This guy is an arse, and also wrong: Sensible Centrism was dead as fuck as any kind of popular phenomenon in the 2000s and it will continue to plague and damage us next year because - like the Tories 2016-21 - it’s rotted corpse was propped up and walked around by the press, like Weekend At Bernie’s

'Palestine is different. Even with broad public support, no major museum has taken up the genocide in Gaza. No large institution I know of has put on an exhibition about Palestinian artists or Palestinian lives. Instead, the opposite'

"It is logically impossible to simultaneously be evil, corrupt, and incompetent" is an absolutely amazing take to have in the year of 2025

If I was a Sensible Moderate with Centrist politics, I’d probably want to have devoted at least somewhat more time to saying I disapprove of genocide, facilitating genocide and draconian crackdowns on protests against genocide, than I had to bitching about protests being childish and self-indulgent.

Good news about the new Avatar: there’s lots of new stuff in this movie, and it’s good fun! Bad news about the new Avatar: *everything else* was in the other two films, and the last forty minutes is the same beat for beat, almost shot for shot!

A bullshit cutout job of an outfit here, used largely to hammer left wingers McSweeney wanted to suck up to. Which makes this yet another incredible self own among an enormous number of em.

Olive, the other reindeer

The “free speech” and “cancel culture” panics have led to overt state censorship because that was always their purpose. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

All these years of dumbass conspiracy theorists claiming that shadowy elites were talking in code and using symbols and shit and meanwhile Rich Pedophile was leaving a paper trail to talk to Dr. Pedophile like "Hey man, President Pedophile is cool, I think you'll like him. Talk soon!"

What is left of the conservative intellectual tradition but the naked exercise of power? Perhaps that is all it ever was, once surrounded with centuries of words justifying its use. Not anymore

Like I say: one of the key functions of the British press is seeking out and recruiting the country’s most malicious wingnuts, and then promoting their crackpot politics. Why do they do this? Well, you have to assume it’s what they think their job actually is.

My full page comic for the @prospectmagazine.co.uk Christmas issue. With sincere apologies.

Yes, this is precisely why the Labour Racism terror had to be kept as far away from courtrooms as possible, and every expulsion and other piece of backroom shenanigans had to be lawyered to fuck to ensure it wouldn’t be subject to judicial review. I recall this being explained, openly, at the time.

I remember people saying after the ‘08 crash that this had to be the end of loot-and-burn neoliberalism, of stripping state capacity to keep the rich warm, and we should create a new system to avoid the “errors” of the old. And ever since, it’s just been screaming abuse at anyone who said this.

Well, it’d be very Britain for this to be the country where she gets imprisoned for terrorism, and not anywhere else.

Our terrifying, dystopian future in which Times journalists can only occasionally roar “answer the question, can a woman have a penis? Yes or no!” at politicians and party hacks, while angrily jabbing a finger in the air

And all it took to achieve this was for the US and Israel to smash fuck out of or suborn the whole region for decades, so that now you can travel from Tripoli in Libya to Kabul, Afghanistan without setting foot outside a controlled client state or a collapsed hellhole that can’t defend itself.

these are the kind of numbers that, *at the end of a president's term*, herald a total wipeout for his party in the next election. we are in december of year one.

If you deliberately present the public with a smorgasbord of shit, they will not like it and they won’t want to eat anything.

You could see this clear as day years ago, when the only journos who made notable trouble for Boris Johnson in the election campaign came from regional papers, while the Westminster ones agreed that whatever you might think of him, you had to agree he was determined to Get Brexit Done.

I love working at the Department of Justice and participating in a conspiracy to cover up the demented 80 year old president's sex crimes. I spend 18 hours a day redacting documents and there's a putrid husk where my soul used to be

It’s been very obvious where Israeli society was going for much of my adult life, and that it was only a matter of time before one of their governments decreed that the moment had come to Do What Must Be Done. This is why we made all that annoying noise about it, for all those years.

This is true across the board. If you show em they can get away with (x) thing they want to do, then they will set up basecamp there and use it to strike out for (y) and (z). And this isn’t new, they were always like this.

If it isn't glaringly obvious, Trump and everyone of his sycophants that deported people to SECOT need to go to prison. The same holds true for Bush, his stooges and their own torture. The more you let them get away with it, the more they do it, and you're next.

This is a factor in the UK too, where local journalism has been severly weakened. This means the centre/Westminster is even less aware of people's concerns, and weakens democratic accountability and policy responsiveness

"Israel🇮🇱 creates conditions of life that are sufficiently unsuitable to life so that it will force the 2 million Palestinians🇵🇸 in Gaza to flee to Egypt." Dr. Kenneth Roth, the former long-time executive director of Human Rights Watch.

They’re calling them the most missile-proof ships of all time. Chinese missiles will be scared to hit them

see also @goodlawproject.org - who leads the org fighting the ban legally - makes the us/uk comparison in this interview on this issue, dems aren't the equivalent of the tories -rather, labour's position would be a hard right republican one in the states www.politicalphilosophypodcast.com/trans-uk

Luckily Britain doesn’t have to worry about this so much, because we have a thriving anti-racist movement and people are free to speak openly against bigotry, without being relentlessly hounded for it by opportunist shitehawks and far right psychos in politics and the press.

yes. she investigated the case of why everyone at the new york times hated her and discovered that it was because she was too smart and too brave.

The system works

LOL yes, heaven forfend

Thing is, we don’t have to ask what would happen if humanity was ever threatened by a civilisation-destroying calamity: we are living through it right now, and the proven answer is “Uprising of fascist billionaires trying to impose militantly aggressive white ethnostate”.

I’d guess actual astronauts would prefer a pen and a piece of paper to one of these machines

Yes, this was always the plan; all the po-faced politicians finger-wagging you about the two-state solution fully understood it was bullshit, and that the actual goal was “get rid of the Palestinians by any means necessary”.

The slapstick comedy of Mr Bombs Away For Freedom here, hectoring the Libs that violence is not the answer, in the country’s craziest Kill ‘Em All weekly paper

This is it! Falling for reactionary BS about "free speech" has led us to basic rights being actually threatened and removed They never wanted debate or discussion, their point was always about putting the very humanity of marginalised communities back in the balance

Okay, so a shitehawk opportunist dangling EU membership as a way of screwing over Sir Keir, in service of his own ambition and nothing more, is at least quite funny

The entire american "free speech" panic was about elites being criticized, which is why anyone who ever took it seriously should be ignored forever

Also screw the BBC for its naked agenda. It refused to carry a hugely expensive first ever YouGov survey we commissioned showing how awful trans lives in the UK have become because it was "not strong enough" but there's no piece of anti-trans hatred too petty for it to platform.

Very on-brand behaviour

Amazing, they’re trying to build the Fourth Reich out of old stories about how kids aren’t allowed to sing Baa Baa Black Sheep

It's remarkable how perfectly this awful story is similar to The Dreyfuss Affair, from the banishment to a cruel tropical prison to the world's worst and stupidest people refusing to let it go even for decades after he was freed.

One to bear in mind at this time of year, when speaking to your Spanish-speaking friends

Pretty wacky to look at an ongoing genocide and conclude that the crazy people are the ones who are *against* it, IMO

‘Voters for the historic duopoly mostly cite the lack of a better alternative that can plausibly win. If that sense changes, the floor will vanish beneath Labour’s feet.’ @piercepenniless.bsky.social on Labour’s complacency. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

My own views and politics can be pretty wacky too, but this never causes me trouble in my daily life, because *I don’t insist upon being an enormous asshole about it all the time, to everyone*.

Damn, I see we’re finally getting our bullshit organised. And this, while the US President is right out there in public repeatedly saying Venezuela has stolen its own oil from America, so now the US is going to take it back by force.