paulschweiger.bsky.social

Yeah, bad news folks: you know how everything in Britain has been increasingly generous, functional, rational, pleasant and generally awesome for the last twenty years or so? Well I’m afraid the party is over for you greedy pigs: it’s time for you to suck up some real pain. Thanks

Far from making America great again, in retrospect Trump and MAGA were manifestations of the decline in US global power, a process that has markedly accelerated as a result of Trump's hubris and strategic folly.

The situation has got so bad that the whole system is having to angrily deny what it can see, and instead engage in a wacky semantic debate and thought experiments about whether it’s theoretically possible to non-racistly support a programme of genocide and ethnic cleansing. That’s crazy stuff folks

You know Leo DiCaprio in Django Unchained? More like that, and less like your nan after two glasses of wine, when she clocks the waiter is Asian and your mum has to rein her in.

It is quite something that we’re entering year four of “is racism making the public dislike these crimes against humanity” while Neo Nazis advise on antiracism, the press debate whether black peoole can be English and MPs talk about being terrified transgenders might attack their elderly relatives.

This is because the US press - as bad as they are - didn’t all go to the same university, alongside all the politicians, who they are friends with.

Illustration from today’s @theguardian.com to accompany piece by @georgemonbiot.bsky.social on the government’s Prepare campaign, which gives the public advice on how to avoid disasters whilst policies that lead us closer to crisis are given the green light www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Still, at least we can fall back on our sturdy social safety net, our modern infrastructure, our unbroken record of military triumph, our healthy institutions, our egalitarian society, our thriving academe, our popular, incorruptible politics and the honesty and integrity of our public discourse.

My name is Luke Akehurst MP and I would have loved to work with the Greens and I am distraught that this means I will no longer be able to

Thanks to the awesome power of AI, I no longer know my home address

Who told the public that America’s horrifying wars are great? Who told them there are evil transgenders lurking in bathrooms, waiting to pounce. Who told them Britain is at breaking point with hordes of migrant invaders stealing the bread from their children’s mouths? It was very specific people.

The point of the Starmer project was seizing back power from the scum - nurses, social workers, teachers - and restoring the natural order (a tiny clique of horrifying, gleefully awful right wing cranks, funded by millionaires and businesses, agreeing polocy amongst themselves, offscreen).

Occasionally, I'm reminded of my all time favourite piece of internet: this Reddit post from 12 years ago in which a guy claims he ruined dinner with his girlfriend's parents by refusing to admit he knew what a potato was.

Shows you how naive I am: I really thought things like the Leveson inquiry, the Iraq War report and the Grenfell fire were too big, too ugly to ignore, and that there would have to be serious consequences and fundamental change. But LOL no, straight in the bin it all goes, and we continue as before.

I’m baffled when people try to suggest that the BBC News is left wing or ‘woke’. Can you imagine someone presenting their flagship radio news programme who so brazenly exhibits and pushes left-wing views and talking points as much as Justin Webb does with those from the right?

Step one has to be building consensus that a liveable, functional country must be paid for, and the idea you can cut your way out of that with deliberate vandalism is both deranged and incredibly destructive: cutting things that work just means expensively replacing them with things that don’t work.

The only lesson the press learnt from the death of Lucy Meadows is "we can hound members of the public to death and get away with it" and that's also the only lesson they'll learn from the death of Jason Arday.

It's me, a Telegraph columnist, taking a break screaming bloody murder about fairness in the women's sports I wouldn't be caught dead watching to wax lyrical about academic integrity in sociology, a field I consider to be fake, at institutions I consider to be communist indoctrination centers.

It really isn’t normal for media outlets to hound minor public figures to death, just for fun, because they can. That really is a Just Britain thing.

An example: you’ll recall that during the most terrifying political scandal of the decade, all of these clowns unified and screamed in unison that even a trace of racism - the mere suspicion of it - in public life was utterly intolerable and had to be destroyed, no matter the cost.

The difference--

For non-Brits: if you understand Britain as less of a modern democracy and more as creepy village in the woods ruled by a clique of malicious elders who periodically sacrifice a bunch of their children to their pagan gods to improve the harvest, then this stuff makes *a lot* more sense.

The last time I “read a book” I learned that there’s a skeleton inside my body. Never again.

If you pile your furniture in the middle of your living room then set it on fire, you will have the warmest house in your street, for a few hours.

Amazing to do this, as we approach our third decade as a completely fucked state that’s incapable of adequately managing a country that was deliberately hollowed out and vassalised to hedge funds and service companies, because the illusion of the Thatcherite consensus went Kaboom forever in 2008.

What is it about Britain that makes us so internationally remarkable for this kind of respectable, utterly brazen and yet humdrum corruption and shit gangster behaviour? Well, I would start at “our elite class mostly go to the same schools and universities together”, and work outwards from there.

This is not to say Reform have a point. They don’t: they are inveterate liars, everything they say is either vexatious or insulting. But it is to say, let’s not pretend Britain does not have An Elite, nor kid ourselves that Kev there doesn’t work for and with it. Of course we do, of course he does.

England *cannot keep its rivers clean of human shit* because the government sold off water treatment - a prerequisite for life - as part of a deliberate project of putting as much capacity as possible into private hands and thus outside democratic control. But sure, it’s a big laugh and a joke.

Zoiks, Scoob! I guess it turns that tribune of the working man Nigel Farage - who addresses the most legitimate concerns of the average punter - was just a wealthy stockbroker with ugly fash politics, whom takes enormous crooked bungs, wearing a mask

Farage has been a major figure in national politics for twenty years. Can I ask why it’s taken until 2026 to “scratch the surface”?

Comparatively minor example: remember that time he very obviously buggerised parliamentary process on live TV just to keep the words “collective punishment” out of Hansard, and all the press agreed it was despicable and corrupt but wouldn’t explain why or what he’d actually done?

Going from “Getting caught setting private investigators on the Sunday Times and trying to report them as Russian stooges”, to “inexplicably pardoned then given a Times column to knife his pals and promote a new PM” and then “oh wow, uh, Head of government policy unit” is quite the career path.

I see the man who has overseen arguably the largest rollback of human rights and protections for marginalised and vulnerable groups in more than a generation is still trying to claim the moral high ground. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Summarises the last 250 years quite effectively.

If the energy regulator’s job is rubber/stamping price rises; the water regulator’s job is sighing and tutting at shit in rivers; the press regulator’s job is requesting minuscule retractions of frontpage lies, and the equality regulator’s job is innovating in discrimination: what is “regulation”?

It’s weird how - when the press goes looking for racism in Britain in the 2020s - the only places it can ever be found are in left wing politics, public services, unionised professions and academia. Isn’t that remarkable, given what you can see and hear every day.

Corbynism being the perfect example, here: a bone-deep cancer revealing the hatefulness of the left, and then one brief wave of Sir Keir’s magic lawyer-beams later, Amazing! Good as new and the perfect party of government. Incredible.

Concealing your plans to scythe benefits from the public is not “moderate”. Nor is joining culture wars on the side of hateful, cruel reactionaries, or conniving in war crimes and genocide, vastly expanding what counts as “terrorism” or creating spurious pretexts to arrest thousands of protestors.