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Niall Ferguson
@nfergus
International man of history. Author, senior fellow, columnist. Latest book, DOOM: The Politics of Catastrophe (Penguin). Opinions my own.
Stanford, CAniallferguson.comBorn April 18, 1964Joined June 2009

Niall Ferguson’s Tweets

Reminder: “Keep Calm and Carry On” was never used during the war. Though millions of copies were printed in 1939, it was decided not to distribute them and the slogan was exhumed and popularized only in 2000. Instead, the government went for this.
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As I said last week, the Biden administration has apparently decided to instrumentalize the war in Ukraine to bring about regime change in Russia, rather than trying to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible. Biden just said it out loud. This is a highly risky strategy.
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After President Joe Biden declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power," a White House official asserted that the U.S. leader was "not discussing Putin’s power in Russia or regime change." apne.ws/CirepbB
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When is going to acknowledge explicitly that by far the biggest culprit is China, which signed up for Paris but continues to build one coal-burning power station a week? China is responsible for 60% of the increase in global emissions of CO2 since Greta was born.
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Replying to @nytimes
"Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour." Read Greta Thunberg's full speech from the World Economic Forum in Davos: nytimes.com/2020/01/21/cli
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Liberals 2 years ago: The tyrant Trump will destroy the constitution! Liberals now: It’s all the fault of the constitution. Let’s destroy it!
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If by “failed” you mean governed and shaped the most powerful country in world history while enshrining eternal and fundamental values, spot on twitter.com/imillhiser/sta…
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This is the central issue of the climate change debate. Until someone tells me how exactly the rest of us are going to constrain China and India, it's all virtue signaling.
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The rise of China and India, with their associated energy demands, has overwhelmed the emissions reductions chalked up by richer nations bloom.bg/2LQnzu4
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"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." -- Winston Churchill, 1945. (From Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 892.)
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In a highly competitive field, this is the most insane Cancel Culture story of the month.
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Toronto District School Board superintendent vetoes student book event with Yazidi activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad because her memoir about being captured and sexually enslaved by Islamic State terrorists “would foster Islamophobia.” lefigaro.fr/culture/de-peu
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This person is beneath contempt.
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What if I told you Europe is not a continent by defintion, but a geopolitical fiction to separate it from Asia and so the alarm about a European, or civilized, or First World nation being invaded is a dog whistle to tell us we should care because they are like us.
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I don't know who you are, Mat Krahn, or whether you're alive or dead or both, but for me you win the Internet this week.
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Free speech on the internet is in free fall. George Orwell’s vision of the future was “a boot stamping on a human face — for ever”. In 2019, it turns out to be a geek hitting “delete” on a keyboard for ever.
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Bravo to for his tireless work in exposing this kind of fraudulent story.
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Right after Donald Trump’s election, the SPLC really stoked panic. A pro-gay Episcopal church in Indiana was vandalized w/“Heil Trump,” a swastika, & an anti-gay slur. Turns out it was the gay organ player who did it. He was only charged w/a misdemeanor. indystar.com/story/news/201
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If you had told me when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s that American universities would be like this in 2020, I would not have believed you: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ Actually, I wouldn't have believed you in 2002, when I moved from Oxford to NYU.
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For the record, I think the illiberal left is the most pressing threat. One important reason for that is that real liberals like worry too much about the rapidly fading populist right and not enough about the Red Guards' takeover of education (and much else).
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Replying to @Yascha_Mounk
The most pressing threat to liberal democracy comes from the populist right. From Brasilia to Washington, authoritarian populists are muzzling dissent, stoking racism, and concentrating power in their own hands. We’re facing the fight of a lifetime.
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The more deranged the cults our time become -- from wokeism to QAnon -- the more I think of Raskolnikov's prophetic dream from the Epilogue of Crime and Punishment.
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Today's scenes in the Capitol are a disgrace. The organizers and perpetrators of this banana republic coup attempt must be prosecuted and punished. Any politician who does not unequivocally condemn what happened should have no future in democratic politics.
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Replying to
"TikTok is not just China’s revenge for the century of humiliation between the Opium Wars and Mao’s revolution. It is the opium — a digital fentanyl, to get our kids stoked for the coming Chinese imperium."
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Replying to
3. After it became clear that there was a full-blown epidemic spreading from Wuhan to the rest of Hubei province, why did you cut off travel from Hubei to the rest of China — on Jan. 23 — but not from Hubei to the rest of the world?
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Traveling in Europe after a year and a half, I am struck by the fact that the soft totalitarianism of "wokeism" does not seem to be nearly as big a problem at continental universities as it is in the U.S. and the Anglosphere more generally.
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Replying to
The case of Joshua Katz's treatment by is one of the worst, if not the worst, of recent years. It illustrates how once illustrious institutions have abandoned their commitment to academic freedom and are now in the hands of ideological zealots and their appeasers.
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Stunning. This brilliantly and terrifyingly illustrates how social networks in a highly mobile population can spread a contagious virus. From a Fort Lauderdale beach to half of America. In days.
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This shows the location data of phones that were on a Florida beach during Spring Break. It then shows where those phones traveled. First thing you should note is the importance of social distancing. The second is how much data your phone gives off.
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"There is a general opinion in the West that if you help us too much, that will provoke Putin to start World War III. The truth is that World War III has already been started by Putin, and now Ukraine is just an avant-garde of this war."
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RIP Sean Connery, the greatest of the Bonds and the role model to a generation. In addition to his extraordinarily handsome face and intimidating physique, Sean had a wicked sense of humour.
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I’m telling you, it was the airplanes.
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On the 11th of September 2001 19 Muslim men hijacked 4 airplanes. Inspired by their prophet and driven by jihadist ardor they sought to destroy the symbols of American success: the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the White House. Let’s not whitewash that plain truth.
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The WOKID-19 plague is ravaging Scotland.
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My God. David Hume is cancelled. Shame on U of Edinburgh.”From the start of the new academic year the David Hume Tower will be known as George Square.” Why? His “views on matters of race, though not uncommon at the time, rightly cause distress today” ed.ac.uk/news/students/
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The rise of the very talented is truly remarkable. She would be a Tory Obama if she won this. The whole leadership contest is a disaster for the bogus narrative that Brexit was motivated by racism and / or nostalgia for Empire.
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NEW - YouGov Tory members poll Boost for Truss, bad news for Sunak Sunak v Mordaunt Sunak: 37 Mordaunt: 51 Sunak v Truss Sunak: 35 Truss: 54 Sunak v Badenoch Sunak: 34 Badenoch: 56 Mordaunt v Truss Mordaunt: 42 Truss: 48 Truss v Badenoch Truss: 43 Badenoch: 46
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This is rather uncanny. It hit me a few weeks ago (writing Kissinger, vol. II) that he wasn't playing "three-dimensional chess" (the Star Trek game) but 2D chess on a vast board. And here's the brilliant quite independently showing how that would work with AI.
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For fun, I coded up the biggest chess game ever, where two AI engines battle it out on a chessboard that is infinitely expanding outwards in both the number of squares and the number of pieces. Here's a video of me explaining it: youtube.com/watch?v=Iy_oYC
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A key reason for the decline of history as an intellectual discipline (and as a popular undergraduate major) has been the increasingly overt politicization of many graduate programs in the United States. James Hankins describes the process well.
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We are all in a Tom Wolfe novel with no idea how to get out of it.
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“The full video reveals that these kids had wandered into a Tom Wolfe novel and had no idea how to get out of it.” Splendid, hard-hitting piece by ⁦@CaitlinPacific⁩ in ⁦@TheAtlantic#CovingtonBoys theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/
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