Before we fought fascists in the 20th century, we (in the broad sense) first voted for them, of course. History does feel alarmingly like it's about to go around for another rendition of this verse a… (View Post)

That reminds me of a (quite possibly false) anecdote I heard some decades ago when I was doing a summer job at BT's research labs. Supposedly some moderately senior bod in the department got fed up w… (View Post)

In the alternate universe where we'd bet big on a combined European security solution, we might now be worrying about having tied ourselves to a structure where many of the other participants were sh… (View Post)

To be fair, the circa 2000 world was pretty good. Being born in 1977, my political and general "how the world ought to be" views are pretty firmly shaped by the period when I went to uni, g… (View Post)

Mmm, hasn't the book industry always been this way? Most people read no or few books, and publishers survive because of the small oddball slice of the population who read a lot of books. The breakout… (View Post)