Best Of

CHECK FOR ACCREDITATION, PART TWO

Good morning @NigelB, @Barnesian, @Phil, @kinabalu, @Cyclefree, @kyf_100

In my upcoming trans article (with discussant contributions from kyf_100 and Cyclefree, currently being pre-read by Taz and Andy_JS), another of the appendices (appendix 6) contains a list of comments prior to the article being written. In that discussion we see the following text...

@viewcode
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5337029/#Comment_5337029
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5337049/#Comment_5337049
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5337052/#Comment_5337052
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5337053/#Comment_5337053
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5337054/#Comment_5337054
@NigelB
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5337057/#Comment_5337057
@Barnesian
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5336716/#Comment_5336716
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5336711/#Comment_5336711
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5336732/#Comment_5336732
@Phil
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5336721/#Comment_5336721
@Kinabalu
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5336695#Comment_5336695
@Cyclefree vs @Viewcode
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5381803#Comment_5381803
@Cyclefree
See also https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/11/17/the-scottish-playbook/
@kyf_100
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5379281/#Comment_5379281
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5379283/#Comment_5379283
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5379284/#Comment_5379284

If you want your identities to be partially obscured (like this)...

[REDACTED]
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5379281/#Comment_5379281

...or totally obscured (like this)...

[REDACTED]
[REDACTED]

...just let me know before 9pm today please.

This will be the most boring article ever published in the history of the Internet but I've come up with a snappy title to leaven the doughy misery of reading the fucking thing - "The Transgina Monologues".

As predicted.

No, @Dura_Ace is right, this sounds like the most monumentally boring thing in the Anthropocene Era, the only thing Dura got wrong is the name. It should be The Mangina Monologues, as that is funnier and it alliterates

Impressively, that manages to be both needlessly nasty and stratigraphically illiterate.
Strictly speaking, we’re in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, not the ‘Anthropocene Era’.

Impressively you manage to get your pompous correction completely and pompously incorrect

"What is the Anthropocene and why does it matter?"


https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-the-anthropocene.html?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=news&utm_medium=grants&gad_source=1

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/anthropocene/

"The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems."

Still digging, I see. Your original claim was “Anthropocene Era”, which is wrong.
Even on the most generous reading, Anthropocene is only used informally as an unofficial epoch, not an era.
Quietly changing the geological unit after the fact is correction by sleight of hand, not accuracy.

WTF are you on about now? You denied that the concept of "the Anthropocene" even existed, I showed you it did, now you're quibbling about era versus epoch to hide your tiny shrivelled testicles of shame

That last line actually made me spit out some tea and laugh out loud, bravo.

If I may continue pompously, I didn’t deny the existence of the Anthropocene, only that it isn't an era. However, I grant that I wrote it clumsily enough that your reading was a fair one.

What would PB be without a pinch of pomposity and a smidge of ambiguity?

Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later

BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation

I sat through five hours of Tristan and Isolde in Edinburgh on Wednesday, and while it was great, just occasionally you felt that a five minute executive summary and three crisp bullet point conclusions wouldn't come amiss.

Jason Groves
@JasonGroves1

Labour Together urges ministers to impose a 'temporary' 2p hike in income tax to fund another energy bill bailout

https://x.com/JasonGroves1/status/2032413254115373333

You can't subsidise your way out of a supply shock.

World energy supply has fallen. World energy demand needs to drop to match supply.

That's what the price is: it's information that tells you that you need to reduce demand. If you (and everyone else) tries to subsidise their way out of the supply shock, then all you do is make the remaining producers of that energy rich, without solving the problem.

Now: there are ways you can ... ameliorate ... a short term supply issue caused by the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. Your country might, if it had any sense, have six months of natural gas demand in storage that could be run down at times like this.

But the better, longer-term, plan is simply to have more energy produced in ways that simply aren't susceptible to the a reduction of natural gas an oil supply. (For what it's worth, coal doesnt help much. Why? Because energy for power generation is pretty fungible. If natural gas gets more expensive, then coal fired power stations get used more. Prices are set at the margin, so the price of coal will rise until -on a per megawatt hour basis- it comes into line with natural gas. Hence why Newcastle Coal prices are now a staggering $130+/ton.)

Some quite disturbing images emerging, of attacks on Dubai towers

Impossible to know if they are

1. Fake
2. Sort of faked
3. Real but from a different place or time
4. Real but seriously suppressed by the Dubai Government

The Dubai regime has made a grave error in jailing people for negative tweets, films of drones, etc. This is going to hugely boost mistrust of *everything Dubai*, and therefore increase hostility to the city in general, and, likewise, only amplify fears in the absence of accepted truth

There have been plenty of cases of westerners being locked up in Dubai for doing fuck all wrong.

The place is not a democracy. The authorities can do whatever they feel like.

Why people clamour to go there is baffling.

A lot of people have no choice. Big companies move there and if you want to keep your job you go with them. For international companies the additional benefit on top of tax advantages is it is well positioned for the three non-US regions Africa, Europe and Southern Asia.

Lots of people will go there for the tax advantages but one of the driving factors is that that is where the work is.

Any human rights abuses suffered by Westerners in the Gulf countries are as nothing compared to what happens to Pakistani construction workers or Sri Lankan maids out there. It's this stuff that is really contemptible.

I’m proud of Scotland. Not in the performative “flag in bio” sense, but in the boring, inconvenient sense of having lived around the UK and choosing to build my life here.

For avoidance of doubt: I’m English, born in Liverpool. I’ve lived in Edinburgh for 20+ years. If Scotland’s “anyone can be Scottish if they choose to live here” means anything, then that’s the lane I’m in.

And I’m proud of what Scotland has in abundance. Energy, talent, universities, land, water, world-class natural assets, and the kind of cultural confidence most places would kill for. We’re not a poor country cosplaying as one.

Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.

Instead, we’ve been served two decades of easy headline politics, with a constant drip-feed of “we’re so much better than the English” policies that look great on leaflets and terrible under a microscope. Free stuff that isn’t properly targeted. Symbolic wins that create hidden caps and unintended consequences. And a relentless constitutional focus that seems to crowd out the unglamorous work of making Scotland a better place to live.

I’m not asking for miracles. I’m asking for grown-up government: competent delivery, honest trade-offs, and outcomes you can measure. If you’re going to wrap yourself in Scottish pride and talk about our resource abundance, then show me the national project that turns that into shared prosperity. Otherwise it’s just branding. And I’m completely out of patience for branding.

And what makes it worse is I don’t see much that’s remotely hopeful in the opposition either. It’s fragmented, reactive, and often seems more interested in point-scoring than building a credible alternative. Don’t even get me started on the Greens

…

I’m not asking for miracles. I’m asking for grown-up government: competent delivery, honest trade-offs, and outcomes you can measure. If you’re going to wrap yourself in Scottish pride and talk about our resource abundance, then show me the national project that turns that into shared prosperity. Otherwise it’s just branding. And I’m completely out of patience for branding.

Take the Scottish references out of that and you could easily be referring to the UK political scene as a whole. No wonder Reform and Greens are getting a hearing.

Ever since the financial crash things in the UK have, on many measures, stagnated or fallen behind. The leading political parties all have some responsibility for that.

In many respects that is what drove Brexit - and a fat load of good that has done for those that voted for it (excluding the retirees on final salary and triple locked state pensions).

Starmer promised that “grown up” government - and I do feel there is genuine intent - but his execution has been dreadful (and he often ends up simply reversing course). In many respects he is as much a prisoner of his own party and an irrational media as he is from his own shortcomings.