@samerfarha@mastodon.social2026-05-14 21:36:19
Last night’s rain
@wraithe@mastodon.social2026-05-22 13:19:47
Ok, this was hilarious
(Original video is on IG): https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYgeGL_I-WX/
https://
@pre@boing.world2026-05-11 09:30:55
Starmer is doing a thing about election results. Is he resigning? 
He says the elections were tough, he lost brilliant representatives. He feels the hurt and takes responsibility. Not just for the results, but also for explaining how they'll do better in the years ahead.
Times are dangerous, opponents are very dangerous, if we don't get it right the country will be on a very dark path.
He takes responsibility for navigation in this dangerous world and for not walking away.
Oh right, he's not resigning then. 😦
He says he'll prove his doubters wrong. He's learned a lot! And realizes now we need a bigger response to this unordinary times.
Times demand serious progressive leadership he says, and Zack or Nigel can't provide that. [Citation needed] Only Labour can [Really, come on, citation needed]
He's pleased to be reducing NHS waiting lists and crime, and for some reason is pleased migration is coming down too.
He says he realizes that people don't think Labour cares about them. So that's something.
So his plan to fix things after this election is to talk more about why he's doing things instead of just saying what he's doing.
Right. Sure. That'll help.
He admits millions of people, like his sister, don't get respect or help and are held back because the status quo doesn't work.
He says he's fighting for them but, eh, perhaps he should be doing that thing where he says more about why and how?
He says we need a complete break to take control of energy and defense and fairness (he isn't resigning though, not THAT complete a break)
"Strength Through Fairness, Hope and Urgency" is his plan.
Three concrete examples of the plan:
Sure, about time, not like the Greens are against that.
Doesn't sound like he wants a re-join though, so not really sure what this means. The EU don't allow partial memberships or cherry picking benefits. Some kind of external heart I guess, an outside-body heart pump?
No. He's going to guarantee training or work placements to school leavers.
So in response to likely being unelected next time, he'll nationalize steel (now he's failed to find a corporate buyer anyway), is going to renegotiate with Europe (again, they have no better offers to give), and offer apprenticeships to education-leavers (who are still going to be mostly in debt by then).
Right.
Oh, and he's going to ban more marches too. Almost forgot that.
What a cock.
He did sound a bit passionate at least for a change.
#ukpol #starmer
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2026-05-25 15:18:11
I've finished reading Simon Winder's "#Germania" a while ago, but I've been slacking with the review. This is a book about the history of #Germany, in the wide meaning of word. However, it's not your boring detailed history book. The author takes us on a deeply personal journey across German landscape, across tiny towns and great forests, Schlosses, churches and monuments, and uses that as a context to bring the country's surprisingly interesting history to light. And honestly, it works — it is deeply enjoyable, to the point of making me wonder if one day I should actually move to Germany, get a Bahncard 100 and start exploring myself.
I didn't quote the book here, but if I were to choose one quote that really resonated with me, it would be:
"""
Solitary tourism is something that everybody should indulge in. Of course it is a fraudulent solitude because its enjoyment comes from its limited duration and having a cheerful, only very temporarily abandoned main base area. […] And then, suddenly, I am in Vienna, standing in the shadow of a monstrous, derelict flak tower, and completely alone. The virtue of solitary tourism is its infinite ability to absorb boredom. I often find myself almost crippled with anxiety that the companion or companions on a journey might be finding everything wholly without interest, would rather be eating somewhere else, are secretly angry that we have wound up walking down this street rather than that, are contemptuous of my own interests. Solitary tourism cauterizes all this: if a museum is boring beyond all measure there is no pressure to feign interest, you just leave. I am perfectly happy, in a zoned-out way, to crisscross a town, walking for hours, just for the off-chance something curious might be round the next corner – indeed in the confidence that there will always be something curious (there always is). But for each street, each bar, each folklore museum to be converted into an inter-human negotiation creates an entirely different dynamic.
[…]
Quite possibly the pleasure of this way of life would be much reduced in some other countries, particularly more insistently gregarious places such as Italy. German culture puts a high value on temporary solitude of a stagey kind. Perhaps this is its great gift. In some moods I think there is no need to do anything other than read German writers from the first half of the nineteenth century – a sort of inexhaustible storehouse of attitudes flattering to those who just like sometimes to be left alone. Everyone must have at least a part of them that wants to live in a stairless, doorless tower as a sort of intellectual Rapunzel, setting aside, at least in part, the complicated sexual frisson laid out by such an idea. Germany really is thick with ivy-covered turrets and the promise of solitude (Kepler staring at the planets above Prague, Faust conjuring demons) – the great majority presumably built in the nineteenth century in response to the whole literature devoted to the subject. There is one turret in Lübeck, built onto a city guard tower of just outrageous fakeness, which would do me for life.
"""
(Simon Winder, Germania)
And if you follow me, you have evidence that the part about crisscrossing towns is so true: the best things I've posted here I found by complete accident, especially the murals.
#books #bookstodon
@pre@boing.world2026-05-08 22:20:48
In my ward the greens seem to have got about a third of the vote vs Labour with the rest. 2:1
Which is a big improvement. 300 or so neighbors to turn.
In the borough we've gone from unanimous Labor to about a third Green. Which is oddly proportional to my ward. Not really sure I understand the actual counting system with the three votes I had or if it's PR or not.
Nationally its awful for Labour but also worse for the country since outside London they lost mostly to the Reform (nee Brexit) party/private-company.
Conservatives seem irrelevant, even Lib Dems more important.
I've been casting doubt upon the idea of an imminent Reform government, saying it'd be unprecedented for Reform to go from one ever elected MP to 400 MPs in a single election. But these elections feel pretty close to that kind of swing.
Starmer says he'll stay on. He has no concept of what government should do other than give tax breaks to businesses to try to get economic growth, and crack down in authoritarian ways with increased surveillance and ID checks and prosecuting protestors.
He doesn't seem to realize that government can just do things, especially after Brexit. It can just pay people to build infrastructure owned by and giving profit to the state. It does not need private investment. Isn't that supposed to be the point of a Labour party?
So things will continue to get worse and Labour will continue to chase Reform policies (and so validate them). So Reform may well win.
There is one hope. Burnham could resign as mayor, a safe-seat MP could resign, and Burnham stands there. Assuming he wins he could then stand for leadership. And then if he wins and then actually does something despite the protest of the right wing of his own party, maybe things could get better.
That's a lot of conditionals. You'd want good odds to place a bet on that.
Or the greens of course. These elections have seen hundreds of new green councilors. The momentum is good. Probably take the council here next time unless that Burnham things happens.
So good for Greens, but better for Reform, and we could do with a Labour party which wasn't failing.
Oh well. Fingers crossed I guess. Few more years till the national ones.
#ukpol