Patch Thompson

Looking forward to being down at @dublincityuni.bsky.social School of Law and Government next week, talking about the British state and the Northern Ireland civil rights crisis!

MAN UNITED BOARDROOM Sir Jim Ratcliffe: “Now Michael, you know why I’ve called you to this meeting. It’s been a disaster and I’m afraid we’re going to have to le…” Michael Carrick: “It’ll cost you £8m to sack me” Sir Jim: “… let you pick the team against Chelsea on Saturday”

Do we think posting a 64 point manifesto on X (the AI-CSAM app) might come off as a bit...desperate?

Justin Webb's one special quality is (allegedly) his ability to understand American politics. Seems even that has been poisoned.

Israel's longest serving Prime minister is posting images of queues outside polling stations in Arab towns, describing Palestinian citizens exercising their right to vote as an existential threat: "The future of our Jewish State is hanging in the balance".

My god he even has the facial hair of a 19th Century municipal socialist.

hate when a blurb for a book is "a page-turner..." yeah that's what a book is, idiot, congratulations on your first day alive

I’m seeing people reacting by pointing out that he’s obviously wrong. I appreciate that, but it’s also a pointless exercise. The problem isn’t that he’s wrong. The problem is that this is normal in American politics — and it’s been normal for a while.

Guess we now know to what level even the people of *Boston Dynamics* will not sink...

Good representation on the back row from the worst sixth formers you know.

Obviously pleased for Kane but this done mean that he's going to be starting out next two tournaments now, whatever form he's in.

Not the main point to ridicule this on, but 'published six and half million books'? Must have one tell of a typing speed.

I don’t know. I don’t think you can be the millionth person to say this if you want clicks

This headline structure is literally the joke format we use to make fun of people like this

More shocking displays by Bolsonaro supporters in the last 24 hours: voters wearing T-shirts that say “long live fascism,” doing a Nazi salute when entering the polls, and a white man walking a Black man on a chain at a pro-Bolsonaro gathering in Rio de Janeiro.

Always fun to see who gets to just repay stuff like this, isn't it? Also, over five grand in two years of travel expenses for a PhD student? Very droll.

The sheer crackpot unreliability of the Kunley Drupka account (an online influencer on the Anglofuturist + racist right ecosystems) is exemplified by this conspiracy theory that IEA director Daniel Hannan has become a secret convert to Islam & is making staffing decisions on that basis.

I remember many yrs ago one of my regular customers asked another of my regular customers "I seen you in Shields th other day with a couple of [racial slur] teenagers, what was that about that?" And the other guy replied "Do you mean my fucking grandchildren?" Never seen a man visibly shrink so fast

As I've said before, it's only once I became a professor that I realized the entmoot, a meeting that goes on for three days and three nights, was a professor's joke about faculty meetings.

cool, cool

One benefit of holding leaders accountable for crimes is that if Flávio Bolsonaro tries to overturn this election, he knows exactly where he’d end up. In prison, next to his father.

Lord Walney? WIth a ponderous, bad faith intervention via The Telegraph? Comes round faster every year.

BBC report sanitises the overt racism: It notes that organisers warned marchers not to talk to journalists, then gives the "anti-immigration group"'s own sanitised description of itself. It does not report they chanted "England for the white man" in the streets. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Viscerally upset by the Beth Upton stuff. They won't be satisfied until they have hounded a woman – who the tribunal explicitly found had done nothing wrong – to her death. Btw the "incident" in Australia is that a patient worried she *might* be forced to be treated by her. She of course wasn't.

"a distinctively British approach to artificial intelligence"

Getting the company you keep awarding contracts to on the sly to conduct a secret review of how you award contracts (on the sly) shows a serious commitment to the bit, I must say.

Two University of Leicester students speak out over ‘absurd’ and ‘Orwellian’ decision by the BBC and ITV Studios to edit out pride pins worn on University Challenge

Fork found in kitchen! Pope confirmed a Catholic!

again, in any functioning industry this would end careers. we all know nothing of the sort will happen.

Man, Hegseth's Department of War is even more buffoonish than everything else. Kinda amazed how the US military didn't just have some basic war plans they could activate. Their lack of preparedness is astonishing. meidasnews.com/news/so-much...

In the long term this is way more destructive than Jackdaw, because it actively slows down electrification and weaning households off residual LNG consumption.

'... may I see it?' 'No.'

One of the things I always find interesting about this list is that it was produced in 1974 and not in 1964 or even 1966, after Wilson's first two election victories.

This is one of the most holy sh*t stories I’ve ever read in my life. www.vanityfair.com/story/jared-...

A gambling company closely linked to Nigel Farage’s right-hand "Posh George" Cottrell got its licence using a document which appears to have been faked. With @petergeoghegan.bsky.social and Cormac Kehoe www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

iirc a British officer in charge of screening and decommissioning IJA soldiers in late 1945 joked that he'd met so many translators and cooks that he wondered how the Japanese fought at all.