Best Of

JD Vance attacks Rory Stewart directly:

https://x.com/jdvance/status/1885073046400012538

Just google “ordo amoris.” Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130. This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years.

@Dannythefink

It’s interesting that @jdvance thinks this gap is a predictor of failure. What IQ does Donald Trump think he has? And what IQ does he actually have?

The highest IQ President since WW2 was probably Nixon closely followed by Carter and the highest IQ defeated presidential candidate was probably Hillary Clinton so high IQ alone does not guarantee success in political leadership

Why are right wing people so obsessed with IQ tests these days? Where has it come from? People used to talk about intelligence, or intellect, or wisdom, or being bright. Now it’s all IQ, and bizarrely specific. I mean who the fuck has actually done an IQ test since the age of about 8?

We will never Rejoin because it will never be worth any UK government expending the political capital required (and this is setting aside problems like the euro, Schenghen, a decade of negotiation, fisheries, migration, possible veto by any one of 27 EU nations)

Think about it. Why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing well and you're high in the polls? You wouldn't take the risk, referendums are horribly risky, pointless

But then, why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing badly and everyone hates you, again you are simply offering the voters a chance to give you a kicking and vote against anything you desire

The only way we might Rejoin is if we are literally starving to death and some national coalition proposes it as the only solution, but then the Europeans will surely veto us as a basket case that will drag down the EU economy

We are never going to Rejoin. It is not practical politics in the real world. Better to accept it

I think this looked to be true pre-Trump, and pre the time when Trumpism might shape the USA for the long term. I don't think it looks certain now.

Why? I know TRIP, the Rory and Campbell show, is not universally popular but the most recent discussion is pretty chilling on the evidence for the direction the USA is going in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0fdoOxkN4o

Rory fucking Stewart is a fucking imbecile. Really. Alistair Campbell is a depressed alcoholic with a huge guilt trip about Iraq. Together they have the political acuity of a cheese toastie

However, I said 95% certain we won't rejoin and not 100% because, black swans

A massive world war, or the USA become a hostile dictatorship would indeed be a very black swan and easily enough to see us back in the EU (and there would probably be even greater sequelae)

But, I don't any of these as more than 5% possibilities, combined

Point taken, though it is possible to miss the wood for your ad hominem trees. (And Rory was my MP, and I wish he still was, and he is genuinely interesting. They are both, in TS Eliot's words 'wounded surgeons').

In probabilities, I think the chance of straight Rejoin EU is fairly small, but the chance (say in the next generation) of some sort of deal, the Switzerland or Norway sort, is more like 30%.

Additionally, the chances of America ceasing to be an active ally and turning its attention away from Europe and NATO are not negligible. Wait and see. We are only 10 days in to the new reality.

Their analysis of Trump (I just watched ten minutes of it) is on the level of a quite bright sixth former. I am regularly astonished by the way apparently clever people - such as you - buy this intellectual pap tricked out as powerful insight

Says the guy who voted for Starmer.

I'm watching more of it now, it's pure midwittery and entirely shite

Stewart has just said "Trump is calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza" which is such a ridiculous misreading it is either a deliberate lie OR more evidence that they really are quite dim

Trump thinks outside the box. He is saying "maybe the Gazans would be better off giving up on their shit lives in Gaza and having a much richer, more peaceful life elsewhere". And, of course, Trump has a very good point. Hamas wants the Palestinians trapped in Gaza forever, their misery endless, their suffering a constant source of grevance and militancy - because we all know Israel will never agree to a 2 state solution, not now

And yet Trump saying "Hey here's a better choice for Gazans than the endless pain that Hamas offers" is somehow Trump calling for ethnic cleansing?! According to Rory "wow who knew immigration was so high" Stewart?

Enuff. Only idiots are taken in by this pabulum. I am disappointed @algarkirk is one of them

I know two otherwise-sensible people who have paid actual money to see Stewart and Campbell in a theatre.

Destroying a region's infrastructure, blocking supplies and encouraging the inhabitants to seek refuge elsewhere so that other people (of a different ethnicity) can move in and build their own homes and infrastructure funded by government isn't ethnic cleansing?
He may not be directly calling for it but he is tacitly supporting it.

Trump is offering a better future for Gazans than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are offering. Its realpolitik

Also, it's not like this is some unprecedented evil; deliberate population movements - to solve intractable problems - happen all the time. Greeks and Turks after WW1, Muslims and Hindus at Partition, Germans after WW2, and many others

The alternative is that the Palestinians continue to squat there in perpetual misery because

1. Israel now won't ever yield to a two state solution

and

2. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel, and nor can anyone else without nuking them (and getting nuked in return) and thereby rendering the entire Levant uninhabitable for 20,000 years

What wonderful examples of things that aren't 'ethnic cleansing'. Idiot.

Which is why I called it a “ridiculous misreading” of Trump

I mean, go ahead and call it “ethnic cleansing” if you want, that enables you to ignore the fact it’s actually an imaginative and humane solution to this hideous 70 year nightmare

In an ideal world Israelis would get over October 7 and ask for 2 states and Gazans would not be enraged anti Semites. But this is not an ideal world, and Trump has bruited the only possible solution that might make Palestinian lives a lot better and fast while giving Israel security

You and Trump may well be right, and this might be what happens. But as a thought experiment, post the same suggestion in reverse – that Israelis should abandon the Middle East and move en masse to set up a new state in America – and you will be cancelled for antisemitism. And that is what is wrong with Trump's idea.

The shoulder shrugging about Gaza and ideas like this from Trump rest on the belief that Palestinians are not 'proper people'.

Quite the opposite. It’s addressing them as human beings who want a life beyond eternal squalor poverty and martyrdom for Hamas

Yes it’s unideal for them. But it is the only idea out there that might radically improve their lives and in short order

Alternatively you can suggest your idea

I don't have anything new and wacky, I'm afraid. Boring old goal of a free and sovereign Palestine co-existing peacefully with Israel. It's never looked further off but it remains the only long-term sustainable outcome.

I doubt that a separate Palestinian state is viable - not geographically contiguous, the extreme Israelis and Palestinians would also constantly seek to undermine it and the Iranians would always to looking to cause trouble.

I think that the more sustainable outcome long term is for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to coexist together in a Greater Israel/Palestine/Israeli-Palestinian Federation/whatever. Jews and Arabs coexisted in Palestine for centuries before Zionism (after the 8th century dispersals) and might be able to do so again. The 2 million Israeli Arabs whose ancestors survived ethnic cleansing in the 1940s show it is at least possible.

The extreme Israelis would have to give up the idea of Israeli as a Jewish state and move towards acceptance of multiculturalism and the extreme Palestinian juihadis would have to give up the idea of pushing the Jews out.

Would it be perfect or a panacea? No. Can I see an easy way to get there from here? Not really. But it would be a viable country with at least a chance of working.

I used to think this falls down on "they breed".

However Israel's birth rate is highest on OECD by a significant margin.

I think where it would fail is because of the 3 million or so Palestinian refugees who have been in Jordan (and Egypt and Lebanon) for 80 years and to whom the Israelis have always refused to grant a right of return. If there is a peaceful, multicultural federation, even the spurious pretexts the Israelis keep making for not allowing them their rights under international law would become untenable. Those refugees, added to the five million in the West Bank and Gaza and the two million Israeli Arabs would mean that the 7.2 million Jews would be in a minority in Israel and without some credible safeguards they would not be willing to accept that.

So I'm afraid my Utopian solution of a civilised, cosmopolitan state is unlikely and a continuation of the present situation of oppression punctuated by massacre is the most probable outcome.

Or, alternatively, the Donald J Trump solution. Which, however much you hate him, or Jews, or America, or Israel, is the only solution which offers anything to the Palestinians other than “more of the same, but probably worse”

Ethnic cleansing always looks deceptively simple and attractive to people sitting in armchairs in London or Washington with large scale maps, especially if they are basically ignorant of the region and its history, as Donald Trump clearly is.

Move people from Place A where they aren't having a good time to Place B where they can thrive. But I'm afraid when you have to inflict it on people who have lived in a place for generations, at the behest of a brutal occupying power, and force them to move to a much poorer place where they are not wanted and have no ancestral ties, it rather breaks down in practice. There are also lots of complicated questions about what do you do with people who are of mixed ancestry, or people who are too old or ill to move.

That is why it is rightly considered one of the four Mass Atrocity crimes, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

And the alternative is…

Well, you posted it, The situation as now - extreme squalor and deprivation - punctuated by massacres

I submit that this is worse, you are free to disagree

I do disagree. Firstly any resettlement in Egypt or Jordan or wherever would inevitably be badly done, and they would end up in refugee camps in the middle of the desert with no amenities and no hygeine, so the squalor would be as bad as, if not worse than, pre-war Gaza. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've never seen, or even worse, smelled, a Third World refugee camp. I have, and it's not something I'd lightly inflict on anyone, unless virtually certain death was the only alternative.

Secondly, the actual process of moving people forcibly would kill thousands or tens of thousands. If you look at the most obvious precedent, the deportation of ethnic Germans from the far eastern part of the Reich by Stalin in 1945-8, about two million of twelve million moved are estimated to have died. If we apply a similar percentage to the 5 milllion inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, that's just under a million deaths. Even the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza hasn't killed anything like that many people.

In practice, of course, the world would be so appalled by the scenes on TV or online or whatever that this huge crime would never be completed, or even partly finished, though starting it would sow enough resentment and hatred amongst the Palestinians to guarantee yet another few decades of support for extremists like Hamas. So it would defeat even its original purpose.

I think this is an excellent summary of the truth behind even the mildest “ethnic cleansing”.

Marianne Faithful has died.

Sad news. If you listed 10 people to personify the 60s in London she'd be on it.

Wild Horses was about her.

"Let's do some living ... after we'll die"

Strange evening here. The phone is going off non-stop.

My wife is making a biopic about Marianne and had become close. She was frail recently, but when she was admitted to hospital at the start of the Covid epidemic, she was the only person admitted to the hospital that day to survive.

A week ago she was filming some test scenes with her Marianne and her Mick. To take a show reel to the Berlin Film Festival where it is being announced...

Can't say more ahead of that, but her Mick is remarkable. And her Marianne is going to be a real star...