This one is interesting. Just when we thought that nothing else in the wider Balkan region could astonish us, up pops a brand new country. No, not Kosovo. Not Vojvodina. Not even Eastern Republika Srpska. Liberland! The basic ingenious idea is that, as luck has it, there is a tiny patch […]
It will be especially interesting watching how fans and opponents attempt to ‘frame’ the Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign, and indeed each other. My Indy piece a few weeks ago looked at the dynamics of framing in the UK election context: A classic framing ploy is the Dead Cat Denial. You […]
Here is a good example (video plus text) of how to deliver a speech using consecutive interpreting: short, sharp sentences. This rather diminishes the sense of the flow of the argument, but it (crucially) keeps up the sense of conversation with the audience. See Speechwriting for Leaders where I explain this […]
Here is a brisk piece by Tim Harford on Causation and Cigarettes, where he looks at how Big Data help (helps?) us see patterns that were not obvious before or confirm our previously unproved hypotheses: We cannot rely on correlation alone, then. But insisting on absolute proof of causation is […]
“She is going to own the wise, smart grandmother,” Walsh said. “Embracing the title grandmother – rather than running away – makes her real, makes her human, makes her a more fully rounded candidate.” (Note the shifty comparative.) It starts. The Feminist-Media Complex starts to bludgeon the world in general and […]
Some people have concluded that my thoughts on the Sturgeon Memo as previously posted were amiss – see the Comments. Am I accusing key people of lying? No. This first: “It seems to me the overwhelming probability is that this document, whether it purports to be a FCO or Scottish […]
Shock! Conspiracy! An official British memo has leaked to the Daily Telegraph giving the uncontroversial opinion that ‘Ed Miliband is not PM material’. The author of this memo is not yet a matter of public record, although no doubt the FOI requests are flooding in, and will be answered after […]
Why am I looking at all those old Football Fascism pieces? Because I heard young Liverpool football player Raheem Sterling on BBC radio the other day, being pressed to respond to alleged complaints from alleged fans that he is being ‘greedy’ by turning down a fabulous new contract with Liverpool […]
Finally, this other one from the now-defunct Business and Politics website. How many times do I have to rail against Football Fascism before people in this country get the point? It started off with Labour’s Football Fascism. Now it’s spread to the unlikely pages of Conservative Home and Tim Montgomerie […]
Here’s another one from 2010. Although can we really say that five years on the Conservative-led UK coalition government really sent out any of the right messages? There has been an oddly half-hearted, pessimistic tone throughout. Jeremy Jacobs thinks that I am being too harsh in saying that it is […]
