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Shane Thomas

@tokenbg.blacksky.app

514 followers 401 following 4K posts

South London

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 6h

Screenshot of text: In all the fingerpointing over the City controversy, one name has been absent from criticism. Richard Scudamore, the former executive chairman of the Premier League, oversaw this farrago.
When Scudamore joined the ruling body in 1999, the domestic television deal was valued at £670 million. When he departed into retirement in 2018, the price for TV rights had grown to £5.14 billion.
Scudamore is an impressive negotiator. He made the top-flight clubs richer than they could have imagined at the turn of the millennium. But, on his watch, Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea, the Glazers performed a leveraged buyout of Manchester United, George Gillett and Tom Hicks brought financial chaos to Liverpool and, of course, Abu Dhabi acquired City.

Screenshot of text: A conversation in, I think, 2008 may go some way to answering that question. At a Premier League lunch for senior journalists in a private room in a West End restaurant, another editor and I brought up the leveraged buyouts of Liverpool and United. These, we suggested, were an existential threat to the game.
Scudamore's response was offhand. The markets will sort it, he told us.
The markets never did.
The quest to make money for the clubs became all-consuming. Reflecting on a period when oligarchs and sovereign states became a fixture in the English game, another senior figure in the sport told me, "Everything was for sale - including the soul of football."

Screenshot of text: Scudamore did a great job with the television rights. When he left - with Chelsea's Bruce Buck strongarming clubs to throw £250,000 each into the pot for his gendoff gift - cheats dominated the title race. His entire tenure at the Premier League needs reappraisal. The realisation that money isn't everything is dawning on some.

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 02/10/2026

Screenshot of text: Neither of these narratives persuades me Rather, I believe the contemporary far right is a cross-class phenomenon. One way to understand it is as a movement that brings together an underclass that has given up waiting on the promises of modernisation - formal work, accountable institutions, real equality before the law - and an elite who no longer even pretends those promises are on offer.

Screenshot of text: When politics is colonised by the attention economy, then public discourse becomes a constantly shifting sea of outrage. Today, this; tomorrow, that. It is a state of affairs entirely inimical to emancipatory politics, which is predicated on bolstering people's capacity to take decisions about their collective fate and participate in sustained efforts to change the status quo. Trump keeps us busy with headlines and late-night posts, while the real work of destruction goes on in the background.

Screenshot of text: It's clear why the powerful would be attracted to such a model that promisese them untrammelled enjoyment of power.
But why do the weakest also vote for it?
Because of the psychological compensations included in the package.
The promise is: 'even if you remain hyper-exploited at your job, even if your life expectations are daily shrinking, we will ensure that there is at least one sphere of life in which your power runs free. At home, you can take it out on your wife or your kids, no one will interfere; and no one can tell you not to make jokes about Black people or gay people?

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 01/10/2026

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 29/09/2026

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 25/09/2026

This bit really put me in mind of Andor. So much of authoritarianism is tons of admin, carried out by lots of little helpers “just following orders”.

Screenshot of text: "We didn't know anyone was coming," he said.
I had travelled for over a day, been passed through half a dozen hands, and yet I had arrived unannounced.
As they led me inside, I could barely walk.
My leg dragged behind me, numb and stiff.
They unshackled me at the intake desk.
The officers here looked bored. Grumpy about a late-night task they had not expected.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 24/09/2026

Had made peace with her returning home after the WC. And if it’s been announced now as a way to counter the downbeat mood after another bad start to a season, it’s worked. Hugely relieved.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 24/09/2026

Screenshot of text: The incident fits a broader pattern in the discourse around 'free speech' and 'cancel culture': whatever comes from the top down is freedom; whatever comes from the bottom up is bullying and censorship. When Macklemore is dropped at the behest of the billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft, it's an exercise of the freedom of businesses to 'demonstrate their values' by deciding whom to platform.
But when Ed Sheeran's fans decide not to buy tickets to his performances, or even demand refunds, it's bullying, mob behaviour. Since most people are not billionaires and do not own stadiums, they can exercise meaningful power only collectively. The collective exercise of power must therefore be demonised.

Screenshot of text: This fundamentally anti-democratic orientation is implicit in the framing of Kuenssberg's question: singers should not be taking positions on 'difficult, complicated' political issues; they should know their place - i.e. to entertain us - and so should their fans.
Politics should be left to the experts, which presumably means the politicians who are facilitating a genocide and the journalists who provide them with ideological cover. By this logic, it isn't clear why ordinary people should be allowed to vote: is it really for the little people to take a position on a question as complicated as who should govern them and how?

Screenshot of text: The powerful tend not to be explicitly opposed to democracy. Instead, the task is to manage things so that elections produce the right outcomes and don't change anything that matters. One of the main ways to do this is to make sure that the people hear and see only the right things, so that when they go to the polls they can be trusted to tick the right boxes and go back to sleep for another four or five years. And this in turn requires that the right people maintain control of the means of mental production. This goes well beyond Kraft, or what he decides to do with his stadium. Most British newspapers are owned by a handful of billionaires, yet nobody asks if it's right for billionaires to be taking positions on complicated political issues.

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 23/09/2026

Screenshot of text: It's a chance for Die Linke to find a hopeful, but more defiant and uncompromising mode to convince disaffected voters that it, too, can display some dynamism and break political impasses. Its agenda faces undeniably tougher opposition than the AfD's. If there is a secret to successful left populism in Europe, no one has yet found it. In Germany as elsewhere, capital has more powerful friends than asylum seekers, and no amount of clever welfarism or redistribution will replace the libidinal thrill that some people get from the thought of
'remigration'.

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 21/09/2026

To that point, Sheeran is one of those musicians who is among the most popular in the world, but you’d do well to find people who would openly admit to being a big fan.

Screenshot of text: Sheeran is low-hanging fruit at this point. While he is a superstar by all accounts, he does not carry the same intense fandom as, say, Beyoncé or even West. There certainly are no Sheeran
"shooters" online defending him the way there are for Brown.
So while one may be heartened to know that a celebrity claiming to be apolitical should be held to a standard that requires saying something, I'm not sure if fans will maintain that energy for their favorites. The Chris Brown train has never stopped, and Kanye West's stardom took only a temporary hit before bouncing back.

Screenshot of text: Far too often, fans excuse outrageous behavior from the stars they love, proving they are incapable of holding them accountable. So while people can take victory laps over making Sheeran feel the wrath of disappointment, would they take the same stance if they grew up loving him or were part of his hive?

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 20/09/2026

Screenshot of text: What next? Demonise doctors and nurses for treating migrants? Attack the police and fire brigade for trying to deal with arson attacks at asylum-seeker accommodation? Oh, hang on, that's already happened.

Screenshot of text: And in Parliament, politicians are still pandering to the far-right for fear of alienating a section of voters who are, most likely, already lost to the tsunami of misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
The type of people who will don a face covering and threaten a lifesaver and the sort of
individuals who will support this behaviour because of an abstract fear of the unknown.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 15/09/2026

Screenshot of text: The vast majority of people who supported VAR didn't do so out of some corinthian ideal that eliminating officiating mistakes would improve the game and make it more fair. They did so because they believed it would result in their team winning more football matches.

Screenshot of text: The logic is fairly straightforward. The assumption that referees are biased against our team is pretty much as old as the game itself. There are stories of referees having to hide out in dressing rooms after matches to save them from a baying crowd which go all the way back to the 19th century.
It was assumed that the introduction of a video assistant would allow these miscarriages of justice to be corrected in real time, and that the world would eventually adjust to the fact that our team was, in fact, by far the greatest team the world has ever seen.

Screenshot of text: Of course, what's happened is that we continued to see what we wanted to see when VAR was introduced. It turned out that this would be the case no matter how
many cameras were pointed at an incident and no matter how many full kit wankers there were sitting in front of a bank of television screens trying to make some sort of sense of what's just happened on the pitch.

Screenshot of text: At this level, the game is essentially unmanageable nowadays. We want consistency when inconsistency goes against us, and we want common sense when the laws of the game are applied according to the letter of them. And this all ultimately fuels this feeling that has grown inside me over the last couple of years, which is that nobody actually enjoys football any more, with the bare minimum expectation being to win every single last game, and more than one or two consecutive failures to win a match resulting in howling demands for something, anything to change.

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 11/09/2026

Screenshot of text: There's little doubt that climate change exacerbated, if not caused, the catastrophe.
Nepal's carbon emissions make up less than
o.ı per cent of the world's total, a rounding error in the global ledger of carbon accounting. The government has reached out to the Loss and Damage Fund, a UN finance mechanism created to help countries cope with climate-driven disasters. The prime minister, Balen Shah, rather than the foreign minister, will now lead the team that goes to the UN General Assembly later this month.
Yet the same factors that underlie Nepal's minuscule carbon footprint also limit its geopolitical leverage. Neither a supplier nor a big consumer of capital goods, high-value products or arms, Nepal has little to trade on but moral suasion.

Screenshot of text: There are 21 'potentially dangerous' glacial lakes at risk of outburst flooding in the three major river basins that cut across the width of Nepal. At first it was thought that this flood might have been triggered by a glacial lake outburst, before it became clear that slope failure was the culprit. These events are much harder to study and predict, though probably caused by melting permafrost. The last four summers on Langtang Lirung have been among the five warmest since 1940. Whatever comes of Nepal's efforts to seek climate reparations, given its young, unstable mountains, its people require more than meteorological vigilance when it comes to resettlement and development.

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 04/09/2026

Screenshot of text: Parents of Black boys often have to negotiate the thin line between loving their kids and preparing them for a harsh world. That preparation can strip away our innocence and joy. How can it not, when the cops we once aspired to be can end our lives? When friends we want sleepovers with have parents who don't want us around? When entering
the wrong store gets us followed, or holding the wrong toy gets us killed?
Preparation might keep us alive, but at What cost?

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 25/08/2026

Screenshot of text: The term 'natural disaster' is a misnomer. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis demonstrated that mass starvation in igth-century India, China and Brazil could be explained by the erosion of state capacity, planning and preparation - due to British imperialism - and the dominance of cash crops for the world market.

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 21/08/2026

Screenshot of text: When you constantly expect lies but refuse to accept lies (a critical distinction), you become better at finding the truth. Surviving an autocracy means not only believing that the unfathomable is possible, but that it's probably happening, so you better start planning for what comes next.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 20/08/2026

Am sure it wasn’t the intention but the Black guy in this ad looks like he’s in the Sunken Place.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 19/08/2026

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 18/08/2026

V notable (and I’m not the first to say it) that there’s no clues here who these people voted for, or where on the political spectrum they reside.

Screenshot of text: For an insight into how much some people hate data centres, read the story of Delsia Bare and her mother, Ida Huddleston, profiled in the WSJ this weekend. The Kentucky farmers refused a $26.5m offer for their 534 acres because it was going to be used to build a 2.2 gigawatt data centre.
"Kick rocks and don't come back," one of them reportedly told the company.
In all the talk about a potential AI bubble, what is underpriced is how many data centre plans may fail to get off the ground due to popular revolt.
Data centres are proving to be a hot-button issue in American elections, and their saliency has also increased in Britain after one was greenlit in London's Brick Lane. It is
unsurprising that a 2021 clip of Elon Musk laughing at water supply concerns near a Tesla factory is doing the rounds again.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 17/08/2026

Renee recently made this observation about where she sees the game going. Does Arsenal’s potential success largely hinge on her being right?

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 12/08/2026

Screenshot of text: quite a few people keen on monetizing football way beyond the present boundaries, he believes the superclubs can make the sort of financial leap that Google and Facebook managed. This latest deal is a step towards that ambition.
Where does it leave supporters? Well, the European Super League adventure brought the
"gly term "legacy fans" into the game's lexicon.
There is a mood within the sport that the legacy is a burden that won't last long.
Tottenham Hotspur are phasing out their senior citizen discounts for season-ticket
holders. That trend will increase as the traditional audience for football grows older.
And once it dies out? The feeling is that the next generations will embrace dynamic pricing and the sort of treatment their predecessors
would never accept.

Screenshot of text: Another idea that has long excited boardrooms is the Disneyland concept. The theory goes that it would be much more profitable if visiting Anfield, Old Trafford or even the Bernabeu was a once in a season - or even once in a lifetime -
event. If someone saves for years for a pilgrimage, they are likely to splurge on tickets, merchandise and club activities to create a
memorable experience. If every seat could be occupied by a different, money-no-object visitor for every game, profits would soar ever higher.

Screenshot of text: Would the atmosphere be affected? Yes. Would it matter? Not when the tills are ringing. There has been a recognisable change in the crowd dynamics of the NFL and MLB in the past few decades. Revenues have still risen.
Enshittificaton is sly. It creeps along, gradually making things worse in unnoticeable increments. There's never a jump shock, just a
moment of despair when it dawns on you that things have changed beyond remedy.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 06/08/2026

Screenshot of text: Growing up, I found an unconscious comfort in a digital social life, where I was freed from those gendered obligations. I recessed into this world, filling my days with hours-long voice calls while playing video games with strangers online. I felt safe from the abstract fear I'd always carried. In the digital world, it didn't matter what I looked like, or what body I was born into. I had full agency over how others "saw" me. This is the reason so many young trans kids find comfort in communities online: a separation from the physical. But I wasn't ready to look inward yet.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 05/08/2026

Screenshot of text: Nor any kind of humanitarian concern for those who drowned or were killed in the crowd crush. "About 48,000 of the up to 60,000 people who came into Ceuta from Morocco returned within a day. Still, the sudden influx created a crisis for Spain's pro-immigration government. Nearly three dozen died." So read a New York Times subheading on Friday. And once you fight your way past the tortured syntax, did you notice anything unusual there? First the integrity of the border, then the political ramifications, then the people who died: the hierarchy of rightwing immigration discourse expressed in three perfect sentences. The death toll has since risen to either 12 or 88 - authorities disagree on the number - and nobody seems over-fussed either way.

Screenshot of text: And so, by small degrees, the line between nationalism and pure-blood white supremacy blurs a little more.
Indeed, the very idea that a single border crossing 1,000 miles and two seas away fromis is somehow our urgent problem, only really makes sense in a worldview whose real distinction is not between "Britain" and "abroad" but between an imagined white Christian Europe and a savage brown other.

Screenshot of text: For all this, the right does not act alone.
The palpable relief on many parts of the left as most of the original 60,000 migrants returned to Morocco spoke of a worrying acquiescence: a tacit acceptance of the dangerous trope@f migration as a prima facie problem.
Here's a radical thought: what if migration is only a problem to those who want it to be? What if we started seeing the mass movement of people less as an existential threat and more as a simple inevitability of human existence? Nine years ago the great Gary Younge set out in the Guardian a utopian vision of open borders and no immigration controls. What happened to that sense of vision and idealism?
When did border discourse, the conversation on why and how we move, become something to be feared and not embraced?

Screenshot of text: The endgame here is massacres, vigilante violence, not "stop the boats" but shoot the boats, the border reimagined as a computer-game war zone. The endgame is what the likes of Musk and his far-right meat puppets are already depicting: a world where zombie armies of "military-age males" invade our virgin turf, and the problem is not the forces that drove them from their homes, but your "suicidal empathy", because these are not equal humans deserving equal treatment.
These are the stakes. And frankly, when the next Ceuta happens, the left needs to think of a better response than simply being thankful they went home again.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 30/07/2026

The weekend of 7th/8th/9th May. The weekend that decides the title?

List of WSL fixtures on Sunday 9th May 2027:

Manchester United versus Arsenal and Manchester City versus London City Lionesses

Chelsea versus Brighton on Sunday 9th May 2027 in the WSL

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 22/07/2026

Screenshot of text: Labour fell behind in the polls because the party antagonised its own base. It became, for millions of voters, the party of criminalising protest; the party of forcing trans people out of workplaces; the party of spending more on war. Rescuing the party's fortunes will require turning back to natural Labour voters. This will involve courting
renters. In 2018, private renters were 22 percent more likely to vote Labour than Conservative; in May 2025, high proportions of renting suggested an area would vote Green.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 21/07/2026

Screenshot of text: It may not have been the face-melting exhilaration inferno of 2022. But I look at the world right now and it's so grim. The air's full of smoke from runaway wildfires. We're all getting explosive diarrhea thanks to Trump's CDC cuts. AI doesn't do almost any of the stuff they say it does, but you still have to use it all the time, because a CEO said so.
Everyone in power seems to be so bad at doing the exact thing they've been empowered to do. I mean, my God—we can't even do photo ops correctly in this country.

Screenshot of text: So I don't know —maybe it's a stretch, but to me, Spain's World Cup win feels like a small act of vengeance for every lost FedEx package, every health-insurance snafu that cost us three hours on the phone, every time we had to work harder at our jobs because our bosses insisted we'd be more productive using some broken tool they never even tried to understand. It's a reprisal for all the gadget designs that made the tech harder to use, all the legal reforms that made life more difficult, all the city roadwork that created more problems than it fixed.
It may not feel cinematic or epic, and it may not make you leap out of your seat. But Spain do what works, and they do it better than anyone else. And what works has its own romance, at a moment when so few things do.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 20/07/2026

Screenshot of text: Over the course of the month, the football itself has provided us with some fantastic stuff, because of course it does. We love this game for
many reasons, but chief among them is how it can create moments of joy and beauty and unity - far beyond any kind of FIFA slogan. On the pitch we've seen some brilliant games and incredible individual and collective stories by virtue of this being the greatest sport on earth. Off the pitch we've had that too as fans and host cities have
demonstrated that, despite what the politicians keep telling you, people of all kinds can exist together quite happily. We've seen fans come together in victory and defeat, the power of community and the human spirit at the forefront of everything - even as those in power foster division from their ivory towers.

Screenshot of text: I've enjoyed much of this World Cup, as I have with every tournament | can remember going back as far as 1978 (just about), but there's a lot not to like about how the game is run and who is running it. Some people may say that's just the way of the world, but I think what we've seen around this tournament has been a grotesque show of pitiful toadying, arch-capitalism, Machiavellian manoeuvring, and outright corruption which, ultimately, comes at the expense of ordinary people. The real football fans who have brought so much to this tournament are the ones who will pay the price one way or another, as Infantino, Trump, and their ilk, continue to line their pockets. Their insatiable, gluttonous greed for money, fame, and power knows no bounds, but it's ok because we had some nice football.

Screenshot of text: We could, you know, have the nice football without all that. It shouldn't be impossible, but the more we just accept it, the less likely it becomes. I'm happy to state my objections for the record, for all the difference it will probably make, but I feel like not saying something is the wrong thing.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 15/07/2026

Screenshot of text: If you watch a female coach of color thrive, it's a reminder that expanding opportunities for historically marginalized groups doesn't have to come at the expense of excellence.
If you go to a game and find your chosen family, you might feel less inclined to conform to a role in a nuclear family that doesn't fit.
If the league puts a spotlight on women like Dearica Hamby, who is outspoken in defense of her rights as a mother-not against the rights of mothers-it flies in the face of the narrow conception of choices the right wants women to believe they have.
The right's worst nightmare is not Caitlin
Clark getting hurt.

Screenshot of text: Their worst nightmare is more people finding out about the Golden State Valkyries, where the energy of a Game 7 meets a gay pride parade and woke has gone anything but broke.
It's the joie de vivre of the StudBudz, who are the antithesis of the humorless scolds the
conservative movement would like to paint the league's Black, masculine lesbians as.
It's Chelsea Gray kissing her wife and hugging her son after winning the WNBA Finals.
It's WNBA core, Part 1 and 2.

Screenshot of text: It's a league in which athletes, whether white or Black, straight or queer, are the main characters in a story that does not villainize, does not pity, does not evoke feelings of superiority or anger, but offers dimension, complexity, and courage.
This is the league as it actually is, but you'd have to dig through endless layers of rage bait and controversy to know about it.
It's a league that can organically, just by way of existing, remind America that the lifestyles its stars lead don't lead to despair and
dysfunction.

Screenshot of text: Right now, this is a battle that the WNBA'S enemies are winning, because they understand the league's power as a symbolic vehicle better than the WNBA does itself.
Commissioner Engelbert, time and time again, has shown up to this knife fight with an empty task force and a rote statement. Her regime has rested its laurels on television rights, sponsorships, and expansion fees while ignoring its biggest asset: its story. The longer it takes for the league to figure out how to tell it, the longer other people will.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 09/07/2026

Screenshot of text: He repeated his frequent assertion that he is the 'most physically and verbally attacked public figure or politician in modern times', a distasteful claim in a decade when two MPs have been murdered and another near fatally stabbed. You might think that his noisome self-pity would turn off some of his supporters, but despite the occasional apostrophe to stoicism and virility, most modern reactionaries traffic in imagined victimhood.

Screenshot of text: Regardless, an uncontested platform won't make Farage disappear: a depressed seaside town in summer may prove irresistible to a media pack already inclined to broadcast the Reform leader's every word, and he has a much more varied, individually targeted and barely regulated world of digital propaganda at his disposal than existed in 2008.
Reform will want to make any by-election, now or later, a referendum on the government rather than Farage, and will probably campaign on a sense that the incoming Burnham administration lacks a clear political mandate, while continuing to press hard on immigration. The traditional attacks on Farage - that he is privately educated, a former banker, rarely seen in parliament or his constituency - will have as little purchase in Clacton this time as before. Enthusiasts for Farage see him as a champion of their xenophobic politics, not a representative of their class or community.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 06/07/2026

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 02/07/2026

The 2 have gotten closer, but I suspect he means getting direct access to the locker room, and I’m betting he wanted to be the main guy on a UK version of First Take.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 02/07/2026

Feel he gave the game away on Stick to Football. Think he wanted to be like a famous US sports mouthpiece, like a Stephen A Smith.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 02/07/2026

Screenshot of text: The penalty shootout is the worst, most agonizing, and yet wonderful and thrilling concept in the game. It compresses all the tension and drama of the game into one segment. When a player misses a shot during the 90 or 120 minutes of play, it's terrible. But when a player misses their penalty kick in the shootout, it feels like the end of the world.
Every feeling is at its maximum.

Screenshot of text: The shootout is also fantastic because, for all of the skill of the players, and the hours they spend practicing penalties, it feels like it's out of their hands. The moment of putting the ball down, stepping back, running and kicking the ball is so singular, so removed from everything else, so isolating and lonely, that it is overwhelming for even the best players in the world. Football is a team sport, and though penalty shootouts have an order of players to take them, it actually reduces the game to its most basic principle. An attacker against a goalkeeper. You have to get the ball beyond the keeper with one kick. There is no second chance. Your teammates are depending on you and everyone's eyes are on you.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 02/07/2026

Screenshot of text: What makes an athlete different from any other celebrity, though, is that on a field or a court—and especially on a tennis court-there is only so much a person can control. There is a sense, finally, of something essential being revealed. A test of strength and skill seems to turn into a test of something else. A stadium becomes a panopticon with the prisoners' doors blown off, leaving the guard, in her tower, the one exposed.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 26/06/2026

Screenshot of text: The Dirty Bill didn't change the rules. The Dirty Bill was the rules.
The Dirty Bill is DOGE running the government. It's Al killing your job, including the programming and writing jobs that trained the Al that killed your job. It's Hollywood pontificating about soul-sucking Al through an SOS from HBO. It's a smartphone going from a luxury to a convenience to a necessity whose true purpose is mass surveillance and social control. It's rule by algorithm that beats to a dead heart. It's a Flock camera on every corner and a Ring doorbell on every home and a frightened family on every block. It's a million QR codes that all read "You're fucked."
No one asked for this, but it keeps coming.

Screenshot of text: The Dirty Bill is the filthiest lucre: mandated counterfeit circulated in a nation of shrieking
Lady Macbeths. Scream all you want; it's content!
You know there is more to this world. You know they'd rather bombard children with digital facsimiles than let them see the real deal and force-feed them robot summaries before
they find a root cause. Conditioning the youngest generation to view life this way eradicates the greatest threat to technofascism: human memory.
Memory, and its expectations.
You write on a network owned by oligarchs — pick one, any one, they're all one — who can flick the kill switch at any time. All your work can be annihilated at whim: your years of effort, your original thoughts, your fleeting triumphs over precarity. No recourse, no rights: a world of words eliminated in a keystroke. You got the Dirty Bill.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 26/06/2026

Ashleigh Plumptre during the 2023 WC in Australia and New Zealand.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 25/06/2026

Tweet from Goma:

My "Roman Empire” is the realization that my life is a lottery win. Somewhere in Sudan, Pålestine, iran, Afghanistan, Iraq or Congo, there is a boy smarter than me. He is more disciplined, more resilient, and holds more potential in his single finger than I do in my entire career.
The only difference? I am siting in a train and he is sting in the rubble of his dreams.
My "bad days" are his wildest dreams.
My "burnout" is a luxury he can't afford because his only job is staying alive.
It's geographical luck and it's a haunting injustice that we all refuse to acknowledge and look away

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Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 22/06/2026

Really should have stuck a bet on this.

Tweet from a few years ago: 4 PM's in the past 6 years. I can foresee a scenario where it becomes 7 in 10.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 21/06/2026

Screenshot of text: When I watch Zendaya, my worst fear is that she'll become her generation's Morgan Freeman-someone who spent the majority of his career being that great neoliberal construction of pop
"universality," which of course means appealing to whiteness. An actor we've never been afforded the ability to see surrounded by Blackness, seen through, and made for our eyes. I fear seeing a talented actor like Zendaya left unrealized, as a bifurcated identity reduced to its status quo mono.

Screenshot of text: Whatever the Black or biracial movie star is going to be in the future, that racial context cannot be ignored for the sake of access to that level of stardom, especially when that level of stardom should be in question itself. We cannot trade the work for half, or even all, of one's identity. We should center those questions around what can be added, not subtracted.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 19/06/2026

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 18/06/2026

Screenshot of text: But don't be surprised if we wake up to a Reform win on Thursday.
Labour fear that Reform are motivating non-voters, boosting turnout- voters about whom little is known and who may easily throw off both their targeting efforts and the pollsters'.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 17/06/2026

🤷🏾‍♂️

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 16/06/2026

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 16/06/2026

Posts from Grace Robertson: someone at the english fa lost their job because michael olise chose to play for france, right? i need to know that people have been held accountable for this.

does harry kane ever talk to olise or musiala about this

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 15/06/2026

Screenshot of text: Beyond the economic tithes, there are the more abstract, less measurable tolls, tolls worth pondering even if today's deal is the real thing. There has been a destabilising impact on millions of people who lived through wartime, their economic, professional and personal lives unsettled by the rapid reconfigurations brought about by the destructive, belligerent partnership of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Together those two decided to pursue their agendas in the Middle East and to hell with the consequences for those who actually live there.

Screenshot of text: In the absurdist "ceasefires" across the region, the very meaning of war is being redefined. In Gaza, nearly 1,000 people have been killed since the ceasefire in October of last year. In Lebanon, since the April ceasefire, Israel's killings, ejection of hundreds of' thousands of Lebanese from their homes and pummelling of parts of Beirut continue. About 1 million people remain displaced. In the last two months, the death toll of almost 1,500 amounts to a third of the total fatalities since the escalation of the conflict in early March. More than one in four of those dead are children. And after the last ceasefire between the US and Iran in April, the two traded more strikes, including recent US attacks on cities in southern Iran.

Screenshot of text: In the absurdist "ceasefires" across the region, the very meaning of war is being redefined. In Gaza, nearly 1,000 people have been killed since the ceasefire in October of last year. In Lebanon, since the April ceasefire, Israel's killings, ejection of hundreds of' thousands of Lebanese from their homes and pummelling of parts of Beirut continue. About 1 million people remain displaced. In the last two months, the death toll of almost 1,500 amounts to a third of the total fatalities since the escalation of the conflict in early March. More than one in four of those dead are children. And after the last ceasefire between the US and Iran in April, the two traded more strikes, including recent US attacks on cities in southern Iran.

Screenshot of text: Lebanon will not be resolved overnight; its millions of displaced citizens will not return and rebuild the moment a deal is signed - Israel is not known for its wise de-escalatory appetite for relinquishing seized land.
Gaza remains an open wound. The Iranians still retain the power to seize up the region and the global economy with strikes and control of the strait of Hormuz. Arab countries remain in a holding pattern of insecurity, hostage to the impossible balance between Tehran, Tel Aviv and Washington.
And the sense that this is how it is, and how it always has been, will settle, as people continue to try to make lives during the biggest regional conflict in the Middle East in contemporary history. Because humans take a lot of killing.

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 14/06/2026

Screenshot of text: This week hundreds of masked men took to the
streets of Belfast to burn down houses and terrorise the families of ethnic minorities and migrants.
The attacks were highly organised, with prominent public figures, including the richest man in the world, openly promoting and glorying in the violence online.
Yet despite all this widespread criminality and terror, just 19 individuals have so far been arrested, with multiple politicians and commentators openly defending those who took to the streets.
By contrast a largely peaceful demonstration outside Woolwich Crown court on Friday, against the conviction of four Palestine Action protesters, led to a total of 107 arrests.

Screenshot of text: In all cases those arrested had merely held up a placard, worn a t-shirt, or delivered a chant in support of the group.
They did not burn down a building, they did not throw a brick, they did not terrorise a family from their home.
Yet all of these people have been arrested and branded as terrorists, with barely a whisper uttered in their defence.
The contrast between how these two groups are now being treated is stark.
Here's what it tells us about where the real
"two tiers" in British justice, politics and journalism now really lie.

000

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 13/06/2026

Screenshot of text: In recent years, that logic has expanded beyond Muslims to encompass asylum seekers and migrants. Yet the demand is no longer merely for condemnation or apology.
Collective blame has given way to collective punishment. It now manifests itself in medieval-style mobs roaming residential streets to set homes and businesses ablaze, and violent threats directed at anyone deemed 'foreign.

Screenshot of text: The Equality Act was not a revolutionary moment that suddenly bestowed new privileges on minority groups. Its main function was to consolidate decades of
existing equality protections into a single legislative framework. The Act protects nine characteristics, including age, disability, pregnancy, race, and religion. It seeks to protect the one in nine new mothers who report being dismissed, made redundant or treated so poorly that they feel forced to leave work - more than
54,000 women every year. It protects the 92 percent of disabled people who face barriers to at least one form of transport. It protects people of colour from discrimination in employment and public services.

000

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 12/06/2026

Screenshot of text: Racist crimes in Northern Ireland reached a record high last year and a political response is urgently required. It isn't just a question of policing. There needs to be a co-ordinated strategy that tackles not only acts of violence but also the narratives that make them possible. Hostility towards immigrants does not develop in a vacuum.

Screenshot of text: The constant negative coverage of immigration not only reinforces perceptions of immigrants as a threat but also fosters attribution bias - the tendency to attribute the actions of a few individuals to an entire group.
In this context, an event such as the attack on Stephen Ogilvie on Monday becomes what social scientists call an 'information shock' - a highly salient incident that appears to confirm existing fears and prejudices, often triggering hostility towards entire communities that bear no responsibility for the crime itself.
Information shocks don't happen if the fears and prejudices aren't already present, waiting to be transformed into collective blame and violent action. (As Natalie McNally's brother has observed, the sentencing of her murderer last week for a 'brutal and frenzied attack that involved the use of a knife' did not lead to 'the same angry outcry and mobilisation'.)

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 12/06/2026

Screenshot of text: How do you stage a tournament while attacking the very basis of its existence, morally and also physically? Welcome to our celebration of openness and international friendship, which we hate! All visitors are welcome here, except the ones we arbitrarily throw into prison, which probably won't be you, but maybe! Please write your credit card number on this form. How can you stage an event when you can't even be bothered to conceal that this is your attitude toward it?

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 10/06/2026

Shane Thomas @tokenbg.blacksky.app · 10/06/2026

Screenshot of text: Mary Ramsay, the deputy director of public health programmes at the UK Health Security Agency, said: 'While the majority of parents are vaccinating, we know some parents do find it difficult to navigate the booking system and attend all their children's vaccination appointments. It is a complex schedule, and with busy lifestyles and other pressures, we know it can be hard for some to prioritise, find the time and get to their appointments?

Screenshot of text: Anti-vaxxers have grown more emboldened since Covid, but they are still very much a minority. Most parents want to immunise their children. Often missing, though, is a sense of vaccination as a public good. Parents are more likely to be concerned with the safety of their own children than the collective healthcare of all children (and adults). There's a lack of solidarity - yet that is the shape of contemporary parenting. As so many aspects of our lives have become privatised and reduced to the nuclear family, so has the way people think about their health. But personal choice can only take us so far.