This is the reason I think the term 'Oxbridge' is actively unhelpful, it makes the problem seem 50 per cent less bad than it is!

Why Pulp‘s This is Hardcore is the best bond theme tune.

the core of James Bond's sexuality (book version) is that he sees femininity as defined by pain and degradation but also believes semi-unconsciously that he deserves to be punished and degraded himself. in this essay I will

I bet an exercise like this would clear up a whole load of other crimes as well. Domestic violence, driving without insurance, other cocaine-fuelled assaults, child support default, the range of scummy behaviour that harms society.

I actually think this is one of the main reasons for our total fucked ness with democracy right now. The incentives for being good at governing is not the same as for winning votes - and the gap is larger now than it has been for quite some time.

People will pick fake authenticity over actual authenticity every time. Basically someone whose good at faking it but lying will always seem more authentic than someone who is a bit awkward in inherently odd situations, in front of a camera who is communicating their actual truth.

Excellent article on the single biggest reason I remain a Labour member and support the Government: because we are, properly and determinedly, delivering radical change to combat the biggest threat we face as a species. Quite why we don't tell anyone about this I don't know.

Is Working Class Politics the ultimate luxury belief? Is Labour's investment in an artisanal steel factory a sign of its decadant hipster ways? In this essay I will...

The worst possible message emerging in British politics is "We'll tolerate jobless serial criminals if, and only if, they are being racist".

It is! Among the old, Reform are doing best with pensioners who solely or largely rely on the state pension. Best way to understand public opinion is to see it as: 1) Do I feel under economic pressure? 2) Do I like Nigel Farage? If “Yes and Yes”, you vote Reform. “yes and no”, you vote Green.

No, you dont get to say that I as a literal member, activist etc am playing along with a hostile media narrative. Calling our evident failure here isnt a hostile narrative. Its telling the truth. When we are good I will promote it more strongly than anyone.

I realise thatsaying this is essentially pointless, but it is worth stating that unlike the cases in BLM the horrifying murder of Henry Nowak: 1) was done by a member of the public, not a police officer 2) was immediately followed by the man's arrest 3) was followed by the man's swift conviction

My strongest view is the majority of people in the UK are *far* less racist than their counterparts were 30-40 years ago, it's just now no one knows *how* to talk about it properly

this is maybe downstream of, or only tangentially related here, but it’s definitely related to the way we have increasingly treated the arts as a hobby for rich dilettantes over the last, idk, 60 years

I am really, really worried about how little mainstream broadcasters and politicians are pushing back against explicit racism. It isn’t difficult to contextualise or challenge with facts. They manage it on other topics.

Don't think people realise quite how deeply split by age current voting intention is. This is the latest YouGov for under-50s: Green: 26% Lab: 18% Reform: 14% Tories: 12% LD: 11% And over 50s: Reform: 36% Tory: 22% Lab: 16% LD: 12% Greens: 9%

The rapid erosion of the mainstream political taboo on Powellism and Mosleyism (etc) is one of the most striking and alarming features of the present moment. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

If we take, say, the 2010 Labour leadership contest: both Milibands or Ed Balls would have been able to command enough support in the PLP to govern effectively. Just set it at 'you need two thirds of your colleagues to sign your papers but the two-thirds can overlap' and you're fine.

The goal shouldn’t be to “win the argument.” It should be to seek remedies. Something severed the tether between economic conditions and public sentiment, and if it isn’t refastened we’re probably all boned whether the next president is a socialist or a centrist. www.offmessage.net/p/democrats-...

I do think we fumbled a probably generational opportunity to meaningfully change police departments by not forcing out everyone who wouldn’t get COVID vaxed and then bumping salaries and education requirements while enforcing vax reqs stringently to move the needle on who elects into the profession.

Heat exchange boilers are right fucking there dude! pr you could be painting tiny fucked up dudes in armour that means they dont have any peripheral vision and that cost £153745 each! And those dudes are almost single handedly propping up the UK economy (with only fans). its patriotic!

if you think crichton’s work is better than Dostoevsky I objectively do not have to listen to your opinion

I don’t mean this as an excuse but I do think the collapse in private space is also a part of this problem. There is a human need to be able to sit down with a close colleague/friend after a grim meeting/event and go ‘fucking hell that was awful’, which has gradually been extinguished

I think politicians of all parties can give themselves a good slap on the back for this triumph. For all the rhetoric about building a knowledge driven economy, they’ve all succeeded in undermining the sector, some by design and others by ignorance.

I despise this stuff. Pathetic. Being British is great. You think only white people are dumb enough to enjoy being British? You don't think you can win a cultural fight with rural Pakistan on urban Kano?? Middle Class British Indians will also like Wodehouse, you can do this guys.

"Someone, somewhere, has taken the decision to defund astrophysics research in the UK, but no-one seems quite sure who that was, or why." The latest on the impact of the catastrophic funding cuts to UK astrophysics, by me, in @natastron.nature.com 👩‍🔬🧪🔭 ✒️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Just, yeah, famously extremely not the culture here. Even something people take an odd pride in, witness this old tweet.

One day when I really want to get cancelled I'm gonna say that the basic idea of the rainbow flag including all the colours sufficed to signal "everyone" and the various editions to mean "but really really everyone this time we mean it" were trying to solve substantive cultural issues via symbolism.

There is also a real issue of equity to consider, in that those with the worst outcomes are disproportionately from more deprived areas and more likely to be mature students - exactly the sort of left-behind students with an interest in bettering themselves politicians claim to be focused on.

I think vox pops - like many things in life - are fine in moderation and when appropriately caveated. The problems with them come from the selection process, which inevitably puts the spotlight on people who are easily accessible in a high street or market in middle of day

When cis people finally comprehend the "always already" thing, our liberation will be complete. Like yeah, there is a clear temporal demarcation between denial/not doing anything about it and acceptance/finally doing something about it - but like I've been dithering unconsciously since age 5.

There’s an “always was” and “always becoming“ aspect to it that’s weird and hard to articulate, I think. Did my transition start when I came out and started HRT? Started questioning? Saw that book where Marvin Redcoat becomes a girl in first grade? Yet I doubt I’ll ever feel as if I completed it.

so we agree about trans inclusion in most cases, good! my concern with 1 & 2 is that it frames the pro-trans side as having caused this & hence having the responsibility to fix it. i don't think that is what happened & i don't think that's a useful way to think about how to act going forward

1. in terms of how we got here—the sudden lurch to the right our politics has taken in the last few years— i just don't buy a "pro-trans overconfidence led to a backlash" narrative a "top down anti-trans propaganda push" explanation fits the timeline much better bsky.app/profile/dani...

But I tend to see this as an earlier mistake - choosing the wrong ground to fight on. After all, gender reassignment is *also* (and explicitly) a protected characteristic in the Equality Act. Since bathroom bans are so burdernsome for trans people, they should be ruled out for that reason.

a lot (most?) people understand racism as “being a meanie” and if you aren’t a meanie then you can’t be racist, even if you believe in, say, the biological inferiority of entire groups of people based on phenotype

I don't think it's "milquetoast center-left parties" as much as what you refer to in your previous post - the left's getting killed in the info wars. I don't think that's a consequence of "milquetoast parties" as much as a general failure on the left. There are plenty of Dem pols bringing heat /1

Rich conservative assholes can decide to fuck everything up, & then do it, & it just fucking works. The right simply seems to do more & better propaganda, everywhere. Why can't the left get its media shit together?! ANYWHERE?! I get more guillotine-pilled every damn day.

technically Stephen the whole series was wars between shippers

i kind of want someone to look into ‘the nose’. you know, the nose that every single woman made by ai has, since the start of ai generating women. It always has too much blusher on the end, for some reason. Anyway I want to know if real people are getting plastic surgery to match ‘the nose’?

There’s not much new to say about this but I find it very sad that in multiple countries in Europe, including the Netherlands and the UK, “there are too many brown people and we should deport them” has become a fairly mainstream talking point for sitting MPs. Not something I expected to live to see

Yeah whenever I see those "we could fund an entire society by just taxing the top 1%!" lines my hair stands on edge. It's usually just false, and whatsmore it's paving the way for a basically libertarian anti social anti tax populist slop.

the electrician may not feel better about the world because unemployment is low, but the people who have jobs when they wouldn't otherwise do, and the people who can get better jobs because they have more bargaining power as labor do. And if they don't, something odd is happening!

Realised recently that Pulp’s song ‘This is Hardcore’ is basically a bond theme song and like that bond would be better and worse than anything we could get…

Too many of the moby dick quotes make me ask the question ‘is this about dicks?’ Is usually is.

The UK now has 90 taxes (more than any time since 1843). Germany raises more tax than the UK, but with only 60 taxes. France raises a bit more than that, but has 348. What's going on? And what can we learn?

I mean yeah I absolutely think we got us a bad case of the affluenza I actually think that lens makes so much about our politics so much more comprehensible

Personally, and this is fatalism I strongly recommend against applying in your own life, if I did not have that belief in the work and its near-holy importance, I would kill myself. There would be no point in living. It is what animates me and grants me vigor far beyond most people.

To be clear, I do not just mean the right. Nihilism haunts many progressives, leftists, and what we'll generously call apolitical centrists. If you cannot posit a world that should exist, you cannot create anything of value and at the core of that work is belief in that other, different world.

the minimum incremental change from "all politicians are pieces of shit, and so it's not worth it to vote" is "all politicians are pieces of shit, and this one isn't saying otherwise and will send me a check"