Fred Maynard

The alternate history where Ireland is a permanently independent country is one in which the battle of Trafalgar has an Irish allied squadron on one side or the other

The sheer number of gambling ads I am seeing right now either says something very worrying about the country or very worrying about me

The connecting thread of my political beliefs is increasingly that life should be harder: children should learn poetry, voting should be compulsory, takeaway food should be restricted to a luxury, tiktok should be banned. A kind of puritan/high Tory virtue leftism with absolutely zero constituency.

- Richard Dawkins, first draft of the God Delusion

Probably a good argument for the term losing its meaning if applied post 1948

It's a simple line but I think back to Steve Carrell in the Big Short saying that for 15,000 years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never worked

This is a problem I have never been able to square, along with the additional problem that a non-nuclear world where all major military powers have nuclear weapons within dashing distance actually increases the stakes of all subsequent confrontations

I get very annoyed by this because Christianity is not a culture, it is a very specific claim about the divinity of Christ. You may as well claim to be "culturally" a tuna sandwich.

Tom Lehrer could as a throwaway gag write a Gilbert and Sullivan parody of "Clementine" with better lyrics than all of actual G&S

The mister resisted/The sister persisted/I kissed her, all loyalty slipped/When she said I could have her/Her sister's cadaver/Must surely have turned in its crypt

"This time I know our side will win" delivered with such utter confidence before armies had even set foot in Stalingrad is just an incredible thing to see

It's like watching a country get swallowed up by the East India Company, if the East India Company was armed with slide decks

YouTube video by mrneglect The Armando Iannucci Shows - Management Consultants

youtu.be/MSJggp-mbiA?...

Both Change UK and this new left party seem to originate in a laudable impulse: that one should stop sitting around complaining and Do Something. Until you actually Do Something and realise oh god this is what Something is going to be

"Have you seen? ACAS says the enjoyment rights bill could go further"
"Ah well, guess we will have to vote Reform"

I'm no expert but I don't think the government's comms weak spot is the general public reading Ofgem press releases about the difficulties in rolling out a new green grid

I love reviews of Nile Rogers at Glastonbury which are like "yeah of course it was great, what do you expect, the man has written 50% of all good music ever, which is somehow Cheating"

The private trials of Keir Starmer | The Observer The prime minister reveals the quiet grief and inner determination of his first year in office – and why he ‘deeply regrets’ his ‘island of strangers’ sp...

Reading this piece you get the sense Starmer must be furious with whoever sold him a career in politics by telling him he wouldn't need to be political observer.co.uk/news/politic...

It would have disappointed Marx to find out that the key obstacles to the motion of historical forces were not the neo-metternichian reactionary powers of the old order but rather just humanity being easily distractible

A hole flying the union jack, or at least has a union jack somewhere at the bottom

I think every polling company should measure willingness to vote for a populist party against support for digging a massive hole in the ground, I think it would tell us a lot

Sometimes I think the best thing a UK gvt could do is just dig a really big hole somewhere. Put out breathless press releases about how big the hole was getting. People would be pro and anti the hole, but overall it would be a big morale boost by showing we could still do something as a country.

The real zero interest rate phenomenon

Changing the norm to "at least three children per family" against the clear revealed preference of pretty much all of humanity is social engineering on a scale that Soviet systems baulked at

Yep, I still think people think this is a policy fix on the scale of like, help to buy. When actually it's a policy fix beyond the scale of inventing the NHS. I'd go so far as saying this is a scifi level fix.

The best thing you could do in the British case is mandate the president resemble the former monarch in literally every sense apart from the manner of selection

One of the many things that annoys me about de Gaulle is the sheer narcissism of a man who wrote a constitution for himself with no thought to what happened when he died. Like the world would basically be over with no de Gaulle in it so what's the point in worrying about that

One of my hobbyhorses is explaining why Alexander van der Bellen and King Charles are actually very similar and I wager this would extend to Charles's attitude to a potential Reform govt

If the key factor is "it's only convention holding them back" then oh boy the UK constitution is a doozy of a comparison to pick

Which actually gets to your point because "let's just do it like other functional democracies do" is both a perfectly valid argument and a completely damp rhetorical squib

In fairness Austria, Ireland, and Italy all have opposition party members as presidents right now and I don't recall it being an issue?