Keith McIvor, AKA JD Twitch, who died last Friday, will be remembered as one of the most influential DJs of his generation. In this wider obituary, eight friends and contemporaries reflect on McIvor's humility, effervescence and limitless creative spirit.

I have said this before *elsewhere* but I do think most of the persistent complaints about the BBC would be solved by roughly a dozen specific employees moving on/being moved on from their jobs rather than taking a bulldozer to the entire thing.

This is very good. I return to the illiberal's epistemic dishonesty: he wishes to participate in liberal discourse yet refuses to play by liberal rules upon which democracy is based: pluralism, empiricism, skepticism, philosophic doubt. For his ultimate authorities are predetermined traditionalisms.

well I can see that the democrats selling out trans people constantly has definitely shifted the rhetoric here

Wes Streeting asking people to listen to the experts when it comes to decisions about child healthcare rather than rightwing scaremongering, is it?

Charlie Kirk never cared about debates.

Want to know how far-right views got mainstreamed to the point that we just had the biggest march organised by fascist and white supremacist groups in UK history? Exhibit A: Living conditions in asylum hotels are awful (some of which even reported in the article) but the BBC chose this headline.

Interesting that every time we discuss women's rights at Lib Dem Conference the group that claims to care so deeply about "the rights of women and girls" is completely and utterly absent.

Of course the slimeball that is Sex Matters is filing amicus briefs with the SCOTUS, as a certified UK charity avowedly “protecting everyone’s human rights” through the medium of decimating human rights.

i have to say, as a trans journalist who has covered the "trans debate" for about a decade now, there is no daylight between how the trump administration and conservatives lie about tylenol and autism and how they've lied about youth trans care.

FINISH YOUR SONGS AND RELEASE THEM - SOMEONE NEEDS THEM.

THE HATE U GIVE is one of the most-challenged books in the current wave in the US. Better believe this is not some white UK parent's sole idea but the US-funded tip of the wedge.

In Scotland in particular, it’s the other side of the coin from total mediocrities getting unwarranted platforms by going TERF. If you’re a cis woman who rejects terfery, and you have a platform through your own talent and intelligence, they’ll try their best to destroy and smear you.

We don’t talk enough about the seething resentment many terfs harbour for younger women and feminists.

This would carry more weight if you hadn't spent the last year cheerleading for the Cass Report

Believe trans people when we tell you the 'science' behind the Cass Report is as solid as the 'science' behind paracetamol causing autism.

People are making Rapture jokes like there's no tomorrow

Why would a man who follows Jenny Lindsay and Susan Dalgety on X write a hatchet job about a vulnerable young woman who's often targeted by transphobes for a virulently anti-trans newspaper that's being gleefully shared by bigots? Maybe we'll never know.

You’ll be shocked to learn that all the people Nick Robinson mentions here as involved in UK “free speech controversies” are on or adjacent to the far right- Connelly, Linehan, T Robinson, Musk- as are most of the politicians cited, and that he ends with a plea to listen to both sides

20 years ago we had debate (not very sensible or calm or dispassionate) & they lost, because their arguments were always baseless bigotry, & trans people got legal rights. 10 years ago they were still screaming abuse at trans women in TV "debates", which is why they got no-platformed.

This is *stunningly* disingenuous, and the fact that Singal continues to enjoy a career writing at the highest levels about a topic that he either unwilling or incapable of discussing honestly is such an indictment of the Anglo-American prestige media.

Its economist house style to not include authors. BUT, it’s some serious bullshit to use that policy to launder the well-known bigotry of this particular author behind the veil of said house style.

...knowing Jəsse's the author (& that gender-affirming care practitioners are well aware of his biases & tactics) utterly changes the meaning of the last paragraph. without attribution, it makes it sound like the authors are suspiciously dodging the question. in actuality they know he's a bad actor!

so the Economist article isn't attributed an author. but someone in the replies of this 🧵 tipped me off that it was Jəsse Singal. & it turns out that it was, which in retrospect isn't surprising (as he's one of the ppl who would never answer this question):

We do not need balance on the absolutely insane bullshit coming out of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. Just say it’s bullshit

If you, like me, are the parent of a neuro-atypical child dreading this autism press conference, please remember: These are the people hurting our kids. Not us. They are the ones stigmatizing and pathologizing them. They are the ones peddling untested science. And we should be very, very angry.

One of those lovely videos where a dementia patient sits at a piano and suddenly recalls how to play, but it's me at 87, and my family is tearing up when they put an old phone in my hand and I post "dick look like an elf after a Keebler industrial accident"

This Friday at noon, tune in to Clydebuilt Radio! From riot grrrl punk to queer club anthems, forgotten blues icons to global pop trailblazers - our music archive tells stories of resistance, community & joy. www.clydebuiltradio.com

I hope there's a live cam from the ISS of the rapture, all those people flying off into space is going to look amazing.

The Performative Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk When Charlie Kirk's killer wasn't who the right needed him to be, they responded with a public ritual of mourning designed to turn a meaningless death into martyrdom.

There's something about transphobia that makes some folk proud to look this stupid in public.

Blame-the-mother theses first appeared around the diagnosis of autism in the decades following World War II. And though they eventually became a black mark on the history of psychology and child development, society's willingness to blame moms has never really gone away.

There was absolutely *no* reason for the news to look the way it did last week, especially on the BBC of all places, beyond the fact that a large swathe of the media (particularly the upper echelons) have been captured by the Twitter machine and have substituted the 'map' for the territory.

The "terrorist reclassification" was an extreme over interpretation by Ken Klippenstein that circulated purely as a headline and is active disinfo, there are a whole gaggle of left/lib journalists right now who have found their niche getting massive engagement by scaring the shit out of trans people

This is how much the price of food has risen in 5 years... 🤯 🥛Milk, eggs and cheese: +47% 🍖 Meat: +35% 🧈 Oil and butter: +60% 🍞 Cereal and bread: +34% 🍓 Fruit: +26% 🥦 Vegetables: +35%

Worth remembering yet again how deciding to be aggressively antitrans elevated KS from a complete provincial nobody to a national newspaper columnist and international rightwing celebrity, & how she's steadily leant into every dimension of that role.

You can't get a fascist to back down from their exterminationist position by criticising their finances, because they will never, ever give a fuck about the money. Fascism is cruelty at any cost.

Freeman was following the same trajectory just the other day re: George Floyd. Trial balloons to see if GCs are ready to start “””protecting (cishet white) women””” from foreigners and black people.

Very plainly, he “could not make Father Ted today” because he can’t be trusted to sit alone in a room without messily shitting himself, and any other reason is light years distant from that.

tell you what, I'll hold my nose and vote if a party, any party tells me they'll deport every member of the reform party. it's a war you dumb bitches and we're losing.

Immigration is a good thing that we should want more of. It's good when people go to new places and bring their culture with them. It's good to go to new places and experience their culture. We do better as a people when we see how other people live and see ourselves as aspects of the same thing.

Kair Starmer simply cannot continue as Prime Minister. He is entirely unprepared for this political moment, and is handing the country to Reform on a platter. No matter your politics, you would have to be a fool to support this inept man as PM.

Years before Reform have a possibility of power, the news agenda following their every utterance has thousands of people worrying about their future. It’s violent

This is best understood by recognising that this isn’t because *the public* have been wildly radicalising themselves to the far right for well over a decade. It’s politicians and media figures who have been roasting their own brains and egging each other on, with results that are all around us.

'sex matters' -> 'ethnicity matters' you just know they aren't far off from 'race matters'.

NION have now launched a website: notinourname.org.uk 53,171 have signed. Let's get to 100,000

📣🏳️‍⚧️ Call for Papers We are inviting papers for our special issue, “Feminist Responses to the Regression of Trans Rights: Strategies, Alliances, Hope.” The issue will be dedicated to trans-inclusive feminist legal analysis that addresses attacks on trans rights & lives. Details below. Please share.

I will never forget how the fully fictional “concerns” of TERFs and billionaires about trans people have contributed to the rapid rise of fascism. There they are, egging it on, not listening to science, history, medicine, and individual experience, fiddling their own prejudices while society burns.

[subtweeting] people wouldn't be having to spend a lot of time trying to correct Reform claims on this irrelevant website if the state broadcaster wasn't their full time PR agent and the Labour party ever tried to disagree with them.

writesbright.substack.com/p/murdochs-r... Supping with the devils. Morgan McSweeney and Rupert Murdoch sat together at the Royal banquet for Trump is why Labour will never act to reform our desperately compromised press