Hmmmmm.....

It's a very important point because people really do have pretty binary perceptions of everything except the stuff they are *really* focused on. Either NHS waits are too long, or they're fine, there's no middle ground of long-ish waits where people are happy-ish.

The Labour party in the UK are doing the kind of toilet police nonsense that was a stable of the Republican Party in the USA 8 years ago. Culturally poisonous reactionaries.

If only people in paid employment had been able to vote we would have had a Corbyn government.

Yeah I do think the (rightful) emphasis on the interracial nature of the Allied War Effort has obscured just how pan-European all sides were by the war's end

Basically most right-wing discourse now consists of people having screaming meltdowns about the fact the UK is among the most successfully multicultural socities in history because are now unable to outright their own failures by dint of privilege

Best moment this government has had was unleashing the police & courts on the far-right in August 2024. It was morally right, politically popular & played to Starmer's strengths. They disgracefully & idiotically allowed themselves to be spooked away from this by a right-wing press that nobody reads

Woke PRI

What the actual fuck!?!

In 2017, Criselda Vasquez painted this portrait of her parents and titled it "The New American Gothic." Last month, her father, the man in this portrait, was abducted by ICE after being in the US for 30+ years. The family is now struggling with bills. A GoFundMe has been started: gofund.me/456d8a193

"It was odd to realise that Enoch Powell's most fervent wish had been that I should never have been born" - especially as my father got the plane from India to England on the Whitsun Bank Holiday days after that famously infamous speech.

Progressive voters are a lot less willing to compromise because the government spent two years telling them to fuck off (which was a thing within their control.) You can't blame the voters for listening.

"Why are oil prices not higher? In short, America’s selling while China ain’t buying" "the US has responded by cranking up exports, while China has slashed imports" www.ft.com/content/ae62...

Not only is Britain not ungovernable, it slightly scares how much the country is clearly yearning to be governed because let's face it if the first person to actually try and do that ends up being Farage then Reform might not quite implode in the way a lot of people expect

america's reactionaries would love nothing more to nullify the reconstruction amendments and render them a dead letter of the constitution. this was as true in 1873 as it is today.

The most millennial song is obvious Dancing On My Own by Robyn. Synth, self-pitying, danceable. It even featured in Girls!

it's very much to Amy Winehouse's credit that she's barely even mentioned in the 'millenial song' discourse. despite Valeray

My parents are liberal but used to watch a lot of Fox before it was banned in the UK and it didn't have no effect, but it wasn't that they became republicans it was that they supported the war on Christmas.

It's so cool and normal that the British Jewish communal establishment is so happy turning antisemitism into a purely partisan bullshit weapon for the right

Blue Labour will say “better to turn Camden into a marginal in order to win Barnsley” and then get absolutely destroyed in Barnsley.

A modern reader’s understanding of piety is actually aided by going “oh, this was real as race to them!”

My problem with this moment is that, as someone who was unpopular complaining about left-wing antisemitism at university 15 years ago, is that the people screaming loudest about taking it seriously are themselves *not taking it seriously*

How did we get to a place where only 45% of public thinks the British state effectively murdering people at sea is morally wrong?

I have two levels of criticism, one moral and one practical. As a practical point I think it is very revealing that she talks about immigration being "fixed" as if it is something that can be fixed by changing immigration law.

London is probably the third or fourth best bagel city in the world. Which basically means their bagels are barely acceptable.

Sandie Peggie *still* getting front page stories and sympathetic interviews while Beth Upton has had to flee to Australia is so unbelievably grim.

This seems doubtful until you go to French hypermarchés and they are basically the only examples of a giant Wal-Mart in Europe

It feels very Bluesky that 10% of my discovery feed is defending Madonna against ageism.

Ok so, I want to talk a little bit about oil futures. I see a lot of arguments about spot vs front future that I think are backwards and I wanted to try and provide some context on how physical commodities futures work.

I've been learning Russian for a while because I am apparently a masochist and really, lads, if you are going to have a language where case is very important to meaning you should also have the decency to not blend every word into the next according to what pleases your tongue

This is why people on the left who claim to care about the global south should regulate their enthusiasm for universal household bailouts in rich countries.

It irritates me immensely when after a pavement with flagstones or cobbles is dug up for works they don't replace them but just fill it with asphalt.

Feel like it should be bigger news that the Home Secretary is very publicly losing the plot

This is entirely true, btw, and even the algorithm reflects it. My Instagram often leans to right-wing bullshit even though I have no time for it but the still-married-dad stuff? That's often pretty liberal! Especially the British-still-married-dad stuff.

And of course the real story for the press in every country other than this one is "British trans doctor forced to flee country", but no, for our own extremist press it's "let's continue to harass them in their new country and try to get them sacked there too"

This tweet is highly defamatory and Martina Navratilova should be fired from BBC Sport for it. It demonstrates an horrendous level of hatred for a trans woman (who was cleared of all wrongdoing in a recent tribunal) because she is a trans woman.

In the same manifesto, Palantir's owners argued that we need a national military draft, that soft power is over, and that we were too hard on Germany and Japan after World War II. I don't think that company should be allowed to exist anymore.

Janan Ganesh on London:

I'm sure it's unfair in many ways but there is something of Ken Livingstone to him. He loved London, totally and completely, and that bled into everything.

ME: [wincing, covering up Starmer's ears] sorry, do you mind not talking about politics around Keir? He doesn't know about scary things like nuclear war or poverty or Peter Mandelson and we'd like to maintain his innocence for a bit longer KEIR: my father was a drill bit ME: that's right Keir!

I often remember that in the BLM summer one of these guys' big points was that it was all an overreaction and racism barely exists. Don't hear that much these days, do you?

The Cyril fishing lore goes deep. This Evita Bezuidenhout segment is very dear to me. It’s pretty remarkable in hindsight? An ANC leader filming a segment with an Afrikaans drag queen - in 1994! South Africa’s transition to democracy was the most wonderful miracle. Makes me so emotional.

there's four categories of economy - developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina

Womp womp

Act of national self-harm that we're not throwing money at American scientists to move here

its so funny how corbyns punishment for being a bad leader of the labour party is accidentally recreating the labour party but even worse. I love it!!! you cannot escape the punishment wheel!!

More generally - and I'm increasingly convinced this is one of the defining political problems right now - if voters cannot recognise the real world in what politicians say, they will look for truth elsewhere. And we're not short of unsavoury figures trying to make the world make sense for people.

A lot has bothered me about the reporting of the Kanye West banned. Firstly how it has been framed as all about it the Jewish community - but we should all be against Nazism! This country fought Nazis. Songs called Heil Hitler should not just be for the Jewish community to object to. And secondly…

One of the best awkward social interactions I've ever observed was at uni, between a guy who told people his dad was a builder (actually a director of a major construction company) and one who told people his dad was a property developer (actually a builder and maybe had a BTL).