Good news lads, we’re on the cusp of a new paradigm in sensible regulation and valuing human creativity, and all it’s going to take is uh an almighty financial crash www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Superb piece on why “AI” is bad user design from @sifu.tweety.fish - and why AI proponents and skeptics so frequently seem to be talking completely past each other. buttondown.com/apperceptive...

I mean LOL of course they are. What did anybody think would happen www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

A war fever special World at One on Radio 4. Some guy explains the UK isn’t ready for war because we’ve been spending our budget on education and health, adding that politicians are scared to talk about war so civil society’s going to have to adapt to make it easier for them. Fantastic scenes really

i hate it when that happens: “It’s like we’ve fast forwarded straight to the end of Reservoir Dogs where everyone gets killed, but without enjoying 10 years of successful government beforehand." www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-mp...

“Labour Together” promoting “easy firing”. LMAO. Almost unbelievable really

Ok so the military’s having private chats with Guardian columnists, which they’re allowed to report in the context of the army needing more money. I see www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“Sneaking out” an announcement that only affects lobby journalists “on the last day before Christmas” (18 December).

On the News Agents, Emily explains that keeping Ukraine solvent is the only way to avoid our nation’s youth dying in battle. I mean yeah maybe, but man it sure sounds like some very important serious people fucked up a lot to get us here, does it not. Maybe come back to that aspect soon.

The lights on the underpass south of Hyde Park Corner have been broken for at least 3 weeks now, adding a thrilling Silent Hill interlude to the commute. Fantastic stuff really

Cool how there have been fifteen million profiles of McSweeney from all the best-connected hacks in the business, and it takes Steve Reed blurting it out to learn that he maybe thinks the NHS was a mistake.

Is this good

We’ve made a society where meeting hunger strikers is a punchline. Let the record show i have a lot of respect for @steverichards.bsky.social but his son appears to be letting everyone down here. www.thenational.scot/news/2570167...

Oh no, did the axis of evil brainwash Harry Cole into interviewing a nazi

Very efficient if the press can pretend to be outraged by woke ads and the bbc at the same time without needing to change channel

Nobody in The Moral Maze gets eaten by the Moral Minotaur, which is a fundamental flaw in the programme.

The biggest piece of evidence is that he is implacably anti immigration, something only racists do. But the British news media has an ongoing active project to deny that there are any links between these two things, to render it politically incorrect to state the connection.

In the Brexit era every newspaper hired 3-5 more Westminster journalists than they actually need to report Westminster politics, so now they have to keep inventing new guys to stay busy www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

On the News Agents, Lewis and special guest Patrick Maguire are having a standard savvy chat until Patrick starts wondering why Labour never appealed to Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney, what do they have against well-to-do fictional skilled tradespeople from the 80s, etc. He seems quite angry about it

How many Guardian political staff does it take to write a story claiming that Badenoch getting a photo op with the original Tory one out of the Spice Girls means she’s back back back? Three. The answer is three www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Very funny to have these takes when the press is full of savvy insider takes about how he believe in nothing & is being walked like a dog by aides whom his other colleagues used to hate & fear but now just hate. Like you don’t even need to disagree with him to think that sounds like a really bad PM!

Useful thread about the 2024 election. The more that voters were exposed to the two campaigns’ messaging, the more likely they were to vote for Harris.

On the NS podcast, Ailbhe gushes about how Streeting’s always in the bar & last to leave a party, & how “without naming names” he left her in no doubt about who he was criticising. I feel like one could paint a less flattering picture with those bare facts if he didn’t have so much hack goodwill.

On the News Agents, Jon does an apparently pointless monologue about the Cuban missile crisis & how Venezuela is not like that because it’s not a threat to world order. Then Emily jumps in & explains that if Maduro is arming Russia(?!?), maybe it *is* a threat to the world order 🧐

[slapping the roof of the LLM industry] this baby can do heresies we never even thought of yet

Idk man, before we do make any fundamental changes to international law should we do something about the press making up & printing racist myths? Because that sounds like the kind of thing they definitely should not be doing www.theguardian.com/law/2025/dec...

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Today in “How’s the Cordon Sanitaire Holding Up?” Nick Robinson interviews Jordan Bardella and declares him charming and charismatic.

Reminds me of when Guardian columnists spent years trying to repurpose Brexit slogans, which they assumed had magic powers. Like “what if the real Will of The People…is a series of citizens assemblies?” Lads you know you can literally make your own slogans, right?

Sam spent the evening at Labour Together’s Christmas party and was shocked that none of the speeches mentioned their polling on replacing the PM, which is “doing such damage to the Labour Together brand”. I mean LOL come on man, do these seem like people who publicly address their own behaviour

They did a deal with the press to get through the election, and after that the terms of the deal changed

IDK man it would be quite odd if a really significant number of people simply forgot how they voted in the biggest, most heated domestic political event of the 21st century

In the UK, liberal commentators have spent decades explaining that newspapers are dying as a political force, while public opinion’s been dragged further and further right in clearly observable ways. They’ve had to distort their whole view of politics & society just to avoid noticing it.

People are dismissing network television like they did radio 20 years ago. If a bunch of liberal rich people invested in non-profit independent radio across the country twenty years ago we would live in a fundamentally different country

It’s striking how clearly western governments are trying to harden up their electorates for the effects of half the world being on fire or underwater, but they can’t say that in public so they’re all like Guys we just thought it’d be nice to change some laws a bit because reasons

Obviously

Yeah, this. Labour & Tory supporters have their pick of who to think is the Real Soul of the Movement, but in a time of monsters sometimes you simply gotta get behind the guy who’s most likely to send some profiteers to prison.

This entire grift relies on convincing people that they don't know how to do the things they have always known how to do, and ironically, if it works, we will, in a very short amount of time, forget how to do all the things we have always known how to do.

There’s forecast by I think Gartner that predicts by 2027 a majority of consumers will have fully retreated from anything with AI in it, and it’s gonna be fun when that runs into whole tiers of corporate management who’ve just completely forgotten how to make good decisions on their own.

Sometimes you have to agree with one of your allies that your other allies are decaying and unviable, because diplomacy

I mean yeah regulate but also there are existing corporate homicide laws that could presumably be applied where a product encourages people to kill themselves www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This would have so much more force if Labour hadn’t disciplined their own candidate for doing too well www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

On the NS podcast, George puts on his expert comms hat & explains he wouldn’t have called the Greens “nuts” (bad.makes potential Labour voters feel alienated) but would instead have said they’re on the side of Putin & Farage (good, makes potential Labour voters feel great I guess).

It’s wild how it’s taken *seven years* to establish what happened and decide to sanction the GRU. Is this Seumas Milne’s fault somehow www.gov.uk/government/n...

I mean maybe the guy surrounds himself with people who think he’s useless. That would make sense, actually

“When I took over the Labour party, everyone said to me, ‘you’re not going to be able to change the party’. We ignored that and carried on. Then they said to me, ‘you’re not going to be able to win an election.’" No they didn't! You're making it up! Why is our Prime Minister living in a fantasy?!

Today Sam & Anne explain that Labour Together wants the PM out, but some guys claiming to represent The Markets want him to stay to make sure no leftwing things happen. British politics, man, it’s amazing

The fact that many GPs don't believe people with mental health conditions will not be news to those of us with mental health conditions who have had to deal with these cunts. Kudos on the BBC for continuing to manufacture consent to take away our rights and healthcare though.

Marina Hyde here, on the UK’s leading culture podcast, on a topic the Green Party leader has addressed repeatedly, complaining that maybe he hasn’t apologised to her personally?

On the News Agents, the team are furious & confused about why the Farage school story hasn’t been picked up properly by the media, listing a lonely handful of dogged journo pals that curiously does not include sister station & ad partner LBC (“news you can trust, and the conversations that matter”)