Alien.

Mamdani:

With the Traitors having a "secret Traitor", I am excited for the British public to conveniently remember how to use singular They/Them pronouns for a month.

FINALLY

Re-up for the evening/American crowd.

they literally just find and replace the word "people" with a concept so they can make threats in the press without it being illegal and cis journos keep pretending they can't see it

Was your New Year's resolution to read about Star Trek? I got you covered! Have yourselves an essay on weaponised blame, Great Man Theory, and who we can *really* thank for the Federation-Klingon War, as IDFC tackles "Context Is For Kings".

Trump Writes Netanyahu Strongly Worded Check

pound for pound this might be the funniest thing ever written

The fact that comments are turned off tells you that for Duncan and other people in the Westminster bubble, they know they can easily find out why he is so hated, they just don't want to hear it.

Of course! Britain, uniquely among all nations, is simply "ungovernable" in a way that not a single politician or journalist or other sensible is even slightly responsible for. It's a totally natural emergent quality that has simply only happened here for reasons. Makes sense.

My standard take here: we're well past the point where it's more generous to assume these people fully know the answer they claim eludes them, and are lying because they think that's advantageous to them, than to assume they're genuinely as gobsmackingly fucking stupid as they're coming across.

These make me laugh 100% of the time

Simply cannot imagine a more McArdle thing to do than demand to know why we're not talking more about whether resisting fascism might drive theatre ticket sales down.

Just a reminder to folk visiting Edinburgh next year please try your best to boycott the Elephant House. It's gone from a nice normal cafe with views of the castle to a mad tourist trap with a giant picture of Jakey R on the wall. It's like if everything wrong with Edinburgh's tourism was a cafe

Just had to Androcles my poor doggie. Fuck you, nature. Read the room.

Doctor Who: Inferno (1970)

Christ, MTG is not reformed. She’s not apologetic for anything material she’s done. She isn’t going to bring anyone over to even a moderate centrist coalition. Stop being naive as fuck. It’s not a “purity test” to say “the fascist who happens to disagree with Hitler on some points isn’t an ally.”

They did the monster mash

This has always been what liberalism does. A thing is good so long as it passes through an institution, for the institution itself is good & all it does is justified. “The system works.” People say today “democracy is under threat from Trump”, when for many, liberal democracy has been the threat.

Felt the need to get one more piece of writing out in 2025, so here's a short piece about Alkaline Trio's "San Francisco", and having to spend time in airports.

EXPLAIN YOUR USERNAME A mate of mine stayed at my rented place for a week once, while doing an intern job nearby. Every evening we'd have dinner and then play *way* too much Timesplitters 2. He'd always be the Accountant, I'd always be the alien squid. The latter choice became a thing.

Doing some writing.

And also, we must loudly express our gratitude to them for the opportunity.

Are white people aware that Trump won twice BECAUSE A MAJORITY OF WHITE PEOPLE WHO VOTED PUT HIM IN OFFICE?????????? Why is this consistently elided???? Stop being ridiculous.

This. I've never been as sold on Gervais' comedy as some, but that's just an aesthetic preference, wholly independent from the fact he's a vile human being. As others have pointed out, there's no way to claim bad people always make bad art, without suggesting good art means the artist must be good.

I have recently learned that, as a matter of fact, racists *really* hate this question.

Split infinitives are impossible in Latin but possible, useful, pretty, and precedented in English. Shakespeare used them, as did Byron, etc etc. Boldly go forth and split the motherfuckers.

"You shouldn't make art for the money" buddy I'll take it one step further and say we shouldn't have to labor for capital at all but in the meantime pay an artist

Our pop stars continue to be both more accountable and more responsive to feedback than the editorial board of the New York Times

The simple fact is if you think capitalism is a system worth keeping and that billionaires as a class should exist, you are not left wing. You are at best a progressive liberal. A left-wing billionaire is like a humanitarian fascist: simply an oxymoron.

Sorry for sharing Twitter shit but: The wildest part of this for me is a fundamental misunderstanding of any coherent definition of “left wing,” because there is no way to be left wing and a billionaire. There are a few ostensibly liberal billionaires, but left wing is not “more liberal than most.”

I watched the first episode of Discovery on a plane and didn't realise that all of the Klingon dialogue was supposed to be subtitled until I read a review a couple of days latwr. I also thought it was a stylistic choice to keep us in the dark.

Had the same thing watching Spartacus on Netflix a couple of weeks back. Thought that not subtitling the "Syrians" was a stylistic choice so we were as much at a loss as the in-show non-speakers, until their conversation went on for a while...

Watching an episode of Picard for the first time in eight months. I'd managed to forget Amazon Prime's absolutely batshit, ableist decision to only show the subtitles for the spoken Romulan if you're *not* already using subtitles for the spoken English. Fucking hell.

If you start watching FIRST TIME CALLER at 11:33 and 30 seconds on New Years Eve, something hilarious happens at midnight.

Fundamentally, these people choosing to soft-soap straight up fascists while screaming abuse at the left tells us that their behaviour is mostly driven by where power lies, and who they are and are not afraid of. They condemn and denounce the people they *don’t* fear, and are rewarded for doing so.

Finished my essay on "The Butcher's Knife Cares Not For The Lamb's Cry" today. It's approx 5000 words, making it very slightly longer than the episode title.

I've said this before, but "white guilt" is just shorthand for "white awareness of structural factors which unjustly benefit you, and which you must therefore resist and work to dismantle".

Is it still necessary to point out that “human rights are a Soviet plot to use the inferior races to undermine and destroy white civilisation” is literal Mein Kampf stuff, by the way? I would like to think people can spot Nazi ideas when they see them, but it’s hard to be confident any more.

Shamima Begum was the beginning of something in so many ways, one of which was 'the last government's inability to just do its job properly (in this case by passing legislation that would have allowed it to prosecute her here at home) and instead going 'no option but to undermine all our rights'.

This Sauron? Sauron who had the biggest security lapse in fantasy history? Once again, evidence that billionaires are dumber than fucking bricks, with 0 reading comprehension. Tolkien couldn’t facepalm hard enough if he tried.

Crossing the Rubicon but shaking my head the entire time so the other legionaries know I disagree

As previously noted: if Rebecca Long-Bailey had won that leadership election then it seems quite likely to me that we would now be in the second term of the Johnson government, oblivious to the scandals, and “Partygate” would still just be some photos saved on a phone in Dominic Cummings’ desk.

I dislike AI because it's exploitative, made by the worst people in the world, and used primarily to justify firing people. But it really does not help that almost every AI defense I've seen employs one of several rhetorical moves that immediately make me class the author as an unserious person.

This exposes the core lie on which the entirety of “gender-critical” transphobia is based. The transphobes’ entire campaign is based on the false claim that they represent cis-women. The number of signatories to this, is way higher the number of signatories to their transphobic WDI “declaration”.

Oct-Dec 2021: - Labour uses conference to lock left candidates out of leadership - Johnson uses conference to tell the press to fuck off, because he is leader on merit - MPs’ second jobs scandal noticed - Sexual harassment scandal noticed - Partygate noticed - Johnson tanked to hated enemy status