Best Of

The Greens have no full answers as yet.

On the other hand, they're serving a usual function. No one else is making some of the kind of perfectly valid case that Polanski was making on QT, that billionaires are helping place all the blame on minorities from structural social and economic issues since Thatcherism.

Neither Starmer, or particularly the Lib Dens, are drawing attention to this reality, and YourParty seems not be functioning yet.

The result is that the public sense of who to hold accountable is gradually being drawn further and further to the right, so he's a useful corrective.

The problem with the Greens is that they are antediluvian, and their policy proposals are crap.

I like "abolish landlords". It's a solution to the problem of too many wealthy rentiers. It's not the solution I would have picked, but it recognises the problem and implements a solution. It's much better than the learned helplessness of Labour,

It’s not abolish landlords, it’s abolish certain landlords. You’d still rent from LHA’s and presumably the likes of Legal & General who build homes for long term rent.

Anyway it’s the wrong solution to the problem. Supply is needed where demand is highest. Build more where they’re needed. The record of both the London and Manchester mayor in that respect is lamentable

Go for Airbnb and second homes by all means but landlords provide a service, whatever type of landlord they are.

No, we need new towns away from overheated London. The British economy is the most unbalanced of our peers since the demise of northern and Welsh coalfields, coastal ports and resorts, the Midlands industrial base, Aberdeen's oil and gas, the Glasgow shipyards and Edinburgh's services.

I tell you who should be our next Prime Minister.

The person who booked Alan Carr on Celebrity Traitors.

Enjoying it?

Not my cup of tea, but if they'd had a DS9 version I can't help but think Garak would win every single time.

Loving it.

Alan Carr has the subtlety of me and he's brilliant at using it.

I was thinking about Garak this morning and whether to put this line into a report

Garak: When the Klingons attacked the station, Gul Dukat and I were fighting side by side. At one point, he turned his back to me, and I must admit that for a moment, he made a very tempting target.

Odo: You'd shoot a man in the back?

Garak: Well, it's the safest way, isn't it?

I tell you who should be our next Prime Minister.

The person who booked Alan Carr on Celebrity Traitors.

Enjoying it?

Not my cup of tea, but if they'd had a DS9 version I can't help but think Garak would win every single time.

Charlie Kirk on his shows talking about Jews:

"Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews and now they're coming for Jews, and they're like, "What on Earth happened?"

"And it's not just the colleges. It's the nonprofits, it's the movies, it's Hollywood, it's all of it."

And in another episode:

"Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years.

[…]

"Until you cleanse that ideology from the hierarchy in the academic elite of the West, there will not be a safe future. I'm not going to say Israel won't exist, but Israel will be in jeopardy as long as the Western children, children of the West, are being taught, with primarily Jewish dollars, subsidizing it, to view everything through oppressor oppressed dynamic. Until you shed that ideology, you will not be able to build the case for Israel, because they view Israel as an oppressor."

The above is from Snopes, https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/charlie-kirk-jewish-money-quote/

When Elon Musk said "Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them," Kirk defended Musk and said this was accurate. See https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-defends-elon-musks-antisemitism-some-largest-financiers-left-wing-anti

'De mortuis nil nisi bonum' and all that but two things stand out about this man to me: Firstly that a range of his opinions are profoundly disturbing.

Secondly, and unnoticed and intellectually important is this: he majored on free and open debate and discussion. But in fact his entire emphasis is on him, Kirk, persuading his audience that he is right with no emphasis at all on the the thought that he could learn from them or be wrong.

Socrates he was not.