Edward

The National Audit Office has released a report into the Afghan resettlement scheme, the findings are grim. 37,950 Afghans have already been resettled in the UK and the Government expects a further 8,632 - 9,741 to be resettled by 2030, bringing the total to 46,582 - 47,691.

Our brilliant young minds are being replaced by goat herders from Afghanistan.

BREAKING 🔴 Kim Jong-un wins North Korea’s parliamentary elections with 99.93% of the vote.

Now the lovely people are sharing that I’m really a Jew and my grandparents from Somerset, Wiltshire and Devon are from Minsk. I think I’ve found the rationale for the vitriol. We are living in very dangerous times.

I just watched the Netflix manosphere doc. If you focus only on its themes and subjects, it's pretty boring overall, but if you look at its format, it becomes quite interesting. It might be the most unintentional work of art ever made (and I don't mean it as a compliment toward the producers). This scene alone is one of the most surreal I've ever seen (so much to unpack that it would take me years). For context: the scene takes place towards the end, when the host returns to Marbella for one last follow-up interview with one of the influencers. At this point, the influencer has received plenty of negative feedback from his own followers about the host, having live-streamed the making of the doc several times, so he's well-aware of his and his producers' intentions (i.e., to essentially do a hit piece), so he tries to set them up by asking his own "cameraman" to live-stream the whole encounter. This time, however, not just for the sake of live-streaming, but to expose them as biased, corrupt, etc. IOW, to engineer a "hit piece" on them (whether his attempt backfires is irrelevant). On top of that, by the time the encounter takes place, the host has been live-streamed multiple times by almost all the subjects he had been profiling (over the course of weeks or months, not sure), which in turn has generated not only lots of discussion on socials (I've never heard of any of the influencers before this so I missed it), but also news articles about the making of the doc, the subjects profiled, the host, their views, and so forth, not to mention content about the news articles and the streams by other influencers... *before the doc has even wrapped up filming*. So it's already kind of unique. Now, though, that the documentary has come out, here are some Qs: Who's producing it? The host or the influencers? Their followers? The media? The other influencers? A combination of all of these? Who is the subject? Is the host making a documentary about himself by making a documentary about the influencers, or one about the influencers by making one about himself? Both? The whole thing is like a production within a series of streams within multiple reality shows within news stories within a debate within multiple platforms within (more layers I'm probably not even thinking of), which can also work in reverse, depending on how you look at it and/or how you've come across it. It's an unintentional work of art insofar as it perfectly captures the absurdity of today's "cultural" production—the way we consume it, contribute to it, engineer it, let it affect us (or the other way around). It also reveals in part why many of us online are prone to describe culture as "stuck". I think the reason we can't seem to ever get to the bottom of why is that we are not really describing "culture" when we say that. We are describing ourselves. Those comments that appear in the chat within the stream within the documentary? That's "us".

A lad born in Mogadishu but living in Dublin is not more Irish than an Irish American.