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David Timoney Profile picture
@fromarsetoelbow
Sep 25, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
Simon Schama's on the telly talking about Romanticism. Says nationalism's power derives from music, so a piece on C18th Scotland is naturally introduced by an Irish air, proving to my satisfaction, at least, that it's largely artifice.
You want to talk about German nationalism? Let's start with a map of the Holy Roman Empire. That won't confuse anyone. Napoleon? An affront to German nationalism, not a catalyst. Herder? The David Goodhart of his day.
Arminius (Herman the German) & the Teutoberger Wald finally make an appearance. This episode is largely a rehash of Schama's 'Landscape and Memory'.
Kiefer and Gorecki's 3rd symphony now. Only 10 minutes left and he's lurched back to Chopin. Genuinely curious to see how he wraps this up.
Lol. He ends at the proms where the crowd sings Jerusalem. The closing moral is that you can be proud of your tribe & yet also of humanity (or perhaps even the EU), which is ironic given recent events on the culture war's musical front.
Despite the heartwarming tale of Chopin (humanity triumphs over the tribe), the lesson of history is that an emotional tune travels & we can vicariously enjoy another nation's chauvinism. National identity, like nostalgia, is an exportable commodity.

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More from @fromarsetoelbow

David Timoney Profile picture
May 31, 2023
New masterly inactivity just dropped ...
Obviously those imagining that Starmer will reverse course once he gets in ("The man is a consummate liar & that's why I'm voting for him") are going to be disappointed, but even those advocating the long game are sketchy on how the change in public opinion will come about.
The point to remember is that that the pro-EU establishment abjectly failed after 1992 to build a popular consensus in support of the project, partly because they wouldn't take on the europhobic press & partly because the EU was always a convenient excuse.
Read 4 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
May 31, 2023
Catherine McKinnon has, to use her own phrase, "winged to the Right" on topics such as porn & sex work, effectively providing feminist cover for reactionary politics, but this springs from a critique of liberation rather than a shared censoriousness.
That distinction is made clear in her take on trans rights. She has remained consistent in seeing "women" as a social construct rather than a biological essence, a point she makes well here. Image
And the inescapable logic of that is a critique of gender critical feminists as people who are insincere in their claim to be motivated by the excesses of male power. Image
Read 6 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
May 3, 2023
Lol. There are literally millions of people directly descended from William the Conqueror alone before you start getting down to the churls. Image
The problem with "ancestors" is that a lot of people imagine a pyramid with a couple at the top. But it's actually an inverted pyramid. Every generation going back doubles in number: you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents etc.
If you assume a generation of 30 years (i.e. birth to birth), 937 years back gets you 31 generations. 2^31 is 2.1 billion. Of course, there may have been a bit of in-breeding back then, particularly among the Southron folk, so the figure may be slightly lower.
Read 4 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
May 2, 2023
As usual, this fantasy is premised on the idea that there are lots of trained doctors & nurses available in the private sector. Leaving aside for the moment that many NHS medics moonlight (i.e. they're the same people), economics 101 tells us that this can't be true.
If it were, and at the scale necessary to make a dent in NHS backlogs, private healthcare would be carrying very large deadweight costs that would make it unprofitable. If those resources are fully utilised, this means the NHS will be in competition with private providers.
Those firms won't divert scarce resources to the NHS as that would be killing their primary business. More likely is that it will drive up the market rate (demand exceeding supply) allowing those private firms to import foreign medics at a premium to supply the NHS.
Read 4 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
May 2, 2023
That £9bn would cover all students, not just middle-class ones, and it includes maintenance grants, which obviously skew heavily towards students from lower income families. The "middle-class subsidy" is much lower.
It is true that the UK's tax burden (all tax as a % of GDP) is historically high, but it's still currently lower than the EU14 & the G7 . A projected high of 37.7% in 2027-28 will simply take us to the G7 average today.
As ever with tax, the key point to bear in mind is incidence: on whom does the burden most heavily fall. And that is lower income groups due to the regressive nature of VAT, the way tax-free allowances work, and, yes, middle class subsidies.
Read 4 tweets
David Timoney Profile picture
Apr 30, 2023
We've been building homes for decades. The whole point of the moratorium on council houses was to shift activity/profits to the private sector, not to curtail building. You can criticise the housing industry for land-banking, but the reality is that we're not short of homes.
The secular problem is the fall in household density since the 60s (in simple terms, the ratio of people to bedrooms), which is the consequence of easier divorce, greater longevity (& the difference between male & female, i.e. more widow years), and fewer kids per family.
The state gave up on the provision of housing in the late-70s (under Labour) because it realised that greater supply would simply stimulate greater demand. The recurrent cry to "build more social housing" remains in denial about this political settlement.
Read 6 tweets

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