British Right-Wing Pundits

xp as I said, diaspora. Chetniks march in the ANZAC parade and their flags have shown up at tennis matches. Let’s just say they’re not too worried about the association.

I know, just saying that when a white immigrant to the UK starts coming out with anti-immigrant rhetoric then yeah it is really very obvious as regards racist (barely) subtext. notable also that her only big hit was a cover version of a Turkish hit.

https://www.ft.com/content/2bd751aa-e2bf-4ab6-a3d5-38fb5b571833

It is hard to establish cause and effect. Wars are so frequent that one can always be tied to a chronologically adjacent invention. Still, the west’s Long Peace more or less maps on to the stagnation that Cowen and others describe. And it is possible to theorise how war might serve as a stimulant. First, the trauma forces the imagination into new and strange places. Second, the resulting ideas are easier to sell because the ruling ideas are so tainted with blood. Third, the violence itself often gives rise to some kind of technical innovation.

In The Third Man, Orson Welles’s character observes that, while the warring states of the Italian peninsula gave us the Renaissance, serene Switzerland produced the “cuckoo clock”. (Harsh on Rousseau and Le Corbusier, that.) The film came out in 1949. A human lifetime later, he could be describing the entire western world. I am writing this on a MacBook that is much the same as the laptop I first owned a generation ago. People watch episodic TV shows, as they did in 1990, even if they do so on-demand. We who dine out most nights wait, in vain, for a new direction in the restaurant world. I now see all this sameness as the (dirt cheap) price of prolonged peace. I have no certainty that a war would be a creative stimulus, just a nauseous feeling that we are due to find out.

"our s
Obviously reactionary nutters have been writing "our society needs a war" ever since 1945, but it feels like there is a coordiation of drum-banging recently with all the conscription stuff. It's pretty chilling how desperately some people want to see Britain nuked in our lifetimes.
The above is obviously risible clickbait but I think it does lay bare some of the hidden arguments behind the acceptable liberal ones.

Who wrote that?

Janan Ganesh, sorry here's an archive link

https://archive.ph/XyWWZ

dying at 'in vain'

That Janan is breathing ought to be enough reason to bring back the guillotine.

the national service act can conscript those aged between 18-41, Janan is 42!

i was gonna say "the new fash are deeply into cosplay militarism" but of course we can take out the "new" from that. it's a central pillar of fascism full stop. if it looks a little more ridiculous now than it did in the 1920s maybe that's just because people can see thru their shit a little more clearly

What the fuck are pro-conscriptionists even imagining? Land battles in eastern Europe? What year is this?

It's like the end of Vile Bodies when were back in the world 1914 in exactly the same conditions, just 15 years later.

*world of 1914

Ugh. Fucking chickenhawk.

the third man line was bullshit that welles made up during filming. i wonder how many people have died due to that scene and the idiot warmongers who think it's fact.

The parenthetical right after basically acknowledges it’s bullshit! Not to mention that most normal people would agree that lime is not the hero of that film

Would you really feel any pity if a few million of those dots stop moving — forever?

Yes, it's a glib self-serving line by a glib self-serving character in movie. Also have we all forgotten the Affair of the Sausages?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affair_of_the_Sausages

i wonder how many people have died due to that scene and the idiot warmongers who think it's fact.

I think it's 0 fwiw

what about this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjpkoPEn0cI

A pile of free copies of The Critic has started to appear every month in the reception area of my work. Usual names on the usual themes. Woke agenda in universities/BBC/civil service. What is wrong with being elitist? Diary pieces that begin "To the theatre..." Cartoons of men on desert islands. Is there a bottomless well of this stuff? Like someone saw a gap in the market between The Oldie and The Spectator, to fill with more mid-brow right-wing STUFF, printed on paper with a nice cover. Who buys it? Who funds it?

Who buys it? maybe those who think of Private Eye as too woke thesedays...

lmao at "Cartoons of men on desert islands."

isn't the Critic funded by Jeremy Hosking? With the money he had left over after giving millions to Laurence Fox and Andrew Bridgen.

it always seems to me that the cartoons in the Spectator are better than the cartoons in Private Eye despite a lot of them being by the same cartoonists - I always wondered how many of the cartoons that appear in the Eye are ones that the Spectator has already rejected? Do cartoonists save their best stuff for the Spectator because they know the Eye's standards are lower?