@lukasros It just didn’t seem an obvious step in the direction of making America great again.
I see the newspapers are calling Angela Merkel the leader of the free world now.
@larand @kdfrawg @gtwilson I’m off to read escapist fiction (Priscilla Hutchins #4) and drink a glass of rum.
@larand We aren’t there yet, but it would be a mistake to think it could never happen.
// @kdfrawg @gtwilson
@gtwilson I was in England — it must have been much harder in Ireland. A friend who worked in Ireland for a while in the early 80s was told to check under her car with a mirror every morning before driving to work.
// @kdfrawg
@gtwilson I grew up with Protestants and Catholics shouting insults at one another across the playground, school evacuations because of IRA bomb scares were quite normal, and occasional explosions in the cities weren’t too unusual. My parents went for a couple of holidays in Yugoslavia, before the groups there decided they couldn’t live together any longer. Sometimes I wonder if the years of relative harmony have been the anomaly.
// @kdfrawg
@larand And on the parts of the media like the Daily Mail, who have no real convictions, but will push this stuff quite happily if it gets them more income.
// @kdfrawg @gtwilson
@gtwilson There’s always a bit of a tendency to it — big sports, for example — but I think the breaking out in other areas of life is partly because of fear and insecurity, maybe related to globalisation. Then, once you get a certain groundswell, you can get a sudden surge of people leaping on. That would be my guess, but I don’t know enough about the factors behind the rise of fascism in Europe in the 30s, or behind the disintegration of some of the Soviet block more recently, to know if there are common features.
I’m afraid I’ve been content to live my comfortable life, and not pay too much attention to troubles that seem remote in time or distance.
// @kdfrawg