Re-elect Sister Smudge for Secretary-Treasurer

This is the paranoia and insecurity that lies behind the whole dictionary of female cheating from chaucer's cuckold to twitter's cuck

Ian, they are the same word

Every good US prestige drama has incredibly funny bits, really

Pine Barrens is still one of the funniest episodes of television I've ever watched

Much like with neoliberalism, where Dunt was going "ah this is a meaningless pejorative term" until it came time to do numbers on the podcast, where strangely enough it did seem to mean something, if a politically contested something, after all

This feels like one of those things where Dunt's "The Left Is Silent" means "I do not actually pay attention to, or have any connections to, anyone even vaguely on the left"

(one of the confounding factors is strong regionally concentrated identities, which is pretty obvious if you think about the UK political system for one second)

I don't want to keep harping on about it, but Duverger is quite clear that his stated law about FPTP is a tendency that can be confounded, and importantly for our current context it can also hasten the demise of a party much faster than it otherwise would.

I would say that one thing that will be pretty difficult to untangle but seems important is the feedback loop between "legacy" media and social media that developed at the same time. A lot of the way "woke" gets reported on seems to have historical parallels, even if social media adds a new dynamic.

"grokkus babeuf" made me cringe so thoroughly that I think an organ imploded, then a second when I learned it is actually just grok

I think this is true, but also that a lot of the impact of all of these is much later that we presume

That is in itself a big if, there's a big gap between even the most mature Disney animated films and Pterry, and I suspect even a "success" would have been a cult film that was a relative flop at the box office, but still

The Mouse having its grasp on Discworld probably wouldn't have been great in the long run but if the proposed animated version of Mort was even half as good and stylish as the concept art it would have been a treasure.

very much a "well, yeah, but what are our options?" situation I think

also, iirc, a lot cheaper to stick a little sharp metal bit on a stick than a full forged sword, and an easier weapon to train yer hastily called-up foot soldiers; I think part of the argument is also how heavily militarised Rome was?

got to make the starving paupers work for their ration, something which absolutely does not consume scarce calories in and of itself, to ensure they don't enter a more eligible class

Also a wee bit of "we tried some things, but were looked at Very Sternly for not applying the good honest principles of political economy"

The law seems to be ill prepared to deal with people who in obvious bad faith put their keys up in court and say "oh well of course I would treat everyone the same with great professionalism and respect, this is just about my private views" then go straight back to public-trolling-as-activism

More than anything else this does tend to suggest the difference between a reviled conspiratorial crank and a respected heterodox thinker is a lot closer to "am I in the right group chats" than any other meaningful measure

Open Letter Relating to the UK Video Games Council - full version on our website https://www.gameworkers.co.uk/open-letter-regarding-the-uk-video-games-council/

We are incredibly disappointed by the Labour government's decision to seek advice from such a narrow segment of our industry. You can find our open letter here: www.gameworkers.co.uk/open-letter-...

But you might as well try and part the sea with a toothpick.

I suspect Discourse stuff looms large on this because Democratic strategists and Dem-leaning commentators are Very Online, and because lowest common denominator type news stories on this thing are very easy to write about (got three posts? that's a trend, baby!)

And at the sharp end as Bouie notes here, "activists" seems to mean "anyone online I find annoying"

Democratic strategists seem to expect a level of democratic centralism from activists that is a) functionally impossible to achieve for any mass party in a nominally liberal society, let alone a US one b) quite tepid-to-openly hostile about the "debate" part of that process

Sexual violence has been both endemic and normalised within many British police forces — and sexual violence against girls from working class backgrounds has long been ignored by the wider British state. Sometimes the obvious answer is, in fact, the correct answer. Nobody cared about these girls.

This abuse happened between the mid 1990s and early 2000s. In 1997 the South Yorkshire police had a case thrown out of court, after it transpired that they had made the Black male suspect stand in an identity parade alongside *eight white men in blackface*.

Five survivors of Rotherham grooming gangs say they were also raped by police officers Three former South Yorkshire police officers arrested in investigation into claims by the women, as young as 12 at the time

God, the number of people who were willing to believe that the South Yorkshire police were too woke to prosecute sexual abuse cases, when in fact the police force was itself an instrument of patriarchal sexual violence. It’s like a case study in the worst excesses of the British press.

It's all fun and games with vague invocations of 'the working class' to justify racist sh*t and then a black working class hero gets brutalised for engaging in anti-imperialist solidarity and it's *crickets*

This chart shows different indicators of hardship for people receiving health-related Universal Credit, compared to people receiving non-health-related Universal Credit, compared to all working-age people. Indicators include, for each of those groups: % of working-age adults who are in a household that had to use a food bank in the last 12 months; % who could not afford to keep their house warm; % experiencing material deprivation; % in a food insecure household; % in a household with 'very low food security'; and % who could not afford to keep up to date with bills. Overall the chart shows these hardship indicators to be very high for people receiving non-health-related Universal Credit, but even higher still for people receiving health-related Universal Credit. Both groups show much higher levels of hardship than found for all working-age adults in the population.

People currently receiving UC’s health element experience disproportionate and unacceptably high levels of hardship. Cutting it will just make disabled people poorer and make it harder for people trying to recover from ill health or move towards work. 2/5

"stop the boats" hysteria has not dissipated, though, and our political and media class have absolutely leaned into validating it.

RNLI donations increase after migrant rescue criticism The lifeboat charity says it has been

It was genuinely bizarre watching some people become radicalised against a lifeboat charity in real time on Facebook from 2021 onwards. Thankfully not everyone felt that way:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-poli...