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Tom Doran Profile picture
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16 Oct, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Unfashionable opinion: the overwhelming majority of politicians in this country are dedicated public servants who are in it for the right reasons.
"They're all on the take, aren't they?" is a very lazy and stupid way of sounding clever and knowing.
The conventional wisdom among non-political people - who I admittedly don't talk to all that often - seems to be "they're all the same. Maybe I just need to get out more.
People from genuinely corrupt countries must have found our expenses scandal either baffling or very quaint. Even the worst pisstakers were trousering trivial quantities of cash.

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More from @portraitinflesh

Tom Doran Profile picture
16 Oct
The off-the-charts misogyny in this image has already been covered extensively by people more eloquent than me. So I'll comment on something else: modern protest movements of the left have completely lost any sense of discipline and optics.
By that I mean: consider a successful, effective protest movement like the US civil rights movement. The first thing its organisers considered when planning any action was: how will this look to undecided members of the general public?
So, discipline was prioritised. Whole families turned up in their Sunday best and marched in an orderly fashion. This wasn't to live up to some ideal of respectability, but to create the starkest possible tableau in the eyes of the world.
Read 40 tweets
Tom Doran Profile picture
16 Oct
I have just embarked on a four hour journey on a coach full of very loud, very jolly people. Keep me in your thoughts and prayers.
Don't be silly, I'm far too middle class to actually engage them in conversation.
They're delightful and the salt of the Earth, obviously, but I still quite powerfully want to die.
Read 13 tweets
Tom Doran Profile picture
16 Oct
Don't. Be. Silly. Islamic extremism is a common terrorist motive and its adherents are disproportionately from certain ethnic and national backgrounds. Acknowledging this isn't remotely bigoted, and is a lot more relevant to his crime than him being a British national.
This is going to be an exceptionally stupid day to be on Twitter.
This is like a mini 9/11, with liberals and leftists far more concerned about potential racism or Islamophobia than they are about, you know, a politician being stabbed to death.
Read 4 tweets
Tom Doran Profile picture
16 Oct
It's routine in Zionist circles, particularly when Israel is at war, to call the IDF "the most moral army in the world". Now, I'm aware there is a strong factual basis to this claim, but to my mind, laying too much stress on it is too big a concession to the enemy. (1/4)
By that I mean, Israel shouldn't have to command the world's most moral army in order to earn the right to defend itself. Israelis are not obliged to hold themselves to a uniquely high standard just because the rest of the world does. (2/4)
I'll also add that, on a philosophical level, there is something queasy-making about the very concept of waging war in a "moral" way. Warfare is inherently immoral, it's something a legitimate state does because it has no other choice. (3/4)
Read 4 tweets
Tom Doran Profile picture
16 Oct
Shit. It was shit. If you wanted to know something, you had to look it up in a book, and if there was no book, you were fucked. I have no idea how I'd have made any post-school friends if the internet hadn't become ubiquitous in my teens.
Encarta was amazing, it used to occupy me for hours, much as Wikipedia does now. But compared to what's now available online, it was a very meagre resource indeed.
There's so much about the pre-mass-internet world that feels bizarre now. Apple was more or less a joke company, for example, barely considered a serious rival to Microsoft.
Read 4 tweets
Tom Doran Profile picture
16 Oct
My dear friend @davidfrum is briefly in London for the weekend, so I'm travelling there later today to spend some time with him. Four hours there, then five hours in the capital, then another four hours back; it'll be an exhausting day. But worth it, I hope.
My usual weekly routine is both extremely monotonous and extremely local, so the change will probably be good for me. Taking the train would be a lot faster and give me more time in London, but it'd also be ten times more expensive.
Americans must find it very quaint that we consider the trip from Cardiff to London quite a long journey. They think nothing of driving thousands of miles. As the old saying goes: to a European, a hundred miles is a long way; to an American, a hundred years is a long time.
Read 4 tweets

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