For all of Starmer’s talk of putting country before party and civic duty etc etc he is pretty straightforwardly doing harm to the country and governance by choosing to prolong the inevitable

Is it bad when your Prime Minister gives a national address on Youtube basically saying relations with the US won't go back to normal - with a miniature figure of a British General killed while defending Canada against a US invasion on his desk. (Isaac Brock in 1812)

I will be more interested when they make this about prosthetics instead of robots. Show me robotics for humans, not robots in the place of humans doing human things, for the love of god

...Jesus Christ.

More Than a Budget Stay: The Controversy Behind Japan's APA Hotels - Unseen Japan APA Hotels in Japan are ubiquitous and affordable. Behind the cheap prices lies an aggressive business strategy and war crimes denialism.

You've probably seen APA Hotels everywhere in Japan—over 900 properties with that orange-and-black logo. What you might not know: the budget chain places books in guest rooms denying the Nanjing Massacre, written by the founder himself.

buff.ly/oQHF9jj

Why I’m one of 100,000 women who’ve signed a petition in support of trans people Those of us who remember Section 28 don’t want to see its warped logic inflicted on another community, writes Kat Brown – and using my safety as an excuse to discriminate against trans people has got ...

We all know that the threat to women is not coming from the trans community – by me for The Independent
www.independent.co.uk/voices/women...

not many people know this, but Barilla has a line of 3D printed pasta it sells mostly to the fine dining industry. I don't want the pasta. I want the pasta printer

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (1851–64)

Gone but not forgotten

Quite a flex to turn up at the presidential palace, get him to confirm you as prime minister, call him unfit to serve with no moral authority, tell him to resign, and then pose for a picture

Your enemy’s enemy is actually not always your friend. No disrespect to the Pope but the Catholic church has a lot to answer for so I’m not jumping on any, ‘Yay the Pope!’ bandwagon. Ditto the Iranian regime, merely because their SM trolling game is good. I can oppose the war without doing that.

I think the video also referenced Edwin Stevens which was what led to a couple of questions there as well, and again, it's bizarre how much people cared about this one American who may have distributed a tract, and not the Chinese man who wrote it.

A video essay(?) about Roberts went out recently that led to a wave of AskHistorians questions about him, and I was pretty annoyed at the level of interest in this one white guy who was basically peripheral to the whole thing, relative to the actual Taipings who actually did stuff.

Vote as though Labour…

- will never rejoin the EU,
- will remove as many trans human rights as possible,
- will harm trans children as much as possible,
- will remove refugees’ human rights

Because this is what they are doing.

absolutely incredible ending to this saga

Sicko.

A complete sidebar from the main thing but France is conspicuously absent from that poster.

To be fair that's in part a quirk of how the full Easter weekend used to be a public holiday, but as weekends off (especially Saturdays) became more commonplace, it was decided that public holidays falling on a weekend should carry over into the following Monday. Well, good news for Easter!

Labour’s manifesto for the Holyrood elections is so transphobic that Scottish Labour Against Bigotry is telling us not to vote Labour.

Incoming Hungarian PM Péter Magyar calls for the UK to rejoin the European Union:

"I remember when I was a diplomat in Brussels... We were able to influence decisions. At the time, the Brits were also part of the EU. Let's hope they will rejoin."

The more she talks about it, the less I sympathize with DeWitt. I understand being annoyed at making a short video but if you can’t go to a Starbucks that’s six minutes away without accidents, losing your passport and everything else, then you need serious help and this isn’t about the prize.

Correct.

Oh, absolutely. FWIW I think the most interesting thing one could do is also think about the idea of territorialising the Hunan Army: what places were functionally being administered by Zeng Guofan's personal bureaucracy, over the regular Qing state?

Appropriate since snakes do not have arms.

Can't help but wonder here if the higher-level parallel here is the way that Labour under Starmer has utterly abrogated any sense of ability to influence public opinion in favour of lazily reacting to what it assumes is an existing and unchanging consensus.

AFAIK the Taiping never held Nanchang nor most of southern Jiangxi. Some day I'll look through the cartographic historiography of the Taiping and work out when that misconception started sneaking in. But at this stage you're likely to have read the nitty-gritty more recently than I have.

But the association of the attacks in Xinjiang with Islamism is fairly tenuous – there is a longer history of friction with the Chinese state that, for most of the 20th century, cut along ethnic/national rather than religious lines, and still does (cf. the comparatively better position of Hui.)

But basically, because Lindley has only ever been of interest to a small niche of China historians, we've never really approached him as a figure in a Victorian context – hence Fraser and I now digging into Christian socialism and attitudes to empire.

What gets doubly ignored is that Lindley broadened his scope to thinking about Africa, in ways that are a bit contradictory: he condemned the invasion of Ethiopia in 1868, but supported Boer land claims against both the British and the native population – and was conscious of this hypocrisy.

For most who know of Lindley, the story consists wholly of that second book as a primary source on the Taiping, but the earlier pamphlet (which was published pseudonymously) gets left out, even though its critique of British imperialism goes on to be the core of the later book.

For some context, Fraser and I have been looking at Augustus Frederick Lindley, a British sailor who volunteered with the Taiping army in China in 1860–63 and then wrote a pro-Taiping pamphlet in 1864 followed by an enormous two-volume memoir-cum-narrative history in 1866.