May 2020

James Butler has thoughts! You should probably read’em! However, this take seems stale: Such permeating cynicism arises above all from depoliticisation: the claim, advanced over the past few decades, that ideological difference is dead, markets ought to be insulated from political contestation, and politics is merely a set of technical quibbles between administrators. Depoliticisation has…

Read More Depoliticisation and after

While I was writing the previous post, on a table outside my flat, I noticed some sort of commotion in the street. Then somebody shouting from the third or fourth floor of the block: “There’s…someone behaving…oddly in the road…do something”. Looking across the street I could see some people who might be doing something, and…

Read More Do something

The fantastic Schibboleth blog recently ran this recipe, and I can tell you that it makes an absolutely superb steak. You don’t really think of Vienna as steak country but of course it was old central Europe’s stockyard city, with its vast rail-fed central markets. When I lived there, although the markets were no longer…

Read More A great recipe and the Housing Act 1988

The Guardian‘s Harry Fox Davies has picked up on the Tigger thing. Neil Davidson is quoted so: According to the report, the documents were destroyed “during the winding down of operations”, but Davidson said this related to actions taken by former members of staff between June and July last year. So – in his telling…

Read More Tigger update

A bit more on the Independent Group’s accounts. Here’s a chart breaking down their expenses by supplier, which really does show how much of a creation of the advertising/marketing/public relations industry they were: Here’s the daily spending on Facebook advertising: And here’s the history of their spending with The & Partnership, by category: You can…

Read More TIG in charts

This is fantastic and it reminded me of a book: Every single #BorisJohnson speech – so you never have to listen to him again. #extendlockdown pic.twitter.com/UiJ2EIu7df — James (@seebsouq) May 7, 2020 Heinrich Böll’s 1955 novella Doktor Murkes Gesammelte Schweigen/The Collected Silences of Dr. Murke, a classic of postwar German literature, was written and is…

Read More Erm