Ed Miliband is entirely right about this. There are legitimate critiques of specific climate policies, but much of the criticism is either scientifically illiterate denialism or ‘it’s just too hard’ defeatism - and often it’s both. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

🔥 @agiftfromtodd.bsky.social : "Y’all get it now?? Do you understand what’s possible? I don't wanna hear no more 'my vote doesn't matter. Nothing ever changes.' Look what happens when you participate. We win everything. There are more of us… for the rest of your damn life, you gotta vote.”

Until I die, I will never understand why so many motorists think that “having a car” should give you special protections from doing crimes.

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women 🧵

Tax policy on the British left is pure "anti-bedtime left". Bizarre idea that you can have a big social democratic welfare state without everyone contributing properly www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Tax work progressively; tax wealth aggressively.

The principle that we all contribute to high quality public services and a welfare safety net is a good one. Solidarity is a virtue. It’s not progressive nor left-wing to attack it as a principle. We all contribute, but those with the broadest shoulders contribute the most.

Worth looking at how road planners nearly destroyed London in the '70s

The German word ‘Pferd’ and its Dutch cognate ‘paard’ are horses of mixed breed parentage. Their common ancestor came from Latin ‘paraverēdus’ (substitute post-horse), a word composed of an Ancient Greek element and a Gaulish one. Zoom in on my new infographic to learn everything about it:

London's Ringways are a whole network of unbuilt urban motorways threaded through the capital. There's never been a complete map of them,not even one made by their designers, until now. Today we're publishing the Ringways Map from @roads.org.uk to let you see in the city that London nearly became.

I don't feel like I live in the same universe as these guys, but I'm very confident that mine is the correct universe because I listen to what the guy says

The impact of ever larger cars - surely this is the major contributor to falling bus speeds in London. Calculations follow but over the last 25 years the growth in width of the average car is the equivalent of up c16% reduction in road width.

Knowing how many block lists you're on or who blocks you is loser behavior. I imagine I'm on plenty. That's none of my business. Why would I give a single shit?

Wirral care workers continue strikes in dispute over pay

Solid as a rock

Just found out that among his many other faults, Enoch Powell was one of those guys who don't believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Why are these people all the same?

My latest: Move over bat tunnel, here’s the wild story of how HS2 were forced to build a multi-million pound bridge for a road that… doesn’t actually exist.

Here's that thing again. You never hear that a sex offender has been arrested and it's a "white British national" (Ian Watkins) or "a white British national of Czech descent" (Ghislaine Maxwell). You only get these precisions if they're a non-white British national. Funny that. #EverydayRacism

Another one for my thesis that Conservatives have lost their minds because they can't accept that Thatcher failed *on her own terms*

Re: Alan Moore's 'read bad books' thesis, I genuinely think George Lucas did SFF a favour with the Prequel Trilogy, because we all spent years arguing furiously about what made them bad and what made the OT good. It was comparative lit crit for the masses (of nerds)!

Alan Moore knows the score

Is matter conscious? app.thenewworld.co.uk/story/144378...

‘If the violent, sexually transgressive, atheistical and generally self-destructive Marlowe had had a motto, then “What nourishes me destroys me” would have been more than appropriate.’ M.W. Rowe evaluates new evidence concerning the playwright’s only known portrait. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...

Good morning. Today I learned about the "trans women" vs "transwomen" distinction in usage. Sorry about that! Here's the fixed version, which I also changed on the main site.

I understand why people think grinding Mandalia Plains in Final Fantasy Tactics is a bad idea that sucks the life out of the game, but I simply disagree. aftermath.site/final-fantasy-...

In the current issue of Forgotten Ground Regained, I have the poems carefully ordered to illustrate different kinds of alliterative poetry. So if you want to learn about Old Norse (Viking!) poetry, read the poems in order in the links given below, or read this thread! alliteration.net/current-issue/

Came across this old interview with Shigeru Miyamoto in which he (inadvertently?) implies that 'Dr' Mario is guilty of some sort of medical malpractice:

Preach.

one of the points consistently mixed is that when we hear the Orcs they talk like British infantrymen in the trenches (including, as Tolkien notes in the Appendixes but leaves out of the main text, punctuating every sentence with "fucking")

In the most cringe variation of this possible, I now make a point of not looking at my phone in public beyond what's absolutely necessary and instead always read a book

Makes his own kimchi and likes the warm sound you only get with vinyl.

Minority representation on TV causes outrage From the new Private Eye, in shops now.

I’m really starting to suspect that most of the tech bros haven’t actually read Tolkien, as they certainly don’t understand it. The gentle hobbits save the “hard men” of Gondor, largely through compassion and selflessness. Not the other way around. The Christian parable is barely hidden!

Wait till they hear about my 'aunt', to whom I am not related at all

A basic issue a whole lot of Democrats and progressives have is that they assume “winning elections” is a solved problem, and the answer is some nice-sounding platitude like “listen to voters” or “help workers.” Then Dems lose and they go “Ah, guess we didn’t listen to voters/help workers enough!”

but the current alternative is "madmen who want to destroy the country and the world". you should have a plan not just for beating them next time, but for excising them from politics

I tell you what, though: I've come to have a very basic problem with the formulation "if liberal government doesn't do XYZ, fascism rises." This to me reflects one of the deepest & most enduring blind spots among the broad left coalition, namely ... they don't believe in the right. Lemme explain.

THEY UNCANCELLED DOCTOR WHO www.doctorwho.tv/news-and-fea...

"Cooperatively run structures are a path forward when we're seeing systems collapse." Proud to be one of 6(+???) worker-led newsrooms in @tinynewscollective.bsky.social. Here's how to join us, feat. interviews with our co-founder @maddiepoore.bsky.social and @soleilho.com of @coyotemedia.org:

Is saying that the Jews run the world antisemitic or just vigilant? Tune in for next week's episode of "is it racist to be racist"

Lakshya Jain working for The Argument putting together bullshit polls predicated on not giving respondents the proper context to make an informed choice so that he can get something clickbaity definitely tracks for a hack like him

I am so tired of 24 hour news about small boats. I simply don’t care how many migrants arrive in the UK any more. No matter how many, they’ll never be as big a threat to British values, our way of life, or indeed women‘s safety, as the bigots who make yelling about migrants their entire personality.

Vaxxed ✅ Hope it turns me magnetic!🤞

Here are my worst socio-political thoughts. I hope I am not really the person who believes these things. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/10/misa...

Reminded of how the Canadian liberals spent two years going “obviously it’s not as simple as just swapping out our incredibly unpopular leader who can‘t govern effectively with someone else” and then they actually tried that

Went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and found out there are members of the Royal Family descended from Oliver Cromwell: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathari...

Fucking great rabbithole. wiby.me

Something else I was getting at with this piece is the question of why some people think that their fave chatbot is a person, and it's basically just because it's really hard to think that something that talks to you doesn't have feelings: