I have distracted myself by cleaning a fermenter and a (beer) kettle today. Everything is once again sparkling steel and I'm, once again, wondering why I find it so soothing. I fucking hate cleaning normally.

Reminds me of the extremely dodgy history of Change Independent party's finances which mysteriously got destroyed

aw man

I think people in Britain assume that their status is akin to American style citizenship and not subjects of a hereditary monarch, whose authority is imposed with remarkable latitude by a series of quite surprisingly authoritarian governments.

Remembered this one, where everyone fully understood McCluskey was referring to Peter being corrupt as fuck - you see now that they all knew this was correct - but the lads were having so much fun squealing in terror, they just figured Fuck It and went with it anyway metro.co.uk/2020/10/20/u...

What do we suppose Rachel has said about posts on,say, murals in the past do we think?

Hahahahahahahahaha

Said it before, I'll say it again: our national commentary on racism was fucked the moment we started making racists the arbiters of what is or isn't racism.

Just as well this stuff didn’t have any drastic consequences for the public and for the actual course of British history. Because if it did, it might look like this is a malicious, destructive system staffed by actively dishonest and secretive people.

We all know this was imposed. What really gets me though is that Labour need Starmer make it to the May elections before burning him but that's fucking miles away. Worse, they're going to deploy a shitty budget between now and then. I'm not sure this can drag out much longer, we already have riots.

Very interesting when wall-to-wall from like Tommy Robinson to Aaron BastanI we’ve been told again-and-again that we are losing young men specifically

Cursed, and what the fuck is it with her and Woody Allen?

Opening apes sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey

what a lot of our (and american) journos/politicos regard as political violence is: anything that openly and forcefully opposes western imperial interests. anything else? poverty, homelessness, the entirety of state security apparatus? well that's just forces of nature. nothing to be done i'm afraid

I think we can guess. I have to say, I have always known you can't trust liberals, but the utter collapse of a progressive "centre" ought to be instructive for everyone.

Almost everyone agrees political violence is bad, but plenty of political violence passes unremarked or supported when it happens to someone else.

He’s talking about Ian Austin and Tom Watson because the wrecking campaign of 2018-19 was all Mandelson, via McSweeney. It looks to me like he is saying that if anyone picks at this thread, the whole thing will come spilling out like Hooper pulling stuff out of the shark’s guts in Jaws.

There's a whole internet of information out there, not for Mike though.

hey gang i have been asked to tell you all that there are two more kittens in need of homes, from the same family as Cube, please share round so london people can see & we can find suitable homes for them 🙏❤️

They were willing to fully cooperate with him and his horrible mates stoking years of panic, then aggressively shitehousing the public past the ludicrous internal party shenanigans. Any noticing of things that happens here will be within very tight, specific parameters.

Thing about Mandelson that will 100% be skipped over is how the press, in the full knowledge of what he'd done, and who he associated with, were also very happy to platform him. It's the same with other members of the Labour right with shady histories. Happy to have them as talking heads.

LOL, Mandelson. Predictable. Anyway...

he's either lying or he did a big ol' don't ask, don't tell when vetting Mandelson for the ambassadorship in any normal circumstance this would be a resigning issue but hey this is Nu Labour

"the heat must be lowered" says british hot dog man meme

I remember Newsnight on the day of Jo Cox’s murder: four of her colleagues lined up not to talk about the type of far right crank who had murdered their colleague, but “social media abuse”, helpfully blurring the line between fascist incitement and calling them dickheads for not opposing austerity.

It’s almost like it’s not only that people in high office turn out to be corrupt; it’s that the press will only endorse you and back your campaigning if you’re so absurdly corrupt that they can get rid of you on a whim, just by suddenly noticing all the ludicrous corruption they always knew about.

They also don't consider most of the people usually subject to political violence to be people. Black people getting beaten by the cops isn't hurting anyone, in their cosmology, unless the black people fight back or a cop accidentally trips over. They don't think we count.

"free speech"

I guess we're really getting a good look at how subordinate UK political culture is to the US. Not that most of us needed reminding.

the fucking prime minister too lol

why is the foreign secretary of the united kingdom putting out a statement on this

One of the main things that dragged me back to labour under Corbyn was the chance to lock the Racist right of the party out. Sadly, Corbyn wasn't ruthless enough, so they came roaring back. But the worst bit was explaining to people that the party was going to be very racist under Starmer...

The public watched the entire political class deliberately inflict Boris Johnson on us all then watched our absurdly press shitehouse him out the door as an embarrassment, and replace him with quite possibly the most absurd, cringe liars and bullshit artists yet. There is no mystery here, is there.

This is a perfectly commendable piece on the direction of travel, but it's notable that while the Tories and Reform get mentions, the Labour Party doesn't. To mix metaphors, you cannot pull your punches when faced with the drift towards Fascism. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

That is indeed the endgame. America is showing the way and our own politicians are more open about it than ever.

It is IMO very difficult to continue to argue that a system that is now producing near-trillionaires who plough the world’s excess into obviously dumb perpetual motion machines and use their clout to reimpose fascism and race science is fair, efficient, moral, rational or even vaguely desirable.

Godzilla-sized hotdog costume

Related, the reporting on Rayner was, interesting. While I won't lament her no one seemed curious about how this all kicked off. It was reported as a blow to Starmer, and it is, but not in the normal sense. Ange was removed to clear the way for his ultimate defenestration. Boy is on borrowed time.

Remember this one, about how Peter is your man if you want to start a business in Moscow? Maybe not: it was published to a deafening silence and nothing was said until a year later, when the author won an award for it and it turned out everyone had in fact read it www.theguardian.com/news/2022/ju...

I'm teaching RSE in a school this week. I think schools really need to focus on a massive programme of radical socialisation. Make them sites of joy and possibility. Put that first and then think about the curriculum (inc RSE). Not the other way round. Academic achievement will also follow.

Your conscience is now Hamas

Absolutely absurd shit here, and anyone defending it is a proper danger.

Andrew Rawnsley, here. I’d ask: how exactly did “an electorate of activists and trades unionists” wind up being force-fed obsequious crawling to America, benefit cuts and genocide by a tiny gaggle of extremely belligerent right wing swine? Is it possible for to happen, without significant fraud.

Ok, major content warning for this, absolutely horrific read. I knew tech companies where effectively paying employees to bank embryos etc. but I hadn't realised the full extent of the exploitation or the size of the market.

A more accurate cartoon might show members of the public happily going about their business while the paper’s staff drive tankers up and down streets all over the country, disinterestedly spraying buildings with aviation fuel.

In opposition, the lads could always switch to booting the Tories, who served up a new clusterfuck once every two or three days. With Labour now in power, there’s nothing for courtiers to do but sit in mute mortification pretending to not see the naked Emperor’s sad, drooping grey ballsack.

Given neither Starmer nor his team appear to have got worse in power - they were every bit as vacuous, cringe, try-hard and catastrophically shit as this when they were in opposition - then I conclude that the main difference now is: they are thoroughly embarrassing their one-time cheerleaders.

Words have no meaning at The Guardian anymore. Linehan is a “gender activist” in the same way that the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan is a “race activist”

britain thrown into chaos as the law accidentally binds a member of the in-group to protect an out-group