Graeme Macdonald

I want to do a 🧵 about the Sidney Sweeney thing, because it's *extremely* revealing & educational.

First, to be clear: I could not give less of a shit about the details -- the ad, the rhetoric, the jeans, her boobs, whatever. Good lord, who cares.

Let's look at the *structure* of the episode.

Lord Dannatt urged ministers to crack down on Palestine Action at request of US firm Police officer was concerned ex-army chief, a Teledyne adviser, sought to have ‘input’ into factory attack investigation

Oh, really? Zero surprises.....

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

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’

The gift that keeps on giving www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

RIP to Allan. If you know, you know, etc.....
Spent a LOT of time with this classic and many others of the Ahlbergs. Thanks to them.

Does anyone have access to this review of Josh Jewell's and Thomas Waller's books in @mmodernity.bsky.social ‬, which starts out with a belated account of our WReC book?

Maybe it will also take ten years before the journal mentions "Pentecostal Modernism," a supplement to WReC's?

More AI puffery on #r4today. The comparison with photography pales when we consider AI’s accelerated global pervasiveness, the scale of its energy consumption and its threat to multiple job roles. The ownership of the personal camera took years. AI is already everywhere. But otherwise, sure.

English Premiership football: pure, unbridled extractivism. Use the power of the hedge fund to pull out the best young player from a storied “big” club. Not even 20. To become “one of your options.” @afcajax.bsky.social The EPL is a vampiric enterprise that sucks the lifeblood of “smaller” leagues.

But the car won, just look at the amounts of them, piled up on the streets. Car love, resistance to bus travel and the deterioration of services in privatisation will take some time to correct. But more city kids are taking the bus. I think.

If so, that’s a shame. I keep thinking of all the money I spent on bus services as a kid, a teenager and young(er) adult. I’d have definitely went to, oh I dunno Aberfeldy or Stranraer if we’d have had free bus travel. Summer holidays would have been wild(er). /

My kids, who live in Glasgow and Edinburgh, use free public bus transport in Scotland all the time. In the city, between cities, all over the country. They love it. My (anecdotal) sense is that out there, beyond the cities, car culture retains a powerful grip and many kids do not use buses enough. /

Turns off the #r4today radio…from Sweet Caroline to spitfires and palaces and Royal assent. YAWN.

👇Continually surprised at the number of British people on this website and indeed in British politics who haven’t grasped this.

All famines are man-made, all famines are political. Historians of empire and humanitarianism have known this forever. Gaza is not starving, Gaza is being starved, by Israel, and this starvation is enabled by our government and by every other government that does not step in to force food and aid.

the depravity of it, the depravity.

Ah,”Sweet Caroline”, the sound of Summer Mordor…

Reform-led Durham county council scraps climate emergency declaration Durham is thought to be first UK local authority to rescind its statement, in a move condemned as a ‘very dark day’

Galling, all the way down. But surely this idiot politics can be squashed? It has huge holes all the way through it.

how many LLMs does/will it take to make an Adam Curtis documentary….?

Five minutes after another item, enthusiastically delivered on Today, on the development of an AI voice tool (“a sophisticated product”) able to mimic regional accents. Using a politician as an example. Easiest editing job Adam Curtis will ever have. If he ever gets another commission.

Breathless, giddy embrace of AI on #r4today is so dissonant with what I, my colleagues, my friends and my student kids are experiencing- a jobs crushing machine, an ethical nightmare, a creative and cognitive cheat code, compromising and twisting human learning- reading, writing, thinking.

Looking forward to Nick Robinson flat out asking if Farage et al are “militant far right” the next time he interviews one of them. The “militant lefty” query was pathetic - and revealing. #r4today

The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world | Moustafa Bayoumi The rules of the institutions that define our lives bend like reeds when it comes to Israel – so much that the whole global order is on the verge of collapse

This is a must read. The rules of the institutions that define our lives bend like reeds when it comes to Israel. So much that the whole global order is could be completely shattered producing a new age of even more brutal & unaccountable power. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Mark your age by the amount of times this billionaire’s view on UK economic policy has been promoted by either the Guardian or the BBC.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.

This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.

It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

The UK has seen 40 years of “investment” asset seizure and value extraction “for the market”. There’s shit in the rivers, dysfunctional transport networks and water infrastructure, brutal rent hikes. Unaffordability rules. But yeah, “the spending hungry left.” These people are court jesters…

What really gets me is the implication that Hibs or Hearts are “feeder” clubs, as if they are somehow “smaller” than Bournemouth or Brighton.

“Disruptor” is a a strange way to spell “extractor”. This, like it is at Rangers and Hibs is part of the imperial control of “smaller” leagues by an emergent class in football’s new world order, who will happily park players and assets at “satellite” clubs for the ultimate benefit of the mothership.

I'll take your iconic and I'll raise you a 'seminal'

COMMUNIST MAYOR!
COMMUNIST MAY OR
COMMUNISM ORMAY
COMMS UNISTA OR
COMMUNIST OR USA
MAYUSACOMMUNIST
COMMUNISM AY-O!
MAY OR MAY OR MAY

All of these kinds of posts should come with the parenthesis: (for at least the next five minutes)

Western leaders call for diplomacy, but they won’t stop this war – they refuse to even name its cause | Nesrine Malik The political centre sees the US and Israel’s war on Iran as a crisis to be managed, while the gap between their detached politics and bloody rhetoric widens, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik

“A political establishment of ostensibly liberal, reliable custodians of stability that has no moral compass, and no care for the norms it constantly claims to uphold.”
Brilliant from Nesrine Malik on the malign vacuum in “Western” politics.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...