Winter has cast its spell on South London. There's frost upon the pile of fly-tipped sofas this eve.

Listen I'm not saying this with complete authority but the only times I think the Royal Navy operated this widely on such a wide ranging and unfocused basis was the anti-slave trade operations

For the record, I can barely speak Portuguese beyond a few tourist phrases 😅

The Bakerloo Line stuff is the most pathetic talking point to come out of the British right. The Conservatives hallucinating a national malaise as a result of their own (correct!) decision to get as much our of the old rolling stock, which has a trade off in terms of maintenance.

Are there any other countries whose "patriotic" publications pay foreigners to write about what a hellhole they think their country is?

I don't know what to call it, but there is a very common and annoying social media phenomenon where people demand validation for mildly antisocial behaviour, instead of just feeling mildly guilty about it like a normal person.

A little treat for fans of noughties rom coms & internecine socialist shenanigans

Again: if you think that going “it’s a problem if you can’t see what is objectionable about this mural” is “silly”, you yourself are a racist and an appeaser of racists, just like the government we now have.

Every so often I run into one of the sanctimonious "pet ownership is unethical" types, and 100% of the time it turns out they don't know how pets end up in shelters. They think it's a supply-and-demand situation where if people stop adopting then the cat factory will simply cease production. 🤦‍♀️

Under new plans to be unveiled by Labour, UK citizenship test has a whole section on Northern Ireland. If you get any of them right, you don't get citizenship.

we decided to give the computers that run society the weakness from the 1966 television show "star trek" where you can argue with them in plain english to defeat them

Listen I understand some people might not know this but the big lesson of the World War Two thing was that "determining the value and traits of people based on genetics is bad, actually"

We are about six to eight weeks away from someone saying that this country was destroyed by the Empire Windrush in a public forum

The natural home, just from an 'what is the audience' for Doctor Who outside of the UK is 'what streaming service has Star Trek' and IMO Doctor Who also consciously benefits from the awareness it should be more 'domestic' than Star Trek.

This is absolutely right. It’s about creating a permission structure for violence, whether that violence is conducted by the state directly or simply permitted by the state.

None of these people believe that Richard Ayoade, Cole Palmer, Zadie Smith and David Olusoga are going to form a squadron of “The Fighting Miscegenates” and start a war against their own parents.

LMAO. If you think this is true of Star Trek (or any sci fi), it is because you affirmatively pushed non-male Trekkies out of your group with sexism and you should work on that.

How does this timid quote tally with what Keir Starmer said in his speech - and in his interviews - just a fortnight ago?

A putatively nationalist movement is being built upon rejecting everything that made Britain actually distinctive and turning it into a particularly shitty toxic version of online America.

As Yom Kippur ends, sending my support to all those grieving and/or frightened after today's horrific attack in Manchester

yet again the only person in the Labour Party who understands comms is Ed Miliband

I think this media habit has become such a problem it needs an embarrassing nickname - 'bookie journalism' or 'Mystic Meg' or something - which should be thrown back at journalists every single time they do this.

"it's your own time your wasting"

I don’t talk about this publicly, but hegseth drives me out of my silence. I attended West Point from 1998-2000. I left, along with about 5 other young women, as a direct result of the military’s then-shameful (non) policies addressing sex harassment and assault.

The level of drug abuse in this White House must be off the charts compared to previous administrations.

Wait. So he knew about the island and refused to go, but didn’t say anything to anyone about what he knew was going on there?

nobody expects the Fabians

8. If you select Tuvix lives in that new Voyager game you should have your Steam/Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo account banned

The radicalisation happening of UK elites is bad, bodes ill for the future, but is also, to be clear, really really funny quite a lot of the time.

What is the point of this government? I cannot imagine many Labour members, supporters or voters thought “what this country needs is a de facto ban on civil service staff networks”. I’m so damn tired. www.gov.uk/government/n...

Yes! This! I want Labour politicians to be honest obsessed with carpet bombing reform. I want true, deep, passionate hatred for that party and all it stands for. I want “if Reform declares war on hell, I will have good things to say in the commons for the devil.”

Repost for Irish Film Classifications by Damien Owens, because it's just come up in FB memories and it's still *brilliant*.

my kingdom for a moral argument

The annual festival of “stop hitting yourself!“ aka the BBC’s commentary on Lib Dem conference.

This person is called Pissshitter because their takes are both piss and shit. Asking the average American to engage with “revolutionary leftists lit” is like trying to draw blood from a rock, just ain’t gonna happen. You meet people where they are, not where you want them to be in your imagination.

Where the separate divisions of ANTIFA landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944:

Our party is poorer for not having Angela Rayner out in front.

Have faith people, have faith

Suspect the precedent of having breached the ministerial code, despite having acted with integrity, might be problematic for more than just Angela Rayner

If Rayner had set out to minimise her tax bill, she could have waited til her son turned 18 before buying the Hove house. She didn't because she wasn't trying to minimise her tax bill.

Having followed the Rayner saga over the past week and a bit, the main sense I've gotten from the press (and not just the right wing outlets) is that working class people (myself included) aren't welcome in politics, should keep away from it, and if we do get involved will be hounded out!

The Rayner thing is just the turd on the icing of a shitty fucking week for news. Utterly depressing. Hounded out by the nothing-to-declare Tories and the morally unimpeachable Mail and Telegraph. Fuck it all. I've had enough news now, thanks. I'm fucking full up.