Carl Harding
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chardle.bsky.social
Carl Harding
@chardle.bsky.social
5.8K followers 13K following 1.1K posts
He/him/oi you.

Woke as hell. I eat tofu and read The Guardian just to annoy people.
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chardle.bsky.social
Just about to send this to BBC complaints. Comments?

#bbc #ukpolitics #reform
RE Today Programme, BBC Radio 4, Friday 24th October 2024 Dear Sir or Madam, Why on earth did the BBC choose yet again to platform Reform when they just lost an election? An interview with Plaid Cymru to learn how they might govern if they won a majority in the Senedd would have been relevant. Labour, the current governing party, lost Caerphilly for the first time in living memory - I wonder how they respond? What was the justification for interviewing a representative of Reform who came second? I can’t remember the last time, following a by election, we heard not from the winning candidate or their party, not from the current government, not even from the official opposition party, but from a party with a handful of seats in Parliament who lost the election. In the context of Cardiff University’s recent study quantising the extent of BBC pro Reform bias on Newsnight, this just contributes to listener’s growing sense that the BBC have an obsession with normalising and platforming Reform, whether they are relevant to the conversation or not. As the study noted, “At present they appear to be applying greater weight to trends in opinion poll data as opposed to the [number] of MPs a party has.” As journalists know (or should know) as well as anyone, opinion polls exist in order to shape public opinion as much as to reflect it. It’s all very well to describe Reform as ‘making the political weather’, but that is true at least as much because broadcasters like the BBC choose to make it true as because of the political reality. BBC Current Affairs will struggle to restore trust in the journalistic integrity of their output until they recover a sense of proportion about Reform and stop acting as if they were employed to promote them. Yours faithfully,
October 24, 2025 at 10:04 AM
chardle.bsky.social
song.link/zcvx0wpmqzfkk

This should be our anthem. If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.
Members of the band Manic Steer Preachers all white walking through a desert, casting long shadows, with distant mountains in the background. Beneath the picture, the test reads If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next Manic Street Preachers.
October 16, 2025 at 11:54 AM
chardle.bsky.social
How they make jerk chicken. (With to apologies to Gary Larson)
An AI generated image of some farmyard chickens wearing red MAGA hats.
October 7, 2025 at 7:46 PM
chardle.bsky.social
This.
Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
October 5, 2025 at 3:38 PM
chardle.bsky.social
Came across this, from Dr Martin Luther King’s 1963 letter to his fellow clergymen, written from jail in Birmingham Mississippi and nearly fell of my chair. Nailed it, as ever.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; …..Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
October 1, 2025 at 10:55 AM
chardle.bsky.social
The folks before us in our house fitted these. Pillar taps. They work fine. Unless your hands are wet or soapy which obviously NEVER HAPPENS IN A BATHROOM.

I’m fine.

But seriously what an obviously stupid design. Did they test them before production? Did they even think about it?

I’m fine.
Pillar taps, a type of bathroom tap which, instead of having a lever or spokes to help to turn the tap, consists instead of a barrel shape.
August 17, 2025 at 5:48 PM
chardle.bsky.social
J B Priestley on Nazis 2

The following excerpt from one of J B Priestley’s late evening BBC postscripts on Sunday January 26th 1941, addresses not only the fascist leader himself but what he represented. Try replacing his name with that of a current fascistic leader and see how it reads.
It’s ridiculous to pretend that everything in the garden would have been lovely if it hadn’t been for Hitler. To see him as a solitary evil giant is to flatter him. What he really is is a wicked dwarf, perched on top of a gigantic toadstool of mess and misery, thrown up because the world, after the plain warning of the last war, refused to reform itself. The Nazis and their like are the festering sores on the diseased body of the world. Fight them? Of course we must fight them! But at the same time we must fight the diseased condition which produced them, otherwise we shall simply go on and on, battling with neurotics and crooks and brigands until civilisation disappears.
July 31, 2025 at 11:51 AM
chardle.bsky.social
J B Priestley on Nazis

The following was broadcast by Priestley on the BBC as one of his nightly postscripts to the day’s radio. It seems as relevant today as at any time since it was first aired over 80 years ago.
Many people are mystified by the existence of so many fifth columnists who are ready to work for Nazism outside Germany. But you see, Nazism is not really a political philosophy but an attitude of mind; the expression in political life of a certain, very unpleasant temperament; of the man who hates democracy, reasonable argument, tolerance, patience, a humorous equality; the man who loves bluster and swagger, uniforms and bodyguards and fast cars, plotting in back rooms, shouting and bullying, taking it out of all the people who have made him feel inferior. It’s not really a balanced, grown up attitude of mind at all. It belongs to people who can’t find their way out of their adolescence, who remain overgrown, tormenting, cruel schoolboys, middle aged dead end kids. That’s why the gang spirit is so marked among these Nazis. It explains too why there always seems something unhealthy, abnormal, perverted, crawlingly corrupt about them and all their activities.
July 31, 2025 at 11:12 AM
chardle.bsky.social
So pleased to discover today that there’s a movie called Shark De Triomphe. Featuring prominently on the poster is which Paris landmark? Why the Eiffel Tower, of course. This kind of wanton madness makes a insane world bearable. Also pleased to discover it belongs to a genre called sharksploitation!
A poster for a Netflix film called Shark De Triomphe. The poster shows an image in slightly blue shaded monochrome of the bottom half of the Eiffel Tower above the waters of the River Seine. The reflection of the tower in the water has been altered to look like the nose of a huge shark, so that the shark image and the arch of the tower together form what looks like a shark’s north agape.
June 26, 2025 at 9:00 AM
chardle.bsky.social
This is what a leader looks like.
A portrait of President Barack Obama.
June 14, 2025 at 9:48 AM
chardle.bsky.social
I do love a bit of Lorem Ipsum, either dolor or fried, I’m easy…
A plastic sealed food packet with a label earring the text, ‘Amazon Kitchen. Orem ipsum dolor & cheddar wrap.’
May 2, 2025 at 8:22 PM
chardle.bsky.social
The R&A, the organisers of The Open Championship must not allow Donald Trump owned golf course including Turnberry to host any upcoming Open Championships.

you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/no...
The R&A, the organisers of The Open Championship must not allow Donald Trump owned golf course including Turnberry to host any upcoming Open Championships.
May 1, 2025 at 11:29 AM
chardle.bsky.social
I mean, cats are kind of weird anyway but holy fuck, what?
Medieval illuminated manuscript detail featuring a cat apparently emerging from a snail shell.
April 21, 2025 at 9:36 PM
chardle.bsky.social
I decided to search ‘mediaeval illuminated manuscript cats’. Opened up a whole big can of weird.
Weird cat from a medieval illuminated manuscript. Weird cat from a medieval illuminated manuscript, apparently washing. Weird cat from a medieval illuminated manuscript. Weird cat from a medieval illuminated manuscript, plating the violin.
April 21, 2025 at 9:16 PM
chardle.bsky.social
From the screenplay to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Colonel Vogel: What does the diary tell you that it doesn’t tell us?

Professor Henry Jones: It tells me, that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them!
A still from the movie Indians Jones and the Last Crusade. Actor Sean Connery wears a tweed suit and hat with a bow tie. He is shown in a mountainous desert terrain. He holds a batteries black briefcase with an umbrella attached by two straps.
April 21, 2025 at 8:13 PM
chardle.bsky.social
A photograph of an extremely dilapidated shed in a rural location with no other buildings around it. It is leaning to one side, almost entirely invaded, and now being held up, by the trunk and branches of a tree which is growing in and through it.
April 10, 2025 at 9:44 PM
chardle.bsky.social
A photograph of an extremely dilapidated shed in a rural location with no other buildings around it. It is leaning to one side, almost entirely invaded, and now being held up, by the trunk and branches of a tree which is growing in and through it.
April 10, 2025 at 9:42 PM
chardle.bsky.social
Latest Skircle - thank you crazies for making my life better, more interesting and better informed.
A Skircle consisting of three concentric circles of Bluesky avatars surrounding my own, representing the strange array of people with whom I most often interact. Thank you all.
April 8, 2025 at 7:14 PM
chardle.bsky.social
A colourful cartoon of a man in slippers say at a desk with a laptop open in front of him. The screen looks as if he’s making a Zoom call with the screen divided into sections with a caller in each. On the wall above and to the right of the computer, an angry-looking ginger cat is raped to the wall. The caption reads: ‘How to prepare for a Zoom meeting.’
April 8, 2025 at 6:31 PM
chardle.bsky.social
Just seen Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of The Worlds, The Spirit of Man Tour at Leeds First Direct Arena. He’s 81 years old and still out there conducting his masterpiece 47 years after it was first released. Fantastic!!!
A photograph taken from a circle seat in a large arena, as the audience is still gathering, showing a stage with places for musicians, cast in blue and violet lighting. Above the stage is a large screen on which is projected, in ornate Art Nouveau style script of the late 19th century, the words, ‘Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of The Worlds, The Spirit of Man Tour.’
April 3, 2025 at 10:21 PM
chardle.bsky.social
If you’re world building and you want to map a natural looking island, try making a pancake with not quite enough batter. Natural looking results, works a treat.

Here’s my island. It even has a little off shore island to the south east.
A colour photograph of a pancake on a plate. The pancake has an irregular shape and looks somewhat like a very high level photograph of an island or a picture in relief map in an atlas.
March 31, 2025 at 10:20 AM
chardle.bsky.social
All you city dwellers are missing a treat. Local newspapers are the ones who really have their fingers on the pulse.
Screenshot of a headline from the website of the English local newspaper The Whitehaven News. The headline reads: Firefighters called to extract pensioner from wooden chair in Millom.
March 17, 2025 at 8:04 PM
chardle.bsky.social
It’s the attention to detail on this scam text that makes it so convincing.
Photograph of a scam phishing text I received featuring hideously garbled English. It reads, “Your parcel from Flewers Delivbry iy due today by 3:00pm. Not going to be in? Track it aw” then follows a long, complicated url clearly unrelated to any reputable company.
March 17, 2025 at 3:51 PM
chardle.bsky.social
Misinformation is everywhere.
A photograph taken in a supermarket. The label above the display says apples. The goods below consist of eight boxes of oranges.
March 17, 2025 at 2:50 PM
chardle.bsky.social
A photograph of black Labrador puppy Jack sitting in a paved garden area looking to camera. Caption: Proud sponsor of Jack.
February 20, 2025 at 2:39 PM