Awesome how we just occasionally go “And of course, it’s bad that the police and the security services occasionally get fuckloads of people killed and then lie like hell about it, and nobody is willing to punish them or change anything beyond asking them to be nicer”, and then forget about it again.

🚨 NEW | Keir Starmer is less popular in Britain than Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. 🟡 Maduro -31 ⚫ Trump -56 🔴 Starmer -56 🟩 Hamas -58 Net favourability ratings via @YouGov, 4-5 Jan

they literally wrote this into the national security strategy!

Amazing wrongness here. 1. If you're arresting 00s of peaceful pro-Gazan protestors, you don't believe in free speech. 2. Even if you do believe in it, it doesn't extend to child porn. 3. You can't debate with fascists. 4. You can put a counter-narrative (if you have one) onto civilized platforms.

I am not certain that even America is in a position to openly dictate to the whole of the Americas in the most crass and insulting terms as well as - at least - the Middle East. I suspect we’ll be looking at this as catastrophic, vainglorious idiocy by this time next year, if not today.

Occasionally they spell it out. Here's the US at the UN security council this afternoon

Sure, but would we say that an average punter who judged the Scottish party by looking at the behaviour of the UK one, would get a misleading impression? Probably not, I reckon.

Whenever people spoke about the harms and chilling effect on speech caused by the OSA, these guys were right in with "so you love child porn huh?" Once again: there are no rules, there are no principles, there are no standards. There is just whatever these people want, forever.

I have a hunch that if you or I were running a website doing this the "urgent contact" would involve door rams and handcuffs so I struggle to see why it can't be slightly more pugnacious than this.

You could already do a pretty amazing YouTube video of “news show presenters who cannot believe what they are fucking hearing from actual ministers”. Start with the Taylor Swift tickets, move on to the collective punishment ones and finish with this.

Damn, I was planning to get way more mileage out of calling myself and other fans “Nancy Boys”.

once again i want to point out that as soon as the OSA came into effect, posts reporting news from palestine were immediately restricted with no recourse to appeal. so far none of these genAI CSAM images have even touched the filter. effectively the 'for you' tab has become a minefield.

Incredible, really. Talks about US forces killing Venezuelan soldiers “in self-defence”, while they were literally invading the country with no legal justification whatsoever. Does nobody have even a shred of self-respect left, at this point? abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics...

If the giant throbbing brains of political commentary cannot possibly be wrong, then it must be someone else’s fault. Like I say: we should expect a full court press on “the public are just needy, whiny little piggies who don’t understand how good they have it”, this year.

It's only necessary if you're trying to cover up a genocide. 👍

"... there are no crimes even the most extreme, reckless, and right wing American president in history can commit that would cause our country to step away from its subordination to Washington."

You will recall that we were supposed to be absolutely terrified of the Labour Party because it was purportedly in hock to aggressive foreign powers. How’s that looking now, folks

What are we doing here, lads. Have we thought this through, at all.

To believe this, you would have to believe that everyone from Nixon to Reagan to Bush II was a We Are The World altruist snowflake. This man is just a Nazi, and by that I mean he is a straightforward Third Reich skull-on-the cap Nazi, and he is open and proud about being one.

Would these people even defend *themselves*, if the Trumpers tried to kick them out of power and replace them? It’s not clear to me that they would.

It’s not fair to pick on Esler in particular when there are far worse to choose from, but it really is worth looking at this, recalling the long years of squealing and horseshit on these and similar topics, and then at everything now bombed to fuck and on fire while our leaders babble excuses.

If we wanted leaders who would stand up to Trump and his goons, then it was probably a mistake to elect a government led by people whose declared purpose is to eradicate anyone who says mean things about America and its foreign policy from politics, as far as possible.

Yeah, I feel like it might also embolden America, as evidenced by their threats to Mexico, Colombia and Greenland

I think this also tells us that the days when the political class used to at least pretend that automatic obedience to Washington was optional, rather than mandatory, are long gone and they won’t be coming back. Which casts the last few decades in a somewhat different light, does it not.

Funny now to remember that time Trump’s White House simply decreed that guy was the actual president of Venezuela, and then the governments of Europe lined up to agree that Why yes sir Mr President, he sure is the most actually the leader guy we have ever seen. The most proper President ever, sir

Let’s see how much “backing for Ukraine” we get in this of this straightforward and plainly reflexive kowtowing to Washington, shall we.

"Labour apologists for Maduro move to turn Starmer against the US Raid on Venezuela leaves PM squeezed between Trump, international law and his Left-wing MPS" [Telegraph] "With Venezuela’s oil, Trump can really hurt China" [Telegraph]

Yes, of course they will continue doing this while Trump’s goons do birthday military parades for the dead leader, sweep people off the streets into vans, kill the fuck out of any foreigner they want and work topple any government they don’t like. This will always, always be the line, no matter what

You might expect these people - seeing that the Starmer project was just swine lying about their colleagues and comically abusing their party’s processes to bully, harass, cheat, insult and expel them - might have thought: this looks really bad and quite dishonest. They did not think that, at all.

The New Statesman podcast lads included this guy defecting to Reform as one of their moderately likely predictions for the year

Sophy Ridge: "I feel like a lot of people are just wondering why on earth Trump has done this.. he said this is about drugs.. but its hard to ignore the amount of oil Venezuela has too" Trump has spent the last few days literally telling us its about the oil

A core example that reality bends to will in the mind of a fascist. Consistency is not even considered, only the now.

I was today years old when I learned that the “Cultural Marxism” talking point we hear from Republicans like Ted Cruz is a literal Nazi conspiracy theory. It has its roots in Kulturbolschewismus, or Cultural Bolshevism, which the Nazis threw around to discredit their opposition.

This is incredibly worth reading in light of what is happening now and the basis on which Trump and Rubio are pursuing charges against Maduro.

In today's Everything is America Now, on the left we have the Republican Governor of Texas in April 2025, on the right we have the UK Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government yesterday. 🏆

I mean we laugh, but the Venezuelan exiles allied to the Trump admin are IMO not wildly less crazy or bent than this crank, and look where that’s got em.

This is about the best, most serious engagement we can ever expect to get, too: Esler did at least recognise actual, real issues that Old Jezza was animated about, unlike his former colleagues who usually preferred to come up with their own wacky ideas about what people on the left believe.

In fact I’ll go as far as to say that the direction of travel has been apparent for half a century in terms of attitudes of lawlessness and exceptionalism. No Trump without Bush (stolen election, Iraq), no Bush without Reagan (Iran Contra, Grenada etc), no Reagan without Nixon

We laugh, but I immediately had dorks tell me this like it was some kind of crushing slam dunk. Perhaps America doesn’t need Venezuelan oil? Has anyone told e.g. the US President or the Vice President, or the Secretary of Defence, because they keep saying on camera that they’re going it for the oil.

Just the very normal stuff you would expect from a government that is not rammed with crackpots and wackos

the reason people sometimes act madder at democrats than republicans when republicans do impossibly evil shit is the same reason why, if you hired an exterminator to handle a roach infestation and he showed up to feed and play with them instead, your first instinct wouldn’t be to yell at the roaches

If actual genocide wasn’t a deal breaker, then nothing will be.

I don’t think it could be more clear that they have no intention whatsoever of resisting the global rise of fascism, or that they are absolutely committed to ensuring a future far right government will have as many coercive powers to use against protestors and dissidents as they can push through now

Also see: anti-austerity protestors of the early 2010s, who were very obviously correct at the time and were *screamed* down by our horrific political/media class, who repeatedly set the police on them. There’s nobody talking about how great austerity was now, is there? All forgotten.

Sure, although all of that - every word of it - was a dumb advertising campaign for the same shit. It was the same gangsterism then, with Tony Blair and a gaggle of the worst people in the country angrily telling the public it was not, when they themselves knew very well that it was exactly that.

The knots Western liberals have to tie themselves in to deal with the cognitive dissonance of supporting a violently anti-democratic and authoritarian empire

We joke, but this is literally what has happened.