Spaced lampshaded it quite well by repeatedly pointing out how absurd it was that they could afford to rent their palace
My assumption was that all TV shows were made about millionaires because you needed a massive house in order for a camera crew to be able to manoeuvre around it. Otherwise everything has to be shot like This Life with the lens quite clearly squashed between the fridge and someone's ear
Interesting that Labour, Lib Dem, and Green voters have near identical opinions on what the UK should do but radically different perceptions of whether what the UK is doing is correct. And perhaps a little surprising that Lib Dem perceptions match Labours?
I dunno. With Iraq there was a concerted effort by politicians, civil servants, experts, & friendly journos to fabricate evidence & build consensus around establishing a lie as reality. This is cheaply thrown out in full knowledge that neither we nor he believes it or believes the other believes it
This is that pundit brain thing where the downsides of articulating your strategy out loud for the world to hear massively outweigh the upsides but you do it anyway because demonstrating acumen in front of your peers is more important to you than actually getting a good outcome
This was the BBC, officially painfully impartial and yet subsequently hauled over the coals and its DG forced out for its supposed anti-war bias
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZUl...
It was so much worse
Even pre coalition there were some bruising Lab-Lib battles in marginals which led to some comically visceral animosities. Could easily see a Labour activist in say Birmingham Hodge Hill thinking "if we have to lose we have to lose, but anyone but the party of the antichrist Nokia Nicola Davies"
Here's Belize, a book I probably didn't give a fair shake to but which was very dull (the fact I spend most of the review talking about a printing error is probably not a good sign)
medium.com/freds-blog/b...
Anyone know any good novels from Benin?
- in English
- available on Kindle
Failing that: literally an work of fiction from Benin at all available in translation on kindle?
Excited to reveal the cover for my debut children’s book from @oneworldbooks.bsky.social @rocktheboatnews.bsky.social , y the fabulous Richard Johnson ! #kidlit
Happy "World Book Day" (UK only). I do not miss thee
He's avoiding all the British mistakes in Iraq but making all the Danish ones
a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people
Excellent statement from GCR2P. Although I think if you're looking to the international community to do better you do need to look to UNGA gcr2p.cmail19.com/t/j-e-ydirvk...
Who benefits? The Greens obviously, but I think the Greens are probably already quite close to their ceiling. I wonder if we might not see quite a big uptick for the Lib Dems? Davey's been a little hedgey, but more anti-war than Starmer + much more than Kemi, there's probably votes in that...
Isn't that because they're a martyrdom cult and they know that every decapitation makes them stronger?
I actually think in some cases - notably Soleimani, Nasrallah - they miscalculate there because the replacements are not as skilled, but they clearly believe it to be true even when it isn't.
The number of OSINT folks on Twitter relishing in all of this as if it is a game is a sign of a sick, sick culture
Trump and Vance would tweet about forever wars and the military industrial complex
I've been thinking this for about 20 years but spent many of them dismissing the idea as crass and reductive. But then it keeps getting proven over again and again. A bad few decades for nuance...
...issue may be inherent to having a sole monopoly custodian of security and violence. State's gonna state
Anyway there definitely are things that can be done to improve this incentive structure, primarily by increasing the political costs of bad FP decisions (lustration! lustration!) but fundamentally (and apols for anarchist intellectual self indulgence at such a moment but it's true) I think the...
It's much less of a problem in diplomacy, but even there there is something in the fact that the worse a country's international relationships are the more they need their diplomatic corps.
... think some people investing in the arms industry may be this cynical) but rather it all happens on a far more cybernetic level than that. It explains why people fail upwards, why bad books sell better, why bad ideas won't die etc... It's a series of gentle nudges towards counterproductive ideas
... they do their jobs the more incentives they receive. You don't get much budget or influence as the security apparatus for a peaceful stable state, but plunge the world and yourselves into a self inflicted crisis....
Of course that's not to say that any of this is intentional (although I do...
This is a bit trite but since that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone else: I feel the reason we are where we are both wrt Iran and generally is because the defence and security industries operate under a set of perverse incentives whereby provided they do not fail catastrophically then the worse..
"Obi Wan "Old Ben" Kenobi. Very dumb guy. Low energy. He said I couldn't win but I struck him down so I imagine that's the end of it"
"Ive decided to attempt to martyr the 87 year old leader of the martyrdom cult. This is a very smart decision which will solve things once and for all"
