Can't believe that the left is recreating the interwar years from first principles

I think the lesson of the last couple of years is No One Wants to Pay to Underwrite the Deal

Jon Pertwee was in naval intelligence! (and also, narrowly missed being on Hood at Denmark Strait)

To be fair his actual service record includes "wounded in the buttocks by bomb fragments in front of Air Vice-Marshal Coningham", so i can see why he might've wanted to sex it up a bit

Christopher Lee telling massive porkies is something anyone who knows anything about WW2 knows for sure but is unwilling to say out loud

so much as I love Lee, he was an intelligence liaison officer with the RAF and his claims to have been in special forces were almost certainly bullshit.

"With the establishment of the New Republic, the AT-AT's lead designer, Floof Bagga, attempted to claim that he had been with the resistance all along - a fact borne out by the nearly 90 percent of AT-ATs destroyed during the war."

Apropos of nothing RE: @tranquilitypress.bsky.social conceptually, this thing started a joke on the @eomproject.bsky.social cover and now we have 10+ projects/books and that's wild to me

PUT IT BACK

Possibly indelugent but it's always really fun to listen in when my mum commentates on Radio 3

Normies, both in the US and abroad, really do not understand how broken American journalism is. America doesn't know to be embarrassed, because 2/3rds of the country never hear about the daily barrage of embarrassing things he does.

Our conference is a month away! With many talks and seminars to choose from. Lastly, it wouldn’t be a WW1 event without Peter Hart, and he’s going to be telling the tale of a Welsh officer at 1st Ypres

Total SuperMac victory

www.ft.com/content/bad1... the last non-royal to get a hereditary peerage in Britain was MacMillan in 1984, but I hadn’t realised until recently Spain still did them, including for Rafael Nadal

I think the UK is the last country in which an inherited title actually has a meaningful political role, in that if you're a hereditary peer you are eligible for the weird mini-election between peers for the 92 of them that still get to hit in the House of Lords. It's likely that will go next year.

"which countries is nobility a specially protected legal condition in" is actually a pretty interesting question. it's not even all the constitutional monarchies - Sweden got rid of the protections in 2003, and now their title-confirming "House of Nobility" is just a private corporation.

i am seriously begging democrats to bring the same smoke to this story that they brought to jimmy kimmel being indefinitely suspended

I like this Guardian piece. www.theguardian.com/film/2023/oc...

Suits, Cask Ale and Spitfires.

Waugh. Tolkien. Powell & Pressburger.

Today in 1940, War Office Film Unit cameraman Harry Rignold visits the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch miniature railway in Kent, and films troops of the Somerset Light Infantry manning an improvised armoured train. Full film: IWM AYY 38 www.iwm.org.uk/collections/...

What on Earth is this? An "in depth" BBC article about free speech in the UK that only cites examples of right-wing/ 'anti-woke' speech being suppressed. How can you mention Lucy Connolly but completely ignore Palestine Action / Just Stop Oil? Gob-smacking. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I do think if we ever see a coalitional breakdown in the GOP we're going to get some truly insane sex scandals coming out all at once as everyone unloads the blackmail shotguns they have pointed at each other

"Having silenced most institutional dissent within his first nine months, what could Trump accomplish in the next fourteen?" My column. www.ft.com/content/a284...

oof

Whenever people say "politicians are the same" I always report "they are clearer not" but it's impossible to follow that up with the glaring reality, which is that while people like Starmer, Jeffries and Schumer are empty suits the Enemy are just actually insane by any measurable standard

I suspect we are, probably for our own mental health, underestimating the degree to which the Trump administration is dominated by the worst swingers imaginable

But enough about the Anglo Saxons

big part of this is because they sent the health reporters, not the political reporters

You see it in the replies and QTs of James' post, too. No, the average person is not concerned about crime because of fearmongering! They are worried about fraud, which really is rising, and the fact the police solve fewer crimes, again a real problem.

The thing is, people sort of…do believe it is true. There are fewer burglar alarms, fewer bars installed on ground floor windows, fewer people list “crime” as an electoral issue now than did in the 1990s. We contain multitudes, etc

it would be political suicide to do it but like 60% of the developed world very badly needs a poltician willing to talk to them like adults and say “listen, you can let in Rahul to work and pay taxes, you can pay more taxes, or your pension can be cut. those are the options. you need to pick one.”

far and away the most compelling argument for pro-natalist policy is how fucking dysfunctional greying countries are becoming politically. can't cut elderly benefits. can't raise taxes. can't let in workers. no throw only fetch politics until something collapses.

I always have to remind myself that Fetterman is from a fairly well-off, upper middle-class background. There's a line in Alan Johnson's biography about how all the working class young activists in Labour wear suits and the middle-class ones dress casually and that's stuck with me a lot.

once again, Trump tried to go beyond the scale of established powers of the executive and it blew up in his face. he is most dangerous in doing the same stuff that Obama and Biden and his first administration did, just with malice and a lack of restraint.

Genuinely wild that basically every C-suite in America has forgotten why they were doing corporate pride stuff and anti-Trump signaling in 2017

Kimmel being unsacked in less than a week seems yet another canary going "oh man this coal mine is FULL of people who don't like that government"

The Khan is the only one I've seen who gets what kind of situation we're in on a real level.

I never thought I’d say this but, I’m cancelling Jimmy Kimmel. For a week.

Mamdani being a Four Freedoms Understander makes him even cooler

Mamdani made the comments at Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park on Roosevelt Island...picked the location to evoke President Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, in which he listed freedom of speech and expression as one of the fundamental “Four Freedoms” of American democracy.

Especially as the MPs have so far been drawn from the more extreme part of the party.

Let’s take a wild guess

"The Regime will find you if you put your name on a list" motherfucker they couldn't even sack Jimmy Kimmel

@djinnandtonic.bsky.social can you put Pain just hurts on some merch

Related the Revolt of the Bosses is basically predicated on rejecting the compromises that were put in place in decades past to protect *them* as much as those compromises protected workers!

Yeah I think they're basically calling into question the base stability that lies at the heart of liberal democracy and I think we're all gonna regret, including them

Ngl this goes hard

If I'm being honest I'm never drinking apple wine in Gethsemane again

The backlash to ABC/Disney canceling Kimmel has been swift, and severe. The whole episode underscores something I've been blogging about for a while: A lot of powerful people just don’t realize how unpopular Trump is www.gelliottmorris.com/p/a-lot-of-p...