It’s illustrative to recognise when the Guardian uses the word investment (straightforward handing over cash to the private sector) and when it uses spending (welfare, public sector wages)

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

Specifically, As Lorde states:

The time between fossil fuel crises is just going to keep shrinking, until there's no discrete single "crisis" - just one unbroken prolonged state of global suffering due to fossil fuel unreliability

The best time to ditch fossil fuels was 30 years ago. The second best time is now

Rage bait that's meaningful. Superb reporting on a depressing state of affairs on these *Great* British shores. It's wild how refugees get demonised while these absolute parasites ("businessmen" as a category) keep getting exalted. Watch out for the "businessmen" in politics, as the last post shows.

Women of the resistance! The quiet beauty of anti-fash activism.

Red meat for the racists who cloak themselves in fake patriotism while actually not giving a shit about their own language, their own art and culture or their own actual history. Constantly pumping themselves up with WWII, the communal global endeavour, while ignoring the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

EG - my hero!

Not that we didn't know, but what a bunch of joyless worms.

It’s that time of year - folks asking us about #bumblebees - WHY THEY’RE SEEING THEM ON THE GROUND - so here’s a thread to explain.
Please #repost!
Every queen that survives means a new colony that gets to exist and produce new queen #bees for next year!
So important to #share!
1/9
#nature #caring

Extreme hijacking of every person's natural attachment and narcissistic tendancies. There's an obvious attraction in another knowing us as if they can hear our thoughts. LLMs mean job done without the human messiness. Our attachment systems aren't built to detect the sham. I'm staying well away.

What a beautifully fluid and astute piece of writing. Reminds me of a chat I once had with a German-Turkish cab driver in Berlin who told me about the way he was sometimes spoken to by customers from the former GDR, telling him he wasn't German even though he'd been born there.

List of all the countries in the world that ban all Afghan women from studying in their sovereign Higher Education institutions:

1. Afghanistan
2. United Kingdom

Must make you proud to wave your flags, UK patriots with legitimate concerns. Wave them!!!

I am not convinced that MAGA cruelty is based on perceived self-interest. Afropessimists argue, convincingly IMHO, that antiblack cruelty and violence is based fundamentally in a psychic need to dehumanize others to stabilize their own existential angst. It's why it's called *gratuitous* violence.

Yet that's not really the point here. I have never demanded that my football club join me in taking a stand against these things. You might reasonably turn round and say you disagree with my characterisation of Reform or even be angered by it. Really though I don't expect Ipswich Town FC to have any politics at all. Football is supposed to be for everyone and the club is the civic heart of the town. How can it fulfil that role when, for the low low price of a stadium tour, it grants a political party the right to use our stadium as a film location and the use of our shirt and our badge (the thing the fans and players are supposed to die for) for their own ends? How can I be expected to shrug my shoulders, show up to the next game, wear that shirt, wear that badge and cheer us on when that badge and the club are being used by those attacking my values? When a section of the fanbase takes up the baton from Farage's visit, as some surely will (you already see far right themed Ipswich Town stickers posted up from time to time), am I to ignore it and thus let that become the loudest and therefore dominant element of our support? I can not and will not, thus the division that we could let lie silent for 90 minutes every Saturday becomes something we have to live with on matchday, bright and angry. We can only be the fanbase that pushed this politics out or the one that welcomed it in and coddled it. Farage and the club hierarchy have taken the option to be 'normal' and 'apolitical' away from us.

Just sad about it really

everyone’s discussing how financially stupid this is and they’re right but it’s also logistically stupid. zero way to charge foreigners and not locals without a hell of a lot of racism coming out in the wash

Today is #LongCovidAwarenessDay

Long Covid changed my life beyond recognition. I got ill. I never recovered. Lost my job. Became housebound. I rely on others to do things for me. I lie on my bed most of the day.

Watch the Guardian's short film about my life with #LongCovid 👇

Why isn't your GROWN ASS SELF seeking out young people to SUPPORT instead of pointing your judgemental finger at them from your couch?

Snap!

As a mental health worker I'd add late-stage capitalism as another serious contributing issue. Being treated like shit by a manager in a job you can't leave because you have no savings and extortionate rent to cover has an impact on mental health too. Tricky for a snappy headline though.

AI Confessions: A Chatbot Saved My Life “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for chat.”

Listening to this on my way to work and thought you'd find it interesting.

slate.com/podcasts/dea...

Byline photo apparently of a man named Wayne Hall, which looks suspiciously AI generated.

I have my doubts that Wayne is a real live journalist. He managed to pump out 36 stories all on his own yesterday.

“If we had English names, I don’t think there would have have been an issue,” she said.

Conditional citizenship is no citizenship at all.

This is really good advice. When I went freelance I made a point of looking up old workmates that I got on with, but with whom I'd lost contact. Asking to meet for a chat over coffee simply to ask them what they were up to with work was great. Got work out of it and reconnection with friendly faces.

Best song of the year

Using tools to soothe is useful, but be wary if they're presented replacements for actual human experiences. This feels like a slippery slope issue. Art and literature and music is soothing too, but is it ok if an LLM makes that stuff and we leave people to attach to that? Philosophical pickles!

Co-regulation for the patient only! But real regulation is a co-created mechanism, which I think therefore is not possible through an LLM because there's no body on the other side. It's like Harlow's cloth mothers monkey experiments. There's soothing, but the same as soothing by TV or screen....

I think we could go quite deep into what 'self-regulation' is anyway? What does it have to look like? Even getting to the bottom of that for every person is different. It takes time and nuance to explore. I see therapy more as an experience of co-regulation that is then taken out of the room.

Yup. I entered after the IAPT boom. Psychodynamic, but max 12 sessions. And patients would only see me after months/years of jumping through CBT hoops. If they weren't 'fixed' by that I was the final step for primary care patients. The extra damage done by all that hoop jumping was never considered.

I once met someone who, in the 1990s, had 3-times-a-week psychoanalysis through the NHS. Capped at 2 years. It's extraordinary what used to be available when priorities were different.

I'm with you on the financial blocks. Not everyone can afford it and I need money to eat too. These difficulties are hard to square. But there's enormous value in being two bodies in a space or two faces looking at each other online or two voices on a phone line - ultimately two humans interacting.

I have yet to witness a widely used LLM involved in an action that wasn't based on keeping eyeballs firmly locked on the screen and away from other eyeballs. That's anti-community in my view.