John Wall at Harry's Place on Kier Starmer:
Starmer is basically a technocratic middle manager who decorbynised Labour but attracted criticism for dumping the Corbynite policies he’d previously endorsed. Many expected him to emulate Kinnock by doing the necessary dirty work, losing an election and being replaced.
Well, give it time...
Bill Sticker on the mystery that is modern feminism:
"Some feminists have even been quoted as saying that women do not need men at all. First they deride the men they reject as ‘involuntary celibates’ and virtually ensure that they will have an equally barren life and run the risk of ending up as elderly cat ladies writing green ink screeds against their ‘oppressors’. They rail against the notion of feminine attractiveness as a primary tool of control, forgetting how much power it actually gives women. Then we see TikTok videos of young women demanding to know where ‘all the good men are’."
"As I said earlier, this is one of those ideas that sound good and which will get a lot of attention but might end up either being a total failure or bring a whole host of problems for Reform. For what it’s worth my view is that rather than target Tory councillors, which might for reasons listed above, backfire, Reform should be going full on for former Labour voters or voters in traditionally Labour areas or those working class majority areas which have been shamefully left behind both politically and economically by the Labour and Conservative Parties."
Longrider on Labour finding out jeering from the opposition benches is easy, governing is hard:
"These are the arseholes who said that they would roll back Sunak’s watering down. Oh, yes, they were going to have a hard deadline of 2030, despite clear evidence that this was insane. Now they are in power and reality is punching them on the nose. This is just the start. The whole scam will eventually crumble."
"This request for people to write in has been up for well over two weeks now. Still front page on one version of the paper. The follow up article composed of the people who wrote in has not appeared as yet."
"And so, the pilot in charge of 250 tonnes of Airbus A330, and on whom the lives of 400 or so passengers depend, is a man whose perceptions are wildly unreliable, at least regarding himself."
"What on Earth do these people think distances the Conservatives from Labour these days? What do they think the current government is doing that Tony Blair didn't already do or want to do? What do they think a Labour government will do differently than the current incumbent?
The two main parties are as different as night and later that night."
Longrider on the news we all expected, hoped for, dreaded...
"So we will now be inundated with weeks of campaigning and impossible promises as these shitbags try to bribe us with our own money. At the end of which we will troop into the polling booths as if it makes a damned bit of difference, because on July the 5th, things will carry on exactly as they are right now – we will still be royally shafted by these bastards – plus ca change…"
David Thompson feels the same way I do about a once but no longer 'must-visit' website ruined by progressives:
"I’ve said before, regarding the pop-culture site io9, the more insufferably woke the site has become, the more generic and unwritten its content feels. By which I mean, it was once possible to stumble across lengthy articles on niche pop-culture subjects, often written with an affectionate expertise. Now, however, it’s difficult to differentiate one contributor from another. The content doesn’t read as if anyone in particular wrote it. It’s flavourless, uniform in its politics and ideological assumptions, both pointedly announced, and uniform in its tone. It might as well be generated by an algorithm."
"The globalists behind the push want to get rid of the ‘women’ clause, get them into the workforce and paying tax for the political class to piss up the wall, inflate the cost of housing even further and make big bucks for the corporates. The native Irish seem to have other ideas, despite being ridiculed for not seeing the referendum for what it was."
LegIron on a salutary lesson for politicians everywhere:
"Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ tells of a man who created a monster, was unable to control it, and eventually it turned on him. It should have been among the required reading for anyone wanting to pursue a career in politics, and this should have been the case several decades ago."
"Everyone who writes or creates has biases. We can do our best to keep these biases in check or try to give both sides of a story or to point out when stories are nuanced rather than black and white, but Pilger did none of this. If a story fitted Pilger’s worldview, even if it meant defending awful authoritarians, he was on it. If Mr Kamm is correct then Pilger’s post mortem reputation will most certainly not match the plaudits that Pilger received in his early life."
Nick Drew at 'Capitalists@Work' on education:
It's pretty clear that for anyone broadly on the right with the slightest regard for social equity (whether for altruistic or self-serving reasons), providing good education for the masses to facilitate any latent potential for meritorious advance is one, if not the main, central plank of policy. It ought to be so for lefties, too.And the ireppresible DumbJon on this year's 'I'm A Celebrity...':
"Meanwhile, back in the real world, Farage was already meant to be dead and buried thanks to voice of the people Nella Rose - or as the public generally refer to her 'who'? "
DumbJon on great form on the Tories chances with Dodgy Dave back in government:
"There is no more ludicrous myth in British politics than the idea that it's the right of the Tory Party that hobbles the Party's election chances. For all that the squish side of the Party like to talk about electability, they sure do seem to struggle to actually get elected."
The videos and other material below come mostly from the Twitter account called Habibi. I know of this poster and he (I’m assuming it’s a ‘he’) has I believe posted on and contributed to the Harry’s Place blog, criticising Islamic extremism. He’s been one of those who although seemingly hailing from the centre Left, has consistently called out Islamic extremism over a period of many years. Basically if Habibi is pointing something out then we should be wise to listen.
Fahrenheit211 sees a glimnmer of hope in Sunak's U-turn:
"Sunak’s announcement could merely be cynical electioneering as all that this move does is bring Britain into line with the European Union’s policy. However, if we put that aside then it could represent a welcome return to realism among British politicians. One reason for this, as outlined by the Climate Resistance Twitter account is that the world has changed from when the Green Blob in the Civil Service and in the Quangos created policies like the internal combustion engine, ban which former PM Boris Johnson just rubber stamped. "
David Thompson on activists' hopes for the latest woke Disney remake, 'Snow White':
"Readers are invited to ponder the conceit that a massively expensive film based on a classic tale for children should exist chiefly to “empower our movement,” i.e., to affirm the politics of mouthy, ungifted actresses.
Rather than, say, to entertain children. Still, I suppose it’s to be expected that obnoxious, narcissistic women should want to re-write a tale that, in its various original forms, is pretty much a warning against female narcissism and spite."
"Somewhere in the attic I have a photograph of my old BMW R1100RS taken during a trip to Portugal. It’s in a forest. Well, what was a forest until it burned down. Wild fires are nothing new. The trip was in 1995 and the place still smelled of the recent burning. Talk to the locals (as we did) and they will tell you that it happens every so often. "
Bill Sticker takes a trip into the wilds, and pronounces it good. Why? Read on:
"Well out in the fringes there isn’t all the wavy hand “look at me” activism of the Net Zero eejits from the East trying to get everyone to share in the insane belief that humanity is ruining the planet, and people insisting we can’t eat real meat because of ’emissions’. That’s a very squeamish urban belief."
"Up until relatively recently Childline has been a pretty uncontroversial organisation. After all helping abused or stressed children and young people get help is a basic moral imperative and something that any reasonable person can get behind no matter what their political, religious or cultural viewpoint may be.
But, according to the therapist and campaigner for the rights of women and children, James Esses, there is now something rotten in Childline. That rottenness is the increasing inclusion in Childline’s policies of the cult of Gender Identity."
