@ianshutters.bsky.social
Belfast-raised; 30 yrs in London as FT theatre critic; now Brexit refugee in Berlin and the Rhein valley. Fat. Smart. Wears tights. At 60 I recognised myself first as genderqueer, then as neurodivergent. He/him, but theyish. Monopolar depressive.
I saw PiL live a decade or so ago: what struck me most was how amazingly he resembled Mark Williams as Arthur Weasley.
When a celebrity panel show can only explain a celebrity panellist's celebrity by saying they've been on I'm A Celebrity..., I think the term "celebrity" may be becoming overused.
When I first heard "Sex Bomb", I genuinely misheard it as "Sad bum, sad bum, you're a sad bum..."
And after seeing John Lydon on The Masked Singer, I think this is a hill I'm prepared to die on.
I'm a two-time Nobel Peace laureate. In 1998, David Trimble said his prize belonged to all the people of Northern Ireland, and I'm a citizen of the European Union, which won in 2012.
I'm sending them both back.
"If not Labour, who?" - Shabana Mahmood just shredded the last of the "if".
Folk who think they're confronting Trumpzism by saying "This is like Germany in 1933":
Venezuela - this is September 1939.
And it's time the rest of the world stepped up.
As a child, I used to read the labels on my grown-up cousins' booze bottles, and I was convinced that Mr Bacardi's first name was Ron.
Protest is when I say such-and-such isn't OK with me. Resistance is when I make an effort that what isn't OK with me doesn't happen any more.
Protes is when I say I'm not going along with this. Resistance is when I make an effort that nobody else goes along with it either.
The transactional carping about taxation is the same: "What do I GET for my taxes?" - You get a fucking SOCIETY. Go look it up. Oh, first learn to read so you _can_ look it up. But pay for that remedial education yourself.
It's not that they don't understand different principles - they don't understand _principles_, as opposed to crass self-interest.
They find it literally inconceivable - _literally_ literally, it just won't fit in their heads - that any mature, rational person might be driven by different attitudes. Therefore, to them, their opponents are _by definition_ either mentally deficient or liars posing in bad faith.
"Anyone who's not a conservative at 40 has no head"
and
"But what if [any prominent Democrat] is in the Epstein files?"
are both manifestions of a mindset all too prevalent on the American (and elsewhere) right:
Per Reuters, Pentagon has informed European diplomats that the United States will partially halt military assistance to the Baltic nations and NATO member states bordering Russia.
The department stated that the decision is linked to the United States’ new priority — “homeland defense.”
Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?...
I'm happy to be corrected, but as I understand it, this hasn't yet actually happened as a matter of legality. Rather, it's been adopted as a motion, and would happen if/when _that_ was passed.
I mean, not that this isn't horrifying enough. More than enough.
And what I find interesting here is that these observations about snowballing media oligarchism carry sources which are all from the same Murdoch outlet.
Russia designated the 'LGBT Movement' as a terrorist organisation. They know there is no such group; that's the point. It means they can choose to arrest ANYONE with any association with LGBT issues and treat them as a terrorist.
The fact that 'antifa' is not a group should not be a comfort here.
![Quentin Letts on [Peter Brook's production] The Suit: “A song by Mr McNeill, delivered in a steady contralto, combines terrible descriptions of violence with a gentle, pretty melody of lament.” It certainly does. It’s called “Strange Fruit”, and was first performed by Billie Holiday in 1939; it went on to become her regular closing number and her biggest-selling record (over a million copies even at the time), and her version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978. Other recordings of it have been made by artists as diverse as Nina Simone, UB40, Tori Amos, The Cocteau Twins, John Martyn, Robert Wyatt, Jeff Buckley, Diana Ross, The Gun Club, Lou Rawls, Sting and Gil Evans, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. In 1999, Time magazine called it the song of the century. And now Quentin has heard it at last, its history begins.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:iivncipihk5k5ys26zhtb7ss/bafkreihnk6bovbx4yvcvwgmyu2aqkpsg57pkgo2rhe4vlvtrutgvdt4vbi)
I can't think why I'm remembering this incident from 2012, and my column in Theatre Record magazine:
(For non-Brits, Quentin Letts is a bilious right-wing political commentator for the Daily Mail, with a sideline as a bilious right-wing theatre reviewer for the Daily Mail.)
Just seen the news about Robert Redford, and my first thought was, "Well, he's out of this shit."
Do you remember when we used to be unable to understand how people could accept theologies that said that this world is an agonising trial we must endure to enter the next?
Nigel Farage grieves for his "friend" Charlie Kirk.
Nigel Farage advocates the kind of relaxation of gun control that Charlie Kirk supported so enthusiastically, waving away thousands of victims as a small price to pay. Before he was shot dead.
Nigel Farage is not very good at joined-up thinking.
WTAF?!
Oh, you count Labour in 2025 Britain as left of centre? How quaint.
Gap-toothed? Tchah, you don't know you're born. Try being fat and crossing Quentin. He once planted a diary story that tried to get me fired for wearing a T-shirt - "baring too much": what, my forearms?
Crikey. I've just discovered that, one of the flats I looked at back when I was first shopping for a place in Berlin, if it had had windows at the back of the building instead of into the courtyard, would have given me a view onto the transplanted and rebuilt house of Rosa Parks. Yeah, in Berlin.
I'm hearing this to the tune of "Lions After Slumber" by Scritti Politti - www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ie...
