magnusramage.bsky.social
Academic (Open University), Quaker, systems thinker, EDI practitioner, cyclist, choral singer, parent, spouse. Introvert, but quite good at committees and networking. Christian-ish, socially progressive, economically soft-left. INFP, 9w1. 🌈
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L'enfer, c'est les emails.
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Peter Capaldi's family even had an ice cream van! (Source: www.facebook.com/GlasgowWorld...)
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If Evangelical Christians in the US were true to their faith, it might be time to revive the slogan "no king but Jesus" (originally from the English Civil War, but with some use in the American Revolution). But so many of them would love Trump as a king.
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In discussions on this topic with Open University colleagues we keep coming back to a wonderful phrase of David Graeber: "the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently" (in The Utopia of Rules, 2015).
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Quite helpful for some of us who are British too. As a neurodivergent person, I find busy pubs fantastically stressful on many counts, but one of the reasons is that the rules for how to navigate them are really unclear.
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The Bible for Neurotypicals
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Awesome t-shirt!
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I stand corrected. Thanks. Blooming British. Now I've properly googled it and seen the dates: it's about the same time as we were invading China to force them to buy highly addictive narcotics, and strip-mining India of its huge resources. Though after we'd stopped enslaving people to grow sugar. 😢
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We British stole lots of places that didn't belong to us, and we deserve to be more ashamed than we are; but I rather thought Hawaii was an independent nation before the American colonisation?
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Currently the 7th most viewed story on the Guardian and on the front page of the app, albeit quite low down. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...
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I've heard to hear a cogent political analysis of GenX politicians as to whether they were Spectrum, C64 or BBC Micro users as teens. But I'm sure it makes a difference.
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I'm slowly working my way through Judith Butler's latest book, "Who's afraid of Gender?", and really struck by their analysis that even Pope Francis - so loved and quoted by liberals - was still highly conservative in his views on gender, sexuality and related issues.
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Coming soon: Trump invokes Article 5 against Vermont
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I really enjoyed that film, as someone who grew up playing video games but who's never been attracted to GTA. I was struck how much like it felt like the virtual worlds of the noughties (Second Life etc), albeit more chaotic and potentially violent.
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Everything that man touches gets spoiled.
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You should read the Facebook comments on my local newspaper feed, in Northampton. A complete moanfest about any sort of infrastructure project!
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That has rather a Four Yorkshireman flavour to it. English regional disparity is a problem, but doesn't mean the Scots and Welsh parliaments shouldn't get properly funded.
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It's ironic in one way, but at a purely human level understandable. The Gaza minute was really exhausting for both clerks and the meeting as a whole, and I think we were all worn out by the time we considered the epistle. Regrettable though.
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Yes, but there remains so much prejudice against SF/F that some authors, or their publishers, want to hang on to the alt-history label. See also magical realism, which especially in the Anglosphere is quite often fantasy that the literary magazines will tolerate.
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Strikingly, the draft Epistle said "Bible" instead of "New Testament" for that line, and I assume that somebody put in a request for it to be changed. The entire attention of YM was focused on the Gaza discernment, mind you, so we were just glad to have a good enough epistle.
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I think alternate-history fiction, related but not the same as counterfactual histories, are often more interesting, and more structural than event or personality driven. Really enjoyed Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford, which rested on a more modest strain of smallpox being brought to the Americas.