The Lowe handgun stuff is so revealing. It's a direct importing of American obsessions into a political culture that frankly doesn't give a shit. You could send out a thousand journos to a thousand UK high streets to vox pop and not find a single right winger who'd independently raise gun ownership.

I've said it before, but some of the Smithsonian DC museums are the best I've ever been to but laughably, from this cynical European eyes, US mythologizing and patriotic. Hilarious for the American right to go after them for not being conservative enough.

I don't think there are any easy fixes in politics, but breaking up Amazon, Meta and Microsoft would be a pretty easy win.

Once again : What women on the left already knew before the Epstein files + Platner is that men can imagine a world of class consciousness (Chomsky), a universe more expansive than ever before known (Hawking), a world where you can live forever (Attia) but not a world where women are fully human.

Peak millennial hipster behaviour, but I bought a machine that lets you print any picture you want on a Polaroid so I made one of Cactus Jack at the IWA Kawasaki Dream.

I normally find the Binface stuff annoying in ways I can never quite put my finger on, but the Farage stuff is admittedly pretty funny.

I would like players to stop gesticulating at the crowd.

It's dead odd with Trump because I'll get shocked at whatever shit he is up to this week - bribing FIFA - and then I'll remember he organized an honest to god attempted coup where he people died and they tried to execute the vice president and that America elected him again.

I liked the bit where the USA absolutely humiliated themselves on the pitch after all the naked and obvious corruption.

It's kinda wild American capitalism completely won, and that they're still shitting their pants over communism because some socially liberal values got folded in. In part, because of new global markets due to the whole global hegemon thing.

I think part of the problem in this whole mess is some people expect (hope?) the crisis will kill off the "right" universities (lower tier post-92s in unfashionable towns) and the "right" courses (SHAPE, particularly post-war). Landscape gardening by forest fire.

I think drawing attention to most Mexican food here is only going to make the Mexicans even angrier than they already are.

The "no one has done the reading" theory of social and political life.

This is the same for AI. They've pilfered the social democratic achievements of the long 20th century for long enough they've convinced themselves the whole system can run on profit and that they don't need to fund it anymore.

A very, very, very depressing (but inevitable?) trend I've started seeing is students AND staff introducing themselves as going to or working at a Russell Group university.

Peter Boghossian being "reckless and irresponsible", throwing around terms he seems to barely understand?? I'll believe that when I see it.

The system constantly requires people high up to "create" systems that generate huge amounts of labour for everyone else in order for them to "evidence" their own promotion.

It's certainly not a "landmark study". It'll be newspaper article overstates press release which overstates report which dramatically overstates extremely narrowly selected journal articles with small, experimental or very wonky methods, and very noisy data.

Boxing off a longer article developing the idea of "fanspiracy" a bit more, and hoping it serves as a useful overview of a bunch of ideas. And man sometimes it's useful to step back and think about how fucking weird the world has got over the last ten years.

It's a minor point from the episode, but @joshshepperd.bsky.social has done some truly amazing work on Adorno's (sort of) relationship with early broadcasting networks and cultures, @annieknk.bsky.social.

Though good news: I think I've finally squeezed my crack that all of political reality is now the off topic pages of an old fan forum into print. If Bethan and Simone let me keep it.

I keep trying to casually drop "metamodern" in my writing before deciding it causes more problems than it solves.

So I have a working theory about this that students say they want employability skills, but if you actually teach them employability skills they get furious about it. Because employment is pretty boring actually.

In peak Twitter I made a shite joke about how academics will bicker about inconsequential details on the internet because that's their job. A woman quoted me, claiming I was privileged and that she wasn't able to argue on the internet. I didn't reply, but I would have said "glad you're over it".

I see we have reached the "true Brexitism and true neoliberalism have never been tried" stage of the discourse.

Do you know what makes a heat wave even better? The baby having a sickness and diarrhea bug and shitting the bed at 3am.

It really is peak centrism punditry day. As if there wasn't tons of research that can explain why Starmer's strategic decisions had negative electoral effects. But centrist pundits simply seem to ignore research on why the centre-left is failing and misconstrue these arguments as normative leftism

I can't believe the pitch of "managed decline, but with better managers" has failed as miserably as it has.

In honour of recent events, I'm reposting my fave political graffiti when Andy was still in his "king of the north" era.

I have two cats. The vet we go to leaves informal comments for the staff. One cat has "nice cat" in the notes. The other has "VERY GRUMPY!!".

I feel like I should have lots to say about Trumpian White House UFC but I think I need a holiday and I don't have much of note to say.

I reckon there's some serious work to be done on how fandom is shaping the stock market at both institutional and retail levels.

This world cup is as bad as ever for "honey shots", being made worse that they're now clipped up for participatory media. Pretty grim really.

The world cup seems to have made the very, very boring transatlantic social media bickering about habits and customs even more intense than usual, and that's saying something.

I think I agree with the gist of this, but newspapers had pictures of 16 year old boobs on the third page, blamed any minority for every social problem, and empowered some of the worst men in history into untold power and money. They were definitely cursed.

I think a very useful heuristic in such circumstances is that whenever complaints are painted as "moved next to a club and now complain about the club" is that either the builders or council haven't delivered on something they promised and that the residents probably have a point.

Higher education got so panicked about its social function it started promising everything - more sensitive citizens, more democracy, better workers, conscientious neighbours, whatever you want - in a way I've never been entirely sure we can deliver on.

Has anyone told the US you hold sporting mega events to help improve your international reputation by generally behaving well towards your guests and hiding the worst parts of your society and regime's actions?

Judging by the worst but somewhat mainstream right-wing theories of "race" on Reddit, both the African and Celtic spirits are prone to violence. Postcolonial melancholia is a hell of a drug.

The TERF movement has been going for decades and the GC movement has been funded by multiple billionaires for over a decade and they STILL haven't come up with a biological definition of female that includes all cis women and excludes all trans women. Maybe that alone should tell you something

In Woke 2 I'm going to make Pixar make this movie and keep all the graphic bits in.

Nothing winds me up more than the national media ventriloquising working class people as having extremely far right views. Mixed race families, extremely nuanced views about race and ethnicity and nationality, friends and colleagues all collapsed into the racism that Tommy Robinson espouses.

Getting chastised by a fascist for not being fascist enough on the anniversary of the turning point of defeating fascism.

Terrible news, we have rolled some light TV time into baby Fern's routine and I have the hello song from Baby Club rattling around my brain almost non-stop and nothing will displace it and I'm concerned this is what the next 10 years of my life will look like.

This is why "hegemony" is always a much better theory than "overton window".

I saw the first half of Logan's Run on Moviedrome when I was 10 or 11 maybe and it'd be hard not to argue it was a formative experience!

Fuck off, Blair, you war mongering cunt.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that we are beyond what people called "postmodernity", but I also think if we dig up Baudrillard and explain the current set up he'll ask to be put back and woken up again when there's something properly new to get to grips with.

AI emails from random Gmail accounts offering to promote my monograph on wrestling via tiktoks and SEO. Erm, I'm alright?

30+ heat in Manchester with a clingy ten month old baby is not the one, ta.