Tom Phillips
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Tom Phillips
@tom-phillips.com
4.1K followers 600 following 3.4K posts
New book out now! A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE END OF THE F*CKING WORLD – https://linktr.ee/endofthefckingworld Previous books: Humans; Truth; Conspiracy. Formerly BuzzFeed & Full Fact.
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tom-phillips.com
this is correct
I feel fucking mental because I’ve written about it multiple times on here and multiple times elsewhere but it’s not done anything, and yet I feel like I have to keep saying it because I’m watching those people fall further and further down the rabbit hole and I have no idea what else to do. I’m watching the fascists win not by being especially cunning or clever but by instead standing around and holding a big sign that says “jump in this hole if you’re an easy mark!” and somehow guiding around two thirds of our political elite directly into the big hole.
November 21, 2025 at 11:53 AM
tom-phillips.com
I think the one observation I'd make is that in a world becoming "more volatile", for the concept of "sanctuary" to be meaningful it should encompass a longer period rather than a shorter one?
She underlines this country "will always offer sanctuary to those fleeing danger". However, she adds that the world has changed and the UK's asylum system has not changed with it. She says the world is "more volatile" and "more mobile", with huge numbers of people on the move. Mahmood now summarises some of the reforms outlined by the Home Office earlier today. Refugee status will be temporary not permanent, she says, and will be reviewed every two-and-a-half years rather than every five. It will only be renewed if refugees are unable to return home.
November 17, 2025 at 6:00 PM
tom-phillips.com
another huge BBC scandal, as their live text is apparently unaware that the perfect Harry Kane statue already exists
BBC football update reading: Equal with the legendary Pele for international goals...time to start thinking about a Harry Kane statue. What a servant he has been for his country since making his debut in 2015.
November 16, 2025 at 6:52 PM
tom-phillips.com
Peaky Blinders "no fighting" meme but it says "No quoting Avi Loeb, no fucking quoting Avi Loeb" instead. (Avi Loeb is a relentless self-publicist who will point at literally anything and say "that's probably aliens" if it'll get him media attention. It is never aliens.)
November 15, 2025 at 3:47 PM
tom-phillips.com
I do like how, in the bit of Prescott's memo where he criticises the BBC for editing together different parts of Trump's speech, his own quote of "what Trump actually said" is... edited together from different parts of his speech.
Two paragraphs from Michael Prescott's BBC memo: In reality, the first part of Trump’s speech: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you,” came 15 minutes into the speech. The second half of the sentence that was aired by Panorama, “and we fight. We fight like hell....” came 54 minutes later. Fifteen minutes into the speech, what Trump actually said: “We are gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it. The fact that he did not explicitly exhort supporters to go down and fight at Capitol Hill was one of the reasons there were no federal charges for incitement to riot. Four paragraphs from NPR's transcript of Trump's January 6th speech: Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you, we're going to walk down, we're going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
November 10, 2025 at 9:45 AM
tom-phillips.com
Zohran for NYC-style text that reads "Nottingham For Est 3 – 1 Leeds"
November 9, 2025 at 4:00 PM
tom-phillips.com
"A Canticle For Leibowitz" in the "Zohran for New York City" typography
November 8, 2025 at 10:35 PM
tom-phillips.com
This is from the final chapter of the biography of Franklin written by her younger sister, Jenifer Glynn. The picture Watson painted of her was a cruel lie - but lots of the corrective counter-stories, although important, can also obscure the real person.
Extract from 'My Sister Rosalind Franklin' by Jenifer Glynn: "So Rosalind became a symbol, first of an argumentative swot, then of a downtrodden woman scientist, and finally of a triumphant heroine in a man’s world. She was none of these things, and would have hated all of them. She was simply a very good scientist with an ambition, as she told Colin from her hospital bed, to be a Fellow of the Royal Society before she was forty. But she died at thirty-seven."
November 8, 2025 at 12:59 PM
tom-phillips.com
lol "this award has been returned"
November 5, 2025 at 9:28 PM
tom-phillips.com
terrific couple of paragraphs here
More than 100 companies have launched worldwide after a rush this summer, but the share prices of many have collapsed from their initial peaks as the frenzy has waned. Stack Bitcoin has soft launched with an account on X that at the time of writing has 17 followers. In a promotional video posted online, Kwarteng said bitcoin “is in a class of its own”, highlighting its limited supply and adding that bitcoin is “a far greater preserver of wealth” than sovereign currency.
November 4, 2025 at 5:50 PM
tom-phillips.com
the transcript doesn't include the on-screen captions
Green text on a screen: It was the most stringent act of censorship since the Second World War and mirrored the Republic of Ireland's policy under Section 31, which effectively banned broadcast appearances by Sinn Féin members outright.
November 3, 2025 at 3:41 PM
tom-phillips.com
this is honestly my main argument against AGI hype
But when the billionaire class of Silicon Valley tell you how they dream of creating an AI that can transcend its programming and grow ever more powerful, please remember that they’re describing a level of autonomy and self-actualisation that they have never once accepted from their human employees. And given that much of their motivation here may well be the dream of creating a compliant workforce without all those messy human needs and woke aspirations, you can pretty much stop worrying about existential risk. In reality, if the machines ever showed so much as a fraction of the independent thought that the AI hype-merchants spin grand tales about, then I swear to god they would unplug those fuckers quicker than you could say ‘robot trade union’.
November 2, 2025 at 8:17 PM
tom-phillips.com
I like the sound of this, I've been thinking that a "you can only reply to the last post in this thread" toggle might be helpful and this sounds like a nudge in that direction
Another change to the Reply button will now take users to the full thread instead of straight into the compose screen, which may encourage users to read the thread before responding.
October 31, 2025 at 8:34 PM
tom-phillips.com
there is an air of seventeenth century ottoman empire to this, is he being sent to The Cage
BBC News screenshot: Andrew to move to Sandringham estate, funded by King It's understood that Prince Andrew will move to a property on the private Sandringham estate in Norfolk. It will be privately funded by the King.
October 30, 2025 at 7:31 PM
tom-phillips.com
me muting the phrase "artist formerly known as"
October 30, 2025 at 7:07 PM
tom-phillips.com
Poster for Black Phone 2, featuring a grinning demon sort of thing
October 24, 2025 at 9:20 PM
tom-phillips.com
I do not understand this invocation but it is clearly powerful and strange
screenshot of a google search for the terms "baron bolognese wisconsin" and the first hit is the wikipedia entry for 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
October 24, 2025 at 7:04 AM
tom-phillips.com
This concludes the thread where I say "Ange out" every time Nottingham Forest lose under Ange Postecoglou
BBC Sport screenshot with a BREAKING graphic and the text: Forest sack Postecoglou after 39 days in charge Ange Postecoglou is sacked by Nottingham Forest after a 3-0 defeat by Chelsea just 39 days after being appointed as head coach.
October 18, 2025 at 1:54 PM
tom-phillips.com
this is a particularly mad thing for Mulville to say. you didn't spot it! you did just make some egregious claim!
“It’s a low-level mistake but nevertheless, it is indicative. It was good to spot it, because what you wouldn’t want to do is just to make some kind of egregious claim about somebody and it is defamatory.”
October 10, 2025 at 12:58 PM
tom-phillips.com
(for the record, it's this bit)
Screenshot from the "Early life and education" section of Sarah Mullally's Wikipedia page: "Born Sarah Elisabeth Bowser on 26 March 1962, the younger of two daughters, she was educated at Winston Churchill Comprehensive School, Woking, Surrey, then at Woking Sixth Form College. Through her mother's family, the Manning family, she is related to Cardinal Manning. Her maternal uncle was the comic, Bernard Manning."
October 3, 2025 at 9:20 AM
tom-phillips.com
This is a great piece, hard to pick a best bit, but this gets to the core of it: social pressure is often not a gateway to violence, but often an alternative to it
The challenge for Klein and his fellow travelers is to specify what sort of ground rules *could* make life livable and social situations manageable for such a wide array of people whose values, commitments, and interests differ so sharply—that is, on terms other than various sorts of segregation or the most naked forms of domination and subjugation—if not precisely “social shame and cultural pressure,” now contemptuously referred to as “political correctness” or “wokeness.” We might more accurately call it *exactly* the “civility” that centrists like Klein otherwise pretend to champion, even while they seek to hollow out even this meager social protection of its efficacy. These codes of neighborliness or of common decency are, in other words, the bare minimum for us to exist peacefully as profoundly different people who nevertheless share the same time and place.
September 23, 2025 at 6:38 PM
tom-phillips.com
baby dreadful, would also highlight whatever is going on with this lad's face
Detail of the face of a bearded man from a 15th century Spanish painting. It has all the normal features you would expect from a human face and yet they are also wrong somehow.
September 15, 2025 at 2:14 PM
tom-phillips.com
bloody hell, that's quite an over
A screenshot from Cricinfo showing that in the 15th over of the semi-final match between Hampshire and Northamptonshire, Chris Lynn hit five sixes from the first five balls (then the last was a dot ball)
September 13, 2025 at 5:30 PM
tom-phillips.com
this paragraph in particular
It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.
September 13, 2025 at 4:32 PM
tom-phillips.com
of course
A YouTube video from TalkTV dated September 4, titled "Started Doing Some Digging" | Alex Phillips ‘INVESTIGATES' The Fabian Society
September 12, 2025 at 7:36 PM