So many emotions: anger; exhaustion; repulsion; disgust; pity; heartbreak; anguish; fury; but more than anything else, when I zoom out the lens and take the long view, I’m mainly just tired.
Geopolitics • Armed Politics/Political Violence • Philosophy • Political Geographies • Palestine
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So many emotions: anger; exhaustion; repulsion; disgust; pity; heartbreak; anguish; fury; but more than anything else, when I zoom out the lens and take the long view, I’m mainly just tired.
Blair consulting on an AI-generated killing field beach resort; columnists writing contrarian pieces about human catastrophe; a rogue state continuing to be armed, all of this subtended by virulent Islamophobia. I know liberals don’t like to talk about the past, but this is the cheque coming due.
I’m just saying, if a single journalist other than Judith Miller had experienced even the slightest consequences for their role promoting the War on Iraq, we might not have had very smug journalists gainsaying genocide like they were calling a football game.
Former Biden State Department official Josh Paul nailed him in his recent interview with Democracy Now:
Tony Blair appears to be deeply complicit in this monstrous plan of ethnic cleansing. That's the consequence of not holding him to account for his war cromes.
Blair has been able to launder himself and is regularly interviewed by the BBC etc weighing in on every topic under the sun from covid to net-zero plans. The man is a war criminal. He should have been sent to prison.
Here’s the thing: Those crushed garlic cloves I threw into the tray to flavour the tomatoes? I’m eating them too. Do you think I’m stupid.
Pan-seared cod with smashed new potato salad, steamed greens and oven-baked tomatoes
Sorry Nate, but that’s simply not possible; because *I* drive the train.
(For non-British followers, the Docklands Light Railway is a network of driverless trains that form part of the London Underground. Adults sat at the front will often vacate their seat so that children can 'drive the train'.)
🔻🔻🔻 Al-Qassam fighters are braver than you or i will ever be 🇵🇸
It’s a chronic issue though but fine
Lemons are a really great example of this. You get two decent ones and then one that is a catastrophe. Morrisons near me have just introduced an even lower-tier option to try and hawk the especially heinous ones. They look like oranges!
It's true, can't even rely on onions
There was a spate with greens last summer where I was genuinely looking around the Sainsbury’s for hidden cameras, whole thing felt like a prank. Everything was yellow with three days to go on the use by date
“We’ll be front of the line for all the trade deals.” Will we? Or will all the other markets just create a new bucket marked ‘Reserved for cretinous twats’ and let us have at it? Because that’s what I think happened.
Every few weeks it’ll cycle round to a different vegetable or green being heinously bad and you just have to be like “Ah okay, guess we’re getting mugged off on peppers this week. Cool. But at least my shitty passport is blue.”
Hands down funniest consequence of Brexit has to be how all fresh produce in UK supermarkets is now just dog shit. Phenomenal. Rule Britannia. Please send us all your least desirable crap for sovereignty purposes. Dumbest fucking country on the planet.
Labour going hard right to try and beat Reform is half the story. The other half is that Labour is under the control of right-wingers with right-wing politics who want Labour to be *the* centre-right party and believe they can achieve this because they’re the smartest guys in the room.
I'm sharing this transcript from a recent Odd Lots episode, as I think Lev Menand helpfully highlights the challenges inherent to the (admittedly huge) task I'm proposing below, but also suggests solutions the left should be thinking of if we want to enact meaningful change to our political-economy.
Best bit of political spin in the entire interview is when Truss defends her mini budget by saying she was ‘democratically selected’ to lead the country.
A lot of people got a bit angry about this interview when it dropped but having listened to the Eric Adams interview I had other thoughts. Quite clever to give her 20 minutes to discuss monetary policy and then let her descend into rambling about child rape and two-tier Britain.
Weisenthal quite sharply asks her if it would have been okay for Connolly to call for people to burn down a synagogue, which Truss defends by stating Connolly wasn’t talking about a specific hotel. 🙃
Mumbles non-specifically for a few seconds on free speech and supporting the speech of people she opposes before quickly pivoting to Lucy Connolly and what a travesty it was that a woman inciting pogroms pled guilty to incitement. Ho-hum!
Very funny bit in this interview where Liz Truss talks about free speech so @weisenthal.bsky.social asks about support for Palestine Action, to which Truss affirms they support terrorism and justifies her stance by saying there are organisations allowed in the UK that aren’t in Arab countries (???).
Here's the thing: You will never convince me to check the same box in the voting booth as someone who thinks and speaks like this, and that does not reflect either political naïveté, nor a character deficit, on my part. Far from it.
Learn.
This connects to the British food argument going on on here (that appears to have started in my mentions). Many foods are authentically British because there is a multicultural, cosmopolitan Britain. Yet that Britain has almost no vociferous defenders now, certainly not in the Labour government.
Maybe I'm showing my own pretentions here but I'm convinced none of the people saying this shit believe it even one iota and they're just doing up play-lumpen theatrics for what they think the unwashed masses like, like Trump kissing the Bible and going, "You love it when I do this, huh?"
Calling Labour Social Fascist at this point is actually too harsh on the history of social democracy. Starmer is England's Kurt Schuschnigg, " He contributes nothing, is friend to nothing, is the hope of nothing. He's got nothing but flaws: aristocratic arrogance and reactionary political views."
Asked by the BBC how he would feel if "your daughter was having to walk past one of these [asylum] hotels every day?" Keir Starmer replies that "I completely get it". "I understand why people want the hotels closed. I want them closed".
I feel like it's hard to get across to my English pals that if the Taoiseach **made a point of insisting to the press** that they put Irish flags all over their house, and made sure to 'always' sit by one in their office, then they would immediately, and forever, be tainted as a massive weird freak.
It's "Where else are you going to go?" taken to a dangerously delusional extreme. They don't believe a significant portion of the left (broadly-defined) will walk away from the party on election day, but they also believe that enough of the right will be 'pragmatic' enough to pick them over Reform.
The incoherence of it has been bugging me more and more, but I think it's important for people to understand that they're not just *playing* at being right-wing; they're pot-committed ideologues, and think they'll be seen as the smarter, more competent choice for a plurality of voters regardless.
The thing is, they're not aping it – they really want to corner what they see as the innate 'centre-right' nature of British politics and think all of this will work when election day comes. It looks reckless to everyone else, but the party higher-ups are convinced they're onto a winner.
From the U.S., Kier Starmer really does come across as a perfect example of you cannot successfully try to ape reactionary conservative politics in the long term. Labour got a single win and Starmer proceeded to drive the party into its worst polling in generations by courting the right.
As a gourmand and citizen of the world I embrace hog fair from all over the globe
Couldn't possibly know what you're referring to
this was the democratic party strategy w/ trump a decade ago. they just thought most americans would never vote for trump. they thought it was good when he won the republican candidacy and viewed their win as inevitable.
I’d add: Labour are only in power in the first place because the national press publicly kicked their opponents to death on their behalf, while blasting the populace with comically slanted propaganda about the awesome non-bentness of McSweeney’s wacky project. They will expect the same treatment.
🛎️
I'll let the capable Mr. Paul Duane handle this particular aspect of their genius electoral maneuvring:
This shaggy dog's fur can hold so many fleas
You see a once viable centre-left, social democratic party driving itself into oblivion; they see a bunch of petulant tree-huggers and immature students who are just throwing a tantrum and will be back by tea time to give Mr. McSweeney his flowers. Are they mental? Not by their sterling analysis!
They think the polls are a good sign because they don't believe a significant chunk of voters will really abandon them once they step in the booth. Their internal victory over the left in 2020 has given them an overinflated sense of their electoral appeal and so they see things differently.
It's an explicit plan to heighten the salience of the Labour/Reform binary come the 2029 election, and regarding how catastrophically stupid this is, the higher-ups in the party disagree. They think they're very clever and capable geniuses and that when the time comes, voters will pick them.
'“This is a definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies that what is going on on the ground in Gaza is genocide,“ the association’s president, Melanie O’Brien, a professor of international law at the University of Western Australia who specializes in genocide, told Reuters.'
'86% of [voters] among the 500-member International Association of Genocide Scholars backed the resolution declaring: “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the [UN] Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)”.'
I got a few scoffs from liberals about my original post (I made the mistake of admitting I'm not a trained economist which made my views immediately uninformed tripe 🤷♂️), but the Liz Truss interview shows the right are thinking hard about precisely this question. If we don't answer it, they will.
And it's made even more pressing by the fact that their *very next* episode is an interview with Liz Truss, who also struggled with Central Bank independence and makes a similar critique, only to descend into rank conspiracism about unelected bureaucrats and left institutional capture.
Full episode here. The part I've clipped is right at the end, in the closing minutes of the interview.
I'm sharing this transcript from a recent Odd Lots episode, as I think Lev Menand helpfully highlights the challenges inherent to the (admittedly huge) task I'm proposing below, but also suggests solutions the left should be thinking of if we want to enact meaningful change to our political-economy.
Presumably by “Tankie” here we mean the anonymous British military person who went to the media and said if corbyn came to power there would be a military coup to remove him?
You’ve got at least 20 people explaining to you in different ways and it doesn’t seem to be getting through, and looking at your output versus mine, the idea I would have to demonstrate my grasp of politics to you is pretty embarrassing reflection of your overestimation of your own abilities. Later.
The Iron Law of Institutions comes for all
Yesterday’s man fighting yesterday’s battles using yesterday’s playbook
The Guardian has today printed the names, and where possible, images, of all the media workers killed in Gaza, as part of an international day of action involving more than 150 media organisations. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
Yeah, I feel you.
Years back when I joined Twitter I built my follow list by checking out who posters I liked followed and building off of that. I checked out one fairly well-known shitposters follow lists and, I shit you not, it was nothing but Japanese animal accounts, primarily ducks and pomeranians. Masterclass.
Rudy Giuliani was returning a set of stolen breezeblocks to a nearby orphanage construction site and taking the apprehended suspect to the nearest police station for processing, hence eyewitness reports describing him being accompanied by a ‘bricked up baddie’
Tbh it’s the suggestion that someone in Corbyn’s team is already briefing to the Telegraph, possibly the man himself. If that’s true then as far as I’m concerned the whole thing’s DOA.
I reject claims that Britain is a nation in decline but I applaud and endorse the legitimate concerns of the rabid pack animals gnawing away at the drywall. How's my polling? oh no
May I remind you that as an American your understanding of British politics is the same as the average GOP republican, scrolling, ill-informed, blah blah blah blah etc.
Just in time for story time
In my opinion, Professional Managerial Class (PMC) is of pretty dubious use when analysing political economy more broadly, but it’s pretty good as a shorthand for the subjectivity cultivated by British elites and political power struggles which they view as internal to their social milieu.
"as a state with equal rights for all" seems to still make a lot of people mad.
Yvette Cooper, shadow home secretary, 2015. (h/t @kabcommons.bsky.social)
They want to be the Conservative Party; what that Party embodied, narratively, before it imploded. That they think the smartest way to achieve that is via this route should be taken as an instructive study in how British democracy works and where politics is actually occurring within this system.
You’ve been reading stories for several years now about the demise of the Tories and, with that, Britain’s ‘natural party of government’. The Labour leadership want to claim that mantle and, in their paradigm, it’s a question of contorting their shape to fit the cast, not altering the cast itself.
“Look how bad I want it.”
They know what ideological variety looks like; you’re not being deprived it because they can’t think differently. The consensus on British political-economy between the main parties is so unanimous as to run on rails, so among the elite, the struggle is not political but between the managerial set.
Labour going hard right to try and beat Reform is half the story. The other half is that Labour is under the control of right-wingers with right-wing politics who want Labour to be *the* centre-right party and believe they can achieve this because they’re the smartest guys in the room.
Should, only they want to be a right-wing party and believe they can beat Reform and Conservatives because they’re the smartest guys in the room.
If you can’t see how attacking this could have hugely dangerous implications for every single person living in the UK irrespective of citizenship or immigration status, I do not know what to tell you.
Sorry to share the same article but @trillingual.bsky.social provides a skeleton key by demonstrating that Starmer is treating politics the way a lawyer treats winning one case, and people can clearly see he’s playing with fire, but his Boys’ Club triumvirate monster anyone who steps out of line.
They’re attacking fundamental Human Rights in search of short-term electoral advantage, which they are deliberately trying to a make a two horse race between themselves and the far-right party, because their top advisers are right wing psychos, but also because they are craven, poll-addled morons.
So people who’ve fled death & torture are going to be denied the chance to live with their families- who may themselves consequently be exposed to the same dangers- and I’d suggest not a single Reform voter will vote Labour as a result while other Labour voters will abandon them in disgust
‘Equality of opportunity’ is like inviting the whole UK population to the same restaurant, giving everyone the exact same menu, and then blaming the hunger of poor diners who can’t afford any of the food items on the ‘poor choices they made’
There are two US Senators standing there. Both are taking huge risks personally & professionally. Senator Jeff Merkley! I'm proud of you Jeff.
Acting Yemeni Prime Minister Muhammad Miftah says that Israel's assassination of PM Ahmed al-Rahawi will only make Yemen "more willing to make sacrifices", saying to "the crown of our heads in Gaza" that "we are with you...with our blood...with our lives".
Rudy Giuliani was returning a set of stolen breezeblocks to a nearby orphanage construction site and taking the apprehended suspect to the nearest police station for processing, hence eyewitness reports describing him being accompanied by a ‘bricked up baddie’
Regarding the legacy of Tony Blair, you can choose to trust vibes-based assessments built on media hagiographies and misplaced nostalgia, or you can read an assessment like the below from someone with a moral backbone who actually worked with him.
Why are they making another Frankenstein movie in 2025? What on earth could that boring old story teach us today?
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind
_,.-~*'*~-.,_ M i S o G y N y & V i B e S _,.-~*'*~-.,_
Yeah, this is also fair.
“…there is no way to advance this project without violating international law.”
That bad boy looks like it goes dumb crazy
Reducing the worthiness of immigrants to narratives of economic input is inherently dehumanising versus the culturally enriching role they serve in society and I reckon "You can take my favourite Chinese spot when you pry it from my cold dead hands" could make for a pretty decent social campaign.