Fuck. Mandelson insisting on being Ambassador has denied us of his true calling - being on the second season of Celebrity Traitors

Republicans once again threatening us with a good time

Literally only watched the last few minutes and was spellbound by Carr's psychological domination over everyone. This is what Dusty Rhodes wanted when he had everyone put him over in promos in the 1980s

Without DEI, we would only make merit-based hires, like the genius strategist who decided to pick a fight with his boss’s new young wife.

We all like to rag on the BBC but just because the Labour Party has been using a phrase for decades doesn't mean its not vague without a clearly defined meaning. Have you met the Labour Party!?! If don't believe me, explain the definitional difference between Democratic Socialism & Social Democracy

Douthat is being badly exposed by being asked to be an actual public intellectual rather than a court jester the NY Times employs to show liberalism can take some light mockery in good humour

Baby Talk begets Baby Talk

Obviously Wes is very calculating, yadda yadda But things are actually quite bad in terms of the increase in racist harassment of Black and Asian staff within the NHS since the summer, and that must have been fed back to him

Tbh the government should have paid more attention to the local election calendar! The time to put up the main taxes was in the first budget ‐ because hardly any Labour councils were up in 2025. Now they're stuck because there's no time to get the pain out of the way without serious consequences.

All In 2025 is going to age like milk at this rate. Didn't blow off the Death Riders storyline, Ospreay/Strickland alliance went nowhere, Young Bucks still dicking around as heels despite losing, Okada nor Storm kicked on as champions, Dustin is MAG & we're back to 4 sodding male single champions.

www.ft.com/content/5480... This speaks to something I've been mulling over. The emphasis on the OBR headroom suggests that Reeves isn't planning a big tax increase to give her genuine headroom & she's still scratching around for small tax increases she wouldn't need if she was increasing income tax

Genuinely lost control at the "so many meetings about birds" point

Lots of politics nerds would be amazed how little lots of politicians care about political knowledge.

10000% This! A May 2023 Election would have been very interesting.

Every day I get a little bit more annoyed at the condescending "that's just how FPTP works, idiot" guff in response to people saying the underlying facts of the last election should set off massive warning lights for Labour

...and the latter has typically been the desperate plea of a dying government. Call me radical, but doing all you can to create the conditions for the former seems a better use of your time in office. It even has some non-electoral benefits.

What I would also add to this, is four more years of politics being focused on Left-Liberals vs Reform will do profound damage to race relations even if Reform is ultimately defeated. Everywhere you go people are reporting increased racist abuse & the coarsened public debate is visible in the media

okay this is impressive but also this is more fuel for my belief that there are simply too many states

A big lesson from the NYC Mayoral Race & one that's been proven many times before, is that bringing back semi-retired veterans because they've got lots of money left in their PACs is a better way to race into early opinion poll leads based on name recognition than actually winning elections

And on the Equality Act, whilst I understand the disclination to reopen the whole thing given the arguments and backsliding it could provoke, Parliament needs to pass an act which provies a clearer steer to the courts about what is and isn't a protected belief. Because this is getting out of hand

We are seeing this continual collapse of all political beliefs short of the Article 17 criteria (an incredibly high bar - ie basically holocaust denial) into protection under philosophical belief and the consequences are utterly bizarre. The law in this area is a complete mess.

To go one step further, it was meant to be philosophical beliefs that placed a burden on the believer akin to religion i.e. fasting, eschewing medical treatment, not eating certain animals. This was to prevent a double standard when accomodating secular and faith-based rationales for the same issue

The haters said I couldn't do it and they were correct. Honestly, great call from the haters.

I'm in North America. These election results are mildly interesting, but we've been here before. Structurally the Democrats have a problem because of the absence of any leader. The Republicans suffered from the same problem, which is how they were taken over by a populist insurgent. /1

imagine if the americans knew about that norwegian commentator.

I really don't think Labour is ready for how badly Reeves going back on years of promises is going to go down

If she had any decency or self-respect she would resign - mistakes and failures of her magnitude must have consequences itcouldbesaid.substack.com/p/it-could-b...

I'm as guilty of it as anyone else (okay I'm more guilty than most) but the way to think of AI-art is the industrialisation of memes. We've had tools for over a decade that allowed any idiot to compile disparate images into a joke, and some could even do it with video. Now AI makes it seemless

Stuff like this always gives me pause when it comes to yimbyism. Sometimes empowering people to say No to dumbass ideas is a good thing

Linear TV is dead, amirite!?!

To prove that there are no great causes left, Stephen actually commissioned me to write about this in the New Statesman ten years ago www.newstatesman.com/business/eco...

Yes, the irony of Americans fulminating against Protestant settlers in 17th century Ireland always struck me as quite a poignant one.

Another great clunking debunking by Emma Monk. Do follow her!

The Halo ICE meme is a litmus test for those that understand what government propaganda is and isn't. Companies putting on politically adjacent events, and cosmetics in their games for things they actively support and believe in is not the same as the DHS using Halo as a "meme".

It's a real problem because actually believing what you consume in the media is a pro-system attitue that was the backbone of post-war stability. But that only works if the media is itself responsible and pro-stability, which it obviously isn't now. So you get conscientious people totally deformed

Discovering that Jerry Briscoe and Pat Patterson were legit legendary wrestlers rather than just Vince McMahon's bumbling, elderly stooges.

Ban X in the UK. It's a misinformation factory.

I see your worthy "why are you still on X" posts and sorry but we've gone way beyond that, no such incendiary publication would be allowed in printed form so why are we still thinking this should be allowed online?

Random Income Tax Thoughts Lower IT Personal Allowance to £8K New IT bands of 15p, 25p, 35p, 45p & 55p Restore Universal Child Benefit & Personal Allowance Restore Inflationary Increases In Thresholds From 2027 Lower NI Employee to 1% & Pledge To Abolish After Review Measures to Raise £50bn Net

I think its now got to be the case that respectable people should just refuse to appear on panels with Goodwin, even if that means cancelling on the BBC at short notice.

We're now at "black people aren't British". Open sewer racism. Look forward to seeing him on QT again soon.

Next time someone tells you that train drivers "just push buttons" show them this from the BBC

When Digital Foundry went independent, one of the new things we wanted to do was a brand-new retro podcast. Thanks to the massive efforts of John and his friends, the DF Retro Super Show goes live today, revisiting the launch of PlayStation 2. youtu.be/DqtLH0MOkgI

I would go slightly earlier - it's Brown rejecting Merkel's offer to be the first President of the European Council. He accepts that, makes way for David Miliband or Alan Johnson, they run a more energetic election campaign and are a better fit to go into coalition with Nick Clegg....

People wonder why the high street is dying but given my odyssey this morning has me about ten seconds from a psychotic break it’s a surprise there’s any shops left at all

Honestly, I kinda want 2028 to be Trump versus Obama just to see Obama’s political instincts unleashed on a man he truly despises.

I'm sure this is true to a certain extent but Douthat is just a conservative ideologue that is looking for any excuse to argue that people should agree with him

This is also important because the whole Labour ‘stability premium’ stuff had largely been achieved by Sunak / Hunt - Important Caveat - vs Truss *but not* austerity and Brexit which Labour appear to largely support.

'Have you considered just doing your day job properly?' - British politics 2019 to ?