The accusations of "raging antisemitism" gained more currency in the US than in the UK,

which is why it's an absolute waste of time trying to talk about them and the Labour Party during the Corbyn era on a US-dominated forum starting from the sort of groundbase of belief typified by your reply.

But to waste just a little of my time, right-wing factions within Labour weaponized a number of issues to muddy the name of Corbyn and the vast influx of supporters his time as leader brought the party, and literally worked to sabotage Labour's prospects in the run-up to the last election, and our media and yours lapped it up wholesale.

Some time spent on Google yourself would probably be more useful if you really want to understand the situation and its development, as the severely sceptical are unlikely to believe any I supply, but here's just a few:

London School of Economics study "Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press": https://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/research/research-projects/representations-of-jeremy-corbyn

Media Reform Coalition report "Labour, Antisemitism and the News: A Disinformation Paradigm": https://www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Labour-anti-semitism-and-the-news-EXEC-SUM-FINAL-PROOFED.pdf

Scottish Daily Record: "Secret Scottish-based office led infowars attack on Labour and Jeremy Corbyn: Explosive leaked documents passed to the Sunday Mail reveal the organisation’s Integrity Initiative is funded with £2million of Foreign Office cash and run by military intelligence specialists": https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/foreign-office-funds-2m-infowars-13707574

Monthly Review report "Anatomy of a Propaganda Campaign: Jeremy Corbyn’s Political Assassination" (includes a section on the antisemitism accusations and the fact that Labour's record on that issue was no worse, and probably slightly better, than the Tories' and that of the general population, as has been borne out by a number of reputable academic studies): https://monthlyreview.org/2022/02/01/anatomy-of-a-propaganda-campaign-jeremy-corbyns-political-assassination/

For some sort of balance and a more or less Establishment overview, a BBC article: "A guide to Labour Party anti-Semitism claims": https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-45030552

I'm not a Labour supporter, BTW, haven't been for decades, and have a history of being critical of Corbyn on this board for my own reasons.

Whatever, what we're left with is a Labour Party under Starmer that's very vocally hell-bent on following the Tory Party down some very dark sociocultural holes (like its stance on immigration) and avoiding addressing some of the main issues that have made the UK such a disaster zone (particularly Brexit).

I would know next to nothing about the Ukraine conflict without Twitter.

What I did know would likely be days old, filtered editorially, of questionable accuracy, and in too great quantity to sift through within a news cycle. Some of the Ukrainian accounts I read regularly are actual people on the ground there (as verified from a number of sources for the best part of a year). Some of them include journalists who can go into greater granular detail than they can in whatever mainstream outlets they have and can update in real time if they want to. Their tweets also give a sense of who they are and what their experiences are like that no ossified, static medium could.

I would have a very warped view of my home country Scotland's politics without Twitter. 99%+ of its media are owned by entities outside Scotland, and all have agendas that mean I have to hold my nose in any search for anything resembling plain facts about the country, its governance and the quest among a significant proportion of its population for independence. It would be easy to feel powerless and isolated in those circumstances. I don't, because I can read selected accounts' output that impresses on me daily that I'm most definitely not alone and shares information I would have great trouble finding elsewhere, or at all.

That's just two examples out of many fields in my own experience.

Thing is, when I first ventured onto Twitter, it was weird and overwhelming. I didn't even have an account at first, so I didn't have access to a timeline or Twitter pals or any of the tools that Twitter uses to bring new users into the fold.

You're stalled at that stage. There's no reason for you to go further if you don't want to. Its no skin off my nose or anybody else's who does use Twitter and finds worth in it on a daily basis. But kindly quit looking down your nose at those of us who do, because it's unnecessarily obnoxious.

This endless succession of threads, usually from people who have little experience of Twitter and no interest at all in learning more because they dismiss it out of hand, seemingly berating those of us who do for our choice among the vast information stream we all have access to nowadays, gets really tired.

Use the media and the internet and these forums however you want to. And let those of us who do find useful information on Twitter on a regular basis and drag it back here to share carry on doing so without the constant timewasting griping.

If it's a post of mine, there'll usually be fair warning that it involves Twitter. Unless DU decides to ban Twitter content from DU, it's not going away.

Probably tl;dr, but you asked a question. There's an answer.

Twitter Blue just launched, and it's ... going really well so far [Contains Twitter]

Gergely Orosz
@GergelyOrosz

On one end, impressive that this new, verified feature got built and shipped in a week, people working 84 hour weeks.

On the other: it doesn’t work.

I’m a Twitter Blue subscriber. The new app tells me I now have a verified checkmark. But I don’t.

Fast work, but sloppy work.

Win98 Tech Support
@Win98Tech

Twitter Blue is apparently rolling out so just getting this ready to go

Where should libraries go if Twitter becomes a wasteland?

Magnetic north, true north and grid north align over GB for first time

As expert map readers will know, when you’re out and about navigating with a compass, there is a difference between magnetic north (where the compass points) and grid north (the vertical blue grid lines shown on OS maps).

The difference between magnetic north and grid north is often referred to as ‘grid magnetic angle’ and it not only varies from place to place, but changes with time. This needs to be taken into account when navigating with a map and compass.

In 2014, for the first time in Great Britain since the 1660s, magnetic north moved from being to the west of grid north to the east. The change started in the very south-west corner of Britain and will slowly progress across the whole country over the next 12 to 13 years. We wrote a blog on the progress of alignment between magnetic and grid north in Britain back in 2019, which you can read here.

Now, there is a third line about to come into alignment – true north. This is the direction of lines of longitude that all converge at the north pole.

On a map projection like the transverse Mercator projection used for the British National Grid, the longitude lines curve away from the straight grid lines. This is called ‘convergence’. The amount of curvature varies across the grid area, except at one line. A transverse Mercator projection has a “central meridian” line where a chosen longitude aligns with a vertical eastings grid line. For the National Grid this central meridian line is 2°W or 400000m E.

The changing direction of magnetic north is now approaching this ’magic line‘ so all three will briefly be in alignment. Due to the magnetic north direction being skewed relative to the central meridian and the fact that it is moving, the triple alignment point will move up the central meridian.


The 'magic line' as it passes through Great Britain

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/newsroom/blog/magnetic-true-grid-north-align-over-great-britain?fbclid=IwAR35Zekr-NXZQTg1-E_VUkZ1adtTErUn_CtVllJfS8IG6PnhKNGR2fvNN_o

I edit books. The Oxford comma is much misunderstood.

Nowadays, rather than having strict house styles, most book publishers are flexible about matters of style, like the Oxford comma, because they want to minimize costs resulting from changing what an author's submitted for publication. Generally, if what an author's done is consistent, or thereabouts, we'll standardize it throughout a chapter or whole book.

The Oxford comma means something different in book publishing than it does in everyday chatter.

It means the comma after the penultimate item in a list is obligatory in all cases.

It's nothing to do with making sense of a sentence by fiddling with the punctuation, that comma's just always there. The Oxford University Press explains why it adopted this practice:

No, Elon and Jack are not "competitors." They're collaborating.

It might be ineresting to compare Twitter sources, but it looks like you have it well covered.

For anyone else who might be interested, here are a few of mine I check out regularly.

Here's Josh Marshall's Ukraine Twitter list (I don't check out this one that often, but it includes some I do, like Anders Åslund, Ukraine Weapons Tracker, Julia Davis (who we've discussed), The Kyiv Independent, Illia Ponomarenko etc.): https://twitter.com/i/lists/1494877848087187461

Individual accounts (mainly aggregators unless they're individuals' names):

The Dead District (based in Georgia) - https://twitter.com/TheDeadDistrict
Glasnost Gone - https://twitter.com/GlasnostGone
NEXTA - https://twitter.com/nexta_tv
Oryx - https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop
News of Ukraine - https://twitter.com/uasupport999
Russia Vs World - https://twitter.com/RussiaVsWorld_
ТРУХА English - https://twitter.com/TpyxaNews
Euromaidan Press (can get a bit over-excited, depending who's staffing it) - https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress
BlueSauron - https://twitter.com/Blue_Sauron
Trent Telenko - https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko
Phillips P. OBrien - https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien
Visegrád 24 - https://twitter.com/visegrad24
Thomas C. Theiner - https://twitter.com/noclador
WarMonitor - https://twitter.com/WarMonitor3
Rob Lee - https://twitter.com/RALee85
Jason Jay Smart - https://twitter.com/officejjsmart
Jay in Kyiv - https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv
ZMiST - https://twitter.com/ZMiST_Ua

I could draw the individual ones together in a Twitter list, but I think it would be duplicative (and overwhelming!). I check out different ones on different days, depending on mood and the type of info I'm after.

Twitter's good for some things - even after Musk took over

How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe