Whitelocke

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Ian Smith, with some justification the Tories won the 1964 election they would have accepted the "Tiger Terms" and recognized a independent Rhodesia and white minority rule. Without the sanctions and arms embargo that state would in far stronger position to fight the insurgency.

Similarly, Rhodesia was left using a limited collection of French helicopters and ageing British Hawker Hunter and Canberra aircraft was a real drag as the War went on.

Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia come to mind. The arms embargo on South Africa significantly impacted the SADF's ability to fight the Border War in Angola. They might well have defeated the Communists if they had full Western backing and equipment.

"This little town has a dark secret" is the theme of half of The X-Files' episodes.

One of the first things the apartheid government did was abolish Smuts era schemes to encourage White immigration.

Never cease to amaze me that Russia had no legislature until the 20th century.

MThe first time a Tory prime minister and the Duma coexisted was under John Major!

The website is a massive fucking echochamber and that's never good for one's understanding of the world.

It's part of a broader trend where visions of the future expected physical tech - aerospace and nuclear especially - would advance leaps and bounds but that computers would remain big and clunky.

"We have the happiest Africans in the world" - An actual Ian Smith quote

I never understood the hate Reddit gets on this app.

One of nuclear's great advantages is that it takes up less space.

Wilson came in on a promise to reverse Britain's relative economic decline and ended up making it worse.

The social reform efforts were good on their own merits, but that was not what got him elected in '64, nor what led to his loss in '70.

Really enjoyable article here. I was pleasantly surprised to read that many Labour MPs believed the Bill wasn't going far enough, even before the amendments wrecked it.

Starmer is delivering a fleabite to an elephant and somehow managing to pay a huge political price for it.

Establishing a port in Gaza would be an interesting project for the Marines and Sappers if they hadn't been shredded over the last 20 years.

Notably, both the Soviets and NATO primarily used land transport for their supplies in their wars in Afghanistan.

Robert Forczyk and Rich Frank were both military officers who became excellent historians in retirement. But then they mainly wrote about military history.

I got really into economic history because it gets into the nuts and bolts of what was actually happening that regular historians tended to just gloss over because they preferred sweeping narratives.

I'm not at all familiar with the Austrian tax system, but how does donating to Ukraine incur tax? Are you donating pre-tax income?

Whenever leftists have proposed substantially reducing people's standards of living they have lost. Voters are not gonna accept you taking away their bananas for breakfast in the name of the greater good.

Bill Slim was right about everything (except young boys)

WW2 really did a death blow to servant culture in the UK. Full Employment meant factory jobs (which, despite their problems, were still preferable) were now available, and the high taxes imposed by the war squeezed the rich to an enormous degree.

All pain, no gain: Labour’s odd strategy Britain’s governing party spends its political capital for little return

Making planning reform a pillar of your growth strategy and then gutting it would be soooooooo "all pain, no gain" www.economist.com/britain/2025...

One reason that I want Labour to go down an Abundance / Progress Studies / Supply Side Progressiveness route (unpopular as that may be ion this app) is that it has real potential to appeal to it's actual voter base, who are presently hemmed in by high house prices and stagnant wages.

Wasn't the Owen plan to break it up into Cantons?

Australia tends to have services organized on a state rather than local level for this reason.

Say what you want about postwar Britain, but most of the nationalized industries — the Gas Boards, Water Boards, the Generating Board, heck even the Railways — actually *worked* unlike so many of today's private entities.

Could you give a summary for those of us who aren't familiar (beyond seeing him in the Death of Yugoslavia documentary?)

Water is more useful than gold, but the latter is pricer because there's less supply of it.

Neither Canada nor Australia are in danger of slipping into fascism any time soon.