Meanwhile.....

That's it. We're definitely winning the world cup now.

We'll ride yer big worms and kick your arses at boxy shield knife fights too.

Grimly ironic that the dangerous, racist and fascist ideology that threatens us is Hegseth’s and it resembles the one our ancestors faced down in WW2.

I've written to Jamie Hepburn MSP, the Minister for Parliamentary Business and Veterans (who is responsible for devolved elections), calling for several reforms: replacing deposits, improving Holyrood results publication, co-option for council vacancies, and improving quality of local election data.

It's pretty gracious of him to show up at all, given that his side lost.

People arriving on small boats are under 4% of migrants but Sky News & the BBC illustrate stories about immigration with a photo of an overcrowded dinghy. A more accurate illustration would be a photo of a doctor or care worker. This is how the media demonises migrants and normalises the far right.

I see his lardship George Foulkes (regularly the most costly 'Scottish' peer) is in the news again. He's really not the sharpest tool in the box.

Farage and Reform are a problem that recedes when the press stop humouring the fuckers and start telling the public in plain terms what they are and how they behave.

Every time the newspaper podcast lads talk about him, they talk at length about how skilled and smart he is. But we’ve all seen him flailing and squawking on the brief occasions where the hacks stop indulging him and start e.g. asking him where all those millions in donations come from.

Just so: absolutely everything he says is said in bad faith and every stunt he pulls is calculatedly vexatious. There’s no argument to be had with him or his supporters and there’s nothing to discuss, because none of them give a fuck what is real or made up.

We need to think deeper: why is this unacceptable for a 17 year old but acceptable for an 18 year old - or a 57 year old? Age controls are not the real problem.

Some delightful new terminology from the Mastodonians:

Again, we should ask: why are so many columnists paid to pretend that they don’t understand things they understand perfectly well, in the most fearmongering and inflammatory manner possible? Because their bosses are either bleak cynics or foaming-at-the-mouth wingnut cranks themselves.

Pollard, yet another guy who isn’t just a roaring, gargling, vexatious wingnut crank *now*: he was one twenty years ago and everyone knew he was, but that didn’t stop anyone picking up bullshitty stories from his paper and running with them when that was convenient.

I just don't understand this stuff. Labour isn't in opposition. It's not writing for an essay competition. So don't whine, legislate: "X com has become a tool by which malignant foreign actors spread disinformation and we will bring before Parliament legislation to block it."

A good summary of the pitch for regaining our status as an independent state, within the EU.

Can you imagine if it was just that, a tiny gaggle of useless fuckwits that nobody in Britain likes or wants, abusing their positions to bend the whole nation to serve their personal interests? Imagine how *enormously* fucked we would now be, if that was what happened there.

I’m hearing there’s a culture of vicious bullying. But how could that be, when the nice, reasonable decent people ruthlessly kicked out all of the vicious bullies? Why, I’m starting to suspect something a bit fishy has been going on here

No senior Labour or Tory politician is going to speak plainly about what happened here, because doing so will stick colleagues in the frame for public shaming and probably police investigations. And I don’t mean they’ll have to keep quiet now, I mean “for the next fifty years”.

A truly disgraceful headline from the BBC. Straight from Spiked. What the fuck has it become?

Again, the business of the British press is the recruitment and promotion of the most abysmal and hateful right wing cranks they can find, to further their shared war upon liberalism, multiculturalism and basic decency.

It's strange to me that Matt Goodwin seems to be on the BBC more than Hannah Spencer when he lost an election to her

It's printing absolute horseshit like this which keeps the Scottish press held in such high regard.

*sighs* even if the political analysis here wasn't poor on the face of it, the process by which an extraordinary Holyrood election (we don't have 'snap' elections) could even occur basically precludes one. Requiring the Greens to be 'mavericks' for this to work is exactly why it won't.

Those people in America and the UK who are weaponising the death of Henry Nowak for their disgusting little hate agenda are absolute scum. All of them. I could not hate anyone more.

Demand another inquiry. Lol

Let she who is never off the BBC whining at the top of her voice cast the first stone etc

Imagine having a megaphone that large and pretending you’re silenced.

Rightly angry piece from @iandunt.bsky.social about the Populist Right BS that followed the awful Henry Nowak murder case and how the media/national conversation has been drawn into it. iandunt.substack.com/p/an-abysmal...

Yes, we've been giving the patient the same medicine for the last 20yrs & it's true they are dying. But we won't have tried the *real* medicine until we've doubled the dose again. Like we did the last time

From Gold Blend to Uther to Buffy, he had something special. RIP.

Oh man, this one really hurts. Thank you for Giles, and then for decades of playing oily bastards who were nothing like Giles and clearly having a ball with that. www.bbc.com/news/article...

come on

Very clearly the only way this could be made to work is a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" in which people are instructed to treat whatever answer they are given as the truth. Since hourly staff are told not to stop shoplifters, it's a bit much to expect them to adjudicate chromosome debates

Damn, it sounds like Britain could really use some kind of antiracist movement right now. In fact, it sort of sounds like they were correct all along about what all of this was. Just as well we welcomed them with open arms and asked them to expound upon their beliefs, isn’t it.

To me to debate always seems to be about whether or not you're a massive racist.

To put it mildly: it does not seem like “common sense” is the overriding priority here, and the results we have are pretty much inexplicable unless we conclude that the bad guys have won and have been in charge ever since.

Let’s be clear: we have annihilated crazy ideas like “let’s plant some nice trees, make a free-to-use broadband network and have a government factory making generic drugs”, apparently so we could have racist rioting, chat about civil war, genital checks at toilets and protection for genocidaires.

It’d be helpful to get acknowledgement that the everyday total malicious lunacy reigns unopposed thanks to a decade of treating the left as if we are treasonous perverts who must be crushed, hand in hand with right wing politicians and commentators who plainly radicalised themselves to pure insanity

I do sometimes feel guilty for documenting the atrocities like this, and I do understand how relentlessly bleak it is. But I feel like people really do need to know this is the way their representatives behave. This is what many of them are like.

It is IMO incredible that the British public have been subjected to most of a decade of terrified screeching from these repugnant assclowns demanding “common sense”, and when pushed, their common sense turns out to be “Staff in Tesco will block any woman they think looks too blokey from the toilets”

"You can't say anything awful these days."

If I worked somewhere management instructed that staff should be intervening to prevent women they assess as looking too manly from using the ladies, then I would a) ignore that and, if I was pressed on it, I would b) seek alternative employment.

It’d be helpful if the lads would ask the crackpot baroness here how *exactly* she sees this working. Are M&S staff to start rugby tackling women entering the toilets, if they assess they look a bit too buff? A stern ticking off? What is the government asking businesses and organisations to do, here

BLYTON.