The Braindump Blog

🎶 Listening to Dreams on Toast by The Darkness.

Another long-serving band releasing an album in 2025 with music that harks back to their signature glam-rock infused albums of yesteryear. You’d recognise this band anywhere.

Apparently they wrote around 150 songs before settling on the 10 that actually ended up on the album, which sounds like a whole lot of work, but the end result was worth it.

🎶 Listening to Mayhem by Lady Gaga.

Gaga is back with her 6th solo album. Doesn’t time fly? I especially liked her music in the earlier “The Fame” days, so I was excited to find out that this one is to some extent a return to the form of her older days, gothicish disco funk et al, and so much the better for it.

Also includes the duet-with-Bruno-Mars song “Die with a Smile”, which is a bit cheesy and played everywhere, sure, but incredibly catchy.

📺 Watched The Celebrity Traitors Season 1.

Unsurprisingly, this is The Traitors, but with celebrities. Astoundingly I’d even heard of some of the celebrities, although who hasn’t heard of Stephen Fry to be fair? Big names!

It’s the same premise. The same potentially psychologically damaging dynamics.

However the stakes felt a lot lower. For a start, each celebrity apparently gets paid £40,000 just to be on the show, which isn’t a ton off the actual prize money of £100k. And secondly, not only is £100k probably not really a life changing amount for many of these folk, they also don’t get it. It goes to charity, which is a nice touch.

But only difference depending on who wins is which charities it goes to - the ones picked by the faithful vs the ones picked by the traitors. As well as the glory of defeating one’s opponents I suppose, which if I had to guess is probably quite appealing to the average celeb I suppose.

Nonetheless, by the end it was really quite addictive. And it did not play out the way I expected it to at all.

Until recently I’ve basically not really cared one way or another about the British flag. It felt just like a fact - “this is the flag of the country you live in” - with no emotional aspect to it, one way or the other. I’d no desire to fly it. I’d no desire to burn it.

More recently, after Operation Raise the Flag et al., much to my surprise I’ve started to actually feel something about it, something emotional. It turns out I do care about it after all.

I hate that it’s being transformed by some of the strategists on the far right from a representation of our country into a symbol of hatred. The flag should, if anything, unite us. It is explicitly being used to divide us. And I loathe that it is being used to represent hate.

I want to find a way to reclaim it from the unpatriotic right-wing extremists, back into at least something neutral, or even better, something with a positive message.

In a The New World article, James Ball puts into far better words than I could something very close to how Operation Raise the Flag et al have been making me feel - as well as helping us to remember what the current actions of a certain type of vitriol-fueled flag waver do to folk who are substantially less privileged than me.

A conversation with a friend who lives between several small towns that have been covered in flags – with more sprayed on roundabouts, road signs, and more, came as a jolt. My friend is British-Pakistani, and the message those flags send is that she can never relax.

She is sure most of her neighbours barely notice them, or think they’re a nice display of patriotism. But she is also aware that the mass display of flags was part of a concerted effort from far right groups and racists, who don’t intend them as a symbol of unity or a celebration of modern, multicultural Britain. They intend them as a threat to people like her.

The result is oppressive. The butcher’s shop down the road now displays a huge union flag on a newly installed pole, as well as England flags painted on the windows. Do they really want her custom?

Her favourite coffee shop is festooned with union jack bunting. Is it just a bit of twee tearoom symbolism, or are the owners sending a message? What are they saying just after she leaves?

Following a hypocritical campaign of victimhood, it’s hard for most people to criticise those who are abusing our flag.

To criticise the display is to risk being misrepresented by the right wing press and populist politicians as unpatriotic and out of touch.

Or worse:

People who have tried to act on their own and cut down flags have been beaten black and blue.

It seems even those people with the whole power of the state behind them are too scared to do anything about it:

The government, afraid of its own shadow, has done almost nothing to speak out regularly and loudly against people misusing our symbols of state for a campaign of hate.

It was not always this way. As ever, I didn’t realise what we had until we lost it:

Among much else, the phenomenon is a reminder of how easily symbols can change and be co-opted, and how fast that process can happen. Whatever the union jack meant as it flew during the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony has nothing to do with when it’s on the streets today. An England flag raised at a football match has nothing in common with one sprayed on to a Chinese takeaway’s shutters.

Ball goes on to show how this horrible appropriation of what should be a symbol to unite the country being turned by right wing ideologues into a message of hate is now infecting the poppy many of us choose to wear for Remembrance Day.

Poppies started as the most sombre of displays of remembrance. The fields upon which millions of men fought and died in the first world war were decked with poppies. Veterans and their families adopted them as a symbol to remember their friends and relatives who had never come home. This practice became a way to fundraise for veterans and their relatives, a commendably charitable instinct that continues to this day.

But has something changed?

So what it is it we’re actually remembering when we engage in what seem like ever more frenetic and extravagant displays of poppy fervour each year? Is this really, sincerely, something that’s about honouring the UK’s veterans of more recent wars, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere? Is the focus on them?

Certainly for the Royal British Legion it is, but the increasing ostentatiousness of the display – and the policing of who is and who isn’t wearing a poppy – feels less about solemn thanks and more about the same kind of nationalism that has come to infest displays of our national symbols.

There’s something stomach-churningly ironic about trying to weaponise the poppy by those who want to punish anyone they deem “not English” enough.

Increasingly, people who share the ideology of the UK’s enemies during the second world war feel empowered to say so – to deny the Holocaust, to demand the UK close our borders, to insist that narratives of “racial purity” are somehow British, rather than the antithesis of our values.

Britain won its wars, the second world war especially, thanks to troops from across its empire. And yet people who dismiss this fact as somehow “woke”, or to be airily dismissed, feel comfortable embracing the poppy as somehow close to their cause.

It is, upsettingly, a very effective political movement, if that’s the right word.

The results of their nocturnal efforts are surely beyond their belief. They have emboldened racists and their champions, and brought misery to those they hate.>

What should we make of this?

This is a reminder of the power of symbols, and of the need to fight for those symbols. As it stands, the flags are being ceded without a fight, and some bastardisation of the poppy’s meaning is being allowed to feed into it.

So then, what must we do?

Well, as awkward and dangerous as it can be, those of us who can should speak out against it. And if you decided to put yourself in a position of power, well, you didn’t campaign on the basis that you’re a massive coward, right?

Pick your side and make it known, or you will, fairly or not, be assigned a default one. No-one sane will think you “hate the flag” if you simply hate that it’s being converted by the hands of a few ill-intentioned everything-a-phobes into a symbol of hatred.

When politicians or commentators are afraid, they vacillate, they hesitate, they dodge the issue, and where they can help it they say nothing at all. Britain’s political elite has a reflexive reaction to avoid saying anything about flags, poppies, or patriotism that might even slightly upset the Daily Mail or Nigel Farage.

For years, they have decided discretion is the better part of valour. But increasingly, it is unmistakably cowardice – Britain’s minorities are being left to live in fear so that politicians can avoid a little discomfort. Those who oppose the UK’s emboldened far right need to speak out, and risk their own necks.

To do otherwise is either appeasement, or it is complicity.

Our country is better than that. It’s on us, the vast majority of people who do not hold extreme, unpatriotic and dangerous right-wing views, to make sure that it stays that way.

📚 Finished reading Minority Rule by Ash Sarkar.

Ash Sarkar, of Novara Media and “I’m literally a communist you idiot” fame, has written a book, which I added to my list of things to read as part of my quest to try and instil in myself some real hope that there was something - anything - the political left could figure out how to do in order deal the perma-crisis that it feels like we’ve all inhabited for at least a few years now.

I’m very glad I read it. To be clear, it doesn’t present a detailed blueprint for what should happen tomorrow - but nor does it pretend to. But I feel that it at least correctly and articulately identifies the key problem, which is more than one can say about a lot of writing on the subject (imho, of course).

The book’s title “Minority Rule” comes from the identically named concept, which she defines as:

…the paranoid fear that identity minorities and progressives are conniving to oppress majority populations.

aka the culture war. This is the whole yawnsome anti-“woke” anti-“liberal elite” shtick. Sure, the prioritisation of the target to most acutely vilify shifts over time. Right now, in the UK, it feels very much like we are all supposed to believe that it’s asylum seekers that are conniving with [insert group you don’t like] to reign above the poor beleaguered British native. That is to say that we somehow imagine that the relatively tiny of group of folk present in our country that have the least power and resources by basically all imaginable measures are our true oppressors; the real reason our lives are difficult, the real reason our country is crumbling. It’s all their fault.

In the past (and still in the present to a large extent) of course it was trans people. Or poor people. Or immigrants as a whole. Or gay people. Or Black people. Or the Irish. You get the picture. Different target, same inane argument.

Regarding the most salient target in recent UK times - asylum seekers - she writes:

How did a word which should otherwise invite feelings of sympathy, solidarity and welcome become a trigger for repulsion, hostility and suspicion?

Sarkar argues that the majoritarian of people are actually perfectly right to think their lives are an unnecessary struggle, almost unbearable at some times for some people - although she’s no particular fan of the conceptual prioritisation of lived experience itself.

And also that we’re right to fear that a small shadowy group of folk are largely responsible for our dismal conditions. But that many of us intuited the wrong group: it’s not some penniless person taking life-or-death risks in order to escape from their foreign torturer that means you have to pay most of your salary out for your crappy rented accommodation, and that’s if you’re lucky. It is the often faceless rich and powerful elites that hold sway.

These same elites proactively use the culture-war tactic of instigating minority rule moral panic in order to keep what is actually the vast majority of the country if we use her preferred definitions - the working-class - divided.

Wealth may not trickle down, but hatred certainly does.

Sadly their efforts worked all too well.

She critiques also many of the aspects of a certain type of modernish day leftist that have been much lampooned by rather less sympathetic authors - fighting amongst themselves about who is the most oppressed, refusing to work with other groups unless they agree 100% with their priorities and so on that have furthered fractured the home of the traditional workers' movement.

All this - and indeed the malign purpose of the culture war itself in her view - has been weaponised by the right and the forces of capital in order to create a fear-hatred loop of distraction large enough that we spend our time arguing about often undefinable “cultural” stuff whilst never finding time to stop to think about our much more quantifiable, and often much more impactful, shared material conditions.

Per the author. materialism is a critical idea to understand. She defines it as:

…the idea that it’s real-world conditions that shape consciousness, and not the other way around: so if you want to understand a person, or a whole community of people, you should look at the distribution of wealth, resources and access to power.

At present we almost never stand back in solidarity with our class as a whole, mutually disgusted at the incredible economic disparities we increasingly see between the poorest and the richest folk in the UK. Or even between the actually a fair bit above average and the richest for that matter.

In her view. we waste a tremendous amount of time and energy “debating”, for example, what bathroom someone who presents as female should use. This stops us from rising up in revolution predicated on the fact that an outrageous number people of all races, genders, sexes, sexualities et al live a cold and hungry existence in one of the richest countries in the world - whilst the same time a few elites makes the same amount of money by doing approximately nothing - or worse than nothing - overnight as we would make in a year.

Sarkar has also a lot to say about how the modern media - traditional and social - landscape has tremendously exacerbated this problem. Namely:

1. A decline in original newsgathering.
2. An increase in commentary around the remaining news.
3. Social media changing how conventional media operates.
4. A decrease in the threshold for ‘newsworthy’.
5. Audience reaction as used as a measure of impact, rather than useful context.

Which bi-directionally influences the modern-day practice of politics, and the apparent increasing feeblisation of those supposedly in government:

Politicians behave more like pundits, signalling their stance on social issues to be cheered by sections of the media, rather than people who actually have the power to transform conditions in the country at large.

After making fairly searing critique of the modern form of indemnity politics as practiced by some of the recent left, she goes on to show, correctly in my view, how now a particular common type of right wing politico has adopted exactly the same style of identity politics despite all their whining and whinging about it.

In her telling, the left enabled this to some extent. The right is able to weaponize identity politics because, contrary to its roots, we created a version that prioritises individual experiences over collective realities.

..identity politics has been appropriated, weakened and warped to become a force that actively inhibits the causes it’s meant to advance

As seems always the case in the modern world: behaviour X is horrible when you do it; behaviour X is great when I do it.

An important consideration: the result not only harms the minorities its weaponised against - but all of us.

A salient example of this to me is the current debate over the European Convention on Human Rights legislation as enacted in the UK. What seems constantly missed in the incessant mass media debates over here is that, yes, laws based on the ECHR can be used to protect the human rights of immigrants to the UK, although in practice they very, very rarely actually are. But in theory, yes, and that is because they are human.

As are you and I. These same laws are what protect your rights and the rights of your family. Do you really want to give all that up just for a very very slightly higher chance of kicking a few people you probably only ever heard of because someone posted a random article half full of misinformation on Facebook out of the country? What makes you think abolishing the ECHR would actually have the effect you want? And even if it did, do you really trust all governments, present and future, to respect your rights even when there’s no legislation that enforces them?

There’s criticism for both the right and the left wing of politics in this book. I expect that there are folk on either side that will have a lot of strong words for the author, although past clashes would suggest she is probably better able to handle it than most of us. Nonetheless, I think it does us all well to read this book from start to finish and think about the causes of our current ideological conflict. If you’re an evil billionaire, sure, you will find little sympathetic to your interests here. But that’s OK, your material needs are already more than met and you can live in your class-conscious bubble and continue to delude yourself into thinking “well actually billionaires are the oppressed class” in your descent into a corrupted form of identity politics if you must (or perhaps become a patriotic millionaire if you have retained your humanity). For the rest of us, quite the opposite.

All the common phrases on this matter sound a bit trite and over-used. But they’re nonetheless true. We have more in common. And perhaps only by acknowledging our shared material status and engaging in some kind of solidarity-driven class conscious politics will we able to do something about the things that make our day-to-day life so hard in the first place.

The “white working class” is of course a real thing, and race - no matter how contrived in principle certainly has a huge impact on many people’s lives in practice. But whilst we’re 100% rage-baited into thinking about the “white” part of the phrase - conducting solely “cultural” rather than class based analysis - we will not improve any of the challenges of deprivation, educational attainment, inequality and so on that many working class families of all types face.

…no one’s talking about the class bit of white working class. It is, fundamentally, a concept that’s intended to stoke the politics of racial resentment

Resulting in no segment of the working class seeing their lives materially improved.

After all, who does actually do you more personal harm - a desperate and traumatised person living in hope that our country will make good on its agreed obligation to allow those most in need to live in and make valuable contributions to our country - or the bank that wants to take your house off you because your employer won’t pay you nearly enough to afford the mortgage payments that your bank just decided should skyrocket?

Who hurts you more? A person who was born with the genitals of one sex but lives their lives peacefully presenting as a different gender - something you may well never have reason to even know - or the monopolistic water company that constantly increases the expensive loans you have to take out in order to cover your bills, whilst polluting the shared natural resource of one of life’s few actual essentials - water - with literal sewage without consequence - whilst at the same time transforming multi-millionaires into billionaires?

What then is the solution? Details are necessarily a little sparse in this book, which to its credit doesn’t in the slightest pretend it is giving out a step-by-step blueprint for the future. There is clearly a lot still yet to be figured out, especially given the massive decline in the institutions associated with the leftist or working class movements of yore. But, to her, and I think my, telling, the answer must surely lie in solidarity.

If we feel alienated, disempowered or lonely, it’s because a project of intense atomisation has made us that way.

A project that tremendously benefited in particular the neo-liberal right of course. Sarkar implores us to focus on the material harms that are being done to us, our friends and our fellow countryfolk on the basis that this will promote economic fairness, but also so much more.

When we are conscious of ourselves as a majority class, we can begin to take back all that was stolen from us – including our sense of comradeship with one another.

📚 Finished reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams.

This book, subtitled “A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism”, is authored by Sarah Wynn-Williams. She went from absolutely idolising Facebook / Meta as an organisation that would do incredible good for the world at large, through to working there as a director of public policy, ending up thinking it was irresponsible company run by extremely unethical people that focussed on growth and profit above all - the titular “careless people” - that actually contributed towards tremendous harm both to its own employees and those of us that populate the rest of the world. This book is her memoir, largely of her time working there.

Those of us that have followed the various scandals and revelations about Facebook that have leaked out in various news outlets over the past few years might have a good idea of many the highlights (well, lowlights). But it’s useful to have it consolidated all in a single source. Some of the stuff on internal culture - the silencing of internal dissent, the ignoring of the wishes of the vast bulk of their ordinary employees, the sexual harassment and total disinterest in doing so, the hypocrisy of outwardly promoting feminism and inwardly caring nothing for the experience of women - was new to me, if unsurprising.

A few of the many many infractions against moral decency that this company actively pursued in order to grow, in order to make their extremely rich C suite even richer:

• A total failure to act on hate speech in Myanmar, that in the end helped fuel the genocide against the Rohingya.
• The targeting of teenagers based on them showing signs of low esteem or depression. Think of instance of them targeting a 14 year old girl with adverts for beauty products after they detect that she deleted a selfie.
• Providing censorship tools and (at least considering) offering user data to authoritarian regimes such as China that demanded them, whilst lying to the authorities about doing so.
• Having their staff help optimise divisive and misinformation-riddled campaigns for various political campaigns that asked, including for Trump’s 2016 victory, in general contributing towards the current degradation of democracy.
• Tolerating internal misconduct and threatening those employees that raised ethical issues with them. This includes protecting the executives that engaged in sexual harassment against their less powerful employees.

When I heard that Meta - supposedly a bastion of free speech these days - attempted to ban its publication, resulting in the author still not being allowed to promote it as such, I knew I had to read it.

The book is an important reminder of the depths the company will sink in order to make more money, to attract new users and wield more power, whatever the cost. And anyone who has managed to remain happily ignorant of how the company that so many of us use - contributing towards their profit each time we do so - might find it truly revelatory. And disgusting.

Some recent ghost stats for Halloween 👻 :

Just over one in three people in England said they believed in ghosts or the spirits of the deceased, with younger people (aged 25-34) most likely to believe in the paranormal, which also includes magical beings, possession, spells, psychics, angels and demons.

…

In total, 39% of survey respondents said they believed there was life after death; 36% said they believed ghosts or spirits of deceased people existed; and 27% said they believed it was possible to communicate with the dead.

Meanwhile, 16% of respondents reported they had had a supernatural experience, but almost one in five had never discussed it with anyone, even family and friends.

In addition, 45% said they had experienced deja vu, while more than a fifth said they had had a premonition of the future.

There’s an interesting gender split in attitude towards these ghosts too:

Parkes-Nield said: “Something that surprised me was, of the people that say they believe in ghosts, they are more likely to be female, but they’re also more likely to believe that the presence of ghosts is something that’s comforting or quite nice, whereas the people who are more likely to believe ghosts are scary are more likely to be male.”

This is so sad:

More than a million ChatGPT users each week send messages that include “explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent”, according to a blogpost published by OpenAI on Monday.

As is the additional:

…about 560,000 of its touted 800m weekly users – show “possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania”

Of course this could very well be reflecting something rather more about the current state of the world and how humanity exists within it than anything causal about ChatGPT itself - although it would probably be foolhardy to suggest that there’s no evidence of adverse impact of its use or theoretical basis for such.

I think it also helps show that there has to be so many very positive uses that this type of technology could be put to - if only it was owned and run by organisations who had some incentive outside of “make as much money as you can for your shareholders”. Likely the real AI alignment problem remains the disconnect between the interests over the tiny number of very rich private monopolistic companies that own its basic building blocks and the interests of human society as a whole.

Apparently today’s youngsters are descending into hysterics after shouting out the numbers 6 and 7.

I did not feel fully explained to after reading the Forbes explainer.

“Six, seven” comes from a 2024 song by the rapper Skrilla, “Doot Doot,” in which he raps: “6-7, I just bipped right on the highway.”

Yes, it makes me feel old and out of touch. Which I suspect the Forbes writer also did given:

Some have characterized the “six, seven” meme as an example of internet “brain rot”—a term for low-quality, meaningless online memes and the negative impact this content may have on consumers, which was named the word of the year by Oxford University Press in 2024.

The WSJ also has a surprisingly long article about it.

Apparently it’s devastating the lives of teachers who have to spend all day avoiding anything to do with the number.

Math teacher Cara Bearden braces herself for any equation that yields the two numbers, knowing her students will immediately scream them right back at her. “SIX Sevennnnnn,” they squeal with a palms-up, seesaw hand gesture that looks somewhere between juggling and melon handling.

…

“If you’re like, ‘Hey, you need to do questions six, seven,’ they just immediately start yelling, ‘Six Seven!’” says Bearden, who teaches sixth- and eighth-graders at Austin Peace Academy in Austin, Texas. “It’s like throwing catnip at cats.”

Now teachers avoid breaking kids into groups of six or seven, or asking them to turn to page 67, or instructing them to take six or seven minutes for a task.

The WSJ is also judgementally categorising the meme as brainrot.

The meme is a prime example of brain rot, the internet junk food consumed by people of all ages to suck away time, productivity and the living of life.

“suck away time, productivity and the living of life”…strong and harrowing words indeed. It’s easy to see why brainrot literally was 2024’s the word of the year.

In some cases the trend would appear to be infecting the teachers themselves. This next sentence feels so very 2025 in so many ways.

On social media, math faculty describe asking ChatGPT to devise tests where every answer is six, seven, 67 and so on.

Numerologists weigh in, again without managing to actually explain anything:

Astronumerologist Jesse Kalsi, author of “The Power of Home Numbers,” calls six and seven “a very unconventional energy” that is somewhat unknowable. “It has a meaning,” he says, “but it is very hidden.”

Here’s one of the truly foundational videos of the 6-7 movement if you want to see what it’s all about.

And Skrilla’s song that somehow started it all (6 7 is about 30 seconds in):

The UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter, reminds us that there is likely more to the abhorrent rise of the far right in the UK (and elsewhere) than a sudden increase in innate racism.

From London to Lisbon, politicians from centre-right and centre-left parties alike had steadily eroded social programmes, fostering a sense of scarcity and creating fertile ground for the stirring up of anti-migrant sentiment, said Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

Knowing that presents a type of political solution that sadly so far the 2 historically-main political parties have done very little to counteract. In fact, they tend to do exactly the opposite.

“If we were doing more, people would not feel threatened, they would not fear falling behind,” he said. “They would be reassured that the digital and ecological transitions and globalisation will be painless because they are protected by a state that cares for them.”

He is of course precisely correct that the typical modern-day framing of the welfare state as something that is, at best, a necessary evil is misguided, inaccurate, self-defeating and really forgets the whole rationale for a large part of its introduction decades ago in the UK.

At the heart of his argument is the need for governments to rethink the welfare state – from food assistance to healthcare and unemployment benefits – as an essential tool to maintain the social fabric of society, rather than a cost to be reduced.

Doing our best to minimise the ability of desperate people to access the support they so desperately need is fuel on the flames of the sort of conflict we see in present day UK.

De Schutter said mainstream politicians around the world had for decades made it increasingly difficult to obtain benefits, increasing surveillance and stigmatising claimants. “And the message was: it’s a cost to society, it’s a burden, rather than an investment in the future.”

What emerged was a sense that access to such resources must be stringently limited, De Schutter said. “The message is: it is us against them. And what goes to one group must be denied to others, because there’s not enough for everyone,” he said. “It’s a discourse that sets people against one another. And that’s extremely dangerous, and I do think that is what the far right is now reaping.”

Research would seem to be on his side.

His view is backed by a 2021 study that looked at 14 countries across Europe and found that a one-point increase in income inequality corresponded to a one-point increase in support for populist parties.

Higher pension levels, minimum wage legislation and increases to child allowances have also been shown to diminish the likelihood of people voting for the far right.

The parties currently reaping the political rewards - Reform here in the UK - may appear populist, claim to be the voice of the “common man”, telling whatever lies they want to in order to maximally rail against some nonsensical combination of “the liberal elite” and the people most in need of help in the world. But their political kinfolk that have actually gotten into power elsewhere have shown that their type typically has no interest in actually helping even the archetypical “White working class man” they espouse such reverence for - let alone the rest of the 99%.

Referring to the current US and Argentinian governments:

When the far right and rightwing populists have won power, including Donald Trump’s administration in the US or Javier Milei’s in Argentina, their actions suggested their focus was on further dismantling social protection, he said.

“Once in power, they work to maintain the privileges of the very economic elite they denounce in their speeches, slashing food assistance, healthcare and other life-saving services,” he said. “They haven’t kept their promises to the lower middle class, they’ve actually made things worse and the levels of inequalities and poverty have grown significantly in those two countries.”

Given Reform’s pro-billionaire, anti-working-class policies, and the astonishing failures we’ve seen so far with their inroads into local government, it is clear they will be no different.

📚 Finished reading Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin.

This was a book with an absolutely fascinating premise that kept me thinking long after I finished it.

The general idea is that, presumably sometime in the near future, a company called Nepenthe offers a controversial medical procedure to the public that allows people to fully erase any particular memory that they have. It is usually only able to erase periods of your life that occurred over a short and defined timespan. The typical use-case is people erasing moments of trauma in order to eliminate their PTSD or whatever else is causing them to struggle with life.

There are two approaches on offer. In the standard method you sign up for the erasure, sign the legal docs, get the procedure done and go about your life unencumbered by the legacy of your previous memory whilst knowing that you erased a memory. You might even know what type of memory it was, but you won’t any more have the direct recall of it. You won’t viscerally remember the whatever presumably terrible thing happened to you. It will no longer affect your mental health.

Then there’s the more dramatic option where you decide you don’t want to even remember that you have ever erased a memory. In this case, assuming you can set up the rest of your life such that you won’t find out, you won’t know you’ve had a memory erasure and let alone what it was that happened to you that you desperately wanted to forget.

Everyone thought the procedure was a one-way operation at first - that when you lost the memory it was gone for good. However new developments in science showed that it could be brought back with another procedure.

People who knew they’d had a memory erased were then allowed apply for it to be un-erased. Those who didn’t know they had a memory erased obviously wouldn’t know about it so wouldn’t think to apply. That’s until such time as the courts mandated that Nepenthe contact all these non-knowing people to alert them to the fact that they did have an erased memory and had a right to have it un-erased if they so wished.

This was obviously a shock to the people concerned. Imagine waking up to an email hat told you you had some of your past erased - and that your previous self had decided to keep that knowledge from your current self!

Although it may not have been a total surprise to 100% of the self-secreting patients: part of the court’s decision may have been driven by a few reports of people getting unexpected flashes, or “traces”, of their supposedly gone memories or other unwanted side effects that the person themselves could have no idea whatsoever of the source. Nepenthe minimised or denied these reports - let us question whether it was really a good idea to allow the sole power to do this procedure to rest in the hands of a private biotech company with their; IRL lessons for us all to learn here - but nonetheless the idea entered the public consciousness.

What would you do if you were one of these people? Would you want to unerase the memory that your past self deemed was unbearable? Would it make your life better or worse? What would the implications be for the people around you - your family, your friends and so on?

This was probably an especially challenging decision for the people who did not go on to lead a good and happy life after the procedure. Could it be that their erasure led to their subsequent downfall? After all, what are we without our memories?

There are of course many deep philosophical questions at play here, not least around what actually constitutes the self, what forms your identity - and I loved watching the characters play through them

Had another wonderful day out with a friend at 2025’s New Scientist Live

The talks I attended:

Why AI isn’t taking over the world in 2026 (and when it might happen)

Flint Dibble exposes how pseudo-archaeology distorts history and offers tools to challenge misinformation about our human past.

Can we eat our way to happiness? The gut-brain connection explained

Emily Prpa explores the fascinating science of the gut-brain axis and how your microbiome may hold the key to a happier, healthier life.

What on earth can we do about climate change?

Matt Winning hilariously tackles climate change, revealing causes, needed changes, and what we can (and can’t) do.

How gaming changed the world

Andy Miah reveals gaming’s transformative impact on technology, AI, and education, highlighting the importance of smart gaming for a better future.

Space oddities: The mysterious anomalies challenging our understanding of the universe

Physicist Harry Cliff discusses cosmic anomalies, from Antarctic particles to mysterious forces, revealing hidden realms of the universe.

Self defence: A myth-busting guide to immune health

World-leading immunologist Daniel Davis debunks immunity myths, revealing unique immune systems and practical tips for enhancing immune health.

Quantum computing: From testing the multiverse to a tech revolution

Maria Violaris demystifies how quantum computers actually work; the global race towards building them; and how they could radically change our everyday lives.

How to insure a hobbit: And other questions from the frontiers of fantasy mathematics

Uncover how mathematics shapes fantasy worlds, from Harry Potter spells to Star Wars tech, as Tom Crawford reveals the secrets behind beloved franchises.

Is our fixation with diagnosis making us feel worse?

Join neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan in conversation with an expert host as she discusses the impact of modern medicine on health and diagnoses.

Are smartphones and social media really causing brain rot?

Peter Etchells investigates if our brains are truly being rewired by endless scrolling and notifications, or if the panic over screen time is overblown.

Previously:

• 2024
• 2022

📺 Watched Wednesday seasons 1 and 2.

This is Wednesday as in Wednesday Addams. The creepy goth girl you’ll be familiar with if you have followed the Addams media at all, which has, astoundingly, existed since 1938 when The New Yorker published their adventures in single-panel comic form. They later debuted on the small screen in the 1960s.

Anyway, here we focus on the daughter, Wednesday, as she attends Nevermore Academy as she goes about the stresses and strains of daily life as a loner-inclined student - occasionally using her psychic visions and impressive intelligence to help solve the odd violent crime here and there.

It’s really well done. The deadpan dialogue is hilarious in places, especially between her and her roommate who has rather different emotional inclinations.

Some of the sound track is excellent too. Lady Gaga pops up in season two. And the piano rendition of The Cranberries' justly famous song “Zombie” is so good I had to rush out and procure a copy.

It’s also on the Wednesday season 2 sound track release which is available in all the usual places including Apple and Youtube - alongside a version by Bella Poarch.

I then found out I’m not very good at playing the piano. But hey, practice makes perfect, maybe.

📺Watched Doctor Who season 2.

That’s the season 2 released in 2025. Confusingly, there have been at least three season 2s now for various whims and licensing decisions. This is the one where Doctor is now played by Ncuti Gatwa.

And I’m pleased to say I found it generally more enjoyable than some of the seasons over the past few years were. Good stuff for Who fans.

At the same time I’m slowly continuing my epic quest to watch all Doctor Who eps from the 1960s onwards. Well, all the ones that haven’t tragically been lost to the mists of time, which, shockingly, it seems quite a few of the early ones were. On that front I have recently entered the colour TV era.

📺 Watched The Inheritance season 1.

This one is a reality show where 13 people are summoned by a deceased version of Elizabeth Hurley and a very English-posh butler to compete for her inheritance. For some reason she wants her wannabe-inheritors to do tasks together, each of which releases a part of the inheritance cash.

The participants then have to decide amongst themselves which person they want to inherit that day’s inheritance money. That person is free to secretly gift segments of their winnings to other folk, or not. And occasionally who to, going forward, disinherit entirely.

A pretty contrived premise that is not quite as compelling, or probably as psychologically damaging as the The Traitors imo - but it’s the same sort of thing and inevitably I was pretty invested by the end. I know I’ll be watching season 2 if there is one.

📺 Watched Black Mirror season 7.

This unsettling show (mostly) about the dark side of of our increasing fascination with technology is back - “what if phones, but too much?”, and, on occasion, extremely on the nose. The home of many a torment nexus.

Previously.

🎥 Watched Infinity Pool.

We join a struggling author and his wealthy wife taking a break at a secluded luxury resort to answer the question: what if the punishment for committing crimes was harsh but it isn’t (exactly) you that has to pay the price for it - at least if you’re rich enough?

The “how” is extremely weird. And creepy. But a pretty gripping - and disturbing - exploration of privilege and morality.

It is of course not like the richer folk amongst us in the real world can’t or don’t buy their way out of the legal consequences of immorality that the rest of us might face. Maybe this film is the logical conclusion of that. I hope not.

Shades of the White Lotus, but messed up. Which is saying something.

📚 Finished reading The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

I’d heard grim and dark things about this book which made me regularly put off reading it until now. It is certainly disturbing, depicting the life, thought processes and cruel and violent acts of Frank, an teenager isolated by his detached and confused mental state and his physical location.

I can see it being rather controversial, especially the somewhat implausible (to me) ending. But it’s a compulsive read for any fans of darkly gothic genres.

I like this quote from Elizabeth Spiers' article “Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning”

There is no inherent virtue in caring about your own children; that is the bare minimum requirement for effective parenting. Virtue lies in caring about the safety and well-being of children you don’t know.

To be clear, the article is not one of the as far as I can tell mostly but not entirely mythical articles from “liberals” celebrating the death of a free speech advocate.

Rather, she writes:

I do not believe anyone should be murdered because of their views, but that is because I don’t believe people should be murdered generally, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done.

Yesterday saw the largest ever far right rally taking place in Britain.

(Photo from UPI.com)

This is not to suggest that every participant identifies as far right politically, and some may not even hold most of the views associated with that extremist movement (although this is something I’d like to have a way of establishing). But it was certainly organised by, promoted by, and paid for by some of the overtly far right elite who wish to replace British democracy and tradition with authoritarism, stifle our free speech, turn our national flag into a symbol of hate and rob us of our rights.

Whilst the organisers' claim of attracting the 3 million participants is laughably high, it seems perhaps 110,000 people or so did turn up to show their support for the convicted violent criminal, unashamed Islamophobe and probable millionaire Tommy Robinson, amongst other things.

There was a counter-protest, I think largely organised by valiant groups as Stand Up To Racism, which numbered around 5,000. I am ashamed to have only stood with them in a metaphorical sense.

(Photo from Reuters)

If you feel inclined to support organisations that are standing against the Robinson crowd in a material way then I know organisations such as the afore-mentioned SUTR are taking donations, as are Hope Not Hate and Amnesty International, which are another couple of worth orgs that I believe had a presence.

There is too much to say to comprehensively summarise what happened and what it means, very little of it good. However, a couple of points stood out to me.

Firstly, for all that the controlling elite of the movement claims to be obsessed with the superiority of everything English and the need for national sovereignty, they sure invited a lot of foreigners to lecture us we should do as a country in terms of the main-attraction speakers.

Éric Zemmour a French politician of the far-right, delivered a soliloquy on the racist and inflammatory conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement Theory, saying:

We are both subject to the same process of the Great Replacement of our European peoples by peoples coming from the south and of Muslim culture. You and we are being colonised by our former colonies

This is a protest that claimed to be - albeit there was no chance it ever was going to be - an effort to “Unite the Kingdom”.

A Belgian politician, Philip Dewinter claimed that:

It has to be clear that Islam is our real enemy, we have to get rid of Islam. Islam does not belong in Europe and Islam does not belong in the UK.

A Dutch commentator, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, put out this absolute inflammatory nonsense:

They are demanding the sacrifice of our children on the altar of mass migration. Let’s not beat about the bush — this is the rape, replacement, and murder of our people… Remigration is possible, and it’s up to us to make it happen. We are Generation Remigration.

Ada Lluch, a Spanish influencer, claimed:

The government are taking our money and financing the great demographic replacement of our nation.”

And of course the biggest celebrity who spoke, via video link, was Elon Musk. With comments that are as deranged, anti-democratic , anti-patriotic as those that we have increasingly have come to expect from him.

A few choice snippets, courtesy of the Independent:

Elon Musk called for a change of government in the UK and railed against the “woke mind virus” as he spoke at Tommy Robinson’s rally in London.

The X owner claimed a “dissolution of Parliament” is needed and said “massive uncontrolled migration” was contributing to the “destruction of Britain” in comments via video link.

And Indy100:

He went on to address what he called “the reasonable centre” – people who “ordinarily wouldn’t get involved in politics, who just want to live their lives. They don’t want that, they’re quiet, they just go about their business.”

“My message is to them: if this continues, that violence is going to come to you, you will have no choice,” he said.

“You’re in a fundamental situation here. Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you.

“You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth, I think.”

Given the UK is supposedly internationally renowned (and hated by the people running this particular event) for its policing of speech, arresting people for tweets and so on - and yes we do in fact have a ban on inciting people to racial hatred so if you plead guilty to that offense then you do face legal consequences - it is quite incredible to me that these foreign entities were allowed to spew such obvious vitriol, hatred and calls to violence to a crowd of 100,000+ people hyped up on Tommy’s lies.

“Two tier policing”, some might say. Especially in an era where we are arresting hundreds of peaceful protestors for holding up signs saying ““I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” or cartoons from a mainstream magazine.

Again, let’s remember, that the claimed aim of this event - its literal name - was to Unite The Kingdom. I suppose they didn’t specify which kingdom. The fake “patriots” organising it clearly had a kingdom other than the United Kingdom in mind.

It’s always easiest to see the hypocrisy in people you disagree with I admit. But this time it’s surely unmissable.

Imagine if instead of a foreigner who looks like Elon Musk - and also happens to use his status as the world’s richest man to support and fund the type of groups that organised this misinformed disarray - we had a foreigner that looks like anything that fits people’s stereotype of “a Muslim” who was avidly and explicitly agitating for the UK government to be overthrown immediately and that it is perfectly reasonable - and indeed necessary - to use violence in order to combat your ideological enemies

Again, this is exactly what the organisers of these events claim to fear - the whole “the UK is under Sharia law and that’s why no-one dares leave their house in London in case they get blown up by an Islamic terrorist” nonsense.

Sharia law is not the law of the land, nor is there any sign that it will be at any point in the future. Friends that live in London report that people do still leave their houses, believe it or not.

Replace the word “Sharia” with the phrase “far right and foreign billionaire friendly” and you get a threat that qualitatively parallels original paranoid conspiracy claim but appears to be rather more likely to happen.

Even in the short term - despite supposedly being a group who often claim to be substantially more infused with a respect of British law and order than others - the calls to violence were unfortunately directly acted upon by (a minority of) the protestors.

The Met police report that 26 officers were injured, some seriously so:

The injuries include broken teeth, a possible broken nose, a concussion, a prolapsed disc and a head injury.

The Tommy Robinson protestors deviated from the organised route in order to encircle the smaller group of counter-protestors:

“When officers moved in to stop them they faced unacceptable violence,” the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.

“They were assaulted with kicks and punches.

“Bottles, flares and other projectiles were thrown.”

The last thing that I want to document for now is once again the difference between the claim of what the organisers and their followers are against, are “terrified” of - and their actual behaviour as exhibited at this event.

The original advertising I saw for this protest referred to it as a celebration of free speech - a “free speech festival”. Sounds fun and wholesome, right? Well, in a different world, perhaps.

What did we actually see? A set of speakers that were largely constrained to basically one relatively marginal set of extremist political beliefs, attacks on the folk who were, as far as I can tell, peacefully counter-protesting, and perhaps most incredible of all, the star speakers literally calling for a crackdown on people’s free speech right:

“This is a religious war,” said Brian Tamaki, leader of New Zealand’s Destiny Church. “Islam, Hinduism, Baháʼí, Buddhism — whatever else you’re into — they’re all false. We’ve got to clean our countries up. Get rid of everything that doesn’t receive Jesus Christ. Ban any public expression of other religions in our Christian nations. Ban halal. Ban burqas. Ban mosques, temples, shrines — we don’t want those in our countries.”

Was it a rogue speaker? Certainly not, if the reaction of the supposedly freedom-loving crowd was to be taken seriously:

…a big crowd cheering speeches that called for banning all public expression of non-Christian religions,

No freedom of speech. No freedom religion. No freedom of expression. No freedom of assembly. People associated with the organisers of the event seem desperate to deprive us citizens of our actual rights, visible not least in Reform’s campaign to remove some of the very laws that protect them.

Sky reporter Tom Cheshire notes that an appeal to Christianity was something relatively novel to this rally of the right compared to others he has covered.

That’s been a difference with this rally compared to past ones I’ve covered - an overt Christian nationalism.

People carried wooden crosses. One person had a light-up crucifix.

When the crowd arrived at Whitehall, they were led from the stage in a chant of ‘Christ is king’. And then a public recital of the Lord’s Prayer shortly after that. It’s an important difference. Not just a flag to rally around, but a religion too.

🎥 Watched The Mauritanian.

In an era where people that should know better are expanding the remit of the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention camp, I finally got around to watching this film. It’s the true story of one person’s experience of Guantanamo’s original setup.

It’s absolutely horrific. The person in question is Mohamedou Ould Slahi who was alleged by the authorities to have been involved in planning the appalling 9/11 terrorist attack on the US. He certainly had some prior contact with al-Qaeda, having trained in one of their camps back in 1990, but claimed that he had severed all connections with the organisation in 1992.

The authorities claimed otherwise, although according to the film they really had very little evidence for it. He certainly wasn’t actually charged with any offence or permitted a court trial before being incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. Whereupon all the horror stories you may have read about that went on there were visited upon him. Per Wikipedia:

Slahi was subjected to sleep deprivation, isolation, temperature extremes, beatings and sexual humiliation at Guantánamo. In one documented incident, he was blindfolded and taken out to sea in a boat for a mock execution.

Basically he was tortured. They even threatened his family. This would have course all been illegal on American soil, but was seemingly par for the course there.

Eventually he was released - but not before having to undergo 14 years of this appalling treatment.

When he came out he wrote a memoir which was published as “Guantánamo Diary”. The Mauritanian is the film adaption of that. Which makes it extremely disturbing of course.

A lot of the focus of the film is on the lawyers who finally defended him - Nancy Hollander and Theresa Duncan - and the difficulties of doing so when your suspect is locked up in Guantanamo, sections of the public are very against the idea of defending anyone who might remotely be involved in terrorism, evidence be damned, and, at times, you’re not quite certain that your client isn’t guilty of a horrific offence.

Nonetheless no-one should face punishment without a fair trial - essentially on the whims of the authorities - and certainly no-one should be tortured.

Also from this month’s Byline Times - concerns for the ongoing ‘insect apocalypse’ based on studies done in the past few years.

The first was based on research conducted by a team at Radboud University in the Netherlands and published in 2017. It revealed that the overall biomass of insects caught in its traps in German nature reserves had fallen by three quarters from 1989 to 2014.

The second was published in 2019 and reviewed 73 reports of insect decline from around the world. The summary was equally bleak. Looked at globally, 41% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds, and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, suggesting that they could vanish altogether within a century.

This is important for all sorts of reasons - not least that almost all ‘terrestrial’ food chains require insects in order to function.

Some terrifying sounding statistics on political violence in the US in this month’s Byline Times.

The technical definition of a civil war is a thousand combatant deaths within a year, according to the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. The definition of civil strife starts at 25 deaths within a single year.

During the five past years, rightwing extremists have killed, on average, more than 60 people a year in the United States. Therefore, by definition, America is already in civil strife, and some argue that it is now on the threshold of civil war.

And later:

Today’s political violence is almost exclusively right-wing, as documented in a study conducted by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies which found that, of the 893 terrorism incidents that took place on US soil between January 1994 and May 2020, left-wing groups and individuals were responsible for 22 of the 3,086 deaths. These numbers do not include the dozens, if not hundreds, of planned right-wing attacks that will have been foiled by law enforcement authorities.

Marche says that the mainstream media is yet to understand and articulate the size and scope of this growing domestic terror threat, arguing that even fringe groups within the anti-government patriot movement are “sizeable”, with one - Sovereign Citizens, which rejects government authority and existing legal systems attracting more than 300,000 active members alone.

Finally, some good news:

…calling your boss a dickhead is not a sackable offence, a tribunal has ruled.

Regarding the upsettingly wide-spread and often violent anti-immigrant protests last year that occurred after the appalling Southport murder:

Two out of every five people arrested after participating in last summer’s riots had been previously reported to the police for domestic abuse

…

Previous offences include actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, stalking, breach of restraint and non-molestation orders, controlling coercive behaviour and criminal damage.

These protests aren’t really anything to do with ‘protecting our women and girls’ (whatever the ‘our’ in that common claim is supposed to mean).

We know many of the protests were instigated or attended by some extremely racist far right extremists. And now it seems like a high proportion of those arrested for their criminal actions at these protests are themselves have a history of violence, often against women.