Professor Emeritus of Sociology University of Kent. Research in violence, inequality & photography. #fbpe 🕎 #nospaceforhate

Canterbury, UK
Joined September 2011
King Charles inherited £650m tax free, gets £354m a year tax free from the tax payer including £132m personal spending money and has an estate worth £22bn that’s never taxed. Like if he needs a pay cut. RT if you want the Monarchy gone. #NotmyKing
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Larry Ray retweeted
Have the West Midlands police yet arrested, Stephen Cooling from Sutton Coldfield Reform? He should be easy to track down because he stood for UKIP in Erdington and was yesterday caught on camera assaulting two female protesters at the Reform conference.
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Very powerful. Yes we are all on that beach
Cette photo mérite absolument tous les prix. Elle a même sa place au Louvre. Elle relate précisément l’inertie de l’individu face à l’effondrement. Regardez la composition. Un chef-d’œuvre involontaire. Au premier plan, le sable doré, les tongs abandonnées, la glacière. Le décor ordinaire du bonheur estival. Deux personnages assis, de dos, comme dans un tableau de Caspar David Friedrich. Sauf que Friedrich peignait des hommes contemplant le sublime. Ici, ils contemplent la catastrophe. Et ils ne bougent pas. Au centre, le parasol. Publicitaire, criard, dérisoire. Un pastis face à l’apocalypse. C’est presque trop parfait : la France qui prend l’apéro pendant que le monde brûle. Aucun scénariste n’aurait osé. Et puis le ciel. Les deux tiers de l’image. Cette muraille de fumée qui avale la lumière, ce dégradé d’ocre et de noir digne d’un Turner. La nature qui reprend la palette des maîtres pour peindre notre propre fin. La femme photographie l’incendie avec son téléphone. Mise en abyme totale : nous documentons notre disparition au lieu de l’empêcher. Cette image dit tout. Le déni, le confort, l’habitude. Nous sommes tous sur cette plage. Nous voyons tous le nuage. Et nous restons assis, parce que l’eau est bonne et qu’on a posé nos congés. Les historiens de l’art parleront un jour de cette photo comme on parle du Radeau de la Méduse. Sauf que cette fois, le naufrage, c’est nous qui le regardons depuis la plage. 💔🌍
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Whoever came up with this deserves a standing ovation. 😂😂😂 “Stop the bungs” with Count Binface standing on the beach while Nigel Farage rows away in a boat full of cash… satire doesn’t get much better than this.
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Larry Ray retweeted
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If Burnham puts country first he would be advised to get behind and support our Prime Minister and suspend his leadership bid until the run up to the next General Election by which time Sir Keir may have had enough of all the undeserved flack he has had from the right wing media.
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THE QUESTION NOBODY WANTS TO ANSWER Something curious is happening in Westminster. Keir Starmer lists achievements that critics said were impossible. The economy stabilising. Waiting lists falling. Migration coming down. Britain rebuilding relationships abroad. Yet the conversation is not about whether those achievements matter. It is about who should inherit them. That should give us pause. Because there are two very different arguments. One says Starmer has failed. The other says Burnham won a by-election. Those are not the same thing. One is a verdict on government. The other is an opportunity spotted by ambitious people. And perhaps the greatest irony of all is this: The louder the talk of a "calm", "dignified" and "consensual" handover becomes, the less it sounds like unity and the more it sounds like power. Politics is full of people who want the crown. Britain needs people willing to carry the burden. Keir Starmer inherited a country that was broken. He rebuilt the party. He won the mandate. Now he is doing the difficult work of rebuilding the nation. That is not a reason to replace him. It is a reason to let him finish the job. #Labour #KeirStarmer #UKPolitics
- Stabilise the economy - Bring down waiting lists and migration - A 'closer, better relationship' with the EU Keir Starmer lists the achievements of his government - targets which two years ago, people told him were 'not possible'.
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1/5 An open letter to @TheLancet from an Iranian-Jewish cardiologist. Today, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals published a campaign to suspend the Israeli Medical Association from the World Medical Association — the body founded after WWII to ensure physicians would never again be weaponized by political ideology. I'm a cardiologist. I'm an Iranian Jew who grew up under a regime where medicine was subjugated to the state. What The Lancet just did is a disgrace to my profession. Here's what they published — and what they deliberately left out.
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The reason the UK’s finances are struggling to meet the demands of our defence budget are the eye watering sums lost through Tory incompetence and CORRUPTION! C£100 BILLION But it’s so much easier to blame Keir #StopTheCoup
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This could be interesting.
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Larry Ray retweeted
Should Nigel Farage be arrested for inciting riots? Like - Yes RT - Instantly
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Too on point not to share. This is great, but too bad the Orange Felon’s enablers won’t let him see it. This Australian's reply to #Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect. "Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage. You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail. Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates. Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you. And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again. And you're calling Greenland poorly run? Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no. 'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years. And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess. So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth." - Tony Locke
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Larry Ray retweeted
I constantly see people on this platform blame Israel for making Jews' lives worse. Here's your reminder of what happened within days after October 7th — before Israel had even finished cleaning up their dead, while hundreds of innocent men, women, and children were being held hostage in tunnels underground. • Vandals smashed a kosher restaurant in London. • A synagogue was desecrated in Porto. • Hundreds outside the Sydney Opera House screaming, "Gas the Jews." • Crowds in Geneva chanting "Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud!" — a reference to a 7th-century massacre of Jews in Saudi Arabia. • A rabbi's home in British Columbia was covered with Nazi graffiti. • A synagogue was set ablaze in Tunisia. • The only mezuzah-marked door in a Paris apartment building was doused with gasoline and set on fire. • Molotov cocktails were hurled at a synagogue in Berlin. This is what happened before Israel launched a single airstrike in response. The idea that anti-Jew hate is Israel's fault — that Jews would be safe if Israel just behaved differently — is not just wrong. Blaming Jews for hate against us is the oldest lie in the book. They don't hate us because of what Israel does. They hate us already and need something convenient to blame it on.
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Starmer builds the party, takes it out of the ashes, makes it electable. Takes it from a devastating loss to a landslide. Two years later, in arrive 2 chancers & traitors who fancy their chances at playing PM & want to steal what was hard won. No credibility. Contemptible.
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The Hierarchy of Victims. And the Rule That Determines It. Danny Cohen is a former director of BBC Television. He is Jewish. He is not hostile to Palestinian suffering and says so plainly. When he asks why pro-Gaza activists are silent on the plight of Afghans, Iranians and Sudanese, the question cannot be dismissed as right wing provocation. It is a question from inside the liberal establishment and it demands an answer. Consider the numbers: over a million Afghans have been forcibly expelled from Pakistan in just over a year. Children as young as thirteen deported to overcrowded camps. Families torn apart. Desperate parents with no idea where their children have been sent. No mass march. No parliamentary obsession. No wall to wall BBC coverage. In Sudan, up to 400,000 people have been killed through direct violence, starvation or disease. More than 10 million displaced. Nearly 20 million facing acute hunger. Eight hundred and twenty five thousand children under five projected to suffer severe acute malnutrition. Mass sexual violence. Ethnic cleansing. The fall of El Fasher marked by summary executions. No mass march. No union statements. No charity sector fury. In Iran, 30,000 citizens were massacred by their own government in 48 hours earlier this year. More than 50,000 arrested, facing execution, widespread torture and denial of medical care. No mass march. No parliamentary obsession. No social media outrage from the same accounts that document every casualty in Gaza with forensic intensity. Three simultaneous catastrophes. Three invisible victim populations. One common variable. Israel cannot be blamed for any of them. Cohen makes the observation that British Jews already know why. The singular focus on Israel, at the expense of attention to so many other humanitarian tragedies, tells us that something else is going on. The target is not the Israeli government. The red triangle associated with Hamas is paraded freely. The chant is from the river to the sea. The target is Jewish people. The BBC observation in his piece deserves particular attention. The corporation has made an editorial choice to cover Gaza wall to wall while giving comparatively little time to three simultaneous catastrophes affecting vastly more people. This is not a resource question. Resources follow editorial priorities. The same institution that suppressed gender critical reporting, that was described by its own former director of news as a sea in which we all swam, has decided which suffering is newsworthy and which is not. The hierarchy of victims is not accidental. It reflects the hierarchy of values of the people making the editorial decisions. Selective outrage is not passion misdirected. It is passion precisely directed. The directing principle is not the scale of suffering. It is not the vulnerability of the victims. It is not the availability of a remedy. It is whether the cause can be used to indict the West and delegitimise Israel. That principle is applied consistently because the people applying it share a common ideological formation. They were educated in the same captured universities, employed by the same captured institutions, and now control the editorial desks, the union structures and the parliamentary priorities of a country that still believes it is being governed in the national interest. The progressive capture of those institutions, documented from the BBC newsroom to the Cabinet, has produced a class that decides which suffering is newsworthy, which victims deserve solidarity and which catastrophes can be safely ignored. The Afghans, the Sudanese and the Iranians failed that test. They always will because their suffering is not useful.
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Larry Ray retweeted
I keep reading about the ‘heavy hearts’ of Labour MPs calling for the overthrowing of the elected PM. Guess what: I don’t give a shiny shit if your heart is heavy. I’m disgusted with each one of you. 14yrs we waited for a Labour govt and you lot have chosen to fuck it up 2yrs in
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Larry Ray retweeted
Please repost if you agree that it would be extremely unwise for Labour to remove Keir Starmer right now
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The British mainstream media is now desperately trying to force a democratically elected Prime Minister to resign simply because it's good for ratings. Disgusting.
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Best Prime Minister in decades, repairing years of Tory destruction in record time, Labour has my vote tomorrow, even though I voted tactically last time.
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