Liz Rubenstein

London Blue Badge Tourist Guide. Private tours for families and groups. Love London, love life, love language. Hate liars. I am woke.

[Liz Rubenstein @LRnw6]

@g_gosden I might very well be wrong but aren’t you always supposed to salute with the right hand?

[Liz Rubenstein @LRnw6]

@cathynewman @Channel4News absolutely gutted that you’re leaving. Your professionalism & integrity have always been inspirational and your choice of coats and gloves have always been fabulous. Evenings at 7pm will never be quite the same. I hope you are able to retain your integrity and honesty

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

If there is precisely one thing you watch today, make it this. French Senator Claude Malhuret. A microphone. And the most magnificently savage dismantling of the Trump administration ever delivered in a language they almost certainly don’t speak.

He covers Iran. He covers corruption. He covers the kind of staggering, industrial-scale incompetence that would get you fired from managing a car park. And he does it with the calm, unhurried certainty of a man who has read every page of the indictment and found it, if anything, worse than expected.

France has never pretended to like these people. But this is contempt elevated to an art form. The kind of refined, aristocratic disdain that takes centuries of civilization to produce and approximately ninety seconds to deploy.

Malhuret sounds like he is four seconds from the button. Not out of panic. Out of sheer, exhausted disgust.
Honestly? Understandable.
Watch it. Share it. The adults are speaking.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Liz Rubenstein @LRnw6]

@Matt_Pinner What business is it of yours? She looks amazing. If you have a problem, look away

[Liz Rubenstein @LRnw6]

@Matt_Pinner Absolutely fucking yes
Anyone who might have a problem is them not JLO
You are the problem

[Spring-Nuts @SpringNuts_]

From @springsteen :

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free, Bruce Springsteen

[Led By Donkeys @ByDonkeys]

BOARD OF PEACE - Season 1

[Reece Dinsdale @reece_dinsdale]

Get your head out of your arse, watch this, have some compassion for your fellow man, stop the easy hating on others… and wise the fuck up!
Merry Christmas.

[⭕️Faerie ❤️ @LiquidFaerie]

Hannah Arendt’s life and ideas offer a profound warning about the fragility of truth in the face of tyranny.

Born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, to a secular Jewish family, she lost her father at the age of seven and was raised by her mother in an environment of intellectual freedom. She pursued philosophy, studying under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, and emerged as a brilliant thinker. Yet her Jewish identity placed her in peril when the Nazis rose to power in 1933.

In that year, Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin for conducting illegal research into antisemitism, gathering evidence for a Zionist organisation. She spent several days in a Gestapo cell before being released, likely due to a sympathetic officer. She fled Germany immediately, first to Prague and then to Paris. When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, she was interned as an enemy alien in the camp at Gurs. She escaped and, with the help of networks including Varian Fry, made her way across the Pyrenees to Spain and Portugal.

In 1941 she arrived in New York, a refugee with little more than her life and her urgent questions about how a cultured nation could descend into barbarism.
These experiences shaped Arendt’s lifelong project. She spent decades examining how ordinary people participate in evil, how truth is eroded, and how resistance remains possible.

Her seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), analysed Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as systems that destroyed not only lives but reality itself. She argued that the ideal subject of totalitarian rule was not the fervent believer but those for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists. Totalitarianism thrives on relentless lying, not to persuade but to overwhelm, leaving people cynical and paralysed, unable to judge or act.

Arendt’s most controversial insight came from covering the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for The New Yorker. Eichmann, a key organiser of the Holocaust, appeared not as a monster but as a banal bureaucrat, driven by careerism and obedience rather than hatred. She described this as “the banality of evil”: most evil is done by people who never decide to be good or evil, who stop thinking and surrender judgement to authority.

In a 1973 interview with French journalist Roger Errera, amid the Watergate scandal, Arendt observed that constant lying erodes belief itself. If everyone lies, people stop believing anything, losing their capacity to think and act. A population thus deprived can be manipulated at will.
Yet Arendt refused despair. In Men in Dark Times (1968), she celebrated individuals who, in oppressive eras, offered illumination through courage and integrity. She emphasised “natality”, the human capacity for new beginnings inherent in every birth. No system can fully extinguish the potential for spontaneous action and resistance.

Arendt died on 4 December 1975 in New York, aged 69, from a heart attack while working at her desk. Her unfinished manuscript on judging was left mid-sentence, a fitting end for a thinker who lived by questioning.

Her warnings resonate today, in an era of disinformation and authoritarian tendencies. The real danger is not the dictator alone but the erosion of truth, when ordinary people grow exhausted or cynical and cease to distinguish fact from fiction. Arendt’s antidote is simple yet demanding: think for yourself, preserve judgement, and kindle small lights of truth. Every act of resistance begins with refusing to surrender thought.

[Marina Purkiss @MarinaPurkiss]

Give this a little click and make Reform sweat…

[Peter Stefanovic @PeterStefanovi2]

This petition calling for a public inquiry into Russian influence on UK politics & democracy already has over 26,000 signatures. Let’s get it to 100,000 this week.

Please sign and share 🙏

https://t.co/68OwbUeG3V

[Liz Rubenstein @LRnw6]

👏👏👏

[HENRY MORRIS @mrhenrymorris]

Fast Acting Monarch Strips Prince Of Titles

Only eighteen years after his friendship with a sex-trafficking paedophile becomes public

Ctd

1/5

[Liz Rubenstein @LRnw6]

I have absolutely no idea how they manage to do it every time but @MarshSongs do it every single fucking time 👏👏👏

[MarshFamilySongs @MarshSongs]

Here's a version of the English nursery rhyme, "The Grand Old Duke of York" 🎶 about the man who says he isn't going to call himself it anymore ... though whether he should be taken at his word ... 🤔

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

British.

[Hanan Ashrawi @DrHananAshrawi]

Traumatised, exhausted, starving, bereaved & wounded, hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians are returning on foot to their destroyed city of Gaza. Without infrastructure, water, food, fuel, electricity, schools, hospitals & homes, they are facing unbearable hardships. Yet their determination & will to return & rebuild attest to incredible resilience & commitment to their land & community.

[Liz Rubenstein @LRnw6]

Call on Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper to take action for children in the occupied Palestinian territory now. https://t.co/l8f7WHIxeP

[Liz Rubenstein @LRnw6]

And @MarshSongs have done it again! 👏👏👏

[MarshFamilySongs @MarshSongs]

In some ways an oddly upbeat vibe for a musical rundown of the #freespeech situation developing in the US ... but this is our 🎵 parody "Freedom of Speech" to the tune of #Disney's "Under the Sea" (by the fantastic @AIMenken) - with some familiar faces cut in. #Kimmel #Colbert 😎

[Liz Rubenstein @LRnw6]

As always, brutal and to the point. Devastating and brilliant analysis of the 💩 show that we are currently experiencing 👏👏👏

[HENRY MORRIS @mrhenrymorris]

The PNG Courier overseas edition on mini-roundabouts

(And Yvette Cooper's bunting)

[Liz Rubenstein @LRnw6]

@MarshSongs @RobertJenrick Smashed it. Again! 👏👏👏

[Liz Rubenstein @LRnw6]

Yet again, one of the very few remaining independent and trustworthy correspondents absolutely nails it. Congratulations @mrhenrymorris

[HENRY MORRIS @mrhenrymorris]

The PNG Courier's overseas correspondent on the facilitation of war crimes in Gaza.

Subscribe today.
https://t.co/9h9PPygRRA