Why is everything so incredibly fucking stupid?

The normalisation of right wing discourse in both major political parties, let alone in much of the media, has been one of the most striking, and disturbing, changes in my lifetime. Things weren’t great in the 1960s (Smethwick) but this is off the scale.

I have a student son Henry Nowak’s age & I can’t imagine what it took for his family to respond outside court with the grace they did, asking that their son’s death not be used for division and hate. That Reform & Restore chose to throw that back in their faces makes me feel sick.

I dunno, the leader of the top polling party in Britain addressing white supremacists might once have been something that would have led BBC News.

My periodic post saying that 1 in 6 people in the UK were born abroad. And yet most public discourse about us treats us either as an evil to be expunged from the country, or as a number which you can reduce at will without any consideration for the lives of the people affected.

“In the space of a few years, the UK has moved from a broadly inclusive status-quo to being the most aggressively anti-trans developed democracy in the world.” www.liberalcurrents.com/the-end-of-t...

@mandyindiana.bsky.social that was insane!

the thing you gotta understand about opinion pieces is that what drives it all isn’t who has the best ideas it’s who is most inclined to relentlessly churn out copy that makes them a main character and ensures hate clicks. this is the lifeblood of a dying medium. it’s a kind of self-cannibalization.

What the actual fuck man! I thought this was a skit at first. She actually stood up and said this 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

A lot of our discourse seems to assume that 1) these wrong beliefs somehow arise naturally and 2) politicians have a duty to behave as if these wrong beliefs are true. It saves asking questions about old and new media, or doing anything brave, but it’s rotting our society and economy.

terrible. 20 years ago, the internet was full of hobbyist blogs and forums. over time, these have been replaced by paywalled substacks and private discord channels, each a walled garden. google's decision to prioritize AI just makes it less likely people will create free, public info

finding it hard to put into words just quite upsetting I find the idea of Google getting rid of the "ten blue links" format of search entirely, genuinely feels like your landlord announcing he's removing your kitchen and replacing it with a bouncy castle, I need my kitchen, let me keep my kitchen

Now That’s What I Call TFI Friday

Thoughts from a Labour MP: “We have to face up to the fact every single one of them is fucking useless. Andy’s strategy has been a disaster. Angela has bottled it. Ed clearly a hiding to nothing. Wes is AWOL. God knows what Catherine West is doing. I am not quite sure how we ended up here.”

Am increasingly of the belief that politics in this country would immediately become 15% less shit if the existing crop of lobby hacks were fired into the sun and replaced with, I don't know, goats.

Wish there was a mode of politics in this country that wasn’t “slow and easily preventable car crash you can see is going to happen from miles away but can do nothing to stop”

Results so far: • We don't know much yet • Bad but not worst-case scenario for Labour • Good for Reform, but in line with polls • Too early to say much on Greens • Don't jump to conclusions on Lab/Reform switchers • These are bad results for Tories! Whatever they say! • We don't know much yet

The government can't stop posting on Twitter, the LOTO doesn't think Tommy Robinson intimidates Jews, the leading party is campaigning for where they'll put detention camps, and it's likely the only response to the attempted murder of two Jews will be restrictions on pro-palestinian protests.

the two paths of prompt development are "reinventing programming languages" and "prayers"

Dear Labour supporters. If you want to put me off voting Green rather than Labour, the key is *not* to attack the Greens, but to ask yourself why I, a life-long Labour supporter, who has voted Labour at every GE since 1983 (my first), can't support Labour. Look at yourselves. Look at your party.

German SPD, Greens, and Linke will stop posting on X. An important step and signal. X and its owner have long become a megaphone for the far right, a venue that is actively used to encourage abuse and violence. It‘s simply shameful how many in politics, media, and academia still actively post there.

I have played this and it is fun!

J. H. Prynne wrote a guide to reading works of literature for Cambridge students. This was the postscript:

In which I argue that "AI" as we understand it today is a structurally fascist artifact. https://tante.cc/2026/04/21/ai-as-a-fascist-artifact/

What if... what really makes Britain "ungovernable" is... the nature of its political media and of its political class?

Hell of an achievement for WaPo to come out with the most dystopian thing I've read this week.

Once again we must ask, where in the world is Congress? They should be pursuing every action possible to rein in Trump's raging lunacy. How is there no sense of urgency? (2/3)

It's simple really, it's because he faced no real accountability for his actions.

Labour's Chris Curtis MP in last night's elections bill debate: “The Government should look at a National Commission to look at our voting system. "We no longer live in a two-party electoral system" - but FPTP acts as if we do (via Make Votes Matter)

I don’t know who needs to hear Jesse Jackson leading the kids on Sesame Street in this beautiful call-and-response reminding them that every child is somebody, but here it is

Feels so much like we’re living in an era where those on the inside of politics think they’re all moneyball-ing their way to success, while those outside of that bubble look on with increasing bemusement around what exactly the guiding principles of parties actually are.

I think I might take one of these "under 20 minutes" AI skills courses the UK Govt. seems very keen on everyone doing and live-post it here... Maybe we can all learn something together! The press release sends me to aiskillshub.org.uk/aiskillsboost/ - let's go and see!

The New World asked me to speak to some British trans women about what life has been like for them over the past few years - here's what they had to say, in their own words: www.thenewworld.co.uk/marie-le-con...

Why is there so much more interest in the tendency of young men to back Reform, rather than the tendency of young women to shun it? Why is there so little interest in the tendency of all young people to favour Greens, and in particular why is there so little interest in young women breaking Green?

All they need to do is get off the damn site. No need to wait for a Ofcom or a ban decision, just stop posting. This is not hard. It just requires the tiniest, tiniest trace of a backbone form No.10. Email to all ministers, all departments. Stop posting, deactivate accounts. Now.

I played a lot of board games! Here are my favourites: boardgamegeek.com/blog/46/blog...

My 20 favourite albums of 2025: albumwhale.com/qwertymartin...

My top five novels of the year: Everything Will Swallow You by @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social, On The Calculation of Volume I-III by Solveig Balle, TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker, Rare Singles by @benjaminmyers76.bsky.social and Only Here, Only Now by @newlands.bsky.social.

What’s good about Walliams is we don’t have to separate the art from the man

this week's newsletter is titled "aren't you tired of feeling insane all the time?" and I think it speaks for itself it is also free to read youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/arent-you-...

This is the point. Policy *should not* be adjusted or fine-tuned in response to minor forecasting judgements. Decisions about whether or not to break a prominent manifesto promise *should not* depend on minor forecasting judgements. This stuff matters. We've got to do better than this.

If he does run I really hope his campaign slogan is "Chaos with Ed Miliband".

This isn't a revolutionary government. But as a Labour government, it does need to be the people's representative to the system. So far it's acted as the system's representative to the people - "no, you can't have that, tough choices". And time is running out to deliver outcomes by the election

No more noble British tradition than resigning over some nonsense everyone is only pretending to be angry about rather than all of the actually bad things you've done.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

How to do best that? Personal view but I think the worst place government can be in raising enough to piss people off but not enough to make a difference to anything they actually notice or care about - eg 1p on income tax that dissapears into an OBR black hole.

Like, if Labour want LD and Green voters to like them and be willing to vote tactically for them, that has to be an active process, and a worryingly large number of Labour people's entitlement around such voters hardly helps that.