9 Comments

That Craig Raine poem went down very badly in my recent best man's speech

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Further to the Jesse Armstrong piece, There’s a great book called Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It) by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, which (if you haven’t read it already), I think you’d enjoy.

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Nov 10, 2023·edited Nov 10, 2023

As a regular hillwalker, I've often thought it would be interesting to try stalking. Hillwalking is *much cheaper*, though, and seeing the end-result of a hunt is always depressing. Deer overpopulation is a real problem, but a better solution would be to reintroduce their natural predators. That not only reduces the number of deer, it reduces their impact - in the absence of predators, deer will entirely strip and kill a growing tree, but if there are predators around they'll only take a nibble and move on. I was hiking in Wester Ross a couple of weeks ago; outside the bothy we were staying in was a small area surrounded with deer fence, stuffed with trees. Outside it was miles and miles of treeless bog. People think the Highlands are untouched wilderness, but they're not: beautiful as they are, they're an ecological crime scene.

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I think the phrase “clickbait conservatism” from the Provate Eye podcast definitely needs to become common currency.

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*Private*. Just to specify that wasn’t autocorrect’s spelling error for the Probate Eye podcast where they look at recent wills 🙄

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Enjoyed this one as usual! Thank you also for introducing me to Tom Hamilton’s stack. When I think of Rishi and Elon, I imagine the latter indignantly patting the formers pretty little head. So as you can imagine this hit my biased spot :)

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I meant indulgently ...

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*looks up “payfence”...

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The Massie article did the same for me!

One recently had a small windfall & am deciding between the US or UK & when I read Massies earlier this week it made me lean towards England then pop up to Scotland to stay with my Uncle and then do some stalking

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