Best Of

Morning all

Independence for London? It has been discussed - there's a general view London (basically to the M25 - there's a natural frontier if there ever was one) would be fine as an independent city state.

On more important matters, on the day I become Supreme Liberal Centrist Dictator (yes, I recognise both the irony and the paradox), my first act will be to outlaw hyperbole.

I read this morning on my news feed the UK has been "rocked by a major earthquake in North Yorkshire". I'm more than intrigued only to find out such earth-shattering (literally) event was 1.0 on the Richter Scale.

1.0? You wouldn't feel it let alone fall out of bed for it. Yes, it can be measured by the geological surveys but, "a major earthquake" ? It's up there with a 20 point fall in the FTSE 100 being called a "crash", a 0.1% decline in GDP being called a "slump" and a one point rise for Reform in an opinion poll a "surge".

So, yes, outlaw hyperbole and take exaggeration with it though that will be a billion times harder...

Missed this.

Donald Trump's son Eric holds talks with John Swinney

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgw118nlkeo.amp

Inviting his dad to be KIng of Scotland. After all, it worked with the Stuart dynasty. He'd want a new Glorious Revolution and MSGA.

Trump is quite similar to Idi Amin, so makes sense

He made a speech at the Department of Justice yesterday in front of an audience of prosecutors where he listed a whole series of people by name who he wants to target - people like Mark Elias (Democracy Docket) and Norm Eisen (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)).

He's moving towards Idi Amin's attack on the Judiciary (see the ex-Archbishop of York, who he locked up when he was around the Supreme Court of Uganda, and had beaten to a pulp.) It's the big one - will the checks and balances of USA democracy hold.

Here's a summary commentary on the speech by Bryan Taylor-Cohen, with Mark Elias: (10 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UuDU-zvSWY

And here's the full speech (one hour):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VDmcrf1m1c

It's better if Trump pops his clogs sooner rather than later - Vance may as bad or worse, but he won't be able to keep all the Republican party or half the US public with him like Trump can

Vance is far more intelligent than Trump though and doesn’t need to face the voters for 3 and a half years

My point is that Trump still needs the votes of, for example, Republican senators - for now. He has them because he is popular enough and Republican elected officials are afraid to oppose him. In a year or two there might be a quasi-dictatorship in the US, and the president may no longer need Congress. I think it's better that Vance replaces Trump before we reach that point, because I think Vance will face more opposition if he tries to claim, as Trump is doing, "l'etat c'est moi."

US has a constitution with a Congress and the Supreme Court, judges for whom Congress also appoints, to remove them and become a dictator Trump would need the military but they take an oath to the constitution and president

Most countries have constitutions. Here's the first line of Russia's:

Russia is a democratic federal law-bound state with a republican form of government.

Well Russia does still have multi party elections, judges and a President

Exactly. And Russian is not a democracy.

It is, it has multi party parliamentary and presidential elections even if not a perfect one.

For most of the 20th century Russia and indeed Ukraine too were one party communist dictatorships under the USSR and before that under the absolute monarchy of the Tsars

Russia's Freedom House rating is Not Free.

https://freedomhouse.org/country/russia

The Economist Democracy Index rates Russia as an Authoritarian Regime. Out of a choice of Full Democracy, Flawed Democracy, Hybrid Regime and Authoritarian Regime.

Democracy Matrix has Russia as 'Moderate Autocracy'. Out of
Working Democracy
Deficient Democracy
Hybrid Regime
Moderate Autocracy
Hard Autocracy


But @HYUFD rates Russia as a 'Democracy'

If Russia was a dictatorship Putin would have got 100% of the vote in the last Russian presidential election, he got 88% and the Communists and New People 4% for their candidates and Liberal Democrats 3%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Russian_presidential_election

Does that mean that the Soviet Union was a democracy? Their elections had other candidates, some of who got elected.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Soviet_Union_legislative_election

(The answer is probably "of course not". There's plenty of space where elections can happen without them being meaningful. Most dictators prefer to operate in that space, it's less embarrassing for them.)

No, as no party other than the Communist Party was allowed to contest its elections

Belarus? It is not a democracy if you allow opponents but fix the result

It is a flawed democracy, a true dictatorship would ban any alternative party from contesting its elections if it has any elections at all for government executive and legislative posts

Belarus is a Not Free country, just like Russia.

https://freedomhouse.org/country/belarus


Belarus 7 points out of 100
Russia 12 points out of 100

Compare:
USA 84 points out of 100
UK 92 points out of 100

We need a real time monitor for the USA score under Trump2. It will be falling fast.

I have conducted a quick review of Facebook and the narrative developing is that we should not be cutting incapacity benefits while we spend billions on asylum seeker hotels. I would guess that a very large proportion of the "middle-aged man on disability benefits" cohort are Reform voters (or soon to be so).

Also links being made to the assisted suicide bill, and waiting lists for operations. Former scaffolders with long-term injuries etc. This is going to be toxic.

Watch the numbers on asylum seeker hotels, which are due out this month.

They are about 40% down from peak, but tbf they also came down under the Conservatives.

But the riposte will be "why are the ANY hotels".

That they are not 4 star hotels as claimed does not matter, because the narrative is about emotion not truth.

So why are there any hotels?

Because we are insisting that they can't work until they are processed, and we're not processing them fast enough.

The interests of the local population seem to come last in either case. Either we put them up in hotels at great expense or let them compete against locals in the job and housing markets.

The best and cheapest and most humane solution is immediate processing. About 30% will be returned and 70% will be accepted as genuine asylum seekers.

These will enter the jobs and housing markets, paying taxes and doing useful work, including, in some cases, helping to build houses.

What do you suggest?

I strongly doubt whether 70% are asylum seekers, and if they are, then the bar is set far too low. Finger in the air: about 2% should genuinely be offered asylum.

Based on what? Three of the top 5 countries for asylum seekers are Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. Do you doubt that people have good reasons to flee those countries?

But why should we take them? Most of them will be coming through half a dozen other safe countries.
I'd suggest people we should be taking are those from HK or Ukraine, where we have specific reasons for taking them. Granted some Afghanistani asylum seekers would fall into that category. In general, we should probably be trying to avoid people from medeival shitholes like Syria.

You had said only 2% are genuine asylum seekers. Now you are saying that they are asylum seekers, but we shouldn’t take them? Is that it?

Let’s be clear, most Syrian, Afghan and Iranian refugees *are* in other safe (and indeed unsafe) countries between us and them. There are far, far more Syrians seeking asylum in Turkey and Jordan, for example. There are about 20,000 Syrian refugees in the UK. There are 3,000,000 in Turkey, 800k in Lebanon, 650k in Jordan, 630k in Germany, 50k in the Netherlands, 45k in Greece, 30k in France and so on. I think it’s a good thing that the burden of helping those fleeing Syria has been shared around, and I note we’ve taken very few as a proportion. (Hopefully, the situation in Syria is now improving.)

Calling Syria a mediaeval shithole is ahistorical, at best, but if you think Syria is such a terrible place, I would hope you would have more empathy for those who have fled.

The ones who have fled are mainly the ones who wanted to make Syria a mediaeval shithole. The change of regime should mean that those now fleeing are the non-mediaeval shithole contingent, but sadly I haven't read any evidence of the first group returning to enjoy the fruits of their labours.

What nonsense is this? Why on Earth do you think that the ones who fled wanted to make Syria a mediaeval shithole?

The logic is fairly simple. Those fleeing before were cheifly those who opposed the dictatorship and wanted to install an islamist theocracy. Now that that goal has been achieved, that regime is perpetrating atrocities, or trying to so so, on their opponents - the Druze, the Christians, the Alawites. These people are now more likely to flee, and are by definition not Islamists.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-west-must-not-look-away-from-whats-happening-in-syria/

The logic is balderdash. It sounds like your usual Putinist propaganda. People fleeing Syria were rarely in favour of an Islamist theocracy. They were, rather, in favour of not dying. There was widespread opposition to Assad’s rule from across the political spectrum, and from multiple different ethnic and ethnoreligous groups. Druze and Christians fled in significant numbers from Assad’s regime (e.g., see this policy brief: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/geography/sites/geography_redesign/files/ucl_migration_research_unit_policy_brief_-_k_eghdamian.pdf ).

However, friends of Assad, like Putin, tried to portray him as an ally in a fight against Sunni extremism. That’s presumably the bullshit you’ve been listening to.

@Roger re Harranty Part 3 The last bit!

If Hanratty was innocent, as I suspect, he was probably framed. France, with whom Hanratty was lodging at the time, would in that case be implicated. The murder weapon was found soon after Hanratty became a suspect. It was wrapped in one of his handkerchiefs and found stuffed down the back seat of a local bus. France wrote a number of letters concerning the crime in the wake of Hanratty’s conviction. Some of these have never been made public. He committed suicide shortly before Hanratty was hanged.
I am sure nobody will now ever know for certain who killed Michael Gregston. The DNA evidence does not, in my opinion, give a definitive answer on that one. It does however pretty much eliminate the possibility of enquiries ever being reopened. One the whole, I believe that is probably a good thing.

This must be my longest ever post on PB. Hope you enjoyed it.

Extraordinary. I see that Thiel has even written a later foreward for Rees-Mogg's book, adding a touch of Nietszche, from the German right, as the son of a man who travelled from Germany to South Africa to become a uranium- mining businessman with black slaves ; and a touch of Mao.

You can almost hear the James Bond music playing in the background .

"Medieval men despaired of the will. They thought of humans as wounded and weak. But they respected the intellect. They thought even humans, if we think carefully, have the power to answer the most profound questions.

Modern men worship the will, but they
despair of the intellect.

It is only through a unique long-term awareness that looks back to Lenin and Stalin as well as forward to the Information Age that the Chinese Communist Party's leaders prevailed amid the trends analyzed by this book.

Those trends-winner-take-all economics, jurisdictional competition, the shift away from mass production, and the arguable obsolescence of interstate warfare are still at work today.

In truth, the great conflict over our megapolitical future is only just beginning. On the dimension of technology, the conflict has two poles: Al and crypto.

Peter Thiel
January 6, 2020 - Los Angeles

Outside the clergy, lawyers
and aristocracy most
medieval men were illiterate

Illiterate is an inadequate and over-used word. It is a word of the modern world where "Reading and Writing" are attempted to be taught to everyone, from about three onwards. In fact, Reading and Writing are two distinct skills.
They can be further broken down into
Reading Printed Text,
Reading handwriting (something some people still find taxing)
Reading historic handwriting
Reading Latin

and Writing a rough barely formed scrawl,
Writing perfectly formed Secretary Hand,
Writing Court Hand
Writing Latin

Your ability which we miscall literacy was somewhere along these two scales. In the medieval period the first obviously did not apply but more than we imagine could achieve basic reading of formal text.

By the seventeenth century most could manage the first two elements of reading but barely manage any writing.

Why do I bring Latin into it - because a contemporary source considered herself illiterate as she "did not have the Latin". She also considered two yeoman as illiterate because they could not read handwriting of only one century earlier. Those two were in fact regularly witnessing wills and Wakefield Deed Registry entries which many contributers to this site, with the greatest respect could not read a word of.

My source was wife of the Master of a School currently but wrongly celebrating 500 years since it believes it was founded in the early 1700s.

Sorry to lecture.

I have conducted a quick review of Facebook and the narrative developing is that we should not be cutting incapacity benefits while we spend billions on asylum seeker hotels. I would guess that a very large proportion of the "middle-aged man on disability benefits" cohort are Reform voters (or soon to be so).

Also links being made to the assisted suicide bill, and waiting lists for operations. Former scaffolders with long-term injuries etc. This is going to be toxic.

Watch the numbers on asylum seeker hotels, which are due out this month.

They are about 40% down from peak, but tbf they also came down under the Conservatives.

But the riposte will be "why are the ANY hotels".

That they are not 4 star hotels as claimed does not matter, because the narrative is about emotion not truth.

So why are there any hotels?

Because we are insisting that they can't work until they are processed, and we're not processing them fast enough.

Another beautiful but cold day. I have two weeks of business travel coming up, so of course I am working instead of enjoying the weather.

I'm deep into the planning stages of my politics YouTube channel, batting ideas back and forward to my partner in crime as we refine the concept. Entertainingly nothing yet about the practicalities of how we produce it (we live in different countries) - likely just record Teams / Zoom and dump the recording into Final Cut for editing.

This is going to be an interesting journey. I intend to be a LD candidate for Holyrood next year. Doing politics YouTube which is guaranteed to at best go beyond the party line and at worst tread on its toes...

As any good representative should do.

Remember the golden mantra.

Constituents first
Beliefs second
Party a long way third
Personal gain falling off the bottom.