JK Rowling, in the Scottish Times: "it is dangerous to assert that any category of people deserves a blanket presumption of innocence." Grim and genuinely frightening. This is the kind of extreme rhetoric you would only normally expect to hear from fascists. #JKRvsLGBTQ

It's getting dark in your bedroom but you barely notice. You hunch over your computer and add another Malfoid head to Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Your fingers are trembling with excitement. Your complete cultural victory is at hand.

IMO “exposing one of the most prominent and famously criminal men in politics as secret partner to foreign intelligence agents and notorious sex offenders” should be viewed as an entirely different profession from “destroying the lives of black academics, apparently just for fun”

Matthew Yglesias appears to be a bit miffed that Lula won in Brazil. Every other stupid thing about this take aside, this election is quite infamous partly because Meta, Twitter, and Trump tried so hard to manipulate the outcome. Has Matty made any comments about that...?

Anyone who’s had this will tell you the same. It’s important to understand: terror of transgender people as sex offenders is much the same thing as black-clad lads in the street shouting against migrants as sex offenders. They are different facets of the same reactionary project.

It's interesting to compare and contrast how the UK's political and media establishment treat JK Rowling for, ahem, "expressing controversial personal beliefs" and "standing up for free speech" with how Sally Rooney has been treated for actually doing those things.

The reality of the "independent" review telling every school in England to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism: its author, Sir David Bell, was being paid by a government agency while he wrote it, and a pro-Israel charity has listed him on its council for ten years. The government told the public he was "independent of Government" and had "no conflict of interest". Neither is true. What we found: - Bell was paid £20,000 a year as vice-chair of Skills England, a government agency, in a seat the Department for Education gave him. He held it until August, through most of the review. - The Academic Study Group on Israel and the Middle East has listed him on its council since at least 2016. Its website says its one firm policy is opposing boycotts of Israel. It gives talks on Israel in schools, which is exactly what his review was asked to judge. - In 2005, as chief inspector of schools, he singled out Muslim schools as a challenge to "our coherence as a nation". The chairman of the Association of Muslim Schools called it Islamophobia, and his own inspectors said he had presented a personal view as inspection evidence. Then we followed the money: - The department's £1.3 million antisemitism training contract had one bidder, according to the tender record. It went to Palace Yard, a company set up in 2022 by the former Labour MP Natascha Engel. - That contract says all its training must use the IHRA definition "as a foundation". It was signed eight months before Bell was appointed. His review then recommended IHRA. - Two of the people who advised Bell, from Partnerships for Jewish Schools and the Antisemitism Policy Trust, now sit on the group putting his recommendations into practice. - The Union of Jewish Students, also on that group, holds a contract worth almost £1 million to train universities. Its own policies include "UJS to advocate for Israel within UK Policy and International Law". - UK Lawyers for Israel* (UKLFI) and the Campaign Against Antisemitism* (CAA) both say the review adopted their recommendations. *For context, UKLFI once justified the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli occupation as "good for obesity". Both these groups have staunchly defended Israel throughout its perpetration of a genocide in Gaza, and regularly conflate Jewish people with the apartheid state. This matters because the review decides how every school treats what pupils and teachers say about Israel, and the IHRA definition it recommends treats some criticism of Israel as antisemitic. A review with that power should come from someone with no pay from government and no tie to a pro-Israel charity. Bell had both. The government put one in a footnote and left the other out. We mapped every link, each with its source, explaining just how far this review is from "independent": newscord.org/editorials/davi…

It should be noted that conspiracies about left-wing thought being controlled by "Islamo-Communism" is every bit as mad and racist as "the Jews are trying to manipulate the world from the shadows", but do not, for some reason, carry the same weight with the media.

Jesus fuck

The purpose of Neoliberalism is to divert public money to the private sector. That's why we pay £14 billion annually to private landlords, instead of £14 billion to local authorities to maintain, upgrade, and expand their council housing stock. Also, Govt surpluses are bad.

Palantir: "We're not intimidating anybody." Also Palantir: "How's your strained relationship with your crank brother btw? He's in the office today. I'm sure he's got lots of things to say about you."

I give it two weeks before the world’s most poisonous media outlets start hounding fuck out of named, individual teachers. They can’t stop the public recognising crimes against humanity, but they can deliver truckloads of grief to members of the public pour encourager les autres.

🔴 REVEALED: Palantir led closed-door review of how MoD buys software Review was presented to defence minister Luke Pollard by Palantir UK boss Louis Mosley in Feb and has mostly been implemented None of this was made public New investigation🧵 democracyforsale.substack.co…

Apart from anything else, why would this be in "References to sexual orientation and gender identity"? It's like putting Racist under "References to race".

RT @WordMercenary: 29 students is actually fewer than the number who spoke to the Guardian about Nigel Farage's anti-semitism specifically.…

One of the worst things Starmer did was stuff parliament with this cohort who just cannot possibly take any criticism whatsoever, and will always dismiss it with the same glib rationalising, even if it destroys them. It’s pretty obnoxious but also you know, bad for democracy.

Trying to understand why a prominent Tory party member organising contract killings isn’t being given wall to wall coverage. The BBC hasn’t even mentioned it on their site.

Again, it’s important to understand that the transgender terror did not arise organically from the public. It was imposed from above, by the world’s most hateful and poisonous media class.

“Israel is a very racist country, its government routinely commits horrific crimes” was humdrum opinion, 14 years ago: never uncontroversial, but well within the mainstream. Now, our political/media class believes it is insanely extreme. Who is it that has been radicalised, here?

As the British media herds the populace back into the two party system pens, what a wonderful reminder that the Tories are basically every bit as bonkers and far-right as Reform now. Proper Saturday morning cartoon stuff this, up there with turning the rainforest into a car park

Everything else about this obscenity aside, data on antisemitism is rendered completely worthless if you open the definition to include "seeing an anti-genocide badge".