Best Of

Good article. I have had similar musings on Citizens of Nowhere and the effect of the Internet and Social Media on the national question.

Benedict Anderson in his influential book "Imagined Communities" linked the rise of the nation state to the rise of a national press, and increased literacy. Communication as the spark to nationalism.

That is now history. On this board I can argue politics with people on different continents, while my neighbours watch either Al Jazeera or satellite TV from India. I can read the Rand Daily Mail as easily as the British one.

On my travels, I note that middle class and professional people are increasingly alike and internationalisd. We have common interests and aspirations and similar lifestyles. It's not just deluxe hotels serving gin and tonics to ageing roues that have become homogeneous.

Is this the end of the Westphalian nation state? Or simply a return to what existed before? A return to polyglot multicultural empires, where loyalty was to class and individual, where French, German, Italian and British nobles felt more in common with each other than with the peasants that they ruled.

In other words are we back under the Hapsburgs, Ottomans, Aztecs and Manchus?

Thoughts and prayers.

Rep. Victoria Spartz's second and last town hall of this weekend -- this one in Muncie, Indiana -- is already starting off with boos and yelling from the 160 person audience.

When she took the mic, the entire audience booed her.
https://x.com/DaniellaMicaela/status/1906000112410566735

That's what happens if you quit the RNC.

“… since the 119th Congress began, she has been listed as a member of the Republican Conference and has been attending Conference events...”

Ah, I thought she remained a Republican, but had quit the RNC.

My apologies.

So, it begins.

The UK must prepare for an exodus of US citizens seeking shelter.

I am not joking.

These academics are all experts on the nazi. They know what they are seeing.



"Three prominent critics of President Donald Trump are leaving Yale’s faculty — and the United States — amid attacks on higher education to take up positions at the University of Toronto in fall 2025.

Philosophy professor Jason Stanley announced this week that he will leave Yale, while history professors Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, who are married, decided to leave around the November elections. The three professors will work at Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy."

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/03/27/three-prominent-yale-professors-depart-for-canadian-university-citing-trump-fears/

Perhaps the NHS will also need extra funding for mental health services for people affected by TDS.

I saw Mr Beer today

That's genuinely his name. The first time I knocked on his door was a very hot summer day. I told him that I got thirsty every time I delivered his mail; he immediately grabbed a bottle of Ramsbury Gold from his beer fridge in the porch and told me to quench my thirst with it when I'd finished work

He also gave me beer for Christmas. So when I started brewing beer, I wanted Mr Beer's endorsement. I gave him a bottle a couple of weeks back, and saw him for the first time since this afternoon

He loved the beer I'd given him, so I gave him a bottle of our latest batch. He gave me a box of Camden Hells lager in return, and said my beer was much better

I think I have a thumbs-up from Mr Beer

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