If Stalin was 75 percent violence and 25 percent propaganda, Putin is 75 percent propaganda and 25 percent violence.
– Peter Pomerantsev, from “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia”
|
|||||
|
There are many weird and angry political movements in the 21st-century West. But it’s hard to think of any as ugly, vindictive and packed with prejudice as the Israel-bashing BDS movement.” December 2nd, 2015 | 52 comments - (Comments are closed)
 In late 1915 steel helmets were introduced on the Western Front.  The Times 8 November 1915 p7 They were not, as The Times correspondent claims, there to protect the wearer from rifle or machine-gun bullets. Indeed, as I understand it, even modern helmets are not always proof against high-velocity rounds. What they were there to do was to protect soldiers from shrapnel. Shrapnel, in case you didn’t already know, is the collective noun for steel balls being expelled from an air-bursting (or Shrapnel) shell. It was a huge killer in the First World War and the steel helmet did a great deal to save lives. One of the good things about the Brodie helmet – as it sometimes known – is that it had an internal harness. This meant that if the helmet was dented the dent was not necessarily reproduced in the wearer’s skull. On the shape, however, with a wide brim and no neck protection, I have always been in two minds. On the one hand, if the threat is from above you would have thought the shape was a good thing as it covers a large part of the wearer’s body. It is also easy to make. On the other hand, British helmets over the last 100 years have progressively given more neck protection which sounds like the British Army’s way of saying they got it wrong. By the way, in my limited experience both steel and more modern Kevlar helmets are a pain in the arse to wear. You either can’t see anything from a prone position or you can’t see anything from a prone position and get a headache. This was one of many changes to frontline equipment during the course of the war. Others included the introduction of the Mills bomb, the Lewis gun and the Stokes mortar. December 2nd, 2015 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Which culture are Germans appropriating when they eat the popular currywurst sausage: Asian culture or British culture that emerged from India? Have we, in turn, appropriated the doner kebab from its birth place, Germany, or from the Turkish immigrants who invented it there? Pizza is regarded as inherently Italian, yet tomatoes are a New World fruit. Pasta was brought to the country from China after Marco Polo. December 1st, 2015 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thirteen members of a Loyalist marching band, the Young Conway Volunteers, have had their criminal convictions for ‘doing a provocative act likely to cause public disorder or a breach of the peace‘ quashed after the Public Prosecutor agreed not to oppose their appeals. The non-offence occurred after the marching band found themselves marching in a circle outside St Patrick’s Church (Catholic) in north Belfast, whilst playing (allegedly aggravated by hostility) a tune alleged to have been ‘the Famine Song’ with the presumably catchy refrain ‘The famine’s over, why don’t you go home?‘, but what they said was the Beach Boys ‘Sloop John B‘ (reportedly an easy mistake to make, the basic tune is widely used). How this was proved at the original trial when they presumably were playing a tune on instruments and not singing was not made clear. Although now acquitted, the band members agreed to be bound over to keep the peace for 2 years (not a conviction but a promise of good behaviour, breach of which could lead to a 7 day jail term). Whilst this acquittal in the face of ‘hate legislation’ is certainly a good thing for liberty, I note the apologetic tone of the response of the Orange Lodge, which presumably has some connection to the band:
One might ask what on Earth were they marching for if not to ‘cause offence‘ (in the subjective sense) on 12th July by their celebration of the lifting of the siege of Londonderry? To say that there was ‘no intent to cause offence‘ appears to concede that offence was caused, rather than taken or even perhaps rejoiced in as an opportunity to throw the legal machinery of the State at the band. Why not say that this legislation is oppressive, tyrannical and makes the law itself a politicised weapon, a sword, not a shield? To me as an Englishman, the whole shebang seems utterly alien, the intolerance and fanaticism on both poles of the Ulster divide mark them as having more in common with each other than with insipid, fundamentally apolitical England. Whether or not that is a good thing for Northern Ireland, or for England, may in the long run be another matter. December 1st, 2015 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you are an anti-Corbynite Labourite, things are looking pretty grim just now:
Quite so, except that the people to whom the Labour Party has just been handed are not pacifists. They favour violence provided that it is inflicted upon Britain and upon civilisation by Britain’s and by civilisation’s enemies. This is Robert Harris, in today’s Sunday Times, and dragged out from behind its paywall here.
But if you are a Corbynite Labourite, things are looking pretty good:
That being from the Momentum website. However, I prefer this piece of Momentum propaganda, which I spotted recently in the tube:
Who knew that political feuding could be so glamorous? Here is another Labour Party related picture which I took, when walking beside a disconnected and unnavigable canal (a certain creek springs to mind) in north London earlier this year. Did the person who threw this sign into the water know something that the rest of us did not, about the future of the Labour Party?
To be more serious, I am content to see the Labour Party reduced to a state of ruin. November 29th, 2015 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
A fourth-year medical student at Leicester University, Mr Ravindu Thilakawardhana, has been deemed unfit to practice medicine by the University, after making comments on Facebook towards someone who had annoyed him, the Independent tells us. It appears that he will not be permitted to complete his degrees and graduate, quite a long way down the line too.
The matter is going to law, with Mr Thilakawardhana taking legal action in the hope of having his sanction overturned. There has been no criminal conviction (not even a prosecution) of Mr Thilakawardhana over his action, and yet his career is effectively ruined, as things stand, because of an intemperate post. This has all the hallmarks of a grotesque reaction to me. How many other medical students might be barred from the November 29th, 2015 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night I attended the final gig in Frank Turner’s current tour for his excellent new album Positive Songs for Negative People. The gig was packed and full of people dancing and singing as loud as they could. It was an unexpected great experience. It was a sort of home coming for him after a long tour and busy few years. Frank is a self-styled classical liberal and I started to have a look back at the posts from Brian back in 2014. It struck me that Brian picks up on something that said back then, “he is the living embodiment of the above notions”. He isn’t political and shouldn’t be held up as a god for libertarians, but he does what we all probably do – go about living our lives, being passionate about what we do, caring for friends and those who need help and not apologising for our views. In essence, we need to remember that in these turbulent days we need to do the one thing that we can do to change the world. That is we need to live as best we can by living in what we believe in. And for that reason going to his gig so soon after the Bataclan was probably one the best things that I could do as a music fan. As someone who used to work in the music industry in London I’m surprised that we never met in the middle of all the industry people, talented musicians and amagi tattoos. As he is my neighbour in Islington, I invite him to have a drink and get to know a few of crazy classical liberals. November 27th, 2015 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Far leftists do not laugh to mock communism. They laugh to forget communism. They dismiss the mass murders, and the suppression of every right that makes life worth living with a giggle and a snort, and imply that you are a bit of a prude if you cannot do the same. Then they throw a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book across the chamber of the House of Commons and look round with utter bemusement when no one gets the gag. With thanks to Mick Hartley. November 26th, 2015 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
I hugely enjoyed this bravura exercise in self-promotion by Milo Yiannopoulos. Sample quote:
And much else in a similar vein. Or maybe that should be vain. As I say, I greatly enjoyed this fireword display. More than any other recent piece of writing, this one reminded me of the most persuasively entertaining stuff that the hippy-lefties were saying and doing in the 1960s, in an earlier age of alternative media. Like Yiannopoulos, they only grew stronger with all the outraged attacks on them by third-rate establishmentarian bores. The hippy-lefties won. Yiannopoulos, as he says, is also now winning. Given that he calls himself a cultural libertarian, that’s all part of what I like about him. But what do others think? I doubt everyone here likes this man’s way with words as much as I do. Maybe I like him because I have only recently started noticing him, and maybe after a while I’ll get bored of him. Perhaps so, but as of now, I want to know more. And you learn a lot about something, or someone, by watching people argue about it, or him. All comments – pro-, anti- or anything else- – will be gratefully read, by me at least. November 25th, 2015 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
The shooting down of a Russian military aircraft, by Turkey, allegedly after it passed into a sliver of Turkish airspace during a mission over northern Syria might well be an isolated incident, like Gadaffi’s clashes with the US Navy over the Gulf of Sidra in the 1980s. For me, I hear an ironic but distorted echo of the shooting down of the Korean Air flight 007 by the Soviets in 1983, when it was 90 seconds from international airspace after passing briefly through Soviet airspace, but that was a civil flight and a clear case of Soviet mass murder. Whatever happened may not become clear, but why it happened is for now, even murkier. Was it a ‘gambit’, like a pawn sacrifice (the eternal lot of the military) in chess to gain a strategic advantage, a pretext to escalate the situation or to force others hands? The upshot of the Syrian refugee crisis, and the recent terrorist attacks in Paris almost seems as they were 1960s KGB/GRU operations designed to sow discord within Europe and to set countries against each other and élites against the people, with Putin having dusted down an old plan and re-worked it. But is that not over-complicating matters? November 24th, 2015 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
The late regicide and Lord Protector was dug up after the Restoration, along with some others, for a posthumous ‘execution’. Well perhaps it will be time again to dig him up and restore him as the Lord Protector, should Prince Charles succeed to the Throne. The Heir to the Throne has weighed in on Syria, echoing Charlotte Church’s comments on Climate Change being a driver of the conflict.
Quite, and who has been running the Pentagon in the last few years, and what was it that happened in Hama in 1982? For me, it is not the stating of views but the sheer smug partisanship that makes it difficult to see the worth of a Monarch when accidents of history give us the prospect of this person as a King, even though he would almost certainly be a powerless cypher, like President Kallinin, who, weeping with grief and powerlessness, signed the papers to send his wife to the GULAG as Stalin looked on. Perhaps the Queen’s sense of duty, and memories of the Abdication Crisis and her father’s unexpected and reportedly unwelcome advancement have given her a fear of openly meddling in politics that perhaps her son lacks. The pantomime horse of a Corbyn Prime Minister to a King Charles III (albeit I would hope that the PoW takes a more auspicious regal name, such as Cnut) might well lead to matters coming to a head. November 23rd, 2015 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Recent Comments