Congratulations to the UK on ending centuries of institutional racism in the few years since I left the country! I did hear something about a ‘hostile environment’ but that must have been a misspelling of ‘beacon to the world’
Also, great job on policing! Turns out that they’re not political, they’re just doing their job.
And also, isn’t it amazing that there won’t be any more noisy, disruptive protests. Such a welcome change.
Anyway, super job chaps. Buccaneering Britain at its Best. Roll on the festival of Brexit when we can all have a jolly good unified knees-up!
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It’s a wonderful political trick, but what is needed now is genuine contrition and self-reflection, not calls for fake ‘unity’ that allow them to skip over their complicity
Let’s really sit with the deep-seated need to claim victimhood that’s at the heart of Trumpism, and the historical illiteracy that it takes to make a claim like this
I too often ‘raise questions’ by lying through my teeth, whipping up a mob, and then hiding, while my surrogates dribble out the same tired culture war whine that has soundtracked the last four years
It’s the end of the year, and like everyone else I’m happy to see it go. Still, I'm going to do one of those year-in-review threads, so please do mute if you’re not in the mood.
Main achievement: @katiekitamura and I have two happy sane children who have learned some stuff at home. We lost my uncle to covid and my parents haven’t seen their grandchildren in a year, but we’re doing ok.
I wrote a lot of non-fiction this year. In March for @nybooks I reviewed @DaleBeran's book about 4chan, Gamergate and how the angry internet fringe went mainstream nybooks.com/articles/2020/…
Some of it is abdication of responsibility by the executive. Some of it is a health system that’s been so stretched that it hasn’t had capacity to plan a vaccination program. But there’s something else. Indifference. Helplessness.
The pollution of the media environment and the politicization of public health information have paralyzed the US virus response and cost thousands of lives. It will be remembered as a criminal act by a destructive administration.
You may want to mute this account for a while because I feel I may have to individually insult every member of the outgoing administration in crude and personal ways
Mike Pence you repressed joyless would-be witchfinder, every time you spoke you always looked like you were straining to expel an enormous bolus of your own hypocrisy from your clenched sphincter
Betsy DeVos you blandly foolish soulless entitled child-stealing witch, rotting like a corpse inside your Chanel suit
It's possible that I may have mentioned once or twice that I have a novel out. It's called Red Pill and it's partly set in Berlin. While I was researching it, I found out a lot about life in the former East Berlin. Some of that found its way into the book. But there was more ...
I was interested in surveillance. These days we all have a spy in our pocket, and the people watching are mostly from big tech companies, looking to predict our behavior. In the GDR, they had the Stasi
At first I was interested in how the Stasi monitored political dissidents and artists - people like the writers Juergen Fuchs and Sascha Anderson