The Rest Is Politics

Can Rory please walk across Israel sometime? I’m neither Jewish nor Muslim, and it’s clear he is a good man who thinks he’s unbiased. Today’s show quoted numbers that seemed to cast Antisemitic attacks and Islamophobic attacks as equal concerns, leaving out context that in the 2021 census data for England and Wales, there were about 3.9 million Muslims, and 280 thousand Jews. So overall attacks are shockingly higher on Jews. There’s a word for that. What is the phenomenon called when you believe a few Jews are far more powerful than the enormous mass of victims around them?

👎🏻

Never again have Mehdi Hasan as co-host, please, since he wrecks the show’s voice, for the same reason that the American spinoff is cringe-inducing. This podcast has been wonderful precisely because Alastair is retired (and a long way from ever being ‘Malcolm Tucker’ again), and Rory has always been temperamentally an outsider. Neither of them is mindlessly ‘in the thick of it.’ Both are genuinely reflective. Both are able to fairly consider questions from outside the frenzied feeding zone inside of which full-time political journalists and politicians all come to live. Hearing Hasan press partisan, debating-point perspectives, above all having to listen to an almost irritable recitation of conventional, second-hand observations I could get from any political site, made it painfully clear what was missing: the generosity, curiosity, and honesty about what they do and above all do not know that Rory and Alastair always bring to the show. Listeners are simply desperate for that, amid a landscape of facile anger and certainty.

The shade trees, here in Indiana keep our air conditioning off. Tall trees and shorter trees this year, have produced bigger and stronger leaves, all by themselves. It has been amazing. Trees are our planet’s answer. And, of course the soil to support the trees. Old news here, yes, but worth repeating. After Trumpeting USA’s biggest mistake is gone, & Putin has been eliminated. The globalist care.