aphclarkson.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

The Financial Times´ editorial board is correct: 1. America has turned on its friends 2. Donald Trump’s abandonment of allies is real and will endure 3. If you are not at the table, you are on the menu

submitted 5 hours ago • 0 comments

However much one finds the FDP's behaviour a disaster, and however much Schadenfreude one might feel about their troubles, with the CDU/CSU heading for power it would still be better if the FDP claw their way back into the Bundestag as a pro-democracy Right wing alternative to the AfD

submitted 3 hours ago • 6 comments

Not the least surprising after recent days. The EU, UK and Ukraine need to check every dependency on the US in Ukraine's defence - military, intelligence, economic, tech - to see where they have the ability to say no to US pressure. I fear the answers will not be pretty, but important.

submitted 9 hours ago • 8 comments

Firing all of the JAGs (Judge Advocates General)—the top lawyers in each service branch—is just as bad as, if not worse than, firing (most of) the Joint Chiefs.

submitted 16 hours ago • 144 comments

Manchester United as a case study for a how a once dominant global power can no longer be rescued by even the most brilliant individual leader once the structural foundations of its power have been allowed to rot beyond a point of no return

submitted 4 hours ago • 6 comments

This is a very neat way of illustrating the essential weirdness of the Starmer project by @georgewparker.bsky.social:

submitted 5 hours ago • 10 comments

If you considered posting something critical of the Trump regime but then decided against due to fear for retaliation, then you are no longer living in a democracy.

submitted 9 hours ago • 5 comments

Remarkable: Trump's own pollster just found that in swing House districts, Dems lead by 5 points and voters want tax policy to prioritize working people, per Politico. Yet GOP is about to brutally slash the safety net and give the rich huge tax cuts! New piece: newrepublic.com/article/1918...

submitted 5 hours ago • 204 comments

So they removed the black chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the middle of his 4-year tour, without cause, and they're seeking to replace him with a white retired Air Force three-star general who lacks the requisite experience as a service chief or combatant commander? Huh, how about that

submitted 16 hours ago • 1803 comments

with tomorrow’s election in Germany, I’ve been thinking a lot about the transgressive appeal of fascism, not as a coherent ideology, but as a form of gratifying sabotage. Talking to AfD supporters in East Germany, what I came away with weren’t actual grievances but a kind of giddiness

submitted 5 hours ago • 16 comments

BBC News on hour reporting straight that Trump has got rid of military chiefs because ‘they’re too mired in woke culture’ 🤯🤯🤯 Traditional liberal democratic media still hasn’t learned how to report on authoritarians, even now when it’s almost too late

submitted 5 hours ago • 59 comments

My view is that subconsciously what he craves is a return for the type of energy you can only have in politics in the 50 days before and maybe the first 10 days after you win an election.

submitted 5 hours ago • 16 comments

This is why isolationist nationalism is inherently imperialist - because no country has all the resources it needs. Since an isolationist nationalist regime does not want to rely on allies and trade partners to get the resources it lacks, it feels compelled to try to secure them with conquest.

submitted 4 days ago • 4 comments

As the Cold War bit, Orwell wrote that the left had to choose between backing and opposing Stalinism. Just as, in 1940, the right had to choose over Nazism. Now the right is having to choose between backing and opposing Trumpism. And once again, the choices made now will have consequences.

submitted 7 hours ago • 9 comments

Just look at these paragraphs from the AP story. Hegseth called Brown unqualified solely because he's Black. Then they fired him... and replaced him with a white guy so indisputably unqualified that he requires a Presidential waiver. This is what "merit" means to them. apnews.com/article/trum...

submitted 15 hours ago • 416 comments

In Österreich 🇦🇹 hatte die bisherige konservativ-grüne Regierung (beide Koalitionspartner wollten das so) durchgesetzt, dass erwischten #Rasern ihre Rase-Autos weggenommen werden. Während der #Koalitionsverhandlungen von FPÖ & ÖVP soll die #Kickl -Truppe versucht haben, das zu kippen, höre ich. Tja.

submitted 5 hours ago • 1 comment

Simple question for Nigel Farage: "Would you support retaliation against the Trump administration if its policies endangered the jobs and security of UK citizens?"

submitted 5 hours ago • 4 comments

Any precedents set in a trade deal with Ukraine the Trump administration would then try to impose on the EU and UK

submitted 6 hours ago • 8 comments

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky is hesitant to sign a mineral resources agreement with the USA due to several "problematic issues" in the project. The draft lacks a mutual partnership foundation and imposes unilateral obligations on Ukraine, - Sky News. news.sky.com/story/zelens...

submitted 6 hours ago • 44 comments

❗️NEW EU estimates that 1st wave of’s steel&aluminum tariffs will hit as much as €28bn of bloc’s exports, we’re told - Sefco also told EU ambassadors yesterday that no negotiations in DC, just 1st contact/explanations (incl. VAT) - w @albertonardelli.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

submitted 7 hours ago • 2 comments

I'm not having Fraser Nelson playing dumb on the rise of racism on the right after years spent printing Murray, Liddle, Taki and Shriver. I literally had a DM row with him years ago where I said this would happen.

submitted 6 hours ago • 42 comments

The problem with Blue Labour - elements of which you'd expect me to be attracted to - is that the world it idealised is not coming back, and can't come back. (1/2)

submitted 6 hours ago • 4 comments

Has anyone asked McSweeney about Glasman's podcast with Steve Bannon and enthusiasm for Donald Trump?

submitted 6 hours ago • 2 comments

This is the kind of naive glorification of pre globalisation 'small towns' that I find so unrealistic. Technology evolved, and it wasn't as if there wasn't crime without immigrants. Nostalgia won't restore the idealised times that never were, we need to understand the world of today.

submitted 8 hours ago • 10 comments

You have to wonder whether he ever read the magazine he edited. Once again, the Andrew Neil chapter in How They Broke Britain sets the scene rather well…

submitted 6 hours ago • 35 comments

This is really the best that Trump and Hegseth could find??

submitted 7 hours ago • 13 comments

It’s hard not to read this news and conclude that they were fired for being female or black. That is in the end what the reverse of DEI is www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/u...

submitted 7 hours ago • 16 comments

In betraying Ukraine and the EU the Trump administration is also embracing a worldview obsessed with seizing control of neighbouring states through force that towards US voters would legitimise US economic bullying of Canada and military operations in Mexico.

submitted 7 hours ago • 11 comments

Friedrich Merz wants a party like its 1999

submitted 8 hours ago • 6 comments

New analysis by me and @p-vanostaeyen.bsky.social. The Islamic State in Puntland, Somalia. We describe the events during the Puntland's campaign against terrorists and provide context to the danger IS Somalia and its operatives symbolize in 2025. www.counterextremism.com/blog/islamic...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

And again, European analysts twisting themselves in knots over every Trump brainfart against Ukraine and the EU need to take deteriorating US domestic political stability into account in analysis of whether under Trump the US will be able to do anything at all

submitted 21 hours ago • 8 comments

Just looking at the latest YouGov poll - the Tories are on 9% with people under 50. It is not clear to me how this helps with that problem.

submitted 1 day ago • 99 comments

A lot of hedging ("the possibility," "unconditionally"), but the direction of travel is pretty clear.

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

Journalists and commentators spent weeks writing Far Right on the march stories about the AfD only to get blindsided by Heidi Reichinnek's revival of the Socialist Die Linke

submitted 1 day ago • 8 comments

absolut wild, was da in der gerüchteküche schwebt. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-21/-mar-a-lago-abkommen-spekulationen-treiben-die-wall-street-um?cmpid=marketsgermany&sref=izhOYBqJ

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

We need to re-emphasise the idea that politicians going abroad to slag off this country to foreigners in return for money or prestige is a shameful thing to do. Because even though I would guess 75% of normal people instinctively understand this, certain others do not.

submitted 1 day ago • 17 comments