellingcat’s more exotic stories was the exposure of a Russian agent who was tracked down via her cat. She was, in his words, a “hot jeweller” living near Nato’s office in Naples and very active in a charity for underprivileged children next to the Nato building. Many of the wives of senior generals joined. As did their husbands with whom she had many affairs. Grozev was eventually able to track her down via her cat’s microchip inserted by an Italian vet. Having tracked down its unique ID from Italian registries, Grozev then cross-referenced the cat’s name to her Russian social media account. “You need one fixed object: without the cat we would never have found her,” he says. “She spread her affections widely but her only true love was the cat.”

Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev: ‘Prigozhin will either be dead or there will be a second coup’

[therefractory]

press him, a little sceptically, on whether Putin can sway the 2024 outcome. “The risk comes from the engagement of AI [artificial intelligence] in election interference, which is the first time we will see it,” Grozev says.

Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev: ‘Prigozhin will either be dead or there will be a second coup’

[therefractory]

He replies without pause: “Putin’s strategy in the Ukraine war is clearly to delay any military outcome until the US elections. He hopes western support will be throttled by a Trump victory.”

Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev: ‘Prigozhin will either be dead or there will be a second coup’

[therefractory]

My problem with Musk is that he’s just not smart enough — he reads all this propaganda and is taking it at face value,” Grozev says. “He’s an avid retweeter and reader of @ZeroHedge [a conspiratorial account that Grozev alleges has close ties to RT, formerly Russia Today, a state news network. ZeroHedge denies it has any such ties and says it is rather Bellingcat that publishes “conspiratorial falsehoods”].

Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev: ‘Prigozhin will either be dead or there will be a second coup’

[therefractory]

Austria the least safe European country? “Yes,” he replies. “While we [Bellingcat] were investigating the Austrians, they were surveilling me and I wasn’t aware of that at the time. They were doing so explicitly at the request of the Russians. That is deep penetration.”

Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev: ‘Prigozhin will either be dead or there will be a second coup’

[therefractory]

“Let’s say I alternate between the west and east coasts,” he says. “You don’t know what the new rules of the game are. There were certain rules before, including that you [the Russians] don’t do anything on American soil, but one never knows whether it is significantly safer here. What is clear is that Europe isn’t safe. And I got that message from several European law-enforcement agencies, including in Austria. You have to understand it takes a lot for the Austrians to admit they can’t protect you, so it must be serious.”

Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev: ‘Prigozhin will either be dead or there will be a second coup’

[therefractory]

Far from it. No, Westminster is healing itself. Let it address domestic issues: dirty and dangerous streets, filthy rivers and poor housing stock. In a spirit of spring optimism, before long I believe parliamentary politics will no longer be seen as a danger zone of corruption, nor the focus of national contempt. As a nation, we are still in recuperation. Bruised, weak, a little confused, Britain is enjoying the first watery sunlight of relatively normal politics. But the road to robust health, to national revival, will be difficult to navigate. Spoiler alert for the coming weeks: it doesn’t lead through Westminster at all.

With No 10 now in calmer hands, it will no longer be the focus of national contempt

[therefractory]

The future of the world economy, including the price and availability of the green technology we need, and the impact of artificial intelligence on our working lives, will be determined by the Chinese and US economies. The fragility of our food and energy supplies was obvious before Brexit, and before the Ukraine war. As the government plots our Brexit course, regulatory standards are still not really set in London. Put this all together and it becomes obvious that the condition of being a crouched, hemmed-in nation will dominate British politics for the rest of my lifetime. To put it simply, the UK doesn’t have the economic strength to give us the services and living standards we think we deserve.

With No 10 now in calmer hands, it will no longer be the focus of national contempt

[therefractory]

What Labour can’t avoid is the more fundamental pressure on radical politics, which has been caused by 13 years of Conservative economic failure. Both of the bigger parties are being squeezed by outside forces into a relatively limited set of politically possible outcomes. With taxation already high and with growth low, it’s hard to see where Starmer’s team will find the investment that public services in Britain urgently need. One of the great illusions that has bedevilled British politics for more than half a century is that our great and ancient parliament has “sovereignty”, or ultimate self-governing authority. That was what powered Brexit emotion. But if you take sovereignty by the hand and lead it gently out of constitutional textbooks into the real world, it is always a compromised term. Any legislature’s power, and hence its authority, is directly connected to the potency of its territory. A country whose terms of trade are dictated by others, whose ability to defend itself is limited, and which cannot feed itself or manufacture the technologies on which its people’s future depends cannot by definition be the possessor of a powerful parliament. And that is broadly the UK’s condition.

With No 10 now in calmer hands, it will no longer be the focus of national contempt

[therefractory]

They do not want to use adverbs such as ‘often’ or ‘generally’ without the support of precise data; but they use formalisation as an aid to intuition rather than affirmation.

Historical data is not a kitten, it’s a sabre-toothed tiger | Aeon Essays

Conditionality

[therefractory]

In short, the alternative quantifiers share the microhistorian Giovanni Levi’s will to avoid a passive approach to data and sources, and uninspiring positivism associated with ‘assertive, authoritarian forms of discourse’

Historical data is not a kitten, it’s a sabre-toothed tiger | Aeon Essays

Authority??

[therefractory]

We teach the value, for cunning historians (a phrase coined in the context of feminist scholarship), of outliers and weirdness as well as of missing data – in short, of dirty data, stored in verbose spreadsheets.

Historical data is not a kitten, it’s a sabre-toothed tiger | Aeon Essays

'Cunning' historians, verbose spreadsheets (!!), weirdness of missing data

[therefractory]

We teach the value, for cunning historians (a phrase coined in the context of feminist scholarship), of outliers and weirdness as well as of missing data – in short, of dirty data, stored in verbose spreadsheets.

Historical data is not a kitten, it’s a sabre-toothed tiger | Aeon Essays

[therefractory]

Most quantifiers routinely talk about ‘cleaning’ data, implying that heterogeneity in the sources is a problem to be solved – and that solving it is a subaltern task. For us, on the contrary, building data from sources and creating categories that do not erase all complications is not just the longest and most complicated stage of research; it is also the most interesting

Historical data is not a kitten, it’s a sabre-toothed tiger | Aeon Essays

'Cleaning' is the wrong term - about preserving the difference and nuance

[therefractory]

Quantification uses categorised data. Yet this categorisation does not have to be done in a standard, ahistorical way or to remain blind to the intricacies of lived identities. Assigning categories such as ‘type of occupation’, gender or religion to persons on the basis of historical sources is always a scientifically tricky and politically charged operation – whether the aim is to produce percentages or write a narrative

Historical data is not a kitten, it’s a sabre-toothed tiger | Aeon Essays

Occupations! How to assign/model!

[therefractory]

Data need not consist of long, homogenous series pertaining to a single phenomenon. Intricate sets of trajectories and interactions are more interesting: patterns can be discovered thanks to techniques such as multiple correspondence analysis, network analysis or sequence analysis.

Historical data is not a kitten, it’s a sabre-toothed tiger | Aeon Essays

Multi-dimensional analysis