Odysseus's victorious crew, looking forward to sinking some cans to celebrate the fall of Troy on the way back to Ithaca, about to be seriously disappointed

Agree with all of this, other than "the right will go 'pro-natalist" - I think what will happen is that much of the right will shift from 'blaming our ills on immigration' to 'blaming our ills on ethnic diversity', which is already happening to an extent.

The thing is there are racist jokes that work in terms of the joke structure being recognizable as a joke [set up, build up, punchline]. This one is like. Heh. You know what's funny? I'm racist. Delivered by a guy without charisma

“Arsehole? Then our vodka’s for *you*”

Replaced it with an old Tom Clancy hardback which, upon flicking through again, has the stupidest inside cover blurb in history.

'I mean, it's on Thursday, that seems pretty safe - oh, you meant ... no more to say, have a lovely Christmas'

amazing stuff. fascinated to know whether Gran passed away between check-in and boarding and the family decided to style it out, or whether they were all in on shipping a corpse from the get-go

there it is. the final straw. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This would go hard as an album cover ngl

As a former editor of Popbitch – and the proud owner of a legal letter sent by HarperCollins, accusing me of being "highly likely to cause serious harm to [their former star client]’s reputation both as an individual and author” – may I just say: GET IT RIGHT UP YE

Terrifying headline if you don’t realize they are sports teams.

'good evening Matt. we're going to start by asking you to go a little off-piste here'

it's not small children who are working in the businesses that drive our country's economy - lecturing kids about reading, writing and maths is a complete distraction

Even by my low expectations for Kemi Badenoch ‘violence against women and girls is something done by immigrants and nobody else’ has shocked me.

Not sure how accurate the translation is, but this doesn’t look good

a sign that Bluesky might have the juice after all: one of the UK's most experienced and committed online commentators is now several hours into the sort of posting spiral where friends should have hidden or possibly destroyed his phone

'Tonight on BBC News, should we fight or capitulate like the worms we are? Joining us in the studio are a former US ambassador and a Nazi'

Morgan McSweeney fuming that this key target voter will be imprisoned for the next few electoral cycles

this is not behavior becoming of a FIFA Peace Prize recipient.

I always enjoy the bit in Rian Johnson films where he looks at the camera and confirms that he's roughly the same type of liberal that I am

enjoying reading this as if they're suggesting that he does a semester in Lille, which admittedly might be worth trying

I do actually think a leading journalist should push back against an assertion that non white people can never be British. It's just racism! bsky.app/profile/sund...

Honestly impressed at Starmer and Nandy's commitment to not doing their job. This guy is literally talking about his wife, his children, her, and her children, and they do nothing!

roses are red rhinos are big

It is actually bonkers that they keep doing this. It's absolutely not impartial to refuse to use the phrase trans women in any coverage of them.

Imagine being the Reuben brothers, opening your FT and reading this sentence:

I don't think we should let the leaders of other countries legislate in our House of Lords...........

could they fuck

Though Reform UK voters are more positive about Trump than others, only half see him as a ‘friend and ally’. This could be the moment where a line is drawn between democratic patriotic parties and the agents of foreign powers.

Join us next week, when, as a counterpoint, Marie will be watching unlicensed boxing in a car park in Thurrock

This mixed metaphor is killing me.

What?

But the good news is, by doing this, we defeated racism in the UK.

this is whose reputation they're trying to whitewash www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/politics/...

hope he's preparing by spending six weeks handcuffed to a hospital bed

Two ways to read this. One is “she lost on every substantive claim, completely failed in her attempts to ban trans staff from the workplace, and won mild procedural victories against her employers handling of her case”. The other way is, I guess, “point one is longer so it must be more important”

this genuinely, for real, does make me feel better sometimes every time you really land a joke, just remind yourself, "wow, all that money and Elon Musk still can't do that"

This will always and forever be the most on point and prescient thing that Fukuyama ever wrote.

the woods are lovely, dark and deep / but I have promises to keep / and miles to go before I sleep / and miles to go before I sleep

like Casablanca? you'll love A Beautiful Friendship, following Rick and Captain Renault in the Free French Army. Ilsa shows up as the love interest halfway through season one to completely undermine the original ending. it's cancelled after two seasons with our heroes invading Sicily.

Kishwer Falkner in The Times talking about the rights of "biological people". As compared to trans people, who are, of course, non-biological.

So much of the story of this Labour government is about it giving a platform to a load of people (Blue Labour, Falkner) who just then use it to wreak evil and then sound off that the government is shit anyway. Where has it got you? Are you going to learn at some point?

simply do not think my banking app needed to give me a 2025 Wrapped

The way I'd put it is that there's currently a global struggle between democracy and nationalist gangster-capitalism, that this struggle is simultaneously unfolding both within and between states, and that the US currently sits at its epicentre

thanks lads, good luck with that

aiming at the median voter in a two-party system is a sensible approach. working out who the median voter between Labour, Reform, the Tories, the Lib Dems and the Greens even *is* will require complex maths, and once you've found him he's going to be far too weird to build a coalition around.

Lib Dem voters and Reform voters, pictured

I suspect you have to be quite racist to stand out as "the racist guy" at a boys public school of the 1980s.