“The guy did a great job for a competitive rate. I’m really pleased with it”

One of my favourite Orwell lines is about Ezra Pound: "Antisemitism is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person. People who go in for that kind of thing must take the consequences." I think about its brisk contempt (applicable to all bigotries imo) a lot.

... Be more Brown - Gordon or Tina ….

How do you find out you’re good at curling? Like are you someone who enjoys ice skating and also sweeping the kitchen? Did these two hobbies accidentally merge at some point?

i have to say, i can't wait to listen to this big wet idiot call his arch conservative supermajority on the supreme court a bunch of leftist cucks

it remains the case that there is no one trump hates more than his supporters

christ

morbid interest in the latest Tony Blair doc rewarded by an essential, Blarite gem: don't lose your temper except on purpose

a lot of people answering this have clearly never seen The Passion of the Christ

People have actually been throwing dildos at ICE in Minnesota The Great Dildo Rebellion is here.

As a woman would you really vote for this, Reform commanding Women what to do with their own bodies.

Can cities survive without the anonymity they give people? Genuine question.

An entrepreneurial politician would translate this into tangible public good for voters to understand. How many hospitals could it pay for? How many police officers?

'ckin hell

this labour government man . . .

you've lost 60% of your voters & coverted 0% of reform ones - yes, that is an actual statistic, 0% but sure, keep at it, i'm sure this latest wheeze will bring em all over

Trump ran on mass deportations. What he didn't run on - but is necessary for such pogroms to succeed - is hiring violent racists and sending them, untrained, to round up immigrants. Reform have been clear they want the former, they're never going to admit that their policy necessitates the latter.

For your weekend listening pleasure. I did the Top Traders podcast. These folks ask the best questions. Got into loads of interesting stuff. Enjoy: www.toptradersunplugged.com/podcast/when...

Britain's arts our one of our proudest and best exports. And yet again (as is so often the case) Brexit is killing the industry. "A cultural cul-de-sac" https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/spotlight-boss-brexit-has-left-performers-in-a-cultural-cul-de-sac

it's catching on

I never knew that Shakespeare was believed to have written revisions to this play, like Tarantino punching up Crimson Tide

😆

My erudition is very limited, and many of you will have better literary examples, but what is happening in the US at the moment seems to be Isherwood’s Berlin stories re-written for the American urban experience by Shirley Jackson. How every thing we see hints at wider cruelties.

My unsolicited advice on how to see more movies 🧵

Beetlejuice, A Mighty Wind, Schitts Creek and so many more. What a wonderful career and a wonderful actress.

O'Hara was one of those actors who convinced everyone, even if they knew nothing about her actual life, that she would be a great hang. A contagious sense of fun and play

Oh man. Someone with so many routes into the culture, from the Christopher Guest movies to Beetlejuice to Home Alone to Schitt's Creek to The Studio (plus my early fave After Hours) www.tmz.com/2026/01/30/c...

you couldn't make it through a couple of pints with a single one of these cunts

We are Christopher Isherwood, listening on the wireless to warnings that Berliners will die unless they stop the rhetoric about the secret police.

from Wendy Cope

I’m ok. I’m a survivor so this small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work. I don’t let bullies win. Grateful to my incredible constituents who rallied behind me. Minnesota strong.

REP. OMAR after being attacked with liquid: “We will continue! These fucking assholes are not gonna get away with this! Here is the reality people like this ugly man don’t understand — we are Minnesota Strong. We’ll stay resilient in the face of whatever they might throw at us.”

christ this is good. inter alia, careful unfolding of the plot, quality of the dialogue especially, elevates what might otherwise be a clumsy melodrama into something touching, sinister, and cinematic (not a combo i've often seen pulled off). thriller about mother/daughterhood, care/abuse. 8/10

The UK version of “Project 2025” by the Reform party includes a British ICE, a concentration camp for 24,000 people, mass surveillance and withdrawing from refugee, anti-torture and anti-trafficking conventions. It’s on their website. That’s how comfortable fascists are in the UK today.

This. I'm not a BBC-basher but IMO Mason is a poor political journalist. It's not that he's 'biased' per se, it's that he reports politics as a kind of giggly spectator sport and as such is preoccupied with spectacle, talking up 'exciting' events rather than analysing them. 1/2

Homeland Security doesn’t like it when we call ICE and Border Patrol “the Gestapo.” So let’s set the Gestapo aside. Instead I’ll use this thread to compare Trump’s thugs to other secret police and terror squads from different times and places. It’s tyranny, no matter where it comes from. 1/10🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵

my voting criteria in any democratic primary is do they support: ▪️ending ice ▪️supreme court reform, ideally packing ▪️adding states ▪️prosecutions for rights violations & corruption ▪️trans rights & have they personally put their bodies between ice thugs & their victims

In other words, they're ideologically motivated brutes empowered by the leader to act with impunity and punish anyone and everyone who doesn't kowtow to the leader's will. Whether that eventually cuts through to wider America and they *act* on it, who knows.

Americans keep comparing ICE to the Gestapo or the Stasi, which is understandable, but they aren't a secret police. Far from it. They're infinitely more akin to the Sturmabteilung, if you need to use comparisons to Germany, or myriad 'personal guards' of various late-20th century dictators.

I'm afraid to say that I've seen the video of today's murder of a Minnesotan by ICE agents, and it's a horrific watch. Five agents wrestle a civilian to the ground, have him near-immobilised, and he's then shot. He's now dead. Solidarity with the Americans resisting ICE.

Execution squads roaming the streets of America.

Being famous is so shit now. Basically an influencer without the password to your own socials.

The Grand Strategy would be: pull out of Brexit reset and even the base agreement; cause chaos in Northern Ireland; do rubbish thin trade deals when we're desperate; truckle to Putin and slow rearmament; strip ouy the welfare state; beg for scraps with the USA. That's electoral hemlock. (2/2)

There is such huge opportunity cost to each Trump tantrum. So many people with critical jobs have lost another week when they could have been doing something useful.

Every day we all have to think about one of the most irredeemable cunts in the history of the world. What’s he doing? What’s he said now? How will it affect your life? What will be left once he’s finished smashing it all up? It’s unconscionable

Has government just quietly told us that it’s building HS2? I’d better explain.

oh it's going to be a Recession recession

Holy shit. Renee Good was alive when the bystander physician asked to check her pulse. She was alive when ICE refused to let him help. She was alive when they told him “I don’t care.” www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

More than 200,000 Danish citizens have signed a petition to buy California as a response to Trump’s attempt to take Greenland. They say they will provide Californians with “rule of law, universal health care, fact-based politics, and a lifetime supply of Danish pastries.”