Concrete Achievements

Category: Twitter

  • It’s very sobering reading and absolutely right.

    It’s very sobering reading and absolutely right. The PMOS lying to the press, very senior officials permitting a culture of rule-breaking. An unbelievable breach of the code, and I cannot understand how Case has not resigned. twitter.com/jdportes/statu…

    Trying to imagine Robin Butler or Richard Wilson allowing it. And it’s easy to say “not in my day” but this is of a piece with the wider Berlusconisation of the British state machinery. And even il Cavaliere didn’t have as much personal control as Johnson enjoys.

    The next government needs a plan (written now) for state reform.

  • I’m getting a bit weary of this sort of thing.

    I’m getting a bit weary of this sort of thing. Are there people in the FR, DE etc political systems who think this? Probably. Is that the official position of any of those countries? No. Are they objectively behaving in pro-Putin ways? No. twitter.com/anders_aslund/…

    A few misquotes out of context (as is pointed out in the replies) don’t mean France is pressuring Ukraine to surrender. Slow action from Germany is not great but not a sign that they want Russia to win (listen to scholz’s speech last night).

    And the country that is actually blocking things – Hungary – never gets a mention. It’s all the bad old Western Europeans. (Or, for Brexiteers, the evil EU undermining heroic British leadership).

    Maybe I’m wrong, maybe stuff is happening behind the scenes that we don’t know about. But I would expect that to be sourced better than a few viral misquotes, unsupported by countries’ actual actions.

  • Links from the week of 23 May 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Links from the week of 16 May 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Double cinema trip since @dzyrl is away for the night.

    Double cinema trip since @dzyrl is away for the night. Triumph of the Will followed by Dr Strange was an interesting crossover…

    One a bombastic glorification of self-appointed superior beings, the other a cinematic masterpiece. 🥁

    The thing that struck me about Triumph, easy gags aside, was how much it didn’t focus on Hitler. My cultural highlights reek of it is all aeroplanes and speeches, but there’s as much if not more of party members clearly having a whale of a time.

    And a Hitler speech is far less chilling than a tiny child giving a Nazi salute to passing soldiers.

  • Great piece by @samfr in by @jburnmurdoch but Brexit didn’t make the UK a more tolerant…

    Great piece by @samfr in thread by @jburnmurdoch but Brexit didn’t make the UK a more tolerant nation, it was already becoming one. If Brexit vote were today it would fail. This is why Cameron’s self-serving narrative about having to call the referendum is nonsense. twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/s…

    He could have held out and attitudes would have shifted. Perhaps not as much, perhaps not as fast, but it was moving in the right direction.

    Admittedly, while Brexit is terrible for the UK and personally very painful, I also think that for European unity, it has not been a universally bad thing. It’s certainly opening up possibilities that UK would have blocked.

  • Very much enjoying the guided walk of Floréal and Le Logis, garden suburbs in…

    Very much enjoying the guided walk of Floréal and Le Logis, garden suburbs in Watermael-Boitsfort on the edge of Brussels. On next weekend too, with events around the region, celebrating 100 years of cités-jardins in Brussels agenda.brussels/fr/article/bru…

    Notable how bottom-up and self-organising the community was in the early days. Particularly in Floréal which was linked to the socialist party and particularly housed the print workers of its journal Le Peuple, whose amazing 30s building still stands in central Brussels.

    You can tell they were inspired by the English garden city movement. Just need a couple of pubs (though like a lot of garden suburbs, they were deliberately built without cafés).

    Next weekend’s programme.

  • Links from the week of 9 May 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • The Brexiteer wager is that no matter how outrageously they screw up, a combination of…

    The Brexiteer wager is that no matter how outrageously they screw up, a combination of right wing press, TV both-sidesing and basic nationalism will mean British people will just blame the bad EU. So far, it’s working for them.

    The logic of this is that they should be as outrageous as possible, because then the both-sidesing will be dragged even more towards “breaking our own agreements is good, actually”. This is also working for them.

    So, for all the Brexit project has failed and will continue to fail in terms of making anyone’s lives better, it is unfortunately delivering for the nationalist right (prop. V. Putin).

  • Alternative titles for mayors proposed by Michael Gove: Tell me you have a teenage crush…

    Alternative titles for mayors proposed by Michael Gove: Tell me you have a teenage crush on the US without telling me … etc.

    Surprised « sheriff » and « Boss Hogg » didn’t make the list.

    I would rather have a « President of the Collective Assembly of the Common Communities Commission » than « Governor of Norfolk ». Particularly a governor of Norfolk that doesn’t govern Norfolk.