Leonardo Carella

reverse heist movie where a single snake has to chase all the priests back into ireland

bsky.app/profile/leon...

The story that GB News has overtaken BBC and Sky in July 2025 is overblown. But it's true that the channel has captured a relatively large, loyal segment of a shrinking pool of viewers. This is, in my view, one of the worst developments for UK politics this decade. pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/b...

New paper out @wepsocial.bsky.social!

🥡 Key Take-Away: Opposition parties seek more conflict with the government when performing poorly in the polls – especially when falling below their previous election result.

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Does it? Seems to me that the EU behaved exactly like a mid-sized nation state, like Vietnam or Britain.

We did get universal USB-C tho.

The EU isn't falling apart, but it's drifting somewhat aimlessly. Not to the same extent, but also not entirely unlike other international organisations - WTO, arguably NATO - that the EU was meant to be qualitatively different from.

The UK was never in Schengen. The point of Schengen was no border checks.

You can look at it optimistically and say: "see? At least the EU is responsive. The public and member states wanted less integration and more fortress Europe, and that's what they're getting." It's a fair point, but then again what would a bunch of loosely aligned nation states do differently?

There are "temporary" border checks in 11 countries. home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/sch...

Legal frameworks on all the things that actually matter for the economy - services, tech, capital markets - are still largely fragmented, and there's been no meaningful action on integration since the banking union, still largely an incomplete project.

Today, the threat of Euroscepticism and formal disintegration in the EU is much lower than 10 years ago, and the EU enjoys much higher diffuse public support. But the bargains it made to put down one fire - on migration, on enforcement, on Schengen - may be extremely costly in the long run.

One by one, the EU is surrendering all the arguments for its continued existence. Economic leverage? Made a mockery by Trump's trade war. Free movement? Currently suspended in 11 countries. Normative power? We fund lagers in Libya. Single market? Effectively an illusion. Rule of law? See: Hungary.

Bluesky is clearly much better than other social media, but oh my god you guys should give it a rest with the 🤓books😍 aesthetics.

But the market isn't going to save your democracy, and maybe doesn't even want to. There's no impending economic calamity from tariffs or reduced immigration or capital flight that's going to bring the kleptocrats down. At least not in the short term - and democracy may not be around the long term.

For what it's worth, I think it's a disaster, and I'm not ready to go full commie yet. Even if the democratic capitalist narrative around the mutual relationship between rule of law and innovation was overly optimistic, it's a story that sustained some of the happiest, wealthiest societies on earth.

The Trump era has killed democratic capitalism as a political model. He upends trade rules every other week, and growth is still 3%; he bans vaccines, and big pharma just takes it; he undermines universities, law firms and the media, and they do deals with him; he attacks the Fed, and markets shrug.

been monitoring the hbo max situation; consistently hearing reports that big bird has a fully articulated cloaca that they never show on tv

Grate cheddar on paella simple as

As a proud Englishman and long-standing football fan, I am now very tempted to engage in some light anti-Spanish hate speech again.

(This is further evidence that it’s “it’s coming home” that’s jinxing it for England.)

Nobody has ever wanted anything to happen more than the Telegraph, GB News and their associated ethnonationalist influencer outriders want race riots to happen. Why do they hate this country so much?

Helsinki (pop 657,000) has not had a single traffic death during the last twelve months.

poliisi.fi/-/helsingin-...

Mass compensation of WASPI women is truly one of the least deserving causes for billions of public spending in the modern era.

This is classic grab bag stuff – 2019 manifesto+++.

Mass starvation stalks Gaza as deaths from hunger rise Aid agencies warned for months that Israel’s harsh limits on food aid would bring acute malnutrition and widespread suffering to Gaza’s 2.1 million people.

Israel is intentionally starving Gaza’s children. It’s a war crime and a crime against humanity, for which there is no reasonable denial or justification. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

Less than three years apart...

I really want to believe otherwise, but I’m afraid the Epstein files “story” is just another instalment in Trump’s opponents long-running fantasy of deliverance - “this one thing will break the Trump fever, that’s it this time”. We need to move away from this “one quick trick to fix Trump” mindset.

We are so close to the Tory party accusing the Bayeux Tapestry of glorifying small boats crossing the Channel.

The Conservatives’ positioning on Supplementary Vote - a system that is massively to their advantage in the current party system - is a great test of whether electoral system preferences derive from parties’ power-maximising considerations (a test that, I’m pretty sure, they will not pass).

This is also instructive for a sense of what would happen if the EU ever gets serious about Orbán.