From 2019, when the news was telling us that staring seagulls out had been proven to stop them eating your chips

The good thing about none of the major parties running in Clacton and Count Binface running against Farage is that it effectively gives Farage nothing to run against, aside from complaining he's running against a man with a bin on his head, which is inherently funny.

If you want an active & aggressive public sector, which means robust state capacity, & think that patriotism is ontologically bad, I think the burden is kind of on you to show that you can have state capacity without a state that people believe in or view as possessing some deeper legitimacy

W.E.D.em Boyz@leftistwonk.bsky.social · last mo.

Almost none of the ”we need to reclaim patriotism” people ever explain ~why~ we should do so. They begin with the assumption that patriotism is a good thing. What if it’s not?

I don't think it's great that there doesn't seem to be a part of the British regulatory state that can't easily be co-opted into a scam. A government with an alleged change agenda might want to do something about that!

Jim Waterson@jim.londoncentric.media · last mo.

Want to run a fake London estate agency and repeatedly scam people out of thousands of pounds through rental scams? The good news is that for £250 you can join all the official renters' protection schemes and do it with a UK government badge of approval! www.londoncentric.media/p/london-ren...

Doctor Trivago

We need leaders who can spell out what's happening clearly and with force.

Do you?

People saying ‘good I don’t want corporations scoring brownie points’ Like I don’t know how to tell you this but corporations that employs millions of people no longer even pretending to support queer people is bad! Do people understand how permission structures work?! Open the schools

NPR@npr.org · 2mo ago

Public support for the LGBTQ+ community by corporations has become politically risky, public relations expert says. n.pr/4fKOBBG

It was kind of Robert Jenrick to set me up for an obvious joke at his expense.

Got a notification from a medieval copyright lawyer

memory is a superpower

SE Gyges@segyges.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"there were no moral panics about the internet in the 90s" are we sure about that. are we absolutely positive

On a structural level, the government is not taking this stuff seriously enough This content is a threat to public order and is driving a disintegration of the social fabric. An administration with its finger on the pulse would understand that a lot of issues run downstream of this

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Great piece by @tbij.bsky.social about how a devout Muslim in Pakistan has been making thousands from Facebook pages spreading racist videos aimed at UK audiences. ‘We have no interest in news. I haven’t even looked at what is being said in the videos’ www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026...

My brother, preparing to be a new dad in a few months;

The rabbit-duck illusion explained at last.

I'm really split on this personally because I agree the museums need the money but having worked front desk at a museum the delight on a tourists face when you tell them it's fee is a universal language I wish we all saw more of

Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Much more on this in tomorrow's newsletter, but the short version is: 1) on the one hand, essentially everywhere else in the world does this but 2) that makes the museum experience everywhere else just a little bit worse.

It's not the biggest thing, but it is genuinely deeply aggravating that everything will get worse for no real gains, just because Americans were stupid enough to elect him again.

Andy Bruce (Reuters)@bruceandy.bsky.social · 5mo ago

💥 UK 10-year gilt yield just struck its highest level since July 2008 at 4.929%

A unifying feature of all great "dominant military victories" throughout history is the winning leader having to beg on social media for China to come rescue him from the consequences of his triumph.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 5mo ago

UN Ambassador Mike Waltz: "This has been a dominant victory the likes of which we haven't seen in modern American military history"

There's a hauntingly beautiful irony in these morons thinking that carefully crafted American hegemony was actually weak and woke, and they would be the ones who would do Power and Dominance properly, and immediately bringing everything crashing down

Inside the Department of War are two wolves: "We've shut down the Colleges of War because book learnings are woke, gay, and irrelevant to war fighting." "How come no one told us the Strait is important, there are different kinds of Kurds, Iran is big, and air power historically doesn't win wars?"

I sat in a fucking court room and heard Apple imply that a naked cartoon banana was somehow inappropriate but somehow Grok non consensually undressing women and children is ok?? www.theverge.com/policy/85990...

Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards

Once you’ve traded your principles for proximity to power, do you even run your own company?

theverge.com

the shit I care least in the whole world about is whether the story about the Earl of Sandwich is true. yes it fucking was. my man was playing cards and eating meat with his hands and then he said hold up check this out. you won't believe this shit. bring me some fucking bread & hold onto your hats

in the movies this is the screensaver on the computers at the world’s most evil company

Increasingly I think the point of a wealth tax is not to raise money but to create space for raising income tax. The lethal thing in politics is when the compliant middle class feels like they have been taken for mugs; if you want to get money out of them, someone else needs to pay more too.

Windows 10 goes out of support today. My fave useless fact about w10 is that the iconic blue desktop background is a *photograph* - not CGI. Tiny 'making of' vid here - youtu.be/_2RacX9DgWM...

the problem with being deep into politics online is that you do, on average, know more than the average offline person but you might also develop at least one mildly insane belief not shared anywhere outside your cohort that you thus can’t be dissuaded of

You, a slack jawed Neanderthal: Duhh my tik tok where I make a weird face just made a million dollars. I'm going to eat a gold crusted steak to celebrate Me, a modern philosopher: I've crafted a magnificent sentence on a website where my only reward is getting yelled at. I live for this shit

I remember having this conversation with a friend that, for all the legitimate critiques of the media reporting, the alternative media was doing no journalism themselves and their model simply consisted of re-spinning the story as reported by the legacy journalists.

“You cannot fact-check your way out of status competition.” Very good, by @danwphilosophy.bsky.social www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/status-cla...

Status, class, and the crisis of expertise

By celebrating "common sense" over expert authority, populism performs a dramatic status inversion. It gifts uneducated voters the power of knowledge and deflates those who look down on them.

conspicuouscognition.com