Confected outrage & pearl-clutching at the allegation of red Toryism for going on a decade but the evidence keeps on piling up.

Pathetic country. Anyone advocating radical change gets lectured about the art of the possible then forced to watch a succession of know-nothings attempt policy by headline, fail, then get hired by the headline-setters to explain how impossible everything is. Your hardnosed realists have glass jaws.

He isn't going to start actually listening to you any more than the Transphobian is going to stop publishing puff pieces for princelings. Make him/them irrelevant! Build your own institutions, your own media, your own discussions where people listen to & engage with one another 🤗

clearing out my open tabs for the new year & have been flipping to this one on the semi-regs recently—a really really good poem by Sara Elkamel

"brains trust" Vapid yet vicious. There's no substantial difference between the Fabians & Starmer on this evidence. Fuck them, fuck their unearned confidence in dismissing any attempt to offer a genuine alternative. You don't need to believe a wealth tax is a miracle cure to see through this BS

Unable to send a text or find an address on Google Maps most of this afternoon in central London. How cool is it that we entrusted online safety regulation to the guys who believed every lie mobile broadband providers told them about national coverage all these years

Great opportunity to share my favourite screenshot of all time:

This is illuminating on how the SWP got into the stupid campist position it's in. I wonder what the wider repercussions would be, to the left of Labour, if the new guard overturned the position on Ukraine.

Stunning. Delphine Seyrig does so much with so little for so long. Watching it now for the first time means belatedly recognising its impact on many other films I've seen previously. The focus on tasks brought I Don't Want to Sleep Alone to mind maybe especially.

If there's ever to be a left alternative parliamentary party that isn't one element of a coalition within the Greens, then it will need to emerge from all the genuine grassroots groups that formed in hope of participating in YP but were frustrated via the machinations of this MP as much as any other

Finally joined a political group. I wanted to overcome my tendency to overthink/internalise figuring out problems that really require collective discussion. When I was younger, I found the available radical left options off-putting, coercive, dogmatic. In 2025 I found comrades who are anything but 🤗

Anyone know what international regulations PayPal might be referring to when disallowing a payment on a UK-based crowdfunding site in Canadian dollars? Was a very curt message...

This is a black trans woman who is trying to leave the USA to start a life in Canada. If you know of any support networks that could help, please reach out.

US commentary on here often identifies in the contemporary Republican party an assertion of the right to abuse, & isn't it interesting to see how a prominent British transphobe might be replicating that in the Times, to this kind of welcome.

Fiancée just described diCaprio in One Battle After Another as the anti-Liam Neeson 👌 😂

“What has gone wrong in our societies that we no longer seem able to create or raise human beings? That is the most important question we can ask in the world we now inhabit, the world after Gaza.”

Always remember to keep your cum tea in a dry place.

Omfg (the singular @bransonreese.bsky.social )

Steve Reed is a pure product of that strain in Labour politics that would cut off its nose to spite its face.

👀

This is Marcel Broodthaers erasure

Just how did walking toff reactionary caricature Jonathan Hall achieve his current role & prominence, is my question for any American journalists passing through town who might be willing to do the job British political journos apparently can't

Me: it would be quite helpful to see a collegiate discussion of welfare spending & also degrowth [cue mentions snarknado]

This is just Brighton though isn't it? www.bbc.com/news/article...

You don't get to run a government that invests what political capital it has left in scapegoating (refugees, trans people) and then lecture others on causing division. Dishonest drivel.

Have only read the introduction so far, but this is really good - on Arab modernism as it developed in the heyday of mid 20th c Beirut. Am reading it because I've been making my way through Songs of Mihyar the Damascene by Adonis, one of the focal points of this study.

It is not the task of art to bring me joy. It is to gesture with a withered hand toward the ruins of the sacred temple in which we once performed ancestral rites that kept us from the dereliction in which we now languish. Today at the Test has been pretty good at this recently

Am connecting this review from @mikkelkfrantzen.bsky.social with the quoted thread: bsky.app/profile/mflo...

I have an enduring, fond memory of emerging onto a rooftop in the city of Fez, Morocco, on holiday with a couple of mates 25 years ago, to discover one of said mates sitting reading Philosophical Investigations. He turned to me & said: "can a dog hope?"

Giving up on following David Osland. He made an untrue claim about Covid contracts that was debunked: he left it up & never responded. In fact he doesn't ever reply or interact with anyone. His is a pure broadcast feed. A "40 year veteran" of the left whose social media isn't actually social at all.

(no)

"most people keep their medicines in the master bathroom!" is a line from the show that lives on in my head. America

Neither pays, I suppose

Assembling a disability aid from a reputable specialist supplier. Don't know what process the instructions were translated by, but I would bet a not insignificant amount it was not a human. They did manage to make clear the legal warning you are on your own if you don't assemble this properly.

Really striking passage, this. Still reading the piece, admiringly.

If I read anything stupider & more indicative of why the UK is fucked today I might cry

Which reminds me, there's a Very Short Introduction to Entropy forthcoming in the series. Well, it started out very short. They're not actually sure how long it is at this point. Also it might not be just one book anymore. Anyway, watch out for it

If you think ‘fake news’, political manipulation and people being driven to extremism are a new phenomenon that has arisen only through social media, let me introduce you to the tabloid press.

Wearing glasses for the first time this evening. Fairly modest prescription for distance sight, mostly in one eye. 21 months sober today but walking along the street feeling drunk, sense of space is all out of whack 😅 Still, already I wonder what I was doing without them.

Contrails & handrails

When you let the bodies pile high. www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/201...

When Ross Douthat has you on the ropes intellectually... Well

late night Liu Zongyuan draft: 千山鳥飛絕 萬徑人蹤滅 孤舟簑笠翁 獨釣寒江雪 a thousand mountains and not one bird in flight a million trails and not so much as a footprint lone boat rush cloak reed hat: an old man fishes alone in the freezing river for snow

Alan Johnson really is one of the luckiest pricks in UK politics.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaat 😃🥳🥳🥳