Philip Armstrong

Writer, actor, tea-drinker, dog-lover, author of ‘Scions of the Gods’ novels. Passionate Europhile #Rejoin #FBPE appalled by our venal, shambolic government.

[Churchill MGᵀᴹ 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇸 @ChurchillFella]

Truth from a woman who moved from Moscow to Ukraine.

"Hello everyone, my name is Ksyusha. I’m a Russian from Moscow who moved to Ukraine during the war. Today, I’m addressing my fellow countrymen.

Nearly 200 drones over Moscow. For the second time in three days, the refinery in Kapotnya is burning. “Lyublino” is burning. All four of the capital’s airports are shut down. This is no coincidence. This is the first serious demonstration that Ukraine is capable of bringing the war deep into Russia. The drones were slow. Next, they’ll be faster. Next, more precise. Ukraine already has its own cruise missiles and ballistic developments. What seemed impossible yesterday is reality today.

While you’re in shock from the sirens and smoke over Moscow, people in Kherson, Sumy, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Kyiv have been living with this for five years already. Destroyed homes, strikes, constant fear.

I know the Moscow where sirens never wailed. Now you’ve felt at least a drop of what they feel every single day.

All the responsibility lies with Vladimir Putin and his regime. With the propagandists who stoke hatred every day. And with the millions of Russians who either support this war or stay silent. Russia started this war. That’s why everything now flying our way is a direct consequence of that choice.

If Putin gives the order to stop the war—it will stop that same day. Zelenskyy has already offered a ceasefire many times. There’s no response. Until that order comes—the strikes on Russia will only intensify. This isn’t revenge. This is forced self-defense.

Ukraine didn’t want this war. It’s simply forced to survive. It’s time to admit it!

[Ben Page @Benpagelondon]

Heseltine not mincing his words

[Supertanskiii @supertanskiii]

"I'm protecting the country from these fucking Muslim bastards raping our young daughters" said a white Scottish man arrested after 5 people were stabbed in Edinburgh.

I’ll fucking say it, this is on Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe.

[Philip Armstrong @PipArmstrong]

The truth behind this MUST come out.

[Nick Reeves #RejoinEU #NAFO #FBPE @nickreeves9876]

"The government have actively avoided looking for evidence Russia interfered."

The Intelligence & Security Committee's Stewart Hosie said the government didn't investigate alleged Russian interference in the Brexit vote, and no one wanted to touch this "with a ten-foot pole".

Starmer has done nothing to rectify this situation. Please repost if you want the government to conduct a full scale inquiry into Russian interference in British politics over the last twenty years. Russia is waging a hybrid war against the UK and this government, like its Tory predecessors, is failing to protect us against the political half of that attack.

[Philip Armstrong @PipArmstrong]

@EdwardJDavey I seriously think Hegseth is deranged. He’s a candidate for sectioning.

[Ed Davey @EdwardJDavey]

Outrageous. The ones who put American lives – and the lives of countless others – at risk were Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Don’t blame the UK for your catastrophic blunder.

[Philip Armstrong @PipArmstrong]

@TrollFootball I thought the First Amendment protected the right to freedom of speech for visitors to the US as well as citizens. 🤔

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Sarah Owen, "The Makerfield candidate for Reform UK, Robert Kenyon has disgraceful said, and I quote"

"The majority of abortions are for vanity purposes"

"He described mums with their fat bellies pushing prams in their PJs"

"And failed to apologise to national treasure Carol Vorderman for endorsing sexually explicit comments about her"

"Mr Speaker, this exposes the rank hypocrisy of Reform UK politicians, talking tough but in reality having zero respect for women"

"Does the the Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy agree with me that Reform UK have a problem with women"

"Further highlighted by welcoming a woman beater into their fold"

David Lammy, "My honourable friend makes a powerful point"

[Philip Armstrong @PipArmstrong]

@SBarrettBar He has an absolute mandate to do this as it was a major manifesto commitment. Not very informed, are you? Perhaps your faux-outrage is getting in the way of your perception of facts.

[PoliticsVideoChannel @politvidchannel]

BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: The British people just named Donald Trump 'the worst thing to ever come out of America' in new poll

[The Rev. Anton Mittens 🌹👮🎓 @MittensOff]

Ryan Bridge has been filmed striking a female protestor in the face in Brighton. That single act destroys any claim Raise the Colours make about “protecting women and girls.” Please share this he cannot be allowed to get away with it. I hope she’s okay and has reported the assault to the police.

[CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOT🇺🇸 @ConstitustionX]

🚨 MIND-BLOWING HYPOCRISY JUST EXPOSED.
Trump is out here popping champagne over a brand new Iran “deal”…
…centered on Iran’s sacred promise that they will NEVER obtain a nuclear weapon.
Sound familiar?
Because ABC’s Jonathan Karl just dropped the bomb: That exact same promise was in the very first paragraph of Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal.
Let that sink in.
Obama makes the deal → Trump rips it up, slaps on “maximum pressure,” starts a war, costs lives and billions…
…only to crawl back and celebrate the exact same core commitment like it’s some historic genius move.
Same promise. Different body count.
History is laughing. The cycle is complete.
What a time to be alive.
🔥 Quote. Repost. Ratio.

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

The richest man on Earth dismantled the organization that feeds the poorest children on earth.

The definition of evil is being a trillionaire in a world where millions of children are starving.

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[Scott Robertson @sarobertson_]

Carney: The new world order will be built from Europe. Canada is the most European of non-European countries, and we are transforming our cooperation with the EU ... In a more dangerous and divided world, Canada has chosen to build and work in partnership with Europe.

[Roger Gall @Shambles151]

Nigel Farage - the leader of Reform UK - is STILL under investigation for failing to declare a £5 million 'gift'.

Please RT this until this until he no longer is.

Thank you

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

OMFG!

JD Vance just said that World War II ended with a “major negotiation,” in an effort to compare it to Trump’s Iran war deal.

FACT: World War II didn’t end because everyone sat down and made a deal. It ended with fascists surrendering.

World War II ended with unconditional surrender, not a big negotiated peace deal.

In Europe, Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally in May 1945 after Hitler died and Berlin fell. There wasn’t a “let’s negotiate terms” ending like some wars.

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

🧐🤔YOU WANTED A WALL, TRUMP? YOU’LL HAVE ONE.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded to Trump’s threats:
“So you voted to build a wall.
Well then, dear Americans — even if geography isn’t your strong suit, and you see America as a country rather than a continent — you should know that on the other side of that wall stand 7 billion people.
And if the word ‘people’ doesn’t resonate with you, let’s call them ‘consumers.’
Those 7 billion consumers can switch from iPhone to Samsung or Huawei in less than two days.
They can trade Levi’s for Zara or Massimo Dutti, and within six months replace Ford and Chevrolet with Toyota, KIA, Mazda, Honda, Hyundai, Volvo, Subaru, Renault, or BMW — brands that are already more popular in many places.
They can cancel DirecTV.
And even if they choose not to, they can stop watching Hollywood films and turn instead to higher-quality productions from Latin America or Europe — with richer storytelling and better filmmaking.
Believe it or not, people can skip Disney and visit the Xcaret resort in Cancún instead — or explore destinations across Mexico, Canada, or South America.
Even in Mexico, you can find better burgers than McDonald’s — with higher nutritional value.
Have you ever seen pyramids in the United States?
Egypt, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Sudan have ancient wonders — none of them in the U.S.
If they were, Trump would probably have bought and resold them by now.
We know Nike isn’t the only sneaker brand. There’s Adidas — and even Mexican brands like Panama.
We understand economics better than you think.
And we also know that when those 7 billion consumers stop buying American products, unemployment will rise, and your economy — trapped behind its own self-imposed wall — will begin to collapse to the point where you’ll be begging for help.
We didn’t want to do this.
But you wanted a wall?
Well.
You’ve got one.”
Her approval rating has reached a historic level — according to a recent poll, it stands at 85%.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

“It’s time to wake the fuck up”

Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Half of my fellow graduate students when I was getting my PhD were foreign nationals. Do you realize one third of all the Nobel Prizes in sciences won by Americans were won by immigrants to America? If you’re gonna trail the world in practically everything, including your economy, it’s time to wake the fuck up”

[Philip Armstrong @PipArmstrong]

@PaulVick138203 @blythbelle No. Kunesberg, Mason &c , yes, absolutely, but Andrew Marr is not one of that sort, exhibiting blatant pro-right bias.