Chris > Recent Status Updates

Hot take: World War One suuuuuuuuuucked :\

Interesting contrast in the opening chapters - Seebohm Rowntree (founder of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation) wrote a book on poverty in the UK in the the early 1900s that almost made a socialist out of Churchill - most people really were blind to the fact about a third of the population lived in malnourished slums. However around the same time we also gave the world 'eugenics' - coined the term and everything.

Finally getting around to finishing this... Thatcher gone, Major's survived his leadership challenge... but it's Blairing time.

Kind of amazing how this book was written in 1915 and the politically illiterate characters spend a couple of pages toward the start parroting the right wing press' view on "the fissical policy", and how it's supposedly going to stop immigrants from taking our jobs. Yep, they had a Brexit debate 101 years before Brexit. Nothing new under the sun.

Some of the bits about losing friends in the middle now make for quite difficult reading in light of recent events

Seems there was only about 9 months between Grohl being virtually homeless and stranded in LA after his first brand broke up, and Nevermind topping the Billboard 100.

"Das Kapital" made it past the censors in Tsarist Russia because it was assumed to be too boring to make much of an impact. Hope someone lost their job over that one.

I'm broadly sympathetic to the book's central thesis (that Western media - even 'liberal' media like The Guardian - is tangled in a web of its own corrupt, warmongering lies), but on the part of the authors there is a frankly obnoxious amount of snide recollections of times they made newspaper columnists look silly in Twitter interactions. Sobering read, but a bit eye-rollingly triumphalist at times.