Essential reading from @petergeoghegan.bsky.social

The outrages and atrocities fall like leaves, uncountable, ungathered; we're left with a residue of powerlessness and shame Pic by Abed Rahim Khatib. In Gaza, the body of one-month-old Majed Mohammed Zarab, thought to have starved to death, is brought to his funeral

All political tribes can be hypocritical but the right's current level of hypocrisy on free speech is deliberate. It's an assertion of power not a blindspot.

Morning everyone.

Loath though he is to alienate floating racists, perhaps Starmer could rouse himself to condemn a violent fascist rally teeming with people who want him overthrown and/or killed

Today people went around my neighborhood in north east London spray painting St George’s crosses onto people’s homes. Many of these houses have non British people living in them. This is getting very dark, very quick.

Democrats Cannot Just Buy Back the Working Class www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/o...

look, it might not have worked with the public, but at least it was the wrong thing to do morally

On the same day in the Telegraph:

Such a wonderful fragment. Rewatching for the infamous coffee twist 3 mins in and it sparked so many thoughts. There was an idea when McDonald's opened in Moscow that it showed why democracy was best, turns out it just showed the tyrants the missing piece they needed www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLsJ...

Funny how the US can run out of eggs without breaking sweat but can't seem to run out of drugs even when it literally bombs the supply chain

One of the unintended (and unremarked upon) consequences of the mass privatisations of universal networks has been to divide tax-raising agents into two groups, a private one where it's 'normal' to raise taxes/prices and a state one like the NHS where it's 'normal' not to.

Those pesky clues

“I don’t want asylum seekers to live on my street” is genuinely a wild thing to say as a notionally progressive politician

one of the most concerning things about Reform's polling is that we'd be looking at dozens of other MPs of the calibre of James McMurdock, a piece of human pond scum who served a custodial sentence for assaulting his ex-girlfriend and is now laughing it up with the Nazis over in the other place

Yet another Brexit-sceptical publication - I've seen it in the Guardian, the BBC and the New Yorker, this time it's the Economist - repeating the false notion that the EU didn't tie subsidies to nature-friendly farming. Truth is Britain, inside the EU, made it happen, decades ago

The Ukrainian branch of Just Stop Oil continues its not-fucking-around campaign

In Chichester, one lamppost when we walked through the town centre today. I wonder if at a certain point the question will change from ‘why flags on lampposts’ in places to ‘why not flags on lampposts’ in others

There’s no public pressure in Europe to help Ukraine for real, only pressure to be reassured something’s being done. Hence this absurd spectacle of European leaders saying they’ll do something with US cover and Russian permission when it’s plain the US won’t cover and Russia won’t permit.

HOPE not hate can reveal that Lee Twamley, photographed at the front of Britain First’s “March for Remigration” in Manchester this month, has served prison time for trying to smuggle Vietnamese migrants into the UK. hopenothate.org.uk/2025/08/19/e...

Madame Tussaud’s getting worse and worse

The point at which Dem governors seek to use their powers to formally obstruct Fed overreach - like, physically, by state agents - gets squeezed impossibly thin between ‘too soon’ and ‘too late’.

Gavin Newsom is holding a press conference today on redistricting and DHS agents have arrived masked up and in full gear. Many are armed with guns.

Is this the civil war starting, or is it just bog standard authoritarian intimidation?

Stunning! An 8-hour time-lapse to show the Earth is rotating while capturing the Milky Way.

I kinda love that Alex Beard's argument is explicitly 'but look, you have to understand. When we said that, it was really easy'.

The only Russian proposal I can imagine that would make the slightest sense from their point of view would be if they are proposing that Ukraine should give up actual Ukrainian lands in exchange for Russia giving up its claims to other Ukrainian lands.

@michaelkofman.bsky.social is the essential source for the war side of the war against Ukraine and though he’s on here he unfortunately doesn’t cross-post much from x - here are a few key bits of his recent thread

Politico narrates Mamdani as the Hercules of mixed metaphors. After he’s faced a gauntlet of pitfalls, watch as he tackles the gamut of snares and combats the raft of obstacles.

This sets out the wickedness of Israeli government policy very plainly. You do not treat people this way, based on their ethnicity, unless you consider them less human than you. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

‘Israel’s allies are still buying time for Israel to change course or come to a deal with Hamas over how many trucks to allow in, as though food were a legitimate bargaining chip. Gazans cannot afford to wait for either.’ New on the blog: Amjad Iraqi on Gaza. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ju...

@christopherjm.ft.com is so far ahead of any other non-Ukrainian journalist on what is happening in that country on.ft.com/414Z2b2

Quite the crowd in Kyiv this evening outside the Ivan Franko Drama Theater, which is the closest protesters can get to Zelensky's office. There's certainly no shortage of civic spirit in Ukraine. t.me/stranaua/204...

“Since AFP was founded in 1944, we have lost journalists in conflicts, some have been injured, others taken prisoner. But none of us remember witnessing colleagues die of hunger"

‘Grappling with how much to embrace’ Struggling with how much to wrestle Fighting over how hard to kiss Agonising over how painfully to torture

@aoc.bsky.social voting no on cutting 500 million in military aid to Israel (a pittance but, hell, a start) & Marjorie Taylor Greene voting yes was absolutely not on my fucking bingo card for 2025… And the AOC bs reasoning re “defensive” aid vs “offensive aid” doesn’t begin to cut it.

Watch as an activist is arrested in Glasgow for displaying a sign reading 'genocide in Palestine, time to take action' 'We're not terrorists', he said as he was taken away by police

Read Huw's full piece here: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Seems like a highly misleading use of averages by David Willetts, conflating the number of pensioners in total, including those with private and workplace pensions, with the pensioners who somehow try to scrape by on the state pension of £230 a week

Massive consumer corporations not even bothering to pretend that AI won’t make customers’ lives shittier in mean, cheeseparing, exploitative ways tinyurl.com/567t4c2z

2125: Brontë country is a wilderness of mesquite, cactus and tumbleweed, with average daily temperatures of 40 degrees. “But at least we stopped the wind turbines”.

This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use development is illegal to build these days.

My most core political opinion - generic liberalism aside - is that the left on both sides of the Atlantic will never truly recover until it is honest with the public and explains that taxes on the middle classes have to rise to pay for public services, not just those on the super rich

If you enjoyed that, try this. One of my favourite of their songs and this performance is just stunning. The song is about artists losing control of, and the value from, their work so with the Rise of AI in progress has increasing relevance. youtu.be/31qwSm3chn4

Surely if you had all the money in the world, the job would actually be quite easy?

Tangentally, one of the bizarre side-effects of the Trumpiverse is that when he says something clear and old-politics normal like 'Electric cars are fine, but not everyone should be forced to own one' it leaps out at you like some atrocious gaffe, a meltdown

This is a great piece, and by no means all bleak. One of the things it highlights for me is the difficulty of scaling up good ideas when the ideas’ attractiveness is so bound up with the commitment and talent of the first ones to carry them out