Seeing a lot of people I frankly thought better of misunderstanding this. It means case by case re. the service provider not the individuals using the service. This is how the Equality Act has worked for years - with providers having to justify exclusion as proportionate.

When you're avoiding a deeply scarring loss of public trust, specifically relating to keeping your promises...

Every location has a picket line in front of it. Don’t cross the line.

the argument was always from efficiency & level of support provided to the poor, but even the evidence on that is quite mixed? (universalist and means tested systems converged, but unclear if that's because more money provided or because universalist systems now have more means testing)

in online corners like these I think people largely recognize how credulous, unprincipled opposition to "wokeness" functioned as lightly papered over defenses of impunity, but it's one of those drums people should probably start beating for normies

it's also quite funny that "woke right" is precisely the kind of obscuring linguistic game-playing that Finkelstein claims he's against, because saying "white nationalism" or even "white supremacy" would be too close to Woke Language

yeah, you can't divorce the context of anti-trans groups believing that trans people are caused primarily if not exclusively by rapid social contagion from even the most well-meaning anti-phone campaign

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

we are at hitherto unheard of levels of The Lads Briefing Against Each Other

Sure, though for the past 3 decades (?) the idea of a national culture has p much been undermined by successive governments : cuts to arts funding, walling off access to creative industries to the richest in society, making the UK incredibly difficult to be a creative worker etc.

I went to meet the 'Rockstar 31', the developers who were suddenly fired from their work on GTA 6 for what the studio has described as gross misconduct. That's not what the workers call it though. They have another couple of words they prefer to use: union busting. www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9nO...

If Epping Council won it'd have been disastrous. That doesn't mean hotels are an acceptable form of accommodation, only the other day @ramfel.bsky.social released a report into how bad conditions are in them. It's that this government's alternatives are worse 3/ www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Two obvious issues are: planning reform isn’t necessarily about even more deregulation. Might involve more, rather than less, strategic planning and even zoning requires an awful lot of upfront investment; and the private sector will only build pro cyclically because it needs to make a profit.

by the by I've said before and I'll say again - I don't agree with the "we need them kids off them screens" values of the boomers. screens are great for a plethora of reasons. But if you do want kids off screens and making friends offline then you need to address the reasons they've 'retreated'.

It's the definition of capitalism! (good ole Kalecki). If you are a class defined by control of the means of production then production is a nice to have, but control is a got to have.

To put it another way, *capital* is perfectly capable of organizing decarbonization. The problem is *capital-owners*, who are political actors and not just the embodiments of the accumulation process. Elon Musk is symptomatic here.

The problem from their point of view is that rapid decarbonization requires public, collective decisions about the organization of production, in a way that threaten capital-owners' authority over both the production process and the political system.

Think you can explain a lot of the freakout about the "woke pmc" and subsequent reactionary turn from the tech industry guys as well with this

one thing that does seem to come out of these reviews is that the public would apparently like more depth on issues like migration or economics, but the reportage is rarely able to engage with these topics on anything more than a surface level

others have noticed this as well but it's very telling that official reviews into the editorial processes around, say, economics and migration have consistently raised issues that affect impartiality (though not bias) but because there's no meltdowns from our media about those, they aren't crises

Not the most important part of the piece but one little aside stands out: "On another occasion, a BBC executive forbade me from writing for the New Statesman, imploring me to ask The Spectator instead, saying that would be perfectly fine."

the one commonality in the vast majority of the verbiage around trans issues in the media is that trans people rarely get to speak on their behalf, and at least some of the people talking Very Loudly About Balance were involved in that editorial choice.

I guess we'll just have to keep people born in 1955 in every single position of authority for the next thirty to fifty years. I can't see how that could possibly become unsustainable.

yet again this seems less like an "impartiality crisis" and more like a "not believing grandpa simpson when he tells you one day you won't be with it any more crisis"

It's sort of interesting to me that for a lot of British journalists, "success" largely means reducing people's access to essential services

When Rosie Duffield is in on it I think we can safely say the anti-phone campaign in Brianna's name is actively at odds with tackling transphobia

A similar, balancing program about Kamala Harris would be about 5 seconds of "Kamala Harris has never encouraged an insurgency to try to overturn an election", but that's not what he means, is it

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.

look I made the "the first jobs to be automated will be the ones at the racism factory" comment as a joke

Worth remembering as ever that within the life time of most of our political class, the 'whacky' idea of abolishing landlordism was cross party consensus

the "this will mobilise voters against them argument" is clearly true and needs to be taken into consideration when running a campaign, but at the same time the opposite is also true, and none of this happens in a vacuum!

They’re wearing masks so they can’t be prosecuted later. As long as they think they can’t be prosecuted, their crimes will intensify. They will torture, starve and kill, as they have already, on greater and greater scale. Signed, someone who’s covered the unaccountable War on Terror for 23 years.

I have various quibbles with EUV's UI, which seems even more obtuse than usual, but managing to partially dismantle England as Scotland, or other similar shenanigans, remains very entertaining

this reminds me that I should probably join the National Trust for Scotland in part to ensure the Restore Trust kind of dickhead is kept away from wrecking heritage bodies

also love that what's being reported as "BBC censorship" by the usual suspects appears to be "any form of editorial process or discussion whatsoever", which I'm sure will be applied across the board and will have no repercussions

a lot of the focus is often about elite competitive sport because that is where they think they can make the case best, but it becomes very clear when you look a little closer that it's just about trans women participating in anything, at any level, down to charity fun runs

I do think the Grainger criteria should be pretty high, but at the same time the current system clearly isn't working as intended and leaves a massive hole in equalities law for bad faith actors to exploit

one thing i find crazy-making is the idea that getting rid of the filibuster would make congress a purely majoritarian institution. bicameralism itself is counter-majoritarian! equal state representation is counter-majoritarian! the fact that senate elections are staggered is counter-majoritarian!

would it not be easier for the popularists to dissolve the people, and elect another?

Rod Liddle swings between tedious by the numbers reactionary takes and absolutely disgusting shit that would get you fired from any other workplace. But he is An Established Voice and therefore that's it: you can't say a thing against him.

the only time the filibuster has ever been used to protect a particular interest of a set of states is to kill anti-lynching and civil rights legislation. that's it.

even beyond everything else "the deference to youth that pervades all institutions" is so hilariously askew from reality that I would argue it should actively disqualify you from being taken seriously

I’m not falling for that new Cuomo campaign that’s clearly someone with a fetish for getting yelled at I refuse to participate in that kind of perversion

I am sorry, we cannot crack down on fraud, it turns out these are load bearing crimes

if the purpose of a system is what it does the tech industry does seem to have mutated into a system to generate and facilitate crimes

Optimus will overturn the fundamentals of economics to an extent that we may not even need money in the future, Musk says, and yet he still recommends people "hold onto your Tesla stock," which seems like a kind of mixed message.

Fight For What You Actually Want remains the savviest political strategy even though it is the least embraced by the people who consider themselves the most savvy. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/do-what-yo...

Beyond the whole media circus aspect of the recent cases involving trans women using the facilities they had always used, the reporting of employment tribunals in the UK is just genuinely awful, just a cavalcade of "McDonalds got sued for hot coffee!" outrage bait

In 2013, Lucy Meadows, before she took her own life, faced a press monstering by a Daily Mail columnist that was outrageous enough that the coroner felt the need to speak on the matter. Nowadays, that kind of monstering is just built into the coverage across the board.

She felt within her rights to use the women's changing room on account of the fact that it was within her rights and also, as the article admits, following NHS policy. But it's so cool that British state media is going full Ministry of Truth to pretend the last 20 years never happened