John Blake

The badge of the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company. Surrounded by an ouroboros, a skull and crossbones sits above an hourglass and the motto "Mortus quies vivis salus". I washed out of Latin shortly after discovering Caecilius was in the fucking horto, but think it's loosely "peace for the dead, safety for the living". The whole design looks like it was outsourced to a 13yo metal fan, tbh.

Bring back proper railway branding, cowards!

"Richard! Stop hiding under a cache-misère of your own mythology! We have guests!"

I find it astonishing that part of the discussion around this war is whether a a leader who started it will get bored with it or not

WHY are you picking one over the other when the electoral maths suggest, at best, an even split between them, & at worst, that only one group is really recoverable and it isn’t the one you like, for any reason other than an attachment to one group more like what you think Labour was set up to help?

I don’t think you can claim at one and the same time that “Labour values are meaningless” AND that Labour must value a group you are obviously identifying as “more like the working class” (middle earners) than a different group (people bothered by hostile approach to immigration).

"School wars": Moral panic or self-fulfilling prophecy? The Metropolitan Police say they still haven't encountered a single incident relating to the viral red vs blue school wars trend. So is the threat real? And are parents unduly worried?

I’ve been obsessed with the “school wars” meme, what it says about London, the very real fears of parents, algorithmic school rumours… and why almost no other news outlets have just sent people to stand and see what happened. Here’s where we’ve ended up. www.londoncentric.media/p/school-war...

Satire: dead again.

“We’ve murdered the entire leadership of a regional power by mistake”

I don’t even believe all military action undertaken by the United Kingdom should be determined by MPs’ vote, but it is just so lazy and offensive to toss off that kind of absurdly weak and vacuous answer at a time of genuine crisis.

You might think in the world of complex international politics, there are no inherently right and wrongs answers, only ones that deal more or less successfully with the vast challenges we face.

But you’d be wrong: *this* is an incorrect answer.

It used to be a trope that it was the left of the Labour Party that loved “one last heave”, offering the same failed policy programme to the country time and again in the hope that *this time* it’ll work.

All Americans I know want to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

All Americans I know would like to see theocracy fall and democracy emerge in Iran.

The debate is not about these objectives but about the most effective means of achieving them.

Is war the best means? I'm skeptical.

Which, if my maths is right, suggests by the end of the 4 weeks, the bombing will be then scheduled to last for just over 2 years, and by the time those 2 years are up, they’ll be committed to a 60 year campaign, and when they get to the end of that, it’ll be scheduled to take just under 1700 years.

Over at Twitter, an assorted combo of paid russian stooges and probably unpaid useful idiots from academia are involved in another cycle of « imagine if Ru did X » about a bunch of international law violations Russia has been committing for a decade. It’s pathetic.

Why have only one thinly planned foreign policy when you can have three?

Jesus wept.

But Green-leaning voters are both willing to be persuaded AND have policy objectives the govt might actually be able to achieve before an election (whereas if there ever was anything that cld be done to persuade Reform-voters to the centre, it isn’t doable now).

But isn’t the correct Q not “who would you like to win back” but actually “who might you be able to win back through taking action now?”

Precisely because Reform-minded voters have been the objects of govt comms efforts by both Con & Lab with no actual delivery they’re prob beyond recall.

Utter vile nonsense. Russia has hit so so many schools and kindergartens, killing and injuring children week on week

“John Bercow is believed to be in hiding”

I'm enjoying how there's functionally no difference between me posting a thought here and going into the garden and shouting it at a pigeon.

Just amazing the number of people who can’t seem to simultaneously keep two thoughts in their head at the same time:

(1) the Iranian theocratic regime is bad and would not be missed

(2) there is a real problem in a world where the President of the US can attack random countries on a whim.

Thoughts and prayers for putin's useful idiots in Western policy circles and academia who tirelessly predict that russian victory is near/imminent/inevitable while ignoring that putin is losing one international ally after the other, wasting thousands of soldiers, and running out of money to burn.

Again, what does that have to do with what I hope for the people of Iran? Do you think you’re the only person who can see that it is plausible this does not work out well for them? Because anyone can see that. But any liberal constitutionalist ought to hope Iranians can build a democracy.

The front page of the NYT.

How would you know that the attack was 1) illegal and 2) w/o clear justification?

“I was jealous of that banging photo of my friend Andrew.”

What has that got to do with what I, and anyone with a belief in constitutional democracy, might want and hope happens now in Iran?

Yeah, I think you might just be an arsehole who wants to look smug on social media. Feel free to do that on someone else’s feed, thanks.

What difference would what happened previously make to what it would be right to hope happens now?