John Lydon

kind of amazing that everything trump does can be understood through the lens of narcissism and it's related needs (e.g., self aggrandizement, revenge, domination, grievance validation). i don't think any character has been so one-dimensional, not even wile e coyote or scrooge mcduck

this is what they said it would be like under socialism

I’m half a century old and I’ve been told by The Great And The Good for all of that time that Iran represents an imminent threat to my life.

It’s been 50 years guys, and I’m still not seeing any imminent threat to my existence from Iran.

New study of media collision reporting from @patrickrerat.bsky.social

"Cyclists are placed at the center of the narrative, while motorists are either omitted or reduced to their vehicles... Making these biases visible is essential for challenging motonormativity"

findingspress.org/article/1575...

But if working people didn't have to give a big chunk of their money to banking, insurance, car and oil businesses just to be able to exist in society, what then? It's like you want to make Global Capital sad, Tom

And they still struggle to see how Gorton & Denton went against them.

Obscene.

Remember when parties who lost elections used to be like "This is a strong message from the electorate and we will listen and learn and change" rather than "Fuck everyone who didn't vote for us, you're all extremists trying to destroy Britain"

Labour and the Greens between them got more than twice as many votes as Reform, though. No amount of switching between Labour and the Greens would have allowed Reform to win.

Good analysis by Ben, my only addition is that I think psychologically Labour cannot accept that their median voter is closer to Hannah Spencer: still young, well off but still renting, female, and socially liberal than it is their desired median voter: Lee Anderson, and that is because of misogyny.

I'm already sick of "It's all a distraction from Epstein" replies. This regime is killing innocent people because our leaders are all power-hungry tyrants and war profiteers. When you say it's "just a distraction" you minimize the gravity of what's happening and the lives lost.

And when you go into your Spar, your One Stop, your Co-op, that's what blares at you.

Text explaining how there isn’t a war on cars, with all the benefits of reallocating street space to move a lot more people with a lot less space and other consequences, including life and death, pollution/emissions, public and personal costs, etc. Providing more choices works better for everyone, including drivers. And more transportation choices support the economic competitiveness of cities, as smart cities know.

I’m not a fan of politicians trying to make people angry for votes by claiming there actually IS a “war on cars” (there isn’t — if anything there’s been a war on every OTHER way of getting around since the 1960s).

A politician just made the claim on LinkedIn. Here’s the reply I posted. #UrbanTruth

Social media created this nonsense idea that not exposing yourself to hatred is isolationist. Choosing to not spend your free time with bigots isn’t living in a bubble. I don’t need to know what’s going on at X. I won’t be smarter or more knowledgeable or empathic by being there. Neither will you.

Flawed economic models mean climate crisis could crash global economy, experts warn States and financial bodies using modelling that ignores shocks from extreme weather and climate tipping points

“Flawed economic models mean the accelerating impact of the climate crisis could lead to a global financial crash, experts warn.”

“Recovery would be far harder than after the 2008 financial crash, they said, as ‘we can’t bail out the Earth like we did the banks’.”

#ClimateCrisis #UrbanTruth

It's really not that surprising. The data exists. I'm just hoping to see my residential street go down to 40km/h.

Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death The capital city is Finnish’ed with car-related fatalities.

“Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year…Citing data that shows the risk of pedestrian fatality is cut in half by reducing a car’s speed from 40 to 30km/hr, city officials imposed the lower limit in most of Helsinki’s residential areas and city center in 2021.”

Downtown highways are a quintessentially North American scar. Their negative economic impact is enormous, and the sooner we get rid of them, the better off we’ll be.

The idea of bombing children as a form of “self-defense” is nonsensical and grotesque, but nonetheless it’s the argument the U.S. and Israel have been relying on for years and years. It shouldn’t be hard to take a stance against slaughtering children

As ever, I don't imagine myself representative of anyone but me. But if I'd had a vote in Gorton I'd have agonised, then done whatever felt most likely to stop Goodwin. After Starmer and Mahmoud's responses I now feel quite motivated to vote *against* Labour?

Andrea Egan, the general secretary of the trade union Unison, said: "The Greens won for a simple reason: many traditional Labour supporters, in Manchester and across the country, want to see progressive values robustly defended against the far-right, not gleefully abandoned.

From The Guardian:

New meta-analysis of 26 published studies concludes that AVs will lead people to use cars a lot more — which would thicken congestion and worsen pollution (even if AVs are electric).

"AV deployment is anticipated to lead to an overall increase in Vehicle Miles Traveled."

doi.org/10.1016/j.tb...

Cover of The Lancet:

@thelancet.com
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

What we have seen in Gorton and Denton is what we saw in Caerphilly in October.

A lot of people really don’t want the hateful politics of Reform and will work hard and smart to try and keep them out.

Labour must now listen to this and stop the grim attempts to mimic Farage.

What strikes me about that result is just how far ahead the Greens were compared to Reform. Again an anti-Reform coalition manifests and it's not actually close

We shouldn’t have to vote tactically. We shouldn’t have to painstakingly analyse small sample polls with huge error margins to figure out how to stop our least preferred candidate winning. We shouldn’t have to be bombarded with conflicting party propaganda about who is in front really. It’s madness.

Not even close, after all that.

Let's hope it turns out to be a big mistake for them to have stood a high-profile candidate who fell on his arse. With any luck that'll cast a long shadow.

Guest list for last night's BBC Question Time.

One thing you might hope would happen after the Gorton and Denton result is that the Green Party are invited onto the BBC's current affairs programmes as frequently as Reform UK are.

#GortonAndDenton

Today's by-election is another illustration of the problems with FPTP.

The result may tell us less about what voters want to happen than whether they can game the system effectively to stop a result most *don't* want.

The electoral system should not be an obstacle that voters have to work around.