Jacob Phillips @Counteredlogos Twitter profile

Pinned Tweet

Jacob Phillips

2 years

Obedience is Freedom is out today! "A strange but deeply affecting mash-up of cultural and literary criticism, personal reflection and philosophy" @jacobreynolds

8

29

87

Last Seen Profiles

@acetobe

@snowykaru

@merritt_da96552

@with_yours

@TSDXclusivety

@Sasha_sofierce

@yerifisip

@spica_goods

@reiimm4

@CorkCoypu

@taylordswiftt13

@FRichbard

@btcmoggers

@virgosimluva97

@motoeilish

@Cute_Gurjari2

@_oreyes97

@mdjsm77761505

@IvanaIvancic3

@avbakiozturk

@SammyObeid

@Opine_Tree

@linkkey

@stevencpa2024

@macxvalentine

@lal_pant

@eddybird55555

@LyMhdy52388

@DropPopNet

@a_rando_hobo

@minicurry

@h3736548368887

@smrroony

@Ssylus1

@smrroony

@hhamyoonseoo7_

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

BBC journalist says 'although he had strong views, he was well-liked by his constituents'. Unbelievable.

250

342

3K

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 month

It's only recently dawned on me how mental it is this country has extreme safetyism around stuff like buying paracetamol, combined with a range of hugely unsafe elephants in the room like zombie knife rampages which are treated as inevitable and unavoidable.

62

44

560

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

4 years

3

93

507

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

11 months

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger is out, and it features a banging first chapter, trust me.

7

43

365

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 months

Need more English industrial architecture on here

14

25

365

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

Insane Moments from 2020

0

41

287

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

Very weird to hear so many media voices praising duty, tradition, obligation, fidelity etc., when those same voices calculatedly and consistently try to undermine the conditions that make those things possible; eg. norms, history, the family, hierarchy, and religion

0

39

266

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 year

I'd love to know the back-story behind a care home choosing to use Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion for this advert.

30

51

262

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

RIP Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. In this paragraph from his Last Testament, he answers a question about how modern cosmology reveals that God is not the heavens:

4

25

231

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

London was once an incredibly bizarre and mysterious place

4

13

209

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

11 months

As someone who spent much of my very early childhood being taken on peace marches and anti-war protests in the 80s - I can assure you that what's going on in London every Saturday is about as far away from a 'peace march' as you can get.

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

11 months

Yay, it's time for the weekly Houellebecqian Dystopia Saturday night show

0

2

27

9

41

209

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

So far in 2023 I have been mostly explaining to journalists that Benedict XVI didn't suddenly invent the Church's positions on abortion, contraception, and sexuality

5

8

205

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

4 years

Prophetic insight from 1960 by CS Lewis

7

40

192

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

Me on the way to a stag do vs me an hour after arriving

No Context Brits

@NoContextBrits

3 years

131

2K

41K

0

22

178

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 month

Natasha Carter

@NatashaCL7

1 month

Can anyone pinpoint the exact moment when the world started to go to shit?

9K

559

7K

10

9

178

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

Assisted suicide reappearing in the last throes of the pandemic might seem strange, but they're related. A society with no widely-held narrative for understanding death tries to control it: by precautionist avoidance first, then setting the terms by which people can die, second.

5

33

152

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

The Benedict XVI generation are those charged with bearing witness to tradition as a vehicle of the abiding mystery of that eternal present for which Benedict XVI himself had always yearned

The Benedict XVI generation | Jacob Phillips | The Critic Magazine

Shortly after the election of Pope Francis in 2013, I was talking with someone still deeply upset by Pope Benedict’s resignation. Her reason for being so upset, she said, was that his papacy had been…

thecritic.co.uk

4

45

167

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

Went full Alex Jones at a security guard after being asked to put a mask on a two year old

12

0

148

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

The best cure for loneliness is solitude

6

36

158

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

Transfixed by the old galleons moored in the East End

2

7

154

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

5 years

Finding it hard to maintain usual levels of cynicism on Twitter after the arrival of this little Nanogeezer on Friday 💖

14

1

149

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

No.

4

6

146

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

11 months

The discourse about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and civilisational Christianity made me think back to that devastatingly unwelcome moment when I realised not only that I believed in God, but I was even going to have to seek baptism, for @TheCriticMag .

Against Christianity’s cultured admirers | Jacob Phillips | The Critic Magazine

On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, by the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, was published in 1799. It was a time of marked hostility to a Christian faith exposed as childish and…

thecritic.co.uk

17

34

145

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

If you're hugely offended by the doctine that human beings are, from the very first moment of their existence, each primordially estranged from their true likeness and purpose - wait till you hear about the way it gets put back together again.

5

9

130

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

Discovering Joseph Ratzinger's books among the typical curriculum material of a late 20th century Theology BA was like

7

10

128

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

5 years

Lovely typo, thanks.

7

8

119

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

16 days

A culture that says choosing the manner and timing of your own demise is eminently reasonable and morally desirable, is a culture of death. For @TheCriticMag .

Reject the culture of death | Jacob Phillips | The Critic Magazine

Florian Huber’s Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself describes a wave of suicides that took place in the German town of Demmin between 30 April and 3 May 1945. The sheer scale of the deaths is almost…

thecritic.co.uk

20

41

126

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

Before Elf and Safety, people lived very different lives

10

117

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 months

'Once in a generation' is quite telling, because this is about ensuring boomers take the last limit left into their own control, yet again leaving disaster in their wake for those left in a limitless world.

3

20

122

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

G7 meeting in Cornwall and no-one has talked about channelling Merlin, escaping Morgan Le Faye, rendering Launcelot's desire for Guinevere worthy of chivalric esteem, nor finding the Holy Grail. Absolute disgrace.

6

15

105

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

People used to scrub the pavement outside their houses

10

9

105

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

7 months

I wrote for @spikedonline about disliking LinkedIn because everybody on there seems to be turning into Bono: saving the world - one zoom meeting at a time.

spiked

@spikedonline

7 months

The laptop classes are convinced they are saving the world just by showing up to work. On LinkedIn, every middle-class professional has confused their job with activism. This self-importance is delusional. They think they’re all Bono, says Jacob Phillips

15

42

266

11

15

107

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

Yes. And this England. A reserved and restrained pallette, a fondness for pragmatic, unwritten settlement which is expressed by limitless shades of grey - an unease about self-confident utopianisms which is expressed by shrouding all in mist or steam

Andrew C Stuart

@AndrewCStuart

2 years

The key aesthetic here is no loud colours. No brilliant whites with red stripes. No garish palettes, no clashing tones. It is attention worthy as a whole. It is a relief, like a painkiller kicking in.

0

8

62

5

8

101

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

Summorum Pontificum was about the 'inward reconciliation of the Chirch with itself', says Benedict XVI in Last Testament

4

22

105

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 year

The kids are alright

12

10

102

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 months

An elderly Led By Donkeys-type in the year 2057 shuffling around a care home barking "Boris is a wetwipe" and "Barnard Castle"

5

13

106

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 year

The word ISIS can refer to an Egyptian goddess, or certain sections of the River Thames, and we have specialist counter terrorism officers here in the operations room who have particular knowledge in this area.

5

13

103

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

20 days

Don't worry, your NHS assisted dying appointment letter will probably arrive a day after the scheduled date then you can go back to the end of the queue and gain another six months 🥳

4

15

103

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

8 months

I knew both these things, but putting them side-by-side like this is quite something.

4

19

98

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

4 years

Reading about who sided with who in theology departments in Germany after January 1933, it was incredible how many of the incidents were actually driven by personal feuds, resentments, petty-minded ambition, and general workaday oneupmanship...very rarely ideology or conviction

3

13

95

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

5 months

My game room

Cam 🎮 (@CamXPetra)

@lastofcam

6 months

What's stopping you from building a game room in your basement?

3K

227

5K

11

5

96

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

1

9

84

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

What should be going on inside all of us, and we forget...until we spend time with lads like this and they remind us

3

6

86

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 year

Me and the lads enjoying another day in a "catastrophic Houellebecqian universe of malaise and doom"

7

15

87

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

11 months

re: that clip of Judi Dench reciting Sonnet 29, the sentiment of the poem goes directly against certain key tenets of therapeutic / recovery-style thinking about 'co-dependence', 'emotional needs', and 'self-esteem', etc, making one wonder if 'wellbeing' destroys poetry.

6

14

89

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

4 years

Debating wearing a suit and tie to the maternity unit so you can make a good first impression on your newborn child

20

0

84

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 months

I wrote about how critics of Nineties nostalgia don't seem to realise that their purportedly left-liberal positions depend on an assumption that the basic dynamics of the 1990s still endure - but the 90s are dead, they just don't know they have killed them.

The Critic

@TheCriticMag

3 months

“The Nineties were the last years in which people shared collective memories,” writes @Counteredlogos , “Widely-held narratives, broadly accepted moments of significance”

1

7

27

3

15

76

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

5 years

0

12

72

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

I wrote this 2 years ago

1

5

66

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

4 years

You can't understand New Labour without imagining a public sector middle-manager in his late 40s listening to Definitely Maybe on CD in 1996, wearing a new, slightly oversized, dark green ("Mallard") M&S blazer

26

10

68

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

6 years

Not a cell phone in sight. Just people living in the moment.

3

19

70

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

4 years

Here to save the left-behind, organic, God-fearing, working class communities of England with an International Baccalaureate and an MA in Philosophical Theology

4

2

67

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

5 months

I have been saying for decades that this is 100% true and I will die on this hill (tor)

Culture Critic

@Culture_Crit

5 months

Did Jesus of Nazareth visit England? It sounds like a wild theory — it's actually far less absurd than it sounds. In 2019, an exciting discovery was made... (thread) 🧵

1K

3K

35K

2

11

75

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

6 years

Peak Guardian when an article which calls the notion of “soul” an "abstraction" which "exists only in the imagination of demagogues" also claims to be salvaging the legacy of Dante and Goethe

5

11

68

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

Dear Waterstones, I take it all back, you're not a deranged-woke-lunatic demon-screed peddling symptom of the decline, but a rightly esteemed and honourable book seller.

4

1

73

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

4 years

Snakes and Ladders was originally an Indian morality game called Moksha Patam. The snakes stood for particular vices (e.g. Vanity/Lying/Drunkenness) , and the ladders for virtues (e.g. Faith/Generosity/Asceticism).

1

31

68

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 year

Nunc dimittis

6

73

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

5 years

There is no such thing as 'England', just a lump of land mostly surrounded by seawater, and the matter in the soil of that land is actually a cosmopolitan raw matter we imported from a primordial precursor to the EU in the Neolithic Age.

2

8

69

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

4 years

3

11

67

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 month

It's like there's now a sort of credit to having been involved in a large-scale failure, even if implicated in it, because it is assumed that managing failure and decline is what Establishment jobs now require.

1

14

72

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

The human condition is writing an email, pressing send, then re-reading it immediately in the sent items folder

3

4

67

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

9 months

It's like those reductio ad absurdum discussions about utilitarianism you have in first year philosophy, except people no longer seem to realise it's absurd.

Danny Kruger

@danny__kruger

9 months

They sure could

9

4

21

7

10

69

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

People fundamentally estranged from completing the daily tasks of life often set about trying to change the world instead, but you can't save the universe before you've done the dishes

4

9

64

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

5 years

When your grasp of UK constitutional law matches your theology 👌

4

8

62

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 months

I wrote about how societies with cultural and religious diversity have profound internal differences about truth, norms, and values - and that means apologies tend now to be just acknowledgements with no promise of absolution, for @TheCriticMag

Sorry, not sorry | Jacob Phillips | The Critic Magazine

Being a parent of small kids, it is not unusual for me to find myself forcing a toddler to apologise to another child. It’s a familiar scene — your three year old snatches a toy from someone else’s…

thecritic.co.uk

8

16

66

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

The BBC's navigation bar is a locus classicus of Current Thing alarmism

3

4

55

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 months

Government and OfS suddenly concerned about "burdensome" HE regulation when universities have been spending spiralling millions on burdensome regulations for years, none of which are designed to safeguard academic freedom and freedom of speech.

Abhishek Saha

@ObhishekSaha

2 months

Bridget Phillipson stops the commencement of the HEFOSA, and prepares to repeal it. A ghastly, shameful, tragic decision.

25

166

451

1

12

63

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 year

In @TheCriticMag I wrote about how a smell — permeating the atmosphere and pervading the air we breathe — cannot be avoided, but I don't want to smell your secondhand ganja smoke anymore.

The tyranny of weed | Jacob Phillips | The Critic Magazine

How the drug took over our public spaces…

thecritic.co.uk

3

14

61

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 month

@post_liberal It's not about whether it worked or not, it's about the willingness to expend necessary effort tackling some problems and not others.

11

0

59

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

5 years

Forthcoming, my dear lads.

7

56

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

The average member of the laptop class really needs to stop going along with the fiction that their job will have purpose and meaning if they dress it up as some sort of mission to change the world, and also be banned from using the word Empowerment

1

3

56

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

5 years

Gaudium aplenty my dear lads

7

0

55

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

"Every civilisation records its history in three books: its words, its deeds, and its art; and of these three, the last is the truest"

3

8

53

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

5 months

@BDSixsmith Well they gave us Trump *taps pen to rapturous applause and laughter*

2

0

56

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 months

I wrote about why everyone needs to stop trying to be their best self, for @spikedonline

spiked

@spikedonline

2 months

The cult of wellness is not good for us. The quest for the correct emotional balance and perfect health is creating a generation of narcissistic worriers. It won’t kill you to live a little, says Jacob Phillips

3

19

81

9

53

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 year

I wrote about why it is that in the highest heaven we will be served with a cup of tea and a custard cream, for @TheCriticMag

Ghosts of British life | Jacob Phillips | The Critic Magazine

One summer, when I was a student, I worked at the Tower of London for a few weeks. The work itself was pretty soul destroying, but in my breaks I could wander anywhere I wanted within the Tower’s…

thecritic.co.uk

10

17

52

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 months

The scene from the Paris Olympics wasn't wrong because the powers-that-be would never dare do a similar pastiche for any other religion, however maddening that fact might be. Neither is it wrong because it might cause hurt or upset to Christians, which it obviously has.

3

6

54

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

Just think, there's an army of apparatchiks who do training courses telling people how to interact across cultural and/or ethnic difference in such a way that would mean exchanges like this are no longer possible

Historicus Hasidicus

@hasidicus

2 years

A YouTuber reviewing a pizza shop in Westcliff-on-Sea meets a local Jew...

879

6K

103K

1

0

53

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

Apparently King David wrote Psalm 50 as an act of repentance for breaking social distancing regulations with Bathsheba

1

6

52

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 months

"Hello, can I have a one-way ticket to a serious country please?"

4

7

52

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 months

Really enjoyed our summer of near-unanimous social consensus and cohesion after Lisa Nandy declared the culture war was over

2

6

51

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 months

It's wrong because what it mocks is true - a fact borne out by the way the sacrament becomes a sign of humiliation in the debased depiction itself - but also because it is so incredibly hackneyed, predictable, boring and unimaginative.

2

1

50

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

Beginning to think "never complain, never explain" has great promise as an overarching rule of life for nearly all circumstances

8

50

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

5 years

Locked and loaded my dear lads

2

3

51

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 months

In an interview on Monday, Bridget Phillipson declared “the culture wars on university campuses end here”

1

9

49

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

In a little-known fragment of an ancient manuscript, St George self-identified as English when he was crowned in glory in heaven - and had the motto 'Take back control' inscribed upon his armour

6

3

45

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

Abandon hope, ye who enter here

10

3

47

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

4 years

1

14

43

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

Here, he discusses Truth in relation to the profession of a theologian:

1

8

46

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

4 months

Starmer eyes are the eyes of an exhausted supply teacher who knows he's lost the lads sneering at the back but just has to pretend he's in command long enough to hold out till the bell rings.

3

7

48

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

9 months

"Hi, our souls are dead, deader than dead, beyond dead, deader than death itself".

“Bad” Billy Pratt

@KILLTOPARTY

9 months

I’m going to die alone, I’ve wasted my lif-

817

804

12K

5

4

46

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

9 months

A nice arrival in this morning's post

4

2

47

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

23 days

I wrote about how the solitary smartphone viewer losing hour after hour to short-form video is Plato's revenge, and is bringing about of the ruin of souls, for @The_Miskatonian

Plato`s Revenge

What did Plato say regarding unclean dietary habits, and living an organic lifestyle? Is this Plato's revenge?

miskatonian.com

3

7

43

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

6 months

What we now call 'assisted dying' is the final fight of the Boomers, a generation that has consistently fought against limits meets the most inexorable limit and takes control of it so its deadly and unavoidable power is exercised within their own power, hence Boomerdämmerung.

3

6

46

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

2 years

@niall_gooch Saw the long version of this at the cinema. Very odd. Seemed to be saying you should Google stuff rather than ask people questions, for fear of committing a microaggression.

2

1

44

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

3 years

Taliban aesthetics

5

33

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

4 years

Just think if Brexit hadn't become a massive culture wars neuralgic issue, great swathes of people who voted Remain could actually admit publicly that they've finally realised what sort of an outfit the EU really is

4

3

43

Jacob Phillips

@Counteredlogos

1 month

After a summer spent reading zillions of articles about the English which didn't mention Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th Century Gothic churches, or the music of Elgar, I wrote one for @TheCriticMag

Towards a shared Englishness | Jacob Phillips | The Critic Magazine

Among all the articles about what it means to be English and/or British in recent weeks, I didn’t encounter one which said what I longed to see. If I had, it would have gone something like this: The…

thecritic.co.uk

4

16

45