Iconic

Is that good

Being an idiot, I'm always forgetting just how really really real the climate crisis is. And I always find it strangely grounding to read things like this and remember, it's not just some ill-defined nightmare, it's actually the biggest threat our systems have ever faced😀

I wrote this with @BenBurgis. The murder of Charlie Kirk threatens to embolden the far right and provide Donald Trump with a pretext for crushing dissent. Escalating political violence corrodes democratic norms and poses a unique threat to the Left. https://t.co/DdXjvZF56C

This is genocide denial.

Had a strange conversation the other day with someone contending that Gaza is just one humanitarian concern among many, asking what was so special about this one case. A lot of it’s about the geopolitics imo but also fucking hell how objectively bad does it need to get

Timeless and poetic truth like you might come across on ancient stones

Political journalism tends to reduce politics to personal gossip. The algorithms of social media reward outrage and scandal mongering. Taken together they create modes of behaviour and thought that are the opposite to those we need to build institutions of mass solidarity.

Imagine tweeting this during a live streamed genocide. Now deleted.

HOUSES RAIDED Police in South Wales have raided this woman’s house after she held a cardboard sign stating that she opposes genocide outside the BBC Cymru HQ yesterday. She was arrested alongside 12 others at this location, and 70 others across the UK. News of more raids, too.

Uphold @ProfAFinlayson Uptight Greedy Bastard Theory:

Among so much else, we’re getting a fascinating and increasingly revealing long-term case-study of how thought is policed in the west

I'll add I guess that's where we are in The Discourse what with all the Squid Game analogising lately, though tbh this feels like a futile attempt to force the above contradictions. Maybe more interesting is how the IDF themselves might be thinking/acting through these archetypes

In purely narratological terms we should be revelling in the horror here much as we do with a saucy high-society murder or salacious True Crime or any other 'fait divers'. But... This genocide might be too distant and lied-about but it's also too close, too true

Always wary with Freud etc. but I feel there's something otherwise inexplicable about Polite Society's refusal to face the tide of real-life stories like these. We LOVE this kind of thing if it's The Hunger Games and 80% of all YA, most CoD titles, Star Wars goes without saying

The obvious unconscious inspiration here was/is The Nazis, plus Orwell's useful USSR caricature, but I think both merely give displaced expression to the much deeper fear that all of our technology might actually not make the world better but (whisper it, even now) *worse*

Stunningly straightforward dystopia shit. This was the dominant scare-story I remember receiving growing up. In books, film, school: the bogeyman of barbaric techno-totalitarian violence speaking in a playground bully's voice...

belaboring the obvious but it feels historically significant that an entire generation has been witnessing the worst human acts imaginable broadcast every single day for two years while governments and institutions make it illegal to talk about them — unbelievably crazy-making

Weirdly moved by the idea that there are still liberals of any description who don't get completely unhinged around [people who support free public transport]. When he says let's prioritise blocking Cuomo... Feels like the reverse of gas-lighting. We *can* have political friends!