💜🤍💚 adult human female, Scottish woman living in an English world, Alt Left (politically homeless ex leftie), looking for sanity in this crrrazy world 😘
I wrote an article the other day describing a political schism I believe has occured in the Left in recent years, which has essentially gone unnoticed, but will define progressive politics over the next decade or two. I've called the new political bloc the Alt Left and it is the reason Kamala lost, b/c this new bloc generally will not vote for left-leaning politicians in their current state.
If you've enjoyed my content and writing over the years, I would ask you to please take a few moments to read this and let me know what you think. It may end up describing you perfectly.
My gut tells me there's a lot of us out there. Millions. And the first thing we need to do in order to make our voices heard within the Left is organize. Our mission is to reform the Left from top to bottom to make it once again reflect classical liberal values.
If you read this a s find yourself thinking "well that sounds like me" follow me over here at @The_AltLeft . I'm envisioning that account as a sort of proving ground for a lot of these ideas. I'll post content designed to stimulate conversation around these topics until we can get to a broad consensus. From time to time I'll post polls on specific issues open only to Alt Left subscribers so that we can further define what the positions are of this political bloc and how we can wield our political power to do the badly needed reforms the Left requires.
Its either this, or throw in the towel and become right wingers, and I don't think any of us want to do that.
Let's start cleaning up our mess.
@PeterTatchell No Peter, transwomen are men who change their outward apprarance. Nothing more. Nothing at all like being gay which is innate. You know this very well. How dare you think you can speak for women on this.
I’ve been left wing all my life and the weaponisation I see mostly comes from the left. Stop gaslighting us into thinking anybody who slightly disagrees with the left’s path to utopia is far right or right wing. And what’s bad about right wing when it means securing your borders and caring about the working class.
I love Japan and its whole culture. Went there on honeymoon in 2000. I loved the people, the language, the temples, the bullet trains, the toilets, the traditional guesthouses, the whole aesthetic style of everything Japanese - modern and old. My favourite place? Kyoto train station. 🥰 xx
Cillian Murphy said something about women that stopped every relationshippsychologist who heard it.
In three sentences he described something most men spend their entire lives unable to articulate.
And what he said will change how you understand every relationship where one person sees more clearly than the other...
Sorry to hear that. My dad had a heart attack when on holiday in Rome in June. The healthcare he received there was excellent and they were horrified to learn that he hadn’t had one proper check up on his heart by cardiology since his triple heart and subsequent heart attack in the last 12 years. Hasn’t been able to see a cardiologist since he returned - he has been told twice by NHS staff to report to A&E with chest pains to get an appt. Because “that’s the way the NHS is now” they say.
Japan will always love you.
The story of the lives Dolly Parton saved without ever knowing it.
Dolly Parton performed in Japan exactly once.
July 1979. Nakano Sun Plaza, Tokyo. The stage costume she wore that night now hangs in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
One visit. That was all Japan ever saw of her.
What Japan received from her is another story entirely. Almost nobody here knows it. It deserves to be told today.
In 1973, in Tennessee, she wrote a quiet goodbye song for a man she was leaving. Nearly twenty years later, Whitney Houston's version of that song swept Japan, and the soundtrack was certified for two million copies here alone.
The last recording Olivia Newton-John ever made, in the final year of her life, was Dolly's "Jolene." A duet, with Dolly herself.
Now the part that sounds like fiction. It isn't.
In 1996, Scottish scientists cloned the first mammal in history from an adult cell. The cell came from a mammary gland, so the team named the sheep Dolly, after Dolly Parton. She said she was flattered.
That sheep proved something textbooks called impossible: an adult cell can be wound back to its beginning.
A scientist in Kyoto, Shinya Yamanaka, later said: "By being inspired by Dolly, I started a project."
That project produced iPS cells in 2006.
In 2012, Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Then Japan began giving the discovery back to the world.
Lab-grown retinal cells, transplanted in Kobe. A world first.
New corneas in Osaka.
New heart muscle for a failing heart.
A Parkinson's trial, published in Nature.
And this year, the world's first approved medicines made from iPS cells.
The circle closed in her own country. In San Diego, Parkinson's patients are now in a clinical trial receiving new brain cells grown from their own reprogrammed skin.
Even the creator of Dolly the sheep abandoned his own method in 2007, calling the approach from Japan "100 times more interesting."
She joked about that sheep for thirty years. The joke became one of the roads that led to Japan's Nobel Prize, and to medicine now reaching human eyes, hearts, and trembling hands on two continents.
One more thing. Her father, a Tennessee farmer, never learned to read or write. In his honor, she mailed free books to children for thirty years. Over 300 million of them. The kids just called her the Book Lady.
This week she died at 80. Her family asked that instead of flowers, people give to the library that mails books to children.
Japan never gave her a medal. Her song won one here. She herself never got anything from us. Most of us sang her song at karaoke without ever reading the writer's name in the corner of the screen.
So it should be said at least once, plainly, from here:
Thank you, Dolly.
Japan will always love you.
Clive Hamilton, Sydney Rally Fix the Act! 2026.
“Australians typically are a pretty tolerant bunch. We’re fine with other people living their lives in all kinds of ways that might be quirky or niche, and we typically let them get on with it—until, that is, they infringe on our own rights by a demand that we must change how we speak and act to conform to their beliefs,” he said.
“Gender ideology is the politics of the one per cent. It demands compliance from the 99 per cent. It’s captured our institutions, and individuals who do not conform are punished, sometimes harshly.”
With thanks to Women's Rights Network Australia and LGB Alliance Australia.
@Alexandr4Denman Sorry this is bollocks (although understand where you’re coming from). No new laws - just the usual livestock restrictions seasonal countryside rules which end every year 31 July.