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1 " Mark Fisher, the cultural theorist whose 2017 suicide seems increasingly prescient, coined the term ‘capitalist realism’ to describe the way that we could imagine the end of the world more easily than we could imagine the end of capitalism. I think that has gone now, and that people can, increasingly, imagine a future shaped by something other than capitalism. "
― Frankie Boyle , The Future of British Politics
2 " A more mundane threat is the sociopathy of giant Silicon Valley corporations. What can we learn from their rise? Possibly that Hitler might have just about made it if only he’d fitted out the Reichstag with a ping-pong table and some hammocks. "
3 " The much-ballyhooed Internet of Things (what is a smart bin? In my day that was a dog) will see a surge in demand for rare metals, forcing up their price. Combine that with the invention of the brain-computer interface and there will be times when the spare capacity of human consciousness will be a cheaper option for processing and storage. For a nutritious bowl of soup we’ll be plugged in, with a thousand others, running algorithms to more precisely push a new wonder mop to lonely housewives idly googling through a Valium comedown. "
4 " Well, this whole section actually hasn’t turned out to be as upbeat as I’d hoped. Let’s move on. "
5 " (Oxbridge is a compound term formed from the words obnoxious and privilege). "
6 " What we often think of as the self-belief instilled by an elite education is really a kind of class exceptionalism, a belief that privilege is earned through talent and hard work, against all of the available evidence. If you doubt this, simply ask the most left-wing Oxbridge graduate you can find what role they think their background played in their success. "
7 " One of the problems with left-wing discourse in Britain is that it seeks to moralise its opponents without ever considering what they really think. "
8 " In South Wales racist attacks went up 77 per cent after the referendum vote. I’m not certain whether to be appalled at their racism or admire that they managed to keep such a tsunami of hatred inside until they thought it was allowed. "
9 " Perhaps a modern concept of sovereignty might involve owning the property in your capital city, or your own railway system. At the moment Britain is in a strange position where we seem to be sanguine about foreigners owning our infrastructure, but we just don’t want them picking our fruit. "
10 " MI5 have denied claims that they’ve withheld intelligence from the Home Secretary. If anyone is guilty of that, it’s God. "
11 " Many Conservative politicians are little more than a collection of personality defects developed in an attempt to lure their father out from behind the Daily Telegraph during the six days a year they weren’t using the top bunk at school as the forced sodomy equivalent of a life raft during a shark attack "
12 " In previous generations the Conservatives hoped that young people would become more conservative as they got mortgages, or advanced up the career ladder, or something else that none of them will ever do again. "
13 " Self-employed may mean no pension, sick or holiday pay but you are Your. Own. Boss! Have to get down to Tesco for when they put on the yellow stickers? Who do you need permission from? That’s right… YOU! You’re the BOSS! "
14 " Perhaps the gig economy can help out with social care, so that anyone with a bike can underbid to spend the day squirting soup through a pensioner’s letterbox; and how silly that police armed response teams still take out lethal suspects, when, once cornered, the shot could be sold to an American safari tourist. "
15 " Toby Young has always embodied contradictions, even if simply by being interested in eugenics while looking like an unviable foetus. "
16 " I’m still struggling to work out whether Boris Johnson represents the interface of the public school system and foetal alcohol syndrome, or what happens when Pixar is infiltrated by the last surviving Nazi war criminal. "
17 " The whole crisis does raise some interesting questions though: if we all agree that we can’t have the weakest people in society dying as a healthcare system, then why do we tolerate it as an economic system "
18 " The world’s worst people think that everybody is going to come out of this in a few months and go willingly back into a kind of numbing servitude. Surely it’s time to start imagining something better. "
19 " Of course, reactionary ‘anti-woke’ types are operating in ignorance at best, and often in bad faith. Their basic position is ‘some people are so marginalised that they have to build a language to describe their oppression, but the real victim is me, who has to learn a new word every nine months’. "
20 " He seems to be viewed as electable by Labour members largely because he looks like someone playing a prime minister in an old Spice Girls’ video. "