Ben

omg sophie this is so useful and has sent me down many further rabbitholes

oh, i bet you think you're sooooooooo special, Isle of Wight

the anger this caused me was instantly overlaid by the rush of satisfaction i, a person technically in the book business, just felt when i realised that the London Book Fair, the world's worst experience, had been and gone and i hadn't even noticed

jk lol can you fucking imagine. fuck every single one of them, and fuck appointed peers too, and fuck this stupid fucking country

[THREAD] with the House of Lords finally agreeing to the removal of the remaining 92 hereditary peers, here's a thread of interesting facts and anecdotes about each of the peerages, a commemorative look at the various quirky fragments of history that will now pass into memory

'I can make it work this time,' but he's not talking about his doomed relationshiop, he's talking about fucking Anger again

'Anger is a trap,' I think to myself, getting dangerously close to wisdom: but then the camera pans to reveal I am just contemplating card rewards in Slay the Spire 2

[my stupidest 'just asking questions' voice ever]

not my photo but it's these fuckers. started with Stop The Boats shit and now the most recent one is literally "Rudolf Hess, Martyr For Peace"

i have a little local neo-Nazi stickering problem. does anyone know good sources of leftist/anti-fascist stickers for covering stuff up? ideally something where buying them contributes money to a good cause or whathaveyou

ok so i did die immediately after this

bruh

this is nuuuuuuts

lots of interesting and critical replies to this, and also this polling thread. making me rethink this take somewhat - but i maintain that it's important that when people disliked the Vietnam war, they *did something about it*. idk. bsky.app/profile/gell...

properly fucking lost it at the bit-a-thon in the last 10 minutes of this. extremely good to have this in my life

this is, i suppose, cause for hope (??)

exactly

to the people responding - correctly, in part - that it's because there aren't "boots on the ground" - yeah, and what's terrifying, again, is the way this suggests you can just bombard chunks of the world at will and people will shrug and go "yeah that's not a real war"

part of what seems most fearful is that the *lack* of real objectives - which is one of the most obscene things about this all - seems like it may fuel people's passivity about. "what are we fighting for? dunno" is hard to care about, protest about

yeah, this is what i said wrong in that post. it's more that it's clear, even if it has gone down worse in the, like, abstract, people don't care as much and/or it doesn't matter that they care? is 'salience' the jargon i'm looking for?

yeah, it's not that it's popular, it's just that it doesn't *matter*

or rather, reprecussions are for Iranian schoolgirls only

and i *know* that this has always been true - i'm not stupid. i also know that norms aren't a battle worth fighting. but it does feel in line with all the Trumpian stuff where you can just... be corrupt, etc. there aren't really any "real" reprecussions. turns out the same is true for war.

this is what i was fumbling towards saying here, maybe. but also it's not just the build-up. it's the revelation that we live in a world where our allies, the west, the developed world, whatever you want to call it, can just start breaking shit en masse at will bsky.app/profile/cine...

this is difficult to articulate but i think the present "war" with Iran is almost unfathomably disturbing because of the way it was just presented to us on a plate. it's barely caused a ripple. half the coverage here is about people holidaying in Dubai, the other half is just "this is happening"

first run went surprisingly - even suspiciously? - well

‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local C...

It's this (and other excellent coverage on the same excellent site) www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-...

can we go one day in this country without a new moral panic about the youth

more like Slay My Productivity 2 amirite