Incredible scene: Travelers wait on hours-long security line at George Bush International Airport in Houston while Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” blasts through the speakers. (video shared directly with me)

Thinking about how annoying Dubai expats are and then remembering that lots of Brits also emigrated to South Africa in the 60s and 70s

I've been on both sides of this line and ultimately the biggest difference I found is that my 'blue collar' job didn't stress me out after hours, but I was outside and really cold for ~4 months of each year and that was so shit.

This is going to be horrific across lots of developing Asia. www.ft.com/content/64c5...

This isn’t quite right: certain countries helped to crush the UN aid agency by pretending to believe that it was a Hamas front, and then they loudly paid no attention at all when the agency was replaced by soldiers firing machine guns at hungry people trying to pick up bags of flour.

Why does Labour propose young Pascal Banque, 7, should get settlement aged 10 because his Dad is a banker, but classmate Marie Marigold, whose mum is a cleaner at the bank isn't eligible until she is 22. (Big barrier to her university prospects, as faces international fees under current rules!)

It's not the biggest thing, but it is genuinely deeply aggravating that everything will get worse for no real gains, just because Americans were stupid enough to elect him again.

if you can’t see that shouting “free Palestine” at a random Jewish person is antisemitic, your brain is cooked. clock out, you’re done. the world has passed you by.

Man, what happened?

Good thread, this is the key point. Far too many people in British politics seem to not understand that ultimately the thing causing the energy price shock is...the world doesn't have as much energy as it did before Trump invaded Iran, something with real and deadly consequences.

One of the most interesting polling stats in British politics is that the % of people identifying as working class has stayed exactly the same since 1980 (60%) - even though on any plausible objective metric there are far more middle class people.

Just spent the week in LA and I really do have to say you can see how people in Southern California become so navel gazy and annoying, they live in paradise

"400 years ago it would never have occured to anyone to be introspective" is perhaps the dumbest thing I've ever heard someone say while try to sound smart. Hamlet was written over 400 years ago.

My left wing party, it is very sick.

I think "ashamed of British animals" is probably the worst position you could hold in British politics?

i think jamelle bouie is where i got this point from (though its obviously not unique to him): trump doesnt escape consequences so much as the institutions designed to impose consequences refuse to penalize him. this is absolutely not the same thing. hes not magic, people are just lazy and stupid.

Right wing dorks post photos of 50s advertising saying it is worth fighting for, but this is real and worth fighting for.

Most accurate portrait of modern culture currently available

a lot of discussion about how "cosmopolitan" urban dwellers are, but a really underdiscussed trend is the homogenization of culture across *rural* areas of the USA - replacement of once-distinct regional cultures with generic "redneck" accent and culture, regional religions with evanglicalism etc

Great sign of the broken information environment that everyone is talking about a thing Dario Amodei said on Feb 12 www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/o...

Nothing they talk about more in "left behind communities" than reinstalling the Shah.

In hindsight I think deliverism was a rhetorical scam, it’s purpose was to make it look like it was in fine, sensible and even smart for a leader and political operation to not have a clear political project and governing ideology

Whoops

for anyone wondering why there’s so much unbridled joy on ScotPol Bluesky about the arrest of a Scottish Labour MP’s husband for spying for China, take your pick

i wind up tweeting this basically every time there's an article like this, but the fundamental thing to me: ask yourself whether you earnestly believe there's more social pressure to be trans, or more social pressure to be cis. it's actually a super easy one!

Strategic advisors in Blue Labour will really be like "you believe in values? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, winning over voters by aping Farage on immigration" and then not win over any voters.

Britain's biggest cultural success, and it is a success, is weaving together different cultures in a common civic culture that nonetheless doesn't ask us to believe in a singular, state sanctioned national story. In fact, top down statist civics always feel completely un-British.

One of the more aggravating bits of current political discourse is how the UK population is now percieved as being pro-Israel when it is clearly not.

The best descriptor for this era is 'vandalism'. These people have decided to break stuff, just because

obviously today is a huge embarrassment for Matt Goodwin and for Reform, which is something that we absolutely ought to celebrate, but we must also remember it's a huge embarrassment for Morgan McSweeney and Maurice Glasman and all the Blue Labour weirdos, and that's important to celebrate too :)

The current argument of the British right is that Muslims turned out in "blocs" with "family voting" to cast their ballots for a party led by a gay Jewish man, and this shows that multiculturalism has failed, voting is "sectarian" and we are in a crisis. Hmmmmmm.

MATTHEW BADLOSS IS IT

The fact that *this* is their worst nightmare, rather than Reform winning, is horribly and depressingly revealing.

Trans people are the guinea pigs for a particularly modern form of oppression, where bureaucratic tweaks combine with the web of documentation needed for life to make it feasible to turn any undesirable person who tries to carry on a normal existence into a criminal.

Leaving to one side any specifities of the current Labour Party, one thing centre-left governments need to understand taking over from rightwing governments nowadays is that every institution /is/ politicised and we need to get comfortable with mass firings of the proxies of the enemy.

The big difference between the US and Brazilian/Korean case isn't that voters care less about democracy. It's that American elites basically did not care about it after two weeks

There are a lot of palpable benefits to working on the railways, but without doubt one of the best is simply that if a passenger is properly rude to you, you can be pretty rude back without getting too much grief.

So much that could be said on the 4th anniversary of the full scale invasion, but it all just boils down to the ultimate admiration for Ukrainians who have endured so much, fought so hard and deserve victory, peace and prosperity. Slava Ukraini!

The British radical right is wedded to the harsh economics of the 80s in a way their compatriots elsewhere aren't, operate at a demographic disadvantage relative to them too, and are only really saved by a media-political elite that is in turn sympathetic or lightweight

the tourettes at the BAFTAs thing, with its lack of clear baddie and its need for sympathy for all and a bit of saneness and restraint, is perfectly designed to send a specific type of (usually american) ultra liberal mental

There are a lot of problems in our societies, but I think a really overlooked catalyst for a lot of our doom and gloom is simply that the group whose existence has got WAY worse and more precarious the past 10-20 years is also the group responsible for informing us

Big problem with the BBC is its sheer credulity and lack of intellectual curiosity about stuff. It feels like it has lost the will to interrogate (with rare exceptions)

One thing I'm getting from rooting around in early postwar periodicals is that middlebrow culture was good, actually and we're impoverished for its demise.

🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺

Everything else aside, these are excellent skills to have if you want to emigrate.

This makes me sad as once upon a time I forgot my British passport and was allowed in with minimal fuss upon providing my card for the Staines Blockbuster and a Labour Party membership card

I was once discussing a friend from the west country who was marrying a Frenchwoman with a very sceptical old bloke from Avignon. He became much more optimistic about their union when I revealed she was from Normandy.

As someone who submits comments to planning consultations, one functional YIMBY move would be to not email people who have commented on one plan about every other consultation that you then open up for comment.