What's amusing, from Scotland, about the current discourse on here re Burnham's Prince-over-the-canal manoeuvres is the North-South, London-Manchester fretting and flyting. "Man from INVERNESS pitches bid to be FIRST MINISTER!!" just doesn't have the same torque. Like, get over it.

the shit that floods the zone is pretty endless, gotta say.....

An actual quote from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade Too often people go to university to ‘explore research and knowledge’ Look forward to Wes S saying 'too often people go to hospital to have operations' or Heidi Alexander saying 'too often people go to the station to catch a train'

Will 'Migrant Deportation Watch' replace 'Spring Watch' in the nation's captivated hearts? truly deranged stuff going on here

We are now at the stage where the BBC - THE BBC - is reporting 'a second migrant is being removed back to France.' Accompanied by photograph of the plane. This is a sign of media derangement and tells you all about how this issue reached such levels of toxicity.

We can build a people's railway for the 21st century 🛤️

The word “civil” doing a lot of heavy lifting rn. A reminder: you can be “civil” in delivery, in tone, style, comportment. What matters is the ‘civility’ of content. To emphasise the civility of the former at the cost of focus on the latter - esp. when it is extreme - is political. And strategic.

If the BBC wants to push a neutral reporting line that Kirk was a free speech warrior, fine. But we should hear more *actual quotations* from the range of extreme views of Kirk - because they were extreme. The summaries given are not representative. #r4today

"Speaking to the You Tube channel Harry Cole Saves the West" News. 2025.

This (once) astonishing story signals the extent to which the far right fascist culture of organised violence has been fostered, emboldened and extended by MAGA politics. Disgusting and frightening. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I know that this is niche Scottish cultural politics, Bluesky, but someone smart needs to write an essay on “The Jim Spencification Effect.” Mr Common Sense Man is here to tell you he is the one true source of left wing values by espousing very right wing ones. What a walloper. Niche post ends.

#wato why does no-one mention the responsibility of social media companies to moderate hate speech and extreme content? They retreated from it, to farm extreme speech for profit….and they sit there benefitting from the chaos it has produced.

How long have you sat in front of your Union Jack today? [...] Admit it, you could have spent *just* a little longer, right? Do Better.

So, in the UK, we now have: 1. Burn Baby Burn (return to fossil fuels) 2. Remigration, Warehousing, Big Racism redux 3. Worship the Flag 4. More, Bigger Weapons Now.... When are we getting: 1. ICE Equivalent? 2. All Vaccines Be The Work of The Devil?

I am in the library early and horrified by forgetting to do my morning sit-in-front-of-the-Union-Jack session. I cannot believe there are no flags in here for me to catch-up. I must remember to ask the librarians where their flags are! Do they not have any?!

Why is #WATO headlining a totally minor local political story about a Glasgow Labour Councillor “defecting” to Reform? Are we to expect this whenever any local councillor anywhere defects to another party? Hard not to be very cynical about BBC editorial policy right now….

The BBC et al informing everyone loudly that Reform are willing to “rip things up” and “pay the Taliban to take back people”are pretty good outcomes for Reform’s press blitz tbh. The liberal response continues to be hopelessly outplayed by the politics it fostered.

why is the main BBC Radio News World at One using a figure from the far right Heritage Foundation as an ostensibly neutral commentator on an issue of Trump controversy, without stating the ideological bent of said foundation? #wato

Today I finished a very interesting novel and used a grouting pen for the first time ever. Both were equally satisfying.

suffering hell, what a lickspittle is Infantino. Was going to say that football does not deserve him, but ofc, this is what elite football *is* - what it has become in its accumulation of profit. It deserves to be dragged by this supplicant clown all over the world's media. Full. Fat. Embarrassing.

I want to do a 🧵 about the Sidney Sweeney thing, because it's *extremely* revealing & educational. First, to be clear: I could not give less of a shit about the details -- the ad, the rhetoric, the jeans, her boobs, whatever. Good lord, who cares. Let's look at the *structure* of the episode.

Oh, really? Zero surprises..... www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

The gift that keeps on giving www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

RIP to Allan. If you know, you know, etc..... Spent a LOT of time with this classic and many others of the Ahlbergs. Thanks to them.

Does anyone have access to this review of Josh Jewell's and Thomas Waller's books in @mmodernity.bsky.social ‬, which starts out with a belated account of our WReC book? Maybe it will also take ten years before the journal mentions "Pentecostal Modernism," a supplement to WReC's?

More AI puffery on #r4today. The comparison with photography pales when we consider AI’s accelerated global pervasiveness, the scale of its energy consumption and its threat to multiple job roles. The ownership of the personal camera took years. AI is already everywhere. But otherwise, sure.

English Premiership football: pure, unbridled extractivism. Use the power of the hedge fund to pull out the best young player from a storied “big” club. Not even 20. To become “one of your options.” @afcajax.bsky.social The EPL is a vampiric enterprise that sucks the lifeblood of “smaller” leagues.

My kids, who live in Glasgow and Edinburgh, use free public bus transport in Scotland all the time. In the city, between cities, all over the country. They love it. My (anecdotal) sense is that out there, beyond the cities, car culture retains a powerful grip and many kids do not use buses enough. /

Turns off the #r4today radio…from Sweet Caroline to spitfires and palaces and Royal assent. YAWN.

👇Continually surprised at the number of British people on this website and indeed in British politics who haven’t grasped this.

All famines are man-made, all famines are political. Historians of empire and humanitarianism have known this forever. Gaza is not starving, Gaza is being starved, by Israel, and this starvation is enabled by our government and by every other government that does not step in to force food and aid.

the depravity of it, the depravity.

Ah,”Sweet Caroline”, the sound of Summer Mordor…

Galling, all the way down. But surely this idiot politics can be squashed? It has huge holes all the way through it.

Breathless, giddy embrace of AI on #r4today is so dissonant with what I, my colleagues, my friends and my student kids are experiencing- a jobs crushing machine, an ethical nightmare, a creative and cognitive cheat code, compromising and twisting human learning- reading, writing, thinking.

Looking forward to Nick Robinson flat out asking if Farage et al are “militant far right” the next time he interviews one of them. The “militant lefty” query was pathetic - and revealing. #r4today

This is a must read. The rules of the institutions that define our lives bend like reeds when it comes to Israel. So much that the whole global order is could be completely shattered producing a new age of even more brutal & unaccountable power. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Mark your age by the amount of times this billionaire’s view on UK economic policy has been promoted by either the Guardian or the BBC.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

The UK has seen 40 years of “investment” asset seizure and value extraction “for the market”. There’s shit in the rivers, dysfunctional transport networks and water infrastructure, brutal rent hikes. Unaffordability rules. But yeah, “the spending hungry left.” These people are court jesters…

“Disruptor” is a a strange way to spell “extractor”. This, like it is at Rangers and Hibs is part of the imperial control of “smaller” leagues by an emergent class in football’s new world order, who will happily park players and assets at “satellite” clubs for the ultimate benefit of the mothership.

COMMUNIST MAYOR! COMMUNIST MAY OR COMMUNISM ORMAY COMMS UNISTA OR COMMUNIST OR USA MAYUSACOMMUNIST COMMUNISM AY-O! MAY OR MAY OR MAY

All of these kinds of posts should come with the parenthesis: (for at least the next five minutes)

“A political establishment of ostensibly liberal, reliable custodians of stability that has no moral compass, and no care for the norms it constantly claims to uphold.” Brilliant from Nesrine Malik on the malign vacuum in “Western” politics. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“This is unconstitutional! We need to make it legal, like all the previous ones. Then it’ll be fine.” Bombing with impunity since 1945…

Have your wages increased by a third in five years? If so then you’ll have less problem than most tenants will in paying their spiralling rents. A Scottish government was formed in 2021 promising rent controls. These should have been delivered urgently. They still could be.

the BBC is wayyy more interested in reproducing and overstating a culture war in universities, rather than reporting on the existential threat to their existence they are presently experiencing via funding crises #wato

some serious Big Bomb tech porn on the BBC World at One rn #wato

Ok, we give our profound gratitude to whoever it was from the Greater Glasgow Municipal Geoengineering Dept that rebelled and switched off the Overcast Iron Dome….😎

The sort of “it’s GORGEOUS OUT THERE!” weather reporting from London based broadcasters that makes my overcast Scottish ass want to put on some woad and shout Freedom!