Best Of

Elon Musk "The left is the party of murder"

Jesse Waters declares war on the left

Laura Loomer "It's time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single leftist organisation"

Can we have a quote from Leon?

See also Unherd/Freddie Sayer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwphU9Wh-BA&pp=ygUGdW5oZXJk (30 mins)

The mood on the right is scared and angry.

Wasn't it scared an angry before this too? Morerer scared and angry, possibly.

Yes, but it was disturbing. I was not as affected by the death, because he was an American and I'm British. So I regretted his death and pronounced my sympathies in a polite and sincere manner: he did not deserve to die in that way. But having watched that Unherd video I was disquieted at the visceral nature of it. Two observations about the Very Online Right is i) they feel things viscerally and are quick to anger/fear, and ii) there aren't any borders any more. Sayers is a Brit, but shared in the grief of the American interviewees as part of one tribe or family. I don't work like that so although I can analyse the emotion and empathise with it, I cannot share it in the same way. @Leon or his predecessor was correct: people live online these days.

I think I would fared badly in the studio. My instinct would be to say to wait for more info before taking precipitate action but that would not have gone down well. A better approach would have been to empathise with their loss, but would I have thought of it in time? I doubt it.

I hate the 2020s.

Kirk hated empathy. "New Age word which has done a lot of damage."
So to empathise would be performatively cruel.

I have a bit of sympathy with Kirk's view on empathy (even if I don't with a lot of his nonsense).

I'm not totally sure I feel empathy very often as such. When something awful has happened to a friend, I very much feel sympathy... but possibly it is a bit of a show off move to suggest I'm experiencing the same emotions as them... in honesty, I'm probably not. I do worry that the performative aspect is a bit damaging.

I kind of agree, but performative horribleness, the default mode of so many nowadays and epitomised by Kirk, is much more damaging

I have never understood why so many British people get so animated about events in America.

Because America is our largest trading partner, military and intelligence ally and foreign investor and the world's economic, military and cultural superpower and what happens there often happens here eventually, from political correctness and the current reaction against it to supermarkets to fast food to the Internet to saying "passing" instead of "dying" for some reason. Not always - thank God Prohibition and loose gun laws have never stood a chance here and attempts to hook us on American sports have mostly failed, but overwhelmingly it's our largest foreign source of inspiration.

No other country comes close to the influence it has on us.

It makes perfect sense for anyone who cares about these things to follow American affairs closely.

But to an extent, that's a circular argument. America is a massive cultural influence on us because we watch it so closely. The downside is that many aspects of the British Question can't be answered by taking inspiration from our former colonies across the Atlantic. (Take the right's fracking obsession; just because it works there doesn't mean it works here.)

I maintain that the sort-of shared language is giving us a very false steer on how similar we are.

The left are also sometimes guilty of casually assuming Britain and America are basically culturally the same. The language of the BLM protests in 2020 seemed to infer armed British police casually shooting black suspects was commonplace. And I have seen it puzzlingly implied that slave ownership was common in Victorian Britain. And the changes to the abortion limit were a needless attempt to import a culture war we have managed quite well without.

Who honestly gives a fuck about Nigel’s mortgage in Clacton?

Fact is the nation needs him and want him as prime minister. We all love him on this site - which is quite striking given the disparate views of Pb

Let’s just have an election and put him into number 10. Get it done. And pipe down about all this mortgage stuff. NO ONE CARES

As John Rentoul said, Farage has never been sanctimonious about other people's tax affairs, so could bat away anyone delving into his without being compromised politically in the way Rayner was. It doesn't matter.

Farage literally said a few days ago that Rayner had to go over an underpayment of stamp duty that was almost identical to his own apparent underpayment.

What matters is whether it’s lawful, or not. Not whether someone has structured their affairs to minimise their tax bill.

Not at all. Public opinion is the judge ofb politicians. Mandy didn't break any law. indeed neither did Angela.

What matters career-wise depends on the person’s previous comments on such matters and general image.

If Bernard Manning told a racist joke in the 80s, he wouldn’t lose his following or any gigs, because it was factored in. If Ben Elton did, he’d have gone against everything his act depended on, looked a hypocrite, and lost work

Jimmy Carr was asked recently if people ever get offended at his shows.

He replied that while there were sometimes a few reluctant parters dragged along, when you’ve been headlining events for more nearly two decades, and your name is on the ticket, the people there kinda know what to expect.

Which is true., if I want to take my parents to a comedy show I’ll choose Michael McIntyre not Jimmy Carr.

I have never understood why so many British people get so animated about events in America.

Because America is our largest trading partner, military and intelligence ally and foreign investor and the world's economic, military and cultural superpower and what happens there often happens here eventually, from political correctness and the current reaction against it to supermarkets to fast food to the Internet to saying "passing" instead of "dying" for some reason. Not always - thank God Prohibition and loose gun laws have never stood a chance here and attempts to hook us on American sports have mostly failed, but overwhelmingly it's our largest foreign source of inspiration.

No other country comes close to the influence it has on us.

It makes perfect sense for anyone who cares about these things to follow American affairs closely.

But to an extent, that's a circular argument. America is a massive cultural influence on us because we watch it so closely. The downside is that many aspects of the British Question can't be answered by taking inspiration from our former colonies across the Atlantic. (Take the right's fracking obsession; just because it works there doesn't mean it works here.)

I maintain that the sort-of shared language is giving us a very false steer on how similar we are.

Seen some ferocious discussion Online about dating at work.
US opinion "Don't ever do it. One of you will be fired. It's impossible to keep secret."
UK WTAF you say?

I met my wife at our work and have been together for 63 years

I have never understood why so many British people get so animated about events in America.

Because America is our largest trading partner, military and intelligence ally and foreign investor and the world's economic, military and cultural superpower and what happens there often happens here eventually, from political correctness and the current reaction against it to supermarkets to fast food to the Internet to saying "passing" instead of "dying" for some reason. Not always - thank God Prohibition and loose gun laws have never stood a chance here and attempts to hook us on American sports have mostly failed, but overwhelmingly it's our largest foreign source of inspiration.

No other country comes close to the influence it has on us.

It makes perfect sense for anyone who cares about these things to follow American affairs closely.

But to an extent, that's a circular argument. America is a massive cultural influence on us because we watch it so closely. The downside is that many aspects of the British Question can't be answered by taking inspiration from our former colonies across the Atlantic. (Take the right's fracking obsession; just because it works there doesn't mean it works here.)

I maintain that the sort-of shared language is giving us a very false steer on how similar we are.

The fundamentals of the UK are radically different from the USA, and our geostrategic interests, while they have intersected, are not identical.

When Acheson said in the 1950s "Great Britain has lost an Empire and still not found a role", this was not merely an observation, but an act of policy. The USA, from the end of the Second World War has acted to reduce British autonomy- most obviously at Suez, but also in such things as our "independent" nuclear deterrent. Macmillan believed that Britain should be "Greece to America's Rome", and most of the British establishment went along with it. From a British point of view NATO was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down. However, from an American view, NATO also kept the Brits in line too.

Since the end of the Cold war, the US has been pivoting away from Europe, and with the advent of Trump this trend is getting faster and messier. Authoritarians like Farage are drinking the American Kool-aid, but the economic policies of Trump will lead to a permanent weakening of American power. Maintaining the American alliance is now an extremely open question. Were it not for the threat of Russia, that discussion would now be far more advanced than it is. Nevertheless, Trump's failure to counter Russian aggression requires us to do it ourselves and better to do that without an at best ambivalent, at worst treacherous, ally.

Britain now truly needs to find a role, and being an off-shore sub-colony of the unreliable, transactional American Empire is not a sustainable position. There needs to be a much greater sense of national awareness- but equally we need to rediscover our global partnerships. CANZUK is one circle, the wider European political community another. As for the US- while we have seen sinister McCarthyism before, the neo-fascism of Trump is fraying old ties faster that they can be repaired. Farage helped push us out from the EU, I very much doubt that he can push us into the US, indeed, the need for much closer ties with the EU is obvious to all and is slowly beginning to happpen.

In the last six months, the US-UK trade has fallen, routine intelligence sharing suspended, after the CIA leaks and the soft influence of the US in the UK has crash dived. Worse is to come, so we better get prepared. Even post Trump, the trust has gone, so nothing will be as it was.