Johnson and Trump: That’s Entertainment
- August 27, 2019
- by
- Matt
If there’s one thing that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have in common, it’s their propensity for lying. Where politicians like Blair and Bush lied and massaged facts to realise specific agendas, both these politicians at least recognised that truth existed and that it was important for politicians to make it seem as though it mattered.
Johnson and Trump don’t care. They lie about everything, big and small. They lie almost as often as they open their mouths. Both men have prospered not in spite of their propensity for lying, but because of it. Johnson’s early...
No Deal: All the Demons are Here
- August 19, 2019
- by
- Matt
There was a time when Halloween or All Hallows Eve was not much celebrated in the UK. Now children up and down the country merrily celebrate the liminal point where the boundaries between the living and the dead dissolve, where witches, ghosts and spirits briefly walk the earth, when ‘Halloween wraps fear in innocence’ in...
John Bolton: American Psycho
- August 14, 2019
- by
- Matt
Over here in the 51st state we’ve been hearing and seeing a lot from US National Security advisor John Bolton in the last few weeks. First there was a photo-op with our stupefyingly dense and utterly out of her depth Trade Secretary Liz Truss in Washington:
Then there was Dominic Raab’s visit to Washington, where the...
From Brexit to Trump: The Incredible Shrinking Countries
- August 11, 2019
- by
- Matt
I’m not much of a fan of the concept of ‘national greatness’. It’s not I don’t think that nations can have qualities and achievements worthy of pride and admiration. But the concept of national greatness is almost always steeped in a collective narcissism and national chauvinism that I find unedifying and inherently repellent.
Its proponents often...
Meghan Markle’s Vogue
- August 01, 2019
- by
- Matt
It’s safe to say that readers of the Infernal Machine probably don’t come here looking for coverage of the Royal Family or fashion. Despite my own well-deserved reputation for discreet sartorial elegance, I generally don’t read Vogue magazine unless I come across old copies at the dentists. It’s true that I was surprisingly engrossed by...
Johnson and His Cabinet: A Confederacy of Bastards
- July 25, 2019
- by
- Matt
Watching Netflix’s documentary The Great Hack last night, I was struck by the ‘Breibart philosophy’ ascribed by one of its contributors to Steve Bannon, to the effect that it is necessary to destroy and break countries in order to be able to rebuild them on Bannonite lines.
Yesterday marks another milestone in our ongoing collapse as...
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