#yes-minister — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #yes-minister, aggregated by home.social.
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I don't think I've ever seen so many qualifiers in a statement before. It's worthy of Jim Hacker #yesminister
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RE: https://mastodon.nl/@bert_hubert/116466243576340833
Even een terugblik voor alle tweedekamerleden naar een uitzending uit 1986.
Yes, (Prime) Minister was een cursus voor kamerleden om kamerleden duidelijk te maken dat zelfs al kennen ze nu alle trucjes van het vak, ze trappen er nog net zo hard in (wat we nog dagelijks in het nieuws zien en in de krant lezen)
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‘Yes, Minister’ Creator on Bringing Franchise to a Close With ‘I’m Sorry, Prime Minister’ and Comedy in the Trump Era: It’s ‘Truly Beyond Satire’
#Variety #Global #News #DonaldTrump #I039mSorryPrimeMinister #JonathanLynn #YesMinisterhttps://variety.com/2026/theater/news/yes-minister-jonathan-lynn-trump-final-play-1236703259/
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Fast forward naar januari vorig jaar:
Government digital document app launching in summer
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy48vl3p0nyo (jan, 2025)(Via Wikipedia over Yes, Minister
XXX) -
Yes, Minister S1/E1 'The Grand Design' Paul Eddington • Nigel Hawthorne - Video Dailymotion
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8mvbz8Yes, Minister.
Een serie om eens de zoveel tijd eens terug te kijken. Daarnaast verplichte kost voor politici en ambtenaren.
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Four decades after we wrote Yes Minister, politics is still reduced to the pleasure of power
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/feb/10/im-sorry-prime-minister-political-satire-jonathan-lynn?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
#YesMinister -
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safety/about/autism.html
Sir Humphry's 5 methods to undermine reports:
(a) it leaves important questions unanswered
(b) much of the evidence is inconclusive
(c) the figures are open to other interpretations
(d) certain findings are contradictory
(e) some of the main conclusions have been questionedPoints (a) to (d) are bound to be true. [...] If some of the main conclusions have not been questioned, question them! Then they have been!
#cdc #autism #YesMinister #yesminister -
#SirHumphrey has a message for you all. #YesMinister
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There’s a 21-minute cut of the 1980s Yes Minister Christmas Special on YouTube. Officially. BBC Comedy posted it today.
Worth your time.
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UK Parliament, 2009: “Bad Language: The Use and Abuse of Official Language”
This is a fun official read:
Sir Richard said: “The evidence must be that this discontentment built up and this behaviour was such as could not go on.” In English, this would be translated as: “People were being quite outrageous and had to stop.”
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmpubadm/17/17.pdf
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Huh, it was the Year of The Lord 2025 when I discovered that #YesMinister is a bloody brilliant comedy series. I know I know, I’m a bit late to the party, but it is wonderful to finally be enjoying it.
And relevant, even (or especially?) today.
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@Armadillosoft @bicmay There's a fantastic Yes Minister! episode that mimics this...
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The best thing the #BBC could do for #political knowledge is to promote and repeat the entire series of Yes Minister.
It is as applicable today as it was back then
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I’m sure #YouTube's algorithm had its own reasons for popping this into my feed, but this timeless #YesMinister clip seems more appropriate now than ever: https://youtu.be/IgLg9zQH3vU #Israel #Palestine
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Royalty, Administration, and Antimemetics
I was all of 15 when defenestration was forever implanted in my mind. It means to throw someone out the window. It happened in Prague, 1618. Some important people were defenestrated, fell 70 feet, landed in dung. This led to the thirty years war and the coining of the word ‘defenestration’. Defenestrating happened to important, visible, people held responsible for mismanagement leading to widespread discontent. While the defenestrated may represent the idea, surely we can’t imagine that it was that specific person who was going around causing the suffering. No, they had minions. Here we explore a bit of their story.
Horned owl (Hoornuil) (1915) print in high resolution by Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. Original from The Rijksmuseum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.Royalty is meant to be seen. They were either chosen by or were the local gods to lead the people. They were the head of everything and if something were to go wrong it was their responsibility. Royalty also means creating good memes. Whether the Alhambra, Taj Mahal, or Beijing projecting power through architectural memes was the standard.
Administration and bureaucratic structures is the silent clockwork that powers the projection. These guys, are antimemetic. The antimeme is a recent invention and denotes ideas that have high impact but are hard to spread. This is important because when the tax burden gets too high you want the peasants to go for the king not the local tax collector.
The Mughal emperors were the head of the administrative machinery with final say over all important matters. The administration itself was antimemetic in nature. The provincial officials such as the bakhshi, sadr as-sudr, and finance minister reported directly to the central government rather than the subahdar (provincial governor). Matrix organization, I hear you thinking. This complex, multi-layered reporting structure, while designed for central control, also diffused responsibility and made the precise locus of decision-making less transparent to external observers and even to other officials.
In the Ming dynasty, the Hongwu Emperor abolished the Central Secretariat to assume personal control. However, the volume of letters got so high that he soon appointed a few grand secretaries. They never held a high rank and always merely “recorded imperial decisions”. If merely were a boxer he would be a heavyweight. Can’t blame that guy with the pen if he’s just doing what the king asks him to.
From the al-Andalus through the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals the the ulama shaped legal systems and molded public morality. Of course the monarchs decrees but the ulama interpreted them and applied them as law into daily life. This interpretive authority, operating subtly within the legal and religious bureaucracy, allowed for continuous adaptation and influence without the visible, attributable acts of formal legislation, making it profoundly antimemetic.
Let me end with the quote from the wonderful, and joyfully mimetic, Yes, Minister:
“Hacker: Humphrey, did you know that 20% of all honours go to civil servants?
Sir Humphrey: A fitting tribute to their devotion to duty, Minister.
Hacker: No, their duty is what they get paid for. The rest of the population has to do something extra to get an honour. Something special. They work for 27 years with mentally handicapped children six nights a week to get an MBE. Your knighthoods simply come up with the rations.
Sir Humphrey: Minister, her Majesty’s civil servants spend their lives working for a modest wage and at the end, they retire into obscurity. Honours are a small reward for a lifetime of loyal, self-effacing discretion and devoted service to Her Majesty, and to the nation.
Hacker: “A modest wage”, did you say?
Sir Humphrey: Alas, yes.
Hacker: Humphrey, you get over £30,000 a year! That’s £7,000 more than I get.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but still relatively the modest wage.
Hacker: Relative to whom?
Sir Humphrey: Well, Elizabeth Taylor, for example.
Hacker: Humphrey, you are not relative to Elizabeth Taylor. There are important differences.
Sir Humphrey: Indeed, yes. She didn’t get a first at Oxford.
Hacker: And you do not retire into obscurity?! You take a massive index-linked pension and go off to become directors of oil companies and banks.
Sir Humphrey: Oh, yes, but very obscure directors, Minister.
Hacker: You’re in no danger of the sack. In industry if you screw things up, you get the boot. In the civil service, if you screw things up, I get the boot.
Sir Humphrey: Very droll, Minister, now if you’ve approved the list…”
[Series Two (1981) Episode Two: Doing the Honours]
Sources
Much of the reading and sourcing of material for this was done across books from the Contraptions Book Club and some deep research help.
- Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography by Robert Irwin
- Monkey King: Journey to the West, the abridged Lovell edition
- Islamic Gunpowder Empires by Dougles E. Streusend
- Kingdoms of Faith by Brian A. Catlos
- Zheng He: China And the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405-1433 by Edward L. Dreyer
- https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yes,_Minister
#alAndalus #Antimemetics #Bureaucracy #Defenestration #Government #HistoricalTheory #history #HistoryMemes #Humor #MingDynasty #MughalEmpire #OttomanEmpire #PoliticalSatire #PoliticalTheory #Politics #PowerStructures #Sociology #YesMinister
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@DrALJONES @palestine Sir Richard Wharton: In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now. #yesminister -
I binge watched all of The Thick of It over the last week.
I didn’t get into it when it was first broadcast.
It’s okay. I’d pick Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister over The Thick of It if forced to choose.
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Yes Minister, the BBC political comedy written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn first aired on this date in 1980. 10 things you might not know:
https://topicaltens.blogspot.com/2025/02/25-february-yes-minister.html
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“It takes two to Quango, Minister” #YesMinister #ABetterAus youtu.be/vXpFbX74bp8?...
A Scandal! | Yes, Minister | B... -
Interesting take by Fujisaki Ichirō, Japan's 2008-2012 ambassador to USA, on US Pres.-elect:
"...the American presidential election is in some ways like receiving a Christmas present..."
"...no matter what it turns out to be, you know you need to act as if it was something that you had wanted all along"😓
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01076/Sounds just like something Sir Humphrey Appleby might have said.
#Japan #YesMinister -
@lizardllama
This Vance sounds like Bernard correcting Jim in #yesminister -
#OpenLetter...
I realise that #LittleMissPorkMarkets hates you because you #ToldOnHer when "she" only lasted 49-days as #PrimeMinister of #TheFormerUnitedKingdom; so much so, that "she" went off to drink #GAndTs with the #GhastlyDarrenGrimes at the #GiantBigotNetwork; but...
#IDigress...
#YesMinister / #YesPrimeMiniter... #PatronOfTheArts...
Where are the rest of the #Episodes...? They were #PublicallyFunded; so, what have you done with them?
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