listening to "Golden earring - Twilight zone"
Now playing at a US chair lift near you
Podcasts preach to the converted. That's why I like them. It may be why advertisers don't
I love podcasts. I love listening to them. I love doing them. There are times when I think they’re the most perfect form of media ever invented. Gather a few people with views on something around a…
listening to "Thea Gilmore - Cover Me"
Love her voice.
listening to "Twilight Zone - Golden Earring"
Naff but great. Playing at every ski lift in Colorado *right now*
CMAP #2: How Books Are Made
It is a common misconception — to paraphrase a commenter in the previous post on common misconceptions about publishing, that “the only two people that matter are the author and the reader (one…
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It is certainly true that Cameron has so far produced nothing more than mood music. But mood music matters. It doesn’t tell you what the musician will do, but it does give you a window on his or her soul. Cameron’s soul seems to me perfectly congruent with the Burkean, Whig-imperialist strand in British conservatism. It was Burke, after all, who saw the “little platoons” of civil society as the places where “public affections” germinated; and there is not much doubt that Burke would endorse the vision of a big society, rich in civil associations and governed on a light rein. I also suspect that it chimes with the mood of a people tired of incessant badgering by bureaucratic busybodies. Instead of re-fighting the battles of the 1980s and trundling out the mouldering corpse of statist collectivism at every opportunity, Labour would do well to battle with Cameron on the ground he hopes to make his own. As Anthony Crosland used to say, the party should never forget that anarchist blood runs in its veins.
New Statesman - In search of electoral El Dorado - very good this, but still doesn’t engage with the central question: if this is the Cameron project, is he even half-capable of describing it, let alone selling it? The fact that the question is there shows why Cameron is no Blair.
Miliband and Miserablism
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Another complicating factor is that I can’t accuse Moran of orchestrating the hate campaign against me. After all, she doesn’t instruct her followers to retweet her remarks. It’s entirely voluntary — and the reason they repeat them, I suspect, is because they think they’re funny, not because they have any particular animus against me. (I may be flattering myself there.) And, let’s be honest, they are quite funny. This whole experience wouldn’t be so painful if I was being insulted by a bunch of morons.
Columnists | The Spectator - Toby Young unwittingly supplies perhaps the most cogent piece of social media theory we’ve ever seen from a print “journalist” (of course, he’s not a journalist, he’s just a knob with a questionable gift for aphorism who somehow gets commissioned by other knobs)
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Britain was built by powerful city government, but we have got the balance wrong between universality and dynamism in the last fifty years. That is one reason I favour in the next Parliament a referendum that is not just about the Alternative Vote for the House of Commons, but also about local government, fixed term Parliaments, and the House of Lords. Call it a Reset Referendum.
Today’s Conservatism looks more and more like a toxic cocktail of Tory traditions - David Miliband - The Labour Party - really quite startlingly good speech by Miliband, laying out the principles of the Labour proposition at the next election. Compare the intellectual capacity of this with the sheer wrongheaded triteness of the Tories.
