Carnage! At The Family Group Chat

At the Sphinx’s performance review and asking how she’s managed to keep her numbers so high this quarter

Absolute carnage in the family group chat as my cousin posts a Christmas riddle from her fiancé’s office that no one can figure out, only to find that someone in the office got ChatGPT to make up the riddle and it’s gibberish that doesn’t have a solution

The right's obsession with SNAP recipients buying popsicles is a modern version of a centuries-old tradition of scolding the poor for what they eat. It mimics verbatim Victorian complaints about the poor indulging in tea and sugar, mistaking consumption as a cause of poverty instead of a symptom.

Answered by my shirt

Global institutions where the US is the largest funding source can no longer be relied upon to present reality as they see it -- which is rather the point of the pressure, to destroy the credibility of those institutions.

100% this (and the answer is that everyone old enough to have been around during the Cold War has taken money from Russia one way or another)

I mean the other reason why it is affirmatively wrong and fucked up to join or make common cause with Your Party is that they are anti-Ukrainian. That in itself should be enough for you and I do judge you if it isn't!

Literally every voter focus group:

In all honesty I wish I had a more useful psychic superpower, preferably one that worked on the horses

I don't like Streeting for various reasons I can elaborate on at length if requested, but I have to say he's played the last few months and this week very well ("being on the sane side re Palestine/Mamdani/Trump" / "making No10 look like loons for attacking him")

Seeing people on Bluesky claiming that Dalston wasn’t a hub for hipsters until after 2015.

Seeing people on Bluesky claiming that Dalston wasn’t a hub for hipsters until after 2015.

Anti-racism is of course welcome but the nonsensical phrase “woke right” is a very clear sign that a writer as lost it

these people are giving the Gender version of

Friendly reminder that dishwashers made after 1995 or so are so water and energy efficient that even if you ran them twice fully loaded it would still use less water than handwashing the same load. So many "green" things feel like sacrifices. Dishwashers are not one of them.

One thing I noticed about the briefings last night was that No.10 (and Labour more generally) have clearly been overthinking why the Tories were so unpopular by the end of their time in office and have forgotten the fundamental reason: because they were rubbish at everything

So much this!

Anyway, the reason that nations should welcome immigrants is being immigrants are selected on “dawg in ‘em havingness” (technical term) because even on easy mode with every possible advantage this shit can be fucking stressful

The annoying thing here (aside from the "everything being objectively terrible and run by fascists", which is baseline) is that this suits most people on the US far right well because they specifically want people to think the federal government is their enemy

Trump is incredibly unpopular here! including amongst Tory voters. What are they doing?

The real irony here is that the reason Noah stuffed this one up is because he's used to the US, which is *actually* dysfunctional, and hence doesn't allow airside international transfers.

My favourite thing is that he went through security, transferred landside, queued for a paper ticket rather than just using contactless, went back through security, was kindly allowed to jump the queue, nevertheless managed to make his flight, and yet somehow this demonstrates that the UK is broken.

The collapse of Noah Smith from 'interesting writer whose occasionally a bit random' into 'complete idiot and mentalist' is one of the most clear cut cases of twitter-poisoning I've seen

It's very Chicago, granted, but High Fidelity, Blues Brothers, Ferris Bueller and Mean Girls is a solid list

This is a pretty meaningless statement, given that it encompasses everything from "they fired the devs and now all their characters have six fingers" through to "they summarise team meetings using Copilot like every actually-existing company"

You are essentially stuck between an ageing society desiring nostalgia and / or risk removal and a shrill social media cacophony demanding everything is sorted out now. With glib supposedly edgy one-liners far too often passing as serious commentary.

100% this

My last word on the matter

The most striking thing about Lewis' thread is that there aren't actually any examples given of the BBC itself "suppressing" anything: all the examples cited are of pieces reformatted or cancelled due to the actions of external invited guests/interviewees, not BBC staff.

have we all seen Noah Smith managing to book a flight from Dublin to Paris with a 90 minute layover in London and concluding this demonstrates Britain is doomed

Help mom I’m being bullied by 87 year old novella writer Joyce Carol Oates again can you pick me up

Oh, so he totally stole the money

The last person to be guillotined in France could have watched Star Wars: A New Hope, although he wouldn't have been able to follow the plot very well because the French dub didn't come out until a month afterwards.

One nice detail that can easily be lost in this graph - even right wingers trust the BBC more than the right wing tabloids

at one point in his life, Andreesen invented the graphical browser. Ever since then, he has done his level best to make sure that rather than this, his obituary will read "That Shitco Guy".

I mean - that's just pretty much all racism when you get down to it. It's just convincing yourself that the rattle of the pipes really *is* a ghost, but with a longer historical pedigree.

Blind spots around never having been poor absolutely exist, even/especially in well-meaning liberals, but this isn't that: it's psychotic nonsense that nobody who had thought about the topic for more than 20 seconds could believe, no matter how out of touch their personal experience of wealth was

As it's that particular anniversary just reposting a link to my article re pre-Dismissal polling and other pseph themes kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2021/12/psep...

It's true that Whitlam was unlucky to be in office for the oil shock and the public backlash to incumbents that it created. So were Ted Heath and Gerald Ford.

A radio programme like the Shipping Forecast but it’s called Bin Day and it just reads out every single council in the country’s bin schedule

A few years ago there was a terrible Gen Z tweet everyone dunked on about how people should get their car insurance payments back if they don’t use it. Anyway it’s fun to discover this is now the stated position of the GOP

I'm glad the other two cars survived

It is interesting to see what even the current court views as obviously-well-beyond-settled

"support your local newspaper", etc

Really is ridiculous we don't have cheap venison easily available in Scotland. They're delicious and it's an environmental duty to eat them!

*two fucking water heaters wired in series*

Another one - and important to remember when people talk about mental health in the past vs today. The reality is back then, people just died.