The newspapers are one of the poisons at the heart of British society. Their function isn't to report the news, it's to weaponise and commodity it.
08.03.2026 09:05
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The newspapers are one of the poisons at the heart of British society. Their function isn't to report the news, it's to weaponise and commodity it.
“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” -Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
This. Always this.
The sooner we stop voting for politicians who see us all as NPCs the better.
His complete immunity from consequences also means he's oblivious to the long term impact. Each civilian casualty is potential motivation for an individual to strike back, so what next? Car bombs in Miami? Plane hijack on the 25th anniversary of 911? This cycle's going to last for generations.
Its almost as if becoming Temu Reform wasn't the vote winning strategy Labour thought it was.
Yeah, and a Superman who went back in time to *specifically prevent a missile attack*.
But its not about those characters being heroes or not. Its the juxtaposition between obviously fictional robots/Jedi/Kryptonians and the reality of bombing Iran. Blurring the lines between fiction and fact.
Yeah, they can include any characters they want (Reeve's Superman famously *stopped* a missile attack!) because its not about the morality, its about merging fiction and reality to desensitise us into not processing atrocities and turning Iranian kids into NPCs. Its about turning war into wallpaper.
Its about blurring the lines between reality and fiction, truth and lies. Keep repeating nonsense, keep reposting memes and even though they won't become objective reality, the fact that Trump acts with such impunity means that doesn't matter. It becomes his world and we're all just NPCs in it.
It'll be a bookcase spray painted gold. The Art of the Deal on one shelf, the current McDonalds menu on another.
A tax on being a woman athlete , because transphobes hate trans people, and hid under the guise of 'feminists' to do it
Well done you clowns, and this is only the start
But hey, let's have another war, let's bomb more civilians, let's keep up the killing so that generation after generation keeps getting radicalised so that the cycle never gets broken. I'm sure there's plenty of shareholder value in that and its worked so well in the past.
Heck, it even reduces *God* to a thing - an afterlife insurance policy, a rubberstamp for whatever atrocity we stick his name on, an NPC in the latest iteration of the Schofield Reference Bible video game that appears to be being played.
The great Terry Pratchett wrote that all sins ultimately begin with treating people as things. When faith gets used as an excuse for that it becomes an insidious blasphemy. Everyone gets reduced to pieces on a chessboard.
Because faith too easily becomes an identity marker strengthened by opposing The Other, whoever that may be. But faith shouldn't dehumanise, it should constantly be *re*humanising. All that "sin of empathy" stuff is an excuse to switch off humanity so that its easier to treat others as the enemy.
Honestly, if you're going around saying Jesus needs us to bomb a school full of kids before he can return, maybe you should ask what he's going to say about that when he *does* come back.
For a tiny bit more context, there are approximately 4,000 public libraries across the UK. “Up to” £150,000 in funding equates to “up to” £37.50 per library, or “up to” a couple of hardback books apiece.
Happy #NationalYearofReading, everyone.
www.librariesconnected.org.uk/facts-and-fi...
Its also hard to get people on board with your "negotiation tactics" when you've blown up the school their daughter went to and the hospital that was treating their granddad. It just tells them that the enemy of their enemy is just another enemy.
The constant condescension about ai is another aspect of it that makes me hate it more. The assumption is you can only be against it because you don't understand it like I do. No man. I don't like voluntarily making every human enterprise dependent on a tech run by a tiny group of financial maniacs
New Post for Ash Wednesday - mattsbibleblog.wordpress.com/2026/02/18/a...
#AshWednesday #Lent
New Post for Shrove Tuesday... mattsbibleblog.wordpress.com/2026/02/17/s...
#shrovetide #tardigrade #shrovetuesday
On top of the moral reasons, it's increasingly a good practical idea to not have our entire lives dependent on a handful of US-based companies who can lock us out the second Trump gets upset by random world leaders. One day Greenland will wake up and be banned from Gmail or Kindle or something.
There's lots of performative noise about "protecting our women and children!" (note the "our") when its a stick to attack political enemies or immigrants or the Orher. It rarely translates into tangible action because the "concern" is more of a weapon/dogwhistle that evaporates when inconvenient.
I’ve done an awful lot of interviews in my 35 years as an academic and @neilmackay.bsky.social has been utterly meticulous with this, precise in questions and follow up. I wish I didn’t live in a time when my scholarship and voice were needed in this way.
#ayewelcomerefugees
New post: Calling Each Other Names (a riff on Genesis 2:19-20) - mattsbibleblog.wordpress.com/2025/09/05/c...
net immigration fell by more than half last year and the politics has gone in the complete opposite direction. It's not really about the numbers
Let's be clear: The flood of hatred sloshing across Britain right now is 100% a product of the political and media elite scapegoating minorities for the harms that those elites have visited upon the country.
Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.
OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.
New post: Calling Each Other Names (a riff on Genesis 2:19-20) - mattsbibleblog.wordpress.com/2025/09/05/c...
Image saying: Small request - check on your non-white/ non-British friends living in the UK, plz (I don't mean me). The rise of the fascists is pretty fucking awful right now and resilience is feeling much harder. Every flag on a lamp post, every comment section peppered with reform morons and just a general rising tension and feeling of "you're not welcome here" is probs making a lot of us feel unsafe right now. Just reach out to someone to see if they want to talk about it, or if they need some support. It is really fucking grim right now, and it's easy for people to feel alone and isolated at times like this. Check on your mates
Saw this on a friend’s page and decided to repost. Being a friend really means stepping up behind the scenes at times like this.
And please don’t dismiss their concerns by trying to reassure them it’s all OK - just allow people the space to be worried, scared, whatever.