pencil line

@AnalyticsForest Ironically by 2024 Southgate had at least learned to sub off Kane when he was knackered.

Kane being dead on his feet is the catalyst for everything here. He has to get out quicker to double up with Spence. He doesn't so Ando feels like he has to. That leaves space behind.

This was a famous French weather forecast in 2014 trying to alert people to what France would be like in 2050 because of climate change Only 12 years on and most of us are already hotter - my town 43 today and not the 34 predicted👇

@DaleJohnsonBBC among the many reasons why the current law is wrong is that it penalises Sels for savin Mbeumo's shot. If he'd let it in, no goal

If Bryan Mbeumo was a defender there's no way his handball would be considered a penalty. So why should it lead to a disallowed goal? Put simply, football has different expectations for attackers. But it can't even make its mind up. Analysis 👇 bbc.co.uk/sport/football… #MUNNFO

The most misguided thing ppl say is ‘social media isnt real life’. Yes it is. Ppl are on their phone 24/7. Theyre cancelling plans so they can look at their phone. Everyone in yr train carriage is scrolling their phone.Nobody knows whats real anymore and everybody is angry.

Zotero is the best citation management software — it's free and does not monetize your data But many folks have a hard time starting out on it. Here's how you can get started on Zotero in 15min: Zotero for beginners: a step-by-step tutorial 🧵

@rcolvile @stephenfhwebb Is it that there are certain issues where everyone already knows how bad things are, so you don't need to tell them? 'Jungle animal threatened with extinction' isn't news; 'gorilla population increasing' is going to surprise more people and so get more attention?

@stephenfhwebb Lots of replies saying research has shown this actually works better. But then why don’t we see it more?

Struck by how much attention this has had, and by the fact that everyone really likes it - says something about the nature of charity messaging…

@moniza_hossain I am cursed to be fazed by the people who don't know that it's a different word from 'phased'

I’m not very pedantic about language and grammar but the fact that no one seems to know the difference between pique and peak is really starting to worry me

@KyleWOrton tbf there is a group of Muslims who stand in the centre of my city most Saturdays with a big sign saying 'Jesus was a Muslim'. It's not like they're trying to hide it. But I agree it's good that we've largely gone down the 'social peace' route!

At the risk of taking this seriously, it is something I have been thinking about of late as I've been revisiting the origins of Islam, and the truth is pretty much the reverse. If the press had emphasised Islam's doctrines in its reporting, it would have made widespread the understanding of Islam's perception of the two prior monotheisms as corrupted versions of itself, and the claim that Abraham, Moses, the other Hebrew Prophets, and Jesus were Muslims. The result would surely have been to increase tensions with Christian and Jewish believers, and in general make Islam appear far stranger and more alien in the West. Instead of leaping at the chance to do something that could have been defended as objective reporting and might well have led more people "to hate Muslims", the press has avoided doing this. More than that, the media - and academics and Western politicians - have almost unanimously spoken of Islam in terms of "the Abrahamic faiths", and gone out of their way to put the least abrasive spin possible on thorny issues, like the meaning of "jihad". Just to expand on this a bit. It is obvious to anyone that the Qur'an (dating to the 7thC AD) contains a lot of material from the Tanakh (no later 6thC BC) and the Bible (1stC AD). For Jews and Christians, the obvious answer is the Qur'an draws its material from their Scriptures, and any discrepancies are because the Qur'an's author(s) made mistakes in copying or understanding. The Muslim perception is that any differences are explained by corruption (tahrif) introduced by Jews and Christians, and, indeed, these differences are part of why God had to send Muhammad as the Seal of the Prophets, to set monotheism back on its proper course after the Jews and Christians proved such unworthy custodians of God's revelations. In other words, Islam's claim is effectively that time and causality run in reverse. Muslims do consider Jesus a prophet, and the Qur'an chides Jews for denying it (4:150-52), but Christians are repeatedly lambasted in the Qur'an for insisting on Jesus's divinity (4:171, 5:72-75, 19:88-93, etc.). (The Qur'anic monotheism - the one held to by the Arab conquerors in the 630s and by the Empire until Islam as we know stabilised in the ninth century AD - is referred to as "Millat Ibrahim", and it is a kind of merger of the Jewish and Christian creeds, which denies some of the distinguishing features of both. The Qur'an's mission to Jews and Christians is not one of "conversion" but "correction"; it is calling them back to the alleged primordial version of the faith they were given, which Muhammad is reviving. Developments after the Arab conquests went beyond the Jerusalemite Holy Land led to the forging of a parallel interpretive canon, Tradition, and salvation history, which was imposed on the Qur'an and defined "final form Islam" much more sharply against Jews and Christians, but in the early phase the Arab creed was a sect within the Judeo-Christian milieu.) The bottom line is that if there has been any distortion in the Western media coverage of Islam's doctrines, it has not been in an attempt "to get you to hate Muslims", but precisely the opposite - to shield Muslims from the kinds of scrutiny and critique that are directed at every other religious group in this most secular age.

I literally – literally – don't know a single humanities professor, regardless of the kind of institution they teach at, who doesn't think students' reading abilities have fallen off a cliff. It's an emergency and in a sane world there would be Congressional hearings about this.

@KyleWOrton @fathomjournal really good piece thanks

New piece in @FathomJournal on my trip to #Syria in late February. Many people were optimistic and seeing Damascus, something I never thought I'd be able to do, I could see why. But there were some signs of trouble even before the massacres on the coast. fathomjournal.org/dispatch-from-…

@NeilDotObrien get stuffed Neil. Their use will stop once the backlog the Tories built up comes down. Stop using this legacy of Tory mismanagement as an excuse to 'exit human rights legislation' don't be ridiculous

- There's 8,000 more asylum seekers in hotels than when Keir Starmer said he'd end their use. - Costs £5.5 million every day - “The tap is still on and the bath’s full” says source > None of this will get fixed until we exit human rights legislation

@AdamBienkov the problem is that it's the 'ally' bit that's wrong. the 'indispensable' bit is the problem

Keir Starmer told his Cabinet this morning that "the US is an indispensable ally of the UK". Here's why Trump's actions overnight have exposed that as a lie bylinetimes.com/2025/03/04/don…

@theobertram that reads like an 'I resign but I am open to jobs in the future' resignation letter

I always admire a resignation over a point of principle. To her credit she waited til after the US trip. 'I expected we'd collectively discuss our fiscal rules & approach to taxation' seems naive. Even if they did, the Cabinet would not raise tax/borrowing to fund overseas aid.

@jamesbreckwoldt or a 'kick out the tories' vote. I don't find much of this surprising tbh. 'People who used to vote Tory have quite Tory-ish views' shock.

TLDR: People who voted Conservative in 2019 and the Lib Dems in 2024 are not liberal They stopped voting Tory not because they were ‘too right-wing’ but because they were too incompetent They voted Lib Dem not as a positive vote for their policies but as none-of-the-above vote

But what do these voters actually believe? Almost half of Conservative-to-Lib Dem switchers (48%) support bringing back the death penalty! While this is lower than Conservative voters (64%), it is far higher than among other Lib Dem voters (25%).

it's very common for deeply dysfunctional employers to staff extremely young because anyone more experienced will see right through their bullshit

@anon_opin If you want to hear more of it, Doves basically nicked it for There Goes the Fear

The greatest hook in the history of popular music is at 1:15 of Sound And Vision by David Bowie, and they only use it once in the whole song.

"An good way to learn German is to try reading children's books to familiarise yourself with basic grammar and vocabulary" German children's book:

@Porter97977215 @KashPrime @opinionatedobs7 @phl43 And at the end of them, they got a slightly reformed version of the ancien regime back anyway

Unpopular opinion, but there is almost no dictatorship so bad that it's worth fighting a protracted and high-intensity civil war to overthrow it, especially since the dislocation and violence created by a civil war makes it even less likely that whatever comes out on the other end of it will be better. Had it not been for foreign intervention, the Syrian opposition would almost certainly have been crushed relatively quickly, as Assad the Elder did with the Muslim Brotherhood's uprising in Hama in 1982. It would have been terrible, but still far less costly both in human lives and economic terms than the 13-year long civil war, which unfortunately may actually not be over, was. Not only would it have been better for the Syrians, but it would have been much better for the rest of the world as well. There would almost certainly not have been a refugee crisis, ISIS would never have become such a powerful entity and it wouldn't have been able to organize terrorist attacks on such a scale in Europe. People will deny that but that's just due to a combination of magical thinking and low-decoupling. There just weren't enough defections in the state apparatus, which is unsurprising given the Alawite domination of the state and the fact that a victory of the opposition would not only have ended that domination but also threatened the security and freedom of their community, for the rebels to have stood a chance had they not been armed and funded by foreign states. While the repression of the initial protests by the regime was very brutal, this alone can't plausibly explain why the West, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies had all called for Assad to step down and started to get involved a few months after the protests started, because by the time they did the repression had done far fewer victims than in other cases where they did nothing and it's not even close. If they called for Assad to step down, it's for a variety of political and ideological reasons, which were dumb and subsequently backfired on them in various ways. I have little doubt that, if HTS and Jolani manage to establish a stable political order in Syria, this new order will be oppressive and have little to do with the kind of democratic ideal supporters of the rebellion were talking about in 2011. It may or may not be better than Assad's regime, I have no idea, but what I do know is that it would be even worse, not only for the Syrians but for the rest of the world, if they didn't manage to establish a stable political order and anarchy prevailed. People who live in countries at peace really underestimate how bad anarchy is and how much better even a tyrannical but stable political order is. This is why, despite the fact that I'm not optimistic about what a HTS-dominated regime would be like, I think the West and the other international actors shouldn't do anything to prevent Jolani from establishing his political supremacy over the country, just as I wish they hadn't done anything to prevent Assad from maintaining his after 2011.

@Zachariah247 @epzilla @SickosCommittee @edsbs @celebrityhottub @JasonKirk_fyi Turkish one is great

@epzilla @SickosCommittee @edsbs @celebrityhottub @JasonKirk_fyi The call in 8 languages lol x.com/chesscom/statu…

So the chess version of “OH NO! DISASTER! WHAT A BAD IDEA!” happened in game 11 of the world championship match @SickosCommittee

@JohnSimpsonNews Same personality type as Louis XVI

Bashar al-Asad has done many evil things, but he’s weak rather than wicked. His family members, Iran and especially Russia told him what to do, and he feebly did it. In person, I found him meek and anxious to please — the reverse of the traditional dictator.