Eliot Richardson

Here is a clear and jargon-free (coughs) description of the differences between, Britain, Great Britain, the U.K., Ireland, and the British Isles. 🇬🇧 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 🇮🇪 Scotland, England, and Wales make up Britain (or Great Britain). This is the larger of the two islands. The United Kingdom (UK) is Britain and a country of the island of Ireland (Northern Ireland) together. Ireland is, as we have said, the other island. But Ireland itself is made up of two countries: The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. This odd situation is compounded by a good many Northern Ireland residents who insist on calling themselves British. (We’ll leave the politics of that out of this post…) Both the islands of Ireland and Britain combined are called the British Isles in a geographic sense. But this framing is contested by many Irish residents, who dislike the term British, for exactly the same reason that some Northern Irish folk love it. Following so far? Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland all have individual national soccer teams. In rugby, however, Ireland play as one team. Confused? It gets worse. At the Olympics, athletes from Northern Ireland can represent Team Ireland or Team Great Britain (there is no U.K. Olympic team). Oh, and let us not forget the Isle of Man. Despite being slap-bang in the middle of Northern Ireland and Great Britain, it doesn’t form part of the U.K., but it is in the British Isles. Happy to have cleared all that up.

Three main reasons: the other side deny biological sex is the basis of sexual preference, and thus they deny that homosexuality is even real. Second: the maximalist lefty/centre/FF/FG position on “LGBTIQ+ rights” is so extreme that it will likely accelerate the conditions that will lead to even more anti-everything backlash. The more you mix “gay rights” up into troony shit (all normal people hate the troony shit and you know it) the worse it is for even the most basic rights of homosexuals. Third: gaybashing is done by immigrant cultures that don’t just hate gay people but see them as an affront to God. Whoever lets in fewer, the better for gays. Very few people who voted for gay marriage had any plan to get gay married. Even gay people. It was a symbol of acceptance. The marriage mattered less than the message. Maria Steen might have religious objections to gay marriage, but who bodes better for the *actual* future of gay people: a woman who has Judeo-Christian convictions? Or a bunch of freaky queer multicoloured neurodivergent open-borders Islamist-appeasing hysterics? We all know the answer.

Timely reminder of when this guy reviewed that guy... Iggy Pop on Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Classics Ireland, 1995): Caesar Lives by Iggy Pop In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin). The grandeur of the subject appealed to me, as did the cameo illustration of Edward Gibbon, the author, on the front cover. He looked like a heavy dude. Being in a political business, I had long made a habit of reading biographies of wilful characters — Hitler, Churchill, MacArthur, Brando — with large profiles, and I also enjoyed books on war and political intrigue, as I could relate the action to my own situation in the music business, which is not about music at all, but is a kind of religion-rental. I would read with pleasure around 4 am, with my drugs and whisky in cheap motels, savouring the clash of beliefs, personalities and values, played out on antiquity’s stage by crowds of the vulgar, led by huge archetypal characters. And that was the end of that. Or so I thought. Eleven years later I stood in a dilapidated but elegant room in a rotting mansion in New Orleans, and listened as a piece of music strange to my ears pulled me back to ancient Rome and called forth those ghosts to merge in hilarious, bilious pretence with the Schwartzkopfs, Schwartzeneggers and Sheratons of modern American money and muscle myth. Out of me poured information I had no idea I ever knew, let alone retained, in an extemporaneous soliloquy I called ‘Caesar’. When I listened back, it made me laugh my ass off because it was so true. America is Rome. Of course, why shouldn’t it be? All of Western life and institutions today are traceable to the Romans and their world. We are all Roman children for better or worse. The best part of this experience came after the fact — my wife gave me a beautiful edition in three volumes of the magnificent original unabridged Decline and Fall, and since then the pleasure and profit have been all mine as I enjoy the wonderful language, organization and scope of this masterwork. Here are just some of the ways I benefit: I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there were others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day. I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins — military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial — are all there to be scrutinized in their infancy. I have gained perspective. The language in which the book is written is rich and complete, as the language of today is not. I find out how little I know. I am inspired by the will and erudition which enabled Gibbon to complete a work of twenty-odd years. The guy stuck with things. I urge anyone who wants life on earth to really come alive for them to enjoy the beautiful ancestral ancient world.

Nepal has elected its first trans Member of Parliament. Like other Asian countries, Nepal recognises a third gender for people who do not fit neatly into male/man or female/women. The idea that gender can be fluid or non-binary is not a new or western idea. It has been around for millennia and exists in many cultures

Here’s a proposition for discussion: When the proportion of women in a sector—law, justice, politics, education—reaches a critical mass, the culture of that sector changes in ways that are functionally independent of the dispositions of the individual women.

The UK's censorship agency, Ofcom, issued 4chan with a giant fine today. We responded to Ofcom with a giant hamster today.