As an Arsenal fan who hates PGMOL, I am absolutely delighted to say Arsenal’s penalty just now was insanely wrong. It happened so far outside the box that there is no legit explanation for it at all. PGMOL and the entire referee class in England needs to go. Incompetent, corrupt or both.

The people who shout “Get in the hole!” at golf might just be the worst people humanity has to offer.

I was at a dinner recently where a bunch of people were talking about how AI was “literally predicting the future and knew everything about their pasts”. I had to bite my lip but desperately wanted to scream, “IT’S FORTUNE TELLING!” Turns out that’s what it is. softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llme...

You know what else is “unpleasant”? Forest fires, hurricanes and mass starvation caused by climate shifts.

Reddit continues to be down. Why is the internet just getting progressively worse?

I feel like the more accurate analogy would be Royal Mail opening your parcel and claiming the contents inside as its own just because I used their service. Now perhaps Royal Mail could do that if for some reason they lent me a million quid to buy the parcel and then I didn’t pay them back…

Ah yes, tourists *do* love nothing more than being served by miserable, stressed, and overworked staff. Really makes that expensive holiday one to remember…

A generation of young Turks who repeatedly voted for HDP to get them past the electoral threshold are currently realizing their parents were right all along about the nature of Turkish politics.

Apparently no.

I put Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu into a photo aging app to make the joke that this serial loser is going to try to be the head of the CHP until 2050. This is genuinely what the app gave me. He is so old that the app can’t actually age him. He is a curse on the Turkish people.

Anyone who has been involved in student politics in the UK (I imagine this holds elsewhere too) will tell you the far left has always been as illiberal as the far right. Get on their wrong side and their ideological “purity” turns into incoherent rage designed to burn. The horseshoe is real.

Day by day, I believe more in the Dead Internet Theory. Not the crazy stuff - I don’t think there’s a shadowy elite deciding what we see. It’s too diffuse for that. But a large portion of the internet is now automated and what we think is real is just… not.

The Pope is an Arsenal fan

Drug cheats losing will never get old.

I don’t think there is another opposition politician in the world who lost multiple times, was told they would lose again, forced themself into candidacy anyway and then lost again, only to now try to come back despite the disgrace so they can lose a bit more. That is an all-time loser right there.

If there is any truth to the reports that Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is planning to return as the head of the CHP, it will confirm what I have said for many years: the man serves only the AKP and himself. There is no more dangerous man in Turkey. www.turkiyetoday.com/nation/main-...

It is amazing to me how everyone is watching this incredibly WWF-style fake fight and actually believing it is real.

Just remembered TomTom used to be absolutely massive two decades ago. Turns out they were worth $11 billion at one point. Now not worth much at all because after physical maps, even physical GPS devices got eaten by phones.

Any sensible democracy should end diaspora voting right now. Emigrants have no right to thrust illiberal governments on their compatriots back home while they enjoy life in liberal countries.

I don’t believe in black magic but I do think Macron (the football kit manufacturer, not the French President) might be doing some diabolical voodoo this year. Crystal Palace won their first ever major trophy yesterday wearing their red and blue striped Macron kit. Amazing. But there’s more…

I have time for almost any argument in this life but I will roll my eyes at anyone who says, “Won’t anyone think of the music? How can they poison Eurovision with politics?”

Hi, first generation immigrant here. The island of strangers my family came to was actually full of future friends. That is the UK I love and no amount of hatred or race-baiting, even by the most powerful people we thought were our allies, will change that.

“A citizen of nowhere, On an island of strangers, Can’t walk forward together, Through this river of blood” is pretty much the lyrics I would have written as a miserable 13 year old, listenting to Led Zep and Machine Head. Should have gone into political speech writing.

That’s 1.

I’m not one for homesickness and after so long, I’m not even sure I have a “home” anymore. And I don’t harbour much hope for tonight. But I would love to be in North London tonight, surrounded by my people, my fellow bags of nerves, to experience whatever will happen together.

The paradox authoritarianism always confronts is that by gutting independent institutions, you end up with an all-powerful state that also happens to have very little non-coercive power because no-one believes anything institutions say or do anymore.

No-one cares about the doll portfolios of little girls - it is just a lazy framing device that presumably worked in a focus group. People do care about having fewer food choices which are also more expensive. Perhaps someone should reframe this debate back to reality?

Whilst clean water and other factors matter here, it is true that vaccines and antibiotics have saved billions of lives. I do worry that this isn’t really the point. A lot of these people believe in “the strong” and “the weak”. So this isn’t really about science. It’s about “natural” selection.

Funny: the actual PM of the UK threatening fly-tippers with predator drone strikes Funnier: re-learning that trying to outfash the actual fash is a Sisyphean task Funniest: Americans finding out what “fly tipping” means, reinforcing their notion that the English are all Harry Potter characters

Good things can still happen

It would seem Turkey has stopped paying someone…

“I had been considering a Caesarian procedure for my first two trimesters but I changed my mind when I saw what Sivasspor thought about it,” said Hayriye Açıkalın, 29, from nearby Tokat. “I don’t care what my doctor says, if Tolga Ciğerci and Alaaddin Okumuş say different, I listen to them.”

Real men eat rats directly from the dumpster

Robin Brooks attacking the EU. One can only assume his paymasters these days are MAGA.

I never trust anything Robin says given his idiotic commentary in the fair value of the Turkish lira which was likely driven by the fact that many of his clients were pro-Turkish government business people.

We’re trying to see who gets blocked first by Fair Value Robin. Nostalgia for old Twitter.. 🤣

If you can’t protest, you don’t live in a democracy.

The good news: a lot of Turkish people finally left Twitter to come here this week. The bad news: the trolls will undoubtedly follow and try to poison here too.

Welcome to the new Turks of Bluesky! I’m still a bit annoyed that it took you so long to realise X was a fascistic dumpster fire but at least you’re here now.

We all have that one mate who is clever and who you actually respect who’s been telling you for the last few weeks that there is some kind of master plan. They might even be carrying on with the facade. But the “money box go brrrr” moment might finally be ending.

“No, no, no. There is a value to losing an economy for a positional gain.”

It’s all Greek to me

I would say this is the banality of evil but that isn’t what this is. This is the evil of the banal.

It can be (and absolutely is) true that some politicians are criminals, get caught committing crimes and therefore face the consequences, while other politicians get jailed not for committing crimes but because they threaten those in power. This is really simple stuff, guys.

Meet me in the national security group chat.

I love that people are genuinely asking whether there will be resignations for this Signal scandal. THEY COULD HAVE CONDUCTED THEIR GROUP CHAT ON AN ELECTRONIC BILLBOARD OVERLOOKING TIMES SQUARE AND NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN. There is no accountability anymore. We need to forget about that “era”.

I’ll say this somewhat cryptically but my instinct increasingly tells me they’re picking a fight. The response hasn’t been miscalculated or factored in as an anticipated cost. I think the response *is* the plan. Very good chance I’m wrong but that’s the lens through which I’m looking right now.

If Bluesky ever had a chance at gaining traction in Turkey, it is right now. The big accounts who have something to say and are currently being throttled, censored, banned or just trolled over on the fascist hellsite have a chance to create a network effect here.

I don’t mean to sound all “what were they doing out alone at that hour?” but if you are still on X, quite openly a social network for fascists, you cannot be surprised when the fascists censor or ban you. Being on X is political, even for Turks. It is not the place to organise opposition.