Something both Carville and McSweeney exemplify is that the ostensibly pragmatic search for positioning to make a party "electable" inevitably selects for people who either already approved of that positioning on its own terms or who easily internalise it.

It was also just never that big. The largest Tea Party protest mobilisation was about 300,000 people aggregated across the country. Basically every major left-leaning protest since - No Kings, Women's March, March for Our Lives, BLM - has been not just larger but orders of magnitude larger.

So, back of the envelope assessment of how many groups could still have a 3rd place with a worse record than Scotland as it stands: A: Possible B: ❌ D: Unlikely E: Likely F: Unlikely G: Possible H: Possible I: Unlikely J: Unlikely K: Possible L: Unlikely

As Scotland are finding out now. If they played in a couple of days instead, they'd likely know what they needed. But ATM they're in a dilemma over whether to try and get a goal back or just hold the score as it is.

The course of the match is developing not necessarily to our advantage

Minor point but I think separating teams on the same points in groups by head-to-head before goal difference is stupid and counter to the point of a round robin group.

YESSSS

HAJDE!

Tangent here but the thing about actual historical kapos is that while the Israeli state initially enthusiastically prosecuted them as no different from broader Nazi collaborators, Israeli society, including Shoah survivors, soon became visibly discomforted by it and they were slowly phased down.

urghhhh why did qatar have to score

Ugh, needed to hold on until half time, that was sloppy

COME ON!

Only a few minutes in, but so far it does seem Barbarez has given blessing to a more attacking approach this time.

Here we go. See the job through, boys 🇧🇦😬

Brad Lander is now a guaranteed future Congressman

I think of Cuba and Malaysia as essentially opposite poles of this. In strict political terms, Malaysia is without doubt the more democratic country. But Cuba is also without doubt the more socially progressive country in terms of the rights of women, LGBT people, and ethnic minorities.

Banning Popehat was a profoundly stupid move by Bluesky. Moderation is a very difficult job at this kind of scale, and I tend to grant lots of leeway for that reason. But this move was simply indefensible.

If Popehat is permanently banned because of this post, I’m genuinely concerned about the viability of this platform. Hopefully, someone like @masnick.com knows more about what’s happening and whether this is just a temporary suspension

See, this is why I hate the best 3rd-place format. Despite the middling performance, a 0-0 draw here will functionally put England through to the knockout stages. Just so much less jeopardy at the group stage.

Still find it wild that the "Boston Stadium" can be 22 miles away from Boston.

Other trains on Sodor moaning about the favouritism given to the express engines:

Well that was a deeply uncomfortable segue, Gabby Logan 😬

US policy towards Cuba for the past 200 years, summarised in a sentence:

OK, well can they release some of that frost to the rest of us please, it's boiling out here?

Reminder that Arron Banks' whole origin story is that he was a Tory donor who was infuriated that despite this William Hague still didn't know who he was.

Repeatedly I feel further reinforced in feeling that so much of how schools try to socialise kids to behave and act justified on as being Just So or "that's just how the real world is" phenomena are really just either ingrained prejudices or huge institutional failures.

Any kind of humiliation punishment is always done for the sadistic pleasure of the humiliator (and their audience if there is one), and the idea that it's some sort of deterrent is just a lie that they tell themselves to justify it.

By this logic it should be at least sometimes possible to win every single voter but one, since every single hypothetical grouping of three voters has a median voter.

Again the "fractal racism" - racism towards migrants and refugees themselves is taken as a given, that we should not be required to take them - but other countries should be, because *our* anti-immigrant racism is more important than theirs.

So many of the people who defend the Occupation out of an anti-anti-Israel worldview don't believe that there are dead Palestinian children with Israeli bullets in their heads. They think there are things that their opponents on Twitter say that they have to counter.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I do wonder if it encourages thinking about this kind of thing in a very particularly individualised way.

Though, "I have been the most physically attacked politician in Britain for now well over a decade" I understand Nugent was pushing on the donations issue, but an appropriate response might've been "Really, have you tried telling David Amess that?"

"No-one cares, apart from the media" - Man who chose to give media interview about it

The article takes great effort to mention that the trans woman prisoner in question committed sexual assault and that her partner in prison killed a child, but you'll search in vain for any mention of the fact that Sutherley was in prison for stabbing a man to death with a pair of scissors.

So, despite the headline, reading between the lines the "divide" is actually between Ronaldo's personal relatives and associates lying and bullying anyone who criticises him, and the majority of 🇵🇹 players, pundits and fans trying to diplomatically persuade him to step back for the good of the team.

It's utterly incoherent and I suspect they know it, because the current state of UK judicial interpretation on LGBT rights is incoherent.

Not quite medication, but my school had an absurd total ban on makeup for students but not teachers. In practice most teachers would turn a blind eye to subtle makeup and give a quite private warning to anyone overdoing it, but there was one teacher who'd make girls wipe off makeup in front of her.

Tangent but there is definitely an ageist pattern whereby older people taking regular medication is considered perfectly normal and standard while younger people doing so (even the exact same medications!) is treated as unnatural, shameful, and to be avoided if at all possible.

Also, in all but one case, the new World Cup goal recordholder has simply played more games than the person they replaced. Stabile 1930 - 8 (4 games) Ademir 1950 - 9 (6) Kocsis 1954 - 11 (5) - the one exception Fontaine 1958 - 13 (6) Muller 1974 - 14 (13) Ronaldo 2006 - 15 (19) Klose 2014 - 16 (24)

Being barefacedly explicit about the fact that: - She and her cohort consider transition to be a negative outcome in and of itself - They conceptualise the purpose of "talk therapy" as discouraging patients from transitioning - Transness is considered as both 'disabling' and 'unnatural'

The right to be cool strikes again — the issue isn't that an idea is really marginalized but implicitly that it's challenged by a group whose respect is coveted. Readers of The Cut are thinking differently about heterosexuality, yes. But queer feminism isn't culturally dominant. It's under attack.

He can and should be mocked as a crazy weirdo, but worth remembering Uri Geller's track record of "close personal friends" - if Trump is indeed the latest, he certainly has a type...

Messi clearly has aged a bit more gracefully than Ronaldo, and the rest of Argentina's team is better than Portugal's, but it's noticeable that they're still overly centring the team around a guy who is visibly getting too old to keep up with guys 15-20 years younger than him.

Worth recalling that the main political strategists who advocated this were Matt Goodwin (who we can safely say at this point wasn't a disinterested actor) and Morgan McSweeney (who managed not to notice at any point that Labour didn't even win this bloc in 2024)

Every detail that has come out about Donaldson's crimes has been worse than the one before.

Those poor girls :( www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/cour…