Given the BBC have a largely sensible set of guidelines on the use of quant polling in news stories, including a ban on a poll being a story in itself, it's always so baffling they have next-to-no similar rules on what is ultimately rudimentary qual polling. It's an insane double-standard.

Shouldn’t be hard to make these illegal

Trying to pick apart a woman's text messages to prove she's lying about being raped is gutter behavior. Consent can be revoked at any time and reading insinuations into text messages that the sender denies were there is ACTUAL journalistic malpractice. I would not trust a man who does this!

Fascinating how rattled Farage allies are by Count Binface. I doubt he can really marshal a serious challenge - perhaps they do. Or maybe they just need to build him up into more than a guy with a bin on his head so this contest doesn't look, well, silly

a lot of these guys are bad people, but also a lot of them are mentally ill and their stories are to some degree tragic.

If you call it Freedom then it’s not communism

When I was studying journalism we had a running joke that all bad opinion pieces ended with a version of "Love them or hate them, they're here to stay" or "Only time will tell." And then Chris Mason appeared to build a career on that joke so who's laughing now?

Horrifying how common it is to see National Front-level racist comments on most of the posts Facebook shoves my way, whether it's the Guardian or a music magazine or whatever. This level of shamelessness is very new and not confined to X. It's like people were just waiting for cultural permission.

This is good. It's how I feel too: "An essay a week? I’m not that interesting. I don’t think I have a new idea every week, at least not anymore, and certainly not one worth sharing." huw.substack.com/p/cancelled-...

FFS, get the vit K shot lunacy.

iron rule of British politics is even if a guy who dresses as a bin becomes prime minister he will have been to Oxbridge

In the first half of 2024, the number one issue in America was presidential age and mental capacity. Flubbing the name of a foreign leader was top headline news, with political and medical analysis. Then people who treated it with utmost importance decided it didn’t matter, and dropped the issue.

I mean this explains quite a lot about experiencing social media in the 2020's www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Really enjoying this series of Origin Story (and going back to re-listen to some of the earlier ones, like 'Woke'), do recommend.

We close season 9 with the thrilling true story of the Luddites and what we get wrong about them. Featuring riots, assassinations, glamorous outlaws, fiendish foes and Britain in turmoil. Plus what does it mean to be a neo-Luddite? And I do a bit of folksinging

A short comic about Lenny #TheSimpsons #comics

News outlets don't need to "cover the controversy" if the "controversy" can be explained by one word: racism. There's nothing to unpack

Wow that's definitely what BBC Radio 4 Today presenter Emily Maitlis looks like. Must find out more

Graham Platner embodies a concept that in 2016 we didn’t have words for so “Bernie Bro” made the most sense. It had nothing to do with Bernie but was an attempt to describe a man who outwardly espouses progressive values but hates women more than he cares about anything else.

Omg, I 100% clicked on this thinking Morrissey's new single was called "Diversity Is a Lie."

I think this is the right reading. Farage is trying to move the terrain to what he knows best (campaigning, division) from a position of weakness. It's an act of desperation. It may pay off in Clacton, which is incredibly right-wing, but it's bad for his reputation and his party nationally.

Happened in Hartlepool! Stuart Drummond was elected Mayor in 2002, under the guise of H'Angus the Monkey, the town's football club's mascot, and was re-elected in 2005 and 2009. He promised the council would give children free bananas - and he did introduce free fruit snacks in schools.

It would be great if Binface won Clacton and then turned out to be a remarkably effective local MP who served several terms

I don’t understand how people can run for office knowing they have insane baggage and/or crimes. Like I spent the entire campaign expecting AIPAC to somehow dig up my middle school livejournal fanfic account. I prepared my family for it. I’m still amazed it didn’t happen.

That’s Clacton baby

Calling a by-election shortly before the summer break – when parliament is in recess so there's less news, even with a new PM – is a pretty *terrible* way to distract from an issue. Farage has basically guaranteed his personal finances and integrity will be headline news all summer.

Good point. Key to Trumpism is degrading its followers to the point where nothing matters, no moral standards at all, except punishing their enemies. Farage wants to harness the same empty, resentful nihilism and this is one way to prove he can

"Emergency podcasts, sir. Thousands of 'em"

Farage is doing what fascists do. Claiming the "will of the people" or "his people" is more important than the law.

Peak right-wing populism to run a "the people vs the establishment" contest when "the people" are represented by a man with several million pounds in undisclosed gifts. Just a regular chap like you or me

As much as I hate to say it because it’s cheap webforum meta discourse, the strongest correlation to Platner support wasn’t ideology, it was if you still frequently use X, The Everything App. I would hope that would lead to some introspection about what remaining on there does to your judgement.

You ever notice the 'Thirty esteemed men with OBEs have gone on the record saying Farage used racist and antisemitic slurs at them for years' story was the beat of two Guardian journalists for months, then the Times picked it up for one single short article and never mentioned it again?

I wrote this in my review of Cory Doctorow's book last month and it's happening again

A good lesson from the Platner disaster is that charismatic populists who say the punchy things you like are often chaotic liars and you should watch out for that (see also: history)

Like I said, there's no small amount of finger-pointing that's going to happen as a result of this. But Platner was a creation of Ryan Grim, Bernie Sanders, and Matt Stoller, as much as he was of Pod Save America and Matt Yglesias. That's what has to be reckoned with.

Early morning press conference at the Whitehouse.

If you're an Origin Story listener (if you're not, this would be weird) please ask us a question about the topics in season 9, how we make the show or indeed anything else. Email us or post on the page below. We'll answer them in a Patreon-only bonus episode coming soon.

Bluesky this morning:

The combination of the keeper's sad fucked-it-all-up face and the commentator saying "Goooooooooaaaaaal" for like an hour is extremely funny

Well there goes NATO, totally worth it 🥰

let this be a lesson to deal with your feelings of gender anxiety and masculine inadequacy with a hobby or therapy or something and not a high stakes senate election

Bluesky will forever be vindicated for never backing Platner. The left that stayed on X thought he was a good pick even after the nazi tattoo thing came out.

Just incredible how many bright red flags Platner's defenders ignored, and belligerently too. What a failure of judgement.

Your reminder that every “news” piece about Tilly Norwood is a press release. The creator keeps saying stuff and the media keeps printing it with no other sourcing. None of it is real

There is no situation that the input of American lawyers can't make worse.

FACTCHECK: A guide to manufacturing headlines, by the Times 1) highlight upfront costs of an “eco” home (EV, heat pump, solar) 2) pretend that petrol cars and gas boilers are free (yes really) 3) count upfront “eco” costs twice, for good measure 4) that’s it!

BlueSky tonight

Unbeatable AI book spam. I will never receive a better one than this.

my theory is that it proves that the US just isn't a football nation at heart - sure you can be happy with a bit of shithousery, or with one of your players getting away with something they shouldn't have got away with, but something like *this* is just on a different level entirely