Oliver retweeted
but if you express it in a way where clearly you've made the stakes in your own mind into a very all or nothing proposition, where you've placed all the chips of your self worth onto the table and dared her to reject you - that's just never going to go well
Oliver retweeted
If I am walking in my own country and continent, I will not step aside for a Paki or nigger.
You are in MY country. Step aside or get barged.
For a White person, I will step aside and smile.
Oliver retweeted
>Germans fell for Hitler and the lesson they learned was to never question the mainstream narrative that all the institutions repeat and not evaluate all information critically
Oliver retweeted
It’s incredible when you hit the god mode of socializing on a long streak of semen retention
zero social anxiety, throwing out compliments, people responding well, never run out of things to say, zero filter or doubt
Of course you can do this without retaining… but it makes it feel effortless
Oliver retweeted
My favourite Parliamentarian question - The "President of Europe" Speech (sometime during the Brown years)
Oliver retweeted
Visceral memories of being bullied at school for enjoying my Hamlet classes... of girls never asked out... of being haunted by the disappointments of the future. This video broods over the wasteland of my youth.
Oliver retweeted
For those who have asked what I mean by "grotbag nationalist", it refers to those who are openly antisemitic, dabble in Holocaust denial, and are comically bigoted in every respect - many of whom don't even think women should be allowed to vote - and would deport people exclusively on the basis of skin colour (though they'd emphasise deporting Jews first). You know who they are.
Moreover, they are ideological puritans, politically inept, and naturally predisposed to wrecking things when they don't get their own way. You could give them a party that was 95% aligned with their own ideology and they would still burn it to the ground in a tantrum. These are people for whom Homeland wasn't extreme enough. There is zero recognition of the need for strategic compromise. They are nihilistic idiots.
They're the ones who complain about "cringe civnat boomers" then rushed in to join a party led by Rupert Lowe - and have spent every waking moment agitating for Restore to become its ideological opposite - not least because they are incapable of starting and maintaining their own party. If your party panders to these people then it is hard-wired to self-destruct. They enjoy the infighting more than activism because they are pathological losers.
Oliver retweeted
The whole "but you were in government for 14 years" argument - when used to dismiss any change of policy by the Conservatives or to close down debate about what should happen next - is intellectually absurd.
By that same logic Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph and Geoffrey Howe should have been ignored between 1975-79 because they all served under Ted Heath. They had four years in government that gave Britain the Barber boom, statutory wage and price controls, the miners’ strike in 1972 and the Three-Day Week.
Yet the whole significance of Thatcherism was that the Conservatives learnt from the failure of the policies and assumptions they had previously accepted.
Political parties are supposed to learn from failure, not remain permanently imprisoned by it.
The test is not whether @KemiBadenoch's @Conservatives have changed their minds. It is whether their new diagnosis is correct and the policies they put forward are capable of addressing the problems they have identified.
Oliver retweeted
The Shadow Chancellor is actually so scary
Why does he keep looking at us like we're the problem 😭
Oliver retweeted
At the 2029 General Election, you can vote for:
1. The current government (Labour)
2. Those who were in Boris’s government from 2019-2022 and now back socialist policies (Reform)
3. Or a new, fresh, Conservative government full of the next generation of serious thinkers.
Oliver retweeted
Sighing and tutting as I read my copy of like the roman so everyone on the tube knows how angry I am at Heath for sacking him from the shadow cabinet
Oliver retweeted
You can always tell these "reformed punk priests" dont actually regret their previous worldy lives and this handwaving of the undersocialized (whos lifestyles reflects much closer to that of the ascetic Christ they claim to preach) always comes from a secret unspoken advocacy for young men to just go and sew their wild oats (like they did) and come back to the church when they're old and gray (like they did) so they can wash their hands of it as a formality and make it into a the cosmic retirement home they call Heaven.
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Oliver retweeted
We went to a Conservative Association function near where we live this evening. It felt like a recommitment to my essential essence: I'm a Tory. This can't and won't change. I've been a member for more than 40 years now. However angry I got at the omnishambles of 2017-24, I still want a Tory govt over any other less appealing option.
I know that there are some very determined Reform supporters with whom I interact on here, and I hope I don't lose that pleasure because I've written that down. It was a sort of "moment" for me today. I absolutely loathe Reform<->Tory attacks (in either direction) because both parties are supported by almost identical sets of voters. It's absurd. I think our worldviews are overlapping to a degree that makes the waste of energy on attacking one another, rather than socialism, almost a moral failing.
And I'm glad Reform exists, because a reaction to the omnishambles was necessary. I think it's a vector for the reinfection of the Conservative Party with "The facts of life" which, as Mrs Thatcher so memorably put it "...are invariably Tory."
But to defeat the enemies of The Good, not to say the good life, who've take hold of almost every institution, needs more than just a willingness to speak bluntly. Parties are themselves institutions, and one that both defended then repealed the Corn Laws, that both resisted them extended changes to the franchise [etc etc; insert everything Peel-Disraeli-Thatcher here]: I believe such an institution is more likely to flex effectively to take on today's enemies.
Oliver retweeted
I knew a form of this really well.
I had been in a relationship with a woman for years. But there was an insurmountable issue, so we broke up.
A few months after we broke up, I met someone else. She was attractive, highly intelligent, and emotionally stable. She was also the first girlfriend I had ever had who had a childhood socioeconomic/religious background similar to my own. (My first non-Episcopalian girlfriend in over 15 years!) The relationship was trouble-free.
Except for one thing: I could not fall in love with her. At first, I couldn't figure out why. Then it dawned on me that I felt a sort of loneliness and frustration when I was with her because she didn't seem to "get" culture. I couldn't have meaningful conversations with her about music, film, art, literature, design, architecture, and so on.
A passionate shared interest in culture was something I had always enjoyed with previous girlfriends, most of whom had some kind of direct personal involvement in the arts or culture. Over the years, it just became something I expected from a relationship — something that made it fun and gave it depth.
The bottom line was that, despite all her remarkable qualities, I felt a kind of loneliness when I was with this new girlfriend.
She told me that she was committed to "learning" about culture, and that she wanted to broaden her intellectual horizons, but it occurred to me that if you don't have that interest embedded in you by the time you're 30, you're probably never going to acquire it, no matter how hard you try. So I broke off the relationship.
Naturally, I wondered whether I had done the right thing.
Shortly after this breakup I ran into my previous former girlfriend in Costco. It took about two or three minutes to fall back in love her. That "insurmountable issue" that had caused our breakup vanished because I realized that if I gave her what she wanted I'd still be happier than being with someone with whom I felt a "cognitive loneliness." And the years since then have borne out the wisdom of this decision.
