Running Dog

I mean, there’s the long tail of the financial crisis plus states gearing up for climate-change migration & resource scarcity, and the reason it all looks so deranged is because almost nobody talks about it in those terms

Screenshot of an Express article; it says: Robert Jenrick lists 30 'activist judges' he vows to axe in war on UK's open border In a bold move, Robert Jenrick is set to unveil a controversial plan targeting what he calls 'activist' judges, at the Conservative Party conference.

I say this with the bluntness it requires: they will get people murdered if this continues. This is not just populism anymore either: it’s completely unhinged and a deliberate choice that does endanger lives. I am not saying this lightly at all.

Michael Heseltine shows the Tories' their moral duty to fight off Farage with a rallying roar in the Observer: "The rightwing equivalents to the fascists of the 1930s are back on the march." And later, "to describe [asylum seekers] as thieves or rapists ... encourages the worst sort of prejudice." He excoriates leaving the ECHR and abandoning climate change laws. But he's still a Tory, with "no faith" in Labour's ability to rebuild the economy.

Please, my Michael Heseltine, he is very politically homeless

Anyone (but them) can see the gaping vacancy in British politics where traditional conservatism used to be. That yawning space belongs to one-nationers - moderate, socially liberal, pro-business, pro-Europe, pro-competence, aiming at low taxes and a smaller state, but only where pragmatically possible. Where are they now? Outside active politics:

I mean aren’t the moderate one nation pro-business pro-competence tories supposed to be voting Labour now? Was that not the whole point of the exercise
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

At least “we need all ur books to train the superintelligence that will cure disease & scarcity” had a promise in it. “We need all ur likenesses, for giggles” is the kind of flex that makes clear the first promise wasn’t real

Enjoying the implosion of the Tories? That’s understandable – but completely wrong | Zoe Williams The world’s most successful democratic party is in a death spiral of its own making – leaving no moderate bulwark between the moderate and truly far right, writes Zoe Williams

Ok so all that stuff about how parties can only win from the centre was bullshit then? Like I think I agree, but it would be great to clarify that point
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Increasingly feels like the real “luxury belief” is that you can simply cut away the safety net and still expect society to function; but that keeps getting marketed as hard-nosed pragmatism by some really smart guys, so who knows what to believe really

“My government has a relentless focus on looking after British citizens. Unless you’re kidnapped at sea, in which case good fucking luck I guess LOL”

Also even if there is Top Secret material justifying a ban, it’s very difficult I think to argue that retired GPs and Quaker students holding up a cardboard sign are party to that information or responsible for it

Making bulky waste collections free could solve this problem overnight, but councils apparently prefer to spend their scarce resources unsuccessfully trying to find people to prosecute

A surprising amount of the time, Crazy Conspiracy Theory is really just an exclusive lobby hack longread with slightly different emphasis and a different tone of voice

Arguably the real dynamic is that elements of the right have hardened, embracing positions that would have been unacceptable a decade ago. By contrast, Labour's policies are clearly less radical, and less socialist, than those proposed by Jeremy Corbyn, eight or so years ago. (Corbyn's new venture is yet to demonstrate it's capable of naming itself.)

You might think commentators would be reflecting on their definitions of radical socialism now that mass deportations are on the menu and their preferred Sensible Moderate solution is eating shit both at the polls and in the governing department. But you would be wrong to think that

I listened to a popular rightwing podcast this week, where the opposition to ID cards came close to conspiracy theories: Starmer was lying; Tony Blair, or maybe his son Euan, was running the government; people would be tracked on the basis of their political opinions; and so on.

The thing is “Blair’s running the government” is just joining the dots from “Morgan McSweeney is running the government” and “McSweeney’s a huge Blair guy btw”, both of which you’ll hear on all the savvy mainstream politics podcasts. Is “Starmer’s lying” conspiracist now?
www.ft.com/content/c7e4...

Idk, it is quite notable how if you pretend to believe the UK state is engaged in secret communism, they give you a prominent job at the newspaper of record. Several such cases

Honestly surprised we’re not hearing a lot more from organised religion about the promise of machine gods reshaping human progress & the nature of consciousness
bsky.app/profile/dyst...

All this stuff bends towards ending online anonymity, when simply having platforms enforce their own community standards & applying social stigma to using the bad sites, would do the job quite well

Politicians & commentators deciding that the lesson of Biden-Harris was “delivery doesn’t matter - could even be bad actually” might have been a strategic error

I wouldn’t rest my argument on “look how accountable newspapers are”, right now, tbh

What bloc do you tactically vote for if you want higher taxes & spending, haven’t lost your mind over immigration, and strongly dislike war crimes? Is Labour part of that bloc, or

The current Labour leadership appears to believe its predecessors were correctly rejected by all right-thinking patriotic voters for anti-British leftwing extremism & bigotry. Like it’s not really a bloc-unity kind of vibe

The incredible thing about patriotism is that it’s optional. You can absolutely want to (and actively do the work to) improve your town or city, and have a functional economy that delivers equitable solutions for people, without having 1 single fucking opinion, positive or negative, about flags.

The lesson we should be taking from LLMs is the immense social value there is in having all kinds of material - all kinds of products of human intellectual labor - freely available online. They should be reminding us of the early utopian promise of the web.

What if we pivoted to having journalists who understand what words mean

Reform: send them all back
Greens: no
Labour: u r the same

successive chancellors have had, if anything, a morally stronger one for a measure putting money into the pockets of some of the people actually making £5 coffees and serving £20 pizzas. Arguably a lot of life's little treats were in reality possible only because of cheap labour, and if the net cost of paying livable wages is that people often earning not much more than minimum wage can't have so many nice things - well, maybe that's what redistribution looks like in an era where chancellors are fresh out of easier options.

The middle classes have to suffer so the poor can afford to live. Have I missed any segments of the economy? [checks Guardian columnist style guide] no, that’s it - hit the big “publish” button.

What a £5 coffee (or a £100 Pizza Express) tells us about a changing Britain | Gaby Hinsliff For many Gen Xers, it feels like we’re sliding back towards the land of our childhoods: where eating out was for special occasions, and Thermoses were king, says Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff

“You could even argue, as the economic gurus of what’s known as abundance theory do, that the really joyful luxury in life isn’t retail therapy but things such as affordable homes or cheap green energy” LOL
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Hard to see it any other light really, isn’t it

Sure, but I imagine they have to write something else in their funding proposals etc

I would personally like respected media outlets to talk more about what Multiverse *does do*, such as how it’s contrived to lose sixty million pounds on a business model of convincing smart kids to do tech apprenticeships
bmmagazine.co.uk/news/sales-r...

Once again, this is playground stuff, but specifically it’s the moment when a kid who’s getting bullied finds an opening to give a bit back, seconds before they learn the hard way about how power dynamics work in practice