Get 'im!

'TIS THE SEASON TO BE JOLLY

When I was a kid, cynics said "the president claims his war is about human rights but it's REALLY about controlling oil!". Now cynics are saying "the president claims his war is about controlling oil but it's REALLY about his own personal involvement in a mass child trafficking network!".

Works though, doesn't it?

we need to start asking the question of whether Trump knows that he is himself.

This happens *all the time*. Cops do what they want and it doesn't even occur to them that they might need a legal basis for their actions until they're actively challenged - and even then they carry on regardless.

TRANS PERSON: *exists* LABOUR: won’t someone think of the children!!! STARVING KID: hi LABOUR: fuck off

I think you can learn a lot from this comparison: 2021 DOD Climate Adaptation Plan stresses the need for the US to 'retain operational advantage' as climate change brings new conditions. 2025 National Security Strategy has one reference to climate change, rejecting it as 'disastrous ideology'.

I genuinely think a lot of people treat it as being graded on a curve, in a sense. Like, help should only go to a consistent percentage of the least abled people, whatever happens.

the conditions that able us all are infinitely revocable

Imagine if it was indisputably shown that a larger and larger number of people met the previously established criteria for mental health problems requiring care & time off work. Surely the only possible response would be to change the diagnostic criteria so most of them didn't count as sick anymore?

Apparently this is the wrong answer, so Wes Streeting is launching another review by a team picked to deliver a more convenient answer 🙄 Whichever review gives the answer they want will be hailed as "gold standard science", the other will be ignored.

We have lived in a world where government data was... good. And we no longer live in that world. Where I could pull up a government website and be like yes this many people live in this country, this many people got sick from this disease this year and so on, and know that info was pretty good

People are going to be like, "well cointelpro, and the war on terror" and that is all true but it has not been a matter of course that when the head of the CDC says something you think, "oh he's just made that up"

I think a lot of people still aren't used to the idea of a federal government that lies openly, nakedly and as a matter of course.

it would take generational breakthroughs in language, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and social media terms of service for me to be able to develop a way to adequately explain how much i hate wes streeting www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

On the fourth day of ACAB, my true love said to me... "NO DUTY SOLICITOR – use one of Netpol's recommended solicitors with protest experience" netpol.org/solicitors/ #12DaysOfACAB

There was maybe a 45 minute window where you could get coverage of what was actually in the budget and it was, crucially, the period when it was leaked by the OBR but before it was announced.

They frame it as asylum seekers living high on the hog, but you click through and it turns out the people in question got arbitrarily moved to the other side of the country and the home office didn’t update their GP so they had to drive back. Layers & layers of cruelty and incompetence

If there's one lesson I think we can draw from stuff like this it's that "optics" are a lie. Power will spin fascist cranks as just normal academics who've been unfairly persecuted and peace activists as terrorists if it suits its purposes.

"I myself have publicly advocated the use of direct action, including property sabotage, in the cause of climate justice. It stands to reason that I should support the same range of tactics in the effort to prevent genocide."

to conflate two points i feel are relevant: Grenfell is in the constituency with the most amount of properties subject to the ~mansion tax~ in the country bsky.app/profile/dann...

Keep drama students out of politics.

The UK strategy on migration is no more sophisticated than "big number bad! make number smaller!" This would be chronically lazy even if the thing being counted were something unequivocally bad like lung cancer deaths.

This really feels like a stitch up.

Six months ago, Labour was spending every shred of political capital - up to and including suspending seven of its own MPs - to maintain the two child benefit cap. Now, they're describing it's abolition as an overriding moral imperative. Cynical, untrustworthy twisters.

This conundrum comes like a week after "only babies question the value of NATO, why are you showing me a photo of trump?" When the system collapses, what you (belligerently) call political common sense will evaporate.

This feels like another example of the dynamic where AI is able to do this because we have already spent years getting ourselves used to wading through human generated 'slop' - unrigorous, low-quality, formulaic, largely unaccountable content (see also: memes, workplace emails, journalism).

I do not believe that justice exists as a metaphysical absolute that society has to try to live up to. I think justice is an ideology and, like all ideologies, it is a way of rationalising the material conditions of life imposed on us.

We're at a point where reducing prosecutions and incarceration isn't a principled leftist stance, it's the only pragmatic way to keep the system functioning at all. This is an unpalatable reality for carceral ideologues so they have to grope around for magical fixes.

This is it: if the state is incapable of pursuing its prosecutions it can just drop them.

People on the left should not celebrate vile reactionaries on the rare moments you happen to agree with them about something. More importantly, no one on the left should be agreeing with these reactionary narratives about the urgent defense of "Western civilization".

literally; outside of actually classified narcotics like cocaine and mdma There is absolutely no medication/drug which is treated anywhere near like this. And this is before we even get to the fact that it's only banned SPECIFICALLY for trans youth. cis youth? can still get it.

you can name basically any healthcare at all. ones with obvious known dangers, ones with lesser known dangers. From radiation being shot directly into your eyes to botulinum toxin injected into your lips. they're all available both on NHS or via private. But not hormone blockers if you're trans.

Being a tech journalist really distorts your impressions of what archetypical human behaviours are.

Uh...huh? And we're saying that Taylorism is a program of coordinating efforts to ensure a better outcome for all, are we? Is that... Is that what we're going with?

Lumping them together as “AI” gives readers the impression that a single class of tool is discerning novel protein structures, teasing subtle patterns out of mountains of LHC data, writing a student’s History 101 paper, and arguing a ketamine-addled billionaire could post up Shaq in his prime. No.

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

Dunno about Mamdani but everything is so clearly just a game to Trump. And not even one he's particularly invested in playing.

TRUMP [after spending 5 minutes with Zohran]: surplus value, it’s a very wonderful thing, very wonderful, and they’re stealing it. Can you believe that? We’re going to be looking very strongly at the bourgeoisie, what they’re up to

Trans people have exhaustively detailed the links between the anti-trans and anti-abortion movements, we warned that transphobia was a wedge issue for the religious right to roll back women's rights, only for us to be ignored, and of course UK TERFs are setting their sights on abortion.

the idea that any form of racism might be based on some legitimate grievance is poisonous, and the idea it can be defeated by addressing it on that basis is ridiculous bsky.app/profile/sund...

The modern concept of inalienable human rights has, in practice, always been a mechanism for US global hegemony and here it is in absurdly heightened form.

And remember. The tech that is producing that Grok tweet is propping up maybe 1/3rd of the stock market. I'm sure nothing bad will happen.

Just saw the front page of today's Mail which has a jibe about "Starmer's socialist paradise" and it's just so funny that Sir Keir thought he was a master strategist who could triangulate his way into a higher plane above such things.

You can tell this is a shit policy because the minister barely talks about the cases that would actually be affected by it and instead focuses on serious sexual violence cases, hoping you'll just accept the flimsy premise that they're directly connected.

‘“Do we think that someone who has stolen a bottle of whisky from a minimart should receive the right to trial by jury?” she said.’ Just one problem with the Minister’s statement: how would you know that they did in fact steal the bottle of whisky until they have been tried?

"active involvement despite scale" killed me

if someone can show me where the automatic settlement and citizenship exists, can we have our fourteen grand in fees back please