If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future. The @theguardian.com just published an amazing piece about my book, "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy." Coming August 18! www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

‘If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future’: the journalist taking on the ‘tech fascists’ of Silicon Valley

As Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their peers have grown richer and more influential, Gil Durán argues they have all but abandoned democracy – and found the perfect government to enable them

theguardian.com

Raise The Colours should at the very least be declared an organised crime gang and treated as such (though my preference is that they be designated a terrorist organisation)...

Oxford Clarion@oxfordclarion.bsky.social · yesterday

Leaders of flag-raising group Raise the Colours Oxfordshire placed trackers on highway workers’ cars to find out their home addresses, the High Court has heard. RTC then attempted to intimidate the highway staff into no longer removing flags by repeating their addresses to them.

This is just rank Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, based on the bigoted idea that there is something inherently scary about a president with the last name "El-Sayed." It is incumbent on all of us to call it out.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 9h ago

JD Vance: "We don't want the next administration, whoever -- god forbid you're gonna have President El-Sayed in three years ... "

my extremely boring James Bond opinion is that casting a handsome young dude who can credibly punch bad guys and smolder sexily at ladies is all we need to do here it's James Bond, there's a formula, people like the formula, people will watch the formula

The Independent@the-independent.com · 13h ago

James Bond producer shares update on 007 casting: ‘It’s got to be really different’

This is a sorry affair. I had not heard of Arday before this, but I know Nathan Cofnas is an arse and his output risible and vapid. It strikes me that nether should ever have been employed if good scholarship is important to a serious institution.

Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 3h ago

Prof Jason Arday has resigned from Cambridge after the University announced plans to investigate allegations of plagiarism www.theguardian.com/education/20...

just as a note for Americans on the whole very sad Arday affair (he just resigned), becoming a 'professor' at Cambridge is a bigger deal than at a US institution. 'Professor' is the senior non-managerial academic rank in the UK; what would be 'professors' at US institutions are 'lecturers' in UK.

Henry Golding. Calum Turner. Nicholas Hoult. Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Rege-Jean Page. If you are struggling to cast this role, perhaps you are simply bad at your job.

Somehow things that would have been a background gag in a Verhoeven movie are now just real

I personally find it reassuring and not at all an indication that I'm listening to a dipshit crank when an interview begins with the regular line, "It wouldn't usually be proportionate to have somebody on the door of every single toilet or changing room asking people their sex before they went in."

EHRC chair challenged on how to enforce single-sex toilet rules

We spoke to Mary Ann Stephenson, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

channel4.com

This degenerate bureaucrat provides further reassurance to businesses by saying if they make existing toilets gender neutral they could be exposed to a lawsuit. And pines for a sex-ID card that people could be challenged to produce. Utterly mental

Gregk Foley@gregk.co.uk · 3h ago

I personally find it reassuring and not at all an indication that I'm listening to a dipshit crank when an interview begins with the regular line, "It wouldn't usually be proportionate to have somebody on the door of every single toilet or changing room asking people their sex before they went in."

Even the neo-nazis don't want to be associated with the Tory Party

Alex Partridge@alexpartridge87.bsky.social · 8h ago

Joshua Bonehill-Paine steps back from being a Conservative council candidate following backlash

"A decision that made sense in a British Rail spreadsheet does not in a regional economy." In praise of inefficiency.

Drought conditions

This week: southern Britain has too little water; this map projection has far too much. But first: in praise of inefficiency.

jonn.substack.com

I recently booked a car viewing via a dealer's website, and didn't even realise I was talking to an AI chatbot. And fair play, it was great! Apart from it booking us in to the wrong department, for the wrong vehicle, and not telling anyone we were coming, which took half a dozen people to sort out.

There's something diminishing about living in a world where men's abuse is so ubiquitous and unimpeded, and still women are chided for not thinking enough of men's woes, men's harms, men's feelings. We're constantly asked why we don't tolerate our endless violation with more dignity.

Rebecca Solnit@rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 20h ago

It's demoralizing living in a nonstop Abuse-a-thon: we've had to learn the sordid details of so many men's abhorrent behavior; I mean this summer has been Graham Platner, Andrew Tate, Jared Leto, Max Miller, plus the horrific L.A. rape-murder of the child by the rapper, to name a few lowlights.

After WIRED contacted Meta about the ads, they were removed for violating policies on child sexual exploitation. However, the researchers kept finding more of the ads—including duplicates of those reported. Hours before we published, they found another 30, including multiple that were 'live' ads

Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

More than 50 offending image and video ads were published across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or Threads, according to Meta’s ad library data. Some ran as recently as this week.

wired.com

I don’t think Badenoch’s plainly unreformed neo-Nazi adviser is any sillier or more insulting than anything else her cohort have to say about destabilisation, anti-racism and anti-extremism. She’s just too stupid to realise you can’t do this with someone jailed for quite horrifically abusing an MP.

My money's on Joe Lycett.

The Independent@the-independent.com · 13h ago

James Bond producer shares update on 007 casting: ‘It’s got to be really different’

Medical technology is near miraculous compared to even 10 years ago, let alone 40. It’s one of the reasons that efforts to ration and profit off these spectacular advancements are so grotesque.

Constantine@ajaxsinger.bsky.social · 21h ago

Food, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.

“…” ✍️ Byline Times https://bylinetimes.com/2026/08/04/reform-council-leaders-firm-advised-95-million-project-which-his-own-council-is-a-partner-in/?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=reformuk&utm_content=reform-council-leaders-firm-advised-95-million-project-which-his-own-council-…

Reform Council Leader’s Firm Advised £95 Million Project Which His Own Council Is a Partner In

Cllr Paul Mackings' consultancy has advised on the South Tyneside College relocation since 2021 and his firm gave £111,000 to Reform UK weeks before he stood as a candidate

bylinetimes.com

In Times of Israel interview, he is pitched as "Britain's leading satirist" with a shocking past, dates the conversion to 2018, is angry at suggestion Israel may have committed war crimes & says his AI expertise means he can see that "evidence" is faked online blogs.timesofisrael.com/talking-to-b...

The Blogs: Talking to Britain’s leading political satirist

From the blog of Jonathan Baz at The Times of Israel

blogs.timesofisrael.com

Hodges is an occasionally useful guy to keep an eye on, mainly because he’ll say things that his less stupid colleagues are smart enough to keep to themselves.

To explain for foreigners: our energy regulator rubber-stamps price rises; the water regulator tuts while rivers fill up with human shit; the press regulator wags an occasional finger, and the national equality body enforces press campaigns against groups of people they hate and wish to damage.

flyingrodent@flyingrodent.bsky.social · 14h ago

Britain, where the national equality body is a boobyhatch jam-packed with wingnut cranks who fervently believe their job is creating weapons for police to hammer minorities that the press hates and wants to harm.

This has the glorious chaotic energy of the early Morph animations and I love it.

David K. Barnes@davidkbarnes.com · yesterday

Here’s the latest stop motion animation from my Tiny Angry Witch team. (I’m the writer, I can’t take credit for the animating!) It’s one of our longest, and it nearly drove us all mad, but we’re really proud of getting it made! 1 x Tiny Angry Witch 1 x broom No AI

Here’s the key bit if you can’t be bothered with the rest:

This is one of the better, more helpful newspaper podcasts and it’s striking they - like all of the lads - talk about Farage and Lowe without any squealing and writhing about the cancerous virus of race hate that must be ruthlessly eradicated, or about the legion of evil scum who support them.

Hi :3

If anyone had any doubt about what kind of publisher Frontiers is, this is a shocking whistleblower account

Michael Okun@michael-okun.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.

They're using our money to buy the world, so they can continue ruling over it as the tyrants they are, even when the oil's finally gone.

Kate Mackenzie@katemac.bsky.social · 10h ago

the thing is how it's just mentioned in passing that these rich petrostates are going hard to guarantee their post-oil economic security; like it's hardly worth elaborating upon and yet it's very significant in the context of more, er, 'frontier' petrostates, or indeed oil demand