So we all love to make fun of the credulous, but… Cuckooing is a thing, sadly

@samiraahmed.bsky.social listing places Bonds have come from on R4 just now, rightly picking up Scotland, Australia and Ireland but missing out Streatham. Sad times.

See also: every deployment of Gatsby as a theme

@jonronson.bsky.social did a tremendous programme on this phenomenon - with what must have been a terrifying experience for the family involved www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Gamergate reaches its natural conclusion

arstechnica.com/health/2025/... Diet Coke to the rescue!

this is an extraordinary canary in the coal mine

Great discussion wrapping up Screen Shot on Radio 4, about the evolution of capitalist/consumerist culture, and the inversion of satire so that the butt of the attack becomes aspirational One of the smartest shows on the radio right now @kermodemovie.bsky.social @ellenejones.bsky.social

Jeepers. How are they finding it this hard?

This is the nub of the issue with the efficiency argument. ID cards become a solution in search of a problem because the things they are meant to fix are complex and don’t lend themselves to the ‘just one thing’ model of fixing stuff

This captures something of the Cybersyn-like nature of the pro ID-card arguments If we can just get all the data in one place everything then we can see the system perfectly and then imagine how we can perfect it!

100% this. The incentives are with the employers who benefit from cheap black market labour. Prove that we’re maxing out prosecutions of shady firms and then let’s look at ID cards.

I have a whole range of observations about digital ID, but the main one is it's a mistake to launch a complex, measurable, highly scrutinisable infrastructure project to achieve a specific measurable target when there is no evidence that the complex project will result in the measurable outcome

Look, we have to make him PM immediately - he must have figures out how to build a time machine!

I mean, it’s not like it’s high art… Feels like we’ve hit a TV rut, what with Slow Horses being a highlight and The Penguin being one of the big events at the Emmys

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again. Ignore the haters, London is the 🐐

it's so nice to see what a functioning judiciary looks like "A transgender woman in the East African nation of Kenya has won a landmark court victory in which the judge not only found in her favour, but ordered the government to pass a Transgender Protection Rights Act." fuck yeah

RAPTCHA

This is amazing

There is only one answer I am not taking follow ups

Holy crap

The immigrant experience, even the second or third generation immigrant experience, so often adds up to keeping the suitcases handy.

When I interviewed older South Asian British people about their retirement decisions over a decade ago, a large number said they had kept a passport and land in India and Pakistan 'just in case' When I asked 'in case what?' they responded 'in case we are told to leave Britain'

This is spot on. Playing to the legality point is exactly the sort of tactic that has contributed to the general shittiness of politics now - it looks like professionals playing tricks on everyone else with their special rules. We have to get ethics back into politics.

Some years ago I went to the National Archives to see the original of this map, drawn by TE Lawrence and presented to the British war cabinet in November 1918. Proposes a divvying up in which Faisal getting Syria and Transjordan, and Abdullah gets Iraq. Always struck by the ?? over Kurdistan.

Absolute Horst Wessel stuff

This is potentially a genius move. If it’s then disputed, it gives you a jumping off point to ask ‘so what did he say then?’

The system’s always been rigged. For decades you can’t even run a imperialist genocide without Antifa disrupting it because of woke

‘The bitcoin president’ Spot on.

Failure to ugly cry over a dead podcaster now a Federal offense.

Just good honest patriots who love their country

Fascism was always about the exciting displays

My column in tomorrow's paper:

I wonder what the roads are like in East Wiltshire?

This is a statue in Bosnia recalling an incident in 1995. Men were fleeing the massacre in Srebrenica. Nermin was hiding on a hill. His dad Ramo had been captured by Serb racists, who said ‘call him down to surrender, and you’ll both be safe’ He did. Nermin came down. Both were murdered.

Just listening to a Radio 4 show about Route 66, and discovering about the Green Book Imagine having to get a travel guide for your own country, to avoid taking a wrong turn and being murdered by racists Last released in 1966 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neg...

Good to see

Encountering the fascists outside Waterloo iandunt.substack.com/p/encounteri...

The view this morning. Hate can be defeated, by ordinary, decent people. But it also needs political leadership standing up to it. Which Britain doesn’t seem to have right now

So I think this is partly true. But here’s some anecdata that led me to believe that there are a lot of racists out there. 16 years ago, my wife and I were invited to dinner in our bit of south London. The host wanted to stand in the local elections & needed local residents to sign her form. 1/7

Turns out that there is likely always to be a bunch of obnoxious thugs who will find any excuse for a ruck Would be nice if politicians could figure out the difference between ideology and mindless thuggery

This is what Harold Wilson said in reply to Enoch Powell's 'River of Blood' speech. Oh to have politicians of this calibre again. Imagine Starmer saying this?

On days like today, it’s important to remember the words of the wonderful Jonathan Miller when challenging the dog-whistling of those who wish to divide us for political or financial gain.

And on the street in central London today I saw two ex-soldiers harassing a young woman on her own. Now, she’d called another woman waving a flag a Nazi, which may or may have been called for. But it’s not exactly the actions of people concerned for women’s safety.

News from Finland. A 9-year-old lost an especially good stick he’d had since he was 2. He hung up 20 posters. A few days later it was returned. It had been found by a 2-year-old, who wanted to keep it for herself, but her mother made her return it. She got toys, flowers and candy as a reward.

Here's a good Soviet joke from tehgraun that I hadn't seen before. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

The problem with every post-Millennial generation is they got to go straight to high speed internet. Of course you'll get computer madness that way. Make them start with those old screeching modems and work their way up

All I saw was cheesecake boat and ocean for at least 5 minutes