Carl Harding

@chardle

He/him/oi you. Woke as hell. I eat tofu and read The Guardian just to annoy people.

13.718 Siguiendo6781 Seguidores1457 Publicaciones

Bluesky

¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y chardle.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

Carl Harding@chardle· 25d

The sun pretending to be Saturn this evening. Well, everybody needs a hobby, right?!

A photograph showing the late evening sun just about to dip behind a dry stone wall. A line of cloud across the face of the sun gives the appearance of rings seen edge on, reminiscent of the planet Saturn.

Carl Harding@chardle· 26d

Which, being translated means, more or less, “Behold! Nigel Farage attacked by a person with a bin on their head!” From My Left Eye youtube channel.

An image in imitation of a section of the Bayeux Tapestry, showing Nigel Farage dressed in medieval peasant style having been pushed over by a man with a bin on his head while onlookers point and shout. Above, as if embroidered, are the words, in Latin Ecce! Nigelus Faragus aggreditur ab humine cum cisterna super capite, which translates approximately to Behold! Nigel Farage attacked by a person with a bin on their head.

Carl Harding@chardle· 27d

This. A screenshot from a video by My Left Eye on YouTube.

A series of six photographs captioned to present a back and forth conversation between two people, as follows: He’s a man of the people. He went to one of the most expensive schools in the UK, then became a banker. He’s fighting the elite. He accepted five million pounds from a foreign billionaire. He’s promised to let me be racist. Thank you.

Carl Harding@chardle· 28d

A sign outside a church saying At the end of the day I’d rather be excluded for who I include, than be included for who I exclude!

Carl Harding@chardle· Jul 10

Go Binny, go! #ukpolitics #countbinface #binface #farage #reform

An image designed in imitation of the Obama campaign Hope poster, featuring alternative political candidate Count Binface. He wears an imitation trash can on his head, a cape and a badge saying Vote Binface 2026. Beneath is written: Hope Count Binface for Clacton on Sea.

Carl Harding@chardle· May 10

Just finished this amazing novel, highly recommended. Its a full length novel that is partly epistolary and also includes short stories. A book about our identities and the courage and love can which make us real. #Booksky

The cover of The Dollmaker by Nina Allen

Carl Harding@chardle· Apr 21

This is both a curse and a blessing for me. I break everything I hear into tracks and techniques. It’s like looking at purple and seeing red and blue.

Carl Harding@chardle· Apr 21

A still from The Simpsons cartoon. A newspaper features a photo of Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist at the sky, under the headline Old Man Yells At Clouds.

Carl Harding@chardle· Apr 20

UK voters. Annoy Reform! Waste their money! Reform are dropping their leaflets on doorsteps up and down the country. But you can send it back to Reform with a cost that they have to pay. Put the address below on an envelope with the flyer in, and put it in a post box! #ukpolitics #reformuk

A copy of the Freepost address for Reform UK to send back unwanted election material and waste their money. The address is:

Reform UK
Freepost RTLT-ZXHY-KSDC
83 Victoria Street
London SW1H OHW

Carl Harding@chardle· Apr 19

Just read this. Amazing, subtle, and unexpected. Set in Columbia it addresses AI, the relationship of humanity to technology, where we go to seek security and how we might escape from a cage of misinformation. As usual I am instantly obsessed and must now read everything by Julianne Pachino.

The cover of the book Jungle House by Julianne Pacheco. It features a green leaf drawn to look like a printed circuit board.

Carl Harding@chardle· Apr 14

I love it! ‘Not a fan of logs in waterfall photos’ is the most wonderfully specific taste statement I’ve seen in a while. Great photo, log included.

Carl Harding@chardle· Apr 14

UK tabloid The Daily Star has it right.

A tabloid newspaper called the Daily Star, with a photograph of Trump’s infamous image of himself as Jesus healing someone. The headline reads, ‘You’re not the Messiah you’re a very naughty boy’.

Carl Harding@chardle· Apr 12

I’ve never recovered from the (presumably unintentional) irony of a man in a mansion with a grand piano singing about having no possessions.

Carl Harding@chardle· Mar 5

Hi #fungi experts, can anyone tell me what this species is, observed today in woodland at Leighton Moss, Cumbria, northern England?

A photograph of a log in the ground, surrounded by dead leaves and twigs and covered in moss. From it grow the fruiting bodies of several small orange/red fungi.

Carl Harding@chardle· Feb 22

This room, which now houses The Durham Cathedral Museum special collections display, was home to The Sharp Library in my day (maybe it still is). I loved it, not mainly for the book collection but for the radiators at foot level under the tables in all the window spaces.

The Durham Cathedral Museum special collections display. A wide, light space with a wooden-beamed roof and deep set arched windows, within which are a number of stone artefacts, including early mediaeval crosses and their bases, and what might be Roman altar stones.

Carl Harding@chardle· Feb 20

Dominion or Domination. Here’s the difference.

Tom Holland writes a book called Dominion about the impact of Christianity on European late antiquity, a subject which has been his specific specialist interest for years. Alice Robert’s then writes what is clearly a response book called Domination (geddit?) setting out the opposite viewpoint.

Holland has no faith commitment for or against. Roberts by contrast is a former President of the Humanist Society. Whatever your prior view one thing is clear: Dominion is a legit history book, Domination is someone grinding a massive axe so damn hard I can’t believe she didn’t set her study on fire.

Carl Harding@chardle· Feb 2

UK shoppers, do not use this gift card. It’s essentially a scam. Read reviews online and you’ll see what we mean.

Carl Harding@chardle· Jan 13

I don’t agree with all his view, but the following quotes from Lord Acton, courtesy of the Acton Institute seem pertinent.

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”

“Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.”

“Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.”

“Everybody likes to get as much power as circumstances allow, and nobody will vote for a self-denying ordinance.”

“Absolute power demoralizes.”

Carl Harding@chardle· Jan 6

shorturl.at/q8C68 #ukpolitics

Peak inequality: FTSE 100 CEOs earn more than average worker’s yearly pay by noon today

Carl Harding@chardle· Dec 4

Pepper the black cat sends you lots of furry love, purrs and healing.

Pepper the black cat asleep on the back of a white armchair.

Pepper the black cat demonstrating love and trust by sitting with her back to the camera, on an orange and white cushion.

Pepper the black cat somehow partly under a curl of blanket.

Pepper the black cat asleep on a cushion on a cane chair.

Carl Harding@chardle· Dec 1

What’s going on with Only Connect, BBC?! The Horned Viper is nearly always chosen last. I’m going to start a support group for rejected symbolic serpents…

The symbols used on the UK TV programme Only Connect, which consist of six Egyptian hieroglyphs, row reeds, lion, twisted flax, horned viper, water, and eye of Horus.

Carl Harding@chardle· Oct 24

Just about to send this to BBC complaints. Comments? #bbc #ukpolitics #reform

RE Today Programme, BBC Radio 4, Friday 24th October 2024

Dear Sir or Madam,

Why on earth did the BBC choose yet again to platform Reform when they just lost an election? An interview with Plaid Cymru to learn how they might govern if they won a majority in the Senedd would have been relevant. Labour, the current governing party, lost Caerphilly for the first time in living memory - I wonder how they respond?

What was the justification for interviewing a representative of Reform who came second? I can’t remember the last time, following a by election, we heard not from the winning candidate or their party, not from the current government, not even from the official opposition party, but from a party with a handful of seats in Parliament who lost the election.

In the context of Cardiff University’s recent study quantising the extent of BBC pro Reform bias on Newsnight, this just contributes to listener’s growing sense that the BBC have an obsession with normalising and platforming Reform, whether they are relevant to the conversation or not. As the study noted, “At present they appear to be applying greater weight to trends in opinion poll data as opposed to the [number] of MPs a party has.” As journalists know (or should know) as well as anyone, opinion polls exist in order to shape public opinion as much as to reflect it. It’s all very well to describe Reform as ‘making the political weather’, but that is true at least as much because broadcasters like the BBC choose to make it true as because of the political reality.

BBC Current Affairs will struggle to restore trust in the journalistic integrity of their output until they recover a sense of proportion about Reform and stop acting as if they were employed to promote them.

Yours faithfully,

Carl Harding@chardle· Oct 16

song.link/zcvx0wpmqzfkk This should be our anthem. If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.

Members of the band Manic Steer Preachers all white walking through a desert, casting long shadows, with distant mountains in the background. Beneath the picture, the test reads If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next Manic Street Preachers.

Carl Harding@chardle· Oct 7

How they make jerk chicken. (With to apologies to Gary Larson)

An AI generated image of some farmyard chickens wearing red MAGA hats.

Carl Harding@chardle· Oct 5

This.

Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Carl Harding@chardle· Oct 1

Came across this, from Dr Martin Luther King’s 1963 letter to his fellow clergymen, written from jail in Birmingham Mississippi and nearly fell of my chair. Nailed it, as ever.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; …..Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

Carl Harding@chardle· Aug 17

The folks before us in our house fitted these. Pillar taps. They work fine. Unless your hands are wet or soapy which obviously NEVER HAPPENS IN A BATHROOM. I’m fine. But seriously what an obviously stupid design. Did they test them before production? Did they even think about it? I’m fine.

Pillar taps, a type of bathroom tap which, instead of having a lever or spokes to help to turn the tap, consists instead of a barrel shape.

Carl Harding@chardle· Jul 31

J B Priestley on Nazis 2 The following excerpt from one of J B Priestley’s late evening BBC postscripts on Sunday January 26th 1941, addresses not only the fascist leader himself but what he represented. Try replacing his name with that of a current fascistic leader and see how it reads.

It’s ridiculous to pretend that everything in the garden would have been lovely if it hadn’t been for Hitler. To see him as a solitary evil giant is to flatter him. What he really is is a wicked dwarf, perched on top of a gigantic toadstool of mess and misery, thrown up because the world, after the plain warning of the last war, refused to reform itself. The Nazis and their like are the festering sores on the diseased body of the world.

Fight them? Of course we must fight them! But at the same time we must fight the diseased condition which produced them, otherwise we shall simply go on and on, battling with neurotics and crooks and brigands until civilisation disappears.

Carl Harding@chardle· Jul 31

J B Priestley on Nazis The following was broadcast by Priestley on the BBC as one of his nightly postscripts to the day’s radio. It seems as relevant today as at any time since it was first aired over 80 years ago.

Many people are mystified by the existence of so many fifth columnists who are ready to work for Nazism outside Germany. But you see, Nazism is not really a political philosophy but an attitude of mind; the expression in political life of a certain, very unpleasant temperament; of the man who hates democracy, reasonable argument, tolerance, patience, a humorous equality; the man who loves bluster and swagger, uniforms and bodyguards and fast cars, plotting in back rooms, shouting and bullying, taking it out of all the people who have made him feel inferior.

It’s not really a balanced, grown up attitude of mind at all. It belongs to people who can’t find their way out of their adolescence, who remain overgrown, tormenting, cruel schoolboys, middle aged dead end kids. That’s why the gang spirit is so marked among these Nazis. It explains too why there always seems something unhealthy, abnormal, perverted, crawlingly corrupt about them and all their activities.

Carl Harding@chardle· Jun 26

So pleased to discover today that there’s a movie called Shark De Triomphe. Featuring prominently on the poster is which Paris landmark? Why the Eiffel Tower, of course. This kind of wanton madness makes a insane world bearable. Also pleased to discover it belongs to a genre called sharksploitation!