Points of Interest

Interesting statements & striking, or even lovely, phrases that leap out from things I read - a commonplace blog (not a discussion platform, just a personal collection. I don’t reply to comments). See also: http://cargocollective.com/Unrealities (fiction) & www.zmkc.blogspot.com plus zedmkc on Instagram

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Every so often, a nation asks itself 'Shall we give the socialists a go this time? What's the worst that can happen?'

Someone on Twitter

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Our language, our music, and our manners are increasingly raucous, self-centred, and offensive, as though beauty and good taste have no real place in our lives. One word is written large on all these ugly things, and that word is ‘me’.

Sir Roger Scruton

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It is divine discontent that makes the world go round.

Edward Norman, Entering the Darkness: Christianity and its modern substitutes.

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A smug prick with no mandate joining up with a snivelling cretin. What could possibly go wrong?

A Twitter user commenting on Andy Burnham and Ed Davey getting together to work on socialncarr.

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Religion was once the handmaid of mystery, an entry into an unknowable world. It offered initiation into the society of eternity, and it did not explain eternal mysteries.

Edward Norman, Entering the Darkness

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The establishment has worked very effectively to ensure that the Reform Party is somehow low status, that there’s something unseemly about joining it, that it’s much better to be a good patrician Tory grandee & go down with the ship in 2029 than to even contemplate going out campaigning with this disrupter. And I think within Britain that's something that really matters. We're still acutely aware of social distinctions.

James Orr

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Inflation is the ultimate tax.

Judith Sloan, journalist, the Australian.

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Politics has never progressed since Theresa May, because the British establishment has been unable to even recognise the demands of voters as demands, things which can be agreed or disagreed with. To them it is all one plaintive, inchoate cry for help to be appeased – usually by doing what they want to do anyway.

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Who is Ann Widdecombe? It was always a strange question to put at the top of a dossier, because the whole country knew the answer. An MP for 23 years. A minister of the Crown. A woman of a faith she took seriously and defended without embarrassment, who wrote novels, campaigned for prisoners and animals, and let Anton du Beke haul her round a dance floor for the nation’s entertainment because she was never afraid of looking ridiculous. You could disagree with every position she ever held and still see what she was: a person who said what she believed under her own name, to your face. Which is more than can be said for the authors of an anonymous page, deleted in the night, by people who judge themselves fit to judge the rest of us.

'Who is Ann Widdecombe?'

How the men behind Hope Not Hate smear inconvenient women

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The problem with Utopia is it can only be reached over a sea of blood and you never actually arrive.

Peter Hitchens

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Not for the first time, the thought occurs that to be truly vicious and evil you have to believe that you are on the side of the angels. Or ‘progress’, as it is also now called.

Douglas Murray on UK commentators and politicians and their churlish reactions to the murder of Ann Widdecome

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Australia's energy market operator AEMO estimates digital infrastructure will account for around 10 per cent of grid power by 2050, up from 2 per cent today.

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What do you call a system in which 69, 993,000 people don’t get a say and just 7,000 people decide who the Prime Minister is? Because the correct term for it is not ‘democracy’.

It’s 30% or Nothing, Stupid.

If the Right don’t wake up, we are completely finished.

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Humour depends on good humour; it depends on not wanting to correct anything.

Satire is corrective, and wants to correct something in the world.

Ronald Knox

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The establishment used to be defined by class & wealth. Today, it’s defined by attitudes & institutions. That’s why Trump & Farage are anti-establishment, while lower-paid BBC journalists & academics are part of the establishment.

Someone on Twitter

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Europe today has a political class like those of the Third World, hated by its citizens and despised by foreigners.

Rui Ramos, Portuguese historian, full text: "Europe today has a political class like those of the Third World, hated by its citizens and despised by foreigners. Many of these mistakes were inspired by a final delusion of grandeur: the aim was to make Europe, after having been the center of world empires, the capital of morality on the planet, a kind of secular Vatican. European oligarchs even aspired to the legitimacy inherent in a monopoly on virtue."

Trump tem toda a razão sobre a Europa

Desligada dos EUA, esta Europa enfraquecida e desorientada tornar-se-ia rapidamente terra para todas as piratarias políticas. Nunca a Europa

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