Which sort of implies it was a white people thing that was influenced by black culture but not when it was too black.

I can see why you might think that from reading about it in 2024 but I’d suggest to you that the tempo slowdown is the major factor. Ska is an uptempo party music. Rocksteady slowed the tempo down and Reggae generally kept the tempo at that slower pace.

Also there was a progression of people leaving skinhead for rock following more high energy bands like The Who and The Small Faces and going through the psychedelic changes into Rock at the end of the sixties.

The fans of ska had no problem with reggae, especially Bob Marley, who was collaborating with Mick Jagger in no time. It’s just they’d moved on from skinhead because the scene had become much more associated with violence. There was also the very deliberate efforts of the National Front to recruit football supporters during the early 70s heyday of football hooliganism. A lot of the people that were into violence were attracted to the second wave of skinhead just as cultural changes to the music in Jamaica and the UK meant that a lot of the first wave were evolving into mods and then some of them hippies and eventually you see the emergence of street punk at the end of the 70s.

As for Rastafarianism, that was not at the time a dogmatic religion like Catholicism or the Moonies but arose out of cultural immersion and community practice in the places in Jamaica where most of its adherents lived. I don’t think it is a matter of being too black, it’s just that it’s very specific to Jamaica and eventually the Jamaican diaspora.

Edit: It’s no accident that the third wave of skinhead was kickstarted by Two Tone and was explicitly multi-racial and also that Two Tone harked back to uptempo ska.

That is a fun fact.

I honestly wonder who was pushing this nonsense.

So, there’s this pair of cunts called the Koch brothers. They have a business that extracts shale gas by fracking and then turns it into plastics for the US domestic market. They’ve done very well out of this business and out of fossil fuels in general.

Somewhat predictably they’re right wing shitheads. They seem to be behind a lot of the bollocks in the Anglosphere at the minute. The distribution network seems to be that they fund various think tanks including a few of the Tufton Street metastasis and also fund Steve Bannon, Turning Point USA and Turning Point UK.

The goal is to keep them and their dynasty on top.

Once the money gets to the UK, usually through Turning Point UK, it funds efforts to distort people’s thinking using social media.

Fifteen minute cities encourage walking and so if people can leave their cars behind that’s one of the major use cases for fossil fuels reduced. Can’t be having that.

Meanwhile in the Pentagon: ‘Autonomous drones you say…’

UKs 70 year olds are far less likely than their American counterparts to share Christian memes. They share different kinds of reactionary memes suggesting that ‘woke’ and what they think is hilarious to call ‘elf and safety’ are the causes of why things are so shit now rather than looking somewhat closer to home.

I saw yesterday that there’s a strong protection from the vaccine against Long Covid. Perhaps that would give him more time to contemplate his foolishness.

Unmiscegenated - I’d bet there’s plenty misogyny flying about in those voids.

It’s got that ‘retrain as a swan’ energy.

Why does there even need to be a COP every year? They know what to do, they know what will be enough and they have the authority in their home nations to do it. COP is just theatre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Wars

Far as that cat is concerned they’re the real star in that picture and the strange human is just photo-bombing.

Liz Truss was probably my favourite PM. Hear me out.

Every day of her premiership I got up out of bed in a good mood, couldn’t wait to hear the news about how she’d fucked the dog the day before. Through various circumstances that I’m not sharing with the internet she did cost me a considerable amount of cash when she crashed the economy but she was just so entertaining. And she didn’t hang around like a fart in a space suit like certain unelected PMs I could mention. The moment when the lettuce outlasted her and a hand came from off-screen and placed a tiara on its head is one of the lasting delights of the last few years.

Pleading won’t do no good, try a brown envelope stuffed with readies.

There’s a lot of people who don’t like the label fascism but just fucking love what fascism does. I think the problem is that a lot of people don’t understand how complex the world is and fascism always tells them that their stupid, lazy thinking is correct. Universal suffrage is the only way to that democracy can work in this day and age and I would literally fight to save it… but boy does it come with some downsides.

If I were a venal and corrupt politician and I were in an easy job that paid extraordinarily well I would hold onto that job as long as possible.

I am going to say that that we’ll be going to the polls in January '25.

Now all we need is for the CIA to take responsibility for the Islamic State and the circle of life (and death) is complete.

Scares the beejesus out of me.

US once again threatening jihadis with a good time. Anyone else read the news story about how the Taliban fighters are all depressed to find themselves as civil servants? That’s how to deter people.

This is what people not from the UK (and a fair few who are) always fail to recognise: the Upper Class are engaged in economic war against everyone else, their goal is to maintain a local hegemony and they have been doing this continuously since at least the 11th Century.

There’s the small matter of his Dad, a former editor of The Times, having written a book about how to profit from disaster capitalism.