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madoc cairns

@madoc.bsky.social
944 followers 110 following 156 posts

writer, editor at plough magazine, personalist, catholic. awaiting the cossacks and the holy spirit

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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
The US’s ongoing assassination wave obviously draws on longer trends, but it can’t, imo, be disentangled from the past two years of moral & legal norms about violence being publicly trashed. You can’t have nonviolent dialogue at home & murderous nihilism overseas. This kind of war always comes home
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
recently found out archaeological evidence suggests Jerusalem, across much of the period covered in the Hebrew Bible, may have had as few as 400 inhabitants, therefore meaning many biblical events fall under the remit of the reknowned adage: "try that in a small town"
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 06/09/2025
Alternatively, if you take the UK at their word, the below images depict the single largest terrorist action in British history
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 06/09/2025
Mike Higgins, who is blind and wheelchair bound, has joined today’s protest against the Palestine Action ban after being arrested at the last. He, and over 1000 others, risk arrest as a “terrorist” & up to 14 years in prison for displaying seven words: I OPPOSE GENOCIDE. I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 06/09/2025
One of the largest acts of civil disobedience in British history is currently underway in Parliament Square, with over 1000 protestors risking arrest & jail time as ‘terrorists’ for public display of seven words: I OPPOSE GENOCIDE. I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION.
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Amnesty International UK @amnestyuk.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
🚨BREAKING: Defend Our Juries leaders arrested in clear violation of international law This is a terrifying example of UK authorities’ willingness to use authoritarian practices. amn.st/63327A6z3d
amn.st
Five members of group supporting Palestine Action ‘arrested in police raids’
Defend Our Juries said a number of its spokespeople were held ahead of plans to announce a fresh mass protest against the ban on Palestine Action.
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 02/08/2025
The number of children a single BBC investigation found to have been killed by IDF snipers (90+) is more than double the number of children killed on October 7 & falls within the lower estimates of the number of children killed by Hamas over the organisation's entire history
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Tom Jamieson @tomjam.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
And we’ve been very much across this on press day. 👀👀👀
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
The UK in 2025: it’s now a terrorist offence, carrying a sentence of up to fourteen years in prison, to hold this cartoon from Private Eye
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
A reminder that according to a Yougov poll from last month (18.06.2025): 55% of British adults oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza (only 15% support) And 45% of British adults think Israel is committing a genocide.
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
Police in Canterbury today informed a protestor that the phrase "Israel is committing genocide in Gaza" could be considered a declaration of support for Palestine Action and therefore a terrorism offence.
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Marie Coronel @mariecoronelsd.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
‘In death, as he was in life, he will remain a sign of contradiction.’ @madoc.bsky.social on the life & legacy of the 266th Pope, ‘Pope Francis. 1936–2025.’ Via The Lamp Magazine thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue...
thelampmagazine.com
The Lamp Magazine | Pope Francis 1936–2025
A symposium on the late pontiff.
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
Some Popes are different. Francis was one such Pope. My biographic introduction to The Lamp's symposium on the last pontificate is online here: thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue...
thelampmagazine.com
The Lamp Magazine | Pope Francis 1936–2025
A symposium on the late pontiff.
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James Crane @jamescrane.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
have to admit though that my favorite of Horkheimer’s critical recoveries of Nietzsche is from Dämmerung (1934), “Nietzsche & the Proletariat”!
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e.g.n. lafleur @egnlafleur.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
"Perhaps most divisive of all was Francis’s own personality: authoritarian and anarchic, austere and ambiguous; the silence and the noise. He remained, always, La Gioconda: wearing a smile that seemed to—and perhaps did—reveal everything."
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
Some Popes are different. Francis was one such Pope. My biographic introduction to The Lamp's symposium on the last pontificate is online here: thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue...
thelampmagazine.com
The Lamp Magazine | Pope Francis 1936–2025
A symposium on the late pontiff.
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karl rove knausgård @uhactually.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
What’s happening in the UK is pathetic and dystopian
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Jack Jones @storiesfromjack.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
If true that PA have dissolved, it now appears to be an offence to show support for the memory of an organisation which no longer exists, but at the time it existed, wasn't proscribed.
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
Not a terrorist offence: Participating in direct action like Palestine Action's Organising direct action like PA’s Supporting direct action like PA’s Being a former PA activist who does all of the above. Terrorist offence carrying up to 14 years in prison: Saying “I support Palestine Action”
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Paolo Sandro @paolosandro.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
I expect this thread to become national news this week. Excellent, as well as infuriating, public service
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Dan McCrum @mccrum.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
Thread on how MPs were told the Terrorism Act would not be used - as it is now being used against Palestine Action
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
This argument recommends that we assume that neither we nor MPs know what our laws are in discussing & voting onthem. All that matters is the law, as (re)interpreted by those MacIntyre called the clergy of liberalism, lawyers. But if this is our situation, we do not live in a democracy at all.
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Stephen Smith @gsds3.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
It’s an excellent thread and fine research, thank you. Charles Clarke was minister of state, one step down from Home Secretary, at the time of this legislation
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
Alasdair MacIntyre on Aquinas, the modern state, and our duty to disobey unjust laws:
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
🧷 Pinning this for reference. Thread-of-Threads on Palestine Action & related issues (ongoing). 🧵🔽
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
The High Court judgement regarding Palestine Action's proscription and the enforcement of the order today from is the most extreme application of terrorism legislation we've yet seen in this country. It's so extreme, in fact, that it's causing the law itself to become openly incoherent. Thread🧵🔽
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
A lot of people have attempted to justify the proscription of Palestine Action on the basis that protests on military property or which damage military equipment have always been understood as terrorism. This is nonsense. Some examples from the last three decades. Thread🧵🔽
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
Ahead of the expected proscription of Palestine Action - the first time a protest group has been legally redefined as terrorist - I went through the Hansard of the 2000 Act they're being banned under. Turns out MPs were assured the law wouldn't be applied this way. Thread 🧵🔽
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
Apologies for spamming your timelines but transferring some threads on the Palestine Action prescription over here for public interest reasons
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
C.L.R James on what the good life is, and why not to confuse it (as "the vulgarians") do, with a "high standard of living" "Men are not pigs to be fattened..."
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
Strong words from the Pope on Netanyahu’s crimes & the complicity of the west: “Herod, for fear of being deposed, murdered children, who even today continue to be torn apart by bombs; Pilate washed his hands, as we risk doing every day until we arrive at the point of no return.”
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
Yarvin's profile seems to confirm my theory that, from the perspective of those forces promoting them, the ultimate utility of the dissident right is the prospect of gradually lowering intellectual standards to the point that engaging with public life will make you dumb as bricks
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 31/05/2025
"Exploitation is but one aspect of the problem. Equally important are attempts to limit – & finally to suppress altogether – the human role in the productive process...man is increasingly expropriated from the very management of his own acts." Chris Pallis, predicting AI in 1968 (!)
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
I was worried about the vatican website redesign at first but the inclusion of a massive gold MAGISTERIUM button that takes you back to the web 1.0 site when you click on it is basically an ideal user experience for the kind of person who regularly visits vatican.va
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Jo Michell @jomichell.bsky.social · 24/05/2025
Succinct summary.
About 4.8mn children are forecast to be in poverty in 2029-30 with the two-child limit in place, including half of children in large families, according to the Resolution Foundation.

Meanwhile, Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, is understood to be wary about ceding too much ground on welfare in efforts to appease Labour MPs. A YouGov poll last year found that
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
One of MacIntyre's less commonly displayed talents was as a reader of, and thinker about, poetry. Of the times he dealt with it directly, my favourite is his 2016 lecture on Homer, Dante, Hill, Peguy & Joyce, 'Poetic Imaginations, Catholic & Otherwise'. A partial transcript:
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
"Lenin urged us not to bow down before the tyranny of the established fact, before conventional opinions about what is possible and what is not. And St. Paul and Aquinas tell us how there is always more to be hoped for than the empirical facts seem to show." Macintyre (2011)
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
Extraordinary that a coworker of Castoriadis, Dunayevskaya,+CLR James ended his life as the foremost Catholic philosopher of the age. Even more so that he saw the second part of his life as in deep continuity with the first. That was the kind of person Alasdair MacIntyre was. RIP
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
A one world republic to equitably share global wealth, end imperialism and outlaw war absolutely? You could say I'm a big fan of the "Ottaviani Intervention"...
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
"We have not committed sin, yet we sin. We sin by omission. If there is anyone homeless,anyone without food or fire, even anyone without work, whose fault is it? Whose sin is it? If there is anyone among us who does not know God...whose fault is it if not ours?" Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
its also worth considering that sometime within the next decade the definition of 'woke' will include anyone who refuses to let tech billionaires grow their gene-edited offspring inside them alien the movie style
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Steven Gnocchi @okeydoxy.com · 20/05/2025
"Those born and raised far from the centers of power should not merely be taught the Church’s social doctrine; they should also be recognized as carrying it forward and putting it into practice." - Leo XIV
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Tara @taradaneese.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
I teach adult convert classes (OCIA, formerly RCIA) and I see more people shift politically left during the process than right. Those very loud, far right converts like JD Vance aren’t the actual majority. They’re just loud and terrible and therefore noticeable.
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
The ongoing evolution of “woke” & “anti-woke” leads me to conclude that in future centuries they’ll be universally adopted as value-neutral labels, their original meanings long forgotten, similar to how Left & Right first described where people sat in the 1789 French Assembly
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
To be clear it seems obvious to me conversions/reversions at scale are attributable to people coming to conclusions about God being Real, and the political framing is downstream of an unarticulated common sense that no one could possibly believe such things any more
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
Another round of commentary framing conversion/reversion to Catholicism as a shift to the political right…feels off to me. Personally speaking the practice of Catholicism has led me to plunge deeper into the woke mania of the lunatic left. Maybe these guys are doing it wrong
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
Watching the pope hug his brother after the mass: Beautiful. Enough pomp and ceremony...what matters is LOVE Watching Vance greet the Pope: Daring to Grasp the Pontifical Elbow, This Yokel Princeling hails the Vicar of Christ with the Vulgar Familiarity of Some Hog Farmer or Tavern Keep
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madoc cairns @madoc.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
a reflection on dying by Vincent McNabb O.P, written toward the end of his life.
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