FredrikB

Marketing in the world of sport and health.

[FredrikB @frebju]

@AllisonPearson He’ll be limiting us to one kitchen per flat soon. Where will it end?

[Endurance Sportswire @endurancewire]

The 2025 @HNLmarathon generated $532M in total economic output, supported 5,000+ jobs, and produced $32M in tax revenue across Hawaiʻi 🏃‍♂️🌴

Read the full Economic Impact Report:

https://t.co/HCLBqEKt2t

#HonoluluMarathon #Running #Hawaii

[Joo @JoosyJew]

We need to talk about the Left.

Growing up, the Left felt like the natural home of virtue and social justice. It was the obvious entry point into politics when you were finding your feet – a place where people were treated fairly and society came first. My street had direct links to the Labour Party, with many canvassing locally, and our neighbour served as a Councillor. You weren’t a bloody Tory. My older generation were hard-working, working-class Brits – receptionist, charity worker, blanket-weaver, tailor, bricklayer, housewife. The Left focussed on making their community better for themselves and for each other. For many years it felt like the default place to put your cross on the ballot paper. Maybe, in hindsight, I was always wrong, and it was never really like that.

Fast forward a few generations and large swathes of today’s Left are unrecognisable. I’m not just talking about the Crank Left anymore. Today’s mainstream Left is more regularly shaped by hate, violence, sadism, apathy, identity politics, guilt, and a rigid, black-and-white view of the world fixed in cement – labelled either good or evil.

This includes much of today’s so-called ‘regular’ Left, who wear their politics on their sleeves, pin-badges, social media bios, TikTok videos, or wrapped around their faces. They are our teachers, our doctors and nurses, our lawyers, our MPs. They are not fringe extremists anymore, standing by a trestle table muttering about overthrowing "The Man". They are a mainstream, socially acceptable toxicity, shielded by the word 'Left'. They scream through our streets dressed as jihadis on a Saturday afternoon, or draped in black calling women Nazís for being women. They walk side by side with Islamist fascists screaming for intifada in our cities. They cheer on jihad abroad. They belittle women for demanding the right to feel safe from men. They lionise murderers who shoot dead CEOs. They share memes of young Jews killed in Washington captioned with chants of "Free, Free Palestine". They post selfies playing trumpets or dancing with joy after a 31-year-old man – whose words they disliked – was executed on camera in front of thousands of students.

No one knows who killed Charlie Kirk. The belief is that it was someone from this broad church that today makes up the Left. But it could yet be someone on the Right who thought he wasn’t Right enough and sided with Jews. Or in the darkest conspiracies, a "Zionist" with a grudge. Either way, it hardly matters, because the act itself is now celebrated by a growing swathe of the Left.

The thoughtful Left-leaning friends on your social media seem to have vanished. A few years back they would change their bios to flags of nations under attack, campaign for nurses’ pay rises, or post selfies on picket lines. Now they share The Grayzone articles, memes about lynchíng JK Rowling, Press TV propaganda about the Hanníbal Directive, or dashboard rants about how Charlie Kirk’s death was poetic justice. Their former selves from ten or twenty years ago would be horrified, but they don’t even notice.

The Far Left was always there, but the banality of its evil has become mainstream. Its extremism has bled into the regular Left, a slow mission creep of hatred. Since October 7th, we’ve watched the Left dive into rape denial, atrocity porn, conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and misogyny, packaging it all up as being on the right side of history. This new breed genuinely believes it is the world’s humble, honourable, virtuous movement. They compartmentalise. A Ukrainian girl stabbed to death on a bus is ignored so as not to mention the black perpetrator. A Gazan man who ráped and mutilated an Israeli woman is excused because Israel is worse ("...and Muslíms wouldn’t rápe Jews anyway"). Starving Sudanese or Yemeni children are forgotten, because they are less fashionable than Palestinians, and the Houthis are cool anyway. The man in a dress flashed ‘her’ penis, actually.

Let’s be honest. The Far Right are no better. They just wear a different rosette. But what makes the transformation of today’s Left so dangerous is the bravado and the smug smile it comes with. They feel untouchable, because society still sees them as what the Left is meant to be, not what it is fast becoming.

The Extreme Right knows it is fascist. The Extreme Left still thinks it is virtuous.

That’s why it’s still confidently smiling.

[Ella Ke @EllaTravelsLove]

A single flower among thorns.

[Ivar Arpi @Ivarpi]

De var på väg till simhallen när Mikael mördades framför ögonen på sin 12-årige son. För att han hade civilkurage. Det är inte “rättssäkerhet” att låta detta fortgå, utan masochism. Nog är nog.

Ny text på Rak höger ikväll.
https://t.co/ROT9Svr9zj

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

"Much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, 'decolonization,' which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states ... and is as dangerous as it is false," @simonmontefiore writes: https://t.co/9zvLNoUqnI

[Daniel Finkelstein @Dannythefink]

This article by a Palestinian human rights activist living in the West Bank is unmissable. Free Palestine! https://t.co/L9vCzuAT9G

[FredrikB @frebju]

@CraigLeMoyne GMs Edsel

[FredrikB @frebju]

@CharlotteCGill Makes me wonder exactly what you were expecting. Just curious

[Tour de France™ @LeTour]

🔥À demain. 9h. 👋@NetflixFR

[Jeff Peel @JeffreyPeel]

So I wrote this post on a well-known newsletter platform earlier. But Twitter Blue permits 4,000 characters now. So here it is...my first long-form post on Twitter. It's about @elonmusk and @JamesClayton5

When Clayton ‘interviewed’ Musk
Shiny new BBC people

Until this morning I hadn’t heard of James Clayton. In my previous life (prior to March 2020) he’s the type of person I may have met on my visits to San Francisco. We’re in the same line of work, so to speak. I used to talk with journalists in the Bay Area when I was running Comms for technology start-ups and their wannabe media star CEOs. Although, James’ role as “North America Tech Reporter” for the BBC is a relatively new one. It used to be that Rory Cellan-Jones ruled that particular roost and would jaunt over from the UK to California to report from the Consumer Electronics Show and other corporate shindigs - and would studiously avoid jobbing comms types like me. He followed me on Twitter for a while but quickly unfollowed me when he realised I was pro-Brexit. And I reciprocated the unfollow when I got bored with his tweeting the results of his experiments making sourdough bread in plant-pots. Rory’s output on technology matters never really amounted to much.

This morning I found out who James Clayton was because of what had unfolded on Twitter - when I was asleep during the night (San Francisco is currently 8 hours behind BST). Apparently Clayton had offered to ‘interview’ Elon Musk on a Twitter ‘Space’ (these are like live streamed radio shows where Twitter users can connect to the spaces to listen to nominated speakers debate various topics). For this one James had offered to interview Elon Musk. And, astonishingly, Musk had agreed. Some 3 million people ‘tuned in’.

Part of the reason Musk might have agreed was that just a few weeks ago, Marianna Spring - the BBC's first specialist disinformation and social media correspondent - had put together a hatchet-job on Twitter under Musk’s management. Spring, like Clayton, has a job title befitting of the BBC’s new role in international broadcasting and global class woke moralising. Where, previously, journalists uncovered conspiracies, corruption, shady dealings or corporate malfeasance, the BBC’s new shiny role is to uncover opinions that don’t match its editorial lines and ensure they don’t get reported.

The BBC’s editorial lines are, typically, these days, defined by the UK government (and its governmental partners in the United States) and corporate partners in the World Economic Forum. Tim Weber, formerly of BBC Business, and one of Rory Cellan-Jones’ colleagues, was a regular at Davos. Now that he’s moved on to Edelman - the uber-woke PR firm that typically launches its corporate “trust” barometer at the annual Davos shindig - he must have amassed lots of Schwab brownie-points.

But the BBC, and the establishment PR machines, have never met the likes of Elon Musk. Where, in the past, the BBC could get away with atrocious, patronising behaviour and globalist schmoozing, now it has to deal with a new era that’s calling it out. And Musk, I have to say, is leading the charge.

Just a few days ago Musk adorned the @BBC twitter account with a “Government funded media” label. And, at yesterday’s lamb-to-the-slaughter Twitter-Space match, Musk supremely, and effortlessly, intellectually eviscerated James Clayton. Indeed I’d go as far as to say that it was the moment when the BBC’s brand was shredded with the same degree of hubristic-precision as when Bud Light decided to put Dylan Mulvaney’s visage on its beer cans. If James Clayton, and the entire BBC Board, aren’t asking what exactly they stand for after this car-crash, then we can expect more of the same: a humiliating descent to that place where ageing media elephants go to die.

[FredrikB @frebju]

@jamessmithPT_ As a cyclist I agree. Vine does come across a cock at times

[Dr. Simon @goddek]

@BBCWorld Staged. Not falling for that propaganda. Attached a video of the rehearsal.

[Professor Karol Sikora @ProfKarolSikora]

Lots of people now highlighting lockdown harms with a degree of surprise...

The warnings were made at the time, but they were ignored. Instead of a mature conversation, it was a cesspit.

Accused of wanting tens of thousands to die. Honestly, it was a disgrace.

[FredrikB @frebju]

@PCvanOranje @berlinmarathon @ASICSeurope @PolarBenelux @daanhoek74 @jolijnswager Congrats PC!

[FredrikB @frebju]

@hanifbali https://t.co/24MyBDRZOt

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

I call on all Weston female politicians who went to Iran & obeyed hijab laws while Iranian women were getting beaten for resisting hijab laws, now it is your turn. Listen and take action. Hijab police killed #MahsaAmini & killing protesters.
#مهیا_امینی

[Capel Lofft @CapelLofft]

Putin has managed to be more respectful in response to the Queen's death than the New York Times. What a world.

[Paddington @paddingtonbear]

Thank you Ma’am, for everything.

[Dr Rachel Clarke @doctor_oxford]

What an exceptionally beautiful thing this was. Thinking of the entire family at Balmoral 😔

[David Monti 🥑 @d9monti]

.@HNLmarathon president Dr. Jim Barahal (pictured below with his wife, Helena) spoke to @wearehpr about the challenges his organization faces in putting on the 2022 #HonoluluMarathon on Sunday, December 11. Listen here: https://t.co/vMn5Tpkz13