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Just when you thought mainstream media couldn’t get any more stupid… Sarah Cruddas is a science journalist. Today, she was asked to take part in a TV debate about whether or not we landed on the moon. As she put it on Twitter: “It is not okay to debate science fact.” There is no debate [more]
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Yet more evidence of the malign influence of US money on UK media and politics. Hope Not Hate analysed social media support for neo-nazi poster child Tommy Robinson and – surprise! – discovered that it’s overwhelmingly from foreigners. Only 40 per cent of the tweets using those hashtags came from UK users while 35 per [more]
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A poster on Twitter reminded me of this 2016 story about the evangelical Family Research Council. It’s about the FRC’s five-point plan describing how to demonise trans people and make it impossible for them to live their lives. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s on the FRC website, with the usual widely debunked nonsense. The [more]
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When it comes to conspiracy theories, there are two kinds of theorists: the batshit insane, and the people who genuinely believe they’ve stumbled on a conspiracy. There was a good example of what I assume is the latter last week in The Observer, which published an astonishing piece about the link between mobile phones and [more]
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Dr Louise Raw on Twitter: Every time @DailyMirror reports a domestic violence murder I have to @ them about their repugnant coverage. A FLING DID NOT DESTROY THIS FAMILY. A FLING DID NOT KILL ANNE SEARLE. HER HUSBAND DID. A woman died in terror- this is a tragedy, not a sexy romp. This is an [more]
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Here’s a fascinating piece by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post: her (white, male) friend Tom felt that white men were vanishing from TV, so she sent him links to evidence that they weren’t. “I felt Tom was watching TV from another planet,” she recalls. Hesse tried to prove that Tom was wrong with easily [more]
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Have you been wondering how the odious racist Tommy Robinson has managed to attract so much apparent support? The answer’s simple. He’s being bankrolled by US right-wingers. This is by no means unusual. US evangelicals are driving anti-trans groups over here and tried to derail the Irish campaign to repeal anti-abortion law. The Russians, as [more]
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According to Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, holocaust deniers don’t really mean it. “I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong”, he says, explaining why so much hate speech remains online on Facebook. The real reason, of course, is that hate speech makes money for Facebook. Hate platforms such as Infowars and articles about holocaust [more]
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The festival may have been a shambles, but to see your country’s First Minister leading the Pride parade is really something. This image was tweeted from the FM’s official account. Update: I realise I didn’t explain why it was really something. I grew up in the era of Section 28/Clause 2A, when the UK government [more]
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I don’t usually post links to my work because I do an awful lot of it, but it’s been a while since I’ve had the thrill of seeing my name on the cover of a book. Business Writing for Technical People is part of a series I’ve written for the British Computer Society, and I [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
