GOOD STRATEGY REBELLION

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  • F*CK DATA MESH: A Critical Look at Data Trends – Book Review

    F*CK DATA MESH: A Critical Look at Data Trends – Book Review

    The Bonfire of the Clowns

    F*CK DATA MESH: A polemic against fashionable nonsense in the data economy

    Alicia Altmann, The Middle Digital Review, Chicago, 5th March 2026.

    In the technology industry, few phrases age faster than the latest architectural revolution. “Serverless”, “big data”, “blockchain”, each arrives with evangelical certainty before quietly settling into the background noise of enterprise IT. Into this cycle of hype steps Martyn Jones’s gleefully abrasive book, F*CK DATA MESH: The Far Side of Data, Information, and Knowledge*. Its title alone signals that this is less a manual than a polemic: a sharply written protest against what the author sees as the fashionable amnesia of modern data discourse.

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  • F*ck Data Mesh: Martyn Jones’s Hilarious Haymaker at Tech’s Data Delusions – Book Review

    F*ck Data Mesh: Martyn Jones’s Hilarious Haymaker at Tech’s Data Delusions – Book Review

    The Bonfire of the Imbeciles

    F*ck Data Mesh: Martyn Jones’s Hilarious Haymaker at Tech’s Data Delusions

    Review by Bella Carmela, WiredWiredWired, Silicon Valley, Thursday 5th March 2026

    In the hyper-connected, AI-obsessed circus of modern enterprise tech, where every startup pitches a “revolutionary” data paradigm like it’s the next iPhone, Martyn Jones drops a bomb: Fck Data Mesh*. Subtitled The Far Side of Data, Information, and Knowledge, this 2025 manifesto isn’t your typical dry treatise on ETL pipelines or cloud migrations. It’s a rollicking, profane takedown of the industry’s sacred cows… Data Mesh, Lakehouses, and the endless hype cycle that turns solid data strategies into vaporware. Written with the acerbic wit of a Welsh data veteran who’s seen it all (from mainframes to metadata meltdowns), Jones channels the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson meets Dilbert, urging businesses to wake up before their next “transformative” initiative sinks another billion into the swamp.

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  • Martyn Jones on Geopolitical Thuggery – Book Review

    Martyn Jones on Geopolitical Thuggery – Book Review

    A Plague On All of Their Houses

    THE END OF HONOUR: FROM ABSURDITY TO GLOBAL THUGGERY

    By Vanessa Bell, Madrid, 4th March 2026

    In Martyn Jones’s The End of Honour: From Absurdity to Global Thuggery, a sprawling and impassioned jeremiad against the moral rot at the heart of contemporary geopolitics, the author diagnoses a profound crisis in the Western liberal order. Published in 2025, the book posits honour not as a quaint Victorian relic but as an indispensable strategic asset, the ethical scaffolding that once underpinned alliances, restrained imperial overreach, and lent credibility to diplomatic endeavours. Its erosion, Jones argues, has precipitated a descent into what he terms “global thuggery”: a world where power is exercised through naked coercion, transactional extortion, and the commodification of international relations into protection rackets. Drawing on an eclectic pantheon of thinkers, from Kant and Lao Tzu to Martin van Creveld and Paul Kennedy, Jones traces this decline from the triumphalism of the post-Cold War era, through the neoconservative adventurism of the Bush administration, to the brazen populism of Trump and his unlikely bedfellows, such as Elon Musk, whom Jones caricatures as a “Bond villain with broadband” fusing Silicon Valley libertarianism with demagogic excess.

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  • The Crisis of Honour in Global Governance – Book Review

    The Crisis of Honour in Global Governance – Book Review

    A Plague On All of Their Houses

    THE END OF HONOUR: FROM ABSURDITY TO GLOBAL THUGGERY

    By Virginia Stephens, Madrid, 4th March 2026

    History, as Paul Kennedy observed in the pages that mapped the rise and fall of the great powers, does not announce its turning points with fanfare. It discloses them, reluctantly, through the accumulated weight of institutional decay, strategic overreach, and, most damningly, the erosion of the codes of conduct that once constrained even the most ruthless of statecraft. Martyn Jones, in this sprawling, ferocious, and occasionally magnificent polemic, has written something that Kennedy’s tradition demands we take seriously: a diagnosis of civilisational decline rooted not in balance-of-payments deficits or military overextension alone, but in the collapse of honour as an operational principle of governance.

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  • The Decline of Honour in Global Politics – Book Review

    The Decline of Honour in Global Politics – Book Review

    A Plague On All of Their Houses

    By Rebecca Kennedy, The Observer, Chelsea, Wednesday 4th March 2026

    The End of Honour: From Absurdity to Global Thuggery By Martyn Jones (martyn.es, 2025)

    In the grand sweep of history, as Paul Kennedy might observe, empires rise and fall not merely through the clash of arms or the ebb of economic tides, but through the erosion of moral sinews that bind societies and their leaders. Martyn Jones’s The End of Honour echoes this Kennedy-esque thesis, charting the precipitous decline of integrity in global politics from the unipolar illusions of the post-Cold War era to the brazen thuggery of contemporary strongmen. Written over a quarter-century, this sprawling polemic, part historical autopsy, part diplomatic jeremiad, dissects how the United States, once the self-anointed guardian of liberal order, has devolved into a “basket case” of strategic incoherence, abetted by neoliberal hubris and neoconservative adventurism. Jones, a data strategist turned contrarian commentator, draws on a lifetime of observation, from Welsh nationalism to Spanish socialism, to argue that honour’s demise has unleashed a world of “global thuggery,” where power is wielded not with restraint but as a blunt instrument of self-interest.

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