Michael, now is the time to let you know that I continue to find State of the Discussion extremely useful, especially if a lot has happened since I last looked. Thank you!
That's absolutely beautiful, russell. I don't know if you've posted it before, but IMO you could post it every new year's day. By the end, I was truly emotional.
I do also think his instability/mental deterioration is becoming more apparent. Not to mention some ideological splintering within MAGA, like the Shapiro - Tucker Carlson row, and the Marjorie Taylor Green defection, and Trump's response to that, and the murder of the Reiners. Although why anybody would be surprised at the latter, given one of his first reactions to 9/11 was to crow about his building now being the tallest in NYC, is anyone's guess.
I'd like to think his comments at the Zelensky press conference about how Putin wants the best for Ukraine, and wants Ukraine to do well, and Zelensky's facial expression, may have cut through with some sane and politically engaged right wingers, as well as the fact that Trump had phone calls with Putin both before and after the Zelensky meeting, but I guess that's an idle hope. People sane enough to see it, and with enough political influence to do anything about it, still seem in vanishingly short supply.
I don't know to what extent the non-UK residents on ObWi know about our Christmas TV traditions, but on the offchance you're interested, it is an inflexible fixture on the Beeb at 3 pm every Christmas day to broadcast the Monarch's message to the UK and the Commonwealth. I hadn't looked at it for years, and it seems like I was not alone, but this year we watched the King, and apparently it was the most watched TV moment this time. Also for many years, it has been a tradition for C4 to broadcast an Alternative Christmas message, and this year's was by Jimmy Kimmel. On the offchance anyone here is interested, here they are (they're quite short - Kimmel's in particular is a mere 5 minutes):
Predictably, the reliably unreliable Trump has already pulled the plug on the pathetically optimistic Starmer’s elephant-trumpeted $40bn Tech Prosperity Deal, as part of his attempts to ensure access to the soggy brains of ChatGPT-ravaged Europeans for his acquiescent social media propaganda platforms, all those royal breakfasts wasted. What lemming-like impulse compelled the Labour government to agree to making Great Britain an enormous energy-draining battery to power the servers that spread unregulated lies about Europe anyway, whose liberal democracy Trump openly declared this month that he intends to destroy? Here’s $40bn, Mr Starmer. Now open the oven and stick your head in. Trump’s high-profile attempt to discredit British news providers goes hand in hand with the ongoing churn of social media accounts, many of which are just now unstaffed AI bots running helpfully from Russian addresses, mangling out unsubstantiated far-right propaganda designed to destabilise European democracies on now-unregulated American platforms. I’ve told the following story so many times even I am sick of it, and I love mind-numbing repetition: a racist auntie shared with me some Facebook flotsam in the form of an essay by an academic, explaining why Muslims are subhuman. I pointed out to her that neither the academic, nor the academic institution he belonged to, actually existed. “Yes,” she said, “but I still think the article makes a lot of good points.” This abject stupidity, combined with hi-tech nuclear-powered propaganda, is what democracy is up against. And Starmer is sleepwalking into European liberal democracy’s online accelerated death spiral, like Billy Blackberry ™ ® from the Munch Bunch ™ ® happily lowering himself into a smoothie maker and thinking it’s a tiny foam-filled jacuzzi specially designed for anthropomorphised fruit-men. Logically, Downing Street should turn itself into a massive content factory, flooding the internet with enough true stories about whatever positive news stories it can find, presented with enough wit and clarity to make them massively shareable, to counteract Musk and Putin’s propaganda. But the problem is Downing Street’s idea of working the internet is a TikTok clip of Keir Starmer standing near a tree. We’re doomed.
This is Steward Lee's latest, on Trump's war against the media, and in this case the BBC. There are various links throughout it, so I am splitting it into 2 parts in the hope that it doesn't go into moderation.
Part 1
Stewart Lee: Trump’s BBC lawsuit isn’t about money. It’s about destroying a news providerThe White House’s dead-eyed shark has monetised his presidency so well that he can pay whatever it costs to discredit institutions that may threaten him.
Donald Trump is taking legal action against the BBC for defamation. Apparently the adjudicated sex offender and pussy-grabbing serial liar still has a reputation that can be damaged. Even if all the president of the United States had ever done was that weird hand dance to Village People’s YMCA and his ill-judged playground impression of the disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, it’s doubtful his reputation would have far to fall, but here goes. In other news, you can say what you like about Fred West but don’t criticise his patio-laying skills, which were exemplary. There is now a terrible risk that, should Trump win the case, the BBC’s assets will be forfeited to him. This means he may own the Doctor Who franchise, and thus the Tardis technology itself, allowing Trump to turn back time in Britain on behalf of Nigel Farage, and return us to a homogenous warm-beer world of whiteness where you can hiss gas noises at Jews and say it was harmless banter if it even happened, which Richard Tice says it didn’t anyway, and he should know, as he keeps a close watch on British affairs from a sunbed in Dubai. It doesn’t matter how much the improbable legal action costs Trump, whose pockets are bottomless, especially since he worked out how to monetise almost every aspect of the presidency. You can even buy a Donald Trump cologne for men called Fight Fight Fight, after the phrase the president cried out after surviving the near-fatal attack on his right ear. I’m bringing out a Donald Trump scent for the ladies. It’s called Fight Fight Fight Fight Fight Off Donald Trump’s Unwanted Sexual Advances. Sniff the Trump scent hard enough and it may even erase the memory of the president’s penis, which, according to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, looks like “the mushroom character in Mario Kart”, and is rumoured to have been the inspiration for the Can song Mushroom, after the group’s vocalist, Damo Suzuki, shared a urinal trough with the 25-year-old Trump in a Manhattan nightclub in 1971. Trump’s legal action against the BBC is worth it whatever it costs, because it allows him to spend however long the case drags on for repeating claims about the unreliability of journalists, specifically the BBC. This gradual process of erosion of public trust in news providers will benefit Trump enormously should, for example, anyone ever write scathingly about his monetisation of the presidency. Cheap at half the price! Is it possible that the death of accurate news reporting is just a side-effect of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and of dark forces trying to make sure whatever happened on Paedophile Island stays on Paedophile Island? And who decided to name it that anyway? It’s like Tracey Island but instead of being full of futuristic space-copter Thunderbirds saving lives, there’s just loads of middle-aged billionaires in toupees and Speedos leering at things. Trump’s instinctive attempts to create smokescreens for his corruption don’t even have to make any sense. The son of film-maker Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle was charged with their murder last Sunday. Less than 24 hours later Trump took to social media to say that Reiner died “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” (capitals the president’s own) as if some vengeful Maga-supporting deity had used the Reiners’ killer as his own instrument of justice. Did Charlie Kirk, a kind of saint who only wanted to spread love and kindness to all humanity, take a bullet in the face for this? And yet Keir Starmer still seems to think he can do business with this dead-eyed great white shark of a man. He’s going to need a bigger boat.
Obvs I can't vote, but I agree with both cleek and wonkie.
First and foremost, the Dems need someone who is young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator, and then whoever that is needs to hammer on the idea that the middle class needs saving and expanding, and that tax cuts have not done the job for that. They need to run on restoring dignity and affordability to working people and reducing the influence of corporations and donors over elected officials
nous is spot on with this, and it looks like a perfect description of Buttigieg. Too bad that being gay is almost certainly as big an electoral disadvantage as being female or black.
Damn. I posted another link from the Atlantic (see Wiles thread) about the Trump Reiner quotes, but unbeknown to me the extract I also copied had too many links (5), so it's awaiting approval. So here, at least, is the full link:
Unfortunately, I no longer have a sub to Vanity Fair. But this is Jonathan Chait in the Atlantic on the subject. Here is his concluding paragraph:
In this way, the most remarkable revelation from these newly published interviews comes not from what Wiles did or didn’t say, but in how Trump and his enablers are spinning it. Comments that would have precipitated a crisis in any other presidency are now simply being dismissed—knowingly, cynically—as “fake news.”
I pretty much agree with nous, and did so as soon as I read lj's post. Referring to himself in the third person in this way has been a frequent ploy of his (God knows what he thinks it conveys - I believe that psychiatrists categorise it as a sign of some kind of disorder, but can't remember which), and as for the illiterate grammar etc which cleek notes, I find that utterly unsurprising. I hadn't thought of the use of AI, but that would be unsurprising too.
I was prompted to go back and check. In an article written by Stears in the Times on July 30 2022:
Back in our tutorials, Truss demonstrated an unnerving ability to surprise. No other student matched her mischievous ability to read out essays on any number of the main events in British political history which always managed to say something new; not always accurate, but definitely new. These essays were creative and self-consciously unconventional. As we argued over the hour, she almost never backed down, even when I did what all Oxford tutors try to do and present fact after fact to try to change her mind.
Oh, I now see properly what you wrote. So if you are right, that must have been commentary, by journalists or other academics, on what Stears had said.
Pro Bono: that would surprise me, regarding the words in bold. They were exactly what I remembered reading when she became PM. Was AI generating that stuff then?
The thing about Liz Truss I can never forget is Marc Stears, one of her tutors from Oxford saying that
"once Truss had an idea in her head, she was "unshakeable" and seemed to thrive on going against the prevailing orthodoxy. Stears noted her ability to argue a position fiercely, even when presented with facts that showed she was wrong, only to later drop that belief entirely and adopt a new one with the same fervour."
That's copied from Google's AI, but I distinctly remembered it from when she was leader, and did a quick search to find it. It's (my) bolded part that I find particularly telling.
I have no idea if this is of any interest to anyone, but it is a gift article from the Atlantic by James Parker called The Great Mystery of Drumming, about a book called Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers by John Lingan. I've heard of neither of these guys, but maybe some people here have.
I wasn’t even born in the 50s but I’m already nostalgic for the days when, rather than re-bombing drowning Venezuelan sailors to make sure none survive an airstrike in a war Congress has not authorised, American operatives in sharp suits and sunglasses instead tried to implement regime change subtly, discreetly and even tastefully, to a soundtrack of Paul Desmond cool jazz classics. It’s called democracy, daddio, you dig?
The historian Frances Stonor Saunders believes the CIA promoted the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in order to discredit Soviet realist art. Donald Trump, meanwhile, just gave some kind of made-up award to the band Kiss, who pretended to be magic animals from space in the 1970s.
A world in which America could imagine abstract art as a cultural propaganda tool is a far cry from one where the president releases an AI video of himself carpet bombing protesters with clods of human excrement, although the 60s Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who canned his faeces and sold them, might recognise Trump as a kindred creative spirit. On balance though, those postwar CIA guys were a better class of bastard.
Because on Monday, quietly and without much fanfare from the mainstream media, the world we grew up in changed for ever and our Euro-doom was decreed. Donald J Trump’s National Security Strategy statement explained, quite explicitly, that he will be actively aiding European far-right nationalist parties to win elections in order to “restore western identity”, end mass migration into Europe, and enforce a contemporary American idea of freedom of speech, which appears to mean the right to say anything irrespective of its accuracy. Don’t like these facts? The algorhythmically amplified far-right avatars of American social media have others. And if those don’t convince you, the president has a cartoon of himself bombing people with shit.
Conservative commentators like to imagine Donald J Trump as a largely unserious presence whose provocative statements are meant to bait the libtards rather than to represent a genuine direction of political travel. Keir Starmer in turn chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast with Magic King Charles of Ye Olde England, and some string.
Trump in turn has already agreed to use the United Kingdom as an enormous energy-sapping battery, housing all the servers needed to generate the algorithmically skewed content that will eventually destroy liberal European democracy. Result! Sir Keir did a great deal with Donald, who then sent him down to the DIY shop to buy some striped paint.
But since Monday’s White House National Security Strategy statement, Starmer’s going to have to up the standard full English at Windsor Castle to at least the level of the late lamented Little Chef Olympic if he wants to avoid the country falling fast into fascism. Baked bean ramekins all round! Just how good can those Windsor Castle sausages be? And will the Royal footmen even be able to find any sausages now Prince Andrew, currently Andrew, is rumoured to have been playing a game involving hiding them?
Keir Starmer chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast
As an alleged teenage fan of Hitler alleged to have told small black British children to go home to Africa, although all in a spirit of harmless banter if he even said it at all, Nigel Farage would benefit from Trump’s foreign intervention in our politics. But being a man of honour and principle he will of course reject America’s direct assistance as it would be hypocritical to do otherwise. Because back in 2016, when Barack Obama said Brexit would harm British trade with America, Farage said: “Vladimir Putin behaved in a more statesmanlike manner than President Obama did in this referendum campaign. Obama came to Britain, and I think behaved disgracefully, telling us we would be at the back of the queue. Vladimir Putin maintained his silence throughout the whole campaign.” Farage and Putin sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
We must assume that, unlike Farage’s colleague Nathan Gill, the Reform leader wasn’t being paid at that point to promote Putin, the world leader he most admires, who, although nominally silent himself during Farage’s referendum, certainly had a lot of online bots making a lot of pro-Brexit noise on Farage’s behalf.
Don’t look for much pushback against Trump’s plan for European regime change from America’s on-off enemy-ally Russia or the rightwing British media. Both Kremlin mouthpiece Dmitry Peskov and the Times columnist Melanie Phillips found some common ground to jointly endorse Trump’s plans, the former saying “The adjustments we’re seeing are largely consistent with our vision … we consider this a positive step”, and the latter commenting “Only Britain and Europe can save themselves. That’s what the Trump administration is saying.” Phillips appears to welcome the dismantling of our democracy as long as it returns us to “principles rooted in historic faith, traditions and institutions”, and the imposition of a puppet fascist government is a small price to pay to get Songs of Praise back on the BBC. And the Kremlin wants to make sure an Islamified UK doesn’t neglect all those beautiful old cathedrals so beloved of its architecturally infatuated international chemical weapons assassins, slaughtering civilians on our streets. Defence analysts discreetly admit we may already be at war with Russia, which is probing our communications cables, badgering European airports with drones and quietly flooding our social media with misinformation to make your Facebook-following uncle foam at the mouth and ruin your upcoming Christmas dinner by insisting Volodymyr Zelenskyy spends all the Ukraine aid money on yachts, cocaine and designer puffa jackets.
And the moment we start sending Russia’s seized assets to Ukraine we can expect to see our entire online infrastructure shut down with the flick of an undersea switch, as British politicians’ eyes melt out of their faces while swathes of civilians evaporate behind them on the high street in invisible chemical warfare clouds, tapping at their suddenly unresponsive phones and asking an inert ChatGPT why their internal organs are wriggling about on the pavement. But the truth is we are now at war with Trump’s America as well, and the only reason we don’t recognise the situation for what it obviously is is because it seems so utterly inconceivable. And still Starmer prevaricates about re-entering the European customs union alongside Trump’s other intended European victim nations, because he worries it may jeopardise our American trade deal, a scarecrow walking into a furnace.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Moving towards Epiphany”
Michael, now is the time to let you know that I continue to find State of the Discussion extremely useful, especially if a lot has happened since I last looked. Thank you!
"
That's absolutely beautiful, russell. I don't know if you've posted it before, but IMO you could post it every new year's day. By the end, I was truly emotional.
"
A happy and healthy new year to everybody here! Please God let it get better......
"
I do also think his instability/mental deterioration is becoming more apparent. Not to mention some ideological splintering within MAGA, like the Shapiro - Tucker Carlson row, and the Marjorie Taylor Green defection, and Trump's response to that, and the murder of the Reiners. Although why anybody would be surprised at the latter, given one of his first reactions to 9/11 was to crow about his building now being the tallest in NYC, is anyone's guess.
I'd like to think his comments at the Zelensky press conference about how Putin wants the best for Ukraine, and wants Ukraine to do well, and Zelensky's facial expression, may have cut through with some sane and politically engaged right wingers, as well as the fact that Trump had phone calls with Putin both before and after the Zelensky meeting, but I guess that's an idle hope. People sane enough to see it, and with enough political influence to do anything about it, still seem in vanishingly short supply.
On “An inscrutable Merry Christmas”
I don't know to what extent the non-UK residents on ObWi know about our Christmas TV traditions, but on the offchance you're interested, it is an inflexible fixture on the Beeb at 3 pm every Christmas day to broadcast the Monarch's message to the UK and the Commonwealth. I hadn't looked at it for years, and it seems like I was not alone, but this year we watched the King, and apparently it was the most watched TV moment this time. Also for many years, it has been a tradition for C4 to broadcast an Alternative Christmas message, and this year's was by Jimmy Kimmel. On the offchance anyone here is interested, here they are (they're quite short - Kimmel's in particular is a mere 5 minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03BT66GQlkg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dergOG7vpJg
"
The best from me for everybody here as well, and wouldn't it be wonderful if 2026 were better! I'm not holding my breath, however.
On “Weekend Music Thread music thread #09 In Russia, Christmas music sings you!”
nous, if it were album names, how about Nazgul Skyline?
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
Wow - Christ indeed
On “Author, author?”
Stewart Lee!
"
Part 2
Predictably, the reliably unreliable Trump has already pulled the plug on the pathetically optimistic Starmer’s elephant-trumpeted $40bn Tech Prosperity Deal, as part of his attempts to ensure access to the soggy brains of ChatGPT-ravaged Europeans for his acquiescent social media propaganda platforms, all those royal breakfasts wasted. What lemming-like impulse compelled the Labour government to agree to making Great Britain an enormous energy-draining battery to power the servers that spread unregulated lies about Europe anyway, whose liberal democracy Trump openly declared this month that he intends to destroy? Here’s $40bn, Mr Starmer. Now open the oven and stick your head in.
Trump’s high-profile attempt to discredit British news providers goes hand in hand with the ongoing churn of social media accounts, many of which are just now unstaffed AI bots running helpfully from Russian addresses, mangling out unsubstantiated far-right propaganda designed to destabilise European democracies on now-unregulated American platforms. I’ve told the following story so many times even I am sick of it, and I love mind-numbing repetition: a racist auntie shared with me some Facebook flotsam in the form of an essay by an academic, explaining why Muslims are subhuman. I pointed out to her that neither the academic, nor the academic institution he belonged to, actually existed. “Yes,” she said, “but I still think the article makes a lot of good points.”
This abject stupidity, combined with hi-tech nuclear-powered propaganda, is what democracy is up against. And Starmer is sleepwalking into European liberal democracy’s online accelerated death spiral, like Billy Blackberry ™ ® from the Munch Bunch ™ ® happily lowering himself into a smoothie maker and thinking it’s a tiny foam-filled jacuzzi specially designed for anthropomorphised fruit-men.
Logically, Downing Street should turn itself into a massive content factory, flooding the internet with enough true stories about whatever positive news stories it can find, presented with enough wit and clarity to make them massively shareable, to counteract Musk and Putin’s propaganda. But the problem is Downing Street’s idea of working the internet is a TikTok clip of Keir Starmer standing near a tree. We’re doomed.
"
This is Steward Lee's latest, on Trump's war against the media, and in this case the BBC. There are various links throughout it, so I am splitting it into 2 parts in the hope that it doesn't go into moderation.
Part 1
Stewart Lee: Trump’s BBC lawsuit isn’t about money. It’s about destroying a news providerThe White House’s dead-eyed shark has monetised his presidency so well that he can pay whatever it costs to discredit institutions that may threaten him.
Donald Trump is taking legal action against the BBC for defamation. Apparently the adjudicated sex offender and pussy-grabbing serial liar still has a reputation that can be damaged. Even if all the president of the United States had ever done was that weird hand dance to Village People’s YMCA and his ill-judged playground impression of the disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, it’s doubtful his reputation would have far to fall, but here goes. In other news, you can say what you like about Fred West but don’t criticise his patio-laying skills, which were exemplary.
There is now a terrible risk that, should Trump win the case, the BBC’s assets will be forfeited to him. This means he may own the Doctor Who franchise, and thus the Tardis technology itself, allowing Trump to turn back time in Britain on behalf of Nigel Farage, and return us to a homogenous warm-beer world of whiteness where you can hiss gas noises at Jews and say it was harmless banter if it even happened, which Richard Tice says it didn’t anyway, and he should know, as he keeps a close watch on British affairs from a sunbed in Dubai.
It doesn’t matter how much the improbable legal action costs Trump, whose pockets are bottomless, especially since he worked out how to monetise almost every aspect of the presidency. You can even buy a Donald Trump cologne for men called Fight Fight Fight, after the phrase the president cried out after surviving the near-fatal attack on his right ear. I’m bringing out a Donald Trump scent for the ladies. It’s called Fight Fight Fight Fight Fight Off Donald Trump’s Unwanted Sexual Advances.
Sniff the Trump scent hard enough and it may even erase the memory of the president’s penis, which, according to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, looks like “the mushroom character in Mario Kart”, and is rumoured to have been the inspiration for the Can song Mushroom, after the group’s vocalist, Damo Suzuki, shared a urinal trough with the 25-year-old Trump in a Manhattan nightclub in 1971.
Trump’s legal action against the BBC is worth it whatever it costs, because it allows him to spend however long the case drags on for repeating claims about the unreliability of journalists, specifically the BBC. This gradual process of erosion of public trust in news providers will benefit Trump enormously should, for example, anyone ever write scathingly about his monetisation of the presidency. Cheap at half the price!
Is it possible that the death of accurate news reporting is just a side-effect of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and of dark forces trying to make sure whatever happened on Paedophile Island stays on Paedophile Island? And who decided to name it that anyway? It’s like Tracey Island but instead of being full of futuristic space-copter Thunderbirds saving lives, there’s just loads of middle-aged billionaires in toupees and Speedos leering at things.
Trump’s instinctive attempts to create smokescreens for his corruption don’t even have to make any sense. The son of film-maker Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle was charged with their murder last Sunday. Less than 24 hours later Trump took to social media to say that Reiner died “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” (capitals the president’s own) as if some vengeful Maga-supporting deity had used the Reiners’ killer as his own instrument of justice. Did Charlie Kirk, a kind of saint who only wanted to spread love and kindness to all humanity, take a bullet in the face for this? And yet Keir Starmer still seems to think he can do business with this dead-eyed great white shark of a man. He’s going to need a bigger boat.
On “The Wiles Interview”
Obvs I can't vote, but I agree with both cleek and wonkie.
First and foremost, the Dems need someone who is young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator, and then whoever that is needs to hammer on the idea that the middle class needs saving and expanding, and that tax cuts have not done the job for that. They need to run on restoring dignity and affordability to working people and reducing the influence of corporations and donors over elected officials
nous is spot on with this, and it looks like a perfect description of Buttigieg. Too bad that being gay is almost certainly as big an electoral disadvantage as being female or black.
On “Author, author?”
Damn. I posted another link from the Atlantic (see Wiles thread) about the Trump Reiner quotes, but unbeknown to me the extract I also copied had too many links (5), so it's awaiting approval. So here, at least, is the full link:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/trump-rob-reiner/685280/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCTLKSpntcAyNF4mSlC9MB3U&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
On “The Wiles Interview”
Unfortunately, I no longer have a sub to Vanity Fair. But this is Jonathan Chait in the Atlantic on the subject. Here is his concluding paragraph:
In this way, the most remarkable revelation from these newly published interviews comes not from what Wiles did or didn’t say, but in how Trump and his enablers are spinning it. Comments that would have precipitated a crisis in any other presidency are now simply being dismissed—knowingly, cynically—as “fake news.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/real-revelation-susie-wiles-interviews/685281/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCSpEPvf5scYMPM_cnV1DeE8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
On “Author, author?”
Charles, I think you need a better grammar checker!
"
I pretty much agree with nous, and did so as soon as I read lj's post. Referring to himself in the third person in this way has been a frequent ploy of his (God knows what he thinks it conveys - I believe that psychiatrists categorise it as a sign of some kind of disorder, but can't remember which), and as for the illiterate grammar etc which cleek notes, I find that utterly unsurprising. I hadn't thought of the use of AI, but that would be unsurprising too.
On ““We’re now poorer than Mississippi. It’s like Huckleberry Finn without the steamboats.””
Pipped at the post by nous! I agree, a novel between the lines.
"
I was prompted to go back and check. In an article written by Stears in the Times on July 30 2022:
Back in our tutorials, Truss demonstrated an unnerving ability to surprise. No other student matched her mischievous ability to read out essays on any number of the main events in British political history which always managed to say something new; not always accurate, but definitely new.
These essays were creative and self-consciously unconventional. As we argued over the hour, she almost never backed down, even when I did what all Oxford tutors try to do and present fact after fact to try to change her mind.
"
Oh, I now see properly what you wrote. So if you are right, that must have been commentary, by journalists or other academics, on what Stears had said.
"
Pro Bono: that would surprise me, regarding the words in bold. They were exactly what I remembered reading when she became PM. Was AI generating that stuff then?
"
The thing about Liz Truss I can never forget is Marc Stears, one of her tutors from Oxford saying that
"once Truss had an idea in her head, she was "unshakeable" and seemed to thrive on going against the prevailing orthodoxy. Stears noted her ability to argue a position fiercely, even when presented with facts that showed she was wrong, only to later drop that belief entirely and adopt a new one with the same fervour."
That's copied from Google's AI, but I distinctly remembered it from when she was leader, and did a quick search to find it. It's (my) bolded part that I find particularly telling.
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
I have no idea if this is of any interest to anyone, but it is a gift article from the Atlantic by James Parker called The Great Mystery of Drumming, about a book called Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers by John Lingan. I've heard of neither of these guys, but maybe some people here have.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/rock-music-history-drummers/684955/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCfu6mZ7op8KFvj2oLcbyLWg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
On “Open Thread”
Just trying again, in case I found out how to delete one link
Part 1
Stewart Lee: Remember when America used to destroy democracy in style? Those were the days
The CIA once promoted abstract expressionism as a tool of regime change. Now we have AI videos of Trump bombing people with faeces
Stewart Lee
Dec 12, 2025
I wasn’t even born in the 50s but I’m already nostalgic for the days when, rather than re-bombing drowning Venezuelan sailors to make sure none survive an airstrike in a war Congress has not authorised, American operatives in sharp suits and sunglasses instead tried to implement regime change subtly, discreetly and even tastefully, to a soundtrack of Paul Desmond cool jazz classics. It’s called democracy, daddio, you dig?
The historian Frances Stonor Saunders believes the CIA promoted the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in order to discredit Soviet realist art. Donald Trump, meanwhile, just gave some kind of made-up award to the band Kiss, who pretended to be magic animals from space in the 1970s.
A world in which America could imagine abstract art as a cultural propaganda tool is a far cry from one where the president releases an AI video of himself carpet bombing protesters with clods of human excrement, although the 60s Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who canned his faeces and sold them, might recognise Trump as a kindred creative spirit. On balance though, those postwar CIA guys were a better class of bastard.
Because on Monday, quietly and without much fanfare from the mainstream media, the world we grew up in changed for ever and our Euro-doom was decreed. Donald J Trump’s National Security Strategy statement explained, quite explicitly, that he will be actively aiding European far-right nationalist parties to win elections in order to “restore western identity”, end mass migration into Europe, and enforce a contemporary American idea of freedom of speech, which appears to mean the right to say anything irrespective of its accuracy. Don’t like these facts? The algorhythmically amplified far-right avatars of American social media have others. And if those don’t convince you, the president has a cartoon of himself bombing people with shit.
Conservative commentators like to imagine Donald J Trump as a largely unserious presence whose provocative statements are meant to bait the libtards rather than to represent a genuine direction of political travel. Keir Starmer in turn chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast with Magic King Charles of Ye Olde England, and some string.
Trump in turn has already agreed to use the United Kingdom as an enormous energy-sapping battery, housing all the servers needed to generate the algorithmically skewed content that will eventually destroy liberal European democracy. Result! Sir Keir did a great deal with Donald, who then sent him down to the DIY shop to buy some striped paint.
But since Monday’s White House National Security Strategy statement, Starmer’s going to have to up the standard full English at Windsor Castle to at least the level of the late lamented Little Chef Olympic if he wants to avoid the country falling fast into fascism. Baked bean ramekins all round! Just how good can those Windsor Castle sausages be? And will the Royal footmen even be able to find any sausages now Prince Andrew, currently Andrew, is rumoured to have been playing a game involving hiding them?
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Part 1 obviously had more links than I realised, so is still "waiting for approval".
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Part 2
Keir Starmer chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast
As an alleged teenage fan of Hitler alleged to have told small black British children to go home to Africa, although all in a spirit of harmless banter if he even said it at all, Nigel Farage would benefit from Trump’s foreign intervention in our politics. But being a man of honour and principle he will of course reject America’s direct assistance as it would be hypocritical to do otherwise. Because back in 2016, when Barack Obama said Brexit would harm British trade with America, Farage said: “Vladimir Putin behaved in a more statesmanlike manner than President Obama did in this referendum campaign. Obama came to Britain, and I think behaved disgracefully, telling us we would be at the back of the queue. Vladimir Putin maintained his silence throughout the whole campaign.” Farage and Putin sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
We must assume that, unlike Farage’s colleague Nathan Gill, the Reform leader wasn’t being paid at that point to promote Putin, the world leader he most admires, who, although nominally silent himself during Farage’s referendum, certainly had a lot of online bots making a lot of pro-Brexit noise on Farage’s behalf.
Don’t look for much pushback against Trump’s plan for European regime change from America’s on-off enemy-ally Russia or the rightwing British media. Both Kremlin mouthpiece Dmitry Peskov and the Times columnist Melanie Phillips found some common ground to jointly endorse Trump’s plans, the former saying “The adjustments we’re seeing are largely consistent with our vision … we consider this a positive step”, and the latter commenting “Only Britain and Europe can save themselves. That’s what the Trump administration is saying.”
Phillips appears to welcome the dismantling of our democracy as long as it returns us to “principles rooted in historic faith, traditions and institutions”, and the imposition of a puppet fascist government is a small price to pay to get Songs of Praise back on the BBC. And the Kremlin wants to make sure an Islamified UK doesn’t neglect all those beautiful old cathedrals so beloved of its architecturally infatuated international chemical weapons assassins, slaughtering civilians on our streets.
Defence analysts discreetly admit we may already be at war with Russia, which is probing our communications cables, badgering European airports with drones and quietly flooding our social media with misinformation to make your Facebook-following uncle foam at the mouth and ruin your upcoming Christmas dinner by insisting Volodymyr Zelenskyy spends all the Ukraine aid money on yachts, cocaine and designer puffa jackets.
And the moment we start sending Russia’s seized assets to Ukraine we can expect to see our entire online infrastructure shut down with the flick of an undersea switch, as British politicians’ eyes melt out of their faces while swathes of civilians evaporate behind them on the high street in invisible chemical warfare clouds, tapping at their suddenly unresponsive phones and asking an inert ChatGPT why their internal organs are wriggling about on the pavement.
But the truth is we are now at war with Trump’s America as well, and the only reason we don’t recognise the situation for what it obviously is is because it seems so utterly inconceivable. And still Starmer prevaricates about re-entering the European customs union alongside Trump’s other intended European victim nations, because he worries it may jeopardise our American trade deal, a scarecrow walking into a furnace.
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