Ironically the BBC stumbled on a really important story: Desperate asylum seekers being forced to turn to fraudulent fee-charging “advisors” to navigate a system that is intentionally impossibly baroque and from which all sources of free advice have been removed. But no: they chose Fake Gay Panic.

I didn't find the kind of feed I was looking to follow, so I tried making my own. It's pretty hard actually, eh. The feature of selecting/making your own algorithm and controlling your own feed is one of @bsky.app 's main USPs over other platforms so I'm gonna persist. Tips welcome.

Instead this in-depth report of horrific state-sponsored racial and sexual violence is buried down the bottom of the BBC front page. I found it way below "response to actor who said thing about ballet". In contrast the top *two* stories today are both "some asylum seekers are liars doncha know".

Fortress Europe pays paramilitaries to beat up, rob, harass, rape and "push back" refugees entering Greece. Well done to the journalist and investigators. This horrible racist and sexist state-sponsored violence should be a huge Europe-wide scandal. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

We were at Downing Street yesterday to call on the government to scrap the anti-protest laws that put our freedoms at risk. Together with Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK over 40,000 of you signed the petition, so we sent them your message. @pscupdates.bsky.social #righttoprotest

Robertson was a nasty right-Labour type in the Blair era who as NATO secretary- general supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now he’s talking up war, rearmament, and welfare cuts. www.ft.com/content/88b1... Starmer accused of ‘corrosive complacency’ on UK defence by former Nato chief

A GENTLE REMINDER: we are trying to eliminate fossil fuels because using them kills us. If fossil fuels were cheap (they're not) or reliable (they're SO NOT), it would still be urgent to get rid of them because their intended use destroys our life support systems.

"When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled . If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse."

Glorious

"Bluesky is dying" say folks hawking around a graph that shows Bluesky is pretty stable and has a history of non-linear growth. If you want an excuse to go back to Uncle Elon's fascism, slip and abusive AI porn factory, without taking responsibility for the implications these graphs ain't it.

Sure we may have dried up the lakes and burned the atmosphere with fossil fuel driven data centres but for one glorious moment we flooded the world's phones and laptops with misinformation.

Not halfway into April and it's already started.

What they did to Gaza, they are doing to Lebanon.

"Ceasefire", Israel style

Some very useful formulae here on the relationship between the far right and the rightward-moving "centrist" parties 1 / "The process of fascisation involves two concurrent and mutually reinforcing tendencies: a normalisation of fascism and a fascisation of the normal." isj.org.uk/france-crisis/

Unseat Trump, disarm Israel. For starters. Or we'll be back to the terror that last night was in no time.

Took me a while to get through this but it's really illuminating on the gap between what markets predict and what physics dictates, and the interconnected chokepoints (fertilisers, superconductors) of fossil capital's just-in-time era

We didn't deserve this day.

I'm the daughter of an Army paratrooper who refused orders during our illegal invasion of Vietnam back in the day. He went to LBJ military jail. Dad taught his girls this: "Just following orders" is NEVER any excuse for anyone who's complicit in war crimes. You MUST refuse heinous orders.

I don’t want to hear about brave and conflicted service members I want to hear about people sacrificing their careers to do the right thing

An unambiguous declaration of genocidal intent. Soldiers who do anything less than mutiny, politicians who do anything less than the utmost to remove him from office, an "international community" that does anything than outright opposition to US-Israeli aggression: you are all choosing genocide.

I really don't want this to be relevant, but: nukes are very bad news for everyone.

When the US admits that they killed any “military-aged men” who walked within 3km of a downed pilot they mean any boy lanky enough to be a teenager and any middle-aged man able to walk unaided with a cane got shot in the head for the crime of walking.

Well, that's us told

So-called "double-tap strikes" are bombs fired specifically to target emergency services and medics and prevent the wounded from being saved. They are the complete negation of the convention that ambulances are not to be targeted and one of the most definitive of war crimes.

I sometimes use my train commute to read something edifying or productive. Today I read a load of funny tweets. No regrets.

Monstrous slaughter (abetted by Britain, however Starmer tries to spin it)

We need a phrase that's like the opposite of "damning with faint praise". "An alibi of faint criticism" perhaps.

Listened to Radio 3 on my way to work. Broadens my horizons, lovely tunes. But the news bulletin soured it... Reports of an Iranian counterstrike that killed no-one and IDF casualties in Lebanon. Not a word about the many Iranian and Lebanese people killed, wounded or displaced. Sickening propaganda

If I'm reading this correctly, Israel has authorised the mass execution of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Palestinian detainees. Kill the PoWs. Kill the hostages. Headlines that call it a "penalty for violent offenses" are whitewashing an enormous war crime. www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-...

Today, we’re showing up. For our neighbours. Our friends. Our family. And anyone who has been scapegoated by the far-right. Half a million strong. Together. This is just the beginning. #Together

The worst doom-scrolling is that of the jobs lists.

This is pure Alan Partridge.

"The imperialist’s fallacy has always been to think that simply by imposing suffering, he can impose his will. Yet this pure negation cannot produce any durable dominance; the Strait of Hormuz bears witness to this. Nonetheless, the destruction is real. Israel and the US are deindustrializing Iran."

Essential reading on bureaucracy, technology and the military kill chain

Good. First Copilot, now Sora. Virtually the only argument people give me in favour of drinking the AI Kool-Aid is that it's inevitable, it's a done deal, there's no room for debate or resistance. But there is. Together we can kill this thing.

LOL the racists are annoyed with MattGPT (fka Matt Badloss) for making their racism look stupid

All your surveillance tech will be used against you

Just finished reading The Brilliant Abyss by @helenscales.bsky.social after realising I just didn't know enough about hydrothermal vents. Brilliant abyss, brilliant #naturewriting. The deep really is full of wonders, to explore and to defend from predatory extractivist capitalism.

The worst of people want our details.

The mayors of London and Manchester - probably the only UK politicians you could call popular - have their central policies promoting public transport over cars (ULEZ, Bee Network). Grand. But the success of Paris really exposes the poverty of their ambitions. Come on. We can do so much more.

This is really interesting! IANAE but what @cominsitu.bsky.social calls "Stirner's gap" between me and my humanity recalls Sartre's later distinction between my existence and essence. (Ironically, he argued for its compatibility with communism under the title "Existentialism is a Humanism")

A transition to renewable energy without strip-mining the earth and it's oceans is possible, and here's a five-point proposal for how to do it.

“It’s inevitable” “you can’t roll it back” “you just have to accept it”

Slime mould (I think?) going absolutely nuts on these stumps. The trees were only felled last year so it's really been having a feast!

Aside from anything else, you’d think “Israel is trying to destroy as much civilian infrastructure as it can” would be the headline, given this is an absolutely horrifying war crime in itself.

"The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs ... have no idea what they’re doing."

Just heard my first chiffchaff of the year. It's really spring now!