Donald Trump’s Lyin’ Eyes
- January 22, 2019
- by
- Matt
If there’s one thing that has defined Donald Trump’s presidency more than anything else, it’s his startling propensity for lying.
According to the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker database, Trump has made 7, 645 ‘false or misleading claims’ since taking office. Last October alone, the WP found that he said ‘1,200 things that were false or misleading.’
It isn’t as if American presidents haven’t lied before. Successive American administrations routinely lied about the Vietnam War. George Bush, with the support of the British government and many of the same politicians who now attack Trump, lied about WMD...
You Won, Get Over It
- January 20, 2019
- by
- Matt
There are some historical laws that can’t be avoided, and one of them is this: that if a country aspires towards something that is objectively impossible, sooner or later that impossibility, like gravity, will impose itself in ways that are impossible to resist or ignore.
You might be able to get away with this for a...
‘Foreigners Like You Have No Right to Interfere’
- January 16, 2019
- by
- Matt
Just after the referendum in 2016, I got a message on this site from an anonymous fascist, which I wish I’d kept. The gist of it was that the people like me had lost, and that people like the writer were now going to take their country back.
The tone was quietly triumphant and determined, and...
Brexit: Clowntime is Over
- January 14, 2019
- by
- Matt
‘In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do,’ wrote Charles Mackay in his classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852). ‘ We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds...
Ceasefire: Goddard’s ‘Westminster mob’ are a threat to our common future
- January 11, 2019
- by
- Matt
Few people who pay any attention to British politics will be unaware of the small but vocal group of far-right demonstrators who have been gathering outside Westminster for the last month. Led by Tommy Robinson fanboy James Goddard and inspired by the ‘gilets jaunes’ movement in France, these protesters have heckled and abused MPs, journalists...
Gavin Williamson: Brexitland Rules the Waves
- January 06, 2019
- by
- Matt
In the final pages of the Beagle diaries, Charles Darwin celebrated the incorporation of Australia and other British colonies into ‘ a grand centre of civilization’ and declared approvingly:
It is impossible for an Englishman to behold these distant colonies, without a high pride and satisfaction. To hoist the British flag seems to draw as a...
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