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I think you're forgetting that Poilievre had a 27% lead until Trump messed it up for him and people saw what far right nonsense ACTUALLY does, rather than what they were told it would do on SM, and how it would answer young Canadian concerns about housing, job, etc. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Many people first heard of twitter after the Arab Spring revolutions. It is perhaps unsurprising that tech owners realised chatting to people could be weaponised to overthrow any form of government, democracy as well as dictatorship.

Totally approve of Burnham's new emphasis on non-academic skills. I always felt that Tony Blair's nonsensical insistence that 50% of the population have degrees made education, education, education into grade inflation, grade inflation grade inflation.

Q: What do we learn from Emily Wilson's humourless review of Nolan's The Odyssey? A: The old lesson that Milan Kundera mentions in Slowness - that the essence of a novel or other work of art is entirely different from the essence of a film. Even a great film. And not much more than that.

When people say something is "of biblical proportions" i think, "okey dokey, so, localised and relevant to a handful of deluded nomads. Gotcha."

The Pursuit of Happyness is essentially a handbook for dictators on how to create a brutalised, self-centred population wrapped up in venerating the abusive system because the only way to make the trauma have meaning is to mythologise the pioneer spirit. Thus how America makes success a virtue.

They don't fly, they tumble out of the sky like a shoe box.

When you see puffins flying they essentially look like someone has thrown a shoebox that they stuck on wings and a beak into the air.

The Pursuit of Happyness is a dreadful movie with the opposite message to what it thinks it says. Ostensibly an inspirational film of one man's grit in the face of terrible societal injustice, it really tells us how broken US society is that he has to go through such unnecessary trauma to survive.

As everyone knows, the best humor is the kind you have to explain.

The problem we have is the super wealthy are insulated by money and have no interest in ordinary people. And it is they who are driving the decisions leading to further climate change, because the world is a plaything for them.

In this way, Elon Musk's view is right that "when two cultures with antithetical values meet, there will be civil war." This is not the "Islam versus the West" struggle he imagines: it is the ordinary people versus the mega rich. That civil war is coming, I believe, especially as the world burns.

When you have such massive imbalances of power as we see with wealth captured by a handful of billionaires, democracy cannot survive. Democracy assumes a level of equality that late-stage capitalism does not allow. I am beginning to believe the only outcome will be violent revolution.

The problem with living now is one cannot exist in a state of constant outrage without harm to one's mental health. Yet outrage is the only sane response. What can one do? Switch off? Give up? Run away? There is no course of action that presents itself as an answer.

Rereading The Hobbit for the first time since I was about 8, after watching the movies. Refreshing to revisit a silly children's book with old-fashioned notions of dwarves and elves that doesn't follow the Hollywood need for conflict at every turn, nor follow cinematic ideas of what a quest must be.

"Have you considered just eating whatever you like and leaving other people to do the same?" "No, I'm going to monetise my fake rage about... cereals. Yeah! Fuck cereals, man!" Completely unhinged bullshit.

In fact I still have the collection from 40 years ago - actually The Oxford Library of Short Novels. Time to read it again, I think!

Just wondering, if intermittency is the problem, why we aren't building submerged tidal mills everywhere we can?

Oh, this is VERY good.

I had no idea about Colette when I was a teenager until I picked up an Oxford collection of European short stories, and I read Cheri. I had recently had a messy split, and somehow the delicacy and honesty in her writing brought healing. I felt immense gratitude to her. I love her to this day.