Mark Brown

Just a big buzzy lad going about his business

This may be more of an issue in the anglophone sphere. Probably the British Empire is the closest, and look how that turned out.

We're in a curious era where means to disseminate information (which in some ways are interchangeable with information itself) are mainly aligned with US power as it currently stands. The information we see is shaped by platform through which it is disseminated. I'm Not sure that's happened before

I was just sort of thinking something along same lines, but from a non-US perspective. This is a very much more connected world than 20, 30 years ago, but lots of the piping that makes it so is controlled by the whim of people strongly inclined to support a US gone wrong for personal direct profit

I wish that Spotify or similar would let people make radio shows, where they play music and talk in between. Since you've paid to access the music, it would be nice to have people share and curate, but with rambling humanity in the chat, not just playlists. This is the narrowcasting of my dreams.

I've always been phenomenally bad at 'having hobbies' because in reality my hobbies have often been 'spend more time with myself' rather than things that can really be expressed in terms of this activity or that. I remember someone saying folks used to go on pilgramages to get some autonomous time

Interesting, this. Finding somewhere you feel safe and free to feel alone is such an important thing. I've often thought that pottering (just following your own wishes in a space or place) is one of the most fulfilling things in the world. Undirected, goalless time that you don't have to account for

Saturday 28th of February 2026

Incredible that one man and a coterie of weirdos can do things that will have effects lasting decades or centuries just for overnight ratings without even a first thought. Very clever people can do incredible things to justify and make happen the orders of fools.

I look back at all the soul searching and sleepless nights and concensus building for 'The War on Terror' and I think: Trump and regime are the made-for-TV sixth installment in a franchise of a particular form of American political ideas. One big bit for the trailers and then nowt but empty surface

YouTube video by ComicTropes Swamp Thing's Lost Media for Over 30 Years

This new interview with Rick Veitch by @comictropes.bsky.social is really, really great

www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8ED...

Looking forward to Goodwin launching another political career founded on his disappointment with this one, which was founded on his disappointment with something previous.

The level of my political analysis today is: people didn't want Reform but lots of people told us people want Reform. I feel the weird period since 2016 has reshuffled the bits and it serves a lot of interests to suggest EU referendum was the only vote ever, when subsequent elections say different

YouTube video by The Fall - Topic How I Wrote Elastic Man

"Life should be full of strangeness
Like a rich painting
But it gets worse day by day"

#fallfriday
youtu.be/ckpc89oTiMY?...

Also:

Oh him, he likes American things now

The character arc for a lot of Reform figures appears to be

1. 'oh I am sad at how things turned out and where my life is at'
2. Discovers a racist form of populism
3. YOU HAVE NOT EVEN SEEN MY FINAL FORM

That's super interesting. I keep thinking about Michael Wolff's Trump books and his observation that the he attracts 'people with no good name to lose'. It must feel incredibly disconcerting to experience that disenchantment, especially if you aren't used to politics as a lived thing

Those were the kinds of things I was thinking about. I was thinking 'I wonder what the Oath Keepers think' and then 'ah'.

But surely 'set up concentration camps, snatch kids, take away rights' must make for some awkward self reflection? As I say, I'm not American, so I'm missing something. I've read lots on the American Far Right. So much discourse on fundamental rights, how so easily discarded?

I'm not American, so may be I just don't get it. I don't instinctively get how cheerleading everything you claimed to fear happening feels like a logical and natural position. Then again, maybe I'm not riddled with prejudice against minorities enough. Is that the special sauce I'm missing?

The absolute fevered dreams of thugs on the streets wrecking things and disappearing people and defending monsters transformed by the sweet honey of prejudice into brilliant examples of 'getting the country back on track'.

It's so peculiar that so many people spent so many years arguing about principles but just can't resist throwing them on the bonfire as long as their chosen enemy is on the receiving end of things that absolutely betray those principles, being given the chance to be appalling without repercussions

It's as if, hear me out here, that the people fantasising about that for thirty to forty years were just worried it might happen to them but really spent so long thinking about they began to desire it as long as it happened to someone else they thought deserved it.

I cannot really get over the way that decades of right wing American fringe discourse was about tyrannical government, unnaccountable secret armies enforcing tyrannous federal laws, fears of concentration camps, pedophile rings that go right to the top, but now it's happening it like 'yeah mint!'

Mutual Improvement 87 about the weather. "I felt terribly ashamed," she recalled. "The unspoken belief had been confirmed, that there always had been something odd about me." It was worse for one of her friends, an uneducated Trish laborer. When he shut himself in a bedroom to write, his anxious family held a conference and did everything to dissuade him. "There's something far wrong with a man who writes letters to himself" his brother exploded. "If you'd just been a pouf the priest could have talked to you or one of us could have battered it out of you. But what the hell can anvbody do about a writer» When he received his first check for a short story, his mother was convinced that he had committed some kind of fraud and insisted that he return it. And when a television play of his was reviewed his mother was shocked and said that theirs had been a respectable family until then; never once had any of their names been in the paper." (h/t Tim Stanley)

Extract from The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose.

I feel seen.

Is there some very dangerous information in the world? Yes, yes there is. Is it helpful for people in distress to have their every action monitored by forces that do not and cannot judge intent? No, not really. The inconvenient truth about mental I'll-heath and distress is it's not just an idea

We have both legislators who know little of mental ill-health and tech companies who know little of mental ill-health conspiring to make the problem go away by making it harder for an individual to find materials about it, egged on by family groups and family 'groups' keen to remove youth autonomy

Instagram to alert parents on teen suicide searches as UK weighs social media ban Instagram said it would notify parents if their teenager repeatedly searches for terms related to suicide or self-harm within a short period, as pressure grows for governments to follow Australia's ba...

The right of people experiencing mental ill-health, distress and trauma to speak of their experiences in public spaces continues to be eroded by the argument that it is a kind of contagion that must be stopped from spreading to young people.

www.reuters.com/world/americ...

YouTube video by Dove From Above Best of Shooting Stars - Season 02 Part 1/4

I:30 to 2:00 here:

youtu.be/8xm6pK-j-yM?...

Harry Hill:

'Postman brings the letters every morning. The dog rushes to the door. They're never for him'