Holy shit.
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@militant_dilettante I suspect there used to be some who weren't, who genuinely thought they were doing the right thing for their nation … and they got shoved out of the way or trampled by the mob. And then there's Liz Truss, who *believes* every scam, fraud, and grift they feed her and earnestly regurgitates them without understanding what it's really about (she's the comic relief on the lecture circuit).
@cstross oh, yes, there might be some types of "true believers", and there might be some incredibly gullible persons. I think, we have both locally, within the so called "Z-movement" for example, and in other places.
Liz-Who-Didn't-Outlive-A-Head-Of-Salad? -
@militant_dilettante I suspect there used to be some who weren't, who genuinely thought they were doing the right thing for their nation … and they got shoved out of the way or trampled by the mob. And then there's Liz Truss, who *believes* every scam, fraud, and grift they feed her and earnestly regurgitates them without understanding what it's really about (she's the comic relief on the lecture circuit).
@cstross @militant_dilettante If Liz wanted to remedy her public image, she could (pay whatever gatekeeping fee they charge and) join Reform, and then attend a public event with a Comic Relief nose-pincher.
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@cstross @militant_dilettante If Liz wanted to remedy her public image, she could (pay whatever gatekeeping fee they charge and) join Reform, and then attend a public event with a Comic Relief nose-pincher.
@fgbjr @cstross Would the Reform take her, though? Taking into account that her campaign slogans/punchlines would be something along the lines of "I WILL CUT YOU, SALAD!!"
I might be using an incorrect grocery term for a leafy vegetable, a refrigerated specimen of which had outlasted Truss in her shooting-star-like career as a Prime Minister of the UK. English is obviously not my first language.
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@cstross @militant_dilettante If Liz wanted to remedy her public image, she could (pay whatever gatekeeping fee they charge and) join Reform, and then attend a public event with a Comic Relief nose-pincher.
@fgbjr @militant_dilettante Or she could flee to Dubai or Argentina and publish a tell-all autobiography explaining how she was recruited by the KGB in the upper fifth at Roundhay Grammar School in Leeds and groomed to destabilize the UK by her controller, one V. Putin. At which point … she wouldn't be *popular*, exactly, but her reputation for ineptitude and stupidity would instantly flip upside-down.
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@fgbjr @cstross Would the Reform take her, though? Taking into account that her campaign slogans/punchlines would be something along the lines of "I WILL CUT YOU, SALAD!!"
I might be using an incorrect grocery term for a leafy vegetable, a refrigerated specimen of which had outlasted Truss in her shooting-star-like career as a Prime Minister of the UK. English is obviously not my first language.
@militant_dilettante @fgbjr It was a head of lettuce—which is indisputably a salad leaf. (Watery and tasteless at that.)
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@fgbjr @militant_dilettante Or she could flee to Dubai or Argentina and publish a tell-all autobiography explaining how she was recruited by the KGB in the upper fifth at Roundhay Grammar School in Leeds and groomed to destabilize the UK by her controller, one V. Putin. At which point … she wouldn't be *popular*, exactly, but her reputation for ineptitude and stupidity would instantly flip upside-down.
@cstross @fgbjr A good strategy, although there is one wrinkle in this storyline (do not tell Liz about it!). V.V.Putin was totally devoted to Germany, and Germanosphere. I doubt he knows even the basic conversational English.
On the other hand, all this East Germany, BRD business of the balding little man could have been one big ruse, and he might be secretly very language-proficient, and a huge UK-nerd (or a general British Isles nerd).
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@cstross @militant_dilettante If Liz wanted to remedy her public image, she could (pay whatever gatekeeping fee they charge and) join Reform, and then attend a public event with a Comic Relief nose-pincher.
#ReformUKLtd won't touch #LizTruss with a barge pole.
#NigelFarage has already gone out of his way to avoid being photographed with her at events that they have both attended.
And this despite Truss having money to pay. She has a well-financed social media operation and is touring the U.S.A. claiming that she will spearhead an English version of MAGA.
Reform U.K. Ltd has nonetheless clearly drawn the line at letting her in.
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#ReformUKLtd won't touch #LizTruss with a barge pole.
#NigelFarage has already gone out of his way to avoid being photographed with her at events that they have both attended.
And this despite Truss having money to pay. She has a well-financed social media operation and is touring the U.S.A. claiming that she will spearhead an English version of MAGA.
Reform U.K. Ltd has nonetheless clearly drawn the line at letting her in.
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#ReformUKLtd won't touch #LizTruss with a barge pole.
#NigelFarage has already gone out of his way to avoid being photographed with her at events that they have both attended.
And this despite Truss having money to pay. She has a well-financed social media operation and is touring the U.S.A. claiming that she will spearhead an English version of MAGA.
Reform U.K. Ltd has nonetheless clearly drawn the line at letting her in.
@JdeBP @fgbjr @cstross @militant_dilettante that’s a very low bar for sanity
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@cstross @fgbjr A good strategy, although there is one wrinkle in this storyline (do not tell Liz about it!). V.V.Putin was totally devoted to Germany, and Germanosphere. I doubt he knows even the basic conversational English.
On the other hand, all this East Germany, BRD business of the balding little man could have been one big ruse, and he might be secretly very language-proficient, and a huge UK-nerd (or a general British Isles nerd).
@militant_dilettante @cstross @fgbjr I don't know how devoted Putin is to all things German. But having watched the broadcast of his speech, many years ago, to the Bundestag, I can confirm that his German is very good.
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@militant_dilettante I suspect there used to be some who weren't, who genuinely thought they were doing the right thing for their nation … and they got shoved out of the way or trampled by the mob. And then there's Liz Truss, who *believes* every scam, fraud, and grift they feed her and earnestly regurgitates them without understanding what it's really about (she's the comic relief on the lecture circuit).
@cstross @militant_dilettante When AfD was formed, it was not a nazi party. Its founders were ordoliberal* economists whose idea was to withdraw Germany from the eurozone to alleviate the Greek debt crisis. (As a € state, Greece could no longer kill debt by devaluing the drachma. AfD figured German withdrawal would effectively devalue the euro.)
1/n -
@cstross @militant_dilettante When AfD was formed, it was not a nazi party. Its founders were ordoliberal* economists whose idea was to withdraw Germany from the eurozone to alleviate the Greek debt crisis. (As a € state, Greece could no longer kill debt by devaluing the drachma. AfD figured German withdrawal would effectively devalue the euro.)
1/n@cstross @militant_dilettante These were pretty right-wing guys, but more from the business than from the blood & soil faction. They weren't nazis, and they were true believers.
They were all (including the founder) purged in about 10 seconds by the nazis and expelled from the party. One of the leaders of the (now) homophobic, economic-populist, xenophobic AfD is a lesbian ex-investment banker who lives in Switzerland with her Sri Lankan partner.
2/n -
@cstross @militant_dilettante These were pretty right-wing guys, but more from the business than from the blood & soil faction. They weren't nazis, and they were true believers.
They were all (including the founder) purged in about 10 seconds by the nazis and expelled from the party. One of the leaders of the (now) homophobic, economic-populist, xenophobic AfD is a lesbian ex-investment banker who lives in Switzerland with her Sri Lankan partner.
2/n@cstross @militant_dilettante * Ordoliberals are not like liberals in the UK sense, let alone the American. They are spiritual heirs to the British ministers who refused to stop food exports from Ireland during the Famine because that would have violated the sacred laws of The Market.
3/3 -
@cstross a person, whose Telegram channel I'm reading since 2022, has this take: every known (far-)right politician contemporary to us is a scam, a fraud, a con artist, a grifter, and a thief. This heuristic more or less holds, with almost no exceptions.
@militant_dilettante @cstross I keep coming back to lack of empathy on this subject. People without empathy are born grifters. Elon Musk is clearly stated that he views empathy as a weakness. The thing that actually saves us, is that doing anything with the power they’ve managed to gain, governing, negotiating, requires an understanding of what the other parties involved want. And if you haven’t got empathy, you will never get that, and cannot execute your plans.
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@cstross @militant_dilettante * Ordoliberals are not like liberals in the UK sense, let alone the American. They are spiritual heirs to the British ministers who refused to stop food exports from Ireland during the Famine because that would have violated the sacred laws of The Market.
3/3 -
Orban functioned as a conduit for Putin's foreign threat funding for years.
Petrostate despots and oil oligarchs fund a lot of fascism globally.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/us/politics/russia-election-interference.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html
Republicans & the Epstein Class cannot resist fossil fuel public corruption.
https://www.newsweek.com/who-konstantin-nikolaev-money-mike-johnson-1870600
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@cstross a person, whose Telegram channel I'm reading since 2022, has this take: every known (far-)right politician contemporary to us is a scam, a fraud, a con artist, a grifter, and a thief. This heuristic more or less holds, with almost no exceptions.
@militant_dilettante @cstross I wonder more often recently: shouldn’t ‚traitor‘ also be on that list? And some corresponding prosecution, ideally?
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@darkling Pretty much, yes.
Only with greater scope; private equity firms don't have the ability of a sovereign to make things legal.
(You can view everything since 1500 as a process of enclosure and not be hugely wrong in terms of economic history. Which is a detached way of saying "farming human lifespan".)
@graydon @darkling @cstross I might place it a little earlier than that. When society moves from broadly equal tribes under a king towards feudalism this is the start of a money economy.
It is also the start of trickle-up economics. Rentals start at the bottom and finish up at the top.
And we still have a slightly different form of trickle-up economics about 1000 years later.
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@graydon @darkling @cstross I might place it a little earlier than that. When society moves from broadly equal tribes under a king towards feudalism this is the start of a money economy.
It is also the start of trickle-up economics. Rentals start at the bottom and finish up at the top.
And we still have a slightly different form of trickle-up economics about 1000 years later.
@peterbrown It starts with the Problem of Armies; once some neolithic king uses a storable food surplus to make a deal with the lower two-fifths of the male population that they can act like they have high primate status if they'll fight his enemies, you've got to have an army yourself or you get used as a status object.
Feudalism is a response to not having enough social organization to maintain centralized power; you can't have a nation state or a god-king autocracy.
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@peterbrown It starts with the Problem of Armies; once some neolithic king uses a storable food surplus to make a deal with the lower two-fifths of the male population that they can act like they have high primate status if they'll fight his enemies, you've got to have an army yourself or you get used as a status object.
Feudalism is a response to not having enough social organization to maintain centralized power; you can't have a nation state or a god-king autocracy.
@peterbrown Once you have enough organization for professional armies and centralized power (that is, you've got a working bureaucracy and can more or less tax reliably), you can get back to god-king autocracy (Great Harry, in the UK) and from there you get to the beginnings of an aristocratic oligarchy with very low social mobility, only two things happen.
One is the creation (by adopting ship-crew social norms into wider society) of the Pirate Kingdom by Elizabeth I.
