Odds and Ends #17: Jon Stewart for President!

A hacky opinion I actually 100% sincerely believe

(Photo licensed under creative commons from, er, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff)

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your weekly newsletter-within-a-newsletter that rounds up the most interesting links I’ve seen this week, and drop in some shorter takes too.

This week, I tell you about my trip to see a Bristol icon last week, explain why Jon Stewart should run for President, recommend the best show that nobody is watching… and share a sick rap battle too.

Don’t forget, my special offer of 20% off annual subscriptions is still running. Just click here on this special link to take advantage of it!

Now, let’s get on with the good stuff.

A weekend in Bristol

One of the best parts of being a childless adult is having the time and money to travel a little, and see some of the architectural wonders of our world. That’s why despite being a card-carrying atheist¹, I’ve enjoyed visiting a number of iconic religious buildings, including Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Cologne’s Cathedral with its incredible flying buttresses, and the Sistine Chapel (both the real one and the one in Woking).

And last weekend, I was delighted to add another to the list. I’m talking, of course, about the iconic Bristol Airport Multi-Faith Area, which went viral a few weeks ago.

Sadly, on this occasion I did not find God² – but I did have a lovely weekend in Bristol. I strongly recommend checking out Aerospace Bristol, where you can walk through the last Concorde to fly, and ask yourself “I wonder where Clarkson sat?”.

Jon Stewart for president? Last-ditch campaign hopes to escape Biden-Trump nightmare (Salon)

The positive argument for Jon Stewart should be obvious: He’s a unique and widely popular figure on the U.S. political scene. He’s much more than a comedian. He’s a moral voice. For years, we’ve seen him demonstrate the kind of intelligence, compassion and leadership skills that the presidency requires.   

He’s been an articulate and effective advocate on Capitol Hill. Millions of people watched his dogged and successful battles in the halls of Congress on behalf of heroic 9/11 responders and military veterans exposed to toxins. (If you missed that, take a few minutes to watch this powerful video clip of Stewart in action. Or this one.) Politicians would kill for his advocacy skills and his connection to working-class people. Imagine what Stewart could do with his hands on the presidential “bully pulpit.” In Joe Biden’s hands, it’s more like a “wooly pulpit.”

Is it a bit of a Hail Mary to try to draft him to run for president? Yes. But these are desperate times. 

It’s basically a tradition at this point in the US electoral cycle that someone writes an article arguing that Jon Stewart should run for President. And every time someone writes that article, I’ll unironically support the idea.

This isn’t just because I love Jon Stewart, having religiously watched The Daily Show since around 2005 until the end of his tenure. But because as the piece points out, he is almost uniquely well positioned to take on Trump.

Obviously, he’s got the performance skills to take on Trump in the air war, and he’s got enough serious political credibility, campaigning to support first-responders and veterans. But what I think the piece above perhaps misses is that he’s also well placed to bring together the fractious Democratic coalition.

As though he is a liberal and has left-wing cred, it would be tricky to code him as particularly “woke” and thus scary to older, more moderate voters in swing-states. To the extent that I can intuit his views, they appear to be roughly “Obama 2012”-style liberal (save for a few ill-advised attempts to wade in on contentious science). Hell, even the lab leak-sympathetic stuff could play well with lower-trust traditional Republican voters.

In a sense then, and I realise this is a comparison no one in history has ever made before, or will ever make again, but he’s a little bit like Keir Starmer, in terms of how he could position himself.

So as crazy as it might sound, I think there’s a compelling logic to it. Plus he’s probably the only figure in American politics who could, at this point, mount a challenge to Biden given the compressed timeline.

If he announced, he’d instantly get a tonne of attention and a tonne of donations. He already has high name recognition. So give him a boring, competent VP who can reassure on “ability to govern” (to play the similar role Biden did to newbie Obama) – and there’s a potentially powerful ticket right there.

Brighton Skeptics lives!

Last week I wrote about the pile on that a group called Brighton Skeptics faced when putting on an event that touched upon the trans debate. The most depressing part was, I argued, that none of the other so-called ‘skeptics’ groups or figures in the movement spoke out to support the principle that talking about ideas is good, even when they are controversial or even when you disagree with them.

Anyway, I’m happy to report that there is a nice coda to the story. Instead of giving up on putting on events completely, as would have been understandable, the organiser has now decided to rebrand, disaffiliating himself from the broader Skeptics movement, and is planning to put on events in the new year under the name “BRIGHTHINK”.

So I hope that anyone in the area reading will support the new endeavour. I’m looking forward to seeing what he puts on, and I hope to make it down to see a future event myself.

For All Mankind returns

It feels like I’m the only person watching it, but the brilliant For All Mankind is back on Apple TV for its fourth season. Basically, the premise of the show is “What if the Soviets beat America to the Moon?”, and it spins out an alternative history from there, getting increasingly sci-fi as the butterflies spiral outwards.

Tone-wise, think Mad Men meets Apollo 13.

I won’t spoil anything else – the trailer above is the for the first season – but I find the show both brilliant and infuriating, with most seasons making maddening choices at the beginning, but culminating with heart-stopping finales every single time.

So what I’m saying is that more people should watch it so that they keep making it, because it looks very expensive.

Ben Ansell’s Reith Lectures (Radio 4)

The four lectures in Our Democratic Future each focus on a specific goal: democracy, security, solidarity and prosperity. Each lecture will consider where we are now and how we are faring today in achieving these ambitions, exploring future challenges before concluding with a look ahead, to ask what we can do to accomplish our collective goals.

I strongly recommend taking the time to listen to Ben Ansell’s BBC Reith Lectures. On the strength of the first two that have been broadcast, they have been almost laser-focused to be relevant to my interests. So they’re probably relevant to yours too. The only way I could be more interested is if Ben somehow manages to bring up the liberation of the Postcode Address File as critical to sustaining our democracy.

Plus there’s also the fun bonus game of working out just how much of an political-media establishment insider you are/how broken you are by Twitter, by seeing how many of the names you recognise from the ‘celebrity’ guests during the Q&A after.

Henry Ford vs Karl Marx (Epic Rap Battles of History)

And finally, I was delighted to see that Epic Rap Battles of History is still going, releasing this battle between Marx and Ford last week. It’s almost as good as Frederick Douglass vs Thomas Jefferson.

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And that’s it! Don’t forget to check out this week’s big essay dropping class-analysis bombs all over the New Statesman, and if you fancy something from the archives, how about this piece debunking/raising questions (depending on your generosity) a spurious set of claims in an NS piece a while back? (I do sometimes write about non-New Statesman things too.)

Oh, and check out this link on here to some of my favourite pieces too.

1. I’m literally an honorary member of Humanists UK.

2. The actual purpose of the multi-faith area is so that Muslim taxi drivers can pray, so it seems like an entirely logical thing to construct to me (I guess that makes me more of a British-style secularist than a French one). (And yes obviously I checked the shelter was empty before taking a gurning selfie.)