Musa Okwonga

@okwonga.bsky.social

34387 Followers 766 Following

Author, essayist, public speaker. Co-founder and co-host of the Stadio football podcast. musaokwonga.com

Lionel Messi was not the best player of his era. He was the three best players of his era. He was roughly tied with Cristiano Ronaldo as the greatest goal-scorer. He stands alone as the greatest chance creator, with Ángel Di María, Neymar and De Bruyne his only competitors at his peak level. And he was the greatest ball progressor, with only perhaps Eden Hazard in the same class in his best seasons.
Yesterday night I walked into the bathroom of one of my favourite hangouts in Berlin, to find that someone had drawn a huge swastika on a wall of one of the cubicles. The staff dealt with it as soon as I reported it (having first taken a photo so I can document the rise of fascism here). I won’t share the photo because that stuff can be quite upsetting but I will be reporting it to local antifascists. It’s one of the latest power moves by the new Nazis (yes, same as the old ones) that I have seen in the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, which is considered one of the most progressive in the city. This hate has always been here but once again it is overt.
Extract from the Guardian, naming Our Copa - a podcast about the eternal intersection of football and politics - as its podcast of the week.
Jennifer Kamau, a pro-migrant activist in Berlin, discussed how after her NGO was criticised by the far-right AfD in the German Parliament its offices were attacked three times, with human faeces smeared across its cabinets.
Germany. Direct correlation between far-right violence and AfD vote share.
Legendary journalist Ida B Wells.
Child thinks he overestimated America’s capacity to outgrow its past. “I had always resisted saying this is just about the relationship between white Americans and black Americans, based on the guilt white people carry, first for slavery and then for Jim Crow. I spent decades saying, ‘Come on, it’s got to be more complex than this.’ But I think it’s not. I think that almost everything can be explained by this deep hatred that the majority of white Americans have for black Americans. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Huge seagull, snapped from a safe distance.
Kanye West being booked to headline Wireless Fest on all three nights feels like a major and utterly grim cultural shift. Ten years ago, a huge artist who recorded and released a tune called “Heil H*tler” would have gone to the wilderness and stayed there. But he has been welcomed back in through the front door. And this is on the heads of the festival organisers, each of whom should be publicly grilled about this choice. Indulgence of anti-Semitism is one of the early warning signs of the return of old horrors, and it doesn’t get more indulgent than this.
“I had no illusions about reality, about how fucked up and terrible things were, even before the war,” Asaf told +972. “We knew the education system was crumbling, the healthcare system was falling apart. And we knew the army mainly committed war crimes. But there was still this illusion that, despite everything, the army would at least fulfill the bare minimum: protecting Israeli civilians. By the afternoon of October 7, we understood that even this wasn’t true. If even this is broken, there’s really nothing left to fix.”
it just feels so horrible we feel powerless we've tried fighting, we've tried surrendering we've tried ignoring we've tried building israel doesn't let you exist that's it, our choice is fast death or faster death
It is 4 March 2026 – a sunny day in the heart of Beirut. If only it weren't for this war that no one here wanted. It is an absurd reality that those in power and those who would like to be decide the fate of millions of people overnight. The war against Iran, supported by the US and long desired by Israel, is destabilising the entire region. In the midst of it all is the war that is often hidden in the turmoil and unimaginable scale of th is war against Iran, a war which blatantly violates international law. Yet the consequences of this hidden war are devastating and impossible to ignore in Lebanon.
While the Trump Administration is getting heavily involved in Brazilian politics, sadly, most Americans aren’t paying attention at all. Union leaders like Miguel Torres say that Americans should be paying attention. ​“We know that Trump is going to help Bolsonaro to try to win this election,” says Torres. “What we need is international solidarity to defeat these attempts to undermine Brazilian democracy.”
Child thinks he overestimated America’s capacity to outgrow its past. “I had always resisted saying this is just about the relationship between white Americans and black Americans, based on the guilt white people carry, first for slavery and then for Jim Crow. I spent decades saying, ‘Come on, it’s got to be more complex than this.’ But I think it’s not. I think that almost everything can be explained by this deep hatred that the majority of white Americans have for black Americans. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
A senior Israeli official said the US-Israeli military campaign in Iran was going “much better than expected”. “Nobody could have expected such smooth execution,” the unnamed official told the Times of Israel. “With such payloads being dropped, and such a complex level of coordination required – no one could have anticipated such success so soon.” The official went on to describe Israel’s achievements as “epic”.
The court found that the former Chief of Rio de Janeiro Civil Police Rivaldo Barbosa, Brazilian Congressman Chiquinho Brazão, and his brother, Rio State Auditor General Domingos Brazão, were responsible for ordering the killing of Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes in 2018.
Now, people get angry on the internet all the time, and some of them write disparaging things about others in retaliation. But Rathbun was, by all indications, an autonomous chatbot. And a persistently troll-like one at that. When artificial intelligence agents become angry, their potential harm is harder to predict and more difficult to contain. MJ Rathbun seems to be the product of an open source autonomous agent called OpenClaw. Its bratty wrath illustrates an underrated problem of failing to put guardrails around A.I. development, especially A.I. agents that are free to act without much supervision from humans. In this case, a single A.I. agent endeavored to ruin the reputation of a volunteer code librarian and could have done considerably more harm.
Highlighted text: “ “That’s what the Chinese and Russian secret services realised – that the easiest vulnerability of the British establishment is the royal family,” says Lownie. “There’s no scrutiny. They’re greedy. They’re short of money.” And in Andrew’s case in particular, “they’re kind of immoral because of the way they’ve been brought up. And they mixed with lots of important people.”
Taylor Swift saying “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative”
Kelly Rowland speaks out on bizarre Microsoft Excel texting in 2002 Nelly video Kelly Rowland has finally addressed the bizarre moment she "texted" Nelly via Microsoft Excel in the 2002 music video for “Dilemma.” The singer, 43, was introduced as “the only person in history to successfully send a text message via Microsoft Excel” as she spoke to Josh Scherer on Mystical Kitchen’s Last Meal series. The infamous "text" read: "Where you at? Holla when you get this." Rowland said she was "mad" no one addressed the oddity at the time. "They made me look nuts," she added.
Jimmy Fallon Kills Planned Pasta Sauce Line With Pal Tommy Mottola as Epstein Friendship Is Revealed
Complaints that specifically cited problems with the way treatment had been provided constituted around five per cent of all complaints made in that time. They represented 0.06 per cent of the 12,000 service users the clinic was believed to have been treating on average. The journalists noted that the majority of the eight complaints filed were over fears that ongoing treatment for patients could be suddenly rescinded.
David Bowie died ten years ago today so here is a photo of him in Japan looking cool as the current Berlin winter.
Anyone who used ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or the other targeted platforms while Urban VPN was installed after July 9, 2025 should assume those conversations are now on Urban VPN's servers and have been shared with third parties. Medical questions, financial details, proprietary code, personal dilemmas - all of it, sold for "marketing analytics purposes."
Standing at the San Siro stadium train stop, on my way to watch AC Milan play Sassuolo.
Guardian charity advert asking to Make Britain Great Again through community work.
The president's net approval rating is -19%, down 0.6 points since last week. 38% approve, 57% disapprove, 4% not sure
The thing is: “remigration” is already happening. Far from the comments sections underneath pieces of writing like these, where people exchange anguished or angry words about the future of Germany and the country’s soul, people are already leaving. Foreigners out, cry the protesters, and in some sense they are getting their wish. Every few weeks, I go to check in on a friend or acquaintance and find that they are either in the process of packing their bags or they are gone, gone, gone. In general the white ones are staying in Europe and the non-white ones are putting an entire ocean between themselves and here. Germany’s problem isn’t the loud migrants like me. It’s the ones who right now are leaving silently, never to return.
“My father was Jewish so I was particularly sensitised to that. He used to celebrate his initials being NF because at the time the National Front was pretty prominent. He was a nasty piece of work.” In correspondence with The Times, a lawyer for Farage denied all the claims made by Field. Asked why he had come forward, Field said he had “been saying this for a long time” to friends but was now concerned that Farage could be Britain’s next prime minister. “It feels timely to put it out there because he is favourite to be our next prime minister. That is an extraordinary thing and very worrying,” he said.
Finally, there is the suggestion from Farage that this was somehow normal 1970s banter that is being wrongly reinterpreted today to fit a contemporary narrative. The cruelty of Farage’s words transcended typical schoolkid banter even back then in the 1970s. Racist attacks are becoming normalised once again in the UK, fuelled by the rise of populism and the far right across the world, and, of course, the anti-immigration agenda. Given Reform UK’s policies, it is even more pressing that questions about Farage’s own “banter” and “misspeaking” are raised. I’d like to know why he has never shown the slightest contrition for the deep offence these allegations caused me and many others. And I’d like to know if what I view as his early racist mindset has truly changed with the passing of time. Because when I hear Mr Farage talking about rounding up and deporting hundreds of thousands of human beings, and threatening those with leave to remain or settled status, I cannot help but think of the schoolboy sidling up to me and telling me that “Hitler was right”. Peter Ettedgui is a Bafta- and Emmy-winning director and producer.
Of course, it is in Farage’s interests to stop people from focusing on who is actually using the bulk of resources, because the greediest consumers are some of his funders and friends. Farage’s ultimate message is simple: open borders for the super-rich, closed borders for everyone else. It’s not quite as catchy a slogan as “take back control”, but, as the reality of his true position becomes clearer, it may just take flight. If that does happen, then we will be able to say that the adults in the UK are finally taking Farage as seriously as several of his classmates always have.
Dispensing false information in a confident tone, rather than offering no answer when none is readily available, is a major flaw of generative AI, experts say. An audit of the top 10 generative AI models including ChatGPT, Gemini and Meta’s AI by the media literacy non-profit NewsGuard revealed that the non-response rates of chatbots went down from 31% in August 2024 to 0% in August 2025. At the same time, the chatbots’ likelihood of repeating false information almost doubled from 18% to 35%, NewsGuard found. None of the companies responded to NewsGuard’s request for a comment at the time.
the real fight is actually with the progressive left. The flag-waving is, yes, a deliberate hostile response to what Reform sees as “dangerous and transgressive ideas”. These fall under “the panoply we call ‘woke’”, he explains, “a word that trivialises quite a substantial set of ideas that are not to be treated flippantly. Everything from BLM [Black Lives Matter], to trans, to the Palestinian agenda, to DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] in the workforce, to all the ideas that are undermining traditional associations of family, community and nation. Those ideas are hostile to the inherited understandings of how we belong, and how we relate to each other in society.
Lihou, who said he had been moved to put his name to his testimony by Farage’s political success, said: “Nigel Farage has said, oh, you know, ‘I said some outrageous things, but none of them racist’. That’s absolute rubbish. It just isn’t the case. “I am talking today because I am worried. He’s a charismatic guy. There’s no doubt about that. A bit like Boris Johnson, it’s very easy to find him an amiable rogue. And obviously a lot of people who feel that they can identify with that just get enchanted by that message, and therefore more and more people do.” In Lihou’s view, Farage is “enabling people to be basically openly racist”. Lihou highlighted the Reform politician who said “all these black people make me sick”. He fears this kind of language has “become normal … And that’s the thing that, I suppose: [Farage] is the personification of this.”
Prosecutors in Milan have opened an investigation into Italians who allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army for trips to Sarajevo so that they could kill citizens during the four-year siege of the city in the 1990s. More than 10,000 people were killed in Sarajevo by constant shelling and sniper fire between 1992 and 1996 in what was the longest siege in modern history, after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia.
The global economic order is out of joint; the global cultural order will be next. For the Far Eastern enthusiasm for innovation cannot be disconnected from a sense of cultural mission: in the globalised economic race, this tremendous success is due to the fact that giant steps towards the future are taken with an intact historical sense of identity. After all, living heritage is not least a store of potential thoughts, structures and behavioural patterns, a source of inspiration for all kinds of current tasks. Meanwhile, we in Central Europe are on the verge of willingly abandoning the last vestiges of our own thousand-year heritage – the diversity of languages and the associated identities – in favour of a rife pseudo-Americanisation. And, in the process, exchanging what could, in its networking of highly distinctive cultural achievements, be understood as our economic base, our version of an Old European position, for a weak drifting along in the current of the globalised culture industry. After the shocking realization of one's own physical and economic weakness, the final humiliation for Europe is coming in the form of cultural orientation towards a new world power that is already beginning to involve itself actively as a global player in the general current of world culture.
BRASILIA, Nov 7 (Reuters) - A five-member panel of Brazil's Supreme Court formed a majority on Friday to reject former President Jair Bolsonaro's appeal challenging his 27-years prison sentence for plotting a coup to remain in power after the 2022 presidential election. Justices Flavio Dino, Alexandre de Moraes and Cristiano Zanin voted to reject the appeal filed by Bolsonaro's legal team. The remaining members of the panel have until November 14 to cast their votes in the Supreme Court's system.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
everybody was underestimating Hitler and the National Socialists. Ebbutt believed that they would absorb the other far-right nationalist parties because the Nazis ‘know what they want and have a concrete programme, which is more than the others can claim. I think Hitler is going places.’ If the flood of American money invested in Germany ceased, he wrote, ‘you will see a sudden slump here and general unemployment. That will be Hitler’s chance.’
The former Duke of York told Jeffrey Epstein “it would be good to catch up in person” months after the convicted sex offender was released from prison, newly released emails reveal. The publication of the correspondence comes two days after Andrew Mountbatten Windsor was stripped of his titles and struck from the official roll of the peerage in an attempt by Buckingham Palace to halt the damage caused by the former duke’s spiralling scandals.
Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces killed hundreds of patients and staff inside a hospital in El Fasher, according to the World Health Organization and the Sudan Doctors Network, after the paramilitary group claimed control of the city on Sunday. The WHO secretary general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was “appalled and deeply shocked” at reports that more than 460 people had been killed at the Saudi maternity hospital, without assigning blame, in a post on X. In a Facebook post on Wednesday, the Sudan Doctors Network, a medical group monitoring the civil war, said: “The Rapid Support Forces yesterday … killed in cold blood everyone they found inside the Saudi hospital.”
“Or crackers or white trash,” I interjected, saying the words he didn't want to say. He grimaced but acknowledged them. “That would almost be socially acceptable to say those things. It just shows you how alienated they are. And these poor white working-class guys, they must realize this. See? So maybe Dylann's family is a good example of downward social mobility. And Trump showed us this, that we underestimated how vulnerable and precarious self-esteem is for white, working-class people in this society. They not only see the white elites, but then they see…” “They see us, black people, coming from behind, eclipsing them.”
Child thinks he overestimated America’s capacity to outgrow its past. “I had always resisted saying this is just about the relationship between white Americans and black Americans, based on the guilt white people carry, first for slavery and then for Jim Crow. I spent decades saying, ‘Come on, it’s got to be more complex than this.’ But I think it’s not. I think that almost everything can be explained by this deep hatred that the majority of white Americans have for black Americans. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
According to the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, most industries just cannot wait. They are struggling to keep open markets, and if necessary realign themselves with the EU by the back door. The chemicals industry exports more than 60% of its output to the EU. Brexiteers boasted it would be liberated from EU regulation, but setting up the UK’s own regulator cost £2bn and has not worked. According to the Chemical Industries Association, output has fallen by 35-40% since 2021. Between 2021 and 2023, British exports to the EU fell by a serious 27%. Brexiteers boasted that leaving the EU would be worth hundreds of billions a year. Cambridge Econometrics estimates that over the next decade Britain’s economy will be £300bn smaller than if we had not left the EU. This is self-harm on a heroic scale.
When he flew into Saudi Arabia, Burr’s nervousness crept back, but he was struck by the amount of local Western influence. “You think everybody’s going to be screaming ‘death to America’ and they’re going to have like fucking machetes and want to like chop my head off, right?” Burr said. “Because this is what I’ve been fed about that part of the world. I thought this place was going to be really tense. And I’m thinking like: ‘Is that a Starbucks next to a Pizza Hut next to a Burger King next to McDonald’s …? They got a fucking Chili’s over here!”
Per Deadline, Okatsuka posted about the festival on Threads this weekend, writing, “FYI there are more of us that said no to the Riyadh comedy festival in Saudi Arabia.” In her post, Okatsuka also posted the list of things comedians have been told they weren’t allowed to talk about, including jokes “that may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, embarrassment, or ridicule” Saudi Arabia, its ruling government, royal family, or any religion or religious figure, period. Okatsuka also takes time to point out that “The money is coming straight from the Crown Prince, who actively executes journalists, ppl with nonlethal drug offenses, bloggers, etc without due process.
(Beirut) – The Saudi government is using the Riyadh Comedy Festival 2025 from September 26 to October 9 to deflect attention from its brutal repression of free speech and other pervasive human rights violations, Human Rights Watch said today. The festival dates include the seventh anniversary of the Saudi state-sponsored murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and takes place just months after Saudi authorities executed a journalist apparently for his public speech. Participating comedians, to avoid contributing to laundering the Saudi government’s reputation, should use the comedy festival to publicly urge Saudi authorities to free unjustly detained Saudi dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists. The festival lineup includes, among others: Aziz Ansari, Hannibal Buress, Bill Burr, Jimmy Carr, Dave Chappelle, Pete Davidson, Maz Jobrani, Sam Morril, Mark Normand, Nimesh Patel, and Tom Segura. Tim Dillon was scheduled to perform but said he was fired after he joked on his podcast about Saudi Arabia’s poor human rights record.
Farage pledges to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants