Highlights
Count Binface and electoral theatre
Don’t be a costumed loon — It’s trivially easy to stand for Parliament in the UK. Any loon can do so. You need ten electors to nominate you and £500 for a deposit – and it’s actually been getting easier. The deposit was introduced in 1918 (£150 – quite a lot of money then). Before […]
I hate this
But does it matter? — I don’t usually say that sort of thing here. I try to be more measured, less personal. I’m talking about the police face recognition vans obviously. This might not surprise you: I mean that I don’t like them. I’m an old git after all, a man who’s written here before […]
Where is my patriotism?
Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag […]
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What have we learnt?
The liberal world order, the whole post-war, rules-based thing that we treasured. That’s obviously over. It’s not just what’s happening now, and not just in theatres of war: the symptoms…
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Where is my patriotism?
Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured…
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A small bookclub
All these novels have fewer than 200 pages, some of them fewer than 100. Together they make up the first couple of batches of books in my family’s Small Book…
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Assisted dying or compulsory suicide?
Do your duty, prepare for your departure. — Tl;dr: Our medical/care system is screwed, governments are all efficiency- and cost-obsessed. They’re fixated on ageing and on the explosion of the…
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How do you fund a monarchy?
There are only two ways: taxation or plunder — In modern monarchies it’s tricky. The sovereign can no longer send soldiers from town to town to extract funds and, since…
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Some bullet-points about regulation
In case you’d got the wrong idea about how the ’regulatory state‘ is supposed to work — UPDATED 23 May 2025. I could update this thing daily. Regulation is always…
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Look like you mean it
Riot season arrived on schedule. — Back in the old days… …lefties used to say things like “the forces of reaction – the capitalists and their proxies – divide us…
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Tape trauma
In the late eighties I lived in the East End of London and I used to rent movies from a little video shop on the A11 near Bow Road underground…
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Eras, golden ages, long decades – periodising the movies
I wrote this to avoid writing about Disney’s big hit of 1946 — Here’s another post lifted from my cinema history newsletter GROSS. I’m reviewing the top-grossing Hollywood movie from…
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Apex capitalism
The Apple Vision Pro represents the end of something. Or possibly the beginning. It’s an apex product from an apex economy. — (updated on 10 June with some new market…