George Potter 🔶

Ed Davey:

a) Has posted about this.

b) Hasn't posted about the Mandelson Files, which should be a resigning matter for Keir Starmer.

🤦🤦🤦

i still think the response to this should not be "giving up" but dramatically changing media consumption habits to prioritize irl and collective sources with physical proximity + high trust

The Mandelson Files released today are damning.

The fact that Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson knowing that he had continued a relationship with Jeffery Epstein after his conviction in 2008 shows serious lack of judgement.

This release is only the beginning of this scandal for the Government.

Just made myself laugh by looking up how long Winston Churchill has in fact been on the banknotes, a tradition that postdates the last One Direction album

all the best comedians tell the audience "this is a funny joke" directly after making the joke

…

hot damn you know the numbers are bad when they're going to court so that people don't know them

We are a country of light and (very) dark animal stories: Black Beauty (a harder read than many will recall); Wind in the Willows and Beatrix Potter; Watership Down and Plague Dogs (gulp); Tarka (by a fascist) and Animal Farm (by an anti-Fascist); Kes.

I think we can cope with animals on banknotes.

Bluesky <noreply@bsky.social> 11:36 AM (40 minutes ago) ... Hi, We've reviewed activity on your account @pod.rape.fan and found it violates Bluesky's Community Guidelines on Repeated Violations and Ban Evasion. We keep our rules fair by prohibiting people from getting around bans and other enforcement actions. For example: Do not create new accounts or use alternative methods to evade bans, suspensions, or other enforcement actions, or help others do so. Your activity was classified as a Critical Violation behavior that is illegal, poses imminent harm, or accounts dedicated to violating our guidelines. These violations result in immediate and permanent account removal. You will no longer be able to access this account. Your previous account was permanently removed. Creating new accounts to evade enforcement is prohibited, and we will take action on any additional accounts.

cassie got perma'd, and she only found out cause her podcast account got taken with it

this website hates trannies btw

how is gavin running so many times why is California ruled by Patrick Bateman doing a Huey long cosplay how do y'all live like this

Huh? This is California we ignore him. And head to the beach

U should kill him before he kills a bunch of trans kids

cassie got suspended (after being unsuspended) for a post from JUNE

pdsls.dev/at://did:plc...

He's my party leader, so alas this exactly the kind of tone-deaf sense of priorities I've come to expect of his leadership...

Even Farron, as fucked up and bigoted as he turned out to be on one hugely important issue, had a strong set of beliefs (indeed, too strong in his case, that's part of the problem).

I remember Lib Dem leaders who, however flawed, had actual principles. Both Ashdown and Kennedy had their issues but you knew they were actual liberals who would fight for their principles.

Davey can't bring himself to take a stand on anything like actual liberal principles, but pointless culture war ragebait? He's right there.

The 2028 election is unlikely to be the most important of my lifetime, not least as Republicans are highly likely to lose it.

The four years following, on the other hand, are absolutely going to be the most important Presidency, as Dems decide whether to fix the system that allowed Trump or not.

Trevor Phillips is on Times Radio at the moment presenting its lunchtime show and talking about the imminent release of the Mandelson files. He’s not mentioned that Peter Mandelson has been his friend for many years and was best man at his first wedding.

British politics, more than any other, has an unrivalled streak of paternalism where marginalized people are easily dehumanized as spoilt children who must be sternly punished and managed and whipped into shape.

Our advocacy is simply seen as as tantrums.

Again, it's worth it to read military history because once you get past the surface layer of jingoism it makes very clear most wars are just wall to wall clown shows.

E.G. many of Rome's campaigns against Persia were about as well thought out as this.

Britain is, Canada, possibly excepted, the place I as a low-caste Sikh heritage Punjabi am the least discriminated against on Earth, India VERY MUCH included. This is not an unimportant thing to emphasise!

The thing is, if you *read* a Polanski interview rather than *watching* one, it's all like this. He's very good at presenting a polished and completely confident front on screen. But beyond that? It's all like this.

“When I was growing up, the story of Israel was always ever-present in the family home and in the school,” he says. “As I got older, though, I was always really aware of socialist Zionism, a small group of people that were always against the eviction of the Palestinians from their homeland, and [non-Zionist Jewish socialist movement] Bundism as well. “So, there’s lots of different aspects of what a Jewish homeland would look like. It is a complicated, sensitive and nuanced conversation. What is clear to me, though, is what Zionism is under Benjamin Netanyahu – a genocidal regime.” “Zionism is racism” is the title of a motion that is being sent to the next Green Party Conference and that Polanski has not opposed. Would that statement not flatten the nuance he speaks of? “If we’re talking about Benjamin Netanyahu and the genocidal regime, then that is obviously racist,” he replies. But “Zionism is racism” would be labelling as racist those he grew up alongside – family, friends – who consider themselves Zionist. “I think all statements and slogans are complicated because there’s always more nuance behind a sentence, and so that’s why I think the sentence needs qualifying to talk about the present day and what’s happening right now.” He would not consider them racists for being Zionists, though, would he? “Who, sorry?” Zionists he grew up around, for example. “I think if someone supports Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide, then I think there’s no other definition of that than racist.” But he has mentioned different kinds, such as socialist Zionism? “Yeah, and so that’s for that person to define what their Zionism is. That’s why I’m defining the Zionism that I’m talking about. And that’s the problem with labels, right?”

This is also a fucking word salad response. 'It all depends what the definition of Zionism is' - except this motion (which he refuses to condemn) literally does not make any distinction! You could be a left-wing Histadrut organiser who hates Netanyahu, this motion would still define you as a racist.

I'd not articulated it like this before, but I've always been uncomfortable with the idea that both "British" and "English" are inherently regressive identities, and it's this, isn't it? Whatever happens to the UK over the next few decades 60m people will end up with one of them.

Headline: Labour’s Islamophobia definition ‘will curb free speech’ Subhead: Guidance on anti-Muslim behaviour will ‘inhibit’ criticism of religion, counter-terrorism tsar says

Headline: Mahmood bans pro-Iran ‘hate’ march through London Subhead: Home Secretary agrees to Met Police request to stop annual Al Quds rally taking place on Sunday

Compare and contrast, both from The Telegraph.

What is London’s al-Quds Day march and why has the event been banned? Annual demonstration in support of Palestinian rights especially sensitive in light of US-Israel war on Iran

Grimly fascinating to read how shamelessly The Guardian advances the argument that the US and Israel committing genocide and now an illegal war of aggression has ~inflamed tensions~ so it is only right and proper criticism of US and Israel be silenced.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Boooooooooo

The New Statesman 2 @NewSt... 3h X THE GREAT BRITISH CRISIS by John Bew We are in the midst of the Fourth Great Disruption of the modern British state. Our politics, across every part of the political spectrum, is lagging perilously behind the realities we face. The fidelity of our political and official classes to the current order comes from an assumption, deeply ingrained in the generation who are coming close to retirement, that liberal or social-market economies were the only possible future and that the rest of the world was destined to become more like us. It is partly why austerity - like appeasement - had far more political support than we care to remember. It is why we spent 0.7 per cent of GDP on development assistance at the start of the last decade and barely 2 per cent on defence. It is why, after 1989, we added even more international and human rights law on top of the international legal order crafted out of 1945. It is why Brexit was such a psychological shock to this world-view. It is why we sometimes look like the last man at the bar at Davos, nursing a cocktail as the lights go off and facing a treacherous and icy route to an unclear destination. So as one world collapses around us, what is the shape of things to come? Here are some hard truths. The current social contract - particularly around welfare, health and pensions - is unsustainable on current + of growth. A domestic and internationa system that does not allow us to control our borders has lost legitimacy at home. We have

Okay, so the Thatcherite consensus went kaboom in 2008; we somehow managed to prop it up and keep staggering on with a desperate last ditch effort until 2024, and now it’s collapsing entirely, at the same time as the Pax Americana. I don’t think we can blame this on human rights or international aid

Minesweeping is woke.

In the early days of Claude I had somebody telling me that the LLM lets him program in languages he doesn't know. I asked how he plans to debug in a language he can't code in or read and haven't heard back.

I cannot begin to imagine how awful it must have felt for Charlotte Nichols to have to say this in public, in response to her boss seeking to weaponise rape for his own political ends. A truly brave woman and a truly disgraceful man.

The last time Labour, in their arrogant authoritarian pomp, tried to wreck our legal system - Blair deciding that 1000 years of habeas corpus was long enough - the Commons caved but the Lords, many of them lawyers & ex-judges, were horrified & fought the plans to a standstill. May yet happen again.