Hugs
Christian, Tertiary (TSSF), Verger, ASNC PhD, linguist,
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Hugs
Our 2025 talks are now available for you to browse and download. That’s over 60 talks featuring fascinating, provocative, and useful conversations from activists, artists, thinkers, and theologians. Individual talks are £3. Or get the complete All Talks bundle for £60. buff.ly/VIPUvQ4
Sounds good
Prayers for you. Where are placed?
This is so important! I also can't believe that in this day and age, MPs have to physically walk through the lobbies, stand up to wave papers in debates or cope with the bear pit that is the House of Commons! We need more disabled and neurodivergent MPs but we won't get them if things don't change.
Ok, rant over for now. TLDR: the UK political system seems designed to waste everyone's time, hinder progress, and exclude people, in ways that frustrate me every single day. A progressive government would fix it. Lords Reform is a good start, but there's so much more to do.
I'm frustrated because it doesn't need to be this way. This constant flying-by-seat-of-pants chaos really doesn't feel like a sensible way to run a country. And it's exclusionary too - it shapes who enters, and stays, in politics...
So today I have chosen to prioritise keeping my commitment to my constituents in Bristol this evening, because I know a lot of them have gone out of their way to make themselves available and prepare for this meeting, and I don't want to let them down...
Prrr
Five out of eight members of staff at #Bangor Cathedral are at risk of being made redundant or discontinued owing to “financial pressures”
But she's an upstart woman, not one of the old boys...
god, the feeding frenzy around Rayner is obnoxious. It looks pretty clear that she took and acted on advice in good faith that was given in good faith. Rules around trusts are complicated, FFS.
Hugs
Forever shocking people by casually mentioning that I was taught as an undergraduate by a man who as a young fellow had voted against my college accepting women (and liked to mention this fact frequently). Sounds like an anecdote which should be told by someone at least twice my age (38) and yet...
One-way street signs are weird. They tell you if you're going the right way, but not if you're going the wrong way. I've tried to discover why this is, but haven't succeeded... timharford.com/2025/02/do-y...
What they want is to be able to say whatever they like with no one being able to criticise them
No-one who claims to be a free speech champion really is.
Accidently went into a craft space. Obviously they have a sense of humour. I saw this on the whiteboard.
There's so much good work going on in Barton Hill - but it's usually only the negative stuff that gets amplified. Right wing activists will tell you it's an open prison. Locals know better. www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/features/the-inspiring-project-connecting-communities-in-barton-hill/
Hugh Bonneville started his live ITV London News interview on Downton Abbey by talking about Gaza.
Section 31: What if, get this, your sacred "Federation" actually turned out to have a shady underbelly? Captain Jean-Luc Picard: I have personally exposed and foiled no fewer than five conspiracies or nascent fascist trends within Starfleet and only one of them was because of alien infiltrators.
1) don't do it unless you really want to, unless it's for a cause you're really passionate about. If they try to lure you with the promise of "exposure", remember that people die from exposure
Exactly. My first friend to transition was 40 years ago, as UG students we had little experience of anything, but it wasn't hard to support a friend. I've watched her battle & blossom & live her life like everyone else. Trans folks aren't new, the orchestrated trans panic is
Not an original thought, but I can only imagine that those who are calling for the ‘reform’, ‘revision’ or even scrapping of the #ECHR are confident *their* human rights won’t be denied or compromised by any changes.
At the core of transmisogyny is, inevitably, misogyny itself. The viciousness with which some people trash trans women for how they look, or their supposed artificiality, or perceived errors in their behaviour, comes from a fundamental loathing of any women who doesn’t conform to their expectations.
This is pure ignorance from the BBC. The arrest had to be done at an airport because he happened to be coming back into the UK and all police officers at airports are armed. The police have explained this twice in public statements and the BBC have failed to read them or deliberately ignored them.
On the Rayner situation, I realise it's slightly different when you're the actual minister of gov, but I had a situation where I was stiffed by poor legal property advice too - as a journalist with over 15 years experience covering housing at the time. Erp. inews.co.uk/inews-lifest...
Boggles
That is Not Helpful@trade;
Sometimes the lectionary puzzles me. Why set the first 21 verses of the letter to Philemon? Why not all 25 verses of it?
Personally would generalise this to ‘a product or service (frequently digital)’.
Which one?
When does term begin? (and where are you training?)
There are lots of Bridgefords which all amuse me...
the first two books have some excellent bits regarding the tendency of tourists and explorers to speak very loudly in their own language in the hopes that this will magically cause people to understand them and the results thereof "mount " is not uncommon in our world
I'm not trying to say there's a simple equivalence here bc we don't know all the facts of the case/arrest, but this feels like a pretty clear double standard.
With SJB the Home Secretary actively intervened to have her arrested against the judgment of the police themselves, to crickets. But now it's the mad prince of Terf Island, and suddenly our laws are a draconian attack on freedom of speech and need to be changed www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/t...
1/5 a slight exaggeration and it is of the pre-school booster www.gov.uk/government/n...
Sadly we probably do now - 1/5 not vaccinated...
So why are people who wear Plasticine Action T-shirts assumed by the police to be supporting Palestine Action but people putting up flags of the Patron Saint of Palestine aren’t? Shouldn’t we arrest them all to be on the safe side? #twotierpolicing
To be clear: when I mean the white atheists (tm), I mean the ones out there making money as Being Professional Atheists, or maybe the ones who spend all damn day seeking out the mentions of strangers on social media to yell at, not, like, people moving through their lives quietly unspiritual or etc.
The god you don’t believe in is not the God I believe in
"WERE YOU THERE WHEN ZEBRAS GOT MADE??? NO??? So why would you think you have any idea why any of this works, little stupid tiny squishy puny human???" That's pretty much the whole biblical theology of suffering in a nutshell
When is hate speech not hate speech? When Keir Starmer agrees with it.
So as far as I understand it, the government is telling the police to crack down on verbal support for Palestine Action but to relax when Linehan advocates punching cops ‘in the balls’. Isn’t freedom of speech marvellous? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
graham linehan didn’t get ‘cancelled’ transphobia is an incredibly lucrative industry in the uk the reasons he can’t get work: a) comedy landscape changed, his thing is studio sitcoms and that became dated b) he’s an egotistical asshole who has burned every bridge he ever made in the industry
And the cathedral is at the end of the rainbow
Decide to join plainchant evensong from the site of Leicester Abbey as it seemed to have stopped raining. It started raining as I was doing the first lesson so I moved under a tree and then saw this wonderful rainbow. Which is very faintly a double rainbow
Yay Fiasco
"That incitement of violence should've been okay actually, my bad"
Thank you. Now I can repost
Image description below:
Given the costs of keeping someone in jail pretty much
Hundreds of IDF reservists sign statement refusing to participate in Israel's planned Gaza City takeover, calling it illegal and warning it endangers hostages www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...
Isn’t it what Musk wants? He wants ‘martyrs’ of hate speech so he can blame governments for persecuting people for their beliefs. By the book.
Beyond that, X is allowed to continue operating entirely as normal, and UK politicians and government departments even normalise it and post there. Musk is playing a dangerous game: he’s outsourcing moderating his site to UK police, then condemning them for doing so. And we’re letting him.
Understandably and predictably, sometimes people choose the latter. And that means police have to intervene on lots of cases that could and should’ve been dealt with by moderators instead. Right wing people are getting arrested because Musk won’t enforce the law on X. And politicians won’t say that.
That means that if you’re affected by a post that breaks UK law (or basic standards of decency), you can no longer deal with it quickly and quietly by reporting it. Instead you’ve just got to accept the threatening/racist/etc behaviour, or else your only recourse is reporting it to police.
Something is being completely missed in the Graham Linehan / broader UK ‘free speech’ row – and it’s that much of this is a direct consequence of Elon Musk no longer doing anything like what’s required to moderate X in line with UK and European law. 🧵
try to make people’s lives better! address literally any of the concerns that led to you winning the election in the first place!
Is a *single journalist* – or senior Labour politician, for that matter – going to look at what Linehan actually said in the original tweets, or are they just going to take his account at face value?
Agree with a lot of this. My other contention is to shove a large levy onto on-line gambling where money shifts from circulating through our economy to offshore peddlers of misery. Increase VAT on all online sales to 40% similar for supermarket alcohol. Reduce VAT on high street sales and pubs etc
Question is, CAN she tie up the loopholes that Thatcher and co opened, where money just "disappears" into hedge funds and places. Or does she have vested interests to avoid tackling those black holes..?
I've been saying 3 for some time
1. A 2% tax on assets over £10 million, raising up to £24 billion a year 2. Equalise tax on income and capital gains, raising around £12bn a year 3. Abolish upper earnings limit on NI - raising around £11bn a year
Date set for Rachel Reeves's budget on 26th November - now time for her to think seriously about how to tax wealth so we can fund our public services. Here are a few ideas:
I would actually very much enjoy watching this.
A Frenchman once spent some time saying "Shakespeare" and breathing out heavily, to demonstrate to me that it sounds similar to "J'expire".
Aaargh
Tony Hawks as the toaster on Red Dwarf springs to mind too
It is a crime in the UK to incite violence, whether it be calling for the burning down of immigrant hostels, or telling people to punch trans women in the genitals. If you want to change that, make the case. If you win, I can call on people to burn your house down and punch you in the genitals.
The church I attend, an inclusive evangelical diverse and cosmopolitan Church of England church in south London, UK has just advertised for a new vicar. Could it be you? pathways.churchofengland.org/en/jobs/vica...
That is a lot. I don't think we lost 10 teachers in the 5 years I was at my 4-6 form entry school (brother's year was the first 5 for a while, year below was 6)
Grace is a thing that happens in the world. It is not confined to churches, and I suspect you find it more often outside them. It is not a pale bloodless thing wrapped up in incense and white altar cloths.
I suspect the people who listen to conservative talk radio 40 years ago didn't think Catholics were Christians...
Aha. When my brother got a new form tutor, a teacher whose form had just left, opted to take on a bunch of year 9s rather than year 7s, so the new teacher got year 7s!
I used to read books like Lord of the Rings or watch movies like Star Wars and think the villains were unbelievable. And of course, now watching the tech oligarchs (who could not spend all their money if they tried) destroy civilization for power, I’m like, guess I was wrong. People are that awful.
Today it was "well, it could be any one of these 11 specimens collected between 1842 and 1910, take your pick which one he meant when he said "type in the British Museum (Natural History)" Utter nincompoop.
We kept the same form letter and tutor throughout. My brother did change tutor because his left, but that was unusual, and he knew that was happening before the end of term as I recall...
This. Labour is now a clearly right-wing party. It has a mostly left or centre-left wing membership, but the rules of the party have been manipulated so that the membership have virtually no influence on policy, and are only offered a carefully curated set of choices for Parliamentary candidates.
I put the soft in soft left and he’s managed to take me from cautiously optimistic to despairing to outraged to actively opposed to the party in about a year. Again, I resent being taken on such a journey by such a man.
if your child is a bit older- and specifics have yet to be announced- there will be a catch up programme to vaccinate them! i'll share details whenever they are published. but if you can't afford the private jabs, do not worry.
(Also, I'm the poster child for the "failure to reach childbearing goals". I'm 46 and have one kid. In a perfect world, I would have had at least five. In an imperfect world in which I chose the father of that first kid better, I would have had at least two.)
No wonder Gatwa was struggling to explain it
If that was how things played out within a conservative social institution 20 years ago, it shows the pace of change, how quickly social consensuses can change, and just how much danger we’re in from a social media ecosystem on X and FB which pushes people towards what are frankly racist views.
I realise this is very much looking at things from a church perspective, but the acceptance of marriage for people with GRCs within the CofE before same sex-marriage was legal is hard to imagine today, especially as it happened without much controversy, a 2/3 majority etc.
Apropos of how quickly right wing politics in the UK seems to be moving towards accepting crazy positions on race and immigration, it’s instructive to look at how quickly a 20+ year old liberal social consensus around the place of trans people has collapsed.
Nice. I was enjoying Venice in the imagination with Donna Leon last week and should return next week to the Venetian Sanctuary but for now I'm in mid Wales with Myfanwy Alexander
I mean... it's not wrong! What you see is the edges/interfaces between ice and air, and because those interfaces are many and small, they scatter light in all directions
The "Obama banker bailout" for the crash still gets me.
Now I'm wondering whether Americans have an equivalent of ribena/squash/cordial at all. I'm sure @oldenoughtosay.com or @houstonmargaret.bsky.social would know
Quentin attempting to explain the peerage to Laurence 🤣
Once again watching England with an archly raised brow from Scotland; we've had 15 years of scorn heaped on Independence supporters up here for being narrow, flag-obsessed nationalists, and now the whole UK Cabinet is lying about having loads of flags they shag all the time, mortifying behaviour
HELL MEANS THERE ARE APOLOGIES YOU NEVER GET phew there's a sentence what if we made it our damn work to do the accountability and repair here while we're still in these meatsuits, mothertruckers
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Someone should tell UK Labour leaders that people voted for them because they were NOT Reform or Tories. Folks could have voted Reform or conservative in the last election and choose NOT to vote for them. That should be a strong hint that Labour might have won because they were different.
My theory is that there is a level of subsidy which would improve birth rates, and it's "the state pays a full professional salary to spend 3-5 years as a stay at home parent"
Ouch. Be gentle with yourself.
