Quotulatiousness

August 4, 2025

TERF Island

Filed under: Books, Britain, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Spiked, Jo Bartosch reviews Fiona McAnena’s TERF Island: How the UK Resisted Trans Ideology:

The truth is, before they are revered, history-makers are almost always reviled. From universal suffrage to the abolition of the slave trade, the freedoms we take for granted today began as the unpopular obsessions of the awkward and bloody-minded. Fiona McAnena’s TERF Island: How the UK Resisted Trans Ideology charts how just such a small group of determined women – mocked, maligned and misrepresented – dragged sex-based rights back from the brink, often at huge personal cost. It’s the story of how they were hated before they became feted.

Part battle manual and part whodunnit, TERF Island is an insider’s chronicle of how a scrappy, unfunded grassroots movement of mostly middle-aged women outmanoeuvred a lobby bankrolled by billionaires and cheered on by multinational corporations and well-intentioned human-resources departments.

I have been involved in the TERF wars for a decade, and I know McAnena herself is no bystander. Formerly a volunteer at Fair Play for Women and now director of campaigns at Sex Matters, she has done her time in the trenches, too. Each chapter is a vivid, accurate and compelling profile of a key figure in the movement, including Transgender Trend’s Stephanie Davies-Arai, Fair Play for Women’s Nicola Williams, Let Women Speak founder Kellie-Jay Keen and Maya Forstater, whose case against her employer established gender-critical beliefs as protected in UK law – all women I’m proud to know.

It’s almost hard to remember how recently it was considered heresy to say, to use the words popularised by Keen, that “a woman is an adult human female”. In April, the Supreme Court confirmed this truth in law. The BBC may still choke on it, but the legal precedent stands. Yet only a few years ago, saying this out loud could land you in a police station, on the dole queue or even in hospital.

McAnena captures the febrile atmosphere of those early days, when stating a biological fact was enough to have you smeared as a fascist. She takes us inside the campaigns that exposed the lunacy of housing violent male offenders in women’s prisons, the cruelty of sterilising confused children and the institutional capture of sporting organisations. Now, a decade after Davies-Arai launched Transgender Trend, barely a week passes without a professional body or council quietly reversing a discriminatory “trans inclusive” policy. That didn’t happen by accident.

What makes TERF Island so readable is that it doesn’t just document the headline moments. McAnena records the unglamorous grind: women lobbying MPs, poring over policy documents and calmly dismantling pseudoscience from stalls in the high streets of British towns. As McAnena puts it, the campaign against gender self-identification, which galvanised the resistance, brought “hundreds of women on to the streets and thousands more online to defend their sex-based rights”. “It was the catalyst for greater awareness, resistance and campaigning for the rights of women and children in the face of the demands of transgender ideology.”

August 3, 2025

ZB37: Czechoslovakia’s Super-Heavy Machine Gun

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Mar 2025

The ZB37 began in 1930 as a design by none other than classic Czech arms designer Vaclav Holek. The Czechoslovakian military was still using the Schwarzlose heavy MG, and wanted something to replace it. To fill all the roles intended, there would eventually be three different models of the ZB37 — one for infantry, one for fortresses, and one for vehicle mounting.

Note that the factory designation for this gun at Brno began as the ZB50, and iterated to the final version being the ZB50. However, it was identified by the military as the ZB37 (for 1937, the year of adoption).

After a series of redesigns, an early version of the gun is finally adopted in 1935 as the ZB35. A series of improvements leads to the final ZB37 model. About 500 of the early ZB35s were produced, and most of these were used to fill export sale contracts. By the time World War Two begins, the Czechoslovak military has about 5,000 of the guns in its possession.

Interestingly, the gun uses a hybrid recoil and gas operating system, with a tilting bolt. It has two rates of fire that can be chosen, and uses the rear spade grips as the charging handle. It is belt fed, using continuous 100- and 200-round metallic belts and chambered for the 8x57mm Mauser cartridge.

During the war, both German and British forces made substantial use of the ZB37. The Germans purchased ongoing production from Brno, and the British had actually purchased a production license before the war began. For the British, the gun was called the BESA and used in several armored vehicles (still in 8mm Mauser) — with about 57,000 being made during the war. A number of export sales were also made, including Romania, Persia, China, and several others. In 1946 another 3,000 were ordered and manufactured for fortress use in the Czech Republic, serving until the end of Communist control of the country.

Thanks to Sellier & Bellot for giving me access to this example to film for you!
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August 1, 2025

QotD: The self-serving mythology of Britain’s NHS

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it is a matter of common experience that members of the middle classes are far better able to derive benefits from the system than the lower classes. They complain where the lower orders swear, and bureaucrats are aware that articulacy is a more dangerous enemy than assaults on staff can ever be.

The interesting question of why the NHS should continue to hold the affection of the British people, when it is at best mediocre in its performance and frequently unpleasant to deal with, is one that should be of interest to all political scientists. The answer is not pleasing to those who believe in human rationality.

The affection represents the triumph of rhetoric over reality. This rhetoric contains an implicit historiography, in which the pre-NHS era is akin to that of jahiliyya, the era of ignorance before the advent of Muhammad, in Islamic historiography: in short, that there was no healthcare for most of the population before the NHS. This historiography has for decades been continuously and successfully insinuated into the minds of the population. It has been Britain’s pale imitation of totalitarian propaganda. Intentionally or not, Boris Johnson recently reinforced the mythological status of the NHS. And when, in the present crisis, retired doctors such as I were asked to return to work if they were able, it was to help the NHS. This was like asking a soldier to lay down his life for the sake of the Ministry of Defence. It says something about the credulity of the public that the response to slogans like “protect the NHS” was dull compliance, rather than outraged demands as to why it wasn’t protecting us.

I suspect also that the sheer unpleasantness of the NHS is reassuring to the British population. It evokes the Dunkirk spirit: we are all stranded on the beach of illness together. And if we cannot all live in luxury, we can at least all die in squalor. Justice is served.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.

July 31, 2025

The intent of Britain’s Online Safety Act … and the actual implementation

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Conservative Woman, Dr. Frederick Attenborough discusses the gap between what the Online Safety Act was intended to do and how it’s actually being enforced now that it’s the law of the land:

X posts like this may not be visible to uses in the UK under the age verification rules of the Online Safety Act.

At the heart of the regime is a requirement to implement “highly effective” age checks. If a platform cannot establish with high confidence that a user is over 18, it must restrict access to a wide category of “sensitive” content, even when that content is entirely lawful. This has major implications for platforms where news footage and political commentary appear in real time.

Ofcom’s guidance makes clear that simple box-ticking exercises, such as declaring your age or agreeing to terms of service, will no longer suffice. Instead, platforms are expected to use tools such as facial age estimation, ID scans, open banking credentials and digital identity wallets.

The Act also pushes companies to filter harmful material before it appears in users’ feeds. Ofcom’s broader regulatory guidance warns that recommender systems can steer young users toward material they didn’t ask for. In response, platforms may now be expected to reconfigure their algorithms to filter out entire categories of lawful expression before it reaches underage or unverified users.

One platform already moving in this direction is X. Its approach offers a revealing – and potentially sobering – glimpse of where things may be heading. The company uses internal signals, including when an account was created, any prior verification, and behavioural data, to estimate a user’s age. If that process fails to confirm the user is over 18, he or she is automatically placed into a sensitive content filtering mode. As the platform’s Help Center explains: “Until we are able to determine if a user is 18 or over, they may be defaulted into sensitive media settings, and may not be able to access sensitive media”.

This system runs without user opt-in and applies at scale. Depending on how X classifies it, filtered material may include adult humour, graphic imagery, political commentary or footage of violence. Already there are signs that lawful content is quietly being screened out.

One example came on July 25, the day the Act’s age-verification duties took effect, during a protest outside the Britannia Hotel in Seacroft, Leeds, where asylum seekers are being housed. A video showing police officers restraining and arresting a protester was posted on X, but quickly became inaccessible to many UK-based users. Instead, viewers saw the message: “Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age”.

West Yorkshire Police denied any involvement in blocking the footage. X declined to comment, but its AI chatbot, Grok, indicated that the clip had been restricted under the Online Safety Act due to violent content. Though lawful and clearly newsworthy, the footage was likely flagged by automated systems intended to shield children from real-world violence.

In The Critic, Christopher Snowdon explains the breakdown of trust between the British public and their government that the implementation of the Online Safety Act only exacerbates:

People are right to be concerned about this slippery slope and yet it cannot be denied that it is pornography enthusiasts who have been hardest hit by the Online Safety Act in the short term. They must now verify themselves in one of three ways, each less appealing than the last. They can submit their credit card details, they can scan in proof of ID, such as a passport, or they can take a photo of their face and allow AI to judge how old they are. If they want to maximise their chances of being the victim of blackmail and identity theft, they could do all three.

While we might not think twice about submitting our credit card details to Amazon or posting our photos on Instagram, there is an understandable reluctance to hand over private data in order to access dubious websites for the purposes of sordid acts of self-pollution. The government assures us that the data will be kept confidential but it is only two weeks since we learned about a data breach that led to the names of 19,000 Afghans who wanted to flee the Taliban being given to the Taliban and it is less than two months since the names and addresses of 6.5 million Co-op customers were stolen in a cyber-attack. Rightly or wrongly, millions of British plank-spankers and rug-tuggers do not wish to identify themselves to anybody.

The result is a surge in interest in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) which allow internet users to access websites as if they were in a less censorious country. Half of the top ten free apps in Apple’s app download charts yesterday were for VPNs. Google Trends data show that searches for “VPN” have gone through the roof since Friday. Readers can draw their own conclusions from the fact that these searches have been peaking between midnight and 2am.

Downloading random VPNs comes with risks of its own and opens up a whole new world of illicit online activity from free Premier League football to the Dark Web. But there is a deeper reason to feel uneasy about this unintended, albeit predictable, consequence of paternalistic regulation. By driving another wedge between the state and the individual, it further normalises rule-breaking in a country where casual lawlessness is becoming part of daily life. A law-abiding society cannot long endure if the median citizen thinks that the law is an ass.

The breakdown of trust can be seen most clearly when the ordinary man or woman does not share the moral certainties of the governing class. Among smokers, a collapse in tax morale — the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes — has led to a huge rise in the consumption of illegal tobacco in recent years. Smokers no longer feel any obligation to pay taxes that are designed to impoverish them to a government that vilifies them. Cannabis smokers learn from an early age to be suspicious of a police force that they might otherwise respect. Motorists who are faced with 20mph speed limits that were introduced by people who hate private transport have no scruples about flouting the law.

July 30, 2025

The Korean War Week 58 – The Empire Strikes Back – July 29, 1951

Filed under: Britain, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 29 Jul 2025

The Kaesong peace talks drag on, with the main sticking point being the Communist refusal to consider any demarcation line other than the 38th Parallel. UN Commander Matt Ridgway is asking for more force from home, but at least he get some organized force from elsewhere — as various brigades are organized into the 1st Commonwealth Division.

Chapters
00:00 Hook
00:21 Intro
00:56 Recap
01:22 UN Perspective and UN Needs
04:40 US Reserves?
06:31 The Commonwealth Division
09:44 38th Parallel or Nothing
15:03 Summary
15:16 Conclusion
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History of Britain VI: Prime Roman Britain

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Thersites the Historian
Published 13 Feb 2025

Britain became a quietly productive part of the Roman Empire once the Celts of southern Britain were subjugated. This was the period when the Romans built cities, forts, and roads across the southern portion of the island. The good times corresponded with the Classical Optimum. However, after 150 or 200 CE, Britain was beginning to experience a decline in its material well-being.

July 28, 2025

Claudius: The Disabled Emperor Who Conquered Britain

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Rest Is History
Published 27 January 2025

This is part 4 of our series on Suetonius and the Emperors of Rome.

00:00 The rebirth of the republic?
10:05 Who is Claudius
15:18 The relationship between Augustus and Claudius
16:20 The scholar emperor
21:12 Claudius’ relationship with Caligula
28:53 Claudius’ rule as emperor
45:50 The problem he had with his wives
56:40 The rise of Nero
58:40 Was he poisoned?
59:51 The lack of sources in Ancient history

Producer: Theo Young-Smith
Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett
Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor

July 27, 2025

QotD: London coffeehouses and Paris salons of the Ancien Régime

Filed under: Books, Britain, France, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Marie Antoinette arrived in Paris at the end of this era of strict censorship, which helps explain why her honeymoon with French public opinion was short-lived. The official press, notably the Mercure and Gazette, continued churning out fawning snippets of society news about the royal couple. But the scandal-mongering libelles and pamphlets had their own paragraph men, called nouvellistes, who picked up “news” from well-informed sources posted on benches in the Tuileries, Luxembourg Gardens, and, of course, under the tree of Cracow. Police efforts to repress nouvellistes‘ gossip proved futile in the face of high demand. One famous libelle of the era, Le Gazetier cuirassé promised “scandalous anecdotes about the French court”. (It was printed in London, out of reach of official French censors.) Another publication printed in London starting in the 1760s was the famous Mémoires secrets, an anonymous chronicle of insider gossip and anecdotes from Parisian high society. A scurrilous book about Louis XV’s mistress, Madame du Barry, also appeared as a collection of gossip that nouvellistes had picked up around Paris.

Despite the libelles circulating in Paris, the Bourbon monarchy was still relatively protected compared with the hurly-burly across the channel in London, where coffeehouses buzzed with political innuendo and intrigue. Some French philosophes, it is true, attempted to replicate London’s coffeehouse culture at Parisian cafés, such as the Procope on the Left Bank. (Voltaire frequented the place, where he liked to add chocolate to his coffee.) Other regulars at the Procope — named after the Byzantine writer Procopius, famous for his Secret History — were Rousseau, Danton, and Robespierre, as well as Americans Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

The Parisian equivalent of the coffeehouse was the salon, which differed from London coffeehouses in both ambience and function. Whereas London coffeehouses were boisterously public, salons were essentially closed spaces, usually held in private homes. Most were by invitation only. Many were hosted by women, usually titled or wealthy ladies with an interest in culture and politics — such as Madame de Rambouillet, Madame Necker, Madame Geoffrin, and Mademoiselle Lespinasse. There was also the Marquise du Deffand, a friend to Voltaire and the English man of letters Horace Walpole, to whom she bequeathed not only her papers, but also her pet dog, Tonton.

As access to these rarefied spaces increasingly became a symbol of social success, admission got more tightly controlled. (Madame Geoffrin expelled Diderot from her salon because she found his conversation “quite beyond control”.) Still, those who frequented salons represented a great diversity within the elites — from rising young writers and established authors to powerful politicians and eccentric aristocrats. The tacit rule was, as in London coffeehouses, that wit was more important than rank. Many great French writers launched their careers thanks to their admittance. One was the philosopher Montesquieu, who found success at the salon of Madame Lambert.

Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.

July 24, 2025

When tolerance becomes a fatal flaw

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Crescent and the Guillotine, Paul Friesen explains why too much tolerance leads to the eventual collapse of social order and perhaps even the culture itself:

It is difficult to know what people are thinking when they endorse the importation of people who want to kill them for their lifestyle choices.

It was Karl Popper who warned that a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance, or it would cease to be tolerant at all.1 A delicious paradox, too often quoted and too rarely heeded. For we have taken the first half of the dictum — the imperative to tolerate — and chiseled it into law, into policy, into university mission statements and NGO pamphlets. But the second half — the requirement to draw a line, to say “no further” — has been treated like garlic in a vampire movie: an antique, anathema, unfashionable.

And so, the paradox has become pathology.

Our courts allow sharia arbitration councils to function in British cities, adjudicating matters of family and inheritance with standards that would make a 12th-century canon lawyer flinch. Our schools include faith-based curricula that require hijabs for seven-year-olds and teach that homosexuality is satanic filth. Our public broadcasters will air a documentary about the importance of free speech, followed immediately by a segment about why cartoons of Muhammad are “unhelpful”.

This is not multiculturalism. It is masochism. It is the belief that liberalism must be so open-minded that its own brains are spilled onto the prayer mat. It is the fetishization of identity at the expense of liberty. It is the ideological pacifism of a society too terrified to assert its own values, lest it be accused of “racism” by those who mistake ideology for ethnicity.

We have enshrined the rights of the theocrat while criminalizing the instincts of the secularist. The result is not harmony — it is humiliation.

[…]

The West’s greatest achievement is not democracy, nor capitalism, nor even the separation of powers. It is the separation of truth from tribalism — the idea that individuals are not to be judged by their creeds, but by their conduct. That women are not property. That speech is not violence. That blasphemy is a right, not a crime.

These are not Western values. They are universal values, discovered in the West by accident of history and preserved through blood, rebellion, and satire. They are the principles that allowed Jews, heretics, atheists, and apostates to live not just safely, but freely. And they are now under threat — from within.

The real problem is not Islam. It is the Western inability to demand anything of those who import their gods and their grievances into liberal society. We treat every imported superstition as sacrosanct and every local tradition as suspect. We require ex-Muslims to whisper their fears while we amplify the complaints of veiled Islamists who denounce our culture from our own podiums.

We are not being pluralistic. We are being duped.

And the cost of this self-deception is measured not just in freedoms surrendered, but in lives lost.

Lives like that of Yameen Rasheed, the secular Maldivian blogger who thought he could use satire to push back against theocracy — stabbed to death in his own hallway. Lives like that of Farkhunda Malikzada, beaten and burned in the streets of Kabul by a mob of men — because someone thought she burned a Qur’an. Lives like that of Samuel Paty, beheaded outside a French school by a refugee he welcomed — because he dared to show a cartoon in a civics class.

These are not random tragedies. They are the predictable outcomes of an ideological toxin given immunity in the bloodstream of liberal society.

What do all these victims have in common? They did not die at the hands of misunderstood minorities or “oppressed voices” who simply needed better integration programs. They died at the hands of men who were indoctrinated — sometimes abroad, often at home — with the idea that God’s honor is more valuable than human life, and that dissent is not to be debated but extinguished.

And more damning still: they died in environments that should have protected them. Environments that instead prioritized sensitivity over security, dialogue over clarity, understanding over justice. Environments where the ever-watchful eye of diversity officers and DEI consultants was trained, not on the assailants, but on the tone of the victims.

We have created a culture where courage is pathologized, clarity is punished, and moral equivalence is the new orthodoxy. When Islamist mobs swarm the streets chanting slogans that would make the Inquisition blush, we are told to “listen to their anger”. When feminists protest the veiling of children, they are told to “respect cultural differences”. When Jews complain about chants of “From the River to the Sea”, they are informed that they are “overreacting”, “weaponizing trauma”, or — most insultingly of all — “confusing Zionism with antisemitism”.

This is not inclusivity. It is assisted suicide.

    1. I refer here to Karl Popper’s 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies, specifically in Volume 1: The Spell of Plato, Note 4 to Chapter 7. Here’s the relevant passage, paraphrased for clarity:

    “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

    Popper argues that a tolerant society has the right — not to suppress opinions — but to defend itself against those who would destroy tolerance itself, especially if such groups refuse to engage in rational discourse and instead promote violence or coercion. It’s often called “the paradox of tolerance“.

QotD: Migrant farm workers

Filed under: Britain, Business, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The decision to import Eastern European workers, particularly from Romania, to work on farms and pick fruit was greeted with outrage. This use of foreign labour despite the epidemic was something else entirely from its use in the NHS, being akin to naked exploitation.

It is certainly true that the fruit-pickers would not be well-paid. Moreover, their accommodation during their stay would almost certainly be uncomfortable and overcrowded. The work they would do would be hard and possibly back breaking. It is certainly not the kind of work I should want to do myself, though I might have thought of it as a bit of an adventure for a couple of weeks to earn some pocket money when I was nineteen. But the Romanian workers are not coming for a bit of youthful adventure: they are coming because they are poor and need the money to live.

The fruit season is short. If the fruit is not picked, it will rot where it grows. Prices are such that farmers cannot offer high wages, and it is surely a good thing that fruit is available at a price that everyone can afford. There have been appeals to the British unemployed (in whose numbers there has been a sudden and great increase) to do the work, but they have not responded. The wages are not such as to attract them, and their economic situation would probably have to be considerably worse before the wages did attract them — and if their situation were to worsen to such an extent, they might choose crime, riot, disorder and looting rather than fruit-picking as a means of getting by economically. As for coercing the unemployed to take the work that is theoretically available to them, for example by withdrawing their social security unless they agreed to do it, the political repercussions would be too terrible to contemplate. It is easy to see in the abstract how our system of social security distorts the labour market, such that we have to import labour to perform such unskilled tasks as fruit-picking, but now is not a propitious moment at which to try radical reform. In politics as in life, you are always starting out from where you are, not from where you should have been had your past conduct been wiser or more prudent.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Contradictions of Labor”, New English Review, 2020-05-05.

Update, 26 July: Original link replaced. Link rot is sadly real.

July 23, 2025

Britain’s housing crisis has roots as far back as 1947

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall on the deep reasons Britain can’t seem to build any new housing:

Homes Fit for Heroes – Dagenham
“These are typical examples of the housing on the Becontree Estate. Initially 25000 homes were built by the London County Council between 1921 and 1934. These homes fit for the heroes of WW1 had all mod cons gas, water and electricity with inside toilets and bathrooms. A further 2000 homes were built before WW2. The Becontree estate was the biggest council estate in the world.”
Image and description from geograph.uk. Photo by Glyn Baker – CC BY SA 2.0

The real problem Britain faces is that it’s no longer legal to build the housing we thought was the bare minimum acceptable a century ago.

    The more apposite point is that a couple of hundred yards up the road are those post-WWI homes for heroes. Here. Semi detached, not huge to be fair. But kitchen, living room, parlour, 3 beds and indoor bathroom. They’re still highly desirable houses in fact. Note, they’ve front gardens. They’ve also back ones too.

    Now, we’ve heard this, even heard it from someone on Bath City Council (who had heard it, we’re not quite old enough to know anyone who was on BCC in the 1920s), and never, quite tracked it down officially. But the statement was made that the Homes for Heroes needed to be on 1/4 acre gardens. The working man needed the space to grow vegetables for his family and to keep a pig. These houses, the 1920s ones, do have substantial gardens as the 1960s ones don’t.

As I pointed out:

    But Homes for Heroes? We’ve done this before. And those Homes for Heroes? Right now, today, it’s illegal to build them. No, really. What was considered the basic minimum that the local council should provide to the working man is illegal to build now. Those decent sized houses were on those decent gardens d’ye see? You can get perhaps 9 dwellings with 1/4 acre gardens on a hectare of land. Last we saw the current insistence is that we must have no less than 30 dwellings per hectare in order to gain planning permission. Even though Englishcombe – as with so much other land – is there and ripe for the taking.

    It’s actually illegal to build houses that were regarded as the proper minimum a century ago.

The reason we cannot is that Green Belt, itself stemming from the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. The point of which — no, really, the stated purpose — was to make sure that no one would ever be allowed to build housing for proles — sorry, stout Britons — anywhere anyone ever wanted to live.

Which is a bit of a problem. For, outside my own head, there’s no constituency for repealing the TCPA and abolishing the Green Belt.

However, there is a large constituency for plastering farmland with solar cells.

    Waller-Barrett’s farm has been targeted for a massive solar plant, which will be called Glebe Farm, and now his landlord plans to take his land away, replacing potato crops with thousands of giant glass panels.

    The decision, backed by edicts from Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, favouring solar farms over food production on UK farmland, means his flourishing food business will shrink – and staff will be out of work.

    Meanwhile the distant landlord will be quids in, potentially quadrupling their rent with virtually no effort.

Oh.

And now one of those little wrinkles of the law. Those solar farms will last 20 years maximum. No, really, that’s tops. The wrinkle being that the land underneath them will be, in that 20 years’ time, defined as brownfield land. Been previously developed, see? And brownfield land to housing is usually pretty easy as a development path. Certainly wholly unlike greenfield (or even Green Belt) to housing.

The land area Ed wants to cover with these things is 2 to 3% of the land area of the country. Which, as it happens, is about the land area currently covered by housing — including their gardens.

So, therefore we can see that Ed is, in fact, playing the long game. He’s going to solve the housing problem by not having to take on the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England and every LibDem middle-ager with too few grandchildren to occupy her time. He’s going to do an end run around that problem by building solar first.

July 22, 2025

Age verification schemes are just another attempt to control everyone’s internet usage

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Marian Halcombe is specifically discussing the British age verification provisions of their Online Safety Act, but similar schemes are popping up all over the west, and they’re only pretending to be about protecting young people from online content:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

The British State, in its infinite filth and hypocrisy, would like you to believe that it is deeply concerned about what you do with your penis. Or more precisely, what you look at while your hand is on it. The latest wheeze — part of the Online Safety Act — is mandatory age verification for all pornographic websites. We’re told it’s to stop children from seeing naughty videos. In reality, it’s a spyware regime disguised as child protection, devised by a ruling class that snorts coke with one hand while signing surveillance warrants with the other.

Let’s start with the pretence. No one in Westminster cares what children watch online. These are the same people who presided over the industrial-scale rape of working-class girls in Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, and elsewhere — refusing to intervene for fear of “racism”. The idea that they now lie awake worrying about a Year Eight boy glimpsing a MILF thumbnail on Pornhub is an insult to the intelligence. They don’t care about children. They care about you.

The age-verification scheme isn’t just about proving you’re eighteen. It’s about linking your name and your age, and your IP address to your viewing habits. Whether it’s ID upload or facial recognition or some third-party database, the outcome is the same: a digital file that knows what you watch and when you watch it.

In a normal country, this would be recognised as deeply perverse. In ours, it’s dressed up as safety. The State that can’t fix the trains, that can’t keep the hospitals clean, now wants the power to log whether you’re big-enders or little-enders. And all under the banner of protecting the kiddies.

Yes, of course it’s technically possible to anonymise verification. But only if you believe that governments, regulators, and their corporate collaborators are incapable of abuse. That’s a belief I do not share. This is the same British government that let GCHQ harvest your webcam feeds and your phone calls under the TEMPORA programme. You didn’t vote for that. You weren’t told about it. You found out because Edward Snowden blew the whistle.

Do you really think the same regime won’t take an interest in which adult videos you watch? Anyone with an ounce of memory knows how this goes. Every intrusive policy begins with “think of the children”. The Video Recordings Act. The Dangerous Dogs Act. The Terrorism Act. And now the Online Safety Act. Once the infrastructure is in place, it never stays limited to its original purpose.

The definition of “harmful content” is vague for a reason. It can grow. It can stretch. Today it’s Pornhub. Tomorrow it’s Twitter. Then it’s dissident blogs, pro-life websites, or even a dodgy meme about immigration statistics. In the end, the target isn’t porn — it’s dissent.

Battle for Gaza 1917: The Palestinian Campaign of WW1

Filed under: Australia, Britain, History, India, Middle East, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Great War
Published 14 Feb 2025

The ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict has its roots in another war more than a century ago. When the First World War began in 1914, the territory of today’s Israel and Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. But in 1917 the British Empire began a campaign that would change history: there would be bitter fighting in Gaza, wild cavalry charges, even talk of a modern crusade. And it would lay the foundations for a century of violence.
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July 20, 2025

Day Eight – Can Charles de Gaulle Save France? – Ten Days in Sedan

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 19 Jul 2025

Ten Days in Sedan continues as our WW2 Blitzkrieg documentary follows the first serious counterblow against the German spearhead. Colonel Charles de Gaulle leads the 4th Armoured Division in an attack against the German flank. De Gaulle’s units are understrength and his assault is improvised but he catches Heinz Guderian by complete surprise. Is this just a fleeting gesture of defiance, or a new kind of French resistance?
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July 19, 2025

Pineapples – The Most Expensive Fruit in History

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 18 Feb 2025

Mini tarts with a buttery crust and syrupy pineapple and wine filling

City/Region: England
Time Period: 1736

For hundreds of years, the pineapple was a status symbol for the very wealthiest of European royalty and nobility. A single pineapple could cost $10,000 in today’s money, and pineapples turned up in architecture, tableware, paintings, clothing, and accessories. Many knew what pineapples looked like, but few had actually tasted one.

And that’s a real shame, because these tarts are absolutely delicious. The crust is good, but the real showstopper is the filling. Pineapple is the main flavor, but the wine gives it a wonderful complexity. You could even make just the filling and serve it with some whipped cream or ice cream and it would be amazing. If you have any leftover syrup, it would go great in some cocktails.

    To make Paste. From Mrs. Peasly.
    …If you would have a sweet Paste; then take half a Pound of Butter, and rub it into about a Pound of Flour, with two or three Ounces of double-refined Sugar powder’d, and make it a Paste, with cold Milk, some Sack and Brandy. This is a very good one.

    To make a Tart of Ananas, or Pine-Apple. From Barbadoes.
    Take a Pine-Apple, and twist off its Crown: then pare it free from the Knots, and cut it in Slices about half an Inch thick; then stew it with a little Canary Wine, or Madera Wine, and some Sugar, till it is thoroughly hot, and it will distribute its Flavour to the Wine much better than any thing we can add to it. When it is as one would have it, take it from the Fire; and when it is cool, put it into a sweet Paste, with its Liquor, and bake it gently, a little while, and when it comes from the Oven, pour Cream over it, (if you have it) and serve it either hot or cold.
    — The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director by R. Bradley (6th Edition), 1736

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