Mark

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[Seán Ako 🇮🇪 @TheAkoFiles]

After this interview, I was threatened with legal action and told my career would be ruined if I published it.

So here it is.

The public deserves to hear the conversation and judge it for themselves.

[ᜰ 🇦🇷 @markklfc]

Joe Cole responds to Thomas Tuchel’s comments after England’s World Cup semi-final defeat to Argentina.

🗣️ “I don’t want to hear excuses about facing strong teams. Everyone knew Argentina were the defending world champions before a ball was kicked. That’s not an excuse that was the challenge. If you want to win the World Cup, you have to beat the best.”

“You scored first and then completely abandoned your identity. The moment England took the lead, they started playing with fear instead of belief. It was like watching a small team desperately hanging on instead of a nation trying to reach a World Cup final.”

“You don’t score against Argentina and then spend the rest of the game camped inside your own penalty area. That’s football suicide. You invited pressure, gave Lionel Messi more time on the ball and practically begged Argentina to come back into the match. Against the greatest player of his generation, that’s asking to be punished.”

“The tactical approach was shocking. Instead of going for the second goal and killing the game, England retreated deeper and deeper. Every substitution sent the same message: ‘Let’s survive.’ You don’t survive against world champions you either finish them off or they finish you.”

“Don’t tell me England lost because Argentina were too good. England helped create their own downfall. This squad has enough quality to compete with anyone, but they were coached with fear instead of confidence.”

“The painful truth is England weren’t beaten by talent alone they were beaten by a lack of courage. A World Cup final was within touching distance, and it slipped away because the manager chose to protect a one-goal lead instead of chasing history. That’s a decision England will regret for years.”

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

People defend capitalism because they confuse it with commerce. They believe “capitalism” is when people start businesses and sell things.

If people understood that the thing they call capitalism and love so much is actually just commerce and that it’s not the same thing as capitalism, they would feel very different.

This is because a local baker selling bread, a mechanic fixing cars, or an artisan selling wares on a digital storefront is a sign of commerce in a market economy, which is simply a mechanism for exchanging goods and services based on supply and demand.

Needless to say, this has existed for thousands of years before capitalism was created.

As economic historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, commerce and capitalism are not only distinct; but historically, they have often operated at cross-purposes.

According to Braudel, ordinary commerce is competitive and transparent, while capitalism is anti-competitive and deliberately opaque, making it a zone of privilege held by a small elite who bend the rules in their favour.

Braudel further argues that commerce, or the market, is horizontal, transparent, and competitive and as old as civilization itself. It involves individuals or small groups trading goods, where barriers to entry are low, no single player dominates, and profit is a reward for fulfilling a specific need.

Capitalism, meanwhile, is a specific institutional arrangement that emerged relatively recently in human history, around the 16th to 17th centuries. It is NOT just people “trading stuff”. It is instead the legal and financial system where the means of production are privately owned, and the primary objective is the continuous, infinite accumulation of capital.

Because of this accumulation-obssessed nature of capitalism, when it scales up, it seeks to eliminate the free play of commerce to protect its investments. True market competition is risky for massive capital as it drives prices down and threatens profit margins.

Braudel contended that capitalism only begins where commerce ends. It is the zone of high finance and state collusion. Because it operates across vast distances such as the 17th-century spice trade, information takes months to travel, which creates a deliberate lack of transparency.

Braudel noted that the great capitalists of the early modern era in Madeira and Venice or the Dutch East India Company, never wanted to compete in a fair, transparent market because competition slices profit margins to the bone. Instead, they secured royal charters, exclusive trading rights, and naval protection. At the same time, the state granted them legal monopolies, effectively outlawing competition.

Therefore, capitalism naturally trends toward creating monopolies and securing state interventions like bailouts, subsidies, and regulatory capture to shield itself from the very market forces it claims to champion. In fact, the most important takeaway from Braudel’s analysis is that capitalism is NOT the natural evolution or the highest form of the free market, it is its dark shadow.

So, when our lizard overlords use “free market” and “capitalism” interchangeably, they’re deliberately hiding this distinction and using the moral legitimacy of the hard-working, transparent business owner to defend the structural privileges of the protected financial elite and its regulatory capture.

If ordinary people could comprehend these distinctions, many self-described “capitalists” would realise they are just pro-commerce, and actually anti-capitalist, because it would be clear that defending “capitalism” means defending the right of a small parasite class to bypass the market entirely.

[Dawn Clancy @dawnmclancy]

"I have three questions today for Israeli people through this press conference. I want to speak to them directly," said Sidoti.

🔴What kind of people are your soldiers who would allow a 14 year old child to bleed to death over a 45 minute period?

🔴What kind of people are your military leaders that would inculcate a culture that soldiers feel free to do this, acting with total impunity?

🔴What kind of people are your leaders? When they give orders, they make statements that encourage this kind of conduct, not merely permit it, but encourage it?

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

This report is haunting even for someone who has documented the most horrific aspects of this genocide - which too many world leaders pretend not to see.

I commend the Commission of Inquiry for its effort to bring about accountability and make the truth accessible.

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

I have been reading the new UN report about how Israel has been targeting children in Gaza. There are no words to describe how awful it is. Here are some of the worst examples:

1) Hind Rajab and family, Tel al-Hawa, Gaza City, 29 Jan 2024. Named. A family of seven plus two paramedics killed. Hind Rajab, 5 to 6, stayed on the phone with rescuers for hours, trapped in a car among her dead relatives. Her cousin Layan Hamadeh, 15, was killed mid-call. The rescue ambulance, dispatched with COGAT clearance, was shelled.

2) The 15-year-old with the white flag, Khan Younis, 24 Jan 2024. Anonymous. Shot in the foot during an ordered evacuation while holding a white cloth, then shot twice more in the back and neck as he tried to rise. His 20-year-old brother killed running to him; their mother shot signaling for an ambulance. Assessed as DAN .338 sniper fire from about 200m.

3) The 10-day-old baby, Nuseirat camp, 12 Apr 2024. Anonymous. Shot in the head by a quadcopter-mounted rifle while being breastfed inside a tent. Survived with brain damage and seizures.

4) The 14-year-old killed with fragmenting pellets, Aug 2024. Anonymous. Cube-shaped pellets that fragmented internally like cluster munitions, destroying multiple organs. The report flags the munition itself as a possible war crime.

5) Jadallah "Jad" Jadallah, Al-Far'a camp, Tubas, 16 Nov 2025. Named. Jadallah Jihad Jouma Jadallah, 14, shot at close range and left bleeding for roughly 45 minutes while about 14 soldiers stood around him. One kicked his cap back when he threw it for attention, one filmed him, one placed a stone beside him to stage a stone-throwing pretext. Soldiers fired at his approaching mother and blocked two ambulances. Body withheld.

6) Layla al-Khatib, Muthallath al-Shuhada, 25 Jan 2025. Named. Layla (Laila) Muhammad Ayman al-Khatib, 2, shot in the back of the head during dinner at home, four bullets fired through the living room window. Youngest West Bank child killed in the reporting period. B'Tselem found the only man in the building was her grandfather, contradicting the "wanted terrorist" claim.

7) Saddam Rajab, Tulkarem, shot 28 Jan 2025, died 7 Feb 2025. Named. Saddam (Sadam) Rajab, 10, shot during an incursion. A soldier told the father, "I am the one who shot your son. God willing, he will die." Medical care obstructed; the boy died of his wounds days later.

8) Walid Ahmad, Megiddo Prison, died 22 Mar 2025. Named. Walid Khalid Abdullah Ahmad, 17, from Silwad. Healthy at arrest in Sept 2024; dead six months later of starvation, muscle wasting, untreated colitis and scabies. First Palestinian minor to die in Israeli custody since Oct 2023. Family learned of his death from a news article; body withheld.

9) The Sde Teiman 15-year-old, detention. Anonymous. Held among 70 adults, shackled until his hands bled, dogs released on prone detainees; described as "the worst days of my life." A separate 15-year-old reported being electrocuted via a needle in his shoulder over 54 days.

10) The four newborns at Al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital, Nov 2023. Anonymous. Found decomposing, still attached to defunct life-support machines, after staff were forced to evacuate without being able to move them. Independently verified by the Commission, Washington Post, and CNN.

11) Newborn hypothermia deaths, Dec 2024 to Feb 2025. Anonymous. At least 15 newborns, including a one-day-old girl, died of cold linked to lack of shelter, fuel, and incubators. UNICEF called the deaths preventable.

12) Sexual violence in detention. Anonymous. Forced public stripping and filming of boys during mass arrests; two cousins aged 7 and 13 stripped at gunpoint in Jenin; new reports of boys raped in custody, one on multiple occasions.

The Commission documents at least 20,179 Palestinian children killed and 44,143 wounded in two years, 30 percent of all the dead in Gaza, alongside 213 more killed in the West Bank. Thirteen times the Commission asked Israel to respond, and thirteen times it heard nothing back. Israel doesn't care enough to even respond. It kills children as a matter of policy.

[Ami Dar @AmiDar]

Yes, the Ben-Gvir video is disgraceful. But that's not the issue. The (obvious) issue is that if that's how nonviolent European protesters are treated in public, any person with a brain can imagine how Palestinians are treated behind closed doors. *That* is the real scandal.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

🧵on 'NYT rift'
1/22
A NYT article on sexual abuse against Palestinians -accurate but barely scratching the surface- is triggering hysteria in the Israeli govt not bcs of the facts, but bcs of the audience.
Apartheid Israel fears NYT readers will finally see and no longer ignore.

[Andy Masley @AndyMasley]

My contribution to the solar/farm discourse is that solar panels capture about 100x as much usable energy from the sun as corn grown for ethanol, if you include the energy cost of growing corn.

Ethanol corn is 40% of all US corn and is literally just there to capture energy from the sun. We have a way of doing that much more efficiently now!

[Jordan Fish @jwordfish]

@i_zzzzzz @jetskitosway2 I come back to this essay super frequently. Remarkably strong work from 2016 refuting everything https://t.co/3MaxCjEy2X

[Irish Girl🌷 @ServeOnlyGod]

We Irish have so many unique and beautiful mannerisms, ways and traditions that we don’t even realise we do. They are things we do without knowing but are passed down from generations.

Listen to this take on why Irish people always refuse the first offer.

It’s so true.

[Iran in Ghana @IRAN_GHANA]

Read slowly.

"We don't need the Strait." "Go open it yourselves." "Fine, we'll open it." "Actually, we're blockading it." "OK not blockading everyone."

Five positions. Six weeks. Two of them today. And our armed forces just sat there, sipping tea, watching America negotiate with America over a strait Iran already blockades.
Empires used to fall in centuries. This one can't hold a policy for an afternoon.

[Peter Daou @peterdaou]

Let's be crystal clear: The world is NOT silent in the face of this demonic evil.

It's the world's 'leaders' and their media propagandists who are silent, and complicit.

[Abier @abierkhatib]

I have no idea who she is, but I’d sit in on her class any time.

The sick question: ‘Does Israel even have the right to exist?’

Watch.

[Spaceballs The X Account @Grunt2A]

Now that Artemis II has launched we have 10 days to get everyone on Earth a Planet of the Apes costume so we can do something hilarious when the astronauts return 😁

[brixton hatter @BrixtonHatter]

List of people who’ve got very upset about @ZackPolanski & the Greens in recent weeks. Good work!

Andrew Neil
Sarah Vine
Zac Goldsmith
Tony Blair
Nicole Lampert
Daily Mail
Heidi Bachram
Al Carns MP
Eve Barlow
Matt Goodwin
Nick Ferrari
Fiona Bruce
Matthew D’Ancona

Add more below

[Old Media @oldmedia]

The Job is an Argentine short film from 2008, and also one of the best of this century.

[TheVikingDane @TheVikingDane]

I have just found my favourite account ever! 😂😂😂

[Rudy Havenstein, Senior Markets Commentator. @RudyHavenstein]

One of the most prescient and insightful comedy sketches ever.

https://t.co/dW125mjGmO

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

@preyanimalgf If they were women, it would be a given that they’re included in feminism. That you have to constantly say this is a give away that even you know they’re not women.