Too many on the left still see autism as a “middle class issue.” It’s not. Being poor or working class just makes diagnosis near impossible. Autism isn’t middle class. Access to recognition is. 1/5

'Blocchiamo tutto!' Marina Forti on Italy's general strike, in particular, the role of Genoese dock workers. 'We are mobilising not only out of solidarity with the tormented Palestinian people, but also out of the anger we are harbouring’. newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

The Examiner, commenting on the trial of Henry Hunt, charged with treason after Peterloo in 1819. Sounds familiar. archive.org/details/sim_...

This deserves *way* more attention than it’s getting Reform’s former Wales leader admits he received corrupt payments in exchange for making statements in the European Parliament to promote Russia’s interests in #Ukraine.

headline in my inbox: "The War on Tylenol". Except that it isn't? It's a eugenicist war on pregnant people, blaming them and their medical caregivers for autism, which the eugenicists regard as a fate worse than death. Focusing on Tylenol hides that fact.

I'm seeing so many takes around parts of the "ID card" melange, I have to add a few. It's not about cards. It's about registers. A register is a definitive 'true source' of data, about people, places, buildings, whatever.

Stinking Brittlegill, I think.

Ok. They’ve pissed me off. I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards: 1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

Fascinating discussion by David Bentley Hart of Romans 5:12, pivoting on the translations of the preposition ἐφ’, grounding two very different theologies - God as saviour of all or God as judge of the individual; or, Gregory of Nyssa or John Calvin gospelconversations.substack.com/p/david-hart...

Flying national flags is dominating the news this week but I haven't seen any uses as innovative as Independent Labour Party politician John Wheatley and his comrades during the 1915 Glasgow rent strike unfurling a Union Jack to undermine attempts to evict the family of a wounded soldier.

Fred Brown recreated Banksy’s removed mural on Scarborough beach. Amazing.

Including 'protest led by young people who seemed to be inspired by the uprisings in Indonesia and Nepal.'

The social industry 'rewards drama, hyperbole, losing one's temper, spontaneous rashness, asperity ... It's the opposite of a political meeting, where such behaviour is, not infrequent, but frowned on and shut down by a good chair.' (@leninology.bsky.social) www.patreon.com/posts/you-ha...

#otd 1846 Frederick Douglass made his eighth appearance in Paisley at the Secession Church on George Street. www.bulldozia.com/douglass-in-...

Tired of hearing 'we need immigrants to staff the NHS & care homes' - as if we're a servant class. Newsflash: immigrants do a variety of work, pay taxes, buy homes, raise families. Britain doesn't 'need us to serve'. We're here to live. Like you.

In the absence of alt text, the printed inscription reads: ‘When you squat down at the seaside for a snack on the beach / You can hear the buggies chortle as they jump out of reach // I believe in bugs, I truly believe in bugs // Ivor Cutler’.

'Highly contentious' is woeful but to concede that autism is a 'condition' with a meaningful 'cause' is already to concede too much.

Once, we had the axis of evil. Now, it's some guys eating hummus in the lamplight.

Mass deportation is possible. It’s important to understand what it would really involve. Both the ideology of racial and national purity that drives it and what carrying it out really means in practice. Camps, barbed wire, goon squads, depossessed people who lose everything they know.

Interesting for its suggestion that anti-government protests in France are taking inspiration from Nepal www.thenation.com/article/worl...

Two voices from the frontlines unpack Myanmar’s crisis. Activist Thinzar Shunlei Yi of the Anti-Sham Election Campaign warns of sham polls, while Thai journalist Wongpun Amarinthewa shares border truths. Listen to their urgent calls for justice and awareness. insightmyanmar.org/complete-sho...

At last, a slogan I can get behind.

At the junction the bus pulls up at the lights alongside a hearse. The driver leans out of his cockpit and turns his head towards a passenger in the front seat and makes some excitable but indistinct remarks about the curious bushy foliage crammed on top of the coffin.

Ceci n’est pas un ours

“Friendship’s political power is made evident by the way in which capitalism attempts to co-opt it” @lauracforster.bsky.social and @joeljoel.bsky.social speak with @theskinnymag.bsky.social about Friends in Common: www.theskinny.co.uk/books/featur...

Experts have long struggled to understand political slogans. The Spencean radical Thomas Preston had a provocative sign displayed outside his shop and delighted in refusing to disclose its meaning to the perplexed authorities.

The history of 'Bella Ciao' is a complex one of reappropriations by many different political causes - in Italy, France Switzerland, Turkey, Iran & elsewhere. Lorella Sini's study opens with its use at a rally of the far-right La Liga in Bologna in 2019 journals.openedition.org/clo/11516

Probably one of the best explainers I've read so far on the protests in Nepal in English here from @globalvoices.org Well worth a read.

'Instead of the truth about how dangerous he was, instead of how much hate and incitement he whipped up during his life, we hear eulogies and platitudes demanding we refrain from speaking ill of the dead. Fuck that.' www.patreon.com/posts/essay-...

Publishers, not authors, own the rights to most books and articles. I doubt authors will see much of this money.

Among Robert Ayton's illustrations for The Ladybird Book of the Weather (1962) are three or four, images of St George's Crosses atop church towers. A more innocent time? I'm not so sure. Even as a kid I found them weird & implausible. Now, they look ... overdetermined. Englishness with extra menace.

The needs of rural residents may be more expensive to provide but surely that cannot justify a ‘second-rate’ quality of provision ✍️Professor Stuart Cole

“I should think that is a manifestation of the popular feeling. I would not condemn anyone who said that. I would say that is how people see the situation in Smethwick. I fully understand the feelings of the people who say it. I would say it is exasperation, not fascism.” (Peter Griffiths, 1964)

On the first day of National Translation Month, here’s Richard Howard remembering how Roland Barthes approached having his work translated into English:

LOL they've literally used Lefebvre's data from 1932, & said "Yep, that happened." There are a couple of interesting points there, and the analysis is not drivel. But it does take some things seriously which are drivel, like this: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Viktor Shklovsky’s Journey to the Land of Movies (1926), which Owen Hatherley describes as 'ostranenie for kids', turns out to be just one of many fascinating reissues of obscure and intriguing 20th-century socialist texts from Rab-Rab Press, a venture new to me. newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

An epidemiological approach to understanding how ideas and behaviours spread is definitely worth exploring. There is an extensive body of work discussing its viability (for me, Dan Sperber's Explaining Culture, is exemplary), but this article in Nature betrays no awareness of it.

Yeah… autism is caused by autistic folks boinking and making new autistic folks, even if they don’t have a diagnosis. Every child’s assessment should come with parental assessments as well.

Disquiet Junto Project 0712: Zebra Code The Assignment: What rhythm do you hear in a bar code? Details: disquiet.com/0712 Deadline: Monday, August 25, 2025, 11:59pm. Project proposed thanks to Jason Richardson, who shared this Boing Boing post: boingboing.net/2025/08/19/w... #DisquietJunto

'During this exercise in scholarly play, I have seen and felt a profound shift in my students’ attitudes toward a form of reading and writing that they generally regard as a chore.' www.historians.org/perspectives...

RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries

Corbyn and Sultana have launched their new party, but they forgot to make their statement about it accessible. It's on their web site as an embedded A4 PDF.

My take on the Leveson review! Restricting jury trials would cut the case backlog & if you’re going to do it, this is a good model. BUT it isn't necessary. Leveson's argument is based on rising demand - when the real problem is poor productivity. 🧵 www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/leve...

Gender affirming care, but only for cis people Which tells you it's not about the treatment safety or patient wellbeing. It's about making it as hard as possible to transition, to live while transitioned, and ultimately: to limit the number of trans people.

Join us this October for our course at the Poetry School (@poetryschool.bsky.social): poetryschool.com/courses/tran... "In this course, we will look at ways of developing other modes of seeing – chief among them, the use of the Archive as both prompt and source material for new work."

People forget that checking racial boxes in the United States is first and foremost an exercise in resource distribution and not a moment to tell your diary how you feel about your family history And it has been a project, a white supremacist project, to make people think it’s about individualism

wrote about the NYT race science (and racist) attack on Mamdani, and why policing diaspora identities is garbage which hurts, among many others, Jewish people. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/the-new-yo...