Best Of

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The last of the few: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/the-last-surviving-battle-of-britain-pilot-dies-aged-105/ar-AA1B70Yn?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=5995d76659d2489bb6e1e2f0cf05a0d1&ei=38

Edit, apologies, I see I am a day behind.

It bears repeating. A fascinating story.

The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.

It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.

I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old.
Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.

The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.

That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)

So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history

Morning, PB.

And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.

Imagine if the Axis Powers had won, we'd all be driving German cars and looking and listening to Japanese consumer electronics.

And @Foxy

Fascism has always appealed to bullies, and (more importantly), weak people who wish to share in the glory of the bully.

The curious thing is that the sort of people fascists glorify, Confederates, Nazis, Spartans, were in reality, pathetic losers. Degenerate democracies have by far, a better military record.

Fascism, including the MAGA incarnation, is all about winning over society's losers - Trump talks about this quite explicitly. Trump is a master at this - identifying points of shame, humiliation and disgust, telling a story about how malign forces - domestic and foreign - have been keeping his base down. Telling them how he will help then win - they'll get tired of winning! He will vanquish their enemies, the elites who to blame for his base's woes. It's a movement built on shame, rage and scapegoating. It's going to take us to some dark places.

The Trump and Putin supporting doesn't seem to be doing Farage any damage.
Perhaps at this point we have to accept that for the majority of the electorate it's just name recognition... "He's on TV a lot, he'll do"
We need a pollster prepared to spice it up, throw in Linneker. Micah Richards, Holly Willoughby, Vernon Kay, Janet SP, Hitler and Stalin as options and expose the public.

TSE's mention of Countdown reminds me of what a friend told me about another inane daytime show, Pointless. Apparently the recognition levels for anything to do with politics are embarrassingly low. Whilst it would appear huge numbers can name the entire cast list of Hollyoaks few can name the current PM. Ask something obscure, like who is Chancellor of the Exchequer, or President of France, and you are likely to register a flat zero.

Of course people want Farage as PM. They recognise him from the telly. They hate the existing politicians, who have dismally failed to make them personally rich, so they would quite naturally prefer someone they can actually recognise and think might at least be a bit of fun.

Perhaps we should try it. It pretty much what they have done in the USA,

The last of the few: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/the-last-surviving-battle-of-britain-pilot-dies-aged-105/ar-AA1B70Yn?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=5995d76659d2489bb6e1e2f0cf05a0d1&ei=38

Edit, apologies, I see I am a day behind.

It bears repeating. A fascinating story.

The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.

It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.

It's ancient history now, and people have forgotten that once we fought Fascists, rather than voted for them.

I have the awful feeling that we are going to need that lesson again.

https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-2024-election-democrats-david-shor

And if you look at people under the age of 25, every single group — white, nonwhite, male or female — is considerably more conservative than their millennial counterparts. And it even seems that Donald Trump narrowly won nonwhite 18-year-old men, which is not something that has ever happened in Democratic politics before.

More vulnerable to Putin's social media propaganda perhaps?

No, it's just cyclical pushback from the youth revelling against wokeism. In the 60s it was flower power vs war, in the 90s it was grunge vs capitalism, now it's tradvalues vs wokeism.

The youth will always, always rebel against what is today's normal and for the past 10 years we've had woke and DEI shoved down our throats by liberals so they're doing exactly what the youth of other generations have done and telling their elders to get fucked. I wish millennials had even an ounce of their bravery on this, we are without a doubt the lamest gen with parents that were selfish who made us virtue signallers (largely).

"We"? I figured you for Gen X (born 1965 to 1980). If I am wrong, congrats on reaching such a high status so young.

My GenZ son is fiercely woke, far more than me. So much so that I am constantly in danger of receiving a judgmental look or tut. So if this anti-woke tendency in the young is a universal British phenomenon (as opposed to us over analysing what Americans are up to) then he’s yet to get the memo. Nor are his school friends.

My generation of males at the age of 18 were, from memory, not exactly all mini-Farages but widely casually racist, extremely homophobic and with pervasive “locker room” attitudes to women. I’m kind of glad that’s not becoming the norm again.