mastodon 4.6.8Born following the unholy union of a duck and a cardboard box, Roberto von Archimboldi entered the world as a broken, diseased disaster. He has been searching for joy ever since.
My profile picture is of an apple, the upper third of which is brown because it is rotten, held lightly between thumb and fingers
I love torrents, not because they let me pirate films but because it is the obvious way to share large files
The response from the left to the glorious breach of Fortress Europe at Ceuta has upset me. Who cares if there is great political game? The people who moved are not pawns. They are agents. Perhaps they exploited a fault line in the ruling class. Good, let's pile into the breach they made and stop trying to repair it.
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The right wing response to the Green victory in Gorton & Denton is extremely troubling. It is important to remember that both the left and the right of the Labour party hated Corbyn because he was anti-imperialist.
I have to say that I don't think that the Greens are authentically anti-imperialist but perhaps they are. The troubling part of the response is the idea that any Muslim who is motivated to reject the Labour party because of their foreign policy is an Islamist. This is to say nothing of the fact that working class people of any religion might be tempted to vote for a party promising to end austerity and redistribute wealth, quite apart from their views on Gaza.
This is a very disturbing racism. They are saying that by rejecting the core tenet of the British establishment, Muslims are anti-democratic, extremists who don't belong in Britain. This is a dynamic that needs resisting. We need to make the bastards defend their imperialism and not allow it to be the threshold of being considered moderate, democratic and mainstream. We also need to insist that whiteness is not a prerequisite of political participation.
So there are many terrible things about Sir Keir Starmer. His complete disregard for the meaning of what he says is one. Here is a snippet from his forward to 'Restoring Control' the immigration white paper:
'It is a wound, as I said on my first day as Prime Minister, that can only be healed by action not words. This White Paper is just that.'
My friend, it is 80 pages of policy proposal. It is literally words.
Windows 11 is so full of bugs. I know that I am preaching to the converted, but at least when my Mint installation starts doing funny things, someone can teach me how to fix it. (Still trying to get my Bluetooth working again and my ersatz clicklock. I think that I did something to the kernel in a failed attempt to get VirtualBox to work).
Fun fact: judges in England and Wales no longer tell juries that the prosecution needs to have established guilt beyond reasonable doubt. They tell the jury that they need to be sure of the guilt of the accused. The standard of proof has not changed, but surety is meant to be a simpler concept for the jury to grasp than beyond reasonable doubt.
I find this odd. It is, I think, meant to help juries understand that they can convict when it is one person's word against another's. In other words, they are saying to the jury 'you can just believe the victim'. It has to be right that the facts can have been established even when two different versions are presented. You can always tell a story about what happened (or deny everything) but it be clear that you are lying. In everyday life, we would say, 'I'm sure that she is telling the truth'. The problem is that the doubt creeps in when you are asked, 'are you sure?'
Being sure is a psychological state. I am aware that I can be sure of something, that I left my keys on the side, and be wrong about how things are, my keys are not where I'm sure that I left them. Being proved beyond reasonable doubt is a fact about how things are in the world. Her version is established because it is clear and coherent. His version is preposterous.
It seems to me that asking a jury to be sure is likely to result in the jury concluding that they are not sure simply because they can imagine being wrong. That would be a much higher threshold than concluding that they have no good reason to think that they are wrong
Maurice Stierl is right. Unless we resist the EU's continuing insistence that migration is a crisis and an emergency, their border politics will end any democratic norms and rights.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2025/dec/18/ten-years-fortress-europe-served-cruelty-profiteers-racists-next-decade-up-us
JH Prynne is dead. The poetry seemed overrated, but he was a brilliant critic. I attended some seminars he gave many years back. They were superb. He seemed a truly kind man.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/apr/23/extraordinary-and-original-poet-jh-prynne-dies
