Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
A fair argument in, say, 2013. But it's 2022 and bitcoin has been around for 12 years now.
If I wanted to send $100 to El Salvador, Western Union would charge me $7.99. The idea of the lightning network is that you can convert dollar > bitcoin and back to dollar again and the transaction is instant and costs less than a cent.
Jack wants to enable that kind of remittance to happen via Twitter and I dare say that is why Musk has invested.
Is it a good investment? I don't know. Despite being around for a year in El Salvador bitcoin hasn't exactly caught on with a largely suspicious population who prefer to hoard physical dollars. However, that's the play.
It's estimated that about 1.7bn people are unbanked globally, which is a heck of an untapped market if this thing catches on.
Why would Jack being setting up Twitter as a competitor for Square which he is also CEO of and started off doing transactions before moving on to "banking"
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
We don't do it for that reason - we don't think Tories are BNP members. It is just to remind Tories that they are also nationalists, and to make them think about why they are using 'nationalist' as a dirty word. I actually prefer the Spanish usage of left wing independistas (UK example being the SNP) and right wing nacionalistas (Tories).
Dickson for one does. And Tories and other unionists don't tend to use "nationalist" as a dirty word - "separatist" is much more useful for that.
I see Serbia & Hungary returned pro-Russian leaders in this weekend’s elections.
Hungary now not letting re supply of weaponry to Ukraine only food and Medicines via Hungary
It was interesting to see the British press entirely wrong-footed on Hungary.
Prior to the election, the press was reporting a stern test, close election, on a knife-edge, blah, blah. "Putinist" Orban would be punished and he would pay the price for not supporting Ukraine. It was all eagerly regurgitated on pb.com.
In fact, the result was a fourth consecutive landslide for Orban.
The proper conclusion is that few, if any, articles in the UK media on Eastern Europe are to be trusted.
I take no pleasure on the return of Orban -- but the biggest mistake, as always, is to believe the bullshit in the UK press.
Well we don't know at this stage whether there was any fraud in the vote. Give it some time for a bit of analysis to be done.
There is something rather indicative in how the one central or eastern European leader who until recently was getting any attention in the UK was Orban. All the impressive Harvard educated types are ignored as Zelensky was too.
The press, insofar as they take an interest in foreign elections at all, always report a "tight race", because it's just more interesting than "X is strolling to victory". Same thing in France. Orban has attracted attention where the Serbian leadership has not because of the "defies EU" theme, and because he relishes the bad-guy anti-liberal image, rather like Trump. But the polls unfortunately pretty consistently showed Orban cruising to victory.
Generally we do collectively underestimate the "strong ethnic nationalist leader" theme in countries in difficulty, despite the ample evidence that it nearly always ends badly.
It was a "tight race" only if you added up the totals of the opposition parties from the last election, and assumed that their recent electoral alliance would hold onto all those votes. That was always something of an unlikely prospect.
And maybe a relevant message for those who think the same would happen in the UK if the anti-Tory allianjce takes shape.
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
A fair argument in, say, 2013. But it's 2022 and bitcoin has been around for 12 years now.
If I wanted to send $100 to El Salvador, Western Union would charge me $7.99. The idea of the lightning network is that you can convert dollar > bitcoin and back to dollar again and the transaction is instant and costs less than a cent.
Jack wants to enable that kind of remittance to happen via Twitter and I dare say that is why Musk has invested.
Is it a good investment? I don't know. Despite being around for a year in El Salvador bitcoin hasn't exactly caught on with a largely suspicious population who prefer to hoard physical dollars. However, that's the play.
It's estimated that about 1.7bn people are unbanked globally, which is a heck of an untapped market if this thing catches on.
Why would Jack being setting up Twitter as a competitor for Square which he is also CEO of and started off doing transactions before moving on to "banking"
- ”A key part of Starmer’s PM potential comes from the SNP reducing the Tory total seats north of the border and for the LDs to flourish in those places where Davey’s party is the only one with a real chance of beating the Tory. There are no deals but it is in the interest of both LAB and the LDs to only run token campaigns in seats where the other is in with a shout.”
The reason the Lib-Labs run token candidates in Scottish Conservative seats is not to encourage their sympathisers to vote SNP, but exactly the opposite.
I don't see that much change in Scotland next time on the SNP-Tory front TBH, I can still see the Tories holding 4 seats even if Johnson is still in charge (Alister Jack, David Mundell, John Lamont and David Duguid I think will hold on) and also an outside chance of regaining Gordon. Only Andrew Bowie possibly looks toast in the context of a GE.
I think Lab-SNP tactical voting was probably maxed out in 2019.
If I was a SCon strategist it is not the SNP and Labour sympathisers I would be worried about, but the SLD ones. The biggest threat to the 6 SCon MPs (5 if you omit the retiring Ross) is tactical unwind. Without the lent support of vast chunks of the SLD base there would still be no Tory MPs in Scotland. Johnson & his circus have managed to not only disillusion, but to totally trample on the aspirations of natural SLD supporters. Hence Ross’s desperation to ditch The Clown.
I agree but there is only a substantial residual LD vote (above 10%) in Bowie's seat and Gordon. I expect a major Con-LD shift in Edinburgh in May but not so much elsewhere. The trend is still overall towards the Tories in Aberdeenshire even if they didn't quite manage to gain Aberdeenshire East and Banffshire and Buchan coast last year and still topped the list vote in those seats.
A fascinating assertion!
Evidence in the public domain for such a statement is scant, but I’m all ears.
The last Scottish by election in January in East Lothian still had the Tories increasing their vote share slightly in what was supposed to be a straight Lab-SNP fight. I can still see the Tories making a modest gain of 10-20 seats overall in Scotland in May. They will almost certainly lose seats on a few councils such as Edinburgh, North Lanarkshire Aberdeen City, Stirling and Glasgow but make gains on plenty of other councils particularly ones like Aberdeenshire, South Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway where they are standing a lot more candidates this time.
SLab could also gain up to 30-40 council seats on a good day although I am less confident of that.
That the only empiric evidence you provide is from a lone STV council by-election in a non-Con area is telling. The differential turnout alone makes a mockery of any attempt to us it to predict Aberdeen, Stirling et al.
I will however retain your post. I could do with a good laugh in May, just before we’re all evaporated.
The Tories are standing something like 32 more candidates than last time overall. I think they are standing pretty much the same or more no. of candidates in every single Scottish Council apart from Edinburgh where they are only standing one in Morningside and the Scottish Borders where they are only standing one in Leaderdale and Melrose.
It's also quite illuminating that the SNP are standing substantially less candidates in Aberdeenshire and Moray and not even bothering in Caol and Mallaig.
Don't get me wrong, the SNP will surely do well in some places like Edinburgh and Aberdeen City expectations wise but it's lazy to suggest they will sweep the board like last years Holyrood elections.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
We don't do it for that reason - we don't think Tories are BNP members. It is just to remind Tories that they are also nationalists, and to make them think about why they are using 'nationalist' as a dirty word. I actually prefer the Spanish usage of left wing independistas (UK example being the SNP) and right wing nacionalistas (Tories).
Dickson for one does. And Tories and other unionists don't tend to use "nationalist" as a dirty word - "separatist" is much more useful for that.
Oh, believe me plenty of the PBTories use nationalist as a dirty word. Look at the reactions today when they are reminded that they are nationalists in the objective sense of the term. And the recurrent way in which the pro-independence movements are lumped together as the ScotNats etc. That is lazy, and daft on a political blog suich as PB when understanding the distinctions between the SNP and the wider movements/voting tendencies is a crucial issue.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
We don't do it for that reason - we don't think Tories are BNP members. It is just to remind Tories that they are also nationalists, and to make them think about why they are using 'nationalist' as a dirty word. I actually prefer the Spanish usage of left wing independistas (UK example being the SNP) and right wing nacionalistas (Tories).
Dickson for one does. And Tories and other unionists don't tend to use "nationalist" as a dirty word - "separatist" is much more useful for that.
Oh, believe me plenty of the PBTories use nationalist as a dirty word. Look at the reactions today when they are reminded that they are nationalists in the objective sense of the term. And the recurrent way in which the pro-independence movements are lumped together as the ScotNats etc. That is lazy, and daft on a political blog suich as PB when understanding the distinctions between the SNP and the wider movements/voting tendencies is a crucial issue.
Ah, "PBTories". A term used to include lots of peopel who are in no way Tories...
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
But that wins the prize.
It wasn’t his technical skills for which he was hired, rather his political skills.
Clegg’s job is to tell governments of the world, that one of the most evil companies ever to have existed is really all smelling of roses and definitely doesn’t need to be regulated - then pivot to of course the industry needs to be regulated, and here is the regulation that we wrote as a huge barrier to entry for upstart competitors.
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less or no better than Corbyn got in 2017 on average even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
I don't think Starmer led Labour is likely to get more than 38% in a GE and won't quite manage to beat the Tories in terms of votes and seats but something like Con 40% Lab 38% would still be the same 5% swing Cameron got in 2010 and result in Labour gaining up to 60-80 seats.
Agreed and likely result in a Starmer premiership propped up by the SNP and LDs.
The DUP won't support the Tories either unless they invoke Art 16
“They” and not “we”. Fascinating. Is FUDHY having doubts? He can do a Rivers of Blood job and jump ship to the Ulster Unionists. After all, he’s just after telling us that the Enemies of the State are going to be made to suffer. They can give him some elementary training for his militia.
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less or no better than Corbyn got in 2017 on average even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
I don't think Starmer led Labour is likely to get more than 38% in a GE and won't quite manage to beat the Tories in terms of votes and seats but something like Con 40% Lab 38% would still be the same 5% swing Cameron got in 2010 and result in Labour gaining up to 60-80 seats.
Agreed and likely result in a Starmer premiership propped up by the SNP and LDs.
The DUP won't support the Tories either unless they invoke Art 16
“They” and not “we”. Fascinating. Is FUDHY having doubts? He can do a Rivers of Blood job and jump ship to the Ulster Unionists. After all, he’s just after telling us that the Enemies of the State are going to be made to suffer. They can give him some elementary training for his militia.
On the one hand I get criticised for being too partisan, on the other for being too objective
I know I'm thick but how does 28 - 32 not equal a negative number? Feel like I'm being gaslit here...
Labelling error on the graph? I can't make sense either.
Not just me then! I was getting worried. Its been a long few weeks...
-4 makes for a less impressive headline.
Johnson is shite but Starmer is less shite
Not gonna win slogan of the year.
But the headline is just wrong according to the graph.
Lots of PB headlines and articles are “wrong”. I used to care, but gave up over a decade ago. My theory is that less than 5% of posters bother to read them, and even then only infrequently.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
I don't see it that way. It's an attempt to point out that wanting to preserve the singularity of the UK is also nationalism. Which it is. Nationalism is simply the belief that a given nation should be a sovereign state. The difference is that one person's idea of the nation, Scotland, isn't sovereign, but another person's idea of the nation, the UK, is. There are a minority of racists on both sides, but mostly nationalists are fine. Most people are nationalists.
The founders of the SNP have very dodgy histories. It is extraordinary that SNP members shamelessly celebrate Arthur Donaldson. That would be like mainstream Tories celebrating Enoch Powell, or perhaps even Oswald Mosely.
On top of all that, you just have to see the posts of most of the Scots Nats on here. They don't just dislike Tories, they genuinely hate English people, just for being English. They are largely too thick or too prejudiced to realise that English people are really quite diverse folk and not all the same as their stereotyping pea-brains want to believe.
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
But that wins the prize.
It wasn’t his technical skills for which he was hired, rather his political skills.
Clegg’s job is to tell governments of the world, that one of the most evil companies ever to have existed is really all smelling of roses and definitely doesn’t need to be regulated - then pivot to of course the industry needs to be regulated, and here is the regulation that we wrote as a huge barrier to entry for upstart competitors.
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
That's far from the only thing about Musk that ought to make you pause and edge on past without making eye contact. The man is loon. Remember when he called that cave rescue guy a "pedo"? Totally mad.
The thing to understand with Elon Musk is that he treats Twitter the way some treat PB. After the lagershed, some crazy stuff gets said...
Which would be fine, were he not an executive officer of a listed company, talking bollocks about the finances of said company late at night.
I’m surprised Tesla didn’t have their developers cook up a Twitter interface app, that sends all Musk’s Tweets to the company’s legal counsel for approval before posting them to the world.
Maybe as a Twitter shareholder, they will now develop a ‘Drunk CEO’ mode, that allows moderation of Tweets in real time by a trusted third party.
An op-ed for state news agency RIA Novosti titled "What Russia should do with Ukraine" by pundit Timofei Sergeitsev has created quite a stir today
The rhetoric is truly horrific, even by the standards of what I'm used to seeing from pro-Kremlin media
Below are a few quotes:
"Denazification is a set of measures aimed at the nazified mass of the population, which technically cannot be subjected to direct punishment as war criminals"
"However, besides the elite, a significant part of the masses of the people, who are passive nazis, are accomplices to Nazism. They have supported the Nazi authorities and indulged them..."
"...The just punishment for this part of the population is possible only as the bearing of the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system"
"The name Ukraine can seemingly not be retained as the title of any fully denazified state formation on the territory liberated from the Nazi regime"
"Denazification is inevitably also deukrainisation – a rejection of the large-scale artificial inflation of the ethnic element of self-identification of the population of the territories of the historical Malorossiya and Novorossiya begun by the Soviet authorities"
"Unlike, let’s say, Georgia or the Baltics, Ukraine, as history has shown, is unviable as a national state, and attempts to 'build' one logically lead to Nazism"
"The Banderite elite must be liquidated, its reeducation is impossible. The social 'swamp' which actively and passively supports it must undergo the hardships of war and digest the experience as a historical lesson and atonement"
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
A fair argument in, say, 2013. But it's 2022 and bitcoin has been around for 12 years now.
If I wanted to send $100 to El Salvador, Western Union would charge me $7.99. The idea of the lightning network is that you can convert dollar > bitcoin and back to dollar again and the transaction is instant and costs less than a cent.
Jack wants to enable that kind of remittance to happen via Twitter and I dare say that is why Musk has invested.
Is it a good investment? I don't know. Despite being around for a year in El Salvador bitcoin hasn't exactly caught on with a largely suspicious population who prefer to hoard physical dollars. However, that's the play.
It's estimated that about 1.7bn people are unbanked globally, which is a heck of an untapped market if this thing catches on.
I think there is a sound argument to buy bitcoin based on ubiquity and functionality, even in the knowledge that it is a house of cards that will some day collapse. I've bought some by way of Paypal crypto, which seems pretty secure (if a little expensive). Just don't bet more than you can afford to lose. I'm £8 up so far.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
I’m not sure those help you determine the merits of an individual UK politician though?
I am presuming there is a chunk of SNP voters who will put a negative mark against all non-SNP/independence politicians regardless of merit, so it clouds the data
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
But that wins the prize.
It wasn’t his technical skills for which he was hired, rather his political skills.
Clegg’s job is to tell governments of the world, that one of the most evil companies ever to have existed is really all smelling of roses and definitely doesn’t need to be regulated - then pivot to of course the industry needs to be regulated, and here is the regulation that we wrote as a huge barrier to entry for upstart competitors.
Seems Facebook going all meta has pissed off a load of their top AI talent who have been heading for the door at a rapid rate. Apparently their UK research group has collapsed as key people have buggered off to other UK companies.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
We don't do it for that reason - we don't think Tories are BNP members. It is just to remind Tories that they are also nationalists, and to make them think about why they are using 'nationalist' as a dirty word. I actually prefer the Spanish usage of left wing independistas (UK example being the SNP) and right wing nacionalistas (Tories).
Dickson for one does. And Tories and other unionists don't tend to use "nationalist" as a dirty word - "separatist" is much more useful for that.
Oh, believe me plenty of the PBTories use nationalist as a dirty word. Look at the reactions today when they are reminded that they are nationalists in the objective sense of the term. And the recurrent way in which the pro-independence movements are lumped together as the ScotNats etc. That is lazy, and daft on a political blog suich as PB when understanding the distinctions between the SNP and the wider movements/voting tendencies is a crucial issue.
Ah, "PBTories". A term used to include lots of peopel who are in no way Tories...
True, Heathener labels anyone who does not agree with her as a Tory. There have been quite a few ardent non Tories pigeonholed as Tories.
- ”A key part of Starmer’s PM potential comes from the SNP reducing the Tory total seats north of the border and for the LDs to flourish in those places where Davey’s party is the only one with a real chance of beating the Tory. There are no deals but it is in the interest of both LAB and the LDs to only run token campaigns in seats where the other is in with a shout.”
The reason the Lib-Labs run token candidates in Scottish Conservative seats is not to encourage their sympathisers to vote SNP, but exactly the opposite.
I don't see that much change in Scotland next time on the SNP-Tory front TBH, I can still see the Tories holding 4 seats even if Johnson is still in charge (Alister Jack, David Mundell, John Lamont and David Duguid I think will hold on) and also an outside chance of regaining Gordon. Only Andrew Bowie possibly looks toast in the context of a GE.
I think Lab-SNP tactical voting was probably maxed out in 2019.
If I was a SCon strategist it is not the SNP and Labour sympathisers I would be worried about, but the SLD ones. The biggest threat to the 6 SCon MPs (5 if you omit the retiring Ross) is tactical unwind. Without the lent support of vast chunks of the SLD base there would still be no Tory MPs in Scotland. Johnson & his circus have managed to not only disillusion, but to totally trample on the aspirations of natural SLD supporters. Hence Ross’s desperation to ditch The Clown.
I agree but there is only a substantial residual LD vote (above 10%) in Bowie's seat and Gordon. I expect a major Con-LD shift in Edinburgh in May but not so much elsewhere. The trend is still overall towards the Tories in Aberdeenshire even if they didn't quite manage to gain Aberdeenshire East and Banffshire and Buchan coast last year and still topped the list vote in those seats.
A fascinating assertion!
Evidence in the public domain for such a statement is scant, but I’m all ears.
The last Scottish by election in January in East Lothian still had the Tories increasing their vote share slightly in what was supposed to be a straight Lab-SNP fight. I can still see the Tories making a modest gain of 10-20 seats overall in Scotland in May. They will almost certainly lose seats on a few councils such as Edinburgh, North Lanarkshire Aberdeen City, Stirling and Glasgow but make gains on plenty of other councils particularly ones like Aberdeenshire, South Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway where they are standing a lot more candidates this time.
SLab could also gain up to 30-40 council seats on a good day although I am less confident of that.
That the only empiric evidence you provide is from a lone STV council by-election in a non-Con area is telling. The differential turnout alone makes a mockery of any attempt to us it to predict Aberdeen, Stirling et al.
I will however retain your post. I could do with a good laugh in May, just before we’re all evaporated.
I think the trend in council by-elections in Scotland has been pretty solid results for SCON and SNP. Possibly due to both parties being good at concentrated campaigning and a tendency for the Unionist bloc to consolidate behind strongest Unionist option. LibDems had a few good results too here and there. Labour not so much. Whether this will apply in May when the whole country comes to vote, who can say. I imagine all eyes will be on Glasgow where the SNP admin has copped a fair amount of stick and Labour will be desperate to make a comeback.
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
That's far from the only thing about Musk that ought to make you pause and edge on past without making eye contact. The man is loon. Remember when he called that cave rescue guy a "pedo"? Totally mad.
Musk has Asperger’s and doesn’t always conduct himself with top social awareness. But he’s done rather more for the good of humanity than you have.
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
I don't see it that way. It's an attempt to point out that wanting to preserve the singularity of the UK is also nationalism. Which it is. Nationalism is simply the belief that a given nation should be a sovereign state. The difference is that one person's idea of the nation, Scotland, isn't sovereign, but another person's idea of the nation, the UK, is. There are a minority of racists on both sides, but mostly nationalists are fine. Most people are nationalists.
On top of all that, you just have to see the posts of most of the Scots Nats on here. They don't just dislike Tories, they genuinely hate English people, just for being English.
I don't think that is true. I think they hate the fact that the English are part of the country that their fellow Scots wanted to remain a part of. If it weren't for the pesky English we'd be an independent nation-type thinking.
And of course everything is amplified on PB.
As for nationalism, well we are certainly seeing one manifestation of it right now in Eastern Europe, to everyone's disgust.
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
But that wins the prize.
It wasn’t his technical skills for which he was hired, rather his political skills.
Clegg’s job is to tell governments of the world, that one of the most evil companies ever to have existed is really all smelling of roses and definitely doesn’t need to be regulated - then pivot to of course the industry needs to be regulated, and here is the regulation that we wrote as a huge barrier to entry for upstart competitors.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
I’m not sure those help you determine the merits of an individual UK politician though?
I am presuming there is a chunk of SNP voters who will put a negative mark against all non-SNP/independence politicians regardless of merit, so it clouds the data
There's no doubt that Sturgeon is still polling extremely well. That said, it's worth bearing in mind that while pro-Indy voters will all give her a positive, that isn't true for pro-Union voters and Unionist party leaders. Lab supporters will vote down Tories, and vice-versa. In this context Sarwar is actually doing pretty well to be in positive territory at all.
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
A fair argument in, say, 2013. But it's 2022 and bitcoin has been around for 12 years now.
If I wanted to send $100 to El Salvador, Western Union would charge me $7.99. The idea of the lightning network is that you can convert dollar > bitcoin and back to dollar again and the transaction is instant and costs less than a cent.
Jack wants to enable that kind of remittance to happen via Twitter and I dare say that is why Musk has invested.
Is it a good investment? I don't know. Despite being around for a year in El Salvador bitcoin hasn't exactly caught on with a largely suspicious population who prefer to hoard physical dollars. However, that's the play.
It's estimated that about 1.7bn people are unbanked globally, which is a heck of an untapped market if this thing catches on.
The Lightning Network isn't magic, it doesn't do the currency conversion part and it only works if the recipient already has bitcoins. You can work around this by using a trusted party in the middle, but if you have a trusted party in the middle then you don't need the bitcoin part. Some sketchy companies have tried to obscure this fact by saying they're using the lightning network as "back-end rails" or some such, but it's all bullshit.
People sometimes use "bitcoin" as a general term for all the cryptocurrency tech that developed out of bitcoin, and somebody may well be able to ship a system with fast, cheap transfers, privacy and sufficient scale, but it won't involve the actual Bitcoin. It might be possible to change Bitcoin so that you could build such a system with it, but this won't happen, because it's been captured by reactionaries.
I see Chris Mason is now favorite for the BBC Pol Editor gig after the all women shortlist was deemed too weak.
Who would have thought there could be any weaker Candidates than Laura K
Star Sports have cut Chris Mason into 15/8 from 9/4 yesterday.
Chris Mason 15/8 Anushka Asthana 11/4 Sophy Ridge 3/1 Alex Forsyth 7/2 Sam Coates 5/1 Paul Brand 11/2 Faisal Islam 8/1 Adam Fleming 9/1 Amol Rajan 12/1 Lewis Goodall 14/1 Pippa Crerar 16/1 Nick Watt 22/1 Ros Atkins 22/1 Emma Vardy 28/1 Beth Rigby 33/1 James Landale 33/1 Nick Eardley 33/1 Jonathan Blake 40/1 Ione Wells 50/1 Gary Gibbon 66/1 Others Upon Request
Note that the overround on the first four alone is 108 per cent.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
We don't do it for that reason - we don't think Tories are BNP members. It is just to remind Tories that they are also nationalists, and to make them think about why they are using 'nationalist' as a dirty word. I actually prefer the Spanish usage of left wing independistas (UK example being the SNP) and right wing nacionalistas (Tories).
Dickson for one does. And Tories and other unionists don't tend to use "nationalist" as a dirty word - "separatist" is much more useful for that.
Oh, believe me plenty of the PBTories use nationalist as a dirty word. Look at the reactions today when they are reminded that they are nationalists in the objective sense of the term. And the recurrent way in which the pro-independence movements are lumped together as the ScotNats etc. That is lazy, and daft on a political blog suich as PB when understanding the distinctions between the SNP and the wider movements/voting tendencies is a crucial issue.
Ah, "PBTories". A term used to include lots of peopel who are in no way Tories...
True, Heathener labels anyone who does not agree with her as a Tory. There have been quite a few ardent non Tories pigeonholed as Tories.
As we have established, "PBTory" is a state of mind rather than a preference at the ballot box.
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
But that wins the prize.
Clegg is nowhere near the board
He just got promoted, now he’s #3 in the company behind Zuck and Sandburg.
He’ll be getting a fair amount of stock options to go with the eight-figure salary too, if he sticks it for a few years he’ll probably be the UK’s first billionaire politician.
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
That's far from the only thing about Musk that ought to make you pause and edge on past without making eye contact. The man is loon. Remember when he called that cave rescue guy a "pedo"? Totally mad.
Musk has Asperger’s and doesn’t always conduct himself with top social awareness. But he’s done rather more for the good of humanity than you have.
There is ancient wisdom that people who do great things tend to be flawed in other ways. One of the problems with western culture is that it has lost sight of this insight completely. In pursuit of perfection, it ends up fetishising people who do nothing of any value, aside from criticising others.
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
But that wins the prize.
Clegg is nowhere near the board
He just got promoted, now he’s #3 in the company behind Zuck and Sandburg.
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
A fair argument in, say, 2013. But it's 2022 and bitcoin has been around for 12 years now.
If I wanted to send $100 to El Salvador, Western Union would charge me $7.99. The idea of the lightning network is that you can convert dollar > bitcoin and back to dollar again and the transaction is instant and costs less than a cent.
Jack wants to enable that kind of remittance to happen via Twitter and I dare say that is why Musk has invested.
Is it a good investment? I don't know. Despite being around for a year in El Salvador bitcoin hasn't exactly caught on with a largely suspicious population who prefer to hoard physical dollars. However, that's the play.
It's estimated that about 1.7bn people are unbanked globally, which is a heck of an untapped market if this thing catches on.
The Lightning Network isn't magic, it doesn't do the currency conversion part and it only works if the recipient already has bitcoins. You can work around this by using a trusted party in the middle, but if you have a trusted party in the middle then you don't need the bitcoin part. Some sketchy companies have tried to obscure this fact by saying they're using the lightning network as "back-end rails" or some such, but it's all bullshit.
People sometimes use "bitcoin" as a general term for all the cryptocurrency tech that developed out of bitcoin, and somebody may well be able to ship a system with fast, cheap transfers, privacy and sufficient scale, but it won't involve the actual Bitcoin. It might be possible to change Bitcoin so that you could build such a system with it, but this won't happen, because it's been captured by reactionaries.
Yes, the Chivo App (El Salvador's state provided bitcoin app) does the currency conversion part for El Salvador. Other apps like Strike may do so in the future - I'm aware it doesn't happen "by magic" over the lightning network.
I didn't want to make my post longer explaining all the details, as it didn't seem relevant to my explaining why I think Musk is investing in Twitter.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
I don't see it that way. It's an attempt to point out that wanting to preserve the singularity of the UK is also nationalism. Which it is. Nationalism is simply the belief that a given nation should be a sovereign state. The difference is that one person's idea of the nation, Scotland, isn't sovereign, but another person's idea of the nation, the UK, is. There are a minority of racists on both sides, but mostly nationalists are fine. Most people are nationalists.
The founders of the SNP have very dodgy histories. It is extraordinary that SNP members shamelessly celebrate Arthur Donaldson. That would be like mainstream Tories celebrating Enoch Powell, or perhaps even Oswald Mosely.
On top of all that, you just have to see the posts of most of the Scots Nats on here. They don't just dislike Tories, they genuinely hate English people, just for being English. They are largely too thick or too prejudiced to realise that English people are really quite diverse folk and not all the same as their stereotyping pea-brains want to believe.
But then the SNP get 40-50% of the vote... do you actually think 40-50% of Scots are as you describe? I don't.
Also, nationalism is way older that fascism. I think I've said to you before you are definitely lacking in a long-view understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism, and I'll repeat that. It's why I included a very brief definition of what I consider nationalism to be, to help people understand what I'm actually saying when I use a word like "nationalism". It's a term that means different things to different people. I do not like your attempt to cast what I described as patriotism because, to me, patriotism means pride in your country, a belief that it is somewhat better than other countries. I think such a view is a little silly, so I would not describe myself as a patriot.
So, in summary, I AM a British nationalist because I would not want Britain to lose its independence to another country. I am POTENTIALLY also a Scottish nationalist because I am open to the idea of Scottish independence. If there was a referendum tomorrow I'd be frantically trying to make up my mind one way or the other today. I'm NOT a British patriot because I don't think Britain is intrinsically better than other nations, and I am NOT a Scottish patriot for the same reason.
If we can work our way through the semantics of this, I think it's pretty clear that most people are nationalists, and if you don't like that word we can agree on another, but it has to stand for the concept of wanting your nation to be politically independent, not being proud or being racist. These are three phenomena that deserve separate words.
Great post but as you say, because nationalism can mean different things to different people there is the danger that nationalism is used to excuse for example, oh I don't know, expansionist policies and thereby your perfectly reasonable "I don't want XXX to lose its independence" becomes "I want to re-include YYY in XXX in order to restore independence of XXX".
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
But that wins the prize.
It wasn’t his technical skills for which he was hired, rather his political skills.
Clegg’s job is to tell governments of the world, that one of the most evil companies ever to have existed is really all smelling of roses and definitely doesn’t need to be regulated - then pivot to of course the industry needs to be regulated, and here is the regulation that we wrote as a huge barrier to entry for upstart competitors.
Ironically, the person who ended up doing best out of the Coalition is Nick Clegg after all
I agree with your conclusion, but I wouldn't put much reliance on the Daily Mail article otherwise. You only have to look at what they say about the UK tax paid to see they haven't a clue what they are talking about.
An op-ed for state news agency RIA Novosti titled "What Russia should do with Ukraine" by pundit Timofei Sergeitsev has created quite a stir today
The rhetoric is truly horrific, even by the standards of what I'm used to seeing from pro-Kremlin media
Below are a few quotes:
"Denazification is a set of measures aimed at the nazified mass of the population, which technically cannot be subjected to direct punishment as war criminals"
"However, besides the elite, a significant part of the masses of the people, who are passive nazis, are accomplices to Nazism. They have supported the Nazi authorities and indulged them..."
"...The just punishment for this part of the population is possible only as the bearing of the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system"
"The name Ukraine can seemingly not be retained as the title of any fully denazified state formation on the territory liberated from the Nazi regime"
"Denazification is inevitably also deukrainisation – a rejection of the large-scale artificial inflation of the ethnic element of self-identification of the population of the territories of the historical Malorossiya and Novorossiya begun by the Soviet authorities"
"Unlike, let’s say, Georgia or the Baltics, Ukraine, as history has shown, is unviable as a national state, and attempts to 'build' one logically lead to Nazism"
"The Banderite elite must be liquidated, its reeducation is impossible. The social 'swamp' which actively and passively supports it must undergo the hardships of war and digest the experience as a historical lesson and atonement"
@ABarbashin Talked to a few folks back at home about Bucha: "Anton, are you stupid or a provocateur? It is clearly a fake/staged by Hollywood" "You've spent too much time in the West, you have been corrupted by their propaganda" "It's the West doing - they need a pretext for more sanctions"
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
I don't see it that way. It's an attempt to point out that wanting to preserve the singularity of the UK is also nationalism. Which it is. Nationalism is simply the belief that a given nation should be a sovereign state. The difference is that one person's idea of the nation, Scotland, isn't sovereign, but another person's idea of the nation, the UK, is. There are a minority of racists on both sides, but mostly nationalists are fine. Most people are nationalists.
On top of all that, you just have to see the posts of most of the Scots Nats on here. They don't just dislike Tories, they genuinely hate English people, just for being English.
I don't think that is true. I think they hate the fact that the English are part of the country that their fellow Scots wanted to remain a part of. If it weren't for the pesky English we'd be an independent nation-type thinking.
And of course everything is amplified on PB.
As for nationalism, well we are certainly seeing one manifestation of it right now in Eastern Europe, to everyone's disgust.
See, for me, Ukraine's fight for independence is nationalism and Russia's attempt to annex the Ukrainian nation is imperialism. I'm don't want to tell you you're wrong in your use of words, but it's totally alien from my own understanding.
So what is the word you would use for the political ideology that says the people of Ukraine should be able to choose their own destiny free from control from outside?
A perfectly legitimate one (four words).
But nations change all the time and over time. Coming back to Bobbitt, he describes a move from the State Nation to the Nation State (am really going to have to re-read him) and all the implications of what a nation says it will do for example for its citizens (a state nation makes itself responsible for the well-being of its citizens; a nation state adds democracy to that).
Who is to say Cornwall couldn't declare independence and if it did what would Westminster do (we know what @HYUFD would do).
Nationalism therefore is fluid. It can be defined as you define it: I'm happy with what I have I just want to preserve its integrity, and it can be defined as V Putin defines it - I want to reassemble Greater Russia.
How have we got from that tweet to Hungary wants to invade the Ukraine?
I don't think we have. Hungary does have some (very) historic claims to parts of the Ukraine which the Soviet Union seized after the end of World War II (which Hungary themselves seized from Czechoslovakia when it was dismembered by Germany).
We don't like to talk about it, but Poland benefited from the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1938/1939. At no point did Poland declare war on CZE, they just took part in the carve up.
I'm sure HUN [1] is just hoping that when RUS inevitably [2] wins in UKR, that Putin remembers his friends and allies in Hungary and rewards it with lost territory.
[1] Yeah, yeah, I'm using three letter Hearts of Iron country name tags now, simplier than typing Soviet Union (SOV) all the time. [2] I don't think RUS will win, but let's wait and see.
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
A fair argument in, say, 2013. But it's 2022 and bitcoin has been around for 12 years now.
If I wanted to send $100 to El Salvador, Western Union would charge me $7.99. The idea of the lightning network is that you can convert dollar > bitcoin and back to dollar again and the transaction is instant and costs less than a cent.
Jack wants to enable that kind of remittance to happen via Twitter and I dare say that is why Musk has invested.
Is it a good investment? I don't know. Despite being around for a year in El Salvador bitcoin hasn't exactly caught on with a largely suspicious population who prefer to hoard physical dollars. However, that's the play.
It's estimated that about 1.7bn people are unbanked globally, which is a heck of an untapped market if this thing catches on.
As someone who first bought Bitcoin at $3, the "cheap transactions for sending money abroad" argument was one of the key reasons for my purchase.
But Bitcoin today is 99.999% tulip speculation, 0.001% people using it for genuine economic utility. And that makes it far too volatile.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
I don't see it that way. It's an attempt to point out that wanting to preserve the singularity of the UK is also nationalism. Which it is. Nationalism is simply the belief that a given nation should be a sovereign state. The difference is that one person's idea of the nation, Scotland, isn't sovereign, but another person's idea of the nation, the UK, is. There are a minority of racists on both sides, but mostly nationalists are fine. Most people are nationalists.
On top of all that, you just have to see the posts of most of the Scots Nats on here. They don't just dislike Tories, they genuinely hate English people, just for being English.
I don't think that is true. I think they hate the fact that the English are part of the country that their fellow Scots wanted to remain a part of. If it weren't for the pesky English we'd be an independent nation-type thinking.
And of course everything is amplified on PB.
As for nationalism, well we are certainly seeing one manifestation of it right now in Eastern Europe, to everyone's disgust.
See, for me, Ukraine's fight for independence is nationalism and Russia's attempt to annex the Ukrainian nation is imperialism. I'm don't want to tell you you're wrong in your use of words, but it's totally alien from my own understanding.
So what is the word you would use for the political ideology that says the people of Ukraine should be able to choose their own destiny free from control from outside?
An op-ed for state news agency RIA Novosti titled "What Russia should do with Ukraine" by pundit Timofei Sergeitsev has created quite a stir today
The rhetoric is truly horrific, even by the standards of what I'm used to seeing from pro-Kremlin media
Below are a few quotes:
"Denazification is a set of measures aimed at the nazified mass of the population, which technically cannot be subjected to direct punishment as war criminals"
"However, besides the elite, a significant part of the masses of the people, who are passive nazis, are accomplices to Nazism. They have supported the Nazi authorities and indulged them..."
"...The just punishment for this part of the population is possible only as the bearing of the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system"
"The name Ukraine can seemingly not be retained as the title of any fully denazified state formation on the territory liberated from the Nazi regime"
"Denazification is inevitably also deukrainisation – a rejection of the large-scale artificial inflation of the ethnic element of self-identification of the population of the territories of the historical Malorossiya and Novorossiya begun by the Soviet authorities"
"Unlike, let’s say, Georgia or the Baltics, Ukraine, as history has shown, is unviable as a national state, and attempts to 'build' one logically lead to Nazism"
"The Banderite elite must be liquidated, its reeducation is impossible. The social 'swamp' which actively and passively supports it must undergo the hardships of war and digest the experience as a historical lesson and atonement"
And how do they intend to achieve this other than threatening the west with nuclear war?
They probably need mass mobilisation and a complete war footing now if they are to subdue Ukraine. And that would probably lead to Europe cutting the gas off. The best they can hope for now is vis a vis Ukraine at large is sabotage.
I assume she didn't smoke in real life like her on-screen character.
My gran made it to 95 while never suffering any health conditions basically up until her death, at the same time as making Dot Cotton look like a just a social smoker. Hoping i have been passed on those magic genes!
Two years with no indication whatsoever as how he wants to change the country. No substantive ideas during the pandemic,nothing to say about economic policy, no alternatives offered to the government on foreign policy just more spending on everything but no new taxes. I am struggling to think of a worse opposition leader in the last 50 years. Hague maybe?
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
But that wins the prize.
Clegg is nowhere near the board
He just got promoted, now he’s #3 in the company behind Zuck and Sandburg.
He’ll be getting a fair amount of stock options to go with the eight-figure salary too, if he sticks it for a few years he’ll probably be the UK’s first billionaire politician.
He was the fall guy for the Cameron. Now he is the fall guy for Zuckerberg.
It is heart-warming to see a patsy get properly rewarded.
@ABarbashin Talked to a few folks back at home about Bucha: "Anton, are you stupid or a provocateur? It is clearly a fake/staged by Hollywood" "You've spent too much time in the West, you have been corrupted by their propaganda" "It's the West doing - they need a pretext for more sanctions"
But interestingly, they are aware of it. And are having to twist their own logic to confront what they probably know, deep down: Russia is acting with all the grace of a rabid dog in Ukraine. So they can't be surprised when the world wants to shoot it.
Two years with no indication whatsoever as how he wants to change the country. No substantive ideas during the pandemic,nothing to say about economic policy, no alternatives offered to the government on foreign policy just more spending on everything but no new taxes. I am struggling to think of a worse opposition leader in the last 50 years. Hague maybe?
Unorthodox view, that Starmer's worse than Corbyn.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
I don't see it that way. It's an attempt to point out that wanting to preserve the singularity of the UK is also nationalism. Which it is. Nationalism is simply the belief that a given nation should be a sovereign state. The difference is that one person's idea of the nation, Scotland, isn't sovereign, but another person's idea of the nation, the UK, is. There are a minority of racists on both sides, but mostly nationalists are fine. Most people are nationalists.
On top of all that, you just have to see the posts of most of the Scots Nats on here. They don't just dislike Tories, they genuinely hate English people, just for being English.
I don't think that is true. I think they hate the fact that the English are part of the country that their fellow Scots wanted to remain a part of. If it weren't for the pesky English we'd be an independent nation-type thinking.
And of course everything is amplified on PB.
As for nationalism, well we are certainly seeing one manifestation of it right now in Eastern Europe, to everyone's disgust.
See, for me, Ukraine's fight for independence is nationalism and Russia's attempt to annex the Ukrainian nation is imperialism. I'm don't want to tell you you're wrong in your use of words, but it's totally alien from my own understanding.
So what is the word you would use for the political ideology that says the people of Ukraine should be able to choose their own destiny free from control from outside?
A perfectly legitimate one (four words).
But nations change all the time and over time. Coming back to Bobbitt, he describes a move from the State Nation to the Nation State (am really going to have to re-read him) and all the implications of what a nation says it will do for example for its citizens (a state nation makes itself responsible for the well-being of its citizens; a nation state adds democracy to that).
Who is to say Cornwall couldn't declare independence and if it did what would Westminster do (we know what @HYUFD would do).
Nationalism therefore is fluid. It can be defined as you define it: I'm happy with what I have I just want to preserve its integrity, and it can be defined as V Putin defines it - I want to reassemble Greater Russia.
Yes, and perhaps I should your insight to mine: no nation is eternal. Viability and kinship change over time, driven (per Bobbitt) by technology and overlapping ideological innovations. What makes a state legitimate today might not have existed yesterday and may cease to be tomorrow. We should be comfortable seeing these changes and adapting to them, which is why I'm happy to be on the fence about Scotland's independence. There's new information coming in all the time. I can imaging a scenario where I'd be happy for the UK to be absorbed into a larger confederation, but not right now, so for now count me as a British nationalist, not as a patriot, not as a racist, and not as someone whose view is unyielding. A country is a tool for its people, not as a thing worthy of its own existence separate from that.
I think the way we're doing wrt Scotland it in the UK (as is) is about right. Ask people and let there be a debate about it; then vote. The $64,000 question is of course the frequency of the vote. I don't have any great insight into that but it does seem to me that Brexit did fundamentally change Scotland's status.
- ”A key part of Starmer’s PM potential comes from the SNP reducing the Tory total seats north of the border and for the LDs to flourish in those places where Davey’s party is the only one with a real chance of beating the Tory. There are no deals but it is in the interest of both LAB and the LDs to only run token campaigns in seats where the other is in with a shout.”
The reason the Lib-Labs run token candidates in Scottish Conservative seats is not to encourage their sympathisers to vote SNP, but exactly the opposite.
I don't see that much change in Scotland next time on the SNP-Tory front TBH, I can still see the Tories holding 4 seats even if Johnson is still in charge (Alister Jack, David Mundell, John Lamont and David Duguid I think will hold on) and also an outside chance of regaining Gordon. Only Andrew Bowie possibly looks toast in the context of a GE.
I think Lab-SNP tactical voting was probably maxed out in 2019.
If I was a SCon strategist it is not the SNP and Labour sympathisers I would be worried about, but the SLD ones. The biggest threat to the 6 SCon MPs (5 if you omit the retiring Ross) is tactical unwind. Without the lent support of vast chunks of the SLD base there would still be no Tory MPs in Scotland. Johnson & his circus have managed to not only disillusion, but to totally trample on the aspirations of natural SLD supporters. Hence Ross’s desperation to ditch The Clown.
I agree but there is only a substantial residual LD vote (above 10%) in Bowie's seat and Gordon. I expect a major Con-LD shift in Edinburgh in May but not so much elsewhere. The trend is still overall towards the Tories in Aberdeenshire even if they didn't quite manage to gain Aberdeenshire East and Banffshire and Buchan coast last year and still topped the list vote in those seats.
A fascinating assertion!
Evidence in the public domain for such a statement is scant, but I’m all ears.
The last Scottish by election in January in East Lothian still had the Tories increasing their vote share slightly in what was supposed to be a straight Lab-SNP fight. I can still see the Tories making a modest gain of 10-20 seats overall in Scotland in May. They will almost certainly lose seats on a few councils such as Edinburgh, North Lanarkshire Aberdeen City, Stirling and Glasgow but make gains on plenty of other councils particularly ones like Aberdeenshire, South Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway where they are standing a lot more candidates this time.
SLab could also gain up to 30-40 council seats on a good day although I am less confident of that.
That the only empiric evidence you provide is from a lone STV council by-election in a non-Con area is telling. The differential turnout alone makes a mockery of any attempt to us it to predict Aberdeen, Stirling et al.
I will however retain your post. I could do with a good laugh in May, just before we’re all evaporated.
I think the trend in council by-elections in Scotland has been pretty solid results for SCON and SNP. Possibly due to both parties being good at concentrated campaigning and a tendency for the Unionist bloc to consolidate behind strongest Unionist option. LibDems had a few good results too here and there. Labour not so much. Whether this will apply in May when the whole country comes to vote, who can say. I imagine all eyes will be on Glasgow where the SNP admin has copped a fair amount of stick and Labour will be desperate to make a comeback.
Yes that's all true (the Tories have polled surprisingly strongly in a couple in Falkirk and West Lothian in particular) although Labour has still had a few by local election wins in Scotland over the past year including one gain from the SNP in Glasgow on transfers last year. The SNP also hasn't won any local by elections in North Lanarkshire over the past few years, which have all been won by Labour or indepemdents.
There are also a couple of wards in West Dunbartonshire and North Lanarkshire where the SNP is only running one candidate.
I would still expect Labour to end up the largest party on a few councils such as North Lanarkshire, West Dunbartonshire and East Lothian.
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
A fair argument in, say, 2013. But it's 2022 and bitcoin has been around for 12 years now.
If I wanted to send $100 to El Salvador, Western Union would charge me $7.99. The idea of the lightning network is that you can convert dollar > bitcoin and back to dollar again and the transaction is instant and costs less than a cent.
Jack wants to enable that kind of remittance to happen via Twitter and I dare say that is why Musk has invested.
Is it a good investment? I don't know. Despite being around for a year in El Salvador bitcoin hasn't exactly caught on with a largely suspicious population who prefer to hoard physical dollars. However, that's the play.
It's estimated that about 1.7bn people are unbanked globally, which is a heck of an untapped market if this thing catches on.
As someone who first bought Bitcoin at $3, the "cheap transactions for sending money abroad" argument was one of the key reasons for my purchase.
But Bitcoin today is 99.999% tulip speculation, 0.001% people using it for genuine economic utility. And that makes it far too volatile.
I wouldn't compare a financial instrument that's been appreciating for 12 years with several boom and bust cycles behind it to a one off mania for flowers that happened 400 years ago, but I do agree that people aren't spending it.
However I'd argue that simply holding on it is a genuine economic utility, the way people hold gold bars as a store of wealth, but don't tend to pay for their groceries in them.
A recent report by Fidelity described bitcoin as "high stakes game theory" and I'd tend to agree. But one man's high stakes game theory is another's pyramid scheme. The truth is that it's probably still too early to tell.
I bought in at about $10 but sadly swapped it for some goodies on the silk road a week later. If I'd kept it, I'd be posting this from a yacht. Possibly the most expensive trip in history, second only to Leon's Ayahuasca experience!
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Its not a gambit. Scotland voted against being a real country in 2014.
Shame.
When oh when will poor England get the chance to vote on being a real country?
Scotland is like one of those cats that scrabbles desperately at the door. When it opens: "oh shit, it's cold outside".
Gets lots of attention though.
So much attention that folk pretend to be Scottish to add credence to their trite observations.
Oh yeah? At least the English (Edit: and the Welsh) actually went for it with Brexit.
A pretty strong argument for voting Yes in Indyref2 would be to avoid the humiliation of voting to stay in the UK for the second time. I reckon that could swing a few people.
There is definitely a relationship between nationalism (of all stripes) and moving abroad.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Or something.
I read somewhere a long time ago that expatriate diaspora tend to be more politically and socially conservative than the population at large in their mother countries.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
I don't see it that way. It's an attempt to point out that wanting to preserve the singularity of the UK is also nationalism. Which it is. Nationalism is simply the belief that a given nation should be a sovereign state. The difference is that one person's idea of the nation, Scotland, isn't sovereign, but another person's idea of the nation, the UK, is. There are a minority of racists on both sides, but mostly nationalists are fine. Most people are nationalists.
The founders of the SNP have very dodgy histories. It is extraordinary that SNP members shamelessly celebrate Arthur Donaldson. That would be like mainstream Tories celebrating Enoch Powell, or perhaps even Oswald Mosely.
On top of all that, you just have to see the posts of most of the Scots Nats on here. They don't just dislike Tories, they genuinely hate English people, just for being English. They are largely too thick or too prejudiced to realise that English people are really quite diverse folk and not all the same as their stereotyping pea-brains want to believe.
All Under One Banner performer sings, "Throw the Jews from our lands!" Oh, wait, it's just *Throw *the English* from our lands!". That's fine then. Nothing to see here. #Civic #Joyous
Two years with no indication whatsoever as how he wants to change the country. No substantive ideas during the pandemic,nothing to say about economic policy, no alternatives offered to the government on foreign policy just more spending on everything but no new taxes. I am struggling to think of a worse opposition leader in the last 50 years. Hague maybe?
Distinction has to be made between the entirely legitimate wish of a minority - including me - actually to know the worked out and costed policies of an opposition who want to be in government and the need to win in the real world. These policies would of course deal robustly with and solve
debt deficit tax levels inflation, especially energy and everything else NHS social care how to win a war against Russia how to have Brexit with cake and eating it student debt pandemics present and future pensioner poverty and a few more for luck.
The trouble is of course that neither this government nor the next can do so. Nor can they deliver high levels of public services and low taxation.
So tactically the best chance of an opposition winning is not going to be by remorseless honesty about how insoluble the problems are, and why.
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
A fair argument in, say, 2013. But it's 2022 and bitcoin has been around for 12 years now.
If I wanted to send $100 to El Salvador, Western Union would charge me $7.99. The idea of the lightning network is that you can convert dollar > bitcoin and back to dollar again and the transaction is instant and costs less than a cent.
Jack wants to enable that kind of remittance to happen via Twitter and I dare say that is why Musk has invested.
Is it a good investment? I don't know. Despite being around for a year in El Salvador bitcoin hasn't exactly caught on with a largely suspicious population who prefer to hoard physical dollars. However, that's the play.
It's estimated that about 1.7bn people are unbanked globally, which is a heck of an untapped market if this thing catches on.
As someone who first bought Bitcoin at $3, the "cheap transactions for sending money abroad" argument was one of the key reasons for my purchase.
But Bitcoin today is 99.999% tulip speculation, 0.001% people using it for genuine economic utility. And that makes it far too volatile.
I wouldn't compare a financial instrument that's been appreciating for 12 years with several boom and bust cycles behind it to a one off mania for flowers that happened 400 years ago, but I do agree that people aren't spending it.
However I'd argue that simply holding on it is a genuine economic utility, the way people hold gold bars as a store of wealth, but don't tend to pay for their groceries in them.
A recent report by Fidelity described bitcoin as "high stakes game theory" and I'd tend to agree. But one man's high stakes game theory is another's pyramid scheme. The truth is that it's probably still too early to tell.
I bought in at about $10 but sadly swapped it for some goodies on the silk road a week later. If I'd kept it, I'd be posting this from a yacht. Possibly the most expensive trip in history, second only to Leon's Ayahuasca experience!
The mining of Bitcoin is an extravagant waste of energy. 0.5% of all energy, worldwide, is used simply to mine Bitcoin. And rising.
I fully expect it to be banned on this basis within the next few years.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Its not a gambit. Scotland voted against being a real country in 2014.
Shame.
When oh when will poor England get the chance to vote on being a real country?
Scotland is like one of those cats that scrabbles desperately at the door. When it opens: "oh shit, it's cold outside".
Gets lots of attention though.
So much attention that folk pretend to be Scottish to add credence to their trite observations.
Oh yeah? At least the English (Edit: and the Welsh) actually went for it with Brexit.
A pretty strong argument for voting Yes in Indyref2 would be to avoid the humiliation of voting to stay in the UK for the second time. I reckon that could swing a few people.
48% of the UK and even 47% of English voters however did not vote for Brexit but to stay in the EU.
That was even with less UK exports going to the EU than Scottish exports go to the rUK
Unorthodox view, that Starmer's worse than Corbyn.
At least Corbyn and his friends had the guts to offer an alternative view to Britain's future.
Starmer might well get elected PM whereas Corbyn was unelectable but yes I hardly think he will be a major PM who really changes the UK like Attlee, Wilson, Thatcher, Blair or even Boris.
More likely he would be another Heath or Brown or May, a technocrat essentially
As a genocide scholar I am an empiricist, I usually dismiss rhetoric. I also take genocide claims with a truckload of salt because activists apply it almost everywhere now.
Two years with no indication whatsoever as how he wants to change the country. No substantive ideas during the pandemic,nothing to say about economic policy, no alternatives offered to the government on foreign policy just more spending on everything but no new taxes. I am struggling to think of a worse opposition leader in the last 50 years. Hague maybe?
Distinction has to be made between the entirely legitimate wish of a minority - including me - actually to know the worked out and costed policies of an opposition who want to be in government and the need to win in the real world. These policies would of course deal robustly with and solve
debt deficit tax levels inflation, especially energy and everything else NHS social care how to win a war against Russia how to have Brexit with cake and eating it student debt pandemics present and future pensioner poverty and a few more for luck.
The trouble is of course that neither this government nor the next can do so. Nor can they deliver high levels of public services and low taxation.
So tactically the best chance of an opposition winning is not going to be by remorseless honesty about how insoluble the problems are, and why.
I am not sure that is true, although it should be.
Reynolds told the truth yesterday by suggesting we should be considering the possibility of at least planning for fuel rationing. He crashed and burned.
When we have a Government that only proposes good news and jam with everything, an Opposition will appear unelectable if they offer bad news.
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
But that wins the prize.
Clegg is nowhere near the board
He just got promoted, now he’s #3 in the company behind Zuck and Sandburg.
He’ll be getting a fair amount of stock options to go with the eight-figure salary too, if he sticks it for a few years he’ll probably be the UK’s first billionaire politician.
He's not really number three at Meta: he's moderately important, and a direct report to Zuckerberg, but he's nowhere near as important (or as well remunerated with options) as the CFO David Wehner, Chris Cox or Marne Levine.
As a genocide scholar I am an empiricist, I usually dismiss rhetoric. I also take genocide claims with a truckload of salt because activists apply it almost everywhere now.
I think that is accurate, we use words like genocide very freely, but when combined with the rhetoric coming out of the kremlin, I think there is both intent and action to destroy a people, which is genocide.
On Russian TV - talk show says Bucha is part of an Anglosaxon campaign to discredit Russia. Macron also gets mentioned for his comments earlier about war crimes. Footage shown on a loop tagged “FAKE” in English.
Russian propaganda experts, and they are experts, probably understand that they need to have these images De-credibalised in the eyes of Russians, or they would seep in anyway people would be shocked, so its a case of getting ahead of events. will it work? Sadly probably yes.
The Russians are claiming that the war-crimes were discovered 4 days after the Ukrainians reported that there were no Russian forces in the city, and that in a 4 day period you would expect rigour mortis (if that is the term) to have stiffened the bodies and for there not to be fresh blood on the wounds. Perhaps a PB medic could opine.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
Starmer's approval ratings are certainly better than Corbyn's. However Labour's voteshare is, if anything, slightly less still than Corbyn got in 2017 even if still much better than Corbyn got in 2019.
Starmer's main success therefore has been in winning over voters who voted Labour in 2017 but LD or Conservative in 2019.
In terms of winning voters who voted Conservative in 2017 and 2019 he has been less successful and he has also lost a few voters who voted for Corbyn Labour to the Greens. That means it will likely still be a close election
The people who love Starmer the most are wealthy LibDems. That might well be enough for him to remove the Tory majority in GE 2024 ... if he is fighting Boris.
But, I am unconvinced that Boris will fight. Boris doesn't like to lose, and he must surely already be looking enviously at his lucrative post-PM opportunities.
I mean, furfucksake, even a completely talentless nonentity like Nick Clegg is now earning 2.7 million dollars a year.
He will certainly get more tactical votes from the LDs in Labour v Tory marginals than Corbyn.
Boris does not have the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board, his skills are in oratory and the lecture circuit.
To maximise his earnings there he needs to stay in No 10 as long as possible to get near Thatcher and Blair fees on the circuit and ideally raise his profile in the US further too at the same time
Well, HYUFD, you have posted a number of outrageous things in your time.
"... the technical skills of Clegg for a big corporate board".
But that wins the prize.
It wasn’t his technical skills for which he was hired, rather his political skills.
Clegg’s job is to tell governments of the world, that one of the most evil companies ever to have existed is really all smelling of roses and definitely doesn’t need to be regulated - then pivot to of course the industry needs to be regulated, and here is the regulation that we wrote as a huge barrier to entry for upstart competitors.
Ironically, the person who ended up doing best out of the Coalition is Nick Clegg after all
He's not paid $15m/year. He got $15m including his share options one year. That share option plan will be for 3/4 years. So it's really more like $4-5m year.
Not saying that that is peanuts... but he's not quite as well remunerated as you think.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
Most British nationalists wouldn't touch the BNP with a bargepole. Nationalist is not a dirty word.
"British nationalist" isn't a political term in any significant use, other than by Scot Nats trying to smear unionists as BNP supporters.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
That British Nationalists consistently contend this says more about them than it does about Scots and their chosen government.
LOL. It was you who implied the SNP and BNP are equivalent, not me. I merely find the BNP odious. So if you, a proud Scottish Nationalist (albeit Swedish-resident) imply that the SNP and BNP are equivalent, then the SNP must also be odious! QED!
I think the problem lies elsewhere: that
(a) it is actually the PBTories who make that equation because ... (b) they deny that their 'patriotism' under the UJ is actually nationalism (whether UK, 'British' or English depending on the individual)
Outside the likes of UKIP, the purest and most blood and soil political discourse I can remember is David Cameron's major Glasgow [edit] speech in advance of the 2014 referendum, and it was British nationalist from start to end by any objective analysis.
Interesting Radio 2 phone-in on 'cakeage' - would you expect a 'cakeage' charge in a restaurant if you brought your own cake and the venue provided cutlery/crockery and served the cake etc.?
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
A fair argument in, say, 2013. But it's 2022 and bitcoin has been around for 12 years now.
If I wanted to send $100 to El Salvador, Western Union would charge me $7.99. The idea of the lightning network is that you can convert dollar > bitcoin and back to dollar again and the transaction is instant and costs less than a cent.
Jack wants to enable that kind of remittance to happen via Twitter and I dare say that is why Musk has invested.
Is it a good investment? I don't know. Despite being around for a year in El Salvador bitcoin hasn't exactly caught on with a largely suspicious population who prefer to hoard physical dollars. However, that's the play.
It's estimated that about 1.7bn people are unbanked globally, which is a heck of an untapped market if this thing catches on.
As someone who first bought Bitcoin at $3, the "cheap transactions for sending money abroad" argument was one of the key reasons for my purchase.
But Bitcoin today is 99.999% tulip speculation, 0.001% people using it for genuine economic utility. And that makes it far too volatile.
I wouldn't compare a financial instrument that's been appreciating for 12 years with several boom and bust cycles behind it to a one off mania for flowers that happened 400 years ago, but I do agree that people aren't spending it.
However I'd argue that simply holding on it is a genuine economic utility, the way people hold gold bars as a store of wealth, but don't tend to pay for their groceries in them.
A recent report by Fidelity described bitcoin as "high stakes game theory" and I'd tend to agree. But one man's high stakes game theory is another's pyramid scheme. The truth is that it's probably still too early to tell.
I bought in at about $10 but sadly swapped it for some goodies on the silk road a week later. If I'd kept it, I'd be posting this from a yacht. Possibly the most expensive trip in history, second only to Leon's Ayahuasca experience!
The mining of Bitcoin is an extravagant waste of energy. 0.5% of all energy, worldwide, is used simply to mine Bitcoin. And rising.
I fully expect it to be banned on this basis within the next few years.
A friend of mine has put a solar voltaic cell on his shed roof for that very purpose. Nonetheless, Bitcoin mining seems to me to be the very definition of absolute bollocks!
As a genocide scholar I am an empiricist, I usually dismiss rhetoric. I also take genocide claims with a truckload of salt because activists apply it almost everywhere now.
Interesting Radio 2 phone-in on 'cakeage' - would you expect a 'cakeage' charge in a restaurant if you brought your own cake and the venue provided cutlery/crockery and served the cake etc.?
It certainly seems to happen when you bring a birthday cake to most restaurants that I've encountered.
Sturgeon 13% Scottish Government 7% Anas Sarwar 1% Keir Starmer -10 Patrick Harvie -15 Alex Cole-Hamilton -15 Lorna Slater -15 Rishi Sunak -19 Douglas Ross -21 UK Government -50 Alex Salmond -62 Boris Johnson -62
But Starmer is a net 52% better than Johnson on these figures
But that is not what your headline is contending: “Starmer starts his third year as LOTO with positive approval ratings”
He has negative ratings north of the border.
The headline referred to the whole country, not just a small part of it.
The “Scotland is not a country” gambit. How original.
Yesterday it was the “England is not a country” gambit.
I wish you BritNats would learn some more tunes.
Ah, I see you're throwing the BNP slur around again. Do be a good chap and fuck off, won't you?
Calling patriotic Scottish posters ScotNats is perfectly fine.
Calling patriotic British posters BritNats is a foul slur.
Who’d’ve thunk that ‘Muscular Unionism’ would breed intolerance and double-standards? We’ll all have to learn to doff our caps to the British Übermenschen.
So the SNP are as odious as the BNP? Thanks for clarifying that.
That British Nationalists consistently contend this says more about them than it does about Scots and their chosen government.
"Civic and joyous". Do you get this sort of thing south of the border?
"The papers this morning report that the SNP member who posted about me being hung from a lamp post has been suspended. Good. Now that they've set the precedent that it's wrong to talk about the execution of your opponents (a low bar, I know) let's test if they mean it"
What bollox , personally I would have stuck him in his tuba. Another spineless wimpeering British nationalist unionist trying to make something out of nothing. The lampost would have snapped before he came to any harm in any case.
Interesting Radio 2 phone-in on 'cakeage' - would you expect a 'cakeage' charge in a restaurant if you brought your own cake and the venue provided cutlery/crockery and served the cake etc.?
It certainly seems to happen when you bring a birthday cake to most restaurants that I've encountered.
Complicating matters a bit, the man in question had ordered dessert (as it was part of a set menu), so the venue was not 'losing out' on the opportunity to sell desserts.
On Russian TV - talk show says Bucha is part of an Anglosaxon campaign to discredit Russia. Macron also gets mentioned for his comments earlier about war crimes. Footage shown on a loop tagged “FAKE” in English.
Russian propaganda experts, and they are experts, probably understand that they need to have these images De-credibalised in the eyes of Russians, or they would seep in anyway people would be shocked, so its a case of getting ahead of events. will it work? Sadly probably yes.
The Russians are claiming that the war-crimes were discovered 4 days after the Ukrainians reported that there were no Russian forces in the city, and that in a 4 day period you would expect rigour mortis (if that is the term) to have stiffened the bodies and for there not to be fresh blood on the wounds. Perhaps a PB medic could opine.
According to the great God Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigor_mortis - "Contrary to folklore and common belief, rigor mortis is not permanent and begins to pass within hours of onset. Typically, it lasts no longer than eight hours at "room temperature".
Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin maxi and plans to integrate Jack Mallers Strike payment system through Twitter. Musk also owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin.
The annual Bitcoin conference is happening in Miami this week, last year the surprise announcement was the first country (El Salvador) to announce Bitcoin as legal tender.
Other countries, possibly Honduras, are expected to make a similar announcement this week, there are also rumours of Apple Pay integration with the Lightning network.
Twitter will eventually have venmo-style payment integration via the Bitcoin lightning network and there are eyes on it eventually becoming a competitor to the likes of Western Union for immigrants sending money to the folks back home.
Bitcoin is worse than a pyramid scheme.
That Musk is involved with it is the one thing that makes me lose respect for him. I don't have much respect for Dorsey to lose in the first place.
A fair argument in, say, 2013. But it's 2022 and bitcoin has been around for 12 years now.
If I wanted to send $100 to El Salvador, Western Union would charge me $7.99. The idea of the lightning network is that you can convert dollar > bitcoin and back to dollar again and the transaction is instant and costs less than a cent.
Jack wants to enable that kind of remittance to happen via Twitter and I dare say that is why Musk has invested.
Is it a good investment? I don't know. Despite being around for a year in El Salvador bitcoin hasn't exactly caught on with a largely suspicious population who prefer to hoard physical dollars. However, that's the play.
It's estimated that about 1.7bn people are unbanked globally, which is a heck of an untapped market if this thing catches on.
As someone who first bought Bitcoin at $3, the "cheap transactions for sending money abroad" argument was one of the key reasons for my purchase.
But Bitcoin today is 99.999% tulip speculation, 0.001% people using it for genuine economic utility. And that makes it far too volatile.
I wouldn't compare a financial instrument that's been appreciating for 12 years with several boom and bust cycles behind it to a one off mania for flowers that happened 400 years ago, but I do agree that people aren't spending it.
However I'd argue that simply holding on it is a genuine economic utility, the way people hold gold bars as a store of wealth, but don't tend to pay for their groceries in them.
A recent report by Fidelity described bitcoin as "high stakes game theory" and I'd tend to agree. But one man's high stakes game theory is another's pyramid scheme. The truth is that it's probably still too early to tell.
I bought in at about $10 but sadly swapped it for some goodies on the silk road a week later. If I'd kept it, I'd be posting this from a yacht. Possibly the most expensive trip in history, second only to Leon's Ayahuasca experience!
Holding it confers no utility.
The utility comes in the ability to use the asset: and there it clearly has certain advantages over existing currencies. It also has some very significant disadvantages, that may be ameliorated by Lightning *if* that achieves widespread adoption. (Which, four years since launch, is far from clear. And it should be noted that if Lightning does take off, it removes many of the things about Bitcoin that people like.)
The thing that argues against it being attractive at current levels is that you don't need $200+bn of float to be able to act as a low cost intermediary for money transfers.
Comments
Johnson is shite but Starmer is less shite
Not gonna win slogan of the year.
https://twitter.com/jackmallers/status/1441092004759293965
It's also quite illuminating that the SNP are standing substantially less candidates in Aberdeenshire and Moray and not even bothering in Caol and Mallaig.
Don't get me wrong, the SNP will surely do well in some places like Edinburgh and Aberdeen City expectations wise but it's lazy to suggest they will sweep the board like last years Holyrood elections.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10683705/Shanghai-separates-Covid-infected-children-parents-brutal-zero-Covid-measures.html
V006.A.2. in the spreadsheet
Clegg’s job is to tell governments of the world, that one of the most evil companies ever to have existed is really all smelling of roses and definitely doesn’t need to be regulated - then pivot to of course the industry needs to be regulated, and here is the regulation that we wrote as a huge barrier to entry for upstart competitors.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10678667/Putin-bathed-ANTLER-blood-health-constantly-followed-thyroid-cancer-doctor.html
The founders of the SNP have very dodgy histories. It is extraordinary that SNP members shamelessly celebrate Arthur Donaldson. That would be like mainstream Tories celebrating Enoch Powell, or perhaps even Oswald Mosely.
On top of all that, you just have to see the posts of most of the Scots Nats on here. They don't just dislike Tories, they genuinely hate English people, just for being English. They are largely too thick or too prejudiced to realise that English people are really quite diverse folk and not all the same as their stereotyping pea-brains want to believe.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10528983/Nick-Clegg-paid-15m-year-Facebook.html
Ironically, the person who ended up doing best out of the Coalition is Nick Clegg after all
I’m surprised Tesla didn’t have their developers cook up a Twitter interface app, that sends all Musk’s Tweets to the company’s legal counsel for approval before posting them to the world.
Maybe as a Twitter shareholder, they will now develop a ‘Drunk CEO’ mode, that allows moderation of Tweets in real time by a trusted third party.
https://ria.ru/20220403/ukraina-1781469605.html
It tells us about the Bayesian prior that has been applied to reach the conclusion from the data.
I am presuming there is a chunk of SNP voters who will put a negative mark against all non-SNP/independence politicians regardless of merit, so it clouds the data
And of course everything is amplified on PB.
As for nationalism, well we are certainly seeing one manifestation of it right now in Eastern Europe, to everyone's disgust.
Edit: although looking at his wiki he has perfectly sufficient levels of blue blood to have probably acquired his furniture via inheritance.
People sometimes use "bitcoin" as a general term for all the cryptocurrency tech that developed out of bitcoin, and somebody may well be able to ship a system with fast, cheap transfers, privacy and sufficient scale, but it won't involve the actual Bitcoin. It might be possible to change Bitcoin so that you could build such a system with it, but this won't happen, because it's been captured by reactionaries.
Chris Mason 15/8
Anushka Asthana 11/4
Sophy Ridge 3/1
Alex Forsyth 7/2
Sam Coates 5/1
Paul Brand 11/2
Faisal Islam 8/1
Adam Fleming 9/1
Amol Rajan 12/1
Lewis Goodall 14/1
Pippa Crerar 16/1
Nick Watt 22/1
Ros Atkins 22/1
Emma Vardy 28/1
Beth Rigby 33/1
James Landale 33/1
Nick Eardley 33/1
Jonathan Blake 40/1
Ione Wells 50/1
Gary Gibbon 66/1
Others Upon Request
Note that the overround on the first four alone is 108 per cent.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/16/nick-clegg-facebook-meta-president-global-affairs
He’ll be getting a fair amount of stock options to go with the eight-figure salary too, if he sticks it for a few years he’ll probably be the UK’s first billionaire politician.
I didn't want to make my post longer explaining all the details, as it didn't seem relevant to my explaining why I think Musk is investing in Twitter.
Talked to a few folks back at home about Bucha:
"Anton, are you stupid or a provocateur? It is clearly a fake/staged by Hollywood"
"You've spent too much time in the West, you have been corrupted by their propaganda"
"It's the West doing - they need a pretext for more sanctions"
https://twitter.com/ABarbashin/status/1510870984114511877
But nations change all the time and over time. Coming back to Bobbitt, he describes a move from the State Nation to the Nation State (am really going to have to re-read him) and all the implications of what a nation says it will do for example for its citizens (a state nation makes itself responsible for the well-being of its citizens; a nation state adds democracy to that).
Who is to say Cornwall couldn't declare independence and if it did what would Westminster do (we know what @HYUFD would do).
Nationalism therefore is fluid. It can be defined as you define it: I'm happy with what I have I just want to preserve its integrity, and it can be defined as V Putin defines it - I want to reassemble Greater Russia.
Perhaps that's why @Nigel_Foremain dislikes it so.
Hungary does have some (very) historic claims to parts of the Ukraine which the Soviet Union seized after the end of World War II (which Hungary themselves seized from Czechoslovakia when it was dismembered by Germany).
We don't like to talk about it, but Poland benefited from the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1938/1939. At no point did Poland declare war on CZE, they just took part in the carve up.
I'm sure HUN [1] is just hoping that when RUS inevitably [2] wins in UKR, that Putin remembers his friends and allies in Hungary and rewards it with lost territory.
[1] Yeah, yeah, I'm using three letter Hearts of Iron country name tags now, simplier than typing Soviet Union (SOV) all the time.
[2] I don't think RUS will win, but let's wait and see.
But Bitcoin today is 99.999% tulip speculation, 0.001% people using it for genuine economic utility. And that makes it far too volatile.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-60984231
They probably need mass mobilisation and a complete war footing now if they are to subdue Ukraine. And that would probably lead to Europe cutting the gas off. The best they can hope for now is vis a vis Ukraine at large is sabotage.
It is heart-warming to see a patsy get properly rewarded.
Labour will be happy with their polling right now.
Don't get me started ...
Unorthodox view, that Starmer's worse than Corbyn.
At least Corbyn and his friends had the guts to offer an alternative view to Britain's future.
There are also a couple of wards in West Dunbartonshire and North Lanarkshire where the SNP is only running one candidate.
I would still expect Labour to end up the largest party on a few councils such as North Lanarkshire, West Dunbartonshire and East Lothian.
However I'd argue that simply holding on it is a genuine economic utility, the way people hold gold bars as a store of wealth, but don't tend to pay for their groceries in them.
A recent report by Fidelity described bitcoin as "high stakes game theory" and I'd tend to agree. But one man's high stakes game theory is another's pyramid scheme. The truth is that it's probably still too early to tell.
I bought in at about $10 but sadly swapped it for some goodies on the silk road a week later. If I'd kept it, I'd be posting this from a yacht. Possibly the most expensive trip in history, second only to Leon's Ayahuasca experience!
A pretty strong argument for voting Yes in Indyref2 would be to avoid the humiliation of voting to stay in the UK for the second time. I reckon that could swing a few people.
https://twitter.com/themajorityscot/status/1510573159359070210
debt
deficit
tax levels
inflation, especially energy and everything else
NHS
social care
how to win a war against Russia
how to have Brexit with cake and eating it
student debt
pandemics present and future
pensioner poverty and a few more for luck.
The trouble is of course that neither this government nor the next can do so. Nor can they deliver high levels of public services and low taxation.
So tactically the best chance of an opposition winning is not going to be by remorseless honesty about how insoluble the problems are, and why.
I fully expect it to be banned on this basis within the next few years.
That was even with less UK exports going to the EU than Scottish exports go to the rUK
More likely he would be another Heath or Brown or May, a technocrat essentially
Not now. There are actions, there is intent. It's as genocide as it gets. Pure, simple and for all to see
https://mobile.twitter.com/eugene_finkel/status/1510922348899315716
Reynolds told the truth yesterday by suggesting we should be considering the possibility of at least planning for fuel rationing. He crashed and burned.
When we have a Government that only proposes good news and jam with everything, an Opposition will appear unelectable if they offer bad news.
Not saying that that is peanuts... but he's not quite as well remunerated as you think.
If we decide that this does amount to genocide that places us under a greater moral obligation to act than in response to invasion alone.
How many lives might be saved in Mariupol if NATO were to intervene directly? How would we ensure that it did not lead to nuclear war?
I am not sure where I stand.
The utility comes in the ability to use the asset: and there it clearly has certain advantages over existing currencies. It also has some very significant disadvantages, that may be ameliorated by Lightning *if* that achieves widespread adoption. (Which, four years since launch, is far from clear. And it should be noted that if Lightning does take off, it removes many of the things about Bitcoin that people like.)
The thing that argues against it being attractive at current levels is that you don't need $200+bn of float to be able to act as a low cost intermediary for money transfers.