Jonathan

@jonathanld.bsky.social

823 Followers 4133 Following

He/him. Editor/Writer/Translator. European citizen. All views expressed here are my own. Interaction is not endorsement.

History offers few if any persuasive prescriptions for the future. It does, however, suggest that politics in the hands of powerful personalities who claim to have a panacea for current ills and offer sweeping change to bring about radical improvement is rarely desirable. 'Be careful what you wish for' is a useful notion to keep in my when considering the claims of potential political leaders. For my own part, I would be happy to avoid charismatic' personalities altogether in favour of leaders who, if less colourful, can offer competent, effective governance based on collective deliberation and well-founded, rational decisions aimed at improving the lives of all citizens. But that is probably another definition of utopia. Personality and Power lan Kershaw
The Nazi Party's electoral rise was meteoric: 2.6 per cent of the vote in 1928, 18.3 per cent in 1930, 37.4 per cent in 1932 - making it easily the largest party in the German parliament (the Reichstag). Hitler failed only narrowly in 1932 to prevent Paul von Hindenburg, the revered war hero, from being re-elected as Reich President. By the time he took power in January 1933 the Nazi Party had around 850,000 members, and its paramilitary wing, the SA (Sturmabteilung - 'Storm Department'), comprised some 400,000 Stormtroopers, not all of whom were party members. The Nazi movement was, then, more than three times bigger than the Fascist Party had been at the time of Mussolini's accession to power in 1922. Personality and Power lan Kershaw
Those who focus on power often do so in the belief that imagination is an ephemeral, weak, unimportant thing. This is not true, but imagination does influence the world in a different way to brute force. Water can be just as destructive as fire, even though its nature is to behave in an entirely different way. Imagination matters because ideas alter beliefs, beliefs shape attitudes, and attitudes decide actions. In this way does the story of the mind play out in the material world. Love and Let Die John Higgs
Linocut print depicting birds flying through the landscape.
A book cover for ‘Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction’ by Alec Nevala-Lee
The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat. No One Is Talking About This Patricia Lockwood
Standing united, they are the West Midlands: one of Europe’s most exciting metropoles to live, work and play, spilt across the three cities of Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton, and four surrounding towns. A place called home to 2.9 million people. They have a rich history that connects them all together. Once the worlds workshop for the automotive industry, innovation shaped their city-region to become an industrial powerhouse.
The north of England was a distant universe, a faraway celestial plane onto which little light penetrated, and to which I hoped I need never return as the very thought of it evoked, at best, indifference, and at worst, sensations of dread, nausea and outright hatred...