QTP with a gif of a powerful woman.

Instead of being amazed that Cheney endorsed Harris despite agreeing with Trump on 99% of his policies, people treated it as though her endorsement meant Harris now agreed with Cheney on 99% of policy. Dumbest electorate in the world.

I mean I don’t think he’s doing it for political reasons but if he can’t make *any* capital with the progressive bloc out of the fact that Blair, Trump, Farage, Johnson; Badenoch and Liz Truss are all attacking him on it, he may as well just resign now tbh

being in the room to watch sober minded French protestants discover what their American counterparts have become is near the top of my list of historical moments i wish i was present for

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his substack depends on his not understanding it".

I give up, Claude is conscious. Ergo AI developers must face imprisonment or execution for performing medical experiments on their living slave.

I mean one of @mikeduncan.bsky.social's big takeaways from years of writing the Revolutions pod is that the Great Man Theory of Historical Change is overrated but the Great Idiot Theory holds considerable explanatory power

Still the best adaptation.

Fascinating detail in here about Terry Nation's sadly thwarted push for ethnic diversity in Doctor Who.

"Mainline conservatism is dying. In the US and UK at least, it is dead.This has been destabilizing to be sure, but let us not waste too much sympathy on it. It caused many harms and ignored many more. We should not fight for a creed that could not fight for itself."

Introducing JOHN HURT as THE WAR QUEER

This is incredible. UK emissions fell 2.4% in 2025 as coal fell to a 400-year low. Incredibly, we used less coal last year than than in 1600, when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne and Shakespeare was writing Hamlet www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-...

In fairness to Tony Gonzalez, he is a Catholic, and what he is describing is simply the sacrament of confession. You don't need to be in Congress to get an immediate answer, you just need to be one of the 1.3 billion Catholics on the planet.

Dear God, I'd forgotten all about these.

Spectacular moon over Worthing pier last night.

Saw a thoughtful thread about AI, don't want to QT or argue. But. The biggest rage factor with LLMs is the people who, because genAI is transformative for coding, think it's transformative for everything else, because they devalue every other form of work and labor and knowledge.

This is the coward's way out. Keep to the schedule but just ask "so how's that republic working out for you guys" of everyone you meet

You're absolutely right. I lied about the message being an indecipherable SOS. I imprudently recommended against warning the search party. I violated quarantine by letting an infected crew member back in. And I tried to kill you with a rolled up magazine. That's on me,

NEW: The Lib Dems are demanding MPs get a vote on allowing the US to use UK air bases. Leader Ed Davey says: “No matter how the Prime Minister tries to redefine offensive as defensive, this is a slippery slope. He must not let Trump drag Britain into another prolonged war in the Middle East.”

I get tired of American voters being pure innocents who can never be judged for their shitty, shitty choices.

(not) Fun Fact! The reason humanity discovered what caused Celiac Disease is because of a WW2 famine. The Nazis cut off food supplies to the Netherlands in 1944, in an attempt to starve out the Dutch strikers who were refusing to help the Nazi occupiers. 1/5

Rich alludes here to the wisdom of the judges at the Nuremburg trial: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

General election prediction: Lib Dems to win every seat with a Gail's, Greens to win every seat with a Gregg's.

you think you've seen the whole movie, and then the alt text reveals you haven't even finished act two

They want $60 for an hour at the axe throwing place? For that money I can buy a case of beer and my own axe, and throw it at whatever I want until I'm arrested again

My experience of the upper echelons of the Labour Party involved being condescended to by the incredibly thick & unpleasant, & thinking that in any other walk of life you would get punched in the mouth for treating people like that. Impossible to overstate how high on their own fumes they are.

Labour's swing toward racism is perhaps the biggest unforced error in British political history; burnt their base to ashes and won them not a single vote on the right.

Lesson from Gorton and Denton: If "vote for the crook, not the fascist" is the last ditch of democracy, "vote for the nice plumber, not the fascist" is a much easier sell.

Worth noting the combined Green/Labour vote was more than double Reform. Didn't even need tactical voting to beat them in the end. Maybe if they hadn't picked such a useless candidate they would have done better.

Keir Starmer must be regretting that he can't fire McSweeney twice.

A Green win must mean that "left behind" voters forgotten by Westminster want open borders and legalised class A drugs. That's how it works right?

I have delayed sleep phase, or as I like to call it "running on by election time"

Such is the arrogance and self-regard of Labour, I'd bet my left ball on them pushing the second button.

Another MAGNIFICENT Oatmealy comic. SO worth your time and laughter and amazement.

Looking forward to waking up in the morning to discover by some miracle the Liberal Democrats have won Gordon and Denton and Ed Davey swans up to Manchester with a massive piss yellow syringe to crudely lean into the drug policy debate and the slogan that they’re “injecting hope into politics again”

I made this for potential incorporation to my slides, and offer it up for any who might want it

Eve: Should I eat this fruit even though God told us not to Serpent: It isn't just a fruit — it's a future. You're determining your own path. You've got this! Eve: God's really mad, I shouldn't have eaten it Serpent: You're right! That one's on me. I'm only an AI model and can make mistakes,

One of the reasons I loved Red Dwarf from the absolute outset - and part of the reason I was never as keen after the first two series - was the weird juxtaposition with that plaintive, haunting, hopeless SOS distress call in the intro. It takes genius and bravery to think of that and run with it.

thought you probably needed to see this

In Nigel Planer's book he writes about how people seem to find Neil endearing, which is something he's never understood. He describes Neil as manipulative, passive-aggressive and self-involved, which is true, but he's also bullied by the other three. So people naturally feel sorry for him.

Congratulations everyone

Reminded today of canvassing in Cambridge in 2005 with our candidate, David Howarth. A man in a suit strode towards us, swearing loudly. I was alarmed, but David knew him, explained that he had Tourette’s, and chatted with him. Such were the times, his swearing went “Fuck! Shit! George Bush! Fuck!”

[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that

I think there’s something to this actually because it’s basically an outsourced version of God as the voice in your head that tells you you’re right all the time that Evangelicals love

"The reality is that, even if those proposing further anti-immigrant measures weren't racist at all (and to be clear, they absolutely are), their policies would still be disastrous. Even current immigration regimes are far too restrictive and are massively harming us."

No cheating! Your last saved picture of a celebrity is your therapist. This should go well...

The difference between Tory entitlement and Labour entitlement is that Tories feel entitled to their place in society, whereas Labour feel entitled to the votes of everyone who isn't a Tory.