[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_and_Round_Went_the_Great...
I think the notion of odd, but brilliant, boffin is deeply embedded in British culture. Or was, until at least the 2000s. The Great Egg Race on TV being a fine example.
On the other hand i knew an old scientist who had quite a few interesting and amusing stories to share about his efforts in WW2. One of them was about his attempts to perfect a formala. Several factories exploded before they succeeded.
Churchill stands virtually alone as one with moral clarity on the Nazis.
USSR allied with them. France was fine seeing everyone else get rolled. Poland signed a nonaggression pact. The British parliament were generally happy to let Hitler have his way.
How about instead, you tell me who you think went out of their way to combat Nazism?
The extent of the German and Japanese atrocities only became clear after the war and they were so great that even the Soviet Union were on the side of the angels.
I wouldn't say they were perfectly content. It was more that they were cowardly and apathetic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_fougasse
They speak to the particular combination of desperation, urgency, and ingenuity found in the UK at that time.
I was at a picnic recently that happened to be on VE day, it really struck me that now London is only about 35% or so English as the ww2 generation would've known it, almost no one has a particularly good reason to bother paying attention. I'm sure I was the only person there who knows who Barnes Wallis was.
And yes I miss the boffins. They do still sort of exist but that type of mind has been strangled by the last few decades drive towards left-brained processes where everything basically has to be nailed down before the work actually starts.
That latter point is one reason why we're struggling so much - we owe a great debt to the generations who built all the infrastructure and housing. We didn't pay it off, we now can't really do anything at scale other than extract rent. The victorians were building a HS2 every few years.
I don't agree with the 'ideology' but I don't find it totally unreasonable or objectionable.
And surely even 'everyone who doesn't worship X and abstain from Y and live according to text Z is living in sin' is... That's just an ideology, that's fine, it's not terrorist until you do some sort of destructive act in its name or try to enforce it somehow?
Some context lost in the linked article I think, not having read into it.
That particular organisation is particularly batshit in that they have e.g. published guidance that watching (say) TV shows about politics or railway journeys could mean you're harbouring dangerous right wing views!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11764775/Yes-Minist...
All in all it's a (deep) state (I mean deep in the sense that we can't see it rather than in a conspiratorial sense) that basically accidentally enacted a huge cultural revolution in the 90s, got away with it for a while, now has nothing to show for it, knows everyone now knows this, and is hedging.
We do not have free speech anymore because of this e.g. see this case of a man having his home raided while police officers rummage through his books - "very Brexity things". Brexit got a majority in a referendum! (which fwiw I was at the time and sort of still am against but they won)
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2053511/pensioner-arrested...
The english middle classes despise their worse offs, but are quite fond of similar people from afar.
Oikophobia, basically.
Unless we get out of this (and we probably won't) there will basically be a "gradually, then suddenly" transition to a very, very, different society as the boomers die off, and then probably a civil war over the scraps.
from Greenberg's Troubling the Waters about Black-Jewish relations.
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