When I wrote this I thought it was disgusting that so many Labour functionaries believe themselves entitled to a peerage as a retirement benefit. Now we discover they wanted to give the grim little man an embassy! www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Did you display good judgement? No. Ok, but did you at least follow due process? Also no.
I mean, would be quite funny if they weren’t running the country I live in!
‘We start to think that what we do sexually reveals something very profound about us, and maybe more profound and more true than something that we’ve committed to intellectually.’
@piercepenniless.bsky.social on men looking at men across history, on the podcast.
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...
And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
Given Russia does not use British bases to mount its war on Ukraine, nor does Britain militarily cooperate with Russia, no -- as it would be somewhat silly to argue for suspending something which does not exist.
‘I don’t think it’s been good for historical practice to obsess about identity framed in those kind of linguistic terms.’
Tom Crewe and @piercepenniless.bsky.social on men looking at men across history, on the podcast. Listen wherever you get podcasts, or here:
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...
And for what? For whom? This incurious man, whose political insight has long since failed? Whose life is dedicated to self-enrichment and marginal parasitism on billionaires? There's nothing there worth lifting a finger for.
So much of the Mandelson affair involves people making objectively insane decisions and thinking, well, this surely will not blow up in my face -- despite substantial precedent that, where Mandelson is concerned, it really will definitely blow up in your face.
‘We’re in a period in which there are these very intense links or affective bonds between men, but the tendency to reduce or to say that that explains away homoerotic material is, I think, implausible.’
@piercepenniless.bsky.social and Tom Crewe on the podcast.
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...
Or a permanent secretary anticipated a need to be "helpful" and acts without sanction to overrule the vetting, and tells nobody on the political side. Likely? I don't think so. With the Mandelson risk profile? ("Surely this won't blow up in my face.")
The only conditions in which that's not the case are:
Starmer has agreed to go in May and wants to eat that sin along with the catastrophe. Impossible.
A perm sec is involved in plotting. Improbable but possible.
Everyone involved is an idiot. True but insufficient.
Mandelson: It's hard to see an official sending his principal out to give a press statement that vetting needs to be examined if either he or the principal knew that the vetting had been overruled. Which suggests Starmer can't have known. Which is crazy.
What man who wages war, asked Erasmus, does not think his cause just? Impossible not to hear the great humanist's contempt, all these centuries later.
I should have broken out the ethel merman wig for this episode (which is Very Very Gay)
Reminded of Perry Anderson's puzzled and intrigued observation that the Roman church (like almost no other institution) has survived multiple changes in the mode of production. (PA partly ascribes it to its distinct non-secular sense of temporality, IIRC.)
Vance's book on Catholicism is going to invent so many new heresies, schismatic fantasies undreamt of by Irenaeus.
War *is* a 'matter of morality'.
All Catholic thought rejects this division. You find its contrary in the traddiest of trad authorities - Pius IX or X - or in Gaudium et Spes, which proclaims (§76) the church's 'true freedom' to 'teach her social doctrine' & 'pass moral judgment'.
‘Our own desire can strike us as alien and predictable by turn, make us seem fools or madmen, even to ourselves. Its hybrid character, our own and not our own, accounts for some of its fascination.’
@piercepenniless.bsky.social on gay history and its uses.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Less objectively important, I do hope Matthew Goodwin - who is due to speak in Hungary today - is having a really wretched time.
I'd be cautious about proffering One Weird Trick to defeat illiberal authoritarianism. Orbán was in power for a long time. I think TGM would want to celebrate the powerful democratic movement (& its insistence on democracy) while cautioning us to look clearly at the actual politics of his successor.
I am sorry that G.M. Tamás is not here to see the deserved fall of Orbán. I hope the incoming government chokes off the vast funding network propping up various petty Lord Haw-Haws across Europe. Exemplary prosecutions for corruption would be salutary well beyond Hungary's borders.
Now when Donald had said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Jeffrey, come forth!”
You can hear the bones humming
You can hear the bones humming
EFF: "To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago."
My favourite audioguide in Seville, narrated by a Brit, exhorted me to look up and appreciate the "trompay low-ill" ceiling painting. It was in fact so charming that I hope it never changes.
What they really *want* to do is the schiaffo di Anagni.
Today has been improved a lot by the tremendous comical possibility of a Trumpian Antipope. Perhaps Calvin Robinson's true destiny opens itself before us.
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
I'm convinced that the refusal to impose meaningful consequences for the razing of Gaza - indeed its celebration by part of the right - contributed directly to this slide into the abyss. It is already too late, but it is still worth governments saying: no more.