What is the point of democracy if elected governments bind themselves to arbitrary numerical targets and not to public service?

Good. Shame on those who stayed.

If reporting is accurate, a positive sign that both Eurovision and UEFA are to consider Israel’s participation. At least they’ve been forced to see there’s an issue here.

The British Prime Minister, and by association the British establishment, do not seem to know - or do not care to know - that Northern Ireland is not a part of Great Britain.

Imagine the hi-jinks if they end up creating a card it’s compulsory for UK citizens to carry, except for the category of UK citizens domiciled in one part of the UK… who then have to carry some other ID if they travel to the rest of the UK to prove they don’t have to… etc etc…

Necropolitician. Where others recognise wanton destruction and smell death; Tony Blair seeks power and profit.

Yep, that's great. Just fantastic. We were told that Starmer would lay out the patriotic case for diversity today. What we got was an article in the Telegraph, behind a paywall, about how the left failed to tackle immigration and now we all have to have ID cards www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09...

The real collective punishment isn’t the genocide, it’s the anti-genocide boycott, says Liev Schreiber, Mayim Bialik, Debra Messing, and 1,200 other racist psychopaths.

Not good.

Over 550,000 signatures already. If you’re undecided or want to know more about the privacy risks and why you should resist digital ID cards, look to @paulbernal.bsky.social who’s reissued a helpful 🧵 .

🧵 Farage’s latest proposal to strip away the rights of our friends and neighbours, those who came here to work hard and contribute, is the natural conclusion of the big lie that all of societies' ills are the fault of immigrants. 1/6

Upping this. I’ll update it at some point…

Function creep is not just real but inevitable

the most important thing to remember when you see eugenicists who don’t believe that autistic people should exist rambling about “the autism epidemic” is not that they’re wrong about the “cause” (although they are absolutely wrong about it); it’s that they are eugenicists

we really do need to worry about what Reform might to do to our medicines and vaccine regulation if they get into power christinapagel.substack.com/p/how-vulner...

“they conspired to bring about a situation where the most logical, indeed the only possible, outcome would be the death of Patrice Lumumba.”

Two parts, and so much of interest (and alarm ) in both. Analysis of police and policing as counter-insurgency. There is a remarkable segment in P2 about immunity: and a (re)definition of “law and order” that grants some persons (absolute) license to ignore or apply it and others…not so much.

First Farage platformed notorious UK anti-vaxxer, Aseem Malhotra, who insinuated that Covid vaccines caused the Royal Family’s recent cancers. Now he’s openly trashing scientific method & evidence, pretending neither can be trusted & facts are a free for all. This is deeply dangerous populism.

A military-technology complex is taking shape.

I’m carefully listening to Farage (on LBC) for the first time in ages. It‘s remarkable how little there is to his positions - he responds to every challenge with outright lies, obvious deflections, & just repeated unevidenced assertions. Total flimflam, racist conman.

Starmer’s latest reset to progressive policies is nowhere to be seen as Mahmood drags HO policy ever further rightwards. An incoming left government should shut down this Home Office and begin anew.

“flagrantly misquoted” www.dropsitenews.com/p/fda-commis...

Just released a new episode with the brilliant @bsonblast.bsky.social about Sudan, the perils of online activism, and ultimately about the struggle between empathy and apathy for African lives, and so much more. www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf71...

Decommissioned armed personnel carriers - packed with explosives and remotely operated. “ It feels like death - and yet you’re still standing, waiting for the next one.” www.middleeasteye.net/news/israels...

Yesterday's Tylenol press conference was at "inject bleach" levels of insanity, but it also revealed the plan for cancelling the MMR. Here's how I think this is going to go down. open.substack.com/pub/rasmusse...

Mark Carney keeps talking about “decarbonized oil.” Today he admitted that’s bullshit. At the Council on Foreign Relations, he started saying BC’s new LNG project was “zero carbon,” before adding a key caveat: “before the Scope 3 obviously.” That’s where the bulk of the emissions come from.

I’ve come to understand the global rightwards movement, of which the USA is the exemplar, as nothing other than the process of liberating capital completely to do whatever it wants, wherever it wants, with and to whatever and whomever it wants; to be accumulated by those who already have the most.

“State violence…often consists of two things: on the one hand violence against people and things, and on the other a violence against the facts” “the investigation, an event which is a political community in the making.” Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, “Investigative Aesthetics”

Next stage, which nobody seems to be talking about - what happens to those who take paracetamol during pregnancy? Will they now become (legally?) culpable should they miscarry, have birth complications, autism??? First they came for trans folks, then LGB, then women... www.bbc.com/news/article...

RFK Jr. is a quack eugenicist who views healthcare as the reserve for the healthy and ‘normal’-bodied and conditions like neurodivergence and non-aesthetically ideal bodies as contaminants to be eliminated from the gene pool. It is no more complicated than that.

According to the branding, “facts are sacred” : but allowances are still made for outright falsehoods.

I hate this framing. The vast majority of the world's countries already recognise Palestine as a state. What "more countries" actually means here is more western countries, again the exception stands in for the universal. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Words shape visions. When the goverment shapes its words literally along the themes of US venture capital, what perspectives will be prioritised? Will these perspectives take into account the realities of political communities today, or rather prioritise the (investment) interests of a few?

I hoped to wake up this morning and read that the government has said in the most unequivocal terms that the plan to strip me retroactively of my lawful entitlement to reside in this country is a moral and legal abomination and anyone supporting it should be condemned, but nope. It's a 'gimmick'

Ask her where she’s going to put the border between the two states; how she’s going to disentangle the current state and how she’s going to prevent the Zionist entity from ethnic cleaning its state. And how she proposes to push the Zionist entity into one of those two states and keep it there.

Because this has always been about the West Bank. It has always been about Jerusalem. It has always been about Al Aqsa. Recognition for a State, a cause, once it is dead in all but name is merely a distraction from the real issue: when will Israel be sanctioned & materially stopped?

And once again: what they say is only ever what Trump said: this is the continuing enshittification of our lives by US Republicans and their thinktanks. I don’t “want my country back”. And I don’t want theirs at all.

“Palestinians have a legitimate fear that those states that are recognizing their right to self-determination will end up not only making of it a symbolic gesture, but that this gesture will be accompanied by greater demands on the Palestinians under occupation than on their Israeli occupier…

“The South is impoverished not because it is somehow “naturally poor”, but because its income is compressed and its productive capacities drained to support development in the core.” www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/5...

“ignoble in action and flawed in rationale” Starmer finally said it: ‘We recognise Palestine.’ But Gaza desperately needs action – where is that? | Nesrine Malik www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“When western powers recognise a non-existent Palestinian state in defiance of reality, the central issues of Israeli colonisation are relegated to the background” www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/un-w...

I like the way Starmer says ‘We recognised the State of Israel more than 75 years ago as a homeland for the Jewish people’ as if the UK had no role in those events and no responsibility for how they played out.

Kirk’s ‘memorial’ getting a live coverage on The Guardian is a great example of how the right gets automatically framed as the default political movement to be ‘understood’ while the victims of that same movement never will never get the same amount of coverage

For this and much else, Britain owes Palestine more than recognition. It owes reparations. For events both before and after the Nakba.

Yet another excellent episode; 1 of 2 on Trump’s use of militarised and overpowered policing: history and context. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

Now that Starmer has announced recognition of Palestine, “as an independent state”, we await the definition of its borders.

“have been shot” Who shot them?

What's effectively happening here (in the British media at large, too) is the construction of "anti-racism" as somehow a "political alternative" to racism, rather than as a minimal civilisational standard, which in turn (further) vindicates racism as *also* an acceptable political position.

“Kallas said it was news to her that China and Russia were among the countries that defeated Germany and Japan (ie, the forces of Nazism and fascism).” www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/why-...

It’s wild how some people act like being kind and inclusive is radical when really it’s the baseline of just being human.