Alternatively, if you use DuckDuckGo on your phone you can watch YT videos through the browser, which blocks ads. So instead of searching YT, you search DDG and click on the video. It’ll ask you whether you want to go to YT or watch in Duck Player.
Not ideal but it’s better than sitting through ads.
Brave browser works perfectly too, all ad-free.
Had a guy come round and install Sky this morning, seemed nice enough doing some work outside but when inside wasted no time going off on some uninvited mad political rant about Nigel Farage not being far right and his daughters school doing parents evening online so that you couldn’t walk around and see the left wing propaganda theyre taught. He couldn’t FO quick enough.
Had similar with a gas engineer. 1st time he was ace, we moved house and had him back for more work about 18 month later. He’d turned into a complete right wing nutter. Didn’t get the work.
urgh, hate to suggest this but would this not be an email to sky?
although he’d get a telling off and then would justify his ‘these days’ views.
Yeah exactly, fuel to the fire.
Im sure that those of us who work in schools regularly shake our heads in disbelief at this kind of nonsense. ‘Left wing propaganda’ like what exactly? Not being a total cu n t as a value is hardly ‘left wing propaganda’ is it? Equally, which parts of the curriculum are ‘left wing propaganda’?
The morons who parrot this shit that they pick up from Twitter/Facebook/TikTok etc are the also the first people to go on about how teachers get paid loads and are off 6 months of the year and have an easy job yet when you then ask them why they don’t want to work in schools themselves if it’s so easy, they usually gave no response. If it’s ’left Wing propaganda’ to spend your own money on food for hungry kids then I guess I’m Karl Marx.
Smartphones and social media was the biggest mistake western culture ever made.
It’s an evolution of the “you can’t say blackboard anymore” shit that’s been going on since I was at primary school in the 90s. One of my earliest memories is a taxi driver taking us to the airport for one of my first holidays abroad moaning that he couldn’t use the p-word even though it means “clean or pure”.
Edit: not sure that second bit is relevant, just a stream of consciousness about how you can’t blame smartphones and the internet for everything. We were on dial-up until 2007ish and my dad only got his first smartphone last year, and he’s been around people (and has the occasional lapse himself) into this sort of mentality for my whole life.
Agreed but everyone being permanently online and the deliberate algorithmic foregrounding of identity politics/culture wars/confirmation bias has absolutely emboldened people to think that they are ‘right’ because they’ve done ‘their research’ etc.
BTW this applies to all sides of the political spectrum, not just the nominally ‘right wing’ stuff we’re talking about here.
The difference is, in my opinion, is that these kind of opinions (as in all the variants of the ‘I’m right and you’re just a pedophile/communist/fascist/etc’ discourse) are now mainstream in a way that they were not (at least not publicly) prior to smartphones and the cultural dominance of 5 or 6 websites, all of whom make their money through the value-free sounding chase for ‘engagement’.
Not to mention that the current National Curriculum was formulated by Mr Gove and the Tories so hardly torch bearers of the ‘extreme Left’.
I suppose I’ve been online, pretty much without fail, every day since I was about, what, seventeen? Lived in a rural place, son to parents who flirted with potentially voting for Griffin-era BNP and bought The Sun and I managed to avoid it all somehow. I never really considered that it might just be that I fluked into the right echo-chambers and through music as much as anything form an inclusive worldview. I look back at some of the things I used to think and say and could’ve easily become an incel fash bellend.
Yeah didn’t want to go there with him.
He was particularly annoyed that his daughter was being taught about Stephen Lawrence and that he’s from London and knew what really went on…
He was happy about yesterdays Supreme Court ruling tho, although he’s probably had a moan about the raging lefty judges before 
We are out there and we have somehow shunned the tradjectory that our school friends didn’t manage to avoid but you have to remember that the majority of them just became the norm.
I think interests at a young age are what separates us. If you find something and manage to take it through the teens to the other side you have a fighting chance of not becoming an average person.
Music, art and skateboarding saved my life.
It turns out that Hell is Bristol Aquarium on a bank holiday Monday.
Go to coyote ugly after you’re done for a nice relaxing drink to reset your nerves
Been listening to a lot of REM recently and couldn’t recall anyone ever skating to them.
Had a quick look on skatevideosite and it seems the only notable use is in an am section of a Jart video, which is surprising
How could you forget that this song features Michael Stipe!
I had such a crush on Kristin Hersh…and Tanya Donnelly
I’m giving away my age a bit here
Juliana Hatfield.
