is it Giro Day?

"What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? . We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called the economy but the fact that we are all, and have always been, projects of mutual creation." . - David Graeber

One of David Graeber's most interesting pieces was from 2013 called - 'A practical utopians guide to the coming collapse.'

Here is an extract.

Unusual - and beautiful - view from above of Abbey Brook from Back Tor.
Photo from @Robble_do on X

Walking up, the twists and turns come as surprises as @mostlyrambling.bsky.social says. And fewer steep drop🤢 vistas on narrow paths.
I can't think of a clough I'd rather walk down than up.
What do you think?

The landscape seems unpredictably folded together. Always a surprise around the corner!

The path down Abbey Brook #PeakDistrict

Mine too. It's where I try to overcome my fear of heights/steep drops - any fear is offset by the beauty and wonder of Abbey Brook

View across moorland in the foreground to a ridge of connected hills. Beyond that is another large hill with a rocky summit and behind that across the horizon stretches an escarpment with outcrops of rock. Blue sky and light cloud above.

A photo you took that brings you inner peace.

#PeakDistrict

Need the BBC's passive voice on this:

A bullet has entered the neck of Charlie Kirk.

Next up: ban people on Universal Credit from buying gold ingots, yachts, bucketfuls of emeralds etc by issuing UC vouchers.
What they do to people seeking asylum today comes to the rest of us in time

This made my day today.

Police pulled over a dalek outside DSEI, London's arms fair, scanned the QR code on its lanyard and were taken to my fake Royal Navy recruitment website - royalnavy.org.uk

52 years after #Chile coup.
This year's theme is the fight for Truth, Justice and Memory, a demand by the Chilean people for the heinous crimes committed following the coup in 1973 and during the 2019 social unrest.
✊Join us Sat 13th Sept 1pm @ Nursery Street Pocket Park Sheffield

And a glorious journey home through #Winnarts #Pass in the evening sun. #PeakDistrict #Castleton

Colour image of Ashopton Viaduct on the Snake Pass crossing Ladybower Reservoir on the edge of Sheffield taken in August 2025. The viaduct is named after the drowned village of Ashopton which stood near the site of the bridge. The picture was taken from Bamford edge and shows the currently low level of water in the reservoir run by Severn Trent serving Nottingham, Derby and Leicester Camera : Fujifilm X-T5 Lens : 75mm f1.8 Samyang Aperture/speed/ISO : f3.5 1/1300s ISO125 Simulation : Classic Chrome

View from Bamford Edge to Ashopton Viaduct on the Snake Pass crossing Ladybower Reservoir on the edge of Sheffield, August 2025 #fujifilm #photography #landscape #peakdistrict

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower"

Elias Rodriguez

You can also add money to his commissary doc.dc.gov/service/auto...

The Israel Embassy Shooter Manifesto 900-word document cites Gaza as motive

If you haven't read his manifesto, you should www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-israel...

You were a delight to hear too Samantha. Long live your hands

Today! (And afterwards on BBC Sounds). I had the best time talking to the very erudite & joy-giving @michaelrosenyes.bsky.social.

At that point whichever decision you make it's a good one

"The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state." — Dan Froomkin @froomkin.bsky.social

presswatchers.org/2025/08/we-h...

Von Sudenfeld : RHINOHEAD (Si Begg Psycho Dancehall Remix 2007) For your listening pleasure... The remixes Domino didn't want to release of this wonderful project by Mouse On Mars and Mark E Smith. Recorded in 2007.

Stunning from #VonSudenfed
soundcloud.com/sibegg/von-s...

and what's the great soundtrack?

Someone tell me, what is the point of being a Labour MP?

What is it for?

He called for us to abandon the Refugee Convention too.

Why not?

The post-war period & the laws we put in place to prevent it ever happening again are over, my friends.

We're onto a new pre-war period right now. And our only choice is whether we, or the powerful, burn.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperia...

Annoying ICE is my new favorite morning commute activity ✊

Disability rights activists in Hillsborough #Sheffield are running free training sessions for anyone who wants to become a Personal Independence Payment advocate.

Support and mutual aid in the face of state cruelty.
Info/sign-up🔽
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

#PIP #DisabilityRights

Once again, the party's supporters react to these demonstrations by chanting "Four more years, four more years," which by now can no longer be described as simply ghoulish. There is instead a kind of mechanical fear laced in it, a sense among these people, as there has been a sense among all people at all times on whom the judgment of future historians has started to dawn, that they have stepped too far into complicity with something evil. Look up photographs of what we now consider this country's—any country's— most morally diseased moments. The dogs being let loose on men and women asking for basic dignity, the marching of undesirables through the streets, the wrath, the bloodlust. Ignore, for a moment, the people engaged most directly in the violence. Look instead at the faces of those who watch from the sidelines. Often, what you'll find is not an expression of proud support or the shock and horror all these people will claim to have felt much later, after the verdict is in. Rather, you'll see a childish little smirk. It's the smirk of someone who has come to realize the ugliness of the enterprise they have passively aligned with but cannot muster the courage to abandon now. The soul, what's left of it, buckles under the weight of contradiction, and all one can do is hide behind that pained little smirk, the half-stance of the spineless, the chanting, with not quite enough conviction, of four more years, four more years, as the bodies pile up outside one's door. It's difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be. From this outcome, everything is reverse-engineered. Being seen as someone who believes in justice-not the messy, fraught work of achieving it—is the starting point of any conversation on justice. Saying the right slogans supersedes whatever it is those slogans are …

Beyond the stream of distractions, there is a much more existential vulnerability. Whatever derangement currently occupies conservative American politics is, at least, something of very real consequence: the minority groups they want to legislate out of every facet of society, the books they want to ban, the mechanisms of democracy they want to subvert—none of it is hypothetical. But if inoffensive centrism is seen to be concerned with these things only in as far as it reflects on the centrist's self-image, if the Hillary Clintons of the world can muster great outrage at the fortunes of the Barbie movie at the Oscars but nothing at population-wide military murder sprees, then every Republican will always be able to say, truthfully: At least there's no contradiction between what I am, what I claim concerns me, and what I plan to do. This is the crux of it, the unavoidable reckoning. Every morning countless well-paid, well-educated foot soldiers in the employ of the Democratic Party wake up and decide on the day's talking points. Every morning a small army of spokespeople step to the lecterns and deliver statements about how much the president cares for innocent lives, or the immense effort the United States makes to minimize unnecessary suffering, or whatever it is that needs to be said that day so as to launder the evil done between the last press conference and this one. A growing number of people ask a different question; the world asks a different question. The world, full of people who factor not one iota in the calculus of those morning meetings, looks upon this and asks, simply: Beyond self-interest, what do you believe in? And every morning the answer, dressed up in anesthetic euphemism and dependent on our collective capacity for resignation to the lesser of two evils, is: Nothing.

It's a kind of thinking predicated on the implicit belief that, for certain people, the only choice is between negations of varying severity. The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity on our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you. While any liberal politician who succumbs to the lure of this framing may benefit in the short term, there is an inevitable and deeply unpleasant terminus waiting. Eventually, the calculus becomes, on pragmatic terms, clear. How much worse can some hypothetical oppression be compared to the current, very real one, which has the additional indignity of being propped up politically and financially by the same Free World whose leaders simultaneously give impassioned speeches about their support for democracy? If both outcomes entail injury, why should anyone opt for the one that adds insult too?

For some, even a hint of self-interest already produces these kinds of results— consider the gaggle of world-famous sports stars who've happily sided with murderous regimes such as that of Saudi Arabia, helping whitewash the government's image in exchange for not much more than money. For others, the bar is much, much higher. But the moral prohibition on siding with any administration that endorses genocide will force a different flavor of the exact same logic that centrist liberalism has depended on for so long: hold your nose and align with the least worst thing. Only the least worst thing will no longer be the mild, ethics-agnostic emptiness of modern Western liberalism, nor will it be the multitude of barbaric authoritarians and their secret prisons. It will be communal solidarity, or else nothing, a walking away from all of this. Countless otherwise pragmatic people who would in any other circumstance choose liberalism by default will instead decide none of this is worth the damage to one's soul. They will instead support no one, vote for no one, wash their hands of any ordering of the world that results in choices no better than this. And the obvious _centrist refrain—But do you want the deranged right wing to win?—should, after even a moment of self-reflection, yield to a far more important question: How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.

An excerpt from Omar El Akkad on the grotesque ideological poverty of contemporary liberalism:

On this, the anniversary week of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, you'd be hard pushed from the aerial footage to tell the difference between there and current day Gaza.

Fascists kill genocide witness
#AnasAlSharif #StopGenocide #FreePalestine