Best Of

Who honestly gives a fuck about Nigel’s mortgage in Clacton?

Fact is the nation needs him and want him as prime minister. We all love him on this site - which is quite striking given the disparate views of Pb

Let’s just have an election and put him into number 10. Get it done. And pipe down about all this mortgage stuff. NO ONE CARES

Well, you could write him his victory speech. You couldn't give it because your tongue is so firmly in your cheek you'd be unintelligible.

Are you seriously accusing Nigel Farage MP of securing a mortgage in his constituency of Clacton-on-Sea by “ejaculating onto the Pope for a TikTok bet”??

Really?? Because that’s what it sounds like. And respected PBers are bruiting this like it’s some credible hypothesis

Get a grip. This site is becoming ludicrous

No, never said at all as you well know.

I'm more interested in your traditional "let's kill off the left" message which you've bored us with in all your ridiculous incarnations for the last 15 years or more.

I suppose you'd prefer a two party system - the "hard right" and the "harder right" with power changing between the two based, rather like central American politics of the 1980s, on which group's death squads were more efficient.

I have never understood why so many British people get so animated about events in America. Sad day for his family, but a man I have never heard of being killed in a country famed for gun violence didn’t really register for me.

However, I’m clearly the odd one out.

I suspect only a tiny fraction of the people in Britain now expressing profound grief had even heard of him before his was murdered. PB is the most illustrious and informed political website on earth, yet according to Google the phrase 'Charlie Kirk' never appeared on its threads until yesterday.

Plus he's on record as saying that a few gun deaths is a price worth paying for the right to have guns
Obviously he didn't mean his own death, he meant someone else's young child but there you go. It's what Jesus would have wanted, probably.

I have never understood why so many British people get so animated about events in America. Sad day for his family, but a man I have never heard of being killed in a country famed for gun violence didn’t really register for me.

However, I’m clearly the odd one out.

I suspect only a tiny fraction of the people in Britain now expressing profound grief had even heard of him before his was murdered. PB is the most illustrious and informed political website on earth, yet according to Google the phrase 'Charlie Kirk' never appeared on its threads until yesterday.

I think it's well informed on politics in general but probably weakish on right wingers who operate on social media. Not sure how well it understands the politics of the young either. On the other point the pictures of a man with his young family brutally murdered elicits sympathy from all but the most cynical and hard hearted. Many posts on my Facebook page emphasise not his political stance but the simple human loss being faced by the man's family. I think if you cannot do this better to stay quiet., and say nothing.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

I have never understood why so many British people get so animated about events in America. Sad day for his family, but a man I have never heard of being killed in a country famed for gun violence didn’t really register for me.

However, I’m clearly the odd one out.

I suspect only a tiny fraction of the people in Britain now expressing profound grief had even heard of him before his was murdered. PB is the most illustrious and informed political website on earth, yet according to Google the phrase 'Charlie Kirk' never appeared on its threads until yesterday.

I think it's well informed on politics in general but probably weakish on right wingers who operate on social media. Not sure how well it understands the politics of the young either. On the other point the pictures of a man with his young family brutally murdered elicits sympathy from all but the most cynical and hard hearted. Many posts on my Facebook page emphasise not his political stance but the simple human loss being faced by the man's family. I think if you cannot do this, better to stay quiet., and say nothing.

I have never understood why so many British people get so animated about events in America. Sad day for his family, but a man I have never heard of being killed in a country famed for gun violence didn’t really register for me.

However, I’m clearly the odd one out.

I suspect only a tiny fraction of the people in Britain now expressing profound grief had even heard of him before his was murdered. PB is the most illustrious and informed political website on earth, yet according to Google the phrase 'Charlie Kirk' never appeared on its threads until yesterday.

I had never heard him. Several apolitical or soft left leaning friends knew him very well and have been profoundly shocked. Depends what the algorithms show you I suppose.

Elon Musk "The left is the party of murder"

Jesse Waters declares war on the left

Laura Loomer "It's time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single leftist organisation"

Can we have a quote from Leon?

See also Unherd/Freddie Sayer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwphU9Wh-BA&pp=ygUGdW5oZXJk (30 mins)

The mood on the right is scared and angry.

Wasn't it scared an angry before this too? Morerer scared and angry, possibly.

Yes, but it was disturbing. I was not as affected by the death, because he was an American and I'm British. So I regretted his death and pronounced my sympathies in a polite and sincere manner: he did not deserve to die in that way. But having watched that Unherd video I was disquieted at the visceral nature of it. Two observations about the Very Online Right is i) they feel things viscerally and are quick to anger/fear, and ii) there aren't any borders any more. Sayers is a Brit, but shared in the grief of the American interviewees as part of one tribe or family. I don't work like that so although I can analyse the emotion and empathise with it, I cannot share it in the same way. @Leon or his predecessor was correct: people live online these days.

I think I would fared badly in the studio. My instinct would be to say to wait for more info before taking precipitate action but that would not have gone down well. A better approach would have been to empathise with their loss, but would I have thought of it in time? I doubt it.

I hate the 2020s.

Kirk hated empathy. "New Age word which has done a lot of damage."
So to empathise would be performatively cruel.

I have a bit of sympathy with Kirk's view on empathy (even if I don't with a lot of his nonsense).

I'm not totally sure I feel empathy very often as such. When something awful has happened to a friend, I very much feel sympathy... but possibly it is a bit of a show off move to suggest I'm experiencing the same emotions as them... in honesty, I'm probably not. I do worry that the performative aspect is a bit damaging.