The response that resonated most with me is that the consequence of this is that more women and children will be on small boats and will die as a result. It’s all really dispiriting.

o fuck me

Yeah, right? Hadn’t occurred to me that the main reason younger men turned up was because they didn’t want to risk their families, but were hoping to get asylum and then get their families to join them. Embarrassing lapse on my part not to have figured that out.

I realise I actually knew that dynamic, I’m just overloaded on Cruel Britannia 2.0. I talked myself into joining the Labour Party in… 2022? 23? Dunno. And they turned into this and I had to quit. Regrettably, given the number of things I would like to quit over, one can only do so once.

I just… I remember being SO excited by Blair after the growing up under the Tories, and then what that turned into, and now this horror show. And just… screw it.

Yeah I won’t be able to vote for them again in the near future. No idea where I’ll go.

Same. I thought... oh god, not Trump again, at least we have Starmer - ax ex human rights lawyer - to talk compassion and sense. 😯 Guess it's the lib dems or Greens, but I'll hold fire until I hear their language when it matters.

Have found it viscerally upsetting. Also, who the hell thinks that "we'll make people leave their grandparents, parents, siblings, kids and cousins in war zones or other hellish environments" is a relatable or reliably vote winning announcement?

(Have probably answered my own question there. People who are so divorced from thinking of these things as about people that they cannot see this is "leave your nan in a war zone, surely someone else will help her")

Fucking hell, why are they doing this? It's just fucking awful. Why aren't they actually working on real problems people have? Christ, this makes me want to abandon the party completely and become a political hermit.

Because like it or not the media along with farage have made immigration and now racism the number one priority in the UK, they've effectively paradise a government over something that isn't really that big an issue.

Her change in views? This from 2015... "It requires all of us to change our attitudes. To stop being so scared of the politics of immigration that we fail to help refugees." www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-poli...

I mean… there’s always this: bsky.app/profile/twee...

I dunno. I can say that I stopped with dystopias after Gnomon because I felt I was playing catch-up.

Maybe we need some grindhouse-style revenge flicks where the victims of unfettered cryptofascism rise up and skin a bunch of billionaires and politicians alive. I'm just sayin'.

Ech. Maybe. But in the end I believe in restorative justice, truth & reconciliation, and so on. I think violent punishment initialises the horror engine for the next round. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s not like we haven’t tried the bloody version before :(

Damn, would I like to share that belief--honestly I would. But Popper's paradox rules the day and the grifters running things bargain only in bad faith. John Brown seems pretty level-headed in this milieu. Jaysus, how did I get so cynical?

Songs of experience… But my position isn’t derived from optimism - I don’t think. I just believe that the new track we need has to be more than simply toppling a bunch of bastards and putting new bastards in their jobs (under new job titles).

From your lips to the gods ears my friend. I'm angry enough at The Bastards to contemplate a toppling, but not naive enough to think it wouldn't be utterly horrorshow.

I’ve no interest in going through the hell of radical societal upheaval - if we can even get there - only to deal with Red Tsars instead of White ones. We need better and more.

There was this (maybe a bit trashy but deeply powerful) book called Dirty Weekend by Helen Zahavi which I read a billion years ago and was basically just, “pissed off woman beats the crap out of everyone who had fucked her over” and I’m starting to think these are the kinds of stories we need now.

Less 1984 and more John Wick with fascists instead of gangsters.

Probably a good idea: dystopian sci-fi is being put out of business by current events

Back to work. No time. Better to put it in the book anyway. Ffs.

Sound advice!

It's so deeply cruel. Heartbreaking