Best Of

Just listened to the Today podcast where Nick and Amol interview Dr James Orr, who is Vance's intellectual apologist in the UK. Extraordinary in two ways: Orr, who is bright and clever was clearly delusional about his friend and what is occurring as USA descends into a police state; and the interviewers, by asking several long questions at a time allowed him to evade all hard issues, which Orr did outstandingly well.

Nothing about Orr's analysis made sense of the Trumpian/Vance wish to absorb friendly sovereign territory - Canada and Greenland - into the USA, and Orr was allowed to evade the issue, and many others.

I've listened and I found the interview to be extraordinarily soft, and notable for the things left out.

No hard questions about Barr's own positions - he is an Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, and something between a conservative evangelical and a fundamentalist (I have not heard enough to discern just where he stands). People with fairly fixed positions can often be very perceptive analysts of positions they do not hold - see some of the often Far Left analysis of the positions of democratic parties.

And they did not even tackle him on eg Vance's Munich Speech being full of fabrications.

It is interesting that Orr attempts to position David Frum as not being conservative, the 'NatCon view' being that Frum's more internationalist conservatism, which Orr positions as Neocon, is an historical dead end.

Orr calls Vance "an old fashioned realist, that is to say an American Palmerston. He does not believe that there are eternal allies, only eternal interests. There is a ruthless pragmatism."

He allots Vance's ideological formation to National Conservatism in the late 2010s, and Orr met him at that type of conference over 6 or 7 years. He frames it as Nat Con giving a framework for Trumpism.

For more, here is Orr on "Family, Faith, Flag, Freedom" at NatCon 2023. To me he has something of both Douglas Murray and Roger Scruton about him.

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

and here is a piece for background about how he was converted to Christianity by reading a Greek New Testament.

https://justinbrierley.beehiiv.com/p/conversion-classicist-reading-greek-new-testament-led-james-orr-christ

Vance and Orr don’t understand “realism” in foreign policy.

They assume it’s all about screwing other nations over, for immediate advantage, whilst ignoring the long term advantages to being known as a good actor.

WTAF???

@NOELreports

🇺🇸 Fox News host Jesse Watters: “We don’t need friends. If we have to burn some bridges with Denmark to take Greenland, so be it. We’re big boys. We dropped bombs on Japan, and now they’re our ally. America isn’t handcuffed by history.”

https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1905927108712386791

Time to batten down the hatches. If our principal ally has gone rogue we neen a new one. China or the EU. I'd prefer either to Trump's America

You can't despise Trump more than I do, but to suggest what America under Trump is doing is as bad as what China is doing to the Uighers and Tibetans, or indeed the people of Hong Kong, is simply nonsensical. Cosying up to China to distance ourselves from America would be like trying to bargain with a rattlesnake to take on an enormous blundering elephant.

Perhaps a better analogy is a rattlesnake living quietly resting under a rock or an out of control elephant with a red hot poker shoved up its bum

You think China is 'resting quietly under a rock?' In what way?

My knowlege of China stretches to a book and a documentary by Shirley Maclean and three good friends who now live and work there. The three I know personally two English and one French who are all successful and don't know each other wax lyrical about the country as did Shirley Maclean. America I know well and enough to know it's become a pretty dislikable place

I work for many Chinese clients and have worked for Chinese owned companies in education for many years.

And either your friends are mad, or they're scared.

You think Trump is a gangster? Xi makes Trump look like the Dalai Lama.

You think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is bad? What's going on in Xinjiang makes that look like a moderately quiet Friday night in Skegness.

You want to cosy up to China? Madness. Simple madness. America under Trump is unreliable, corrupt as hell, violent and becoming more dystopian by the second - but it has a long way to fall before it is China.

Even if Thames Water isn't fully nationalised - and to be blunt it should be - it is surely high time and long overdue that the government looked at the sort of debt for equity swap they did with RBS and HBOS.

This is just ridiculous.

It absolutely is. WTF should the water customers of Thames have to pay for a wrong call on interest rates by people who have done very nicely indeed out of it to date? Its outrageous.

Tens of billions have been sucked out of customers bank accounts and we get absolutely fuck all in return. The rivers are still polluted and the beaches still have raw sewage (a polite way of saying shit and piss) pumped into the sea on a daily basis even without rain causing overflows. Zero investment, tens of billions in leverage and tens of billions paid out in dividends.

I'm a pretty right wing capitalist but the one area which makes me a raging lefty is the water industry. Bankrupt it all and bar any previous owner of any water company from owning UK infrastructure. They need to be turned into forced sellers of anything else they own too, literal fucking parasites sucking the blood out of the country.

I had a really nice chat today with a lovely lady on my route

We've had a few brief chats before, but since I last saw her a couple of months ago I noticed on one of her letters that she has a CBE

I looked her up and found she was awarded it for services to health care. She had a long career in the NHS, and after retirement (which she told me today was forced on her by a reorganisation) she had a few other positions including working with the Red Cross in Moscow

She's big into wine; I delivered her a bottle from Hard To Find Wines last week (a NZ pinot noir from a vineyard called, I think, Remarkables, that she and her husband visited 30 years ago when it had first opened)

AND she's big into walking. She's going away on a walking holiday for a week in a fortnight. And the reason she bought the house in Ogbourne is because she walked past it on a Ridgeway walk many years ago

She's a soul mate from a different generation