I’m an anthropologist, sometimes I occupy things & such.

I see anarchism as something you do not an identity...

...so don’t call me the anarchist anthropologist

Twitter was David’s public platform and tools for practicing a new language – clear and understandable for everyone, it was a space where he made friends and enemies.

Tweets 7,501 Replies 51,144 Retweets 24,559 Everything 83,204
Sun 2 Feb 2020 23:28

this year’s “Great Development Dialogue” at LSE soundcloud (hint, I was one of the people on the panel) https://t.co/M698wPhM14

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Sun 2 Feb 2020 13:23

if Bloomberg really wanted to help America he can buy Fox News and turn it into a news organisation. It’s not like he doesn’t have the cash. https://t.co/MJuMb9AXtv

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Sat 1 Feb 2020 10:57

Bullying is a matter of continual provocations calculated to eventually elicit a response that can be loudly condemned. Bullying by the strong is referred to as “politics”. Bullying by the weak is referred to as “terrorism.”

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Sat 1 Feb 2020 10:23

classic model of bullying: continual provocation, repeated if necessary 1000x, until victim finally responds. Then everyone rushes in the equalise them or condemn the victim. Racism, sexism, operates largely through constant subtle bullying. https://t.co/11pxB8rADZ https://t.co/RXBDjjY5yw

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Wed 29 Jan 2020 19:45

Starting to renationalise the trains… Now can they resist the pressure to sell it back to the private sector who will ruin it & force them to nationalise it again? Or will they finally give up on such nonsense. https://t.co/hw9MH7iikk

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Wed 29 Jan 2020 18:14

presumably they announced internally that there were upcoming cuts right before the election, so as to ensure that everyone at #bbcnews was sufficiently scared, so that they would be bending over backwards to prove loyalty to the ruling party (as indeed, most did)

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Wed 29 Jan 2020 18:10

I’ve heard the word “wunun” but then people say, no, that’s not exactly it, but it’s not clear what a wunun is or if that’s not the term for such cross-cultural practices & understandings, then whether there is an indigenous term for it at all. There wouldn’t have to be.

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Wed 29 Jan 2020 18:09

Don’t suppose any of my 101.8k followers know anything about indigenous Australian regional organisation? Trying to figure out if there is a commonly used term for them: e.g, traditions of hospitality, customs, moiety structures, that went far beyond any one ethnolinguistic group

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Wed 29 Jan 2020 15:59

Presumably any remaining Labour supporters working at BBC to be sacked as part of efficiency measures … https://t.co/ctN9fCAfS5

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Tue 28 Jan 2020 18:34

I can’t remember whether this is the 5th or 6th time a Belgian court made this ruling. Yet every time 1. The gov’t figures out a way to force them do it again, 2. The media doesn’t report it as “court decides PKK aren’t terrorists” but as “Turkey protests Belgian court decision” https://t.co/iXn1W1uW9j

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Tue 28 Jan 2020 10:43

why are these people being referred to as “moderates”? They have behaved in the most extreme ways possibly since 2015 https://t.co/iIAK3nd7Yd

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 12:44

since the entire attack, which turned into something of a lynch mob, & yet another attempt to discredit me as a scholar, was based on *assuming* my reaction was not based on (say) 20 years of work with antipoverty movements in the global south (as it was) but my political bias 4/

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 12:42

it was especially ironic considering the claim was I had made up my mind & then looked for evidence, despite the fact all I’d said is “what’s the other side saying?” since the data I was citing was coming from right wing think tanks. In fact they were the ones guilty of this 3/

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 12:41

the online reaction was remarkable: right-wingers started a campaign against me based on that tweet, to claim I was biased against empirical evidence, since I assumed there was “another side” – they even put it on my wikipedia page! 2/

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 12:40

I might add this is the reason, when I was first presented with the “capitalism is making everything better” story I immediately asked “what’s the other side of the story?” It didn’t in any way match what I’d heard from 20 years of work with movements in the Global South 1/ https://t.co/Mn8HLGOM2G

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 12:05

all in all, capitalism is having a very bad run globally. If it really is improving people’s lives to the degree its exponents claim, it has done the worst job of self-promotion ever. This seems unlikely as self-promotion has always been one of its strongest points. 9/

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 12:00

the age breakdown is uneven, with those aged 35-54 being the most anti-capitalist, and older people the least anti-capitalist. As the case of the US or UK shows though, this must vary a lot by country: Eastern Europe presumably looks very different 8/

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 11:57

the most surprising thing in the above breakdown is that women (online at least) tend to be just a bit less anticapitalist than men. Is this an effect of those likely to be online, plus the fact that women had to fight their way into the corporate sector to begin with? 7/

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 11:55

the US online population is predictably one of the more pro-capitalist, though it’s interesting that in the US, the younger you are, the more anti-capitalist you tend to be. This isn’t uniformly true internationally 6/ https://t.co/Ij7hkyfCFy

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 11:52

also interesting that India is seething with anticapitalist sentiment, considering the ascendancy of the right. It suggests again that many people vote for the right because they think unlike the left they’ll be allowed to make *some* sort of structural change 5/

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 11:50

(the case of Japan also suggests that Japanese zero-growth capitalism, while always described as a colossal failure, might better be viewed as one of the few cases where capitalism became sustainable) 4/

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 11:47

it’s curious that Thailand is the single most anti-capitalist population on earth. Japan is the least anti-capitalist, which is again interesting considering over 10% of the Japanese population vote for the Communist Party each election 3/

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 11:42

obviously it’s also a sample of people who are online – why am I guessing that Ecuadorian peasants or Indonesian factory workers with no online presence are likely to be even less satisfied with capitalism? 2/

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 11:37

global online survey discovers 56% of the global public thinks actually-existing capitalism is a bad system. Especially interesting considering the incessant propaganda being put out by Pinker types insisting capitalism’s making things better for everyone https://t.co/GstPhL0EO4 https://t.co/gFBMIU2XEY

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Sun 26 Jan 2020 11:33

according to Edelman’s global online survey, the UK media is less trusted to tell the truth by the public of any country other than Russia. (Chinese people, interestingly, largely believe what they read in the news.) https://t.co/GstPhL0EO4 https://t.co/WMMyT20hpq

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Sat 25 Jan 2020 19:37

The crazy thing is so many people act as if these are still predictions of some hypothetical future apocalypse, which you can either believe or not. No. It’s happening now. Australia is on fire. Droughts sparked wars in the ME that are sending millions fleeing…

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Sat 25 Jan 2020 19:28

20 years ago alarmists were saying if we don’t do anything, there will eventually be ecological catastrophes that will set off chaos, war, unrest, millions of refugees will flee; rich countries will turn fascist & create walls to keep them out… People: it’s already happening.

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