The 51st state. Trump demands that the UK allows American chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated meat into its supermarkets. UK already agreed to pay more for US drugs, reduced tax on private equity managers, considering cutting tax on tech companies. 'Tacking back control', someone said.

I have been a good mask-wearer but I have somehow managed to pick up my first cold since before the pandemic. My throat is full of razorblades and my nose is full of the unmentionable. Absolutely and entirely fuck this.

End sentences with prepositions if you like. The idea that you shouldn't comes almost entirely from Dryden being snarky about Ben Jonson. Like the nonsense taboo on split infinitives, it's based on a snobbish desire to make English sound more like Latin. I'll go with Jonson over Dryden any day.

was it your christmas wish to listen to three people collectively lose their shit over a meritless polemic? well then, belated christmas, you filthy animals.

An essay I wrote about a great female antagonist, one of Shakespeare's neglected early triumphs, Queen Margaret in the First Tetralogy... www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/tricky-...

Share a great female antagonist

Also, thanks to bad writing, they seem to be saying that Michael and Peter are laden with pseudoscience, oversimplifications, and questionable data. Sentences have subjects, NYT.

'Owned' is a very good book. Taibbi is full of shit.

this isn’t even a political statement btw it’s a craft one. A plotless novel is fine. A choiceless one is bad.

Ana Kasparian praises Tucker Carlson. She praises his frequent guest, Douglas Macgregor, who is a far-right Russian propagandist. Calls Tucker influential with the anti-war left, and says he "brings up some thought-provoking points on a lot of issues that I care about."

"We would know!" cried Megan as Batya sat there going "mmm hmm"

Thread

As Hannah Arendt put it: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." Undermining that distinction will be a lasting legacy of generative AI.

The fact that Martin and Sinatra were both the sons of immigrants is the point here, emphasised by the reference to "the third world". He's telling you he wants America to be a homogeneous white ethnostate.

Wealth is, amongst other things, a way for utterly talentless knownothing mediocrities to buy attention to their opinions which they do not deserve and which no sane society would voluntarily afford them.

Utterly shameful that this farrago was published, let alone that it is being given awards by 'reputable' periodicals. It is a very revealing book, but only indirectly, in that its existence and reception reveal the terrifying bankruptcy of American intellectual and journalistic standards.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. Here, the intersection of the timeless moment Is England and nowhere. Never and always. - T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

This is why it’s so important to trace things back to the beginning whenever possible. I believe @rauchway.bsky.social calls these “historical urban legends”

Please join us over at the Horror Christmas Calendar for my own contribution, "Never Again" (read by David Court). Huge content warnings: I wrote it in a particular frame of mind. A holly-jolly Christmas it is not. youtu.be/8-_jK2uaxnE?...

When a Christian Nationalist hears someone say “You believe what you want, but I don’t agree with you” what they generally hear is “I think you’re evil and should be silenced.” This is what they call “projection.”

To people on the Right, phrases like "this is true" or "I believe this" mean "I like this... this serves my interests... this makes me feel good because it confirms my prejudices". Conservatism is, baseline, the political wing of sociopathic cynicism. Trump, as usual, just elevates it to new levels.

Technically, Trump doesn't "lie". To lie, one must wish or expect to mislead. Trump is doing something else. He is informing people of the propositions to which they must publicly accede in order to be considered loyal.

Please join us this Christmas night for @timescarcass.bsky.social 's superb contribution to the Horror Christmas Calendar, Medusa: youtu.be/qUuDc4I7lsI?...

The audiobook of my new Christmas ghost story, read by @elliotchapman.bsky.social, is up over at @exaggeratedelegy.bsky.social's channel. youtu.be/qUuDc4I7lsI?...

He'll gladly renounce the millions of dollars profit he makes from undercutting the rest of the drugs market, as soon as someone solves the riddle of the sphinx + gordian knot multiplied by fermat's last theorem that is how to set up a health care system like most industrial countries already have.

Plenty of scope there then.

Hang in there mate, you're nearly there...

My essay about Christopher Lee's readings of M.R. James stories for BBC Scotland in 2000. Happy Christmas to all who celebrate, especially to those like myself who celebrate spookily. www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/an-even...

An absolutely harrowing ghost story by @timescarcass.bsky.social befitting the Christmas season.

It's always a treat when I'm surprised by a new post on my own site, and this new short story by @timescarcass.bsky.social is as lovely a Christmas present as I expect to get this year. www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/medusa-...

The Guv'ner.

Give it up for 70s BBC scream queen Anna Cropper.

Milton Johns

Labour supporters are the most homophobic and almost the most transphobic.

It's what I said it was: a sex trafficking operation run by a network of rich rapists with Epstein as money hub, farming girls out to other rich rapists. And a cover-up so shambolic the fucking Krassenstein muppets could uncover it.

At the end of the book, Bob Cratchitt is late for work on Boxing Day. But for the spirits, Scrooge would fire him. That's why Tiny Tim is dead in the alternate future Christmas that Scrooge is shown. The Spirits don't intervene to save Scrooge; they intervene to save Tim.

One of my favourite videos ever. Hilarious. youtu.be/SwPCmHURZzE?...

The 2025 Horror Community Christmas Calendar is up and running over at @exaggeratedelegy.bsky.social's channel. Stay tuned for more stories. youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Marjorie Taylor Greene and the future of MAGA. Latest for @theintercept.com

The best writing advice I can give is: relish language.

This victim told a driver that she couldn't report Trump raping her because "They will kill me." In 2021, another victim said that Epstein told her girls who don't behave are fed to alligators and took her where they die. He threatened to kill her and her son.

I understand where it comes from. Bad writing often takes the form of info dumping. But this is to mistake cause and effect. Its not bad because its telling; its just telling badly. Showing badly is just as possible but can be harder to spot. I think it comes from aesthetic prejudices of Modernism.

My essay about Christopher Lee's readings of M.R. James stories for BBC Scotland in 2000. Happy Christmas to all who celebrate, especially to those like myself who celebrate spookily. www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/an-even...

The walls are closing in www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/nationa...

For years I've been hearing the left are all about feelings over facts, participation trophies, etc. Now an instructor has lost their job because adults with child brains don't think they should be marked down for ignoring assignments and instead listing the opinions of their imaginary sky friend.

There’s always this idea that people on the left are siloed when it comes to where they get their political information from, but then you ask conservatives and… www.city-journal.org/article/manh...

Weird how The Free Press was able to publish all of these without comment from the Washigton University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital.

The through line of Weiss's journalistic ethos is that criticisms of conservatives are stale the moment they're uttered because they're predictable, but literally any take that cuts against a liberal/left line is a bold insight never before heard or seen in such startling fashion

Y'know what happened to all the journalists in 1930s Germany who decided to go along with the Nazi regime and help them? Mostly nothing.

I highly recommend watching this segment, not just because the CBS News execs and the White House didn’t want you to, but because these men were tortured and they deserved to have their voices heard.