Dr Patrick O'Brien
Senior Lecturer in Public Law at Oxford Brookes. Research: judges, judging, and public law.
Also @patrickcobrien@mastodon.ie; patrickcobrien@twitter.com
- One problem I haven't seen canvassed much in this context is an analogue of the uncanny valley problem. When someone is detectably using AI to send emails or something, I emotionally disengage. I'm a human and I have no interest in talking to software. I think this is innate bsky.app/profile/link...
- Missed the bit of Putnam's fairly gentle book about social change where he started foaming at the mouth about foreigners.
- Why Starmer’s “island of strangers” remark owed more to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone than Enoch Powell. www.newstatesman.com/politics/lab...
- Look, no one seriously thinks that Starmer believes any of this. So what it tells us is that a Labour Prime Minister and his advisors are so lacking in political judgment, and feel so pressed by the the far-right, that they miss obviously racist dog whistles even in planned speeches and papers.
- "Yesterday's incendiary xenophobic speech was written entirely in Andale Sans MS. You *can't* say it was like that notorious 1968 incendiary xenophobic speech, because 1960s typewriters didn't have sans serif fonts."
- Be under no doubt whatsoever that if you are an immigrant to the UK, no matter what your status or background, this remorseless xenophobia will eventually come for you. Labour are chasing the far-right vote, so the right have to go right-er, more vicious, more openly racist. And so on.
- You'll never wait so long (so long, so long) You'll never wait so long Woke Marxist Pope Woke Marxist Pope Woke Marxist Pope Woke Marxist Pope
- Reflections from the depths of marking: it occurs to me that "show, don't tell" is a rule that should be drilled into writers of non-fiction as well as fiction.
- Reposted by Dr Patrick O'BrienViable Post-LLM Pedagogical Strategy: – In-person, active learning only – One-on-one instruction – Examination via practical tasks – No lectures, just enigmatic remarks – Classes offered only in Swamp – Breaks for intensive physical exercise – Hit obstreperous droids with walking stick
- www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025... Stop using 'woke'. Just stop. Everyone. 'Woke' is a magical populist rallying cry *precisely because* it is meaningless. It assembles a coalition of angry people who don't agree about anything much except that they know they're against an abstract something.
- Reposted by Dr Patrick O'Brien[Not loaded yet]
- All UK policy is now made for a target audience of imaginary angry men in pubs. And because those making the policies don't actually believe in them - it *all* feels wrong to them, but y'know focus groups innit - they have no antennae to distinguish plausible policies from stark raving mad ones.
- There seems to be some confusion about whether UK universities are public or private entities. Easy to sort out: due to decades of utterly incoherent policymaking today's universities combine all of the disadvantages of the private sector with all of the disadvantages of the public sector.
- As a specialist in judicial independence, gonna go out on a limb and say that a justice minister explicitly declaring her intent to purge the judiciary is … bad.
- Highly amused by The Times covering the papacy like a split in the Tories over Brexit. “Savvy Cardinals in the Via Dextra WhatsApp group are pushing an unlikely saviour for the papacy … Liz Truss.”
- This is exceptional.
- This can have no purpose other than stoking xenophobia. It is only intelligible as a policy if you accept the starting premise is that there is something inherently disordered about simply being a foreigner.
- This all feels a bit like that moment in the life of every parent, when a toddler throws an epic tantrum because they want to do something that is impossible because it would violate the laws of physics.
- www.thetimes.com/comment/the-... Idk man, I think "you're all being so mean to the far right, and you have to stop because they're going to get really really cross" has been tested to destruction as a containment strategy at this stage.
- Reposted by Dr Patrick O'Brien[Not loaded yet]
- It’s actually ok to defend democracy and the rule of law. We need to do more of it. Claiming that doing so is hypocritical, or that democracies are required to practice absolute viewpoint neutrality, is all part of the grift.
- The “turtles all the way down” problem of legal regulation
