Robert Chapman

Of course, thank you

I realise this is Portland Maine but across the Isle of Portland UK there has been a Keep Portland Weird campaign going back decades.

Labour is trying to prove mental health is over-diagnosed so it can cut DWP benefits further Wes Streeting's new review into mental health and neurodivergency will be vice chaired by “the most hated doctor in Britain”, Simon Wessely

Labour is trying to prove mental health is over-diagnosed so it can cut DWP benefits further www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/...

Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness— for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps-they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of-and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.

James Baldwin to Angela Davis in 1970, discussing white Americans:

Feeling with theory / Neuroqueer music events David Shannon and I are organising two events in Sheffield, both called Feeling with Theory: Exploring the Meaning of Music around Neuroqueer identities. More info on the respective links below, bu…

Take a look at these events in Sheffield next month co-organsied by a friend.
thisdamnpassivesoul.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/f...

Experiences of transphobia over the past year have made me sometimes regret coming out as nonbinary for the first time. I've long received hatemail and death threats for being a public-ish trans person, but that wasn't so bad and it never made me regret being out. Things are getting so much worse.

ICE is now targeting Black and Latino children in Chicago, arresting and zip-tying them. Their goal is simply to terrorize these kids and families of color with no regard for legality, let alone basic humanity. It's Nazi-level shit. ICE must be abolished.

The thing to know about Trump's autism and paracetamol claims is that the cruelty is the point. They want women in pain and disabled people stigmatised. And they enjoy showing they can lie outrageously without accountability. I worry that debating the science is to play their game, by their rules.

Sperm racing is all the rage among the tech bros. Why am I not surprised? | Arwa Mahdawi It started as a gag, but Eric Zhu’s sperm races are doing good work in putting male fertility under the microscope – literally, writes Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi

"Sperm racing isn’t just about racing sperm. It’s about turning health into a competition. It’s about making male fertility something people actually want to talk about, track and improve"
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

On the relationship between trans politics and disability In the aftermath of the decision in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers  USCK 16, many disabled people sought to give practical

On the relationship between trans politics and disability

D.K. Renton

criticallegalthinking.com/2025/07/16/o...

How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

Bertrand Russell once received letters from Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, inviting him to a debate. Russell not only declined but replied quite generally that “nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.” @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social

Wild that a few years ago loads of liberal and conservative op-eds and books blamed "post-truth" on left-leaning 1970s french intellectuals. Meanwhile, on Truth Social, you do not need evidence to give medical advice: you just post your truth and then other people "ReTruth" it if they agree.

Someone I admired hugely. Read her autobiography if you haven't.

"If you want to see if a man or woman has fascist potentialities, give him a flag. If he starts waving it, worshiping it, making a fetish of it, he's good fascist timber." - undercover journalist Avedis Derounian, reporting on an America First meeting in 1941.

What Is Political Violence? - Boston Review Pundits and politicians conceal the truth: it’s all around us, perpetrated by our political system itself.

If you want to oppose “political violence,” then demand the abolition of ICE, the end of an ongoing genocide, and insist Congress stop killing people by forcing for-profit healthcare exclusion on us. If you’re not doing that, spare me the sanctimonious speeches.
www.bostonreview.net/articles/wha...

lithub.com/inside-the-p...

You can read an excerpt from Slavery and Capitalism on @literaryhub.bsky.social .

Trump officials reportedly set to tie Tylenol to autism risk Washington Post says announcement imminent despite guidelines showing drug – known as paracetamol elsewhere - is safe for pregnant women to take

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

Great thank you!

Will take a look - thanks!

Thank you!

What are some movies or series from the past few decades that explore themes of health or fitness in relation to fascistic tenandancies?

The RITAs Awards #RITASawards The full list of The RITAs Awards for Excellence in Awfulness 2025! Patronising Interventions Award sponsored by having a cup of tea in a warm bath CIC (we’re Disability Confident™): The Decider li…

Our full list of dishonours….

recoveryinthebin.org/2025/09/19/t...

I'd rather not have to chose, but if I have to, I'd follow Sultana. She has both steadfast politics and the necessary energy and drive. Corbyn has too much baggage and the independent MPs have no ideological coherence as a group and thus were never going to form a good basis for a party.

I think the kind of fascism we are seeing now is distinctive partly as it is mediated by capitalist realism. Even fascism's proponents can't see beyond the horizon of capitalism as the only possibility; so the fascism of today works within that despite being a reaction to ongoing capitalist crises.

Horkheimer once described "bourgeois class solidarity" as "the outrage that even rich people are no longer safe". I think this gets to the heart of something relatively powerful and widespread but underrecognised.

He condemned the criminality, not the politics - only the means, not the ends

MP Danny Kruger says Tory party ‘is over’ as he defects to Reform East Wiltshire MP says he hopes others follow his path and accuses former party of clinging to ‘defunct institutions’

While he's in the news for defecting to a far right party, note that this is the hard right nationalist mp who works closely and co-authors with leading British critical psychiatrists and ptmf authors on mental health politics.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Workhouses in England and Wales linked to transatlantic slave trade, study suggests Report highlights how British workhouses were funded and supported by those who profited from slave economy

"The new study challenges the argument that the experiences of some of the White British people in workhouses could be compared with what enslaved people endured."
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Deluze, in 1976: "All our petty fears will be organized in concert, all our petty anxieties will be harnessed to make micro fascists of us; we will be called upon to stifle...every suspicious face, every dissonant voice, in our streets, in our neighbourhoods, in our local theatres."

I have been a parent for a few weeks now. I like it a lot. But most of my conversations are now just me saying things like "yes its hard being alive, isnt it. Especially when you are awake" to a tiny crying blob.