Even if you believe Morgan’s own legend, his actual achievement here is “Labour’s billionaire bribes officer, who destroyed the member funded model and once again made the party a reliable generator of - say - huge contracts for energy industry scams, in exchange for free Taylor tickets”.

The Guardian (and every other media outlet) knows whether this really important story is true or not - but they won't say because of (I assume) source protection. My question is, how does this serve the public?

Again, to their credit as human beings, the lobby journos laughed out loud, collectively, when this was announced, but then went back to their day-job of transcribing any bullshit they get fed, & attributing it to anyone or no-one as required.

“Here’s the bias of politics: leftwing policies are portrayed as unrealistic and childish, while the centre and right’s ideas are framed as sensible and all that’s possible.” My column on a system that welcomes Reform and dismisses the Greens as fantasy. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I am obliged to report that when the No 10 spokesman gave this part of the statement there was a brief but heartfelt outbreak of laughter from journalists, one of whom later asked if the PM might thus be interested in a bridge he had to sell.

If he does run I really hope his campaign slogan is "Chaos with Ed Miliband".

What's striking about this is that the briefing, and whether or not it was done behind Starmer's back *is* the story, and multiple journalists can confirm exactly who it was, but won't, because the subject of an extremely damaging political story is also the source, and the press is a participant.

There's a certain type of politician that needs to believe themselves to be too moral to get involved in the dirtiness of politics and gets caught in the cognitive dissonance of hiring other people to do it for them. Gordon Brown was like that with Ed Balls and Damian McBride.

What strikes me about this Labour briefing disaster is that the journalists, and the journalistic apparatus involved in this kind of scheming *is* the story here, and the role of the press at this point should be to actually disclose who their "sources" were.

Apologies for the JK Rowling / Media transphobia posting, but this year old JKR tweet of a Telegraph article is going around, and I find something quite remarkable about this, which is that the Telegraph has edited the story to refocus *on* the tweet, creating an odd sort of credibility loop.

I’m baffled the WASPi women case has caught on at all, and how many people I’d found credible are enthusiastically behind it. Particularly people on the left left (like me!) who think it’s wise to conflate this specific demand with more generous pension policy or opposition to benefits cuts.

The government is allegedly reconsidering payments for WASPi women. I wrote this last year on why I don't think they're due compensation – and why it would be hugely unfair to pay it out. www.thenewworld.co.uk/the-case-aga...

Would just like to point out that Anna Waehre, the researcher here mentioned as guilty of grievous research ethics violations targeting trans minors was a panelist in a SEGM conference last year with a large number of other abuse apologists.

Ight lad #supermariobros #wallaceandgromit #3dart

A brilliant example of what Lewis Goodall talks about when he argues why right-wing radicals keep winning. They don't play by the rules and simply don't care. Whereas the institutions they want to destroy do even when said rules are contorted to absurdity and are blatantly being used against them.

Was having a conversation recently about these people and how they have to believe they are right. They truly believe history will laud. They couldn't do what they do if they believed anything else.

I came across a clip from yesterday from LBC of John Sopel and Emily Maitlis talking to Shelagh Fogarty about what's happening at the BBC and they all conceded the complainant DID have a point about the BBC's pro-trans bias and it was just three people being transphobic for a couple of minutes.

Fierce and fascinating News Agents episode on the BBC crisis. Man alive they hate Robbie Gibb

Oops I’ve just got to the transphobic bit

What's fascinating here is that as she rhymes off the list of gender critical people at Newsnight pursuing an explicitly gender critical agenda, in the context of a discussion of ideological capture at the BBC, she doesn't recognise that she was part of the ideological capture of the BBC by GCs.

From FB: LOL.... 64MB like it's a postage stamp. 1k games.... that was impressive.

The thing I find interesting about AI, specifically the many useful things people hope AI will do, is that quite a lot of them are things that were quite easy to achieve in the late 90s, early 2000s before computers began to flip the relationship between taking instructions and making suggestions.

he looks pretty good for a guy whose face is being gnarled by leopards.

that newsreader that just got in trouble for refusing to say ‘pregnant people’

Lisa Nandy has now begun working on selecting the worst BBC Director-General of all time

I haven't updated on this btw, but I regret to inform you that's because I kept reading it and I don't think it's a good book at all, and I'm genuinely surprised people I respect on the left keep suggesting it is, or that it's earth shattering.

This, sent behind a block, is also funny. Will writes a post about a public figure for his audience of two thousand people. When he's corrected, he deletes the post but specifically doesn't acknowledge fault. The person who says he could have checked is being a prick about it.

I don’t normally enjoy being blocked but it’s very funny to me that Will blocked me, not for pointing out you could still get the poppies, but for saying he should have checked.

Took less than 30 seconds for me to verify you can still get these, and in the 15 minutes since posting this, Will didn’t think to check.

The Reform Party’s newest MP, Sarah Pochin, has admitted her comments were “phrased poorly”. Let’s call them what they were: racist. This half-baked apology is not enough. The Reform Party must suspend Pochin immediately to show that racism has no place in politics.

Even if we want to blame all of this on Farage - and it’s very clear that lots of personally culpable people do want to blame it on Farage - he is a pure media creation, a man who owes everything he has to the indulgence and promotion of maybe six or seven media outlets.

Explaining to someone once that I didn't go to my own graduation because I couldn't afford to rent the cap and gown, and they knew exactly how I felt because they'd been in Aspen during theirs. The only similar thing I experience is people who tell me they have "a little bit" of adhd.

I never quite find leaks like this plausible. While it's certainly true that Starmer's leadership has gone very, very badly, I don't think within Labour there's really that same "we can only go up from here" conviction that haunted the Tories ever since Cameron resigned.

I completely forgot I ordered this… I suspect most of the interesting / serious revelations have dropped already and there’ll only be gossip left, but there’s only one way to find out.

I've now played all three of the Jurassic World Evolution games, because I love park builders, and it's remarkable how consistently mediocre they are for exactly the same reason. So much effort has gone into the dinosaur simulation, and so little into the park / guest mechanics.

It cannot be overstated how much sexist men lie to themselves about their “ownership” of popular culture.

This reminds me of a thing my Dad would do where he'd take the way Americans would call something fancy "the cadillac of..." but with random cars. Most of the time it wasn't funny, but then he'd catch you off guard with one, like calling Kit Kats "The Fiat 500 of Biscuits".

Should Lisa Nandy resign after misleading Parliament on the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban? Our journalists discuss 👇 🗣️ 'Did anyone brief Lisa Nandy before she went out to parliament?'

You don't believe in evolution? You mean you're a primate change denier?

Worth noting that the Labour party appears to fully accept the salary threshold definition of "contribution to society", remarkable given its history and voter base (do nurses not contribute to society?)

King Prince Charles is visiting the Vatican today, presumably to request Prince Andrew be moved to a different parish after some trouble.

To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?

To be absolutely clear, it is impossible to vote for a party that cannot bring itself to unequivocally defend the rights of people living and working legally in this country. Because arbitrary removal of legal rights, or sudden varying of terms, for some is ultimately a threat to everyone.

'The plan? Stake our entire reputation on a huge group of Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans behaving themselves.'

The whole British government and media loves Maccabi Tel Aviv fans! The far right football fans that love to cause violence! *5 minutes later* We regret to inform you the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans are far right and have caused violence

Well I was not expecting BILL NIGHY to be spitting facts today! observer.co.uk/culture/inte...

Absolutely incredible: the for-real stance of the British government here is that a) the right of notoriously violent foreign football hooligans to attend games in British cities is non-negotiable, and b) in particular, fuck the people who live in the area, who are scum

Genuinely insane the response from MPs to the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban. Every single one should be asked if they're prepapred to be held personally responsible for any violence that occurs if the West Midlands Police are pressured by the government to ignore their own risk assessment.

We might ask how the centre and right uniting to defeat the anti-racist left - by screaming accusations at them about their supposedly Hitlerian racial hate - has somehow become a consensus of centre and right xenophobia and racist incitement, with unified support for genocide and ethnic cleansing.

this is insane. the maccabi fans are dogshit, this is a safety decision, and the pressure coming from the top to review this--conflating the move with antisemitism--is entirely detached from reality