Depressed Reader

As end-of-empire scenarios go it is so much more dignified to get your capital city sacked by the Visigoths than to have a bunch of illiterate rich people in their 70s doing it through a series of incomprehensible tantrums because their brains were defeated by their phones.

47% of people think immigration is primarily illegal. There were 4% irregular arrivals in March

New YouGov polling. A monumental failure of our political class to educate, a monumental failure of our media to report fairly, for a generation

Right to buy in England ‘fuelled housing crisis and cost taxpayers £200bn’ Common Wealth report calls discounted sales of council homes one of the ‘largest giveaways in UK history’

Right to Buy has been an absolute scam, with taxpayers paying the price. Time for govt to get a grip on the crisis once and for all - end Right to Buy now, and put in place rent controls to stop landlords ripping off renters.

www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Former UK Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption, "Palestine is a state, the sooner the UK acknowledges the facts, the better"

Steve Rotheram, Labour mayor of Liverpool city region, has told Robert Peston he is deeply critical of Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint the former editor of the Sun newspaper to a new Whitehall perm sec position in charge of all 7,000 civil servants engaged in communications and PR

Statement here

“My parents very clearly do not love me”: Children of Bayswater Speak Out We speak to several children of Bayswater Support Group members. Their experiences highlight the harm groups like Bayswater do to young trans people, and the gateway they provide to broader far-right ...

transsafety.network/posts/my-par...

This is so heartbreaking. But also it shows the real life influence of tw*ts like Peterson and how the GC movement has built this infrastructure to spread its hate. Great reporting from trans safety network.

I debated 20 far-far-far-right conservatives (racists? fascists?) on Jubilee's 'Surrounded.'

Here are some of the highlights of them unable to answer my basic questions or rebut the simplest of points. Not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Here's the full 'debate': www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-W...

“The point about PR isn't that it favours one party or another. In the unlikely event that most people choose a populist party we'd get a populist government. What PR will not do - and FPTP very much would - is to hand 100% government control to a party that most people voted against” Andy Beck MVM

The worst chief justice of all time Move over, Roger Taney and Melville Fuller.

New in PN: The worst chief justice of all time

"American history has no shortage of legendarily bad chief justices and disgraceful decisions. But John Roberts has overseen the wholesale corruption and capture of the Supreme Court, and history should look back on his tenure with revulsion."

To be a huge issue. We went from, oh, she underwent a “sex change” to the GC language of “sex is real” (implied, and therefore unchangeable) 3/3

Ahhh I see :) x

Sex at all, and I would treat anyone as trans and valid who says they are, because I don’t think you magically become trans when you start taking hormones or only after you’ve had particular surgeries. I was simply making a point that this language distinction between sex and gender didn’t used 2/

I don’t disagree, was just trying to be brief for character count sake, but yes, the four elements of sex are referring to the authority of academic biology. But I would say that “it depends what authority we’re talking about” does mean it’s complex. I’m not trying to asset a rigid definition of 1/

Ignorance properly (that I’ve seen, I’d be happy to be wrong!) I think it’s accurate to call them anti trans, but they’d protest. They coined Terf and then declared it a slur. Perhaps we just need to really associate that Gender Critical = Anti Trans. 3/3

Now seen as two separate things that never overlap, when twenty years ago post transition was referred to as having undergone a “sex change”. There’s no snappy catchy easy to understand way of explaining this to the general public, or labels we can put on anti trans folk that capture their 2/

Unfortunately, sex as a biological concept is complicated. It’s made up of four things (hormones, chromosomes, primary and secondary sex characteristics) and only one of those is generally how sex is assigned at birth. It’s a result of the rise of the anti trans movement that sex and gender are 1/2

"Careless people … smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Baron Hain, "Al Qaeda - real terrorism"

"ISIS - real terrorism"

"This Labour government is treating Palestine Action as equivalent to ISIS or Al Qaeda, which is intellectually bankrupt, politically unprincipled, and morally wrong"

“The New York Times collaborated with a white nationalist eugenicist hacker and agreed to keep his identity a secret to publish a Zohran Mamdani hit piece” is a way bigger story than “18 year old Zohran Mamdani ticked ‘African American’ on his Columbia application because he was a citizen of Uganda”

This is how to have difficult conversations with vaccine sceptics

Interesting analysis!

This seems important from Jake Sherman

HAWLEY: Let's see the Trump chart. You don't think it's a little bit anomalous that Trump has so many more nationwide injunctions against him?

KATE SHAW: A very plausible explanation you have to consider is that he's engaged in much more lawless activity than other presidents

“Please don’t ask me about the effects of policies I caused or point out my hypocrisy, I would only like to talk about how I am a cool space person”

whenever i encounter people who say they can't understand shakespeare verses I always send them this clip from the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing

Opinion | Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death

Elon Musk “apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad PR for the world’s richest man to take food and medicine from the world’s poorest children”

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...

So to say she creates pain and suffering worldwide just isn’t it for me. I probably create more pain and suffering world wide because I eat meat and don’t have the money to offset that. 4/4

On the tour $100k bonuses, all her tour dancers and band have (and have had for years even when it wasn’t industry standard) healthcare plans etc, and she promotes the causes of LGBTQIA+ dancers, singers, and people of colour, even having a black trans man play the romantic lead in one of her MVs 3/