I need to go to fuckin bed now, like a normal person, but I may have Some Tweeting to do later about how I think I've inadvertently redeemed Ptolemy's bugfuck bonkers map of Scotland. Well, not *entirely*, but to a pretty significant extent for the Lowlands at least. OK, so this is Ptolemy's map of Scotland. As you may notice, it's... a little wonky. Like WTAF levels of wonky, bent over at a 90º angle (and then some) like someone came at it from behind, stuck a knee in its back & snapped its frickin spine like a supersoldier getting creative.

The message: take your civility centrism out to the desert, put a bullet in the back of its head & bury it in a shallow grave. "Decency" will not prevail when fascism's unleashed just because it's decency. Bourgeois propriety is exactly what the fascists are radicalised against.

https://twitter.com/CharlesPPierce/status/1323908547260940289

Fascism is fuelled by ressentiment and related pathologies. Like narcissism (because arguably it *is* a mode of narcissism, narcissism on a societal level,) when challenged by realities you'd expect to make a reasonable person see reason, that shit just *powers the denial*.

I hate the prequels, but I will consider them worth it for McGregor being given a chance to do Kenobi again but, fingers crossed, in a series with good stories & a proper Star Wars visual style. Like rough drafts I can bin from my memory, needed on the way to a finished product.

https://twitter.com/donohoe/status/1323247200869273600

Him being ages with me, I find the tale of him making the lightsaber noises with his mouth during the fights just so identifiable with, & you can see the love he put into it. I've always been gutted for him that he got a childhood dream only to have it turn out... like it did.

Bob and Sally are still friends because Bob and Sally are both cunts.

https://twitter.com/sentientist/status/1322934522896289792

If Sally wasn't a brunching centrist fuckin tool, she'd take her friend Bob aside & have a friendly fuckin word with him about him being a fascist. If she was anywhere near open enough to get through to him, you can 100% guarantee he'd break the friendship off, him being a cunt.

"I think he's ready to go. I believe it now." Even if one extends Trump the most charitable reading--that the gobshite vpidly sought to posture a calming stance while not alienating the fash--it's worth saying that there's no way he'll back out of the leadership role he's now in.

https://twitter.com/amyspitalnick/status/1311377582764556288

I mean, it's a real fuckin stretch being that charitable, but I don't wanna underestimate just how much his narcissism can and does drive him to just speak without actual intent at all, without real thought, just opening his gob & spewing extemporized drivel that pushes buttons.

All you really need to know, AFAIC, fiction-wise, practically speaking is past perfect versus simple past and the idea of "continuous" that gives us, like, simple present versus present continuous.

https://twitter.com/howtaobrowncow/status/1311373745341239299

(In fiction, present continuous can read kinda floaty & distanced, which can be put to good effect, but because of that it gets used to slather a contrived air of import in lieu of actual effective import, & that can grow old as fast as every sentence being its own paragraph.)

It's a bully's smugness. Simple as that. As a narcissist, he's always already performing superiority & scorn, the triumphalism of having already won, and when he's using that to recruit followers, they get to feel the same gleeful exultation over whomever he's targeting.

https://twitter.com/BlanksSlate/status/1311001032512729088

I don't really get why this is mystifying, tbh. It's written all over his face every speech he gives, and it's written all over the faces of the audience members as they lap it up. It's transparent that he's crowing, gloating over his opponents as if he's already won.

New toy. #rakesden All snake's head fritillaries and snowdrops are now planted around the garden. I didn't manage to get that many into the lawns because there was gie few spaces I could even get down to any depth even *with* the bulb planter, but there's enough to test if they survive at least.

Don't know how folk are glossing over the ban on working with external agencies "promoting divisive or victim narratives that are harmful to British society" because that's ANY group highlighting ANY form of prejudice, making this Section 28 for everyone.

theguardian.com/education/2020… Literally any group addressing any form of victimisation can be classed as promoting a "victim narrative". Any group saying gaybashing occurs, racism exists, the Holocaust happened... those can all be deemed "victim narratives".

Bulbs! Must say the packaging from Farmer Gracy looks terribly classy, and with zero plastics. Hmm. The advice with the ranunculus is to start them in pots in a cool greenhouse, and to give them 3-12 hours of a soak beforehand, so I guess the cold frame thingy will be coming back into use and they're not going in today.

They should have taken it right back to the Sheriff of Nottingham, the original proof that #ACAB.

https://twitter.com/thepoliticsund1/status/1309425403560374272

Oh no, just think of the travails of that poor Jonathan Wild, Thieftaker General and kingpin of the London underworld--at least the bit of it that wasn't run by Charles Hitchen, City Under-Marshall, that fine upstanding copper & fence with his team of 2000 pickpockets.

I mean, it's not wrong; debate club is fratriarchy by rhetoric.

https://twitter.com/ProfSunnySingh/status/1309077604838842371

Also, I will make "fratriarchy" happen to save us all godawful mouthfuls like "imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal" if it's the last thing I do, and I don't care if you call me Gretchen for it.

"school" or workhouse?

https://twitter.com/feministabulous/status/1308829265639727104

"OK, kids, today's lesson is carrying. Now if you'll all pick up your box of bricks--no, Sean, you can't go to the toilet, you'll just have to hold it in."

Option 4: An open border between NI and Scotland as part of the rUK with Wales, and a hard border around an independent England.

https://twitter.com/RussInCheshire/status/1306904103671541763

By "hard border" I may or may not mean "moat of fire". And before youz sane English folk get in a flap about being left trapped in Little Brexitannia, all existing UK citizens would continue with rUK citizenship, yez'd just be living abroad, see, we widnae hing yez oot tae dry.

Do not mention that "In 2015, she signed a letter in support of the Ordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family which endorsed the Catholic Church's teachings on human sexuality and its definition as marriage as between one man and one woman." No, you must not mention this "faith".

https://twitter.com/Danny_Funaro/status/1307766199808405506

How very dare you mention the fact that the fascist is a fascist? Good people have spent nigh on two millennia co-opting an anarchosocialist cult to imperialist ends & propagating it via reforms & revivals into a multi-headed force for oppression guised as "piety"! The prejudice!

This

(though I think casting it as "imperfect" versus TERFdom in the thread maybe minimises the eugenics apologetics that makes the Harry Potter books, IMO, faux-progressive fascism, bound to a biological determinism that 100% stands as foundation stone for her TERFdom.)

https://twitter.com/RB_Lemberg/status/1308057926859448320

I think there's arguably a glimpse of her TERFdom actually in the deeply weird way Rita Skeeter is characterised as having a heavy jaw and "mannish" hands with thick fingers. That's a revealing way of rendering her a grotesque to code her as villain (like the "swarthy" goblins.)

Well, learning experience in #Rakeden: I'd expected the herb robert in Undercherry all to have flowered and gone over long before now, as elsewhere, so it could then be cleared, allowing the bugle & cyclamen time to come back through late summer. Alas, no. I'm guessing maybe that area directly under the cherry just hasn't had enough hours of sun to spur the flowering, so it's just grown thicker and greener, leaving the poor bugle and cyclamen too deprived of sunlight, I reckon, to get going on again properly.

Not about fixing the politics, just about fixing the craft, but I may or may not have simplified the whole Barty Crouch Jr/Sr backstory to entirely remove the whole dumb & complicated Bertha Jorkins distraction because what even is the point there? I mean, you simply have Crouch Sr's wife die *when the Dementors are hunting Sirius*, her dying wish for Crouch to give their son her love... & for Winky to give their son an Invisibility Cloak & wand to Imperius Curse dad, stage his own death & walk out past the Auror stand-ins.

I may or may not have edited the instances of characters in TPoA talking about Azkaban or the Dementors to slowly make more & more explicit that wizard justice is an abuse of human rights the Muggles would never allow, not "in this day age", not "in a civilised country". This contrast may or may not be encapsulated by a Hermione, earlier seen frowning & headshaking over a Muggle Studies tome, furious at the prospect of Buckbeak's execution: that wizards see Muggles as peasants with pitchforks, but it's the wizarding world stuck in the Dark Ages.

I'm guessing from the fact I'm still getting wafts of smell in my flat--from all the way over in the back lane diagonally opposite my corner of the back court--that the council hasn't yet removed the food bin that was left unemptied for six months & then left toppled in the lane. I went out the other day to find a half dozen empty bins for food waste just sat there, with the overstuffed one lying on the ground, lid open, rotting food waste spilling out, where clearly the bin men had lost control of it on the uneven cobbles and just left it where it fell.

There is a bit of dry shade in Birchby that's looking a bit bare at the moment, and I'm trying very hard not to buy three (3) Carex "ice dance" for £3 each cause it'd be under a tenner and there's one in there already they'd go with, maybe with one used elsewhere for balance. Also do I want to pre-order 30 or 50 snake's head fritillary bulbs for September, they're so cheap, how can I resist them?