@johnmcdonnellmp.bsky.social : "Isn't the reality this, that when he sought to realise his ambition to become leader of the Labour party with very little base in the party, he became dependent on McSweeney and Mandelson and Labour Together to organise, fund his election.."

With the help of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has reached a long-awaited deal to take over InfoWars. We've enlisted the help of @timheidecker.bsky.social, who will be InfoWars' Creative Director. Please stand by for more.

Of course we are, and it’s a global movement. We’ve spent the last ten years whistling past the graveyard because a particular type of Sensible Moderate thought they could ride the far right wave and turn it to their advantage. I think we have now proven beyond all doubt that they can’t do that.

assuming everyone has already read this but if not: please be advised that the first time I read it I was at my desk at work and I had to go for a little walk halfway through because I thought I was about to die from quietly laughing

Shuker said this best, but is by no means alone: okay, I may have fucked my career and absolutely clowned myself in public, but at least I helped to inflict a disastrous Tory government upon the public and that made the dirty hippies that I despise cry. I can always look back upon that with pride.

The paper has never been at all shy about which way it will jump, when presented with a choice between left and far right. They have been very open about it.

Well, one important person in particular *was* asking for that appointment, and things have historically tended to go quite badly for people who make that guy unhappy. People who upset him quite swiftly wake up to find platoons of reporters on their doorsteps, asking them questions quite forcefully.

Do you see why might it be awkward for some people in the British press to investigate a scandal about Peter Mandelson: a man who is infamous for running many secret, extremely poisonous hate campaigns against his colleagues, with the full and enthusiastic but undisclosed cooperation of the press

Thing is, I can sort of believe that Starmer just literally didn't ask whether Mandelson actually passed vetting, and also that his Downing Street imagines this to be an excuse rather than a pretty strong case for resignation in and of itself.

We're supplying military equipment to Israel. And Labour cares so little about it that Belgium has to step in and stop the shipments. I guess Labour's too busy arresting protestors against the genocide?

“I’ve been using ChatGPT to help with cooking for a while now, so I didn’t think too much of it when the ingredients list included a bottle filled with gasoline and a cloth wick,” said the alleged attacker

Not dunking on Zack or this post, I’m just always struck by how easily American journalists will admit that the media shapes public polling and political outcomes when they’re not talking about America.

We have many decades of verified, repeatable, consistent research showing that is exactly how mass media works. Several enormous industries are built on the idea of media affecting attitudes and beliefs. Reporters who deny this in a fit of pique at facing down their own behavior just look unserious.

Apparently the take "Politicians fully understand that their policies will kill vulnerable people but they really want that second job with a big company and for journalists to like them" is a take that engenders more Trust In Politics. Which is interesting.

Thomas gets taken to a black ops site

Couple of days since I finished #Bait, and the quality of episode four keeps popping back into my mind. So well directed and performed, visually stunning and with a great soundtrack. The SOPHIE track in the pink rickshaw is a real piece of perfect television.

It's tight but he is just on

Tricky times for the content creators, life coaches and right wing journalists who left Britain shrieking claims that it was becoming an authoritarian state

Genuinely kind of disturbing how little attention has been paid to Israeli officials explicitly promising to do unto southern Lebanon what they did to Gaza

For whoever needs to hear this I'm the only Jewish person to lead a political party - third largest in the country. The Daily Mail have been & always will be my enemy - they historically supported fascists & continue to do so. I'll take no lectures from them on Antisemitism.

Reputation laundry goes brrrrr

Man with his dog flees from bombs in Tehran. (Photo by Pooria Hatami)

Is it any wonder our media ecosystem is such a mess? The guy in charge of the supposedly impartial watchdog is slagging off the BBC to the right wing Telegraph - which is hostile to the BBC - & defending the fact his organisation has let GB News act share misinformation and constantly promote Reform

They screamed at us for years in order to force this lot onto the country. Just remember that.

Amazing here, as the Times - whose political correspondent it was that this guy spread rumours about, claiming he was a Russian agent, because he’d written about the massive secret billionaire bung Labour Together took - joining in the rehabilitation process. After what, one month?

Yes, only a crazy person would imagine that something suspect may have happened here

The world energy shock is coming — it will deepen inequality in ways we've seen before. Our new @newstatesman1913.bsky.social piece argues that without urgent government action, the Strait of Hormuz crisis will ripple through our economies and rip apart our societies. Here's why. 1/

the war at home www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Got some good news about fossil fuels

"“No one has done more with less than the Iranians,” said Seth Krummrich, former chief of staff at US Soccent, the special forces command responsible for operations in the Middle East.”" www.ft.com/content/0c08...

Highly recommend this one, by @kellygrieco.bsky.social. Very astute and insightful analysis that makes it clear Iran considers the global economy by way of the Gulf states, and not Israel, the enemy's center of gravity.

the uk no1 single on the day max dowman was born was some streaming nonsense nobody cares about because it’s long after people stopped giving a toss about the charts, that’s how young max dowman is

Donald Trump letting you know how the authoritarian capture of the media is going, in case you missed it. Unlike other authoritarians in places like Hungary and Poland he has no worries about advertising his authoritarian take over of the media.

There's a hauntingly beautiful irony in these morons thinking that carefully crafted American hegemony was actually weak and woke, and they would be the ones who would do Power and Dominance properly, and immediately bringing everything crashing down

When a federal judge (finally) put ICE officers under oath, they admitted that they are given daily detention quotas and rely heavily on a Palantir-supplied AI tool to select targets, without warrants and without enough evidence to obtain one. They simply go into neighborhoods and round people up.

PR guys doing their most outlandish joke impressions of their worst clients don’t come close to what AI CEOs keep saying in public forums

European countries had many opportunities to reconsider their support for Israel’s ever-escalating wars, if they did not want to end up where they led to.

Team crying child

There may have been other occasions where a World Cup squad had to sit out the tournament because the host nation was trying to destroy its government and collapse its civil society into anarchy, but I don’t recall any.

John means this as high praise, and not as an outstanding reason why everyone thinks this system is comically terrible and clearly destined for the bin, one way or another.

Again, the reason so many of us in academia are so categorically opposed to AI is not because we’re Luddites or idiots or denialists. It’s because ~every current tool & application of it is built on criminal theft & the bad faith monetization of it.

I think it was pretty clear in the 2020s that fascism across the white-people world was an international movement, and that its adherents were far more closely aligned with each other than they were with their compatriots. Is this not the underlying point of the Trump-Putin stuff, after all?

increasingly difficult for your public life to survive the boundaries of extremist thought being pushed to include just nodding along with medecins sans frontieres or miss rachel

Obviously I don’t like Chelsea but Alan Shearer is talking nonsense. It’s offside, it may not feel good because you want Wrexham to win but it’s just offside.

We recorded another Wolves pod but thankfully this one didn't get lost like the midweek Ghost Pod debacle. Here's Chris, Paul and myself on last night's game theliverpoolway.podbean.com/e/wolves-0-l...

Do you see how this divides into real people who actually matter, even if they’ve been dead for decades, and lesser people whose lives simply do not matter at all.