Fred Maynard

Haddock : Quelle semaine, hein ? Tintin : Capitaine, on est lundi, il est 10h

Means of production is too broad to define an individual life but obviously does define the historical movement of groups (this seems to me to be the heart of dialectics)

Alternatively: one person does not have a class. A million people do.

The jump immediately from "Britain's self mythologising is incorrect" to "Britain must have some uniquely malign role to play in world affairs" is fascinating, like its impossible for the UK to be just another country where some stuff happened that doesn't really prove anyone's point about anything

The overcorrection is usually because people desperately want history to have a moral to it. You get it a lot with slavery, like people will tell you about the Arab slave trade as if teaching the British slave trade was only there to make some point about Britain being Good or Bad

The debates also bring home what an achievement the emancipation proclamation was. The fact that only five years after the caution Lincoln expresses here the same guy would enact a step even his radical fringe would not have dreamed of is, I think, instructive.

Isaac Chotiner: it's interesting you don't use wireless earphones
Me: I actually save a lot of money this way.
IC: Because wired headphones are cheaper.
Me: Right.
IC: how much have you spent replacing cheap broken headphones?
Me: *laughs* I mean a lot right, probably a lot but -

Next time, we absolutely promise, we won't devolve into factional bickering

Increasingly convinced that the conversation in the USA about whether you can ever again get a civil political discourse is just a proxy for "can the USA ever get proportional representation"

It seems ill-advised for a nation that has rebellion against a Greek empire as one of its founding myths to adopt Greek imperialism as a model

"It's the institutions stupid" can replace most political commentary, most of the the time

I just can't fathom it, there's such a lack of depth

General Giap lived long enough to both command a WWII campaign against Japan and have opinions on the first seasons of Game of Thrones

Bayrou's short tenure reminds me just how impossible it must have been in the Third Republic to remember who was French PM.
50 years of saying "I thought it was Ribot, no, Herriot, no that was in October" etc

Other than "do you want to spend time getting really good at front-facing video" I don't know what questions a comms director at this level can usefully pose

I'm guessing I don't want to know the answer, but in this proposed 1-state Palestine, what is meant to happen when the Israeli citizens vote for secession

I feel like people online have a very different idea of Ezra Klein to the one that actually exists

Presumably someone at these things always says "let's not what we always do and what everyone expects us to do and collapse into factional bickering" and everyone in the room agrees and then they just immediately do so anyway

"Your comms strategy is simply whatever easily recognisable character archetypes you can assemble on your frontbench" is underrated

Who would have predicted in 1990 that the German Greens would the ones practically be calling for a march on Moscow by this point

Whatever else you think about Johnson, a good reason to pick a leader who is a cartoon stock character from Wodehouse is it it instantly signals "rootedness" in England, which saves a lot of time and bunting expenditure

Absolutely, Corbyn is the undisputed master of WIBNIEWN politics and the lingering affection for that style is going to make it ever harder to come up with a FP programme beyond "what if NATO but this time it had no guns"

I think the actual problem is foreign policy views that amount to "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice"

A good test for political communication is "can I imagine groaning through the Aaron Sorkin speech"; Starmer's problem is that one cannot even imagine what that would look like on patriotism

Something that has just occurred to me is that all have had it explained to them that comms is all about the front facing video now, and have felt so embarrassed that they're never going to catch up that they simply put the whole of comms in the "too difficult" pile

We've had more "I simply do not wish to do the comms and don't see why I should change" PMs recently. Theresa May, arguably Truss and Sunak both, Starmer all have seemed offended, as if this part was never in the job description or something.

It is crazy to me that in one lifetime you could plausibly have seen Shakespeare perform, Rembrandt and Velazquez paint, read a first edition Paradise Lost and Don Quixote, heard Allegri's Miserere, and met Spinoza, Descartes and Galileo.