Also we have had a go at pulling the bad levers.

But also, going by memory, she was really unpopular in her first term. The Thatcher of popular imagination takes quite a bit from her later terms when the oil and privatisations had kicked in.

Presumably Thatcher pulled the easy* lever marked “liberalise labour markets” which is now not available.

* Not at all easy but easier than whatever needs to happen now.

Look how happy the grey brigade were at losing winter fuel allowance. If young people must suffer so the old can luxuriate, that is how it must be.

(I totally agree with you obviously.)

Bluesky has a lot of posters who live in London. The good people of Morecambe, or Scunthorpe, etc who do have spare bedrooms have better things to do.

It absolutely is. Amazingly I flew Juba-Nairobi-Bangkok and my bag did too. That pile of bags in the middle of departures seemed to function…

The airside departure “lounge” smelt of kerosene and when the flight was called, everyone ran to the plane because they were usually overbooked. Luckily I am quite fleetfooted.

He basically stole this idea from Iain Banks’ Culture novels. It’s completely unoriginal. In the books the robots are intelligent boxes with weaponry; Musk can’t make a car whose doors open when you want them to.

In the modern world it is somewhere like Chad or Afghanistan, and even they fluctuate! Most Europeans have no idea of the gulf between a middle income country like India or Thailand and the really terrible failed places.

Did William Gibson warn us about this?

He has been insane about the UK for ages, as you say it puts a big question mark over his other writing about not-America.

A well known US climber - a real Yosemite tough guy type - just came to London en route to some European climbing and was raving about it on instagram. It really does have broad appeal.

If the Era of Stupid were to abate a little it’d be curtains for old Jolyon.

But being triggered beats being busy! ;) As we all know. May your day be productive and enjoyable.

Indeed. Though I would be interested to see how one could describe this ideology as an ideology without being offensive, since it is apparently possible yet never seems to occur.

But my reading of Steven’s post was that he totally was using ideology in that sense, and that it was completely inoffensive. I struggle to see correctly describing an ideology as such is really that politically charged. Lots of identities come with adjacent ideologies! That’s just how it is.

We know there is a “trans ideology” because there are trans people who hold views opposed to that ideology, ie it is separate to their identity. It is not unkind to point this fact out…

Same here, I can remember getting double glazing. We didn’t have central heating until the late 80s either. Lots of homes were cold back then.