Jim Bliss
@jimbliss
Philosopher, psychoanalyst, former industrial engineer. Writes words and code. Near Dublin (Ireland). At the intersection between anarchism, socialism, & despair. GenX, gamer, #COYS and very left wing. He/Him. They is fine too. "Everyone's lost but me."
They can't fucking help themselves, can they? Even when the headline is explicitly about a "high temperature warning", they illustrate it with people smiling as they eat ice cream on the beach. Yes, the Climate Change-induced heatwave is literally killing people across Europe. But isn't it FUN!?
Awww. Not Sam Neill. He's been one of my favourite actors since I saw Wim Wenders' Until The End of The World. I don't think I've ever been disappointed by a performance of his (even if the film itself wasn't great). And while I never met him, he seemed like a genuinely lovely man, too. R.I.P Sam.
Once again, the Irish news media aren't necessarily framing the story as they probably should be.
"Which argument are we going with?" We're going with whichever argument is the most anti-Spurs on any given day.
But as someone whose memory stretches back more than a few months, I've seen this growing since long before Reform became a serious electoral force. The people who control the Labour Party have been dragging their party to the right for years now. And it's because *that's who they are*. 2/3
"Click on a few multiple choice responses and we'll tell you who you are". Surprised by the amount of hope. And a tad unsettled by the 23% 'Dubai'. It's probably because I clicked a lot of "Disagree" rather than "Strongly Disagree" (I expect too much nuance). britmonkey.com/2020s-politi...
A line from science fiction (The Expanse) that leaps unbidden to my mind when I read the news these days.
🎵🎶 "You still think swastikas look cool The real Nazis run your schools They′re coaches, businessmen and cops In a real fourth Reich, you'll be the first to go Nazi punks, Nazi punks Nazi punks fuck off!" 🎵🎶
"quote with a fictional band that is not spinal tap" Spinal Tap are not a fictional band. They've toured their own music, written by the band members, so are less "fictional" than most manufactured boy or girl bands you care to mention. First properly fictional band I always think of is...
We saw them in Dublin a couple of years ago and it was a fantastic concert. I predict you'll have a great time tonight (I wasn't aware they were playing again until they'd sold out).
Sadly yes. I mean, like any good populist party, they'll talk the talk on Climate Action if they think that's what you want to hear. But it doesn't translate to policy. I hate to "argue by infographic" but this Friends of the Earth image is instructive In context: www.thejournal.ie/three-leadin...
It could be a close race in the Dublin Central byelection (not my constituency, so I'm just a spectator). Looks like it'll be very close between Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats. Both are crap when it comes to Climate Change, but for everything else you gotta be hoping for a Social Democrat win.
I'm forced to frown at the headline; "Keir Starmer leaves door open to ditching his Brexit red lines". As I mentioned before, closer ties with the EU are not simply a choice the UK makes. The EU has to agree. 1/2
It's a bit of a stretch, but I'm going to use this as an excuse to repost this gem...
Labour slipping to fourth place now. Starmer may say he's staying on, but will his party allow him to? And does it really matter? The media seem to want Farage. They looked over at Trump's USA and said "oooh, let's have some of that". And what the media want, they get. By any means necessary.
Aha! This is why the world's so fecked at the moment. It's all the fault of the archaeologists! I've seen enough Buffy to know how easy it is to accidentally activate a curse while trying to decipher something.
Christ, look at the time! I should be asleep, but I've been "one more chapter"ing this book (The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa) for the past hour. It's weird as hell, but incredibly compelling. Still a bit to go, but I'm already more than willing to recommend it to fans of strange speculative fiction.
🎵🎶 "You still think swastikas look cool The real Nazis run your schools They′re coaches, businessmen and cops In a real fourth Reich, you'll be the first to go Nazi punks, Nazi punks Nazi punks fuck off!" 🎵🎶
I love "Roog". You can also find it in Volume 1 of the Collected Short Stories.
Just to provide evidence for those claims. A recent survey of social media comments featuring the far-right tropes "Ireland is Full" and "Irish Lives Matter" found the vast majority came from outside Ireland, with the UK and USA being the 2 largest sources. See: www.thegist.ie/the-gist-sun...