Best Of

So the BBC is going to fight - fight like hell - and I'll be there with them. They should crowdfund the cost of the case. Allow people to contribute if they are so inclined. Put me down for £500. I'll give up nuts for a year. It's a no brainer.

There was some stuff from Newsmax on the BBC this morning saying both that the BBC couldn't afford to fight the case (£50m plus) versus settling (maybe £10-15m) .. and that they would be embarrassed by the discovery process.

I'm with you in saying bollocks to that.
The BBC's own right to discovery is likely to be very interesting in what it might turn up. And I'm happy to help pay to defend such a transparently nonsense lawsuit.

It's important, I think. People talk a lot about "British values" and if not giving in to extortion by malevolent foreigners isn't one of them it jolly well should be. I also like the calculus of it. IMO the potential damage to Donald Trump of having this litigated in open court in the US is greater than that to the BBC.

I'm on the side of freedom of speech here, and in that case that means I'm 100% behind the BBC in this case.

US law should be on their side here too - far more than if the case was going to be heard in the libel capital of the world, London...

They should not settle, Trump has an extraordinarily high bar to pass in the US court system. And any halfway competent attorney ought to be able to defend them quite honestly.

Newsmax guy agreed that it was a weak case, but seemed to think we'd just settle on pragmatic (ie monetary) grounds, since a successful defence might still cost £50m plus.
I guess someone working for Newmax places very little value on journalistic independence, so he might even have been commenting honestly.

BBC v Trump

Like Neil Hamilton v Al Fayed.

Can’t they both lose ?

However anything that undermines the license fee is all well and good.

Just for you.

https://x.com/EdwardJDavey/status/2000850649064546505
Keir Starmer needs to stand up for the BBC against Trump's outrageous $5bn lawsuit and protect licence fee payers from being hit in the pocket.

Trump wants to interfere in our democracy and undermine our national broadcaster. We cannot let him.

So Ed Davey has no comment to make on the actual merits of the case, he just reflexively says BBCGood and OrangeManBad.

The claim that the $5bn lawsuit is "outrageous" is implicitly a comment on the merits of the case. $5bn is, indeed, clearly outrageous. The largest defamation settlement by the media in US history is the $787.5 million paid by Fox News to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023, when Fox repeated Trump's false claims about the election. The BBC case is a one-off bad edit and wasn't broadcast in the US, it clearly doesn't remotely approach the scale of Fox News's comments about Dominion, but Trump is claiming over 6 times as much in damages.

Alex Jones has faced over $1bn in settlements for his lies over Sandy Hook, but that's across several different trials. Again, Jones' persistent campaign against the Sandy Hook victims is many orders of magnitude greater than one bad edit, and yet Trump thinks he deserves nearly 5 times as much.

You repeatedly dismiss comments as "OrangeManBad", but you don't ever explain how the Orange Man is not bad. How is Trump selling Ukraine down the river not bad? How were his comments about the murder of Rob Reiner remotely acceptable?

So the BBC is going to fight - fight like hell - and I'll be there with them. They should crowdfund the cost of the case. Allow people to contribute if they are so inclined. Put me down for £500. I'll give up nuts for a year. It's a no brainer.

There was some stuff from Newsmax on the BBC this morning saying both that the BBC couldn't afford to fight the case (£50m plus) versus settling (maybe £10-15m) .. and that they would be embarrassed by the discovery process.

I'm with you in saying bollocks to that.
The BBC's own right to discovery is likely to be very interesting in what it might turn up. And I'm happy to help pay to defend such a transparently nonsense lawsuit.

It's important, I think. People talk a lot about "British values" and if not giving in to extortion by malevolent foreigners isn't one of them it jolly well should be. I also like the calculus of it. IMO the potential damage to Donald Trump of having this litigated in open court in the US is greater than that to the BBC.

I'm on the side of freedom of speech here, and in that case that means I'm 100% behind the BBC in this case.

US law should be on their side here too - far more than if the case was going to be heard in the libel capital of the world, London...

They should not settle, Trump has an extraordinarily high bar to pass in the US court system. And any halfway competent attorney ought to be able to defend them quite honestly.

Newsmax guy agreed that it was a weak case, but seemed to think we'd just settle on pragmatic (ie monetary) grounds, since a successful defence might still cost £50m plus.
I guess someone working for Newmax places very little value on journalistic independence, so he might even have been commenting honestly.

BBC v Trump

Like Neil Hamilton v Al Fayed.

Can’t they both lose ?

However anything that undermines the license fee is all well and good.

Just for you.

https://x.com/EdwardJDavey/status/2000850649064546505
Keir Starmer needs to stand up for the BBC against Trump's outrageous $5bn lawsuit and protect licence fee payers from being hit in the pocket.

Trump wants to interfere in our democracy and undermine our national broadcaster. We cannot let him.

So Ed Davey has no comment to make on the actual merits of the case, he just reflexively says BBCGood and OrangeManBad.

What merits of the case could Trump possibly have? I mean Davey really doesn't have to go into analysis mode on this

He said to march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically”, but the BBC said that he said march to the Capitol “and fight like Hell”.

Given that there was actually a disturbance at the Capitol after the event at which he spoke, a reputable journalist might want to make sure that his words were accurately reported.

The actual quote is

I said something's wrong here, something is really wrong, can have happened.

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.

Trump used the word fight twenty times. Is it plausible he wasn't inciting the mob?

a

So the BBC is going to fight - fight like hell - and I'll be there with them. They should crowdfund the cost of the case. Allow people to contribute if they are so inclined. Put me down for £500. I'll give up nuts for a year. It's a no brainer.

There was some stuff from Newsmax on the BBC this morning saying both that the BBC couldn't afford to fight the case (£50m plus) versus settling (maybe £10-15m) .. and that they would be embarrassed by the discovery process.

I'm with you in saying bollocks to that.
The BBC's own right to discovery is likely to be very interesting in what it might turn up. And I'm happy to help pay to defend such a transparently nonsense lawsuit.

It's important, I think. People talk a lot about "British values" and if not giving in to extortion by malevolent foreigners isn't one of them it jolly well should be. I also like the calculus of it. IMO the potential damage to Donald Trump of having this litigated in open court in the US is greater than that to the BBC.

I'm on the side of freedom of speech here, and in that case that means I'm 100% behind the BBC in this case.

US law should be on their side here too - far more than if the case was going to be heard in the libel capital of the world, London...

They should not settle, Trump has an extraordinarily high bar to pass in the US court system. And any halfway competent attorney ought to be able to defend them quite honestly.

Newsmax guy agreed that it was a weak case, but seemed to think we'd just settle on pragmatic (ie monetary) grounds, since a successful defence might still cost £50m plus.
I guess someone working for Newmax places very little value on journalistic independence, so he might even have been commenting honestly.

BBC v Trump

Like Neil Hamilton v Al Fayed.

Can’t they both lose ?

However anything that undermines the license fee is all well and good.

Just for you.

https://x.com/EdwardJDavey/status/2000850649064546505
Keir Starmer needs to stand up for the BBC against Trump's outrageous $5bn lawsuit and protect licence fee payers from being hit in the pocket.

Trump wants to interfere in our democracy and undermine our national broadcaster. We cannot let him.

So Ed Davey has no comment to make on the actual merits of the case, he just reflexively says BBCGood and OrangeManBad.

What merits of the case could Trump possibly have? I mean Davey really doesn't have to go into analysis mode on this

He said to march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically”, but the BBC said that he said march to the Capitol “and fight like Hell”.

Given that there was actually a disturbance at the Capitol after the event at which he spoke, a reputable journalist might want to make sure that his words were accurately reported.

The actual quote is

I said something's wrong here, something is really wrong, can have happened.

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.

Trump used the word fight twenty times. Is it plausible he wasn't inciting the mob?

The problem is getting the two facts to be admitted

- Trump incited the Jan 6 riot and attempted to steal the Presidency by pushing the VP to not validate the result.
- The BBC fucked up in editing the speech

Bit like Alison Rose and Coutts losing a truth telling competition with Nigel Fucking Farage. As a result of which they had to make Farage rich enough to have a Coutts account again.

Wronging a Wong'un Doesn't Make A Right.

I think the BBC should fight the Trump suit, by the way.

The issues are (to me):

a) Is Trump being misrepresented?
b) If so, does he have any reputation to defend?

To me, the answer is No and No.

OT rant about government meetings. I've been sent this email for a Teams call:-

Please join the meeting 5 minutes before your allocated time of 11:15 by clicking on the link.
...
Join the meeting 10 minutes before your allocated time by clicking on the link. It is important that you are ready and join on time.

So in the course of a paragraph, they want me to join at 11.15, 11.10 and 11.05. This automatically generated nonsense must have been sent out for months if not decades with no civil servant bothering to read it.

Indeed, no civil servant will join before 11:20

The cheap jibe aside, one of my perennial bugbears in my local Government career was senior officers moving from meeting to meeting and often arriving late and unfocused and that applied both in the office and on Teams calls.

Managing meetings was a perennial struggle - I acquired a bit of a reputation for being a tyrannical Chair but I always wanted a 60 minute meeting to end after 50 minutes to allow those moving to the next meeting time to move, both physically and mentally, from the one issue to the next.

Part of what is perceived as the issue with decision making stems from this, I believe. Senior and especially middle management are overworked and become scared of taking decisions because they fear there has been inadequate discussion and the standard response is to arrange another meeting which rehashes all the old arguments wasting everyone’s time,

Whisper it quietly, but I suspect this happens in the private sector too.

I asked a chatbot yesterday how to waste as much time as possible by calling a pointless meeting.

If your goal is maximum wasted time, book a meeting titled:

“Alignment on the Alignment: Scope, Ownership, and Next Steps” (60 mins)

Agenda (aka time-sink fuel):
1) 10 min — “Context recap” (read the same thing everyone read yesterday)
2) 15 min — Define what “done” means (argue about words, decide nothing)
3) 10 min — Ownership (assign “shared ownership”, i.e., nobody)
4) 15 min — Options review (2 options, pick “we need more data”)
5) 10 min — Next steps (schedule another meeting)

Invite at least one person who shouldn’t be there and one person who can’t decide anything. End with: “Let’s take this offline” and don’t.

I laughed for a moment then realised it sounded just like all the meetings I actually have to sit through.

One of the issues with tariffs that tends to get underplayed is that domestic firms will tend to raise their prices if foreign competitors get hit by tariffs.

So: imagine that there are currently two suppliers of widgets, each costing $5.00, and one is domestic and the other foreign.

Tariffs put $2 on the price of imported widgets, and so people might thing the domestic producer would now sell twice as many widgets for $5.

What actually happens is that the domestic producer raises their price to $6.99, and -price elasticity being what it is- sells 1.5x as many widgets, but at 40% more per widget.

That is profit maximizing behaviour for the widget manufacturer but shows up in higher prices for everyone.

But in Trump fantasy world the foreign manufacturer of widgets absorbs the $2 so the American taxpayer gains but the American consumer doesn't even notice. Don't think that fantasy is enjoying contact with reality (am I back on the Bonnie Blue thread?)

New PB policy:

Additional photos are acceptable is they are of food you cooked yourself, that is delicious, and which are accompanied by a recipe.

PBers note, that rules out photos of pizzas with pineapple on them.

No photos of this delicious treat, then?

I'm guessing this is allowed though as it's under the pizza?

Do it properly: