Rasputin never bathed and was illiterate. Con men allow the vanities of the self-obsessed wealthy to do 95% of their work for them.

Who could have foreseen that trying to make the police more democratically accountable without having any actual democratic accountability would prove to be pointless and expensive? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

We're doing the 'he can chair a meeting' thing with Streeting again this time? After it went so brilliantly with the transparently disastrous 'human rights lawyer' last time?

If you were writing a murder mystery, the moment where the protagonist discovers that the victim had been sent hundreds of wildly incriminating emails by dozens of potential murderers before they mysteriously died in prison would come across as deeply hackish.

I repeat: very much looking forward to Wes Streeting being the first sitting PM to lose his seat in British history.

For 15 months, Harris was the *Vice President* in an administration which armed, enabled, promoted, and lied on behalf of a genocidal terrorist state. Literally everyone said that this would be fundamentally corrosive. We were told that this was infantile, or, worse, necessarily antisemitic.

In the dying days of the Terror, Robespierre became convinced there was a plot to oust and execute him, and so moved to quash it. There was no such plot. Except, there was now! Robespierre's opponents, motivated by his growing paranoia, overthrew and executed him days later.

Soooo logging into your work network from home? Banned. Getting Netflix from another country? Banned. Young people hiding their sexuality from abusive conservative parents? Banned. As usual, prurient censorship sweeps up a whole bunch of vulnerable people. Which is largely the point.

Unfortunately, we tend to appoint them as Ambassador to the US.

Yet again: the very worst possible quality of a government is *inconsistency* - doing the right thing too late. Thus, they get the worst of all worlds: all of the approbrium from the Left for making the wrong decision, and no credit from the Right for sticking to their guns. Abysmal.

This is the power of a public counter-hegemon: a national political voice that can contest the establishment / fascist narratives spun by the right wing media. In reality, they are brittle, and can be smashed. This is the massive value of the Green Party's current trajectory.

There's a seductive surface-level obsession with how minor events or the acts of a single individual can lead to world-historic shifts (the 'Great Man' theory; the Butterfly Effect etc).

A group of powerful national journalists choosing to single out the healthcare of a vulnerable minority for a campaign of intense laser-like scrutiny would, in an humane society, be described as an insane radicalised pogrom. But on Normal Island, that's a Wednesday.

'Death By Lightning' is a staggeringly good historical drama. Shannon's performance as self-effacing and humble James A. Garfield is pitch perfect; Matthew Macfadyen's delusional and earnest Charles Guiteau is heartbreaking. Incredible evocation of Reconstruction US. Phenomenal - massive recommend.

Fascists: Look! This institution of state has a permanent left-wing bias! It's secretly run by communists! Conservative pro-capitalist institution of state: Oh god we're so sorry our left-wing bias offended you, fascists. Please, accept the human sacrifice of our secret communist department head.

So the months of grinding expenditure of political capital, threatening, ridiculing, cajoling, suspending your own MPs - was not only morally gutless, but also wildly self-sabotaging? Recite after me: we have always been at war with EastAsia. The two-child benefit cap has always been bad.

"We need to create such a hostile & unwelcoming environment for illegal migrants that the vast majority deport themselves" = make the country dysfunctional, dangerous and unlivable for everyone, because we cannot contemplate even one person liking it here. A quintessentially British sentiment.

The BBC has a long record of doctoring footage. But consequences only seem to follow when the Right are maligned. 1984: BBC reverses order of footage of Battle of Orgreave, portraying miners as aggressors. No apology. 2017: Newsnight edits interviews with Corbyn. No apology; Kuenssberg promoted.

The problem with politics in a depoliticised neoliberal society (where there is only one 'choice', that of a maximally efficient market) - is that it becomes totally abstracted from issues, policies, people, etc - to mere 'message'. And 'the message' can change at any moment, right? ... Right?

The First World War was so unforgivably pointless and horrifying that an entire generation of European workers very nearly overthrew capitalism for good. War is a racket. And worse, it opens the door to social forces outside of the control of the ruling class. They forget this at their own peril.

I'm sure it's a sign of a confident, secure government that it's having to tap up whatever access journalists it can to put out hit pieces on a party that currently has 4 MPs.

Who is Labour for? Older voters in 'Red Wall' ex-industrial areas have gone Reform. Young people in London and other inner city areas have gone Green. Looks like we're down to half a dozen polprofs who still think Starmer is playing 4D chess. Masterful gambit sir.

Huh I didn't know the guy who discovered the double helix in DNA was still alive *cursory Google* Oh NO

My least radical opinion is that living well, beyond mere survival, is a fundamental human right that should not be tied to one's capacity to 'work full time'. Poverty is an unnecessary evil in a world where we already produce more than enough for everyone. Its only use is to discipline labour.

Cursory glance at the comments under the Telegraph's wall-to-wall frothing apoplexy at poppy-less David Lammy at PMQs (and, horror, being handed one halfway through which he pinned to the *wrong side of his jacket*) - 'aggressive', 'savage', 'should be in a cage' etc. Qwhite on the nose.

Literal actual outright public neo-Nazism eliciting some mild tutting (masking tacit approval from equally antisemitic neoliberal elites), whilst anti-genocide activists are painted as Hitler 2.0. www.thenational.scot/news/2559354...

Just in case illusions have grown in the past 24 hours: the Democratic Party will learn nothing. They will continue to view Mamdani and the groundswell of grassroots activists who got him there, as childish communists who have nowhere else to go. The next task is to prove them entirely wrong.

In the closing years of the Ancien Regime in France, the King's finance ministers advised him of a strategy of confidence: using a combination of overtly lavish public consumption and secret loans to trick the public into confidence in the solvency of the Monarch. Then, as now, it did not work.

Whilst *another* senior partner has been caught out citing cases which have been hallucinated by AI, one of the UK's biggest law information platforms LexisNexis are pumping out cringeworthy AI slop adverts and rebranding as 'AI first'. Feel like I'm going insaaaane

Mamdani's victory is not only a victory over the fascist Right, it's also a fundamental repudiation of corporate Democratic strategy. The dynasty candidate literally tried to run as a wrecker against the legitimate primary candidate (with the tacit approval of Dem leadership), and *still* ate shit.

Again - Mamdani is not anyone exceptional or unique. He's just a guy who isn't a black-hearted glass-eyed corporate homunculus, who espouses policies based on basic kindness. Every right-wing ex-social-democrat will lay claim to his victory, whilst stripping it of its threateningly humane content.

Please god expose this weird little briefcase-clutching homunculus to even greater public scrutiny. Place his scrawny body upon the lectern, and let us see his revolting twisted form for what it truly is. Release the sausages!

Huh strange that 'vote blue no matter who' ceases to apply the moment the blue in question is mildly left-of-centre. Almost as if this electoral 'coalition' was in reality merely a coercive guilt trip designed solely to prevent a third, pro-working-class party from emerging to the Democrats' Left.

There's a strong possibility that the bond markets (ie a handful of City traders & sovereign wealth funds) will see the Budget as a chance to effect regime change by performatively throwing a shit fit if Reeves passes even the palest tax rises on high earners. Do not be fooled - it will be a coup.

This headline is obviously designed to elicit horror and shock... Whereas in reality, it just illustrates how tragically recent this moral panic is. Literally nobody even raised an eyebrow at another woman using the women's facilities. Because it never was as issue. It still isn't.

If you dug up Karl Marx in the year of our lord 2025 and asked him 'Is class the only oppressive relationship that matters?' he'd say 'Don't be ridiculous, sure it's the dominant one which dictates the shape of capitalist society, but there were supposed to be eight volumes of Capital dawg'

There *is* a direct line from the securitized response to 9/11 (in which Cheney was key), the liberal institutionalisation of it under Obama, and its use to drastically expand repressive methods at home under Trump I, Biden & Trump II. Fascism is the application of colonial methods to the metropol.

I don't think anyone disagrees that glorified depictions of women's suffering are generally corrosive to society, but: 1. Does banning choking in porn address this? 2. Are bans on specific types of porn remotely enforceable? 3. Is there an easily available work-around such as VPNs, again?

Thucydides NUTS

The most toxic liberal impulse facilitated by the rise of fascism is the nostalgic lionization of monsters from our past. Dick Cheney was a monster, in his own time. He would be a monster now. If Hell exists, he is trying to clean up on the contracts for the burn pits.

Teen Vogue turned young people's non-specific anger at the state of the world towards incisive investigative journalism and material action in support of political candidates with transformative social agendas - and for such cardinal, unforgivable sins, of course they could not be permitted to live.

Liberalism is the belief that no violence is justified (except that which maintains your property), that no revolutions are legitimate (except the one which established your rule), and no outgroups should be victimised (except those which are being victimised right now).

I firmly and unironically believe that the large social media companies should be nationalised, and placed under management of a board comprising the company's workers, community representatives and media experts. Private ownership of social media, put simply, results in the promition of Nazism.

Every passing day makes me more certain that Labour will crash us out of the ECHR as a (desperate, futile) gamble to appeal to conspiracy theory-driven knuckledraggers who will remain eternally convinced that they are cryptocommunists.

I used to think that the Left-SR / Kronstadt slogan 'Soviets without Bolsheviks' was abstract and objectively counterrevolutionary - but in light of the endless willingness of the modern British 'dynastic' Left's endless willingness to court transphobes and landlords, maybe they had a point.

I really don't think that Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski have any kind of special, unique charisma. They're literally just two fairly ordinary blokes who talk about actual issues, who can answer a question directly, and are clearly having a good time. There is no magic here. We could all be them.

Time traveling French Communard from 1871: so you press the button and it summons the barricade to YOU?!

Does this make anyone feel more safe? Or is this just the creeping paramilitarisation of British policing along the lines of unhinged US police gangs, for the goals of persecuting outgroups - protesters, migrants, ethnic minorities, trade unionists etc?

For the avoidance of doubt, I ain't wearing a poppy this year, or any year. The poppy, once a warning of the futile, horrifying sacrifice of a whole generation of Europe's young men, is now welded as a blunt weapon by those who would gleefully do it all again.

Communists don't promote and organise the working-class for vibes or aesthetics, we do so because the working-class is the only cohesive force in society whose direct economic interests demand the abolition of exploitation and misery.