adamcain.bsky.social
🇱🇧🔶 QPR FC (God help me)
5,630 posts
941 followers
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There's another aspect to that.
If US tech companies start to lose contracts because Trump and Musk make them a security risk, they will reevaluate their relationship with Trump and Musk.
If not, they won't.
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Why would you thank Bardella for anything?
He's not trying to help.
He's scared that being on the same platform as Bannon will lose him votes in France.
It is good to scare him.
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The bastards are all bastards and can all rot in hell.
But it is encouraging that even some of the bastards are ashamed of the other bastards.
We beat them before. We’ll beat them again.
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Still missing him. Keep the flame burning, Duncan.
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I think you may be drawing the wrong insinuation here.
I’m not suggesting the USA could use Diego Garcia as an alternative to Germany.
I’m noting that US projection depends on use of lots of facilities owned by other sovereign nations, quite a few of whom they are currently insulting publicly.
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“Free speech"
Latest RSF Index on press freedom. Top 10 all in Europe, Germany at 10. 17 of top 20 in Europe. Highest non-European entry: Canada at 14, then New Zealand at 19 and Timor Leeste (East Timor) 20.
USA at 55 (down from 44 previous year.)
rsf.org/en/index
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*cough* Diego Garcia *cough*
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The extent to which RefUK are out of step with voters of *all* other parties on numerous issues leaves them exceptionally vulnerable to tactical voting.
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They'd also either have to make a wildly implausible reverse ferret, or come right out and own up to being the Russian assets they have always been.
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God, these people are so fucking stupid.
How can you not look at Farage and see a conman coming miles off?
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Starlink is the thing that worries me most though.
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The whole lot of them are shouting about the enemy within, while declaring themselves to be enemies.
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He's also promised a trade war with the EU and China simultaneously, which apart from the damage it will do in itself, makes the obvious (maybe necessary) move for both China and the EU to move to a rapprochement and increased mutual trade to balance losses in the US.
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He's left with no "peace in one day", Zelensky taunting him from Kyiv, and Europe hostile.
It's looking like he's managed to turn the Canada election against his mates too.
And he's spat in the face of every US Arab ally.
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The experience of the freeze on US aid that Trump imposed via Congress for much of 2024 doesn't actually support this. It was very tough, but Ukraine held on.
If Europe can step up a bit and Ukraine continues to make Russia pay for every mile, what does Trump do?
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The really important thing over the next six months or so is to demonstrate this.
I judge that Trump sincerely believes in the invincibility of the Russian army, and that therefore if he pulls the plug on Ukraine Putin will be in Kyiv in, err, 3 days.
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I’ll be there, so should all British political leaders.
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This is the correct way of thinking.
Outrage is a given, unless you’re a fascist or an appeaser.
The point is: can they get away with it?
And I don’t think they can. They can hurt Ukraine and Europe badly, but I don’t believe they can crush us. They offer no incentive not to resist.
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I had a friend at uni who went into air traffic control.
For as long as we stayed in touch he was continually resigning because it was so fucking boring and goofing off to Thailand or wherever, then going back when he was skint for six months or so because it was so well paid, then resigning and...
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There is absolutely no length of podcast you could create that would cause me to choose Kemi Badenoch *or* Jordan Peterson, let alone both of them, over Dvorak.
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If we're honest, in any country which isn't either at war or facing it, foreign policy is rarely an issue at the ballot box.
But that's why the "special relationship" is balls. Trump told Americans he'd sell out Ukraine and Europe and they didn't give a fuck.
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Actually, you are entirely right on Chechnya, fair point.
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You wouldn’t have got any solidarity with people killed by Russian bombs from Tony Benn, so I wouldn’t expect any from people who quote him approvingly.
To be fair, his son Hilary is a different matter altogether.
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The EU is a special problem because it threatens to become the global regulator of standards, and standards and regulations are inimical to the gang of Robber Barons that are at the core of both the Trump and Putin regimes.
We are in a war between democracy and oligarchy. Time to read Thucydides.
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Ditto Canada. It's sort-of Trump's Ukraine - he doesn't recognise Canadian as a separate identity to American any more than Putin recognises Ukrainian identity.
In which case, how to explain if they are happier and less dysfunctional than you?
Better destroy them before your people notice.
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Yep.
The EU is a threat to both Trump and Putin because it shows there is an alternative.
If you were east of the Iron Curtain, don't have to be Belarus, you could be Estonia or Czechia.
If you were west of it, you needn't allow unfettered neo-Liberalism, you can be a social democracy.
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that "Come the Reckoning" didn't make the cut when moving house.
I felt the first book was very much trying to defend his rep, so candid if not necessarily honest; the WW2 one felt a bit more circumspect, presumably Official Secrets Act was in play.
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The podcast was great BTW and nicely balanced on R B L - ordered the book and a ticket for the Oxford Lit Fest thing.
I lent "British Agent" to my son and have a horrible feeling
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As with us on the east of the Atlantic, you need to re-arm.
Canada and Europe should be co-ordinating their response. I am dispapointed that Europeans so far seem oblivious to the fact that they have one friend in North America (and perhaps others south of the Rio Grande.)
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Cannot agree more.
We are in a crisis here and it is ridiculous that we are fannying about on the issue of Russian assets.
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I think the point is, it's not necessary for Trump to "side with" Adolf Putin by boosting Russian cannon fodder with troops or military advisors - "humanitarian support" as Putin calls that; or to pump explicit Kremlin propaganda.
Farageist collaboration is all Putin requires, until Europe resists.
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You are the first person I have seen make this point, which has struck me for some time as very plausible.
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I later found his WW2 Political Warfare book in a 2nd hand bookshop - not as amazing but still interesting.
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Ooh, looking forward to that.
When my Granny died 35 years ago, among her books was Bruce-Lockhart's "Memoirs of a British Agent" (taken out of the W H Smith Library in 1940 and never returned.)
I took it home and read with astonishment.
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All this is quite important of there is a counter-theory that the violence is all exagerrated, some Danish farmers and traders came over, founded some towns, good at trade, all quite positive really.
Which was pretty current when I was at uni and Nick Brooks was doing his stuff.
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The other element to Brooks’ conclusion, is that it has implications for understanding the Vikings. If “they sent a lot of guys”:
Who is “they"? Where did they find the guys? Why did the guys want to go? What does this imply about structures in Scandinavia (for which we have no written sources).
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Brooks is not certain whether or not the Vikings were actively and deliberately anti-Christian, but he is sure (and I think right) that if you were an Anglo-Saxon Christian that’s whaty it flet like, and furthermore that is the perspective that matters in understanding the English response.
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3. Christianity as a religion should not be privileged as “true”, as Victorians dod, but it should not be discounted either, because the vioctims of the invasions were Chritian - they would care if their religion was being attacked.
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It was also being argued that the violence was over-exagerated, especially by monks. Brooks is saying:
1. Lots of soldiers means lots of violence, don’t underplay it.
2. Violence vs monks mattered. It attacked literacy and essential administration...
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I think that is a little odd, as a view of Brooks’ point.
It’s not “hey guys, the mystery of Viking success is solved.”
It is: the facts require the Viking invasions to be *big.* The contrary argument - that they were small, was being made.