In the news

There was an interesting video doing the rounds of a Finnish intelligence colonel giving a lecture on Russian war doctrine and political psychology. He explains the Russian equivalent of double speak, where the speaker says something that is clearly not in line with objective facts.

His explanation is that there’s a cultural understanding in Russia that there’s no need to tell the truth to your opponents, and it’s expected that you’d lie to preserve the interests of your group. When Putin says the little green men taking over Donbas aren’t Russian soldiers and when Russian assassins used a radiological weapon in England, we expect him to tell the truth because there’s mountains of evidence. The colonel says any Russian listening to Putin would understand that he’s using strategic lying, or tactical truth, and they wouldn’t consider him a liar for it because he’s lying to people outside the group, who don’t really matter.

I’ve come to believe that this exact thing happens here, and probably everywhere, except that the intended recipients are the working classes. Any person from the elite in group would see through the PM and friends, and realise that their lies are designed to placate the workers, while their actions actively screw the workers over and give ever more power to the elite. It’s beyond mere propaganda or cultural conditioning, it’s gas-lighting.

Sadly, most of us struggle to accept we’re being lied to, despite our lying eyes.

Edited with just the sniffing:

https://twitter.com/wsebag/status/1534082742647930882

Mad Nad
Don’t tell Patel

I’m sure there’s more to add so we can have more characters than the muppet show.

this is a quite brilliant book that I think might explain the above

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691121178/everything-was-forever-until-it-was-no-more

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of “late socialism” (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.
Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.
The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie — and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.

Johnson looks like he's been crying here. Or shoving something up his nose. Maybe he's worried about what he'll do when he loses this job? His future looks a bit pathetic https://twitter.com/MichaelLCrick/status/1533927291822166019

There is some serious sniffing to the back of the throat going on there.....

Suspect it might just be allergic rhinitis caused by tree pollen, boring as that explanation is.

This. This season is particularly bad for Erythroxylum novogranatense pollen.

Allegedly he wasn't sniffing like that earlier in the evening. But hayfever can come on fast so who knows? Nobody knows.

Although one thing I will say is that as somebody who did a fair bit of gak in their youth, there's something about his whole demeanour that is strangely familiar to me in that clip.

He does seem quite jolly and animated

Weirdly i was going to say the opposite - he didn’t strike me as looking like he was on gear, apart from the sniffing

Yup hay-fever os very much a possibility here.

And there we have it. Nobody knows. Mental to see people saying this is proof he's coked up.

Pretty mental that it’s up for discussion, given he’s a man with access to nukes.

I don't think it's coke at all

Same. But it is a nice little distraction that he can get his minions or client press to easily bat away and use it to move on.

"Wall of silence surrounds plan for nationwide collection of citizens’ internet records"

Oh.
Not good if true.

Maybe he is just sexually aroused?

Heh, I see they've budgeted £4.1m to shut down Verify, the programme I worked on: https://www.civilserviceworld.com/news/article/leader-appointed-and-41m-allocated-to-retire-govuk-verify

Pretty sure I could've switched it off for less than that.

Maybe hayfever doesn't exist and summer is just hot.

I asked my MP to vote against Johnson last night. Got an auto reply to say he’d “carefully consider my views”. Nothing from him since, assuming that he’s one of the 25% backbenchers who support Johnson.

The local newspaper is having a poll on public support for Johnson. Closes tomorrow but with over 700 responses was running at 77% against Johnson. My MPs hot take on this lack of public support should be entertaining/enraging

Classic conspiracy theory nutters.

Creating stories when there is a obvious and much more plausible explanation. Albeit a less sexy one.

Bees are fish.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cedhzq3IAvJ/