Another thread on another Biden speech. Many people I find perceptive commentators seem to have watched a different speech. This was not honest, nor realist, nor a mark of a president determined to undo the excesses of liberal interventionism. It begins with Biden insisting that America never went to Afganistan for anything other than to hunt Al Qaeda. This is revisionist. The coalition for war was always deeply divided and multifaceted.

A tentative thread on the Biden speech

Adam Curtis once leaned heavily on the book 'Everything was forever, until it was no more' by Alexei Yurchak - a slightly odd book about the way that language in the Soviet Union slowly degraded. Instead of confronting reality, the job of propagandists, indeed of all official discourse, was to stitch together a series of recognisable banalities.