Shane Thomas
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tokenbg.bsky.social
Shane Thomas
@tokenbg.bsky.social
450 followers 360 following 2.9K posts
South London
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tokenbg.bsky.social
Really, me and Mariona are basically the same.

(we don’t need to focus on the being good at football thing)
November 28, 2025 at 2:20 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Disclaimer as this briefly discusses sexual violence.
Screenshot of text: The bill passed by 185 votes to 184. It was the first time any bill tabled by the RN has passed It isn't legally binding - the president can ignore it - but it is a milestone in the RN's strategy of normalisation, in which the centre and the traditional right are colluding. As in the UK, however, the slow march of the far right should be measured not only by parliamentary precedent but by the incremental intrusion of extremist ideas into the mainstream.
November 28, 2025 at 1:01 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Intentionally or not, think he’s really aligned on something with this phrase. Think you can track a lot of current sociopolitics through the lens of people desperately (and understandably) wanting rn.
Screenshot of text: A Labour Chancellor long ago once said that: "If I were to resign every time a policy was unpopular, I should resign once a month." Once a month would probably sound almost gentle a prospect for Rachel Reeves, who has found herself the most unpopular member of a deeply unpopular government, boxed in by her own decisions and those not of her making, in office at a time of deep want.
November 28, 2025 at 11:36 AM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Tweet from Technically Ron: In all fairness Brits probably don't do Thanksgiving because if we had to take a day off for the anniversary of us fucking over a native people and ruining their country we'd never have to go to work.
November 27, 2025 at 10:15 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Basically any woman with melanin, slightly masculine presenting, or even a little taller than the median woman now becomes a target.
Screenshot of text: In its guidance, the EHRC says judgements on single-sex spaces will need to be made on what people look like. This means that staff at venues such as gyms, leisure centres and hospitals across the country will be able to question transgender people about their gender at birth. They will also have the right to then refuse access to single-sex services if there is doubt they are telling the truth. However, the guidance says people will not be given licence to ask for gender recognition certificates if there is suspicion someone is lying about their sex. Screenshot of text: "This is a misogynist's charter, plain and simple, and the government must reject it." The Equality and Human Rights Commission's transgender guidance has been dubbed a "misogynist's charter" after reports that trans people could be banned from single-sex spaces based on what they look like.
November 25, 2025 at 1:27 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
November 20, 2025 at 8:33 AM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Screenshot of text: The sections of 'Restoring Order and Control' that mention children are chilling, suggesting that many asylum seekers bring their children not because they love and care for them but as a 'fact' to 'exploit... in order to thwart removal'. Families whose asylum claims have been rejected may continue to receive financial support as long as they have children under eighteen. The government is now looking for ways to remove this support. The UK does not currently detain children, but MPs who expressed concern that this might change did not receive reassurances. Henceforth, those in 'core protection' will be barred from family reunification. Screenshot of text: Refugeehood is not supposed to be like this. The ideal envisaged by the Refugee Convention is that refugee status should be a kind of substitute citizenship for people whose bond of citizenship with their country of origin has been broken by the threat of persecution. Those displaced by persecution and war may well want to return when they can, but until then they need to get on with their lives as everyone else does. That means pursuing their hopes and ambitions for education, for work, for family. These are goals that are already hard to achieve for exiles in a new country, with an unfamiliar language and customs and, often, suspicious, unsympathetic and uninformed neighbours. Screenshot of text: What seems to be envisaged is a two-track system in which economically useful refugees are recruited and retained, while those in 'core protection' are weeded out as soon as possible. The thirty-month review system will operate alongside other measures targeting criminality and antisocial behaviour to exclude the undesirable. In this context, the government's determination to 'reform' Article 3 of the ECHR also looks sinister: unreformed, it makes it more difficult to remove the sick, disabled and elderly to countries where decent healthcare is unavailable to them. Screenshot of text: The UK's refugee protection regime has always involved hypocrisy, as successive governments trumpet their adherence to humanitarian principles and the international order while doing their best not to incur the costs and obligations of those commitments in practice. Meanwhile, across the country, Labour activists and councillors have long supported refugees and refugee charities and promoted their cities and neighbourhoods as places of tolerance and welcome. What will now be tested is whether those core Labour supporters are willing to tolerate policies so openly hostile to their professed values.
November 19, 2025 at 1:04 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Screenshot of text: Proponents of this agenda say that the problem is not Black history per se, but rather concepts such as white privilege and systemic racism. But talking about slavery without addressing the way it continues to shape the social, political, and economic infrastructure of our country today is like talking about a hurricane only by discussing the speed of its winds, and not the damage it left behind.
November 17, 2025 at 1:33 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
I’m reminded after our win away to Liverpool last season, there was a great discussion on Sky about whether Renee should be made permanent manager. And this bit feels v interesting
November 16, 2025 at 7:00 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Screenshot of text: The ceasefire came, but the bombing never really stopped. In each moment of silence people still count the dead. In each interval of calm, I feel time slowing down-as if the world outside Gaza moves forward while we remain stuck inside the same unfinished sentence trapped between survival and meaning. When I write, I don't feel proud. I feel late. Words cannot keep up with what happens here. Language always follows loss. Still, I write, because forgetting is another kind of death. Writing does not save anyone; it only makes absence visible. It says, "We existed." It says, "We tried." And in Gaza, we have no more space to bury names.
November 14, 2025 at 1:00 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Translation: Fuck rules of engagement. We should be allowed to kill and brutalise who we want, when we want.
Screenshot of text: Some of the army's most senior officers have written an extraordinary letter to Starmer to complain about the creeping use of humanitarian law, my colleague Tom Newton Dunn reports. In an unprecedented move, a group of nine four-star generals have signed an open letter in today's Times to complain about how the legal system is negatively impacting military effectiveness under this government. The generals write that a collapse of faith in the legal system throughout the armed forces "risks everything" due to the use of "lawfare" against soldiers. They write: "Today every British soldier deployed must consider not only the enemy in front of them but the lawyer behind them. Make no mistake, our closest allies are watching uneasily, and our enemies will be rubbing their hands." The letter makes clear the widespread anger throughout the armed forces, particularly due to the "ever-broadening interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights"
November 12, 2025 at 2:02 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
November 11, 2025 at 2:25 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
2nd time in a row the world is proclaiming a PTA film, saying he may be the best of his generation, and I’m left looking at him like…
The Master in an episode of Doctor Who, saying “I think you can do better.”
November 7, 2025 at 1:01 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Screenshot of text: This is an astounding country which birthed the Industrial Revolution.” Screenshot of Adrian Lester in a play, saying “Feels like they’re missing something.”
November 6, 2025 at 1:49 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
A picture of Tim Robinson dressed as a hot dog from I Think You Should Leave. It's part of a meme template when a person causes distress to others and tries to absolve themselves of responsibility for their actions.
November 5, 2025 at 2:41 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Which leads me to ponder if we’ll be getting horror films that are pandemic themed.
Screenshot of text: In feeling out what really scares us, horror often connects with its cultural moment by accident, she contends; art forms like it help an audience process social anxieties "long before a culture is fully prepared to grapple with those problems and traumas in mainstream public discourse." And because it triggers an intensely physical response and denies viewers the catharsis of a happy ending, horror imprints its imagery and ideas on us long after the movie ends.
October 31, 2025 at 2:24 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Can’t see how this will hurt community cohesion, nope, am sure this will pass by without indecent.
Screenshot of text: It is a part of the home secretary's ambition to move 10,000 migrants into military sites, with Starmer telling minsters he wants all migrant hotels cleared within the next year. This was the type of thing that the Tories tried to implement under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. But backlash from Tory MPs, over the prospect of an influx of asylum seekers in their constituencies, meant limited success. But Mahmood has found quite a simple way to get past this by choosing sites in opposition constituencies. The Inverness barracks is in a Lib Dem-held constituency, while Crowborough is in a Tory seat.
October 30, 2025 at 1:59 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Screenshot of text: And not only suffer but that they deserve to do so. It is what they have earned. I feel like accepting that sets you on a morally and spiritually dangerous path. Even if, like many others, I feel the need to differentiate and elevate myself as someone who is doing things the right way, by working, following the rules, and making a life through talent and determination, someone who puts into the world and the greater economic system, and thus deserves access to its benefits, I still can't justify the feeling and idea that because I do all of those things, that those who do not should be condemned to suffering and living out hell on earth. I would much rather some of my tax dollars go to provide for those people than build another predator drone. Screenshot of text: It was a question that also put in perspective for me how much we accept the suffering of others as a normal part of living in this world It feels like all the time we're told and asked to accept that our price for being in this society, which is bragged about as prosperous and more glorious than all others, is the needless pain of others. A country that could solve this poverty and affliction and chooses not to, for whatever reasons it decides are just, is not really a good one. To celebrate the hoarding of wealth while condemning those who are unable to prosper in an increasingly difficult and unforgiving situation, feel extraordinarily wicked. I believe that any argument for how the world should be, whether that's a political argument or not, should start with, how can we lessen the suffering in the world, rather than who can and should be condemned to suffer. Screenshot of text: I'm also reminded now of a passage by Emil Cioran from On The Heights of Despair: "Whenever I think of man's abject poverty, his rot, his spreading gangrene, I am gripped by mortal despair. Instead of constructing theories and ideologies to deal with poverty, man, this rational animal, should simply give the coat off his back in a gesture of fraternal understanding. Poverty in the world compromises man more than anything else and will no doubt bring about the downfall of such a megalomaniac animal. In front of poverty, I'm even ashamed of music. How, then, should one support any social or political doctrine?"
October 30, 2025 at 12:00 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Which should lead people to ask, who’s keeping him hostage?
Screenshot of text: Several MPs said that while they had been buoyed up by Starmer's passionate speech to the Labour conference in late September, in which he talked about leading a "fight for the soul" of the nation against Reform, there had been little to follow this up. "People want to hear not just what Labour stands against, but what it stands for," one MP said. Another said: "Having managed to somehow stick his head outside the hostage cell, Keir's captors have got him back inside and have sent out Shabana Mahmood to explain what we'll do to people of different national origins who live and work in the UK. It is totally incoherent."
October 28, 2025 at 1:59 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
The amount of times I’ve had this conversation with one of my own sisters.
October 22, 2025 at 1:35 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Screenshot of text: The Israeli state is not the same as Israeli people, and Jewish people are not the same as Israeli people or the Israeli state. This isn't difficult to understand. Some of the finest people I've ever met have been Jewish. It is extremely troubling that antisemitism is on the rise globally, but the assumption that anybody who raises complaints about the behaviour of the Israeli government - or even any particular group of Israelis, if those concerns are well-documented and have been much-reported - is de facto an 'antisemite' is facile to the point of being insulting. It feels astonishing that this even needs to be said.
October 22, 2025 at 10:02 AM
tokenbg.bsky.social
This could be about anything.
Screenshot of text: The Daily Telegraph has had a permanent hate-erection for the last four days
October 21, 2025 at 12:46 PM
tokenbg.bsky.social
While I’m not going to act he was my all-time of all-time, think a reason for the sadness (beyond it always being sad when someone dies) is we won’t see another like him for a generation, if ever.
Screenshot of text: lot of people are real busy tryin' to get their point across,' he told Vibe in 1995. 'Not letting the listener use their imagination. You should be able to lay back and close your eyes and come up with your own vision.' Screenshot of text: The scholar Howard Rambsy Il has described how he once, as a student, tried to impress Amiri Baraka by talking about the saxophonist Albert Ayler. 'What you heard were rumours,' Baraka said. 'Rumours of what Albert sounded like live. The recordings couldn't capture his sound, his actual sound. Se what you heard were ruins of his real sound. D'Angelo's talent was sometimes overshadowed by rumours of his ruination. But at least we have the prodigious remnants of what he did. Some performers have had the life negotiated out of them by the time we get to hear them, and from the very beginning, there's nothing left. There is no cataclysm in their rhythms. No great wonder and no ruins. No rumours of virtuosity, only the chit-chat of tabloids. But not everyone has so much to put on the line.
October 21, 2025 at 11:00 AM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Screenshot of text: If the ongoing American crises of culture, technology, and government share a common thread, it's the steady advance of — for lack of a better term — fake shit. Our phones are turning into pocket-size casinos, offering windowless retreats from the real. Bots argue with bots on social media, and the slop churned out by Al is then regurgitated by different Al. The stock market seems ever more divorced from economic fundamentals, and the American military is being ordered around by a man who watches news clips of his own debates and rallies and grows convinced by his own made-up arguments. At the bottom of our splintering reality, there is still real art —real endeavors, inspirations, and feelings. But more and more, they're covered in mounds of fake shit. Screenshot of text: The traditional containers of albums and singles never seemed to be enough to hold his intentions. D'Angelo approached making music the way Black grandmothers approach making biscuits on Sunday before church; the way dorm hair braiders approach stitched cornrows; the way bandleaders in New Orleans approach second lines; the way fire-and-brimstone preachers approach Easter service; the way quilters approach quilting. Drawing on knowledge passed down from the ages, they work hard to perfect their craft, not just because of the promise of a transaction or consumption, but because the doing is the thing. So it is with making music, and the impossible task of assigning form to the ineffable. Sometimes the process is slow, painful, inefficient, or imperfect. But we don't make art because it's quick and easy.
October 20, 2025 at 10:30 AM
tokenbg.bsky.social
Screenshot of text: There's a case to be made that, under the right circumstances, progressive voices should meet their opponents in open debate rather than insist on deplatforming them. When we refuse to share the stage, our opponents get to cast themselves as martyrs sacrificed at the alter of the so-called "woke mob" and champions of free speech. But when we invite them into the light of honest conversation, their arguments often fall apart. Most of them, after all, are more comfortable sniping from behind a screen than trying to standing their ground against logic, reason, and evidence. Screenshot of text: This is not to suggest that debate is a one-size-fits-all solution. Safeguarding marginalized and vulnerable people from harm must always come first, especially when open discourse risks exposing them to harassment or retraumatization. Yet, when approached with care-through consent, structure, and skilled moderation-debate can serve as one of our most effective tools. It is not a cure-all, but part of a broader toolkit for understanding and persuasion. And when wielded responsibly, it can be a weapon worth unsheathing at the right moment.
October 19, 2025 at 11:48 AM