Maryanne
@abigbirdruns.bsky.social
Runner. 250 marathons. Co-Chair of the 100 Marathon Club UK. Dog lover. Sea swimmer all year round.
80 year-olds with pro-Palestine signs: arrested as terrorists. Greens planning to block a road, to highlight an existential crisis: sent down for years. Masked far-right thugs blocking roads and ports, using intimidation, obstruction & threatening behaviour: no arrests. The real two-tier policing.
Radio 4 Today presenter Anna Foster saying the protesters looked very much like Fascism and 🙌 for actually calling it what it is.
Finding it really telling right now we CAN arrest people holding signs peacefully about their political views. But we CAN'T arrest men beating women with literal sticks at Reform UK for expressing their views. So freedom of speech includes violence now for certain groups?
Fascist paramilitaries in England, with Tommy Robinson supporting them on social media. Tommy Robinson, the 'English patriot' who went for a meeting with Elon Musk's dad in Russia a few weeks ago. How far would one have to dig to find the hand of foreign agents funding these fascists?
HOPE not hate@hopenothate.org.uk · 2d agoPatriot Platform, the far-right group whose black-clad masked members caused hours of disruption in Dover yesterday, calls itself a Christian “army of patriots” dedicated to protecting women and children. There’s a problem with that story.
What do you call it when agents from a foreign country pay you to commit the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the you owe allegiance...?
Anonymous@youranoncentral.bsky.social · 2d agoAt least one source of funding confirmed for the potential terrorist group Patriot Platform; the group's main organizer Danny Tommo bragged that a US think tank provided them with £30,000. Elon Musk previously paid nearly £100,000 in legal fees for Tommo's associate, Tommy Robinson linked to IDF.
I'm generally happy to give someone like Burnham a bit of time to get things in order but I'm already pretty impatient for an explanation why an octogenarian holding a small protest placard gets a criminal record but 200 people dressed as paramilitaries blockading Dover can just get the train home.
Possibly the most incredible Beethoven Ode to Joy flashmob by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Nuremberg and the Hans-Sachs-Choir in front of the St. Lorenz Church in Nuremberg, Germany. [📹 Evenord-Bank eG-KG] Original post
Let me get this straight. Vicars and old ladies holding up traffic are terrorists but gangs of masked men in black holding up traffic are perfectly fine? Something wrong somewhere...
"I was expecting to learn things. I was expecting to have fun. What I was not expecting, though, was that there’d be a moment that felt akin to how I imagine religious people experience faith, in which I stood looking at the magnitude of creation and felt genuinely overcome by emotion."
Here’s how you dig a big tunnel under the ground
A flashback to September 2021.
jonn.substack.com
just stop oil protesters got five years in jail for *planning* to do this to the M25.
Unofficial BBCNews (UK) Bot@bbcnews-uk-rss.bsky.social · 3d agoMasked protesters block access at Port of Dover
Not that many years since a popular position in right-wing British politics was calling for the police to use significant force to remove protesters blocking roads Of course, that was when environmentalists were doing it
Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social · 3d agoMasked men dressed uniformly in black blocking a seaport, very normal www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
The visual similarities to loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland are not a coincidence
Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social · 3d agoMasked men dressed uniformly in black blocking a seaport, very normal www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Gerard McCarthy's response to Maureen Lipman is so fucking good
Incredible moment in the doc when Farage’s right-hand man Dan Jukes lists several foreign donors who’ve given money to the party via their kids. It’s not just one or two backers - it’s a huge conspiracy cooked up by the party to break the law. It’s bigger than we even thought
"Even those who don’t care about propriety must know that the stench of incompetence is the real killer in politics." Good from Tim Shipman on Farage's crisis spectator.com/article/refo...
Cambridge university was ordered to pay £5,000 compensation to a former PhD student who was found to have been bullied by Professor James Orr, who is also Reform UK's head of policy as.ft.com/r/c0b319f3-2...
Can’t quite get over the fact a party that waxes lyrical about how they are patriots and represent the views of the common Brit have admitted on camera they can’t get any British donors 😭 What a time to be alive
Wow. Watch Channel 4 News now Nigel Farage discussing elicit funding for reform U.K. from a foreign donor All on secret camera
As a new Harry Potter trailer makes the rounds, it bears repeating that there’s no way to watch this show without supporting J.K. Rowling’s bigotry and the structural violence she’s inflicting on the trans community.
There is no ethical consumption of HBO’s Harry Potter series
You can’t without supporting Rowling’s transphobic bigotry.
theverge.com
If you’ve never rocked out to Punjabi music, then I feel true pity and sadness for you.
One of the most moving things I've seen.
Humanists UK@humanists.uk · 6d agoSir Nicholas Winton was a British humanist who organised the rescue of more than 650 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia, on the Kindertransport. In 1988, Winton featured on the BBC's 'That's Life!' programme, hosted by Esther Rantzen, unknowingly surrounded by the people he saved. 🧵
It appears that plagiarism only matters to The Times if it’s done by black professors
Rachel Rees@rachel-rees.bsky.social · last wk.As honoured as I am to see that The Times has picked up my Chagos article practically *word for word*, including my hard-gotten quotes, I’d prefer some credit — or for everyone to read my original FT piece! free link to read the evidently enviable article below (cheaper than a Times sub!) 🌴
Amazing. It seems that plagiarism is only a problem for The Times when black people do it
Rachel Rees@rachel-rees.bsky.social · last wk.As honoured as I am to see that The Times has picked up my Chagos article practically *word for word*, including my hard-gotten quotes, I’d prefer some credit — or for everyone to read my original FT piece! free link to read the evidently enviable article below (cheaper than a Times sub!) 🌴
'“Why is this a bank holiday anyway?” someone asked me one Monday in May, in roughly the way you’d address a question to ChatGPT if it complained a lot more and never shut up about its dog...' So, I decided to find out.
Why is this a bank holiday, anyway?
I don’t like Mondays.
jonn.substack.com