Philip Proudfoot
Researcher of activism, labour, accountability, and humanitarianism in the Arab World & elsewhere | co-founder of The Accountability Archive | Personal account, views, especially the bad ones, are my own.
- One thing AI is actually amazing at is languages. I’ve been asking it to read out loud Arabic news as I’m trying to keep up my fus7a and it’s unlike any other language tool. And chatGPT can also speak and recognise and hold a conversation in pretty much all spoken Arabic dialects too
- Sometimes we focus a lot on the negatives (and there are many) but god I would have loved this when I first started learning Arabic
- Trump is emboldened to announce he will commit war crime because the global north establishment — for 15-months — decided that Israel can act with total impunity. They destroyed the pretence of entire rules based order. And now they have the audacity to cry about consequences.
- Brilliant as ever is Alex de Waal in LRB on Famine Classification in Gaza www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
- A good addition to this critical work by Stephen Devereux at from @ids.ac.uk www.ids.ac.uk/publications...
- It’s a real struggle to not just collapse into a deep depression; always see myself as an optimist but everywhere is burning, the left is busy organising “networks” and “spaces” and a continued rightward slide feels inevitable. Feeling particularly doom-pilled today.
- In Britain, I continue to think that the only way forward is if Jeremy Corbyn launches a new party, just to give it some basic momentum, and a few defections from the remaining left of the party, with a broad alliance from the start with the greens if not a combined new party
- This could be a new Co-operative + Labour style merger, but socialists and greens, Can’t see how else we win.
- Google Earth / Maps is now updating its satellite imagery of Gaza. We now have a top-down view of some of the worst atrocities committed since the Second World War.
- For Development Studies / Academic BlueSky (if it exists here) … our new paper on the politics of social assistance in Lebanon is out, with the BASIC programme @ids.ac.uk It explores how Lebanon’s fractured social contract remained in place during the fiscal crisis. www.ids.ac.uk/publications...
- Michael Burawoy was killed on Monday in a hit and run. Horrendous. Burawoy was one of the greatest sociologists of labour. www.mercurynews.com/2025/02/04/o...
- The main takeaway from this is that it confirms proscription in Britain is a political tool not objective application of law: Countless journalists detained for writing about Palestine, but these two jokers can have a chat with the leader of a still proscribed organisation.
- We can put aside any points about HTS or their plans for Syria etc. What this underscores is just the hypocrisy of “proscribing” organisations
- There’s also a direct causal line from the Iraq war to this exact moment. Utterly mad
- Aid — since it was formalised and linked to gov — has always served as a state arm. Trump merging USAID to the DoS is an acknowledgement of that fact. The same as DFID into FCDO. In some sense, this was inevitable, given the decline of activism and rise of donor-power. We need a new model.
- Humanitarianism started as a collection of amateurs, often socialist as much as religious. Over time, it became increasingly reliant on donor states predominantly in the global north. Inevitably, this meant it become an expression of political power rather than humanity.
- What we know is aid — in its current form — isn’t helping to end crises. They keep growing. The US-led system functions to, at best, contain emergencies and exert influence, warding off other actors. USAID attacks are bad, but let’s not pretend the old system was on the side of the angels.
- Over at the other place, people seem to have not heard of a printer.
- Free speech protects us from tyrants, gifts us an open society, free debate, and scientific progress. Pretty shit, then, that what its advocates actually mean is being racist online and bullying trans people.
- What will Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE possibly do without USAID!? ….. Trump should really fix the American education system. Oh well.
- These people cannot conceptualise that if your democratic "choice" is between neoliberal A Team or neoliberal B team, with slightly different visions of how to tinker around the edges, then, perhaps, it doesn't feel like a choice. In this nightmare, an authoritarian who promises change is appealing.
- Why won't you just shut up and support the side that pretends to be the good guys, while facilitating genocide, burning the planet, and eroding your future!
- We had one shot at a better future in Britain, and these arseholes spent the entire time calling him "comrade Corbyn" and "Magic Grandad," and now they're upset that their support for democracy has declined! lmao. truly pathetic.
- Reform’s surge is easy to understand. It is the same as Brexit. People are fed up. The economic model Britain has pursued since the 1980s has failed. They want change — any change — and they don’t trust establishment parties to deliver it. Reform is an empty vessel, it just means “different”.
- But Labour, knowing this, will still ignore it. What they’ll do instead is assume their popularity is due entirely to conservative, nationalistic, and anti-migrant sentiments. And replicate them. They won’t change from neoliberalism despite its failure. And, as a result, Nigel Farage will be PM
- You don’t hear much from the Stameroids these days — I think some might finally accepted you can’t just wear a nice suit and tell the economy to grow. And others, who believed he secretly had a plan, have learned that isn’t the case. It’s a shame this folly will cost us fascism.
- Please, for the love of god, don’t vote for any political party in Britain that threatens to privatise the NHS.
- For around five years (2015-2020), many countries in the global north had a choice between (democratic) socialism or barbarism. Welcome to barbarism.
- Unsure if this is a parody. “Let the adults handle politics now” *gestures to the burning planet granted to us by these ‘adults’*
- The problem here is if you allow machines to learn then they will ... learn
- Liberal institutions—from centrist parties to multilateral orgs—are still fixated on ‘restoring order. But their ‘order’ birthed right-wing authoritarianism, enabled 15 months of genocide, eroded the power of labour, and rewarded capital. This isn’t a strategy. It’s a death cult
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- Ah ok, so we just pretend that there is zero connection between liberalism, the economic conditions it has created, and the emergence of a populist right capitalising on resultant grievances?
- I genuinely don't know how clearer the signs need to be that our economic models are flawed and that we need to break rising inequality and just distribute more equitably. What will it take?
- One of the things Britain is good at is universities. We punch above our weight and they’re key economic drivers across the country. So you’ll never guess which sector the government is going to allow to collapse next?
- What liberal centrists get wrong is they believe right wing populists like Trump are trashing the international rules based order. No. It was trashed by liberal centrist global north governments who funded, armed, and ran political cover for a 15-month genocide.
- For much of the world, the hypocrisy is nauseating. You cannot present yourselves as the good guys after you have directly facilitated genocide — perhaps the single biggest crime the world system was set up to, ostensibly, prevent.
- My mum has a brief cameo on this report (pushing the trolly) This is the hospice where she works as a nurse. It has been absolutely devastated by the governments refusal to find end-of-life-care properly 👇 t.co/rFB1taMSpo
- Establishment liberals are mindless zombies with no theory of capitalism’s collapse. The weirdo-right has a theory, but it’s something like ‘too many genders,’ ‘not enough neo-gothic buildings,’ and 'more crusades.’ We're stuck between zombies and wacky incels.
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- If only they'd consider the fact we need to eat less soy
- I suppose one hopeful outcome of the next few years is the rest of the world decides it’s had quite enough of the USA and instead builds a new alliance and institutions outside of an isolationist Trump administration.
- Why was there an executive order from Trump to withdraw from WHO? well one can draw a direct line from the rapid circulation of conspiracy theory among his MAGA base on Twitter etc to that eventual decision, which will significantly harm public health. Ban Twitter.
- Governments — that are not the USA — need to rediscover, in 2025, that they are, in fact “governments” — we do not need to be bossed around by a far right tech billionaire who delights in causing toxic political violence. Our governments can follow Brazil, simply ban Twitter, and he will fold.
- In order for Twitter to operate in a given territory it must cease deliberately boosting Nazi content and ban fascists. Seems reasonable.
- There is no free speech defence when the algorithm is not allowing us to freely choose what information we see.
- Global North governments have two possible explanations for what they permitted to happen Gaza: 1. They believe Palestinians sit outside of humanity and the rules based order; the post-ww2 system doesn’t apply in Gaza. 2. They have simply allowed Israel to destroy that system.
- This is dangerous misinformation: “Now there’s a ceasefire, we can get aid in.” The humanitarian system delivers during wars because laws and customs protect aid workers & supply trucks. Israel violated these laws repeatedly—and not one Western state acted to enforce them.
- Politicians who say this are endangering humanitarian operations everywhere. The foundational idea of aid is that you assist people on the basis of our shared humanity and not on the current political status of an ongoing violence or wars.
- Often of course, the reality is far from the ideal and aid is deeply politicised. But rarely do politicians — especially those from the main donor states — issue statements that directly contradict humanitarianisms basic rationale and foundational myths.
- Alongside lifesaving aid, it will be imperative Gazans receive massively scaled-up high-quality psychosocial support — this must also be understand as a priority need. Israel’s crimes risk an entire generation growing up with utterly debilitating mental illness.
