Patrick WC

Senior Developer @angrycreative. Londoner.

[Patrick WC @Patrick_WC]

Neoliberalism wasn't a thing when we defeated the small pox virus. Greed is delaying global recovery and increasing the likelihood of new variants. When will the government and big pharma stop looking at short term profit forecasts on a graph and start thinking long-term? 🤑🤑🤦‍♂️

[Richard Burgon MP @RichardBurgon]

As we look at the nightmarish scenes coming out of India, let's remember that our government is blocking a temporary waiver of the vaccine patents that would allow poorer countries to produce their own vaccines.

[Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar]

I pulled out of SXSW London, and I hope other speakers and chairs do too.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Banning Cenk Uyghur and Hasan Piker from entering the UK is an absurd and cowardly decision from an increasingly authoritarian government.

Let us call this what it is: an attack on the freedom to criticise Israel, as well as the UK government’s own complicity in genocide.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

For any British viewer, watching these Irish commentators explain why it is important for Ireland to boycott a football match against Israel is like being thrust into an alternate universe. One where morality – not money – guides the agenda.

A different world is possible.

[The Celtic Way @TheCelticWay3]

You fundamentally just wouldn't be allowed to say this on British TV.

Well done to Richie Sadlier.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Oracle’s £250m gift to the Tony Blair Institute appears to buy you an entire Question Time episode.

[Led By Donkeys @ByDonkeys]

“My name is Amos Goldberg. I am an Israeli Professor of Holocaust Studies. For nearly 30 years I have researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence.

And I want to tell whoever is willing to listen that what’s happening now in Gaza is a genocide.

A year ago when October 7th happened, like all Israelis I was in shock. It was a war crime and a crime against humanity. 1200 people - more than 800 of them civilians - were killed in one day. Children and the elderly were among those taken hostage. Communities were destroyed. It was outrageous, traumatizing, personal. Like most Israelis, I know people who were killed, who lost loved ones or whose loved ones were taken hostage.

But immediately afterwards came Israel’s response and within weeks thousands of civilians were killed in Gaza. It took me some time to digest what was unfolding before my eyes. It was agonizing to confront that reality. I was reluctant to call it a genocide.

But if you read Raphael Lemkin – the Jewish-Polish legal scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ and was the major driving force behind the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention – what is happening in Gaza now is exactly what he had in mind when he spoke about genocide.

It does not need to look like the Holocaust to be a genocide. Each genocide looks different and not all involve killing of millions or the entire group. The United Nations Genocide Convention explicitly asserts that genocide is the act of deliberately destroying a group in whole or in part. Those are the words.

But there does need to be a clear intent.

And indeed, there are clear indications of intent to destroy Gaza: Israel’s leaders - including the prime minister and the minister of defence - and many high-ranking military officers, media personalities, rabbis, as well as ordinary soldiers were very open about what they wanted to achieve. There were countless documented incitements to turn the whole of Gaza into rubble and claims that there are no innocent people living there.

A radical atmosphere of dehumanization of the Palestinians prevails in Israeli society to an extent that I can’t remember in my 58 years of living here.

Now that vision has been enacted. Tens of thousands of innocent children, women and men have been killed. Over a hundred thousand were wounded. There is a near total destruction of infrastructure, intentional starvation and blocking of humanitarian aid. There are mass graves and reliable testimony of summary executions. Children that were shot by snipers. All the universities and almost all hospitals are gone. Almost all the population is displaced. There have been numerous bombings of civilians in so-called ‘safe zones’. Gaza does not exist anymore. It is completely destroyed. Thus, the outcome fits perfectly with the stated intentions of Israel’s leadership.

Lemkin - that scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ - described two phases of a genocide. The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called ‘imposition of the national pattern’ of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements.

And therefore, I have come to the conclusion that this is exactly what a genocide looks like. We don’t teach about genocides in order to realize it retrospectively. We teach about it in order to prevent it and to stop it.

But like in every other case of genocide in history right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.

But reality cannot be denied.

So yes, it is a genocide.

And once you come to this conclusion you cannot remain silent.”

- Statement to Led By Donkeys, December 2024
- Photo: Parliament Square, London, 8.40am, 4th December 2024

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Ashok Kumar | 🇵🇸 @broseph_stalin]

Let’s confront Green Party “scandals” head-on

One day Zack is “too rich” the next “too poor”. He spoke at the Red Cross, while Keir helped kill Gaza Red Cross aid workers. Zack worked for an MoJ agency, Keir’s MoJ illegally mass arrested anti-genocide activists

The real scandal

[Happily Dissatisfied @nocontextEFC]

When you go for a jog?

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

Repost if you’d like me to represent the UK at #Eurovision 2027.

[𝔗𝔯𝔲𝔱𝔥 𝔐𝔞𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔰 @politicsusa46]

THIS is how to articulate the argument against the continuing unconscionable actions of the Israeli genocidal apartheid state.

My thanks to Dr Myriam Francois for her words of truth.

🎥 TikTok - https://t.co/X5gVIajJau

[Patrick WC @Patrick_WC]

Absolutely vile. When will other media organisations report on this story?

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Blisteringly good, this. @Jonathan_Hinder is one of Labour's finest MPs.

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

This is a hard article to read, but I hope you'll do so. I've spent some time reporting on widespread rape and other sexual violence of Palestinian male and female prisoners by Israeli authorities, and the article is now published. The assault victims were warned not to give speak of what they endured -- they were sometimes told they would be killed or raped if they gave interviews -- but they found the courage to do so. One man described being raped three times in a single day in Israeli prison, the third time after he tried to protest. A young woman said the guards would come in at the beginning of each shift and strip her naked and abuse her. Another reported that she was shown photos of herself being raped and warned they would be released unless she cooperated with Israeli intelligence. Even three children who had been detained told me they had been sexually abused. Look, whatever our position on the Middle East, we should be able to agree on being anti-rape. Sexual assaults were horrific when Israeli women were targeted on Oct. 7, and they're equally horrific when Israeli authorities use them against Palestinians day after day after day. We should be able to find common ground in opposing rape. Here's a gift link to the article: https://t.co/aMMHId49OO

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

This country might be about to have its 6th Prime Minister in 7 years.

Why? Because they’ve all failed to take on a rigged economic system that enriches the few at the expense of us all.

People want a society where children don’t go hungry. That is really not too much to ask.

[Patrick WC @Patrick_WC]

Impeccably timed cough right here

[Olly @oIIyjm]

I think I'm now at the stage of pitying him.

The silence at the end - where it was obviously assumed there would be hearty applause - is so gloriously cringe-worthy.

[Peter Jukes @peterjukes]

There’s something rotten in the state of the BBC’s political reporting. And unless it’s fixed soon, they will bring the catastrophe of Trump to the UK.

[Karl Hansen @karl_fh]

If you’re still having to clarify what your values are 11 years after becoming an MP, 6 years after becoming Leader of the Opposition, and 2 years into being Prime Minister, it’s because you don’t actually have any.

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

This is what would happen if you replace the word "Muslim" with "Jews" in Trevor Phillips quotes: