At my big age of peak masculine maturity I am uncomfortably aware that I am not actually *good* good at anything where that is a meaningful possible level of accomplishment, but I switched to bass guitar a decade ago and play in contexts where "barely mediocre" is good enough and have a good time

If you take care of your people they will take care of you

I always thought Sun Tzu's "Art of War" was a little simplistic and obvious but it turns out yes, you do literally need to tell the Secretary of War "you need to feed your troops and keep them from being wiped out by preventable diseases"

I was told to read The Art of War to be a more effective businesswoman, and I didn’t understand all of it or how it relates to sales but you should know that as night began to fall I placed a strong body of archers in ambush nearby with orders to shoot directly they saw a light.

I remember my mate, who is now a music technology lecturer, saying he'd learned everything there was to learn when we were about twenty. He probably meant major and minor. I've been trying to play Terraplane Blues properly since I was thirteen, I still can't. I can't imagine that level of arrogance.

Becoming secure enough to be humbled by the act of realising your true skill level at something you love? This might be the progesterone talking but that’s hot.

Yep. I have owed my safety and sanity on more than one occasion to cis people who have fully interrogated their gender and know for sure who they are.

Cis people who did some thinking before coming out to themselves as cis tend to be some of the most reliable, honourable and secure people I’ve ever known.

Oh my god, this means prince harry is an orphan now 😭

I’m not even joking when I say that this is one of those moments when a boy becomes a man no matter what age he is

Sadly if this were true Paul Burrell would’ve sold the story to the tabloids years ago

Oh I mean if you know a little chemistry then in a sense we do have more film lying around

My favourite conspiracy theory was always that the queen was not just a drug dealer but THE drug dealer, and my second favourite is that she had Diana killed. But I’m saying what if we combine these and decide that the queen had Diana killed to protect her drug empire from an upstart rival dealer?

The UK Trans Experience: you can be arbitrarily included in a lawsuit that has nothing to do with you, be included in national coverage and have dozens of articles written about you, be found innocent of everything and still have journalists follow you to different countries to call you a pervert

Inglourious Basterds made at least one workable policy suggestion that might be relevant in this century and knives are cheap

America would’ve been a much nicer country if their rulers hadn’t structured their entire economy and society and culture around pleasing the auto industry and then we wouldn’t have had sentences like this

I think there’s something to be said for examining the attitudes of a Labour Party full of MPs handpicked by Mandelson.

This attitude alone is so, so damning.

Presumably it was a very short article

Any other leader would be 40 points ahead

ANCIENT GREEK PRO WRESTLING PROMOTER: ok so you're going to be what's known as a "heel"
ACHILLES: fuck you

(in the ancient greek afterlife)

PYRRHUS: I just really hate that even thousands of years later my name is still synonymous with something so embarrassing, you know?

PRIAPUS: come on man

we have a whole political and media class that has basically made policy making of any import impossible for nearly two decades by treating anything other than spending cuts and authoritarianism as "unserious" and/or "reckless"

What if... what really makes Britain "ungovernable" is... the nature of its political media and of its political class?

I listened to this and it sounds as if the PM deliberately misrepresented the vetting process, including who made assessments and who made decisions.

Keir Starmer very much Chose not to know cause Knowing would make him responsible. Clever little lawyer man trick he thinks we’re all too stupid to see

When I lived in Silicon Valley a programmer exasperatedly asked me what I 'expected' tech lords to do to make their products safer. I told them to hire more social scientists and listen to what they had to say.

They were very surprised there was a quick answer to the question, lmao

in other words, whitewash the british empire as well as english subjugation of the welsh people and our culture and language.

Remember when Wes Streeting announced he was going to make around 100k NHS backroom staff redundant with no audit, risk or impact assessment, then spent six months or so begging the treasury to give him the money for redundancy pay outs, to then be forced to take it out of future healthcare budgets?

Again, from freebiegate, to Mandleson, to Doyle just a consistent theme of behaviour that would be unacceptable and, frankly, result in a disciplinary in the private sector is just normalised in parliament.

A real, persistent problem for our politics that it is so endemic and normalised.