At what point are we allowed to say that this is not the Epstein rot, or the Saville rot, or the Weinstein rot, or the Cosby rot, or the Worboys rot, or the Pelicot rot, or the Nassar rot, or the Sandusky rot, or the Watkins rot, or the Raniere rot, or the Jeffs rot, or th bsky.app/profile/fina...

The problem with social media is that you’re only allowed to hold opinions in batches. If you believe X and Y, you must also believe Z, which is atmospherically similar to X and Y and believed by all the same people. If you don’t do this, everyone hates you. It makes actual thinking impossible.

UK govt drafting legislation to remove Mandelson peerage, has referred information to the police www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cl...

This. I’m not a natural revolutionary to say the least but this whole mess is making me want to man the barricades.

This is the sort of crap that rightly enraged people against Boris, and Starmer falling for it shows how deeply politically inept he is.

I know this isn’t the main takeaway from this story, but Wambsganss is an actual surname??

This is a truly timeless piece... harpers.org/archive/1941...

The extent people have hallucinated a completely different novel based on a film version a decade or so ago and earnest online influencers will never not be fascinating to me

Oh no

Social media being toxic for adults as well is not a reason not to regulate it for kids.

Neil Gaiman. Still sad/angry about it.

Holy moly this chart: Cumulative US measles cases

Lib Dem gain the entirety of Surrey

This is so good by Freddie de Boer on Kanye and mental illness. freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-mental...

In my morning scroll of misery I’m seeing a lot of reposts of “TikTok is censoring anti-ICE content” but far fewer reposts of replies from people pointing out that their video of amusing cat antics is also blocked and that maybe the platform was experiencing technical issues

OMG

He’s very good at this.

Would love to take daughter to NY, but it’ll have to wait.

Surely all over for Trump now he’s lost the ‘catbongos’ subreddit

They know what they say is untrue, they do not care it is untrue. The media know that what they repeat is untrue, they do not care it is untrue. Their supporters know what they are told is untrue, they do not care it is untrue. Telling the truth is not enough, unless people care about the truth.

Worth remembering when looking at the horrific scenes in the US right now that both Reform and the Tories have pledged to bring in ICE-style organisations to the UK if they win power

Corrupt kleptocrat’s death squads execute second dissident as military round up clergy and terrorise cities in chaotic lawless petro-state.

Completely unoriginal thought but: it's frustrating that the actual experience of living in large cosmopolitan multicultural city (London Uk in my case) is actually pretty dope, but a lot of politics is organised around this being a nightmare scenario that must be apologised for and avoided.

So there are practical reasons the NEC might refuse Burnham. But there’s also the obvious politics here: Burnham is trying to quit his supposed dream job as mayor to become an MP, with less power and a lower salary, again. Having spent a decade saying he hated Westminster.

If the US were a geopolitical rival the headlines would be like: US Secret Police Execute Second Dissident In the Streets As Militarized Occupation Enters Sixth Week

We knew from the Google Glass experience that creeps and absolute dangers would pull the worst kind of shit with these things, and yet Meta went ahead with their pervert glasses and refused to listen to the women who said DON'T MAKE THESE.

Milburn’s grasp of the subject illustrated by his referring to ‘Child Disability Allowance’, which doesn’t exist. Does he mean DLA?

MSP airport. Clergy risking risking arrest and a huge gathering of protesters. The song is, “Down to the River to Pray.”

I love Stephen. The face of a doomed WW1 officer and the wardrobe of John Travolta. #thetraitors

Absolutely the right result. So chuffed for them. #TheTraitors

GET IN #TheTraitors

Traitors or Faraaz to win please - the others are useless. #TheTraitors

Today I am thinking in particular of the family of Guardsman Daniel Probyn, from Tipton, serving in the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, killed in Afghanistan on 26 May 2007. How dare the US President insult his family and his memory, and those of all our British service personnel who were killed

Books are good actually

What is the point of them

Fucksake. #TheTraitors

Starmer maybe rightly doesn’t take bait each time but he needs an outrider - a semi-licensed “off message” attack dog - to make Haw-Haw Farage pay for sucking up to the guy who denigrates British war dead.

My brother fought in the infantry and lost soldiers in Afghanistan. The press used to report deaths before families had been told and I would check my phone over and over, scared it would ring. I went to the inquest of one of his killed men. I saw his red-eyed parents, girlfriend and baby daughter.

Fuck you.

I cannot tell you how absolutely infuriatingly this stuff comes across to Europeans. When we say America is no longer a reliable ally, it goes considerably deeper than Donald Trump himself. This kind of complacent, condescending shit is a *huge* part of it.

“How can I hate women? My mum’s one.”

Yet again can’t help noticing that lots of the people vocally opposed to a social media ban for under-16s don’t have kids. I know Jonathan Haidt overstates his case, but he didn’t invent the anxiety around kids’ smartphone/internet use; he’s tapping into something that already existed.

From Terry Pratchett's 'Guard's Guards' when the guild leaders have to accept the demands of the dragon:

This victory lap Zack and supporters are doing would be earned if he’d been derided for saying the US should be kicked out of NATO, but what he was actually derided for was calling for the UK to leave NATO

Rare combative tone from Keir Starmer on the Trump tariffs tonight, as he stands up for Greenland/Denmark. "Applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of NATO allies is completely wrong. We will of course be pursuing this directly with the US administration."

This surely makes sense.

I am wondering at what point some variant of "it would be good for Beitain to move closer to Europe" becomes a significant strain of thought in Europe again. I understand why there is caution - but it still feels like there must come a point where the advantages outweigh the bullshit