Would legalising weed for the purposes of fiscal responsibility link the two in a way that made weed look uncool? If so, this could even be sellable to Labour's puritanical wing.

As a white man, I hate AI for appropriating my culture of being confidently wrong about things while using Reddit as a primary source.

Seems like a thing the government *should* maybe consider stepping in to address - not to bail out the company but to support the pipeline by protecting frontline workers - given how close this is to a key priority

"Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

"at manchester city all we get is an orange and a cup of tea."

For as many years as anyone been counting two or more inmates been mistakenly released from British prisons most weeks. Record does not make it acceptable. System needs to be fixed. It does leave me asking why BBC now gripped by end-of-civilisation hysteria heard on Radio 4 Today programme.

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...

Obviously a lot of the dumb things about Neom are sui generis, but the stuff about the unfeasibly large quantities of material required does show why pretty much every sci-fi concept about space colonisation is just not going to work.

Going to use this to describe the writing projects I have abandoned

In 1773, a crack monastic order was dissolved by the Catholic church for a heresy they didn’t commit. Today, still wanted by the Holy Office, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help and if you can find them, maybe you can hire - the J-Team.

Conspiracy theory: Infantino has been bribed to do this, but not by Trump. The Nobel Prize reckon that if Trump get this then he'll stop bothering them and a small kickback is a price worth paying for that.

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

The thing about Racist Tradcaths is that they're basically trying to reverse-engineer their own bespoke Christianity based on a combo of criticisms leveled at the Church by liberal society and Warhammer memes. It's like if you tried to reconstruct Judaism from the pages of Mein Kampf.

to quote @slacktivistfred.bsky.social, vampires fear the cross *because* it is powerless.

In a lower register, I regret to say I realised that you can Shania-Twain-ify the NY mayor: "The best thing about Zohran Mamdani..."

Nate Cohn is uh.....losing it. "Did the 15 point uniform swing in these races prove that the Dems have a winning formula? NO. Did the 2 point victory of a private equity bro prove that woke is dead? YES"

Approximately 60k prisoners are released in the UK each year. The fact that that about 0.5% of these releases are of the wrong people is absolutely mad.

It's interesting that the NYC results map bears very little relationship to the map from the primary. Broadly speaking Cuomo's support looks like the usual Republican coalition plus 10% everywhere, plus the UES, whereas he didn't really hold on to the working-class minority votes from the primary.

On the one hand the Grainger Test is fundamentally a dumb one, because it protects all kinds of things that really shouldn't fall under the Equality Act. On the other hand, every application of the test is dumber than the last.

Dick Shotman United States, Census, 1950

It was a close-run thing, but my oldest T-shirt has just about outlived its subject.

VP Cheney will be honoured with a 21 gun salute accidentally aimed directly at 21 of his friends

The bit I remember about the Cheney shooting wasn't just that they made the victim apologise, it was that the accounts all heavily emphasised that they gave Cheney a drink afterwards to settle his nerves, which was clearly then trying to hide the fact he did it because he was blind drunk.

The thing about Cheney not backing Trump is that it was surprising not so much because he had scruples as because the Trump project is basically about overturning Watergate and that used to be Cheney's project too.

Got there in the end youtu.be/9Fwu73VoJZA?...

There is something magnificent about Nigel Farage, who has lost two of the five MPs he was elected with *last year*, explaining that HR departments don't matter.

A friend told me that her American dad got in touch to talk about some news he'd seen on Facebook: there are riots in England over DEI, and the King dramatically burst into parliament to tell Starmer off, and then Prince William did the same to Sadiq Khan. AI really is inventing bold new universes

Hard to escape the conclusion that the guy they've just released without charge spent a day in the cells because there were two black guys on the train.

BROKE: Making up a guy in your head to get mad at WOKE: Making up a guy in your head to get mad at you

It's a bit like the Samaritans, if the Samaritans were also heavily involved in selling rope and barbiturates.

The problem with diagnosing "the electorate have unreasonable expectations around tax and spend" is that those expectations did not develop in a vacuum. They are the product of decades of politicians and the media telling them they can have x services with y tax levels, or not contradicting it.

There have been four months of this millennium when Daniel Hannan has not held political office. Who the fuck is "We", Daniel?

Ngl, I'm not particularly wild about the fact that educational and age polarisation on cultural issues has meant we've ended up with some pretty right-wing people joining centre-left parties

That Andrews piece is one of the purest distillations of internalized misogyny I‘ve ever come across. what a wretched way to view the world.

The Guardian giving more and more time for what is essentially new age quackery is a bad trend for the broad left in this country.

the assumptions made about the target audience by making the first two items "OnlyFans' and 'child support' are kind of incredible

Opinion is divided in this house about whether this should be described as a mandrake or a carrot king.

Convenience and urbanism is bad, “spirituality” and “the natural order” is good and oh my god my hippy/fascist senses are tingling so hard right now

I've read this story five times and I literally do not know what it is trying to say. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I'm anti-anti-anti AI I think. It probably could be used in responsible ways for many applications, but it's appropriate that it face stiff headwinds when doing so to keep the people who want to use it honest. The skepticism is healthy.

Scary Halloween costume ideas for cycling fans: - Tour de Pologne sprint finish - Biological passport abnormality - First four hours of Milan San Remo without phone battery - Quinn Simmons' political views - 2.2 Italian fall classic with UAE on the line-up - A fully functional Zwift Setup in July

I am gonna stop complaining about lisa nandy but she has a borderline lovecraftian take on a big vision of politics. Her vision of british towns is so big that it cannot be meaningfully contained to paper or described. It can only be feared and respected

> trying to find news about Sudan > go to BBC News homepage: nothing > click through to "World": still nothing > click through to "Africa": "Fear of mass killing as thousands trapped in besieged Sudan city" is the FIFTH story, just below "Migrant sex offender deported from UK after mistaken release"

Technically the surname Mountbatten-Windsor was bestowed by a 1960 Privy Council order, so I guess they could strip that one if they wanted to. Which I guess would make him Andrew Glücksburg instead?

Broadly I think that a lot of people on the online left do need to realise they are instinctive liberals rather than socialists or communists (lol), but if that ever happened the consequences would just be a lot of socialists or communists realising they're actually quite politically friendless

Labour needs a culture secretary.