“WHOAH! Be careful not to step in that pile of shit there!” exclaimed the man pulling his pants back up.

Fascinated how the guy who made superstars of Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, and Michael Knowles thought that unfettered racism and every phobia in existence wouldn't eventually include anti-semitism

"Why travel all the way to Italy when you can visit a place much closer by that is shaped like Italy?"

bigthink.com/strange-maps...

'She's Delusional': US Ambassador Rejects Bridget Phillipson's Claim UK Played Key Role In Gaza Peace Deal

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/shes-d...

Isn’t “delusional“ precisely the quality you need to be on side with the guy who claimed to have ended a war between Cambodia & Armenia, thinks that the definition of “asylum seeker” is “escapee from a lunatic asylum“ & that windmills cause cancer?

Don’t know what the ambassador’s whining about.

But what about all the waste they told us about? What about all the savings DOGE was going to find? What about the promises to cut council tax?
It's almost as if they were just making shit up to fool people, like they did with Brexit.

I’m concerned about the changes to the Skilled Worker visa route and the impact it may have on Londoners working for Transport for London, our other public services and beyond.

Political journalists didn’t set out to become clients of power – they just slipped into it. Half-truths, soft questions and silence bought with access. Read this analysis on how deference has turned to complicity ⤵️

@eastangliabylines.co.uk @peterthurlow.bsky.social

This made me spit my coffee out

"the gruesome Badenoch-Jenrick double act, and the Putin-friendly chums of the oil lobby in Nigel Farage and Reform is where right wing politics is right now: as a naked and open defence of class relations and oligarchical interests.”

averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/p/about.html

I'm sure BBC investigative documentary strand Panorama is even now working on an incisive exposé of Reform's financial links to Russia and it's just that they haven't announced it publicly yet

Can’t even get the right Bond film on the t-shirt. Amateurs.

You'll have to believe that this kind of iron certainty that a failing strategy will somehow just work anyway will put jobs on the line in the case of a wipe out next year.

But it won't, because that isn't how this work, normalisation of the politics of Reform is the point.

There was a period in history during which full-plate armour was so impregnable, and ransoming back captured nobles so lucrative, that the knights could treat warfare as a game while their men-at-arms got slaughtered in the mud.

I think about that a lot when I look at modern politics.

This is it. I didn’t find it at all difficult to leave Twitter in the end: it stopped being fun and became boring and depressing. Whenever I opened it I’d see things that were obnoxious or upsetting. It was a relief not to do that.

it’s good enough. Over time, it will deteriorate. Now it might run well enough to be worth maintaining in running order into the foreseeable future or (& this what happened with ex-Twitter), you may get to a point where one or many things may fail so badly that it’s unusable & beyond economic repair

Think of the decision to leave ex-Twitter not as a simple binary choice but a question of degree & gradual deterioration to the point of unusability.

Imagine a social media platform as a car. It might not be everything you want even when you buy it, but it gets you where you want to go &

This is an exact encapsulation of why I moved to Bluesky.

No amount of handwringing in the Atlantic about how I owe some eternal Promethean suffering to the discourse is going to make me stay on a site I hate, that stopped doing anything for me professionally years ago.

New post just out:

The relationship between Russia and the European radical right goes well beyond Reform's Nathan Gill being bribed.

In this post I trace the history back to the 1990s and look at the threat it poses now.

(£/free trial)

open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/r...

Saw the globe thing at Hexham Abbey today. There was a stage being set up underneath it as there's a 'Pink Floyd by Candlelight' show on tonight.

I remember Shipman's simile not just because it was so confidently, hilaroulsly wrong, but for reminding me of that Larkin poem which totally nails Johnson's idle bluffer philosophy of life:
"Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?"

It's almost exactly four years since Tim Shipman's notorious "Boris Johnson squats like a giant toad" tweet.

Seems like important context given how we often talk as though the next election – four years away – is a done deal.

I find it weird how people can acknowledge that UK politics is volatile to an unprecedented degree and yet talk very confidently about the shape of an election in 2029. Reform is depicted as a permanent and unstoppable force and Labour as utterly doomed. Doesn't add up to me