Pippa Rex

More a twitter voyeur than active participant! Concerned that common sense seems to be an increasingly scarce commodity 🇬🇧

[Pippa Rex @collippa]

....and there you have it!

[Pippa Rex @collippa]

@PeterTatchell Are you aware a murder investigation has been launched?

[Pippa Rex @collippa]

@RonDeSantis Ron - don’t let yourself down son

[Pippa Rex @collippa]

@GarySpedding @Susanshox @jan_murray You’re a disgrace Gary

[Pippa Rex @collippa]

@omgsidewalks Ada & Muriel

[Peter Bone @PeterBoneUK]

There is always a Yes Minister episode!

[Barrister's Horse @BarristersHorse]

🧵The Mandelson scandal is morphing into apportioning blame on one individual and one circumstance, but that is not accurate.

There are at least 6 occasions when the issue of Mandelson's security vetting was flagged:

[Mike Gardner @mikegardner_wb]

BREAKING NEWS: “Starmer denies knowing he was Prime Minister”

Sir Kier Starmer has revealed that no one told him until last Tuesday he won the 2024 election and had become PM.

He told Beth Rigby “I was totally kept in the dark by my officials. I’m really angry about it.”

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Today's ruling by the IOC means a welcome return to fair sport for women and girls, but I'll never forget the scandal of Paris 2024, when people who consider themselves supremely virtuous and progressive publicly cheered on men punching women.

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

A powerful scene in the Odyssey happens when Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca after twenty years of war and wandering.

You would expect the story to end with celebration, with the hero coming home, the family reunited, and order restored.

Homer does something far stranger.

Odysseus arrives disguised as a beggar, because Athena warns him that the palace has been taken over by more than a hundred suitors who have been living there for years, eating his food, drinking his wine, and pressuring his wife Penelope to marry one of them.

They believe Odysseus is dead and in their minds the kingdom is already theirs.

So the king of Ithaca walks through his own halls dressed in rags while the men stealing his house sit comfortably at his tables. They mock him, throw scraps at him, and one of them even strikes him, and Odysseus takes it. That is the remarkable part, because the same man who blinded the Cyclops and survived twenty years of disasters now stands quietly while strangers insult him in his own home. Homer tells us his heart burns inside his chest and that he wants to attack them immediately, yet he restrains himself and waits.

Instead of striking, Odysseus studies the room carefully. He counts the men, watches their habits, and quietly observes which servants remain loyal and which have betrayed him. The hero of the Odyssey does something most people cannot do, which is delay revenge until the moment is right.

Eventually Penelope announces a contest and brings out Odysseus’ great bow, declaring that she will marry the man who can string it and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads lined up in a row. One by one the suitors try and fail, because none of them can even bend the bow. Then the beggar asks for a turn. The suitors laugh at first, but the bow is eventually handed to him.

Odysseus takes it in his hands and strings it effortlessly. Homer says the sound of the bowstring tightening rings through the hall like the note of a swallow. Then he places an arrow on the string and sends it cleanly through all twelve axe heads.

In that moment the beggar disappears. Odysseus turns the bow toward the suitors and reveals who he is.

What follows is one of the most brutal scenes in Greek literature. The doors are sealed and the suitors realize too late that they are trapped inside the hall. Odysseus, his son Telemachus, and two loyal servants begin killing them one by one. There is no escape, no mercy, and no negotiation. The men who spent years consuming another man’s house die inside it.

It is a violent ending, but Homer wants you to understand something important. The real danger to Odysseus was never just the monsters and storms on the long journey home. It was the possibility that someone else might take his place while he was gone. When Odysseus finally returns, he reminds everyone in Ithaca of a simple truth: a man’s home is not truly his unless he is willing to fight for it.

[Λttic Rahman @atticrahman]

Iran please stop bombing British military bases. It’s against International Law.

That’ll do it.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

The arguments about Iran are so polarised that no one wants to admit that several things are true at once:

You'd be a fool not to have serious reservations about the idea of a regime change war, especially in the Middle East.

You'd also be a fool to allow terrorist-funding lunatics to develop nuclear weapons.

Neither the people condemning these strikes, nor the people cheering them on know how this is going to work out.

So far, Trump Administration interventions have been extraordinarily successful in achieving valid objectives within a highly limited scope.

The strikes on Iran during the 12 day war achieved destruction of several nuclear facilities.

The Venezuela operation decapitated the hostile regime and replaced Maduro with a non-hostile leader.

Both also achieved significant "don't fuck with us" deterrence globally.

However, it is not remotely clear at this moment in time whether something similar can be achieved in Iran.

I understand and fully empathise with the people who think regime change is not going to work in Iran and you'll end up with the same as what you had or worse.

And I understand just as much the people who celebrate an evil dictator being killed and Iran's nuclear and military assets being degraded further.

The thing we do not know, and the thing that will determine whether this has all been worth it, is what the future leadership of Iran will look like. This seems to me to be the biggest risk Donald Trump has taken at any time in his first or second term. If it pays off, the reward both domestically and globally will be huge. If it doesn't and things go south, it could derail his Presidency and define his legacy like Iraq did for Blair and Bush.

Very few people have any idea which of these scenarios is more likely and one thing is for sure: none of them are talking about it on social media because they're all sitting in command bunkers, not on X.

I hope the people of Iran are released from living under tyranny. I hope the peoples of the Middle East can live in peace.
I hope the takeaway for any would-be terrorist is the realisation that October 7 might not have been such a good idea.
I hope that with the Middle East stabilised, the US can turn its attentions to the theatres that really matters to the security of the West: Russia and China.

Whether any of that happens remains to be seen and it seems the hardest thing for anyone to do is to not express an opinion before the smoke has cleared.

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

"The impact of the fall of the Iranian regime will be far bigger than most people realise. It will be a genuine “cut the head off the snake” moment.

Because once the Ayatollahs fall, the entire political ecosystem they’ve been propping up starts to collapse with them. It will instantly strip away, and I cannot believe I’m even saying this, a huge amount of the fake “legitimacy” groups like Hamas have managed to gain over the last few years. It will drag into the light all the ties, funding routes, training links, and ideological coordination that the IRGC has had with terrorist organisations across the region.

And yes, it will absolutely delegitimise the modern “pro-Palestine” movement as it currently exists in the West, because so much of it isn’t actually about Palestinians at all. It’s about Islamist propaganda, anti-Israel narratives, and the constant repackaging of extremism as “social justice”. The fall of the regime would rip the mask off that entire performance.

But perhaps the biggest slap in the face of all will be that it will expose the one subject liberal leftist activists fear the most, because it destroys their whole worldview.

It will prove, in the clearest possible way, that the biggest struggle the Iranian people have faced was not “Western imperialism”, not “Zionism”, and not some abstract geopolitical grievance.
It was life under Islamist oppression....

And once millions of Iranians are free to say that openly, without fear of prison, torture, or execution, the activist class won’t be able to spin it anymore. They won’t be able to pretend that political Islam is “resistance”. They won’t be able to sell the lie that terrorists are the oppressed heroes of history.

The fall of the Iranian regime will create an ideological earthquake."

*
@AntSpeaks

[Pippa Rex @collippa]

@GBNEWS What an absolutely incredible young woman - articulate, determined, proud 😍

[Pippa Rex @collippa]

@jk_rowling From a lifetime of exceptional writing, your best bit of writing yet 😍

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

Saying “trans women are women” was never true in fact and now isn’t true in law, either.

A victory for all of the women who faced personal abuse or lost their jobs for stating the obvious.

Women are women and men are men: you cannot change your biological sex.

The era of Keir Starmer telling us that some women have penises has come to an end. Hallelujah!

Well done @ForWomenScot!

[Pippa Rex @collippa]

Absolutely love AI Granny

[Interesting AF @interesting_aIl]

British company 02 has launched Daisy, an Al-powered "granny" designed to waste scammers' time with lifelike, rambling conversations

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women's faces.

[Pippa Rex @collippa]

@elonmusk True - but tells you all you need to know about the direction the majority want to head!

[Pippa Rex @collippa]

Hasn’t it just….

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Labour and Black Rock. Working together. Irony has surely died.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Really looking forward to the day a flag is flown for Scottish victims of femicide, but sure, let's hear the list of trans people who've been murdered in Scotland. Ever.