A celebration of journalists' outsourcing critical thinking to whatever presentation politicians serve up. It's NOT inevitable, Sam. You COULD apply some judgment, instead of pretending you are an infant looking at different things dangling from a mobile above your crib. Or is that too much work?

Just as an aside: I’m pretty sure Charlie Kirk never actually said this to JD Vance.

Pity a thought for the seething rage of the terfs who spent all summer planning for their big moment and big speeches at conference, only to be reminded, yet again, that the rest of the party thinks they're a bunch of extreme weirdos and won't even give them the time of day to debate them. Tragic.

It's always the same. The far-right is only as "popular" as it is because of the billionaire fascists behind it. All these "men of the people" are backed by the billionaire class they're supposed to be against. That's why they get so much exposure. That's why they can afford to take so many holidays

One of the biggest mistakes journalists have made is staying on Xitter long after it became a consciously molded tool for spreading far right propaganda. They lost touch with reality. They have thus visibly struggled to understand the historic moment.

Fleetwood Mac isn't playing at JK Rowling's 60th birthday party. But that won't stop me reading that they are aaaaaaalllllll fckn day.

And, as ever with the transphobic @thetimes.com, they fail to mention what Boyne had actually said that upset people: He compared women who support trans rights to the wives in the Handmaid’s Tale who hold down young women for their husbands to rape. They unethically hide that from their readers.

Hadley Freeman in today's Sunday Times. "It feels like several millennia ago but can you remember the reaction to George Floyd’s killing five years ago? I’ll help: it was extremely weird." "The responses to Kirk’s killing are strikingly similar to Floyd’s five years ago"

We need to be very clear about this. Rising Christian nationalism is a threat to us all. humanists.uk/2025/09/17/r...

I’m in Vienna right now. A city which went from being the intellectual and cultural capital of the world to a “provincial backwater” (to quote Brian Barry) in a couple of decades due to nationalism, anti-semitism and fascism which drove away the leading scholars and artists it didn’t murder.

Yeah man we should really fight back by staying on X

This isn’t leadership. This is “we’ll be cowards without the basic political competence to articulate opposition. What will you do?”

Duchess of York calls Epstein a 'supreme friend' in resurfaced email

The colleges should do a deal and offer to build a statue of Trump or Jesus instead. Just to fuck with the attempt to impose control.

this charlie kirk deification is some of the weirdest shit i have ever seen

What they won’t have is any kind of strategy. Which makes the meeting pointless. Trump can just block and they’ll be stuck thinking “so, what next”.

That’s me in the video. And a Fox News host just celebrated me being assaulted by ICE. If ICE will do this to a congressional candidate with a big platform, just imagine what they’re doing to the people they’re kidnapping.

In case you thought I was exaggerating, here is the "debate" on Kimmel from Newsnight. David Frum explaining the horrific first-amendment-breaching executive overreach. British right wing hacks: bUt HiS jOkE wAs iNaCCuRaTe!

It’s because a) a lot of those people don’t bother to check what actually happens (there are rules governing transition with no evidence of remaining advantage) and b) a fair whack of them don’t care what the evidence is; they just hate trans people. (Speaking from experience of showing evidence)

I missed this. I mean, I know Vance is literally a fascist. But it’s still shocking to see.

Christianity as practiced is in a real fucking mess.

I see the curse of Dad’s Army has reached American television

I’m constantly impressed with how professionally incompetent professional politicians are. Real world empirical evidence shows the “trans athletes” issue is a non-issue. The rules in place were working pretty well. Trans athletes were very far from dominant. Probably at a certain disadvantage.

It wasn't so long ago that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka TR) was clearly beyond the pale for British mainstream politicians. But remember, people, Bluesky is in a bubble and the other place represents the full range of modern opinions. www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-p...

The Dutch rip the hell out of Donald Trump and Disney for the ridiculous Jimmy Kimmel firing. This is what you call Free Speech, Trump.

These are official state lies. Signing up to this text is capitulation to the regime of lies. Kirk was instrumental in the violent murderous insurrection. He laughed at violence against his opponents, and ran an organisation that facilitated harassment’s and death threats.

“The archbishop’s track record is consistent with the Catholic Church’s record of covering up child sex abuse allegations.” So typical MAGA ccrjustice.org/home/press-c...

I guess if you have difficulty with the idea of not killing everyone you don’t like, Logan, you’re giving yourself away.

You don’t expand the tent by adopting policies your base hates. You dumb fucks. CAMPAIGN TO PERSUADE MORE PEOPLE YOU ARE CORRECT How the hell do you think the right has power? By cleaving left? Is that what is going on? You dumb dumb fucks.

If someone goes from a media outlet to a government agency and then implements a policy attempting to prevent the media from reporting on the agency, what does that tell you about their media outlet?

This is a classic totalitarian move: everything is a state secret unless marked otherwise.

*A Centrist restaurant consultant walks into a pizza parlor* "I can't understand why you're not doing more to get people who hate pizza to come in here to complain about your menu"

Coursework vs Final exam

"Power has really gone to the tech companies, who have enormous influence over the government. And unless people get out of their apathy, that’s ... certainly where the U.S. is likely to stay." @garymarcus.bsky.social discussed what we need to do to prevent AI tools from undermining democracy:

This is just as some experts have been insisting for a while.

at one point Albania was on the brink of civil war after the collapse of pyramid schemes that had sucked up roughly half of GDP, and now that is only the *second* stupidest thing the country has done.

Heritage Foundation has released an absolutely insane policy proposal to label all trans people as domestic terrorists. It uses completely made up instances of terrorism and made up statistics but facts don't matter to them. They want us all eradicated.

To all the people who casually fell into the anti-trans moral panic: you are playing the role of antisemites in this current historical re-enactment. Yes, *those* antisemites. You fucking idiots.

And the way you get general skills is developing them to learn specific topics. So let people study what they want at uni; just focus on the quality of the courses.

Some of the things the Trump regime is doing give the clear impression they’re deliberately emulating 1933 onwards.

One of the charges against BlueSky is that the prevalence of negative attitudes towards GenAI demonstrates it’s in a bubble. But this survey suggests it may be more representative of actual populations.

1930s-era Nazis published headshots of "criminal Jews" in their papers. @nypost.com is publishing headshots of "criminal trans people". This, too, is fascism. And it's trying to manufacture outrage against trans people— just like the original Nazis.

gold

What about “fascists”, Dick? They’re running squads kidnapping people at will, they’re removing freedom of the press, they’re getting minorities fired from their jobs, and they’re disregarding the courts where they can’t simply install a corrupt goon. What about “fascists”?

The right’s grievance is that several years ago, Twitter took down posts of photographs of Hunter Biden’s penis

I have a theory that Keir Starmer suffers from imposter syndrome and that’s why he won’t stand up for the dignity of the office or the UK as a sovereign country.

"Foreign-born UK residents are much more likely to be of working age than the UK-born — and thus less of a fiscal burden. They tend to be healthier than the UK-born, and are much more likely to have a university degree. 75% have lived in the UK for more than 5 years and 90% speak good English."

👀

First Colbert, now Kimmel. Last-minute settlements, secret side deals, multi-billion dollar mergers pending Donald Trump's approval. Trump silencing free speech stifles our democracy. It sure looks like giant media companies are enabling his authoritarianism.

The beginning of this is what got Jimmy Kimmell suspended by order of the Trump regime. At what point do journalists stop cooperating with the White House?