Lucy

Has everyone gone fucking insane?

To those who pay attention to such things this is grim as fuck, actually.

And I know I’m also in a bubble and keep thinking ‘am I missing something here?’, but I’m not sure I am.

I occasionally check X via my work account to see what some old mutuals are saying about all this stuff, and it just seems so far removed from reality.

I often worry that Bluesky is as much of an echo chamber as X (which it is, let’s be honest) but then I see stats like this, which surely indicate that we are closer to the baseline of public opinion than X is.

Feel my pension might be safer in a shoebox under my bed at this point

Britain is in a deep structural economic hole thanks to austerity, Brexit and global shocks that is nearly impossible to get out of. It is rather unfair to expect government to reverse those long-term drags on national prosperity, but it needs to start explaining to voters why we are where we are.

Here's the bit (from Tony Travers) there's no quarrelling with. National Labour has been complicit in the London-bashing it thinks will please Reform-fancying voters elsewhere in the country, from Reeves's spending review speech on. But there's no pleasing them. And a big price could now be paid.

It really is something to see politicians, commentators and media outlets whose whole identity is based on being so-called ‘patriots’ frothing with excitement as they line up to back a deranged megalomaniac who consistently attempts to belittle and bully the country they claim to love

Blair is probably the best prime minister of my lifetime, and almost certainly the worst former prime minister of my lifetime.

Exactly. The man who killed Huntley murdered three people including a pregnant woman, whom he also raped. I’m not sad Huntley is dead (I have a 10 year old daughter) but I’m also not going to celebrate vigilante justice by someone who committed hideous crimes himself.

his killer being a man who murdered three people including a pregnant woman who he also raped is a perfect demonstration of how ‘paedophile hunters’ are just violent men looking for a socially acceptable target for their violence

Henrietta Barnett, a super-selective girls’ grammar in north London, has 4.8% of pupils eligible for free school meals against a national figure of 25.7%. These schools are not engines of social mobility.

This might make more sense if the grammar system genuinely rewarded the brightest regardless of background. It doesn’t, as the wealthy tutor their kids from year 1-2 onwards, at a cost of many thousand of pounds, to ensure they pass. It’s a measure of privilege, not innate intelligence.

As always: its not just grammars you're bringing back, its secondary moderns.

And no one wants their kids to go to one. Which is a issue when 75% of kids will do so.

Always missed in this debate. You're making the education of the majority worse, to privilage a small minority.

Kids love dressing up though. Also most of them do lots of other activities to encourage reading at the same time.

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

"Mr Speaker, as @GIGACHAD_1776 said to me on X yesterday"

‘Orcs’ is a racist dog whistle.

Starmer in the Commons when challenged by Tory MP Gareth Bacon about UK actions over Iran: "Hanging on to President Trump's latest words is not the special relationship."

I applied for a job with Robin Wales once. Clearly dodged a bullet there.

I get why people compare worries about kids on social media with previous moral panics but I think an important difference is that when previous generations worried about computer games or rock music they were worrying about things kids did that their parents didn't understand.

Childless adults stop opining on kids’ access to social media challenge

Also that article she’s screenshotted doesn’t even say what she claims it does.

Once again: childless Very Online adults are not the voices we should be prioritising in the debate around kids and screens.

Nope. Social media is still bad for kids and no one should be listening to TL on this as she is the poster child for the Terminally Online.

Well, it worked out brilliantly in Afghanistan…

Sincerely hope they will listen to this (but not holding my breath).

Among the many, many reasons this is nuts: the bulk of British Muslims are Sunni, while Iran is a Shia theocracy. Sunni-Shia rivalry and mutual hostility goes back roughly a thousand years and has played as large a role (if not larger) as Protestant-Catholic rivalry/conflict in Europe

My radical take is that the people primarily to blame for the inevitable wave of anti-Semitism we are already starting to see are in fact the people being anti-Semitic