The Trump regime has murdered numerous innocent people for their opinions, merely living, moving to a new country, riding in a boat, defending their neighbours. Make of that what you will, but this seems far more pertinent than some right-wing thug that died in a scuffle

Setting up for the most obvious false-flag attack in history? 🤔

Currently ambivalent on necessary and sufficient conditions for fascism, but a strong through line in reactionary thought is imaginatively projecting one's own selective memories into a monoculture, then into the past, that must be preserved, with numerous omissions: halcyon days due to Halcion

The Guardian went "Vote tactically, vote for the LibDems" in 2019, spent a good part of 2025 & 2026 so far trying to say backing Greens wouldn't be sensible. Seeing them still shill for Labour in Gorton & Denton, & talk more about Reform then the Greens (who are *ahead* of Labour) is something.

one of the first women who tried to expose Epstein was a trans teenager, so it’s especially galling to hear somebody like @bphillipsonmp.bsky.social say this shit

We ex-Labour voters are simple folk, you see, easily won over with a strongly worded tweet or a Speech About Values, and not inclined to dwell on the government’s plans to, for instance, force our friends & neighbours out of the country by preventing them from getting permanent residence for decades

Israel has been dumping herbicides throughout southern Lebanon as part of a concerted ecocide campaign to render the region uninhabitable. This has been going on for months with Lebanese journalists & environmentalists regularly reporting on it. The BBC: we don’t know why the Israelis are doing it

The Guardian, Labour’s client newspaper, is not just trying to pretend Labour is not losing to the Greens it now has a puff-piece about the Reform candidate. Labour’s (& :. the Guardian’s) biggest nightmare is the Green Party winning, so the Labour establishment is now getting behind the fascists.

I like to imagine that once every 72 hours or so Leo shambles down the hall in the middle of the night in his bathrobe to wake up some cardinal like “sorry man emergency confession real quick” and the cardinal is like “[sigh] was it the one about finding new ways to murder JD Vance again”

This (the video that OP's thread is on) reminds me quite a bit of some of the racist "no go areas" genre of "travel" videos that @annieknk.bsky.social covered in an episode of the QAA Podcast.

posted abt korean politics and somebody replied to me saying they can't be bothered to care about international matters with everything going on here (don't go looking for that reply leave them alone) and it makes me think about how hard the US works to isolate us from developing global perspectives

This is why they killed Malcolm X and MLK and took away passports from Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois— all developed increasingly global perspective on how oppression is global and connected so resistance should be as well. Also, some people lack curiousity or affinity for humankind beyond household..

you, specifically, could have prevented this

The subheadline on this NYT piece is going to turn me into the Joker. Like... this... is exactly what trans people have been saying was going to happen for years.

I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe. @tante.cc has a very thoughtful reply here: tante.cc/2026/02/20/a... A few further comments, 🧵>>

Seems that people have forgotten why Sam Kriss was cancelled in the first place, given that everyone is sharing that San Francisco piece of his. Nope, not going to read it.

My nieces visited me in London this week so I thought we'd go and do a bit of subvertising, installing their art on the public transport network. Safe to say most people would rather see children's art in these spaces, instead of ads for crypto, private healthcare and gambling.

If Hodge is appointed Ofcom chair, I hope people go back to the story of how she absolutely tried to suppress media coverage of her disgusting mishandling of a paedophile scandal. www.theguardian.com/society/2003...

a trans woman i know is being deported back to the USA due to the Home Office messing up paperwork. her wife is desperately trying to raise the funds to prevent this. they have 48 hours before she’s put on a plane and might never be able to return. please, help if you can. they’re both terrified.

I just watched the whole panel and it is interesting to me that the press has honed in on AOC ‘stumbling’ (choosing her words) on one response, and ignoring how NATO Envoy (and former Trump AG) Matt Whitaker effectively dodged the same question, then later completely flubbed a question about Germany

We use 'vice signalling' mainly to mean edgy posts or eating at Chick-fil-a etc., but really it means that to succeed in certain groups you *need* to show that you enjoy causing suffering. This is as true of the News of the World as it is of SS units or just groups of lads telling rape jokes.

Being nice to trans people really did turn out to be a load bearing part of liberal democracy ey

With every fibre of my being, let me say this in a loud, clear, booming voice: this should have happened when Virginia Giuffre was alive to see it.

Watching this crisis over the years and the international inertia has been harrowing, and remains so www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It's incredible how it was revealed that the anti-trans push over the past decade was concocted in no small part by a literal PEDOPHILE CONSPIRACY and the reaction of transphobic lawmakers, journalists, academics has been a shrug and a "well, we gotta carry out the orders from pedophile island"

It's doubly ahistorical as it ignores how gay rights in the 1970s-00s followed a near-identical trajectory: initial acceptance, violent backlash, regression of rights, slow rebuilding/expansion. And, yes, mealymouthed centrists told us we were asking too much then, too.

"Is Merzbow haram" could possibly be the most Birmingham question ever asked

Re-reading "Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist" jewishcurrents.org/memoirs-of-a... via @jewishcurrents.bsky.social

Morning. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYr8...

the energy with which i am wishing you all a happy new year

And here is some of this research into SM and RSE websites (it does suggest a correlation between self esteem and user generated content, so having moderated online youth work spaces clearly has a role to play) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

... rather than fund these kinds of online projects to create these spaces for online youth work, or to properly regulate SM companies, or even set up their own, they just talk about bans. It's never about increasing a capacity to act, just clumsily obviating 'harms'.

In the research into online sex and relationships young people are always saying how much they value user generated content from social media (but that of they want advice they'll go to websites like BISH). They need safe spaces online to do this (would also recommend The Mix and Scarleteen), but

"Starmer promised stability, service over spectacle and a government of national renewal. Instead, we got the muddle of endless U-turns, persistent stagnation in the absence of joined-up, large-scale strategy and now, a full-blown crisis" - @rachelshabi.bsky.social www.thenation.com/article/worl...

Given that BlueSky itself is an American social media platform itself...

whenever anyone on bluesky scolds a palestinian for the way they post, this video should be forced to play in full before their post gets automatically deleted.

Imagine a state broadcaster announcing: “x’s use of the word ‘pandemic’ in reference to Covid-related deaths in 2020 is highly controversial.” That's pretty much where we are.

Absolutely right. Like Chris, I resent the framing that European governments are learning this from the US. It’s totally routine for hundreds of black African people to drown in the Mediterranean when trying to reach Europe. The EU, and its homegrown structural racism, enabled that all by itself.

Wim Wenders going “We have to stay out of politics" when it comes to Gaza and Palestine, depressing.

🙃

In the New Statesman this morning, I tackle an odd subgenre of Epstein coverage that's become more and more prevalent: breathless warnings that we're on a slippery slope to mob rule when we ask awkward questions of the world's most powerful people. www.newstatesman.com/comment/2026...

And yes, I am part of this symbolic elite and this is precisely why I have a responsibility to call this out It's not about any of us personally but about a system we are benefitting from. What we do about it though is up to us

If only the symbolic elite didn't hate the people and democracy because they know a democratic system would threaten their position, we wouldn't be here today Rancière diagnosed our current crisis incredibly precisely 20 years ago... www.versobooks.com/en-gb/produc...

The same goes with the idea that the solution to the resurgence of the far right is to continue placing our faith in liberal democracy when it is really existing liberalism which has led us here I know critical work is easy to ignore but come on... 3/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

I wrote about this top down process here in particular and it's just incredible to see people who know better still pushing these damaging narratives 2/ journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Pretending the rise of the far right and the focus on issues such as immigration or trans people comes from the "legitimate concerns" of "the people" is not just factually wrong, it's a deeply political point Refusing to see this as primarily top down processes is to protect the status quo 1/

A reminder that if you live in England or Wales & were born between 1970-1990 – or even before 1970 – you can help protect your community by getting the MMR vaccine free from your NHS GP now. I did last year. www.nhs.uk/vaccinations...

"Rogers has become the public face of the Trump's growing hostility to European liberal democracies. Since assuming office in October, she has met with far-right European politicians...On 13 December, she met with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) parliamentarian Markus Frohnmaier..."

Ever since the Stochastic Parrots paper was published, I've been fielding the question "How do I know that you're not (just) a stochastic parrot?" ... one that I find inherently dehumanizing, as I write about here: journals-sagepub-com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/doi/10.1177/... Short 🧵>>

So glad our culture and news media spent decades responding to people like this with "what would make you say that," and "let's debate this respectfully," and "why do these ideas resonate with people," and "let's hear him out," and "wow so provocative," instead of "man, shut the fuck up."