Old times

I have noticed more and more people around my age – or younger – talking about how free children used to be when we were all young, and how sad it is that children today don’t have the same liberties that we did. Certainly, times have changed; there was a single state TV channel until […]

Weight lifted

Trump is gone, and a weight is lifted. Now America can go back to being its usual bad self, instead of this weird bad self. Though I doubt it will ever be the exact bad self it was. While I see the value of reinforcing the national narrative, there did seem something hubristic about the […]

Thoughts consolidating

My thoughts and opinions about Trump’s deplatforming are slowly consolidating, developing vague outlines. I had a vague feeling that there was something not right, but there is also so much schadenfreude, that it’s hard to think through how. But there is a feeling of an establishment mob to counter the more violent, unruly neo-Nazi mob […]

Not a coup

As usual, alarm at goings on in America is accompanied by irritation at the people I agree with. ‘Coup’ is a grandiose term for a ramshackle mob, but such is the self-aggrandisement that everyone seems to be using that word. Then there are at least a couple dozen examples of my old favourite, the point […]

Coups past

It’s hard in the moment to make sense of the significance. I see online the shock and horror people are feeling, and some of the images are as memorable as the grainy ones seared into my memory of soldiers climbing like rats over the walls of the PTV building, the state broadcaster in Pakistan. After […]

Punching octopuses

There was a social media flurry a few days ago about octopuses that punch fish, seemingly for no reason. Sometimes, it appears, there is a reason. This fascinating article is about octopus hunting parties, where the octopus is a hunter and is accompanied by a motley band of fish who act something like hunting dogs […]

Pardon power

One of the most intractable problems in Pakistani law is that the heirs the murdered can forgive murderers, and there is little the state can do about it. I know someone whose brother killed her father, but the son went unpunished not because the father was a terrible man (which he was) but because the […]

Tier 4

London went into Tier 4 lockdown last night and there does seem to be a great deal of anger. I wonder if we are reaching a point where it will break. I’m sure much of the anger is at “cancelling Christmas” but much of it is, correctly, directed at Boris and his government. Everyone could […]

Year of sadness

I listened to a podcast on the coronavirus response in the UK. It went through aspects of the pandemic response over the last nearly-year, and asked if it was inevitable that things would be this bad. The answer, inevitably, was no. They summed it at the end: an unserious prime minister, a weak centre, good […]