My version of this would look so much more sophisticated if I had actually finished an album of Tenebrae singing modern choral music or Clare College’s recording of Imogen Holst’s choral works. As it is, my first one is the same as everyone else’s…

‘Unpopular policy.’ Tells you far more about how much American tech firms are out of touch with the realities on the ground, away from the Twitter algorithm.

Hearing rumours Taylor Swift has been dissing my girl Charli "XCX" Martel here?! Bring it on, TayTay.

GDPR is a great example of the sort of regulation which (I) creates a bunch of effort for people who want to comply (ii) gets innocently over-zealously deployed (III) becomes deployed as an excuse for orgs not to do things they don't want to and (iv)is fairly easily disregarded by those who want to.

Just drove past our local Synagogue (in Greater Manchester) and was pleased to see many still walking in and out for services amongst the very significant police presence

One reflection talking to other Jews today is how unshocking this is. Numbing, upsetting, scary but not shocking. We all knew it was coming. Given the enormous rise in antisemitic incidents in recent years, it's a surprise it hasn't happened more often.

The Right Reverend Dr David Walker, Bishop of Manchester, has issued a statement in response to the attack on Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue this morning. Read the statement in full: www.manchester.anglican.org/bishop-of-ma... @bishmanchester.bsky.social

Can’t wait for Taylor Swift to regeneration the Archbishop of Canterbury on Friday

The half time orange is another example of the curse of "Keir Starmer genuinely loves football but talks about it like an invader from Neptune who's read about it in his guide to earth"

Wasn’t the first one bad enough?

Looks like Dominion status is back on the menu, boys! (For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not serious!)

This is a clear sign that the Overton window has shifted when it comes to race and national identity. It’s a disturbing and dangerous change which goes to show liberal values aren’t universal or inevitable, but something you have to fight for.

Good grief, in this day and age? Anglican Christianity is not a religion of all humanity, nor is it the American civic religion (even if it’s had pretensions to be in the past). So who is this stuff for and what is it trying to say?

Just think: in a few years’ time you’ll have all your most iconic photos of this era set to do the Ken Burns effect, with a soundtrack of Taylor Swift songs played in a minor key on the piano.

I see the man who said Christianity has nothing to say about assisted suicide also thinks Christianity has nothing to say about migration.

Come on, @theguardian.com, call it “mass deportation plans.” Those are the words Reform used, don’t obscure it. (Not quite as bad as that BBC push notification given the plainer second headline, but still, no need to water it down…)

Absolutely agree! It is, at times, quite disturbing how much people a decade or so older than me have completely fried their brains on too much internet, and ended up politically loony. And that’s before we get to the boomer-oriented slop on Facebook.

Should have stopped the milk.

I’ll tell you what I’d do if I were Ms Reeves (after I’d recovered from throwing myself in a weir). That’s to do this, make it 5%, and then pin the threshold on the basic rate to the state pension and bin the triple lock. “Labour will never again tax your state pension.” It’s a good line, no?

I think my most 1st-gen-US-immigrant and least British liberal opinion is that this is basically fine, and could probably make a bunch of things easier.

forgive the double quote tweet, but... I increasingly feel like a big problem is the loss of the language of morality in politics? We're scared of it because awful people have historically used moral condemnation to be awful, but I do feel like you sometimes have to just go "this is just wrong"

Quite. So many Labour people on this website visibly have no idea of just how bad things have got for ethnic minorities since they came on, and how their visible indifference lands.

Much to like here, but I wonder how true it is in many place these days? Not so easy to twitch the net curtains in your three person flat share when your flatmate has a Teams meeting in the kitchen, and you need to find £1500 between you to pay the landlord each month.

As someone who has autism, (with the papers to prove it and all, and 5 years in special education), there is a great deal about autism that makes your life miserable. If there were factors that could be isolated as increasing its incidence, then yes, that’s absolutely something to care about.

People say "autism never used to exist" and then you go to the Natural History Museum and the exhibit has a caption like "Born in 1762, The Revd [name] was famously irascible, steadfast in his routine, and dedicated his life to collecting 25,000 rare beetle specimens".

Pol, most weeks we’re dangerous believers of medieval superstitions who are coming for people’s right to autonomy. Now you want to tell us how we ought to respond to the far right?

This is what a unique, perhaps even onetime, opportunity for Europe.

Nothing like choosing someone who failed to act on allegations of abuse to illustrate your campaign to *checks notes* let doctors help people kill themselves. Can’t see how that’s a bad look at all.

Peter Kyle, who followed his degree with a doctorate and then became an aid worker, says that the point of going to university is to start a business. I wonder if he could look his younger self in the face.

Has he… has he met the average American college student? I mean, I don’t suppose the overall motivation levels are all that different, but I can’t say my experience of my siblings’ colleges was that they were all future entrepreneurs!

what did y’all think ‘God always brings good out of evil’ meant? vibes? papers? essays?

It’s a hobby horse of mine, but one of the things that I think polling tells us again and again is that Britain is more socially liberal than much of Europe and than many of its own citizens think. And it’s happened comparatively quickly.

Foreign billionaires have no business trying to stir up violence on Britain’s streets.

Good to see this from a Labour MP. There’s too much in the social media ecosystem that rewards ‘tear it all down’ politics, and that’s particularly true where the owner of one platform is doing as much as he can to incentivize voices who he agrees with.

Them: “Supernatural evil can’t use machines. Machines can only do what they’ve been programmed to do.” Me:

“A cold-blooded murder, carried out in broad Caribbean daylight. An assassination. And a war crime.” This is the article you should read today.

Apropos of how quickly right wing politics in the UK seems to be moving towards accepting crazy positions on race and immigration, it’s instructive to look at how quickly a 20+ year old liberal social consensus around the place of trans people has collapsed.

Asylum seekers often have complex legal cases and a need to make backup copies. Indeed, many get seriously penalized for not having a sheet of paper. Banning them from photocopying seems necessarily cruel and pointless

18,000 water man may not be the hero we want. But he may just be the hero we need.

Some might say it’s easy for the leader of the Lib Dems to have a conscience. On the other hand, Ed Davey clearly does have one, and it is encouraging that there’s at least member of the our political establishment willing to stand up for what’s right.

Potentially putting Afghan asylum seekers who worked with the British armed forces into concentration camps and then paying the Taliban to accept them back Afghanistan so that they can execute them should be a greater cause for alarm than it appears to be.

Richard Slotkin makes the point in 'The Long Road to Antietam' that General McClellan seizing power and installing himself as a dictator was not nearly as implausible in 1862 as we think today. In the history of presidential republics in the Americas, an unaccountable strongman... isn't unusual.

Hard to beat that for a summary of how fragile constitutional institutions actually are.

Members of my family were tortured and killed in the Holocaust because countries like Britain said it wasn't their problem. Everyone said never again. And here we are. It's sickening beyond belief.

You know what’s a sign of church decline? Nobody turned that ‘New World Order’ meme about ‘You will own nothing and you will be happy’ into a Christian thing. Nobody even tried to ‘Youth Pastor Voice’ it. Won’t believe in the Quiet Revival until we get quality internet content like that.

Genuinely one of the best choices Mr Bush made: if you’re facing a crisis and there are children in the room, don’t alarm them. And perhaps the same thing can be said for a country as a whole. He made lots of *bad* choices. But he made some good ones that day.

Like all good jokes on Bluesky, the replies are a mix of Americans who are unhinged, Americans who strongly disapprove of any displays of humour and Americans for whom a sense of humour is proof of being Actually Evil.

A crucial thing to recognise about 'small boats' discourse is that it's not a 'right/left' issue. I mean, the Royal Navy is the most Traditional Institution as you can think of, and its code of ethics is completely out of kilter with the violence that many on the far right want to tacitly hint at.

Agree with all this but also, when Cummings et al say they'd like to *sink* the small boats, who do they imagine is going to do the sinking? Cummings seems to think it's the Navy, but the Royal Navy does its best to stop *enemy sailors* from drowning. Are they going to let asylum seekers drown?

Tinderbox Britain: How conservatives ended up praying for violence iandunt.substack.com/p/tinderbox-...