Jay

@natalieben When we come back, it's constant comments how self-condfident, comfortable, independent our three are. We do nothing different than we did in the UK. I tell teachers, parents, GPs etc in BC about UK norms and they literally gasp and put their hands to their mouth in horror.

@natalieben It's not schools. It's UK culture towards children. They're treated like a separate, inferior species. Our decision to leave the UK was heavily influenced by the casual cruelty and disrespect children face from parents, schools, society.

So much going horrendously wrong in schools "Their child had had a toilet pass for a number of years, but it had now been taken away. She said the child required an updated doctor's note to obtain a new one. The note would cost £24" bbc.com/news/articles/…

@FPLpandas @SimonOKing @bbcweather Mate, you'll be fine. Maybe tuck away the garden furniture.

@SimonOKing @bbcweather I’ve got 15,000 mph winds

Oops, don’t be alarmed by some of our @bbcweather app data this morning. Be assured there won’t be 14408mph winds, hurricane force winds or overnight temperatures of 404°C. 🤦‍♂️ It is being looked at and hopefully sorted asap 🤞

@BFriedmanDC @dfenton It's not breaking down. It broke down at least 8-9 years ago. Cambridge Analytica, Brexit, Trump... all a direct result of the breakdown. Social media are publishers without responsibility; info needs to be curated. What's happened without those checks & balances was inevitable.

@ELPinchbeck And treat each floor/room differently, eg attic rooms with zero roof insulation are a different beast than mid floor, stone wall insulated, south facing... its not about 'building' solutions, it's about 'room' solutions.

@ELPinchbeck Redo draught proofing strips on windows (and doors) each year. Heavy curtains and sausage dogs. Listed sash windows are a 'mare to double glaze etc, don't go there. Boiler upgrade was good (in 2013, our oil boiler had a service sticker from 1984), but heat pump a game changer.

@CapelLofft A lack of imagination & inability to see beyond a narrow worldview is truly the mark of a mediocre white man. Being unable to see beyond a growth-based perception of 'living standards' is terrifying. I started to live beyond growth & my 'standard' of living grew exponentially.

Politicians and environmentalists have got to face up to some hard realities. If you seriously want to decarbonise the economy and abandon the use of fossil fuels now or very soon, then - unless you lean very hard into nuclear - living standards are going to have to collapse

@AndrewBowie_MP Again...People didn't vote for Labour because we love them. We just wanted anything but the Tories. People don't 'approve' of Labour, but we're still relieved to have the grown-ups back in charge. Which shows quite how terrible you were.

In 2015, the new Conservative Majority Government, re-elected from coalition, had approval ratings of 39%. That's still 16% higher than the new Labour Govt...and that was after 5 years! Again...Labour have been in power for 2 months.

@teymoornabili @DoctorVive The fact you saw no deliberate misinformation doesn't mean there was no deliberate misinformation. Which is exactly why you need it to be curated. 🤷‍♀️

omg. The paper he's citing as proof that my research is faulty explicitly says that ESTIMATES OF $136/tCO2 FOR DIRECT AIR CAPTURE ARE NOT BELIEVABLE. (Yes, eventually I'm going to block the *entire* BTI, but first I have to defend myself from this nonsense.)

@KlinikPatrick @CharlieJGardner No, not in light of those reasons per se. But it is a naive argument that's already been proven incorrect on multiple occasions. If we continue down the ecocidal path of using the term degrowth, we'll very soon see lay-offs, unplanned lack of growth etc called 'degrowth'.

@JayBWritesStuff @CharlieJGardner I see, thanks for your diligent answer. And finally, you think that the argument that degrowth couldn’t be “co-opted” is weak in light of the reasons you mentioned?

'Degrowth' is going to be the most inappropriately overused word since 'rewilding', isn't it?

@ClaireCoutinho You shat on everyone for 14 years. You lied, you obfuscated, you pleaded ignorance, you killed thousands of people with your 'hard choices'. You just don't get to take part in this conversation.

Starmer says he ‘didn’t want to means test the winter fuel payment.’ But look at past Labour manifestos: In 2010, 2015, 2017 & 2019 they mention the WFP. In 2024 they were silent. They planned this before the election. They *chose* not to give pensioners time to prepare.

@glyphodend @jasonhickel This is so important. Social tipping points seem distant, until they're not- I think we're far closer to Israel being discarded than most of us realise.

@jasonhickel Excellent. The West of course eventually abandoned the Apartheid regime when it no longer proved useful for counter-insurgency, i.e when socialist revolution threatened. It will discard Apartheid Israel too when it no longer seems useful in the face of anti-Western insugency

Why does the Biden administration support the Israeli genocide and war crimes even in the face of virtually universal condemnation, at massive expense, and to the point of totally debasing the rules-based international order? Why do it? People fall back on narratives about the power of AIPAC in US elections etc, which is real but also doesn't capture the whole story. The truth is that US capitalism depends on it, and the US ruling class broadly understands this fact. The key thing to understand is that capitalist growth and accumulation in the imperial core (the US, Britain, Germany etc) relies heavily on the appropriation of cheap inputs and resources from the periphery and semi-periphery of the world economy (broadly, the global South). They need the South remain a subordinated supplier within global commodity chains. In order to maintain this arrangement, it is imperative for them to suppress sovereign economic development in the South. Because the "problem" with development is it means Southerners begin to produce for themselves and consume their own resources. This makes resources and inputs more expensive for the core, which constrains consumption and profits. Economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core. To avoid this, the core states constantly intervene to prevent or crush any movement or government in the periphery that seeks national liberation and economic sovereignty. The US started to support the Zionist project in the 1960s, and invested heavily in the Israeli arms industry, with the explicit intention of using Israel as a staging ground—a massive military base—for counter-revolutionary interventions against rising Arab socialist and national liberation struggles in North Africa and the Middle East. The US could not accept the prospect of sovereign development in that region: liberation movements had to be crushed or destabilized and they used Israel to help them do it. Israel is not an "ally" in the conventional sense. It is a proxy. They support Israel for the exact same reasons that they have backed assassinations or coups against liberation leaders across the global South: Mosaddegh, Lumumba, Nkrumah, Allende, Arbenz, Sukarno, Sankara... Israel assassinates movement leaders in the Middle East and interferes in regional political processes, all in concert with the US, but it also constantly bombs the frontline states, destabilizing their societies and economies and forcing them to divert resources toward defensive spending rather than industrial development. The Zionist project is intolerable not only because it is murderously hell-bent on ethnically cleansing Palestine, but because it creates chaos and instability across the whole region. The core states used South Africa in the very same way. The key reason that Western powers supported the apartheid regime in South Africa – against overwhelming international condemnation – was because it served as a highly militarized Western colonial outpost that was geared up to run counter-insurgency operations not only within South Africa, but also in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, the DRC, etc., leaving immense violence and chaos in its wake. The vast majority of the world—and international law itself—supports Palestinian liberation, but Palestinian liberation would constrain Israeli power and open the way to regional liberation movements, and this is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital. So this is the situation we are in. The Western ruling classes are willing to back obscene violence in Gaza, and shred the liberal values they claim to believe in, because they want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation and geopolitical hegemony. You cannot appeal to imperial power in moral terms. The only way the US will stop propping up the Zionist regime is when it becomes too costly for them to do so. This will come down to the strength of the resistance and regional political and military opposition, but also the extent to which people can coordinate boycotts, divestment and sanctions, and punitive measures under international law.

@aims_co_il @jasonhickel Except no one here is accusing 'the Jews' of anything. The Israeli government? Sure. Zionists? Maybe. But Jews? You're the only one conflating the three.

@jasonhickel Nothing new here. You say Israel is a proxy for USA. Others say Israel controls USA. Some accuse Jews of being capitalist. Other communist. Etc etc. As someone once said- show me what you accuse the Jews of and I will tell you what your problem is.

@suprememercian That's a lot of words to say you're thick as pig shit and have absolutely no clue what matters to normal people. "Community is alien to English people" 🤣🤣🤣

@Cyril_Matvech @BjCruickshank Your lawns have never 'required' water. You've merely chosen to prioritise green lawns over water conservation for 14 years.

@BjCruickshank My lawns have never required water this summer. That is first in the fourteen years I’ve owned this property. Hoping for a bit of a beautiful dry autumn.

One of the missing elements in this Winter Fuel Allowance scandal is that Labour politicians seem to forget that there are two different countries in the UK with a huge north/south climatic divide. Many pensioners in Scotland have never switched their heating off this 'summer'.

@33630c3bab504c9 @BjCruickshank No. There's nothing amazing about it. Tories court their key voters - old people - while Labour don't. Same type, different target audience.

@BjCruickshank Isn't it amazing how the tory scumbags managed to uphold the WFA with all their theft and corruption but our liberators need to cut it .

@KlinikPatrick @CharlieJGardner Multiple reasons, incl. 1) "Growth is good". V hard to break this engrained cultural norm. (2) Misunderstood as recession/sacrifice. First impressions matter. (3) 'De' is negative. People instead want better, joy, hope. (4) Ideologically 'attacks' conservatives; wellbeing unifies

@JayBWritesStuff @CharlieJGardner Why is it problematic?

@i_iratus You're missing something. Classrooms/bedrooms with bright primary colours are places of over-stimulation, with incr problem behaviour, poor sleep etc. Humans aren't designed to be surrounded by so much bright, it's too much. 'Calm' background = space to focus on play, sleep etc

@KlinikPatrick @CharlieJGardner It's one of the arguments frequently used by people who want to use the term degrowth, when behavioural scientists, linguistics experts, cognitive psychologists, comms professionals etc explain why it's a problematic word.

@JayBWritesStuff @CharlieJGardner May I ask where you took this quote from?