These are the legitimate concerns that we should be hearing about in our media.
These are the legitimate concerns that we should be hearing about in our media.
A lot of energy has been expended recently (and not so recently) to dehumanise refugees, so nobody will be upset about the dead children. They’re only children, they’re not dogs or donkeys or anything. If they were we’d be prompted to empathise.
Okay, but we’re about 10 years beyond our government, regardless of party, pretending that they actually care about the consequences of their refugee policy in terms of human lives lost or saved, they only care about the impact of their policy in terms of news headlines.
Yes, but you have to walk The Washington Post slowly back from the fascism or you’ll spook it.
If that is true then the US should offer to take them.
The size of payment and desire is redundant if there’s no other country for you to go to.
Okay, where are they supposed to go once you’ve paid them to leave? Is the US going to offer them citizenship?
Does she even live in the UK? Half these right wing rabble rousers seem to be emigrants these days.
They know what works. Same way food brands know snacks high in fat, sugar and salt will sell well.
Fundamentally anyone who can’t even spell the name of the governing party correctly doesn’t have much business butting in on UK politics.
Why is Labour still on X-Twitter when its owner is pushing out xenophobic rabble-rousing lies like this?
![Elon Musk @elonmusk 9:09 AM BST Aug 31, 2025 The Labor Party goal is destruction of democracy by importing voters and bribing them with benefits paid for by British citizens [Quote tweet] Basil the Great @Basil_TGMD How Labour plan to win the next election In the Scottish and Welsh devolved assembly elections the voting age is 16 The Labour Government changed the voting rules in UK wide elections to match this In the Scottish and Welsh devolved assembly elections foreigners can vote The Labour Government will soon change the voting rules for UK wide elections to match this This is why they're bringing in so many migrants. They will say you need to vote for us or another party will get in who will likely deport you 9:01 AM Aug 31, 2025 377.2K Views](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2kf2qj56o2vq7jfaq4x4ogp6/bafkreibevrfbnto7mxu3fppl473ueh7pyghcro543boa446zfgjquc55ku@jpeg "Click to view full size")
I assume they’re gazing lovingly at the USA and thinking the government could employ them all to round up immigrants and put them in camps.
You should write a post about how impossible it was to find a local child to mow your lawn because none of them knew what a choke was and they all refused to be paid with a cheque signed with a fountain pen… and something about using a slide rule. Would do numbers.
BRING BACK GOING TO THE TIP!!!
It was the petrol posh people used in their fancy autocars with seatbelts.
Handle operated car windows and flip out indicators. Spokey-dokeys.
8. 2-stroke lawn mowers. 9. Leaded petrol. 10. Pebble Dash. 11. Slide rules. 12. Fountain Pens. 13. Fire Engines with bells. 14. Sewing machines. 15. Newspaper rounds.
I think it needs to be weirder. 1. PROPER Bin men. 2. smoking in pubs. 3. pub carpets. 4. pickled Eggs. 5. White Dog poo 6. British Leyland. 7. Scrumping.
We get our milk delivered along with the rest of our groceries. Does that count?
Link to post. bsky.app/profile/davi...
This is what they mean of course.
I have no intention of reading that article so I’m just going to assume the one man the goat respects is Batgoat.
Cost = value seems like a very bad way to look at defence spending to me.
I also don’t understand who she is trying to rage bait with this stuff. Normal people go to supermarkets. Just seems like the right being completely mental as usual.
I’m assuming Ms Phillips hasn’t been in a supermarket for a very long time, or even your average greasy spoon cafe. She lives an entirely gated upper middle class life.
Is a new right wing insanity emerging?
Genuinely kept thinking the same thing on our holiday. The government should just bring in road pricing. Will generate income and can blame all those foreign lorries.
Apparently we have a shortage of authors and camera operators in whatever alternate reality the government operates in.
Looking at the government’s shortage occupation list and think I’m going insane. www.gov.uk/government/p...
The whole thing is myth making, based on middle class and antiquated assumptions about what the problems are and what the solutions are.
It’s the great unspoken success of the UK that kids with a migrant background outperform native-born kids at school, despite a widespread perception that somehow they are a problem for schools
A myth of reverse discrimination is created to explain away differential performance, in order to avoid interrogating cultural issues within the working class.
Articles like the original Telegraph one being commented on are part of the problem: bsky.app/profile/davi...
It’s there to create division and promote racism by invoking racial grievance among the majority ethnic group. In part because it also invoke the other, “the non-white”, without having to mention them.
This is a very good point.
There’s a lot of learned helplessness involved and combined with grievance stoked by the right for political leverage.
One of the problems with our media/political/civil service leadership being so heavily dominated by the privately and selectively educated is few of them actually went to school with the “white working class” so don’t really understand the attitudes involved.
Politics is paused for summer recess. It’s really the media climate creating this permissive environment. Social media is clearly not helping. We’ve known misinformation on Facebook and Twitter has been a major problem at least since Covid. Regulators really need to step in.
Basically I don’t know if immigration really *is* the thing everyone is talking about in angry, frustrated terms, or if that’s just how it appears to me, or appears to those setting the news agenda, or how they want it to appear. It’s not what we talk about while watching our kid’s play football.
I’m just constantly struck by the constant disconnect between the main narrative (presented here) of national and widespread discontent about immigration, vs the reality of the protests small, generally met by larger counter protests. Likewise the narrative of Reform’s dominance vs the reality.
The third possibility is that neither is true and it’s simply that our media is committed to a Reform government for personal tax, ideological or the simple love of drama reasons.
Question: Is it the Bluesky echo chamber that makes it appear as if our media is committed to a racist, radical right Reform government? Or is it the boiled frog echo chamber of Twitter that has convinced our media that’s what everyone else wants?
Integration is bad. We don’t want the refugees learning about our history and culture.
Reminder that small boat migration is c.5% of all UK immigration. And asylum-seeking generally is far lower per head of UK population than most other west European countries e.g. 🇩🇪 🇫🇷 🇮🇹 🇪🇸 🇧🇪 🇳🇱 🇦🇹 🇮🇪. Yes even Ireland takes way more. Yet none have the same sense of crisis and moral panic as the UK.
I like how Big Tech’s Big Idea is always just saying “how about you do all the work?”
It all went downhill after the radio newsreaders stopped wearing dinner jackets.
As every gambler knows: the only way to beat the odds is to keep doubling down.
To be clear: I’m sure it is Trump, I just think it’s funny they released such a terrible photo.
I like how the response to rumours that Trump is dead was to release a photo that doesn’t really look like Trump and say “see, Trump is alive.”
The only sensible response to this is for the government to go even harder on their anti-immigration strategy to win back those Reform voters.
The banality of evil.
At least they now have a hobby, one that gets them out the house and socialising, I’m sure it’s an improvement on whatever came before.
You’d expect to see some sort of change of direction sometime this autumn though, at least to indicate an intention of trying to sort itself out - some major personnel changes at least, even if it doesn’t extend as far as any sort of vision or big policy ideas.
I keep having to remind myself that we’re barely 20% of the way through the current parliament. Still possible that the government gets its act together and all the doom and gloom of the first year will end up looking ridiculous after the next election. Possible, but not necessarily likely.
Ben Obese-Jecty is the only Conservative MP and frankly one of the vanishingly small number of MPs, full stop, to react to this stuff in a normal way.
If nothing else: if it is a huge success the story of how they managed to pass that particular camel through that particular needle will be super interesting.
Hold the phone. You haven’t actually leveraged your house to place a massive bet on the Harry Potter series being a flop have you? Only I think that probably is taking it too far. Otherwise I assume a “huh, well I guess I was wrong.” would probably be sufficient.
Underground server farms will be the longbarrows of the future.
Thoroughly disgusted that this campaign to put up meaningless flags everywhere and has not put forth a single demand for a straw bear, garland king, jack of the green or Berryman. They’re just not serious people.
Indeed.
Guy probably has a book called The Bible TBH.
Tom Clancy’s The Bible.
What the fuck did I just read?
Ah what's wrong little buddy? Why the dirty delete? Big clever dark money think tank boy like you can almost certainly defend the position you came to based on ✨vibes✨ against a bunch of people who have actually read a book one time.
If the sandwich thrower was a conservative he’d be hailed as a resistance hero and have his own TV show by now.
I suspect Jenna failed to notice the sarcasm.
In the sense that very few records will survive for future historians to plunder because it’ll all be lost when the servers get turned off?
Unfortunate is a weird choice of word here.
“Legitimate concerns” latest.
Umm...wow. "HOPE not hate can reveal that Lee Twamley, photographed at the front of Britain First’s “March for Remigration” in Manchester this month, has served prison time for trying to smuggle Vietnamese migrants into the UK." hopenothate.org.uk/2025/08/19/e...
US military doctrine says it’s okay to bomb the families of US military personnel living on US military bases because they count as legitimate military targets…
The problem with modern life is we spent 60-70 years building various checks and balances designed to stop stupid people from hurting other people or themselves, but then decided to spend the last 10-20 trying to dismantle them because folks with money decided they interfere with ‘innovation’.
A big sign that says “A robust social safety net.
He’s got it on his CV now, so what else does he need to do?
The money people would rather have the fascism than the taxation, so the rest of us get to choose from various flavours of fascism.
WTF?!
Worth pointing out again that the “concerned citizens worried about sexual predators in our communities” really should be focussing on conservatives, not asylum seekers.
Cameras don’t talk to you. I don’t think it’s more than that. And the end of the day LLMs reliably beat the Turing test - which highlights the flaws of that particular assessment, but it is the main difference that explains most of this nonsense.
Remember people: the way to beat Farage is to never criticise, only agree with him.
[rings bell] We got another one!
No it can't suffer, you shitwits. Stop anthropomorphising a probability engine. There is some truly fucking dreadful coverage of AI, and the idiot Guardian is one of the worst offenders.
I generally feel uneasy about documentaries as a format, ironic given my most significant work is in documentary, but I feel most uneasy about true crime documentaries. Documentary requires a sensitivity to its inherently manipulative nature and true crime often fails at this task.
You can’t really go wrong with “I’ll know it when I see it.” When it comes to genre. You’ll get academic attempts to write taxonomies of individual genres, but they’ll always fall apart at the edges because authors can’t help mashing up genres tropes.
Guys, you’re allowed to say it’s rubbish and that her other stuff is much better.
It’s a bold choice to talk about “her transformation” alongside a portrait that makes her look like she’s wearing a halloween costume made from human skin.
The Wikipedia description for literary fiction is hilarious. The authors seem so desperate to write ‘boring’. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literar...
I figure it’s basically a marketing term, often used when there’s not a clear genre you can stick it in.
Marketing to snobs. I’m totally fine with it.
Perhaps she means they should be at Beach Rave 2. allevents.in/the-hague/am...
The really weird thing is that ‘Literary fiction’ and ‘art house cinema’ those people champion are also genres, they just like to pretend they’re not so they can feel superior while selling less product.
From a commercial perspective most people are the opposite. Consumers embrace genre to such an extent that most commercial publishers and producers actively reject work that doesn’t sit easily within genre. It’s largely a marketing thing of course: if you know the genre, you know the audience.
Sometimes they call it speculative fiction. The absolute losers.
I totally agree with your other point though. Snobs are fools. There is much liberation to be had in embracing one’s love of genre.
Oh, I was referring to your comment about musicals. There’s quite an interesting discussion to be had around whether they are or are not a genre in their own right. See, for example, Rick Altman’s work on Genre and musicals in particular: www.amazon.co.uk/American-Fil...
*Citation needed.
Otherwise known as the “speculative fiction paradox”
You could have a soap opera set in Diagon Alley, hell yoi could rerun the Fantastic beasts storyline and not make it suck. There’s near endless opportunities there. I’m assuming that’s not happening is is because Rowling doesn’t want it to.