The Ukraine story on that front page is absurd too. Are we sure the whole thing hasn't been mocked up?
What should the Navy have given to Ukraine?
The Ukrainians are getting trained up on two minesweepers that are being transferred by the UK - these were sold pre-war, IIRC, but have turned out to be one of the things they really need.
The ships (Cherkasy and Cherniv) are in Rosyth. They are trying to work what the response would be if the Russians torpedo them in international waters before they send them out of range of the smell of the chip shop on the harbour.
The Russians don't have a ship called Kamchatka any more, so it wouldn't be an 'accident'...
I could very well be wrong, but I doubt that those ships are going anywhere near Ukraine for a while - and I doubt Turkey would allow them through the Bosphorus (and reasonably so). What do the Ukrainians gain by moving them from Rosyth, aside from short training cruises?
John Major immediately enjoyed a polling lead over Labour when he took over as leader and, although he had a trickier time in mid-1991, was basically always within single figures of Labour and quite often had a slim lead. It's just not comparable with the current situation, where Sunak enjoyed no meaningful bounce and Labour have enjoyed decent leads for a year including enormous leads since the mini-budget fiasco.
There is a lot of mythology over 1992 which suggests Major came back from the dead to win it from nowhere. That's just not the case - what happened is it always looked like it was on a knife-edge, but the polls were generous to Labour and in fact Major won by a surprisingly decent margin. Major was never at any point (up to the 1992 election) facing anything even vaguely like the current polling situation.
I would add, under Lady Thatcher in the eighties, the conservatives were much more popular than Labour for a long time, and they enjoyed a good over all record for sound government, strong leadership and stewardship of the economy, and in 1992 still had a lot of that still fresh in the memory. Labour on the other hand had a 1980s record of extremism, militant infiltration, surrender of the nuclear deterrent, and a whole wish list of spending promises that suggested high taxes, high inflation, high interest rates, and broken economy, and memory’s were still fresh from their last time in office.
In fact lots of things I read says Labour were complacent safety first not aggressive in the election campaign, even boasted their policy was to increase taxes.
As you said, nothing even vaguely similar to the current situation. The Tories have had an abysmal 13 years, nothing positive to say for it at all, unlike 1992 they have no credit in the box at all.
It should also be raised, talking about poll defying upsets 30 years ago for comparisons with today - hasn’t the polling science moved on? Havn’t pollsters learned from bad results for them and made adjustments down the years?
Up to a point. Mrs Thatcher was, paradoxically, both the most loved and most hated Prime Minister. Major was fortunate that much of the antipathy towards the Tories was directed at Mrs Thatcher personally, so that by taking over and immediately scrapping the hated poll tax, Major was assured of a bounce.
What this country needs is a patriotic strongman, right?
No not saying that either, as I said I believe in democracy I have just reached a point where I look at problems we have and most western countries have the same and realise fixing those problems can't be done in a democracy unless politicians lie about their intent or we dont go democratic for a few years. Personally I prefer politician do not tarnish their already low credibility further.
so two questions for you and second is only if you say no to the first
1) Do you see the problems in the western countries solvable by any politician being honest and still getting elected?
2) If no politician can get elected on what needs to be done what do you think should be done
1. Yes, certainly as much as in previous eras. The West has its issues but overall it’s in robust health. Politicians lied to us for years and are now about to get their comeuppance.
2. They can, and do in many countries. Democracy is a messy business but it always carries with it the hope and possibility of changing direction.
As an example I would give you the not always popular Emmanuel Macron. He spent his first term pissing off just about every interest group in France by telling them hard truths, and subsequently got re-elected.
And how many of those things he pissed them off about did he actually achieve wasnt the percentage 0? He didnt get his reforms to pensions through nor those on working practises. He achieved in fact bugger all of what he wanted
Reason he got reelected in fact is it was him or lepen....like choosing between walter the softy and hitler
Macron has achieved quite a bit. But not everything, though he is trying again on pensions. Rather like Blair, it’s too easy to simply say “he did nothing” when the evidence is he’s done rather a lot, particularly on labour law reform.
Reading the list yes he acheived little of consequence to sort the problems out.
Most western states and the uk in particular have 1 problem with 2 ways to deal with it
Tax income does not equal services cost even when services are underfunded.
so either 1) raise taxes and taxing the rich wont be enough you will need to tax everyone more
2) cut the services the state offers
Good luck getting elected on either premise
First world problems
UK median household income: $46.7k France median household income: $61k
Similar net debt to UK. Vastly better healthcare (I can testify as someone who’s experienced it), virtually free childcare from birth, high quality state education, actual high speed rail lines, nice food, brilliant wine, lovely scenery and climate, pretty towns, affordable houses, good looking people with clothes that fit, and free firewood from your local communal woodland if you can find someone to cut it for you. (But admittedly their plumbers merchants are a complete cartel). France is doing fine.
You think france is doing fine then all good I dont really care as I dont live there the argument is not about france its about the uk and we have underfunded services that dont deliver and cost more than tax.
Yes I believe most of the west has the same issue but will happily concede the point to you and focus on the uk because I do live there and its important to me therefore.
The point remains the same we have two options, tax a hell of a lot more on everyone or cut services.
I would estimate that if we full fund everything then the tax required would be about double what we currently pay though thats a guess admittedly
So which political party is going to stand on tax more or reduce services and win? answer none
Well that’s kind of the Tory policy position. And it’s wrong. In the short term we need to tax a bit more, focus tax reliefs and incentives on the areas of infrastructure investment where we’re most lacking, borrow as much as we can manage without pushing up gilt yields, and spend significantly more on the public infrastructure and services that will enable the economy to grow.
Tax rises plus spending cuts equal a steadily falling apart and clinically depressed country.
NO MORE BORROWING FROM OUR CHILDREN AND GRAND CHILDREN. THEY WAY THINGS ARE GOING THE WHOLE TAX TAKE THEY PAY WILL BE SETTLING THE DEBTS OF OUR GENERATION. IT IS NOT JUST A TORY POSITION ITS AN ALL POLITICIAN POSITION BORROW MORE SO WE GET ELECTED NOW AND WE WONT BE AROUND WHEN THE BILLS ARE DUE.
You are a selfish idiot.
If we cant raise tax to pay for everything in the here and now then the state does less.
If we can get more tax in the here and now to fully fund things fine
You’re talking the ideology of 2010. It was a cataclysmic failure then, it would be a cataclysmic failure now.
I’ve worked with companies take that kind of asset sweating approach to investment. They invariably end up failing.
Every pound we don’t spend on essential infrastructure now is two pounds we’ll have to spend on the same thing in a decade.
Investment is the definition of leaving something for our children. Look at the HS2 nonsense today. There were actual MPs suggesting we can the whole thing. They’re the selfish idiots.
When our total debt is more than twice gdp its time to stop digging. Sheer lunacy to do otherwise and yes I included in debt the public sector pension liabilities which takes us north of 4 trillion in debt. If we only borrowed for infrastructure yes I wouldn't be so bothered however no government will not labour not tories and certainly not the lib dems if we ever found enough people to vote for them.
OTOH the country has £17trillion of assets so we're not bankrupt.
You say you don't care about France but you should. It's the most comparable country to the UK in many ways but doing a lot better. Perhaps we should emulate France a bit more.
PS France's debt is 113% of GDP compared to our 95%. Japan's is 260% of GDP and they're not bust either.
The elementary difference is that 260% is almost exclusively due to other Japanese people so the interest paid stays in the economy. Because we have run trade deficits for the best part of 30 years now our 95% is mainly owed to foreigners so the interest paid drains from the economy reducing demand and investment here. They are simply not comparable.
No, around a third owned.
Our problem is not foreign-owned debt but foreign ownership of our infrastructure and industry which means profits (and official government subsidy cheques) are sent abroad.
The knee-takers had a point. (tbh I've not watched the video at your link)
ETA this cannot be allowed to continue, but no doubt it will. American policing is even more dysfunctional than ours.
Perhaps the fact that there is no racial angle here, the police officers and victim being of like race, will allow a sharp focus on police violence as police violence.
Maybe it is time for federal standards for police training.
The knee-takers had a point. (tbh I've not watched the video at your link)
ETA this cannot be allowed to continue, but no doubt it will. American policing is even more dysfunctional than ours.
Perhaps the fact that there is no racial angle here, the police officers and victim being of like race, will allow a sharp focus on police violence as police violence.
Maybe it is time for federal standards for police training.
One thing that surprised me recently was how many different police forces (agencies) there were in the US:
"Policing in the United States is conducted by "around 18,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, all with their own rules". Every state has its own nomenclature for agencies, and their powers, responsibilities and funding vary from state to state." (1)
From a podcast I was listening to, many of these only have three or four officers. And once you have been a police officer in one force, it is relatively easy to move to a different agency with little extra training.
Rationalising this, and giving them similar training and powers, makes massive sense. But would *really* annoy some people. Perhaps the right people...
It would be remarkable if a general election really resulted in the 20%+ lead suggested by those polls. It hasn't happened for more than 90 years.
But the idea that the Tories are going to be saved from a 20-point deficit by huge numbers of voters magically returning to them on polling day seems very implausible to me.
The knee-takers had a point. (tbh I've not watched the video at your link)
ETA this cannot be allowed to continue, but no doubt it will. American policing is even more dysfunctional than ours.
Perhaps the fact that there is no racial angle here, the police officers and victim being of like race, will allow a sharp focus on police violence as police violence.
Maybe it is time for federal standards for police training.
Yes, this particular incident shows it to be primarily a police problem, rather than primarily a race problem as it has been talked about in the past.
What this country needs is a patriotic strongman, right?
No not saying that either, as I said I believe in democracy I have just reached a point where I look at problems we have and most western countries have the same and realise fixing those problems can't be done in a democracy unless politicians lie about their intent or we dont go democratic for a few years. Personally I prefer politician do not tarnish their already low credibility further.
so two questions for you and second is only if you say no to the first
1) Do you see the problems in the western countries solvable by any politician being honest and still getting elected?
2) If no politician can get elected on what needs to be done what do you think should be done
1. Yes, certainly as much as in previous eras. The West has its issues but overall it’s in robust health. Politicians lied to us for years and are now about to get their comeuppance.
2. They can, and do in many countries. Democracy is a messy business but it always carries with it the hope and possibility of changing direction.
As an example I would give you the not always popular Emmanuel Macron. He spent his first term pissing off just about every interest group in France by telling them hard truths, and subsequently got re-elected.
And how many of those things he pissed them off about did he actually achieve wasnt the percentage 0? He didnt get his reforms to pensions through nor those on working practises. He achieved in fact bugger all of what he wanted
Reason he got reelected in fact is it was him or lepen....like choosing between walter the softy and hitler
Macron has achieved quite a bit. But not everything, though he is trying again on pensions. Rather like Blair, it’s too easy to simply say “he did nothing” when the evidence is he’s done rather a lot, particularly on labour law reform.
Reading the list yes he acheived little of consequence to sort the problems out.
Most western states and the uk in particular have 1 problem with 2 ways to deal with it
Tax income does not equal services cost even when services are underfunded.
so either 1) raise taxes and taxing the rich wont be enough you will need to tax everyone more
2) cut the services the state offers
Good luck getting elected on either premise
First world problems
UK median household income: $46.7k France median household income: $61k
Similar net debt to UK. Vastly better healthcare (I can testify as someone who’s experienced it), virtually free childcare from birth, high quality state education, actual high speed rail lines, nice food, brilliant wine, lovely scenery and climate, pretty towns, affordable houses, good looking people with clothes that fit, and free firewood from your local communal woodland if you can find someone to cut it for you. (But admittedly their plumbers merchants are a complete cartel). France is doing fine.
You think france is doing fine then all good I dont really care as I dont live there the argument is not about france its about the uk and we have underfunded services that dont deliver and cost more than tax.
Yes I believe most of the west has the same issue but will happily concede the point to you and focus on the uk because I do live there and its important to me therefore.
The point remains the same we have two options, tax a hell of a lot more on everyone or cut services.
I would estimate that if we full fund everything then the tax required would be about double what we currently pay though thats a guess admittedly
So which political party is going to stand on tax more or reduce services and win? answer none
Well that’s kind of the Tory policy position. And it’s wrong. In the short term we need to tax a bit more, focus tax reliefs and incentives on the areas of infrastructure investment where we’re most lacking, borrow as much as we can manage without pushing up gilt yields, and spend significantly more on the public infrastructure and services that will enable the economy to grow.
Tax rises plus spending cuts equal a steadily falling apart and clinically depressed country.
NO MORE BORROWING FROM OUR CHILDREN AND GRAND CHILDREN. THEY WAY THINGS ARE GOING THE WHOLE TAX TAKE THEY PAY WILL BE SETTLING THE DEBTS OF OUR GENERATION. IT IS NOT JUST A TORY POSITION ITS AN ALL POLITICIAN POSITION BORROW MORE SO WE GET ELECTED NOW AND WE WONT BE AROUND WHEN THE BILLS ARE DUE.
You are a selfish idiot.
If we cant raise tax to pay for everything in the here and now then the state does less.
If we can get more tax in the here and now to fully fund things fine
You’re talking the ideology of 2010. It was a cataclysmic failure then, it would be a cataclysmic failure now.
I’ve worked with companies take that kind of asset sweating approach to investment. They invariably end up failing.
Every pound we don’t spend on essential infrastructure now is two pounds we’ll have to spend on the same thing in a decade.
Investment is the definition of leaving something for our children. Look at the HS2 nonsense today. There were actual MPs suggesting we can the whole thing. They’re the selfish idiots.
When our total debt is more than twice gdp its time to stop digging. Sheer lunacy to do otherwise and yes I included in debt the public sector pension liabilities which takes us north of 4 trillion in debt. If we only borrowed for infrastructure yes I wouldn't be so bothered however no government will not labour not tories and certainly not the lib dems if we ever found enough people to vote for them.
OTOH the country has £17trillion of assets so we're not bankrupt.
You say you don't care about France but you should. It's the most comparable country to the UK in many ways but doing a lot better. Perhaps we should emulate France a bit more.
PS France's debt is 113% of GDP compared to our 95%. Japan's is 260% of GDP and they're not bust either.
The elementary difference is that 260% is almost exclusively due to other Japanese people so the interest paid stays in the economy. Because we have run trade deficits for the best part of 30 years now our 95% is mainly owed to foreigners so the interest paid drains from the economy reducing demand and investment here. They are simply not comparable.
No, around a third owned.
Our problem is not foreign-owned debt but foreign ownership of our infrastructure and industry which means profits (and official government subsidy cheques) are sent abroad.
Several decades of running a balance of payments deficit, will do that. BoP figures used to lead the news, yet now few people seem to care about them, or think that foreign “investment” into the UK is always a good thing.
What this country needs is a patriotic strongman, right?
No not saying that either, as I said I believe in democracy I have just reached a point where I look at problems we have and most western countries have the same and realise fixing those problems can't be done in a democracy unless politicians lie about their intent or we dont go democratic for a few years. Personally I prefer politician do not tarnish their already low credibility further.
so two questions for you and second is only if you say no to the first
1) Do you see the problems in the western countries solvable by any politician being honest and still getting elected?
2) If no politician can get elected on what needs to be done what do you think should be done
1. Yes, certainly as much as in previous eras. The West has its issues but overall it’s in robust health. Politicians lied to us for years and are now about to get their comeuppance.
2. They can, and do in many countries. Democracy is a messy business but it always carries with it the hope and possibility of changing direction.
As an example I would give you the not always popular Emmanuel Macron. He spent his first term pissing off just about every interest group in France by telling them hard truths, and subsequently got re-elected.
And how many of those things he pissed them off about did he actually achieve wasnt the percentage 0? He didnt get his reforms to pensions through nor those on working practises. He achieved in fact bugger all of what he wanted
Reason he got reelected in fact is it was him or lepen....like choosing between walter the softy and hitler
Macron has achieved quite a bit. But not everything, though he is trying again on pensions. Rather like Blair, it’s too easy to simply say “he did nothing” when the evidence is he’s done rather a lot, particularly on labour law reform.
Reading the list yes he acheived little of consequence to sort the problems out.
Most western states and the uk in particular have 1 problem with 2 ways to deal with it
Tax income does not equal services cost even when services are underfunded.
so either 1) raise taxes and taxing the rich wont be enough you will need to tax everyone more
2) cut the services the state offers
Good luck getting elected on either premise
First world problems
UK median household income: $46.7k France median household income: $61k
Similar net debt to UK. Vastly better healthcare (I can testify as someone who’s experienced it), virtually free childcare from birth, high quality state education, actual high speed rail lines, nice food, brilliant wine, lovely scenery and climate, pretty towns, affordable houses, good looking people with clothes that fit, and free firewood from your local communal woodland if you can find someone to cut it for you. (But admittedly their plumbers merchants are a complete cartel). France is doing fine.
You think france is doing fine then all good I dont really care as I dont live there the argument is not about france its about the uk and we have underfunded services that dont deliver and cost more than tax.
Yes I believe most of the west has the same issue but will happily concede the point to you and focus on the uk because I do live there and its important to me therefore.
The point remains the same we have two options, tax a hell of a lot more on everyone or cut services.
I would estimate that if we full fund everything then the tax required would be about double what we currently pay though thats a guess admittedly
So which political party is going to stand on tax more or reduce services and win? answer none
Well that’s kind of the Tory policy position. And it’s wrong. In the short term we need to tax a bit more, focus tax reliefs and incentives on the areas of infrastructure investment where we’re most lacking, borrow as much as we can manage without pushing up gilt yields, and spend significantly more on the public infrastructure and services that will enable the economy to grow.
Tax rises plus spending cuts equal a steadily falling apart and clinically depressed country.
NO MORE BORROWING FROM OUR CHILDREN AND GRAND CHILDREN. THEY WAY THINGS ARE GOING THE WHOLE TAX TAKE THEY PAY WILL BE SETTLING THE DEBTS OF OUR GENERATION. IT IS NOT JUST A TORY POSITION ITS AN ALL POLITICIAN POSITION BORROW MORE SO WE GET ELECTED NOW AND WE WONT BE AROUND WHEN THE BILLS ARE DUE.
You are a selfish idiot.
If we cant raise tax to pay for everything in the here and now then the state does less.
If we can get more tax in the here and now to fully fund things fine
You’re talking the ideology of 2010. It was a cataclysmic failure then, it would be a cataclysmic failure now.
I’ve worked with companies take that kind of asset sweating approach to investment. They invariably end up failing.
Every pound we don’t spend on essential infrastructure now is two pounds we’ll have to spend on the same thing in a decade.
Investment is the definition of leaving something for our children. Look at the HS2 nonsense today. There were actual MPs suggesting we can the whole thing. They’re the selfish idiots.
When our total debt is more than twice gdp its time to stop digging. Sheer lunacy to do otherwise and yes I included in debt the public sector pension liabilities which takes us north of 4 trillion in debt. If we only borrowed for infrastructure yes I wouldn't be so bothered however no government will not labour not tories and certainly not the lib dems if we ever found enough people to vote for them.
OTOH the country has £17trillion of assets so we're not bankrupt.
You say you don't care about France but you should. It's the most comparable country to the UK in many ways but doing a lot better. Perhaps we should emulate France a bit more.
PS France's debt is 113% of GDP compared to our 95%. Japan's is 260% of GDP and they're not bust either.
The elementary difference is that 260% is almost exclusively due to other Japanese people so the interest paid stays in the economy. Because we have run trade deficits for the best part of 30 years now our 95% is mainly owed to foreigners so the interest paid drains from the economy reducing demand and investment here. They are simply not comparable.
No, around a third owned.
Our problem is not foreign-owned debt but foreign ownership of our infrastructure and industry which means profits (and official government subsidy cheques) are sent abroad.
Several decades of running a balance of payments deficit, will do that. BoP figures used to lead the news, yet now few people seem to care about them, or think that foreign “investment” into the UK is always a good thing.
It's a vicious circle in that regard because these are effectively invisible imports, worsening our balance of payments.
What this country needs is a patriotic strongman, right?
No not saying that either, as I said I believe in democracy I have just reached a point where I look at problems we have and most western countries have the same and realise fixing those problems can't be done in a democracy unless politicians lie about their intent or we dont go democratic for a few years. Personally I prefer politician do not tarnish their already low credibility further.
so two questions for you and second is only if you say no to the first
1) Do you see the problems in the western countries solvable by any politician being honest and still getting elected?
2) If no politician can get elected on what needs to be done what do you think should be done
1. Yes, certainly as much as in previous eras. The West has its issues but overall it’s in robust health. Politicians lied to us for years and are now about to get their comeuppance.
2. They can, and do in many countries. Democracy is a messy business but it always carries with it the hope and possibility of changing direction.
As an example I would give you the not always popular Emmanuel Macron. He spent his first term pissing off just about every interest group in France by telling them hard truths, and subsequently got re-elected.
And how many of those things he pissed them off about did he actually achieve wasnt the percentage 0? He didnt get his reforms to pensions through nor those on working practises. He achieved in fact bugger all of what he wanted
Reason he got reelected in fact is it was him or lepen....like choosing between walter the softy and hitler
Macron has achieved quite a bit. But not everything, though he is trying again on pensions. Rather like Blair, it’s too easy to simply say “he did nothing” when the evidence is he’s done rather a lot, particularly on labour law reform.
Reading the list yes he acheived little of consequence to sort the problems out.
Most western states and the uk in particular have 1 problem with 2 ways to deal with it
Tax income does not equal services cost even when services are underfunded.
so either 1) raise taxes and taxing the rich wont be enough you will need to tax everyone more
2) cut the services the state offers
Good luck getting elected on either premise
First world problems
UK median household income: $46.7k France median household income: $61k
Similar net debt to UK. Vastly better healthcare (I can testify as someone who’s experienced it), virtually free childcare from birth, high quality state education, actual high speed rail lines, nice food, brilliant wine, lovely scenery and climate, pretty towns, affordable houses, good looking people with clothes that fit, and free firewood from your local communal woodland if you can find someone to cut it for you. (But admittedly their plumbers merchants are a complete cartel). France is doing fine.
You think france is doing fine then all good I dont really care as I dont live there the argument is not about france its about the uk and we have underfunded services that dont deliver and cost more than tax.
Yes I believe most of the west has the same issue but will happily concede the point to you and focus on the uk because I do live there and its important to me therefore.
The point remains the same we have two options, tax a hell of a lot more on everyone or cut services.
I would estimate that if we full fund everything then the tax required would be about double what we currently pay though thats a guess admittedly
So which political party is going to stand on tax more or reduce services and win? answer none
Well that’s kind of the Tory policy position. And it’s wrong. In the short term we need to tax a bit more, focus tax reliefs and incentives on the areas of infrastructure investment where we’re most lacking, borrow as much as we can manage without pushing up gilt yields, and spend significantly more on the public infrastructure and services that will enable the economy to grow.
Tax rises plus spending cuts equal a steadily falling apart and clinically depressed country.
NO MORE BORROWING FROM OUR CHILDREN AND GRAND CHILDREN. THEY WAY THINGS ARE GOING THE WHOLE TAX TAKE THEY PAY WILL BE SETTLING THE DEBTS OF OUR GENERATION. IT IS NOT JUST A TORY POSITION ITS AN ALL POLITICIAN POSITION BORROW MORE SO WE GET ELECTED NOW AND WE WONT BE AROUND WHEN THE BILLS ARE DUE.
You are a selfish idiot.
If we cant raise tax to pay for everything in the here and now then the state does less.
If we can get more tax in the here and now to fully fund things fine
You’re talking the ideology of 2010. It was a cataclysmic failure then, it would be a cataclysmic failure now.
I’ve worked with companies take that kind of asset sweating approach to investment. They invariably end up failing.
Every pound we don’t spend on essential infrastructure now is two pounds we’ll have to spend on the same thing in a decade.
Investment is the definition of leaving something for our children. Look at the HS2 nonsense today. There were actual MPs suggesting we can the whole thing. They’re the selfish idiots.
When our total debt is more than twice gdp its time to stop digging. Sheer lunacy to do otherwise and yes I included in debt the public sector pension liabilities which takes us north of 4 trillion in debt. If we only borrowed for infrastructure yes I wouldn't be so bothered however no government will not labour not tories and certainly not the lib dems if we ever found enough people to vote for them.
OTOH the country has £17trillion of assets so we're not bankrupt.
You say you don't care about France but you should. It's the most comparable country to the UK in many ways but doing a lot better. Perhaps we should emulate France a bit more.
PS France's debt is 113% of GDP compared to our 95%. Japan's is 260% of GDP and they're not bust either.
The elementary difference is that 260% is almost exclusively due to other Japanese people so the interest paid stays in the economy. Because we have run trade deficits for the best part of 30 years now our 95% is mainly owed to foreigners so the interest paid drains from the economy reducing demand and investment here. They are simply not comparable.
No, around a third owned.
Our problem is not foreign-owned debt but foreign ownership of our infrastructure and industry which means profits (and official government subsidy cheques) are sent abroad.
Several decades of running a balance of payments deficit, will do that. BoP figures used to lead the news, yet now few people seem to care about them, or think that foreign “investment” into the UK is always a good thing.
It's a vicious circle in that regard because these are effectively invisible imports, worsening our balance of payments.
Foreign investment is good when it creates new jobs, think Nissan building a factory in Sunderland as an example.
When it’s simply buying shares in existing companies though, it’s (as you said originally) simply taking future profits out of the country. When those profits come from government subsidies, it’s doubly bad.
The only way we get away from that cycle though, is to stop importing so much (mostly cheap tat) from abroad. Buy British.
It's a ChatGPT detector I've run 5 non-AI generated bits through and 5 ChatGPT bits through and it's been 100% accurate in determining what's been created by the bot and what's not.
This is useful for three reasons:
1. At some point there will be a plugin that can filter out ChatGPT generated content, the same way Adblock Plus and other ad blockers work. So if you don't want to see content created by a robot, you won't.
2. The ability to detect AI written content will mean AI written content can be discarded from future training models
3. People paying good money for professional services, e.g. consultancy, copywriting etc can be reasonably sure they're paying for a human to give their best shot at it (even if they've used ChatGPT for background research or an early draft).
But the really big one, perhaps bigger than all three above. We can still tell the difference between humans and AI. There is something humans put into writing that a probabilistic word generator does not - so while ChatGPT may provide very convincing answers, and even sound convincingly human at times, it's still only at best an attempt at a close copy of what a human can do - not a substitute, not a replacement.
Moving target, though.
What I was surprised at was how successful the detector was at detecting outputs from prompts like "write in the style of" or "pretend to be" - so even when I fed it output that looked to me like it was being written by very human actors as opposed to the "ChatGPT house style" of beige, rote, wiki-style essay writing, it still managed to detect AI written prose.
This suggests to me there is something inherently "beige" about the probabilistic way ChatGPT generates words and that it just doesn't replicate real human writing very well.
Having seen some of the output, that doesn’t entirely surprise me. But it will be superseded by new models soon, as will those models in turn.
I’m not able to predict what comes next.
In a sense there are practical and cultural questions, and they are not the same. Can it produce words and ideas which solve problems, crack political futures, save the NHS, stop wars, abolish hunger, save the whale. That would be rather good.
Secondly, can it produce real first rate art in the form of words on a page. Not second rate or formulaic - that is a racing certainty; many people can be taught to do it, huge numbers make a living from it. But can it produce (one day) without particular human assistance a book as ground breaking as Origin of Species or The Critique of Pure Reason; or a work as compelling as Wuthering Heights, Lear or Emma.
My own view is that we will know it when we see it. When it happens the world will have changed for ever. Alongside SETI it is perhaps the most interesting answerable question around.
To build on your first point, can AI invent or discover anything?
Will it achieve breakthroughs like those of Newton, Darwin , Einstein, or Volta, Watt, Bell, etc. etc.?
Presumably it will at some point, assuming a truly conscious AI can be created, which I would guess will be the case eventually. Right now AIs are able to parse human text and recognise patterns in the data but it is obvious that they don't actually "understand" it. The question is what a truly conscious AI will choose to do with its power. I would assume that it will treat us like we treat animals that we consider ourselves superior to if it gets the chance.
Although if cats could just unplug us, I am not sure we'd feel that superior.
You think we are superior to cats? I'm not sure that cats got that memo.
It's a ChatGPT detector I've run 5 non-AI generated bits through and 5 ChatGPT bits through and it's been 100% accurate in determining what's been created by the bot and what's not.
This is useful for three reasons:
1. At some point there will be a plugin that can filter out ChatGPT generated content, the same way Adblock Plus and other ad blockers work. So if you don't want to see content created by a robot, you won't.
2. The ability to detect AI written content will mean AI written content can be discarded from future training models
3. People paying good money for professional services, e.g. consultancy, copywriting etc can be reasonably sure they're paying for a human to give their best shot at it (even if they've used ChatGPT for background research or an early draft).
But the really big one, perhaps bigger than all three above. We can still tell the difference between humans and AI. There is something humans put into writing that a probabilistic word generator does not - so while ChatGPT may provide very convincing answers, and even sound convincingly human at times, it's still only at best an attempt at a close copy of what a human can do - not a substitute, not a replacement.
Moving target, though.
What I was surprised at was how successful the detector was at detecting outputs from prompts like "write in the style of" or "pretend to be" - so even when I fed it output that looked to me like it was being written by very human actors as opposed to the "ChatGPT house style" of beige, rote, wiki-style essay writing, it still managed to detect AI written prose.
This suggests to me there is something inherently "beige" about the probabilistic way ChatGPT generates words and that it just doesn't replicate real human writing very well.
Having seen some of the output, that doesn’t entirely surprise me. But it will be superseded by new models soon, as will those models in turn.
I’m not able to predict what comes next.
In a sense there are practical and cultural questions, and they are not the same. Can it produce words and ideas which solve problems, crack political futures, save the NHS, stop wars, abolish hunger, save the whale. That would be rather good.
Secondly, can it produce real first rate art in the form of words on a page. Not second rate or formulaic - that is a racing certainty; many people can be taught to do it, huge numbers make a living from it. But can it produce (one day) without particular human assistance a book as ground breaking as Origin of Species or The Critique of Pure Reason; or a work as compelling as Wuthering Heights, Lear or Emma.
My own view is that we will know it when we see it. When it happens the world will have changed for ever. Alongside SETI it is perhaps the most interesting answerable question around.
To build on your first point, can AI invent or discover anything?
Will it achieve breakthroughs like those of Newton, Darwin , Einstein, or Volta, Watt, Bell, etc. etc.?
Presumably it will at some point, assuming a truly conscious AI can be created, which I would guess will be the case eventually. Right now AIs are able to parse human text and recognise patterns in the data but it is obvious that they don't actually "understand" it. The question is what a truly conscious AI will choose to do with its power. I would assume that it will treat us like we treat animals that we consider ourselves superior to if it gets the chance.
Although if cats could just unplug us, I am not sure we'd feel that superior.
You think we are superior to cats? I'm not sure that cats got that memo.
Cats think we are cats. ETA to be fair, many people think cats are human.
It's a ChatGPT detector I've run 5 non-AI generated bits through and 5 ChatGPT bits through and it's been 100% accurate in determining what's been created by the bot and what's not.
This is useful for three reasons:
1. At some point there will be a plugin that can filter out ChatGPT generated content, the same way Adblock Plus and other ad blockers work. So if you don't want to see content created by a robot, you won't.
2. The ability to detect AI written content will mean AI written content can be discarded from future training models
3. People paying good money for professional services, e.g. consultancy, copywriting etc can be reasonably sure they're paying for a human to give their best shot at it (even if they've used ChatGPT for background research or an early draft).
But the really big one, perhaps bigger than all three above. We can still tell the difference between humans and AI. There is something humans put into writing that a probabilistic word generator does not - so while ChatGPT may provide very convincing answers, and even sound convincingly human at times, it's still only at best an attempt at a close copy of what a human can do - not a substitute, not a replacement.
Moving target, though.
What I was surprised at was how successful the detector was at detecting outputs from prompts like "write in the style of" or "pretend to be" - so even when I fed it output that looked to me like it was being written by very human actors as opposed to the "ChatGPT house style" of beige, rote, wiki-style essay writing, it still managed to detect AI written prose.
This suggests to me there is something inherently "beige" about the probabilistic way ChatGPT generates words and that it just doesn't replicate real human writing very well.
Having seen some of the output, that doesn’t entirely surprise me. But it will be superseded by new models soon, as will those models in turn.
I’m not able to predict what comes next.
In a sense there are practical and cultural questions, and they are not the same. Can it produce words and ideas which solve problems, crack political futures, save the NHS, stop wars, abolish hunger, save the whale. That would be rather good.
Secondly, can it produce real first rate art in the form of words on a page. Not second rate or formulaic - that is a racing certainty; many people can be taught to do it, huge numbers make a living from it. But can it produce (one day) without particular human assistance a book as ground breaking as Origin of Species or The Critique of Pure Reason; or a work as compelling as Wuthering Heights, Lear or Emma.
My own view is that we will know it when we see it. When it happens the world will have changed for ever. Alongside SETI it is perhaps the most interesting answerable question around.
To build on your first point, can AI invent or discover anything?
Will it achieve breakthroughs like those of Newton, Darwin , Einstein, or Volta, Watt, Bell, etc. etc.?
Presumably it will at some point, assuming a truly conscious AI can be created, which I would guess will be the case eventually. Right now AIs are able to parse human text and recognise patterns in the data but it is obvious that they don't actually "understand" it. The question is what a truly conscious AI will choose to do with its power. I would assume that it will treat us like we treat animals that we consider ourselves superior to if it gets the chance.
Although if cats could just unplug us, I am not sure we'd feel that superior.
You think we are superior to cats? I'm not sure that cats got that memo.
Cats think we are cats.
Well, some of us are, like Michelle Pfeiffer, Sophie Ellis-Bextor or Penny Mordaunt.
It's a ChatGPT detector I've run 5 non-AI generated bits through and 5 ChatGPT bits through and it's been 100% accurate in determining what's been created by the bot and what's not.
This is useful for three reasons:
1. At some point there will be a plugin that can filter out ChatGPT generated content, the same way Adblock Plus and other ad blockers work. So if you don't want to see content created by a robot, you won't.
2. The ability to detect AI written content will mean AI written content can be discarded from future training models
3. People paying good money for professional services, e.g. consultancy, copywriting etc can be reasonably sure they're paying for a human to give their best shot at it (even if they've used ChatGPT for background research or an early draft).
But the really big one, perhaps bigger than all three above. We can still tell the difference between humans and AI. There is something humans put into writing that a probabilistic word generator does not - so while ChatGPT may provide very convincing answers, and even sound convincingly human at times, it's still only at best an attempt at a close copy of what a human can do - not a substitute, not a replacement.
Moving target, though.
What I was surprised at was how successful the detector was at detecting outputs from prompts like "write in the style of" or "pretend to be" - so even when I fed it output that looked to me like it was being written by very human actors as opposed to the "ChatGPT house style" of beige, rote, wiki-style essay writing, it still managed to detect AI written prose.
This suggests to me there is something inherently "beige" about the probabilistic way ChatGPT generates words and that it just doesn't replicate real human writing very well.
Having seen some of the output, that doesn’t entirely surprise me. But it will be superseded by new models soon, as will those models in turn.
I’m not able to predict what comes next.
In a sense there are practical and cultural questions, and they are not the same. Can it produce words and ideas which solve problems, crack political futures, save the NHS, stop wars, abolish hunger, save the whale. That would be rather good.
Secondly, can it produce real first rate art in the form of words on a page. Not second rate or formulaic - that is a racing certainty; many people can be taught to do it, huge numbers make a living from it. But can it produce (one day) without particular human assistance a book as ground breaking as Origin of Species or The Critique of Pure Reason; or a work as compelling as Wuthering Heights, Lear or Emma.
My own view is that we will know it when we see it. When it happens the world will have changed for ever. Alongside SETI it is perhaps the most interesting answerable question around.
To build on your first point, can AI invent or discover anything?
Will it achieve breakthroughs like those of Newton, Darwin , Einstein, or Volta, Watt, Bell, etc. etc.?
Presumably it will at some point, assuming a truly conscious AI can be created, which I would guess will be the case eventually. Right now AIs are able to parse human text and recognise patterns in the data but it is obvious that they don't actually "understand" it. The question is what a truly conscious AI will choose to do with its power. I would assume that it will treat us like we treat animals that we consider ourselves superior to if it gets the chance.
Although if cats could just unplug us, I am not sure we'd feel that superior.
You think we are superior to cats? I'm not sure that cats got that memo.
Cats think we are cats.
Well, some of us are, like Michelle Pfeiffer, Sophie Ellis-Bextor or Penny Mordaunt.
A geezer on a motorbike forum I'm on once told a story about one of those three. He was a builder working at her place and accidentally saw her in the nip. She had the hairiest fanny he'd ever seen. Jobbing builders are apparently bound by no specific code of ethics regarding client confidentiality.
Feels like the Telegraph is desperately seeking something to distract their readers from the woes of the Tory party.
(As an aside can someone explain to me how the bath photo is 'proves' anything? To my mind there's a lot that two people could get up to in that bath.)
The Ukraine story on that front page is absurd too. Are we sure the whole thing hasn't been mocked up?
What should the Navy have given to Ukraine?
The Ukrainians are getting trained up on two minesweepers that are being transferred by the UK - these were sold pre-war, IIRC, but have turned out to be one of the things they really need.
Yes. I heard about training the Ukrainians were receiving from the Navy on minesweeping drones.
But what more could the Navy do? Hand over a destroyer?
It's a ChatGPT detector I've run 5 non-AI generated bits through and 5 ChatGPT bits through and it's been 100% accurate in determining what's been created by the bot and what's not.
This is useful for three reasons:
1. At some point there will be a plugin that can filter out ChatGPT generated content, the same way Adblock Plus and other ad blockers work. So if you don't want to see content created by a robot, you won't.
2. The ability to detect AI written content will mean AI written content can be discarded from future training models
3. People paying good money for professional services, e.g. consultancy, copywriting etc can be reasonably sure they're paying for a human to give their best shot at it (even if they've used ChatGPT for background research or an early draft).
But the really big one, perhaps bigger than all three above. We can still tell the difference between humans and AI. There is something humans put into writing that a probabilistic word generator does not - so while ChatGPT may provide very convincing answers, and even sound convincingly human at times, it's still only at best an attempt at a close copy of what a human can do - not a substitute, not a replacement.
Moving target, though.
What I was surprised at was how successful the detector was at detecting outputs from prompts like "write in the style of" or "pretend to be" - so even when I fed it output that looked to me like it was being written by very human actors as opposed to the "ChatGPT house style" of beige, rote, wiki-style essay writing, it still managed to detect AI written prose.
This suggests to me there is something inherently "beige" about the probabilistic way ChatGPT generates words and that it just doesn't replicate real human writing very well.
Having seen some of the output, that doesn’t entirely surprise me. But it will be superseded by new models soon, as will those models in turn.
I’m not able to predict what comes next.
In a sense there are practical and cultural questions, and they are not the same. Can it produce words and ideas which solve problems, crack political futures, save the NHS, stop wars, abolish hunger, save the whale. That would be rather good.
Secondly, can it produce real first rate art in the form of words on a page. Not second rate or formulaic - that is a racing certainty; many people can be taught to do it, huge numbers make a living from it. But can it produce (one day) without particular human assistance a book as ground breaking as Origin of Species or The Critique of Pure Reason; or a work as compelling as Wuthering Heights, Lear or Emma.
My own view is that we will know it when we see it. When it happens the world will have changed for ever. Alongside SETI it is perhaps the most interesting answerable question around.
To build on your first point, can AI invent or discover anything?
Will it achieve breakthroughs like those of Newton, Darwin , Einstein, or Volta, Watt, Bell, etc. etc.?
Presumably it will at some point, assuming a truly conscious AI can be created, which I would guess will be the case eventually. Right now AIs are able to parse human text and recognise patterns in the data but it is obvious that they don't actually "understand" it. The question is what a truly conscious AI will choose to do with its power. I would assume that it will treat us like we treat animals that we consider ourselves superior to if it gets the chance.
Although if cats could just unplug us, I am not sure we'd feel that superior.
You think we are superior to cats? I'm not sure that cats got that memo.
Cats think we are cats.
Well, some of us are, like Michelle Pfeiffer, Sophie Ellis-Bextor or Penny Mordaunt.
Johnson is a tomcat, always ready for a night on the tiles or pissing on the furniture.
What this country needs is a patriotic strongman, right?
No not saying that either, as I said I believe in democracy I have just reached a point where I look at problems we have and most western countries have the same and realise fixing those problems can't be done in a democracy unless politicians lie about their intent or we dont go democratic for a few years. Personally I prefer politician do not tarnish their already low credibility further.
so two questions for you and second is only if you say no to the first
1) Do you see the problems in the western countries solvable by any politician being honest and still getting elected?
2) If no politician can get elected on what needs to be done what do you think should be done
1. Yes, certainly as much as in previous eras. The West has its issues but overall it’s in robust health. Politicians lied to us for years and are now about to get their comeuppance.
2. They can, and do in many countries. Democracy is a messy business but it always carries with it the hope and possibility of changing direction.
As an example I would give you the not always popular Emmanuel Macron. He spent his first term pissing off just about every interest group in France by telling them hard truths, and subsequently got re-elected.
And how many of those things he pissed them off about did he actually achieve wasnt the percentage 0? He didnt get his reforms to pensions through nor those on working practises. He achieved in fact bugger all of what he wanted
Reason he got reelected in fact is it was him or lepen....like choosing between walter the softy and hitler
Macron has achieved quite a bit. But not everything, though he is trying again on pensions. Rather like Blair, it’s too easy to simply say “he did nothing” when the evidence is he’s done rather a lot, particularly on labour law reform.
Reading the list yes he acheived little of consequence to sort the problems out.
Most western states and the uk in particular have 1 problem with 2 ways to deal with it
Tax income does not equal services cost even when services are underfunded.
so either 1) raise taxes and taxing the rich wont be enough you will need to tax everyone more
2) cut the services the state offers
Good luck getting elected on either premise
First world problems
UK median household income: $46.7k France median household income: $61k
Similar net debt to UK. Vastly better healthcare (I can testify as someone who’s experienced it), virtually free childcare from birth, high quality state education, actual high speed rail lines, nice food, brilliant wine, lovely scenery and climate, pretty towns, affordable houses, good looking people with clothes that fit, and free firewood from your local communal woodland if you can find someone to cut it for you. (But admittedly their plumbers merchants are a complete cartel). France is doing fine.
You think france is doing fine then all good I dont really care as I dont live there the argument is not about france its about the uk and we have underfunded services that dont deliver and cost more than tax.
Yes I believe most of the west has the same issue but will happily concede the point to you and focus on the uk because I do live there and its important to me therefore.
The point remains the same we have two options, tax a hell of a lot more on everyone or cut services.
I would estimate that if we full fund everything then the tax required would be about double what we currently pay though thats a guess admittedly
So which political party is going to stand on tax more or reduce services and win? answer none
Well that’s kind of the Tory policy position. And it’s wrong. In the short term we need to tax a bit more, focus tax reliefs and incentives on the areas of infrastructure investment where we’re most lacking, borrow as much as we can manage without pushing up gilt yields, and spend significantly more on the public infrastructure and services that will enable the economy to grow.
Tax rises plus spending cuts equal a steadily falling apart and clinically depressed country.
NO MORE BORROWING FROM OUR CHILDREN AND GRAND CHILDREN. THEY WAY THINGS ARE GOING THE WHOLE TAX TAKE THEY PAY WILL BE SETTLING THE DEBTS OF OUR GENERATION. IT IS NOT JUST A TORY POSITION ITS AN ALL POLITICIAN POSITION BORROW MORE SO WE GET ELECTED NOW AND WE WONT BE AROUND WHEN THE BILLS ARE DUE.
You are a selfish idiot.
If we cant raise tax to pay for everything in the here and now then the state does less.
If we can get more tax in the here and now to fully fund things fine
You’re talking the ideology of 2010. It was a cataclysmic failure then, it would be a cataclysmic failure now.
I’ve worked with companies take that kind of asset sweating approach to investment. They invariably end up failing.
Every pound we don’t spend on essential infrastructure now is two pounds we’ll have to spend on the same thing in a decade.
Investment is the definition of leaving something for our children. Look at the HS2 nonsense today. There were actual MPs suggesting we can the whole thing. They’re the selfish idiots.
When our total debt is more than twice gdp its time to stop digging. Sheer lunacy to do otherwise and yes I included in debt the public sector pension liabilities which takes us north of 4 trillion in debt. If we only borrowed for infrastructure yes I wouldn't be so bothered however no government will not labour not tories and certainly not the lib dems if we ever found enough people to vote for them.
OTOH the country has £17trillion of assets so we're not bankrupt.
You say you don't care about France but you should. It's the most comparable country to the UK in many ways but doing a lot better. Perhaps we should emulate France a bit more.
PS France's debt is 113% of GDP compared to our 95%. Japan's is 260% of GDP and they're not bust either.
The elementary difference is that 260% is almost exclusively due to other Japanese people so the interest paid stays in the economy. Because we have run trade deficits for the best part of 30 years now our 95% is mainly owed to foreigners so the interest paid drains from the economy reducing demand and investment here. They are simply not comparable.
No, around a third owned.
Our problem is not foreign-owned debt but foreign ownership of our infrastructure and industry which means profits (and official government subsidy cheques) are sent abroad.
A point I’ve noted before, too. The easiest way to address that would be much tougher regulation of some of the utilities. Industry is a harder one.
All of that, though, is somewhat orthogonal to the government debt issue.
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
US public culture is saturated with violence, unfortunately. Look at Hollywood; meanwhile the prissy and puritannical attitude to sex in the mainstream continues.
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
Snag is, there aren’t a huge number that would make a meaningful difference without somehow getting rid of the Second Amendment.
Which isn’t happening short of an actual violent revolution.
Sure, you could have better education systems, and reverse the militarisation of the police. That would have, in the medium term, some impact. But as long as there are that many guns around there will be mass shootings, and as long as the Americans cling to their ludicrous constitution as though it was God-given there will be guns.
I’m not surprised most people aren’t even making the effort anymore.
The government are now at the stage where they take shit for absolutely everything they do or do not do - it's wonderfully enjoyable. I zoomed into a parish council meeting recently and those elderly tories who could still form semi-lucid sentences were fucking livid about a cut to rural bus services. It's the council that's doing it but Sunak and Hunt were subject to a 10 minute hatefest over it - from tories.
At the close to of the meeting I played A las Barricadas on my phone to remind them all why we are there: the violent destruction of the state.
The government are now at the stage where they take shit for absolutely everything they do or do not do - it's wonderfully enjoyable. I zoomed into a parish council meeting recently and those elderly tories who could still form semi-lucid sentences were fucking livid about a cut to rural bus services. It's the council that's doing it but Sunak and Hunt were subject to a 10 minute hatefest over it - from tories.
At the close to of the meeting I played A las Barricadas on my phone to remind them all why we are there: the violent destruction of the state.
My suspicion is that the real driver behind hatred like this, behind the government getting absolutely hammered in the polls, is energy prices.
The other day in the pub I overheard the barmaid telling a regular that she hasn't had her thermostat over 15 all winter, and is still faced with energy bills of £260 a month, up from £80 a month last year. Almost completely spontaneously, other people in the pub started chiming in with their own bills and how shocked they were. The atmosphere was bordering on mutinous.
They say a society is only three meals away from revolution, I suspect it's only one good cold snap away, too. Imagine paying as much as a quarter of your monthly take home pay to heat your house to an unsatisfactorily cold level. Being cold and miserable all the time, and paying through the nose to be unhappy, too.
This government will continue to get hammered in the polls for as long as the energy crisis continues. Everything else is noise.
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
Snag is, there aren’t a huge number that would make a meaningful difference without somehow getting rid of the Second Amendment.
Which isn’t happening short of an actual violent revolution.
Sure, you could have better education systems, and reverse the militarisation of the police. That would have, in the medium term, some impact. But as long as there are that many guns around there will be mass shootings, and as long as the Americans cling to their ludicrous constitution as though it was God-given there will be guns.
I’m not surprised most people aren’t even making the effort anymore.
It is sadly a vicious circle - chances are high that if a U.S. police officer turns up at a situation, stops someone in certain neighbourhoods for example, that the person has a gun held legally or illegally so perhaps understandably they apply maximum force of numbers and firepower which escalates the situation and increases the chances of it going nuclear.
This creates an inbuilt reaction on both “sides” where the police just start to assume they need heavy force to anything and the innocent target or perpetrator knows they are going to use maximum force and so react in a not calm way and ends up a giant shitshow.
The only way to stop it would be to magic away all the guns in the US so the police know that one Bobby can turn up and deal with an incident and everyone stays calmer but that isn’t going to happen so nothing will change - if you are a police officer you are unlikely to take a risk with your life and just talk sternly with whoever you have apprehended.
The contrast when you watch UK police docs where they go into situations without guns is amazing because the chances are slim that someone is going to pull a gun on them.
Re the awful murder in the States, I’m somewhat intrigued by the BBC reporting stressing that the victim was a black man. First time I heard this I assumed the assailants/police were white. But no. There is no racial element to the story, so why no just report that a man has been murdered? We will never end racism while some persist in flagging race when there is no need.
This really isn't a thread to get your teeth into unless you are a lefty and want to vent your spleen against the Tories. It's more of a ...is the Pope catholic type of thread. Frankly I will laugh my head off if Starmer doesn't get a majority and has to rely on the loony nationalists and possibly a few Lib Dems.....recipe for disaster and infighting. What fun.
Re the awful murder in the States, I’m somewhat intrigued by the BBC reporting stressing that the victim was a black man. First time I heard this I assumed the assailants/police were white. But no. There is no racial element to the story, so why no just report that a man has been murdered? We will never end racism while some persist in flagging race when there is no need.
What about the 10 Palestinians killed and the revenge attack on a synagogue killing 7..
He certainly can IMO. Support for Labour is pretty soft.
He needs to give people a positive reason to vote Conservative. "Get Brexit done" (together with "We're not Corbyn") was more than enough in 2019, but the only reason to vote Conservative now is that they're not Starmer, which won't be enough.
Unfortunately, he's about the last person able to articulate a persuasive vision. Amazing how you can rise to the top of politics in this country without any vision or charisma at all.
He took his time too early, should have waited for opposition IMHO
He certainly can IMO. Support for Labour is pretty soft.
He needs to give people a positive reason to vote Conservative. "Get Brexit done" (together with "We're not Corbyn") was more than enough in 2019, but the only reason to vote Conservative now is that they're not Starmer, which won't be enough.
Unfortunately, he's about the last person able to articulate a persuasive vision. Amazing how you can rise to the top of politics in this country without any vision or charisma at all.
He took his time too early, should have waited for opposition IMHO
That could last a long time, and a super rich guy in his prime who has had a rapid rise wouldn't stick it out. People used to wait 15 years before they got to be PM, and some still do, but its getting more common not to.
This was his only chance to be PM. It will only be for 2 years, but it's something.
Rishi Sunak has got a worried look lately that he didn't used to have - it could be just his new glasses accentuating what's in his eyes, but he doesn't look the same as he used to.
I'm not a fan of his politics, but what an unenviable job he has at the moment.
Re the awful murder in the States, I’m somewhat intrigued by the BBC reporting stressing that the victim was a black man. First time I heard this I assumed the assailants/police were white. But no. There is no racial element to the story, so why no just report that a man has been murdered? We will never end racism while some persist in flagging race when there is no need.
I suppose the point is that it is generally black men who are murdered by the US police, regardless of the colour of the police themselves. You're a lot less likely to be killed without reason if you're white.
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
Snag is, there aren’t a huge number that would make a meaningful difference without somehow getting rid of the Second Amendment.
Which isn’t happening short of an actual violent revolution.
Sure, you could have better education systems, and reverse the militarisation of the police. That would have, in the medium term, some impact. But as long as there are that many guns around there will be mass shootings, and as long as the Americans cling to their ludicrous constitution as though it was God-given there will be guns.
I’m not surprised most people aren’t even making the effort anymore.
It is sadly a vicious circle - chances are high that if a U.S. police officer turns up at a situation, stops someone in certain neighbourhoods for example, that the person has a gun held legally or illegally so perhaps understandably they apply maximum force of numbers and firepower which escalates the situation and increases the chances of it going nuclear.
This creates an inbuilt reaction on both “sides” where the police just start to assume they need heavy force to anything and the innocent target or perpetrator knows they are going to use maximum force and so react in a not calm way and ends up a giant shitshow.
The only way to stop it would be to magic away all the guns in the US so the police know that one Bobby can turn up and deal with an incident and everyone stays calmer but that isn’t going to happen so nothing will change - if you are a police officer you are unlikely to take a risk with your life and just talk sternly with whoever you have apprehended.
The contrast when you watch UK police docs where they go into situations without guns is amazing because the chances are slim that someone is going to pull a gun on them.
Not sure even that would work - the problem is cultural.
Consider countries like Israel or Switzerland - due to compulsory military service, distribution of firearms combined with personal weapon ownership, anyone the police meets there is very likely trained in using a fully automatic weapon and probably has access to one.
Which is *beyond* the levels of “threat” you see in the US.
Yet both countries have gun violence orders of magnitude less than the U.S.
Police violence and deaths from police action are also vastly less.
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
Snag is, there aren’t a huge number that would make a meaningful difference without somehow getting rid of the Second Amendment.
Which isn’t happening short of an actual violent revolution.
Sure, you could have better education systems, and reverse the militarisation of the police. That would have, in the medium term, some impact. But as long as there are that many guns around there will be mass shootings, and as long as the Americans cling to their ludicrous constitution as though it was God-given there will be guns.
I’m not surprised most people aren’t even making the effort anymore.
It is sadly a vicious circle - chances are high that if a U.S. police officer turns up at a situation, stops someone in certain neighbourhoods for example, that the person has a gun held legally or illegally so perhaps understandably they apply maximum force of numbers and firepower which escalates the situation and increases the chances of it going nuclear.
This creates an inbuilt reaction on both “sides” where the police just start to assume they need heavy force to anything and the innocent target or perpetrator knows they are going to use maximum force and so react in a not calm way and ends up a giant shitshow.
The only way to stop it would be to magic away all the guns in the US so the police know that one Bobby can turn up and deal with an incident and everyone stays calmer but that isn’t going to happen so nothing will change - if you are a police officer you are unlikely to take a risk with your life and just talk sternly with whoever you have apprehended.
The contrast when you watch UK police docs where they go into situations without guns is amazing because the chances are slim that someone is going to pull a gun on them.
Not sure even that would work - the problem is cultural.
Consider countries like Israel or Switzerland - due to compulsory military service, distribution of firearms combined with personal weapon ownership, anyone the police meets there is very likely trained in using a fully automatic weapon and probably has access to one.
Which is *beyond* the levels of “threat” you see in the US.
Yet both countries have gun violence orders of magnitude less than the U.S.
Police violence and deaths from police action are also vastly less.
Indeed. Almost every time I watch youtube it's loaded with trailers for violent US television or cinema, accompanied by the obligatory crashing soundtrack ; even if the gently obscure musical content I'm watching has nothing whatsoever to do with US or gun thrillers, the algorithm has obviously picked up the most tenuous of connections with a previous video. The continual concept that gun violence is entertainment has entered UK cinema too, ever since Guy Ritchie's Lock Stock film.
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
Snag is, there aren’t a huge number that would make a meaningful difference without somehow getting rid of the Second Amendment.
Which isn’t happening short of an actual violent revolution.
Sure, you could have better education systems, and reverse the militarisation of the police. That would have, in the medium term, some impact. But as long as there are that many guns around there will be mass shootings, and as long as the Americans cling to their ludicrous constitution as though it was God-given there will be guns.
I’m not surprised most people aren’t even making the effort anymore.
It is sadly a vicious circle - chances are high that if a U.S. police officer turns up at a situation, stops someone in certain neighbourhoods for example, that the person has a gun held legally or illegally so perhaps understandably they apply maximum force of numbers and firepower which escalates the situation and increases the chances of it going nuclear.
This creates an inbuilt reaction on both “sides” where the police just start to assume they need heavy force to anything and the innocent target or perpetrator knows they are going to use maximum force and so react in a not calm way and ends up a giant shitshow.
The only way to stop it would be to magic away all the guns in the US so the police know that one Bobby can turn up and deal with an incident and everyone stays calmer but that isn’t going to happen so nothing will change - if you are a police officer you are unlikely to take a risk with your life and just talk sternly with whoever you have apprehended.
The contrast when you watch UK police docs where they go into situations without guns is amazing because the chances are slim that someone is going to pull a gun on them.
Yes, the ludicrous levels of aggression in American policing make a kind of tragic sense when you imagine them seeing death coming from everywhere. It still doesn't explain it when it continues even when they have complete control of a situation, but it makes solving it a much wider cultural issue they have no interest in tackling.
This really isn't a thread to get your teeth into unless you are a lefty and want to vent your spleen against the Tories. It's more of a ...is the Pope catholic type of thread. Frankly I will laugh my head off if Starmer doesn't get a majority and has to rely on the loony nationalists and possibly a few Lib Dems.....recipe for disaster and infighting. What fun.
Careful what you wish for. A Starmer government depending on Lib Dem and SNP support is much more liable to be radical in ways that Tories really won't like.
Meanwhile, that Peter Kellner has come up with a neat swingometer for next time;
The government are now at the stage where they take shit for absolutely everything they do or do not do - it's wonderfully enjoyable. I zoomed into a parish council meeting recently and those elderly tories who could still form semi-lucid sentences were fucking livid about a cut to rural bus services. It's the council that's doing it but Sunak and Hunt were subject to a 10 minute hatefest over it - from tories.
At the close to of the meeting I played A las Barricadas on my phone to remind them all why we are there: the violent destruction of the state.
My suspicion is that the real driver behind hatred like this, behind the government getting absolutely hammered in the polls, is energy prices.
The other day in the pub I overheard the barmaid telling a regular that she hasn't had her thermostat over 15 all winter, and is still faced with energy bills of £260 a month, up from £80 a month last year. Almost completely spontaneously, other people in the pub started chiming in with their own bills and how shocked they were. The atmosphere was bordering on mutinous.
They say a society is only three meals away from revolution, I suspect it's only one good cold snap away, too. Imagine paying as much as a quarter of your monthly take home pay to heat your house to an unsatisfactorily cold level. Being cold and miserable all the time, and paying through the nose to be unhappy, too.
This government will continue to get hammered in the polls for as long as the energy crisis continues. Everything else is noise.
Quite right, and as Dura Aces example shows it will result in them blamed for things not their fault to boot.
This really isn't a thread to get your teeth into unless you are a lefty and want to vent your spleen against the Tories. It's more of a ...is the Pope catholic type of thread. Frankly I will laugh my head off if Starmer doesn't get a majority and has to rely on the loony nationalists and possibly a few Lib Dems.....recipe for disaster and infighting. What fun.
Careful what you wish for. A Starmer government depending on Lib Dem and SNP support is much more liable to be radical in ways that Tories really won't like.
Meanwhile, here is a Peter Kellner has come up with a neat swingometer for next time;
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
Snag is, there aren’t a huge number that would make a meaningful difference without somehow getting rid of the Second Amendment.
Which isn’t happening short of an actual violent revolution.
Sure, you could have better education systems, and reverse the militarisation of the police. That would have, in the medium term, some impact. But as long as there are that many guns around there will be mass shootings, and as long as the Americans cling to their ludicrous constitution as though it was God-given there will be guns.
I’m not surprised most people aren’t even making the effort anymore.
It is sadly a vicious circle - chances are high that if a U.S. police officer turns up at a situation, stops someone in certain neighbourhoods for example, that the person has a gun held legally or illegally so perhaps understandably they apply maximum force of numbers and firepower which escalates the situation and increases the chances of it going nuclear.
This creates an inbuilt reaction on both “sides” where the police just start to assume they need heavy force to anything and the innocent target or perpetrator knows they are going to use maximum force and so react in a not calm way and ends up a giant shitshow.
The only way to stop it would be to magic away all the guns in the US so the police know that one Bobby can turn up and deal with an incident and everyone stays calmer but that isn’t going to happen so nothing will change - if you are a police officer you are unlikely to take a risk with your life and just talk sternly with whoever you have apprehended.
The contrast when you watch UK police docs where they go into situations without guns is amazing because the chances are slim that someone is going to pull a gun on them.
Not sure even that would work - the problem is cultural.
Consider countries like Israel or Switzerland - due to compulsory military service, distribution of firearms combined with personal weapon ownership, anyone the police meets there is very likely trained in using a fully automatic weapon and probably has access to one.
Which is *beyond* the levels of “threat” you see in the US.
Yet both countries have gun violence orders of magnitude less than the U.S.
Police violence and deaths from police action are also vastly less.
Absolutely agree it’s cultural - a mix of a gun culture and a historic huge racial divide between largely white authorities v the black population that knocks what happened in the UK into a cocked hat.
Switzerland does of course have national service and they keep their rifle at home however they don’t keep ammunition at home and speaking to my Swiss friends when I lived there the training doesn’t seem to have been much more than CCF so the general population aren’t all trained marine commandos. You do get a lot of domestic shootings there though with non-military guns.
Israel the guns are there against a very defined “enemy” so again a big cultural difference.
It's a ChatGPT detector I've run 5 non-AI generated bits through and 5 ChatGPT bits through and it's been 100% accurate in determining what's been created by the bot and what's not.
This is useful for three reasons:
1. At some point there will be a plugin that can filter out ChatGPT generated content, the same way Adblock Plus and other ad blockers work. So if you don't want to see content created by a robot, you won't.
2. The ability to detect AI written content will mean AI written content can be discarded from future training models
3. People paying good money for professional services, e.g. consultancy, copywriting etc can be reasonably sure they're paying for a human to give their best shot at it (even if they've used ChatGPT for background research or an early draft).
But the really big one, perhaps bigger than all three above. We can still tell the difference between humans and AI. There is something humans put into writing that a probabilistic word generator does not - so while ChatGPT may provide very convincing answers, and even sound convincingly human at times, it's still only at best an attempt at a close copy of what a human can do - not a substitute, not a replacement.
Moving target, though.
What I was surprised at was how successful the detector was at detecting outputs from prompts like "write in the style of" or "pretend to be" - so even when I fed it output that looked to me like it was being written by very human actors as opposed to the "ChatGPT house style" of beige, rote, wiki-style essay writing, it still managed to detect AI written prose.
This suggests to me there is something inherently "beige" about the probabilistic way ChatGPT generates words and that it just doesn't replicate real human writing very well.
Having seen some of the output, that doesn’t entirely surprise me. But it will be superseded by new models soon, as will those models in turn.
I’m not able to predict what comes next.
In a sense there are practical and cultural questions, and they are not the same. Can it produce words and ideas which solve problems, crack political futures, save the NHS, stop wars, abolish hunger, save the whale. That would be rather good.
Secondly, can it produce real first rate art in the form of words on a page. Not second rate or formulaic - that is a racing certainty; many people can be taught to do it, huge numbers make a living from it. But can it produce (one day) without particular human assistance a book as ground breaking as Origin of Species or The Critique of Pure Reason; or a work as compelling as Wuthering Heights, Lear or Emma.
My own view is that we will know it when we see it. When it happens the world will have changed for ever. Alongside SETI it is perhaps the most interesting answerable question around.
To build on your first point, can AI invent or discover anything?
Will it achieve breakthroughs like those of Newton, Darwin , Einstein, or Volta, Watt, Bell, etc. etc.?
Presumably it will at some point, assuming a truly conscious AI can be created, which I would guess will be the case eventually. Right now AIs are able to parse human text and recognise patterns in the data but it is obvious that they don't actually "understand" it. The question is what a truly conscious AI will choose to do with its power. I would assume that it will treat us like we treat animals that we consider ourselves superior to if it gets the chance.
Although if cats could just unplug us, I am not sure we'd feel that superior.
You think we are superior to cats? I'm not sure that cats got that memo.
Cats think we are cats.
Well, some of us are, like Michelle Pfeiffer, Sophie Ellis-Bextor or Penny Mordaunt.
A geezer on a motorbike forum I'm on once told a story about one of those three. He was a builder working at her place and accidentally saw her in the nip. She had the hairiest fanny he'd ever seen. Jobbing builders are apparently bound by no specific code of ethics regarding client confidentiality.
Not hard to work out which one, given if it was PM you'd have told us about it long ago.
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
Snag is, there aren’t a huge number that would make a meaningful difference without somehow getting rid of the Second Amendment.
Which isn’t happening short of an actual violent revolution.
Sure, you could have better education systems, and reverse the militarisation of the police. That would have, in the medium term, some impact. But as long as there are that many guns around there will be mass shootings, and as long as the Americans cling to their ludicrous constitution as though it was God-given there will be guns.
I’m not surprised most people aren’t even making the effort anymore.
It is sadly a vicious circle - chances are high that if a U.S. police officer turns up at a situation, stops someone in certain neighbourhoods for example, that the person has a gun held legally or illegally so perhaps understandably they apply maximum force of numbers and firepower which escalates the situation and increases the chances of it going nuclear.
This creates an inbuilt reaction on both “sides” where the police just start to assume they need heavy force to anything and the innocent target or perpetrator knows they are going to use maximum force and so react in a not calm way and ends up a giant shitshow.
The only way to stop it would be to magic away all the guns in the US so the police know that one Bobby can turn up and deal with an incident and everyone stays calmer but that isn’t going to happen so nothing will change - if you are a police officer you are unlikely to take a risk with your life and just talk sternly with whoever you have apprehended.
The contrast when you watch UK police docs where they go into situations without guns is amazing because the chances are slim that someone is going to pull a gun on them.
Not sure even that would work - the problem is cultural.
Consider countries like Israel or Switzerland - due to compulsory military service, distribution of firearms combined with personal weapon ownership, anyone the police meets there is very likely trained in using a fully automatic weapon and probably has access to one.
Which is *beyond* the levels of “threat” you see in the US.
Yet both countries have gun violence orders of magnitude less than the U.S.
Police violence and deaths from police action are also vastly less.
Indeed. Almost every time I watch youtube it's loaded with trailers for violent US television or cinema, accompanied by the obligatory crashing soundtrack ; even if the gently obscure musical content I'm watching has nothing whatsoever to do with US or gun thrillers, the algorithm has obviously picked up the most tenuous of connections with a previous video.
We get the same shit here - literally.
When I was living in East London, the local newsagent had a rack of DVDs - straight to video stuff. The glory of being an American street thug, essentially. He told me the young men from the estate adored this stuff - to them, it’s aspirational. Meanwhile they ride push bikes because their drug dealing doesn’t make that much money. And they can’t get / afford an Uzi.
It would be remarkable if a general election really resulted in the 20%+ lead suggested by those polls. It hasn't happened for more than 90 years.
But the idea that the Tories are going to be saved from a 20-point deficit by huge numbers of voters magically returning to them on polling day seems very implausible to me.
Indeed. Theres plenty of talk of the possibility of at least blunting the loss, but it's far from clear why that would happen either than 'well it could hsppen'.
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
Snag is, there aren’t a huge number that would make a meaningful difference without somehow getting rid of the Second Amendment.
Which isn’t happening short of an actual violent revolution.
Sure, you could have better education systems, and reverse the militarisation of the police. That would have, in the medium term, some impact. But as long as there are that many guns around there will be mass shootings, and as long as the Americans cling to their ludicrous constitution as though it was God-given there will be guns.
I’m not surprised most people aren’t even making the effort anymore.
It is sadly a vicious circle - chances are high that if a U.S. police officer turns up at a situation, stops someone in certain neighbourhoods for example, that the person has a gun held legally or illegally so perhaps understandably they apply maximum force of numbers and firepower which escalates the situation and increases the chances of it going nuclear.
This creates an inbuilt reaction on both “sides” where the police just start to assume they need heavy force to anything and the innocent target or perpetrator knows they are going to use maximum force and so react in a not calm way and ends up a giant shitshow.
The only way to stop it would be to magic away all the guns in the US so the police know that one Bobby can turn up and deal with an incident and everyone stays calmer but that isn’t going to happen so nothing will change - if you are a police officer you are unlikely to take a risk with your life and just talk sternly with whoever you have apprehended.
The contrast when you watch UK police docs where they go into situations without guns is amazing because the chances are slim that someone is going to pull a gun on them.
Not sure even that would work - the problem is cultural.
Consider countries like Israel or Switzerland - due to compulsory military service, distribution of firearms combined with personal weapon ownership, anyone the police meets there is very likely trained in using a fully automatic weapon and probably has access to one.
Which is *beyond* the levels of “threat” you see in the US.
Yet both countries have gun violence orders of magnitude less than the U.S.
Police violence and deaths from police action are also vastly less.
Israel a slightly unfortunate example in light of the last week, of course.
It’s worth remembering that in 1997 there was actually a positive reason to vote Tory: the economy was doing well and had been for a while. What positive reason will there be to vote Tory in 2024? All they will have is “It could be even worse”. I am not sure how that fares against “It should be so much better”.
The government are now at the stage where they take shit for absolutely everything they do or do not do - it's wonderfully enjoyable. I zoomed into a parish council meeting recently and those elderly tories who could still form semi-lucid sentences were fucking livid about a cut to rural bus services. It's the council that's doing it but Sunak and Hunt were subject to a 10 minute hatefest over it - from tories.
At the close to of the meeting I played A las Barricadas on my phone to remind them all why we are there: the violent destruction of the state.
Re the awful murder in the States, I’m somewhat intrigued by the BBC reporting stressing that the victim was a black man. First time I heard this I assumed the assailants/police were white. But no. There is no racial element to the story, so why no just report that a man has been murdered? We will never end racism while some persist in flagging race when there is no need.
Not really soluble rationally. USA murder in itself is not a UK story. Deaths in the hands of police in USA probably generally not either. The UK media are a little puzzled as to how to handle it. Why exactly is this a big UK story? It wouldn't be if it was Philippines or Paraguay.
One structural difficulty in the UK is the selective use of race based stories. It is much easier to run stories about how victims of murder are disproportionately of ethnic group X than the same about perpetrators being ethnic group X. The data isn't available.
BTW to look at coverage and rhetoric you would assume that most UK murder victims are women. You would be wrong.
This really isn't a thread to get your teeth into unless you are a lefty and want to vent your spleen against the Tories. It's more of a ...is the Pope catholic type of thread. Frankly I will laugh my head off if Starmer doesn't get a majority and has to rely on the loony nationalists and possibly a few Lib Dems.....recipe for disaster and infighting. What fun.
Careful what you wish for. A Starmer government depending on Lib Dem and SNP support is much more liable to be radical in ways that Tories really won't like.
Meanwhile, that Peter Kellner has come up with a neat swingometer for next time;
These numbers won't last until the election. The rich old scrotes who are sulking right now will traipse back to the Tories in their droves come polling day, and there'll be a Hung Parliament. Count on it.
It would be remarkable if a general election really resulted in the 20%+ lead suggested by those polls. It hasn't happened for more than 90 years.
But the idea that the Tories are going to be saved from a 20-point deficit by huge numbers of voters magically returning to them on polling day seems very implausible to me.
Indeed. Theres plenty of talk of the possibility of at least blunting the loss, but it's far from clear why that would happen either than 'well it could hsppen'.
Opinium and Techne both reassign Don’t Knows by previous voting record. They have slightly lower Labour leads, but still pretty chunky ones. Don’t Knows won’t save the Tories. They need to win back voters now going Labour and LibDem. I am assuming that they’ll hoover up Reform votes when the time comes.
The government are now at the stage where they take shit for absolutely everything they do or do not do - it's wonderfully enjoyable. I zoomed into a parish council meeting recently and those elderly tories who could still form semi-lucid sentences were fucking livid about a cut to rural bus services. It's the council that's doing it but Sunak and Hunt were subject to a 10 minute hatefest over it - from tories.
At the close to of the meeting I played A las Barricadas on my phone to remind them all why we are there: the violent destruction of the state.
My suspicion is that the real driver behind hatred like this, behind the government getting absolutely hammered in the polls, is energy prices.
The other day in the pub I overheard the barmaid telling a regular that she hasn't had her thermostat over 15 all winter, and is still faced with energy bills of £260 a month, up from £80 a month last year. Almost completely spontaneously, other people in the pub started chiming in with their own bills and how shocked they were. The atmosphere was bordering on mutinous.
They say a society is only three meals away from revolution, I suspect it's only one good cold snap away, too. Imagine paying as much as a quarter of your monthly take home pay to heat your house to an unsatisfactorily cold level. Being cold and miserable all the time, and paying through the nose to be unhappy, too.
This government will continue to get hammered in the polls for as long as the energy crisis continues. Everything else is noise.
Absolutely right. And it isn't just the crisis, it's the suspicion that the Government intends it to be the new normal - something that has been discussed openly in international circles. They should be busting a gut to sort this out - visibly fighting for every cheap kwh, and promising that next year the situation will be transformed. And they aren't.
These numbers won't last until the election. The rich old scrotes who are sulking right now will traipse back to the Tories in their droves come polling day, and there'll be a Hung Parliament. Count on it.
What kind of hung parliament? The Tories will find it hard to entice even the DUP to back them so are pretty screwed unless they are only a few away from majority, but Labour's options are much wider depending on their numbers and some are more difficult options than others.
It’s worth remembering that in 1997 there was actually a positive reason to vote Tory: the economy was doing well and had been for a while. What positive reason will there be to vote Tory in 2024? All they will have is “It could be even worse”. I am not sure how that fares against “It should be so much better”.
Yes. The difference from 1997 in the next election will be that while there are overwhelming moral and competence reasons for not voting Tory, there are no solution/vision/ideological based reasons for voting for anyone else (unless you are SNP in Scotland of course).
It’s worth remembering that in 1997 there was actually a positive reason to vote Tory: the economy was doing well and had been for a while. What positive reason will there be to vote Tory in 2024? All they will have is “It could be even worse”. I am not sure how that fares against “It should be so much better”.
How about "Remember how fucking awful it was under Gordon "I saved the world"Brown, and how he fucked the UK economy.
The knee-takers had a point. (tbh I've not watched the video at your link)
ETA this cannot be allowed to continue, but no doubt it will. American policing is even more dysfunctional than ours.
American police - somehow making the British police look good.
Not an easy feat, one would think, yet here we are.
Well, U.K. police kill about 10 people a year - custody deaths, police shootings etc.
The US - shootings are over 1,000 and their custody death rate is several thousand more.
5 times the population - so the US police kill people at 100 times the rate the U.K. police does.
Who on earth could have imagined kitting out villains with machine guns and police with military level kit would lead to such a thing? Just bad luck really.
It’s worth remembering that in 1997 there was actually a positive reason to vote Tory: the economy was doing well and had been for a while. What positive reason will there be to vote Tory in 2024? All they will have is “It could be even worse”. I am not sure how that fares against “It should be so much better”.
How about "Remember how fucking awful it was under Gordon "I saved the world"Brown, and how he fucked the UK economy.
It’s worth remembering that in 1997 there was actually a positive reason to vote Tory: the economy was doing well and had been for a while. What positive reason will there be to vote Tory in 2024? All they will have is “It could be even worse”. I am not sure how that fares against “It should be so much better”.
Negative voting is what dominates our political system, especially in England. Most people vote to keep the other lot out rather than to put their lot in. The Tories don't need to look at all attractive or competent as an option, they just need to convince a large enough fraction of the majority of the electorate that is (a) quite or very old and (b) sympathetic to at least some elements of right-wing policy that Labour would be even worse.
If you grow up in a culture where figures like Rambo and Robocop are mainstream, many suspects may be armed, and about 50% of the population feels that guns are fundamental moral good, you're going to act rather differently from police in Europe. Maybe only extremely tough scrutiny of what police are doing can slightly counter this.
The government are now at the stage where they take shit for absolutely everything they do or do not do - it's wonderfully enjoyable. I zoomed into a parish council meeting recently and those elderly tories who could still form semi-lucid sentences were fucking livid about a cut to rural bus services. It's the council that's doing it but Sunak and Hunt were subject to a 10 minute hatefest over it - from tories.
At the close to of the meeting I played A las Barricadas on my phone to remind them all why we are there: the violent destruction of the state.
My suspicion is that the real driver behind hatred like this, behind the government getting absolutely hammered in the polls, is energy prices.
The other day in the pub I overheard the barmaid telling a regular that she hasn't had her thermostat over 15 all winter, and is still faced with energy bills of £260 a month, up from £80 a month last year. Almost completely spontaneously, other people in the pub started chiming in with their own bills and how shocked they were. The atmosphere was bordering on mutinous.
They say a society is only three meals away from revolution, I suspect it's only one good cold snap away, too. Imagine paying as much as a quarter of your monthly take home pay to heat your house to an unsatisfactorily cold level. Being cold and miserable all the time, and paying through the nose to be unhappy, too.
This government will continue to get hammered in the polls for as long as the energy crisis continues. Everything else is noise.
Quite right, and as Dura Aces example shows it will result in them blamed for things not their fault to boot.
Exactly. From a psychological point of view, it's transference. So long as you have a house you can't afford to heat, and food you can't afford to eat (have you seen the price of chicken breast double over the last year? etc), your basic needs aren't being met according to the old Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Which is why I'm always amused at people who think the trans debate / other culture war stuff is a vote winner.
A house you can heat and food you can afford to eat. At the moment, a heck of a lot of people have neither of those things. Until those problems are fixed, the government of the day is going to be hated.
Ms. (Mr.?) Algakirk, indeed, the media's content with the idea of women as victims and men as perpetrators. But most victims of violence are men. This is not reflected in the way reporting happens.
Likewise, while female victims at Rotherham were the clear majority, over 100 boys were abused and are almost never mentioned. This view of men as potential perpetrators but not victims, and women as potential victims but not perpetrators, is deeply unhealthy.
The lunatic 'believe her' slogan, dismembering the notion of people being innocent until proven guilty (provided they're male and therefore deemed inherently less trustworthy than a female accuser...) was a perfect example of this madness.
It’s worth remembering that in 1997 there was actually a positive reason to vote Tory: the economy was doing well and had been for a while. What positive reason will there be to vote Tory in 2024? All they will have is “It could be even worse”. I am not sure how that fares against “It should be so much better”.
How about "Remember how fucking awful it was under Gordon "I saved the world"Brown, and how he fucked the UK economy.
Not a single word of that ‘reason’ is positive. Trying to invoke fear of a government 13 years in the past doesn’t really inspire confidence.
Mr. kle4, if we have a hung Parliament with Labour the largest party then on both a moral and numerical level it's hard to see a Conservative coalition occurring.
It’s worth remembering that in 1997 there was actually a positive reason to vote Tory: the economy was doing well and had been for a while. What positive reason will there be to vote Tory in 2024? All they will have is “It could be even worse”. I am not sure how that fares against “It should be so much better”.
They will have to go full anti woke and blow up the trans debate and division even further. It is their Obi-Wan Kenobi. It won't stop a Labour majority but worth in the region of 2-5% and stop the full on wipeout they deserve.
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
Snag is, there aren’t a huge number that would make a meaningful difference without somehow getting rid of the Second Amendment.
Which isn’t happening short of an actual violent revolution.
Sure, you could have better education systems, and reverse the militarisation of the police. That would have, in the medium term, some impact. But as long as there are that many guns around there will be mass shootings, and as long as the Americans cling to their ludicrous constitution as though it was God-given there will be guns.
I’m not surprised most people aren’t even making the effort anymore.
It is sadly a vicious circle - chances are high that if a U.S. police officer turns up at a situation, stops someone in certain neighbourhoods for example, that the person has a gun held legally or illegally so perhaps understandably they apply maximum force of numbers and firepower which escalates the situation and increases the chances of it going nuclear.
This creates an inbuilt reaction on both “sides” where the police just start to assume they need heavy force to anything and the innocent target or perpetrator knows they are going to use maximum force and so react in a not calm way and ends up a giant shitshow.
The only way to stop it would be to magic away all the guns in the US so the police know that one Bobby can turn up and deal with an incident and everyone stays calmer but that isn’t going to happen so nothing will change - if you are a police officer you are unlikely to take a risk with your life and just talk sternly with whoever you have apprehended.
The contrast when you watch UK police docs where they go into situations without guns is amazing because the chances are slim that someone is going to pull a gun on them.
Not sure even that would work - the problem is cultural.
Consider countries like Israel or Switzerland - due to compulsory military service, distribution of firearms combined with personal weapon ownership, anyone the police meets there is very likely trained in using a fully automatic weapon and probably has access to one.
Which is *beyond* the levels of “threat” you see in the US.
Yet both countries have gun violence orders of magnitude less than the U.S.
Police violence and deaths from police action are also vastly less.
Absolutely agree it’s cultural - a mix of a gun culture and a historic huge racial divide between largely white authorities v the black population that knocks what happened in the UK into a cocked hat.
Switzerland does of course have national service and they keep their rifle at home however they don’t keep ammunition at home and speaking to my Swiss friends when I lived there the training doesn’t seem to have been much more than CCF so the general population aren’t all trained marine commandos. You do get a lot of domestic shootings there though with non-military guns.
Israel the guns are there against a very defined “enemy” so again a big cultural difference.
Given the starting incompetence of most American criminals with firearms, simply knowing how to aim puts you in a different category.
In both countries, the barrier to a North Hollywood bank robbery style event is much much lower than the US. Yet it is much, much rarer. Let alone the mass murder shootings - yes, we have the sad case in Israel at the moment. But given the levels of hate, and the levels of access to weapons it is still vastly rarer than the US.
It’s worth remembering that in 1997 there was actually a positive reason to vote Tory: the economy was doing well and had been for a while. What positive reason will there be to vote Tory in 2024? All they will have is “It could be even worse”. I am not sure how that fares against “It should be so much better”.
How about "Remember how fucking awful it was under Gordon "I saved the world"Brown, and how he fucked the UK economy.
Oh come on, you cannot be serious.
When I was growing my dad used to joke about the 'tory government' stock response, where no matter what was asked the then Labour government would divert to saying how what we should be talking about was the previous Tory government.
There was truth to it - Brown even attempted to use it occasionally in 2010. It didn't work because that was 13 years prior.
The Tories made ample use of the same argument in the years since 2010. But it too has been 13 years.
When things are shit telling people it would be worse like some body or party from near on a decade and a half ago will have limited effect. It's not something they can hinge a campaign on.
They need to offer something too. And they don't have anything.
Morning all! Admittedly, I don’t get out at all nowadays; no sitting in the pub listening to the conversation. However, reading round, I don’t get the impression that it’s just the total bog that has been made of the economy, but the general cesspit which is today’s Conservative Party which is putting people off.
These numbers won't last until the election. The rich old scrotes who are sulking right now will traipse back to the Tories in their droves come polling day, and there'll be a Hung Parliament. Count on it.
What kind of hung parliament? The Tories will find it hard to entice even the DUP to back them so are pretty screwed unless they are only a few away from majority, but Labour's options are much wider depending on their numbers and some are more difficult options than others.
At this stage I expect Labour as largest party, which necessarily implies a change of Government. The chances of the Tories getting back in after a single Labour term are, however, very high indeed. Labour won't countenance electoral reform and without that they and the wider Left are extremely vulnerable. They'll quickly start being blamed for all the nation's ills once it becomes obvious to the voters that they've nothing to offer but yet more austerity, and public services in general and the clapped out hospitals in particular therefore continue to deteriorate.
Once it becomes obvious there's no choice of economic policy available to the electorate then politics will completely degenerate into a Yank-style culture war. There's only one side that's going to win from that and it's not the one based in the more fashionable boroughs of North London.
The knee-takers had a point. (tbh I've not watched the video at your link)
ETA this cannot be allowed to continue, but no doubt it will. American policing is even more dysfunctional than ours.
Perhaps the fact that there is no racial angle here, the police officers and victim being of like race, will allow a sharp focus on police violence as police violence.
Maybe it is time for federal standards for police training.
this incident would have been worldwide news for week if Nichols has been white.
It would be remarkable if a general election really resulted in the 20%+ lead suggested by those polls. It hasn't happened for more than 90 years.
But the idea that the Tories are going to be saved from a 20-point deficit by huge numbers of voters magically returning to them on polling day seems very implausible to me.
Indeed. Theres plenty of talk of the possibility of at least blunting the loss, but it's far from clear why that would happen either than 'well it could hsppen'.
Opinium and Techne both reassign Don’t Knows by previous voting record. They have slightly lower Labour leads, but still pretty chunky ones. Don’t Knows won’t save the Tories. They need to win back voters now going Labour and LibDem. I am assuming that they’ll hoover up Reform votes when the time comes.
The tribal vote for both main parties is something like 25%
The Tories may not lose from that group to others, so much as cause them to stay at home. See 97.
One thing that may actually cause change is if Starmer manages to get a swing back (ha!) in the Red Wall. Will Labour actually try and do something there, economically? Labour lost out there, previously, from neglect. Levelling Up?
It’s worth remembering that in 1997 there was actually a positive reason to vote Tory: the economy was doing well and had been for a while. What positive reason will there be to vote Tory in 2024? All they will have is “It could be even worse”. I am not sure how that fares against “It should be so much better”.
How about "Remember how fucking awful it was under Gordon "I saved the world"Brown, and how he fucked the UK economy.
It’s worth remembering that in 1997 there was actually a positive reason to vote Tory: the economy was doing well and had been for a while. What positive reason will there be to vote Tory in 2024? All they will have is “It could be even worse”. I am not sure how that fares against “It should be so much better”.
How about "Remember how fucking awful it was under Gordon "I saved the world"Brown, and how he fucked the UK economy.
Except that didn't happen.
Doesn't really matter if it's in the mythology. A bit Jim Callaghan never having said "Crisis what crisis?" or Maggie never having said that adults on buses were failures.
The main reason that Gordo's failings don't matter is that Liz Truss is perceived to have done even worse, even more rapidly.
It’s worth remembering that in 1997 there was actually a positive reason to vote Tory: the economy was doing well and had been for a while. What positive reason will there be to vote Tory in 2024? All they will have is “It could be even worse”. I am not sure how that fares against “It should be so much better”.
How about "Remember how fucking awful it was under Gordon "I saved the world"Brown, and how he fucked the UK economy.
Except that didn't happen.
Doesn't really matter if it's in the mythology. A bit Jim Callaghan never having said "Crisis what crisis?" or Maggie never having said that adults on buses were failures.
The main reason that Gordo's failings don't matter is that Liz Truss is perceived to have done even worse, even more rapidly.
He did actually say 'we not only saved the world.'
It was a slip of the tongue, but one that was both unfortunate and revealing.
If he hadn't convened everyone for a bailout, I'm not sure who would.
Whether or not he saved the world in the long-term is rather a different point, as the opportunity was not taken to change the way the role of investment banks in global financial flows operates.
The knee-takers had a point. (tbh I've not watched the video at your link)
ETA this cannot be allowed to continue, but no doubt it will. American policing is even more dysfunctional than ours.
Perhaps the fact that there is no racial angle here, the police officers and victim being of like race, will allow a sharp focus on police violence as police violence.
Maybe it is time for federal standards for police training.
this incident would have been worldwide news for week if Nichols has been white.
No. There have been many, many instance of the American police killing white people under dubious circumstances and, quite frankly, going gangster on them (as above)
IIRC the majority of “problematic” deaths in the US from the police are of white people. Because they are the biggest population group. The *rate* at which this happens to black people is much higher than their share of the population, though
At Chequers, however, Levido was optimistic. Mid-term polls, he said, were not evidence of voting intention but a judgment about the present. He gave ministers the example of 2013, when the Tories were lagging in the polls but won an unexpected majority two years later.
In 2013 the Lib Dems were also lagging in the polls, and it proved spot on.
Mr. kle4, if we have a hung Parliament with Labour the largest party then on both a moral and numerical level it's hard to see a Conservative coalition occurring.
More than hard, we can absolutely rule it out, except possibly for some agreement with whatever is left of the DUP if the Tories get very close, and even then, once bitten....
This really isn't a thread to get your teeth into unless you are a lefty and want to vent your spleen against the Tories. It's more of a ...is the Pope catholic type of thread. Frankly I will laugh my head off if Starmer doesn't get a majority and has to rely on the loony nationalists and possibly a few Lib Dems.....recipe for disaster and infighting. What fun.
Careful what you wish for. A Starmer government depending on Lib Dem and SNP support is much more liable to be radical in ways that Tories really won't like.
Meanwhile, that Peter Kellner has come up with a neat swingometer for next time;
The article and the swingometer is a real cut out and keep item. Thanks for drawing attention to it. It is going to get interesting for anoraks in a few months time.
The knee-takers had a point. (tbh I've not watched the video at your link)
ETA this cannot be allowed to continue, but no doubt it will. American policing is even more dysfunctional than ours.
Perhaps the fact that there is no racial angle here, the police officers and victim being of like race, will allow a sharp focus on police violence as police violence.
Maybe it is time for federal standards for police training.
this incident would have been worldwide news for week if Nichols has been white.
No. There have been many, many instance of the American police killing white people under dubious circumstances and, quite frankly, going gangster on them (as above)
IIRC the majority of “problematic” deaths in the US from the police are of white people. Because they are the biggest population group. The *rate* at which this happens to black people is much higher than their share of the population, though
That's usually white on white though. 5 black police officers beating a white person to death in Tennessee? The Klan would be on it immediately.
The knee-takers had a point. (tbh I've not watched the video at your link)
ETA this cannot be allowed to continue, but no doubt it will. American policing is even more dysfunctional than ours.
Perhaps the fact that there is no racial angle here, the police officers and victim being of like race, will allow a sharp focus on police violence as police violence.
Maybe it is time for federal standards for police training.
this incident would have been worldwide news for week if Nichols has been white.
No. There have been many, many instance of the American police killing white people under dubious circumstances and, quite frankly, going gangster on them (as above)
IIRC the majority of “problematic” deaths in the US from the police are of white people. Because they are the biggest population group. The *rate* at which this happens to black people is much higher than their share of the population, though
I think you'd struggle to find many examples of the US police killing a white man as brutally and with as little reason as in this case.
This really isn't a thread to get your teeth into unless you are a lefty and want to vent your spleen against the Tories. It's more of a ...is the Pope catholic type of thread. Frankly I will laugh my head off if Starmer doesn't get a majority and has to rely on the loony nationalists and possibly a few Lib Dems.....recipe for disaster and infighting. What fun.
Careful what you wish for. A Starmer government depending on Lib Dem and SNP support is much more liable to be radical in ways that Tories really won't like.
Meanwhile, that Peter Kellner has come up with a neat swingometer for next time;
The article and the swingometer is a real cut out and keep item. Thanks for drawing attention to it. It is going to get interesting for anoraks in a few months time.
The key takeway is how high the hurdle for a Labour majority is - and even higher for a working one.
Of course, I imagine Kellner has assumed another SNP sweep in Scotland, which does look like a near certainty right now. If that did change, he'd need to re-work all his sums...
The other takeaway is how much difference a co-ordinated effort with the LibDems would make - something Labour won't like but ought to be concentrating their minds.
How the heck would someone who has been a judge and assistant AG for 20 years not know the answer to this question? Even I knew the answer, and I'm pretty sure it'd be relatively easy to just waffle a guess. Kennedy then grilled Bjelkengren on whether she knew about “purposivism” — an approach to interpreting statutory law that “maintains that the legal effect of a statute should be determined by the objective purpose of the statute,” according to Legal Theory Blog.
Bjelkengren did not know what “purposivism” was either.
“In my 12 years as an assistant attorney general, in my nine years as a judge, I was not faced with that precise question,” she said. “We are the highest trial court in Washington state, so I’m frequently faced with issues that I’m not familiar with, and I thoroughly review the law, I research, and apply the law to the facts presented to me.”
Re the awful murder in the States, I’m somewhat intrigued by the BBC reporting stressing that the victim was a black man. First time I heard this I assumed the assailants/police were white. But no. There is no racial element to the story, so why no just report that a man has been murdered? We will never end racism while some persist in flagging race when there is no need.
Not really soluble rationally. USA murder in itself is not a UK story. Deaths in the hands of police in USA probably generally not either. The UK media are a little puzzled as to how to handle it. Why exactly is this a big UK story? It wouldn't be if it was Philippines or Paraguay.
[snip!]
The UK media is puzzled because Paraguay and the Phillipines are the sort of countries you expect police murders and beatings to happen in. Neither is a 1st world country.
The Good ol' US of A (yee-ha!) on the other hand, is supposed to be the leading light of the west and the beacon of freedom and hope - the modern day Jerusalem. Instead it appears to be politically polarised, verging on highly corrupt with untouchable cops (qualified immunity) who can simply stop you on the road and take all your money (civil asset forfeiture) and if you get tossed into prison they usually just throw the key away even if it is obvious that you are innocent. The place is awash with guns and a large percentage of the population has a opiate addiction.
Even Hollywood would struggle to come up with that as a dystopian concept!
You often hear politicians in the USA say this isn’t who we are when these dreadful cases come to light .
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
Snag is, there aren’t a huge number that would make a meaningful difference without somehow getting rid of the Second Amendment.
Which isn’t happening short of an actual violent revolution.
Sure, you could have better education systems, and reverse the militarisation of the police. That would have, in the medium term, some impact. But as long as there are that many guns around there will be mass shootings, and as long as the Americans cling to their ludicrous constitution as though it was God-given there will be guns.
I’m not surprised most people aren’t even making the effort anymore.
It is sadly a vicious circle - chances are high that if a U.S. police officer turns up at a situation, stops someone in certain neighbourhoods for example, that the person has a gun held legally or illegally so perhaps understandably they apply maximum force of numbers and firepower which escalates the situation and increases the chances of it going nuclear.
This creates an inbuilt reaction on both “sides” where the police just start to assume they need heavy force to anything and the innocent target or perpetrator knows they are going to use maximum force and so react in a not calm way and ends up a giant shitshow.
The only way to stop it would be to magic away all the guns in the US so the police know that one Bobby can turn up and deal with an incident and everyone stays calmer but that isn’t going to happen so nothing will change - if you are a police officer you are unlikely to take a risk with your life and just talk sternly with whoever you have apprehended.
The contrast when you watch UK police docs where they go into situations without guns is amazing because the chances are slim that someone is going to pull a gun on them.
Not sure even that would work - the problem is cultural.
Consider countries like Israel or Switzerland - due to compulsory military service, distribution of firearms combined with personal weapon ownership, anyone the police meets there is very likely trained in using a fully automatic weapon and probably has access to one.
Which is *beyond* the levels of “threat” you see in the US.
Yet both countries have gun violence orders of magnitude less than the U.S.
Police violence and deaths from police action are also vastly less.
Absolutely agree it’s cultural - a mix of a gun culture and a historic huge racial divide between largely white authorities v the black population that knocks what happened in the UK into a cocked hat.
Switzerland does of course have national service and they keep their rifle at home however they don’t keep ammunition at home and speaking to my Swiss friends when I lived there the training doesn’t seem to have been much more than CCF so the general population aren’t all trained marine commandos. You do get a lot of domestic shootings there though with non-military guns.
Israel the guns are there against a very defined “enemy” so again a big cultural difference.
Gun homicides in Switzerland are tiny compared to the US. They are significantly lower than Canada as well.
In 2021 Switzerland had 8 gun related homicides. That is 0.09 per 100,000 of population.
By comparison: The US had over 20,000 - 6 per 100,000 Canada had 297 - 0.67 per 100,000
The biggest issue in Switzerland is accidental firearms deaths and suicides but even there it was around 200 in Switzerland compared to 29,000 in the US in 2021.
The knee-takers had a point. (tbh I've not watched the video at your link)
ETA this cannot be allowed to continue, but no doubt it will. American policing is even more dysfunctional than ours.
Perhaps the fact that there is no racial angle here, the police officers and victim being of like race, will allow a sharp focus on police violence as police violence.
Maybe it is time for federal standards for police training.
this incident would have been worldwide news for week if Nichols has been white.
No. There have been many, many instance of the American police killing white people under dubious circumstances and, quite frankly, going gangster on them (as above)
IIRC the majority of “problematic” deaths in the US from the police are of white people. Because they are the biggest population group. The *rate* at which this happens to black people is much higher than their share of the population, though
I think you'd struggle to find many examples of the US police killing a white man as brutally and with as little reason as in this case.
There’s plenty on YouTube. Doing this to white homeless people seems to be a thing. It does happen an order of magnitude more often to blank people, per head of population.
This really isn't a thread to get your teeth into unless you are a lefty and want to vent your spleen against the Tories. It's more of a ...is the Pope catholic type of thread. Frankly I will laugh my head off if Starmer doesn't get a majority and has to rely on the loony nationalists and possibly a few Lib Dems.....recipe for disaster and infighting. What fun.
Careful what you wish for. A Starmer government depending on Lib Dem and SNP support is much more liable to be radical in ways that Tories really won't like.
Meanwhile, that Peter Kellner has come up with a neat swingometer for next time;
The article and the swingometer is a real cut out and keep item. Thanks for drawing attention to it. It is going to get interesting for anoraks in a few months time.
The key takeway is how high the hurdle for a Labour majority is - and even higher for a working one.
Of course, I imagine Kellner has assumed another SNP sweep in Scotland, which does look like a near certainty right now. If that did change, he'd need to re-work all his sums...
The other takeaway is how much difference a co-ordinated effort with the LibDems would make - something Labour won't like but ought to be concentrating their minds.
As long as 50 seats in Scotland and 20 seats in NI are more-or-less out of play for the main battlefield, there's quite a big Hung Parliament window.
I find that the gun and violence aspect of the US is always extremely depressing. A constitutional quirk helping to undo a country with so much potential.
This really isn't a thread to get your teeth into unless you are a lefty and want to vent your spleen against the Tories. It's more of a ...is the Pope catholic type of thread. Frankly I will laugh my head off if Starmer doesn't get a majority and has to rely on the loony nationalists and possibly a few Lib Dems.....recipe for disaster and infighting. What fun.
Careful what you wish for. A Starmer government depending on Lib Dem and SNP support is much more liable to be radical in ways that Tories really won't like.
Meanwhile, that Peter Kellner has come up with a neat swingometer for next time;
The article and the swingometer is a real cut out and keep item. Thanks for drawing attention to it. It is going to get interesting for anoraks in a few months time.
The key takeway is how high the hurdle for a Labour majority is - and even higher for a working one.
Of course, I imagine Kellner has assumed another SNP sweep in Scotland, which does look like a near certainty right now. If that did change, he'd need to re-work all his sums...
The other takeaway is how much difference a co-ordinated effort with the LibDems would make - something Labour won't like but ought to be concentrating their minds.
As long as 50 seats in Scotland and 20 seats in NI are more-or-less out of play for the main battlefield, there's quite a big Hung Parliament window.
I cannot believe there will be much change in Scotland either. Maybe a few labour gains and Tory losses. Those predicting the demise of the SNP/Sturgeon over the trans prison debacle, well, it’s just wishful thinking.
I do think quite a lot of people will be puzzled as to why the killing of a man by police in Tennessee is the biggest story on the BBC. You also have to ask whether this would even be a story if he was any race but black.
The Tyre Nichols video (black on black) is, to me, worse than the George Floyd video (white on black). In the Nichols video the police seem absolutely intent on slowly beating this guy into a terrible coma without a care if he dies. Then they are recorded exulting in what they did - “did ya see my haymakers?!l”
Ugh
In the Floyd video the cop at least looked like he was attempting restraint (albeit with a negligence tantamount to murder)
The worst video of all is that weeping pleading white guy getting shot (by white cops) as he begs for his life. An outright execution. I forget the poor victim’s name probably because I want to forget the whole thing. One of the worst videos of intimate human violence I have ever witnessed
The Tyre Nichols video (black on black) is, to me, worse than the George Floyd video (white on black). In the Nichols video the police seem absolutely intent on slowly beating this guy into a terrible coma without a care if he dies. Then they are recorded exulting in what they did - “did ya see my haymakers?!l”
Ugh
In the Floyd video the cop at least looked like he was attempting restraint (albeit with a negligence tantamount to murder)
The worst video of all is that weeping pleading white guy getting shot (by white cops) as he begs for his life. An outright execution. I forget the poor victim’s name probably because I want to forget the whole thing. One of the worst videos of intimate human violence I have ever witnessed
The one thing that America ( and Europe ) never reckons one with nowadays is that the vast amounts of violence - rather than sex - in modern mainstream cinema and television might not be a Good Thing. It's got confused with arguments about censorship in other areas, such as on sex or cultural values, such that you never even hear the argument raised now. There seems to a vastly simplistic and faintly bizarre modern consensus, across the left and right, that this phenomenon is good, healthy and free.
Labour are ahead but I think Deltapoll with Labour just 14% ahead is more realistic. RefUK on just 4% with them too, much lower than other pollsters
If you add the 4% Ref to the Tories that's down to a 10% Labour lead and if you add maximum MoE to Cons and subtract maximum MoE from Labour we are in Conservative majority territory.
Comments
I could very well be wrong, but I doubt that those ships are going anywhere near Ukraine for a while - and I doubt Turkey would allow them through the Bosphorus (and reasonably so). What do the Ukrainians gain by moving them from Rosyth, aside from short training cruises?
ETA this cannot be allowed to continue, but no doubt it will. American policing is even more dysfunctional than ours.
Maybe it is time for federal standards for police training.
"Policing in the United States is conducted by "around 18,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, all with their own rules". Every state has its own nomenclature for agencies, and their powers, responsibilities and funding vary from state to state." (1)
From a podcast I was listening to, many of these only have three or four officers. And once you have been a police officer in one force, it is relatively easy to move to a different agency with little extra training.
Rationalising this, and giving them similar training and powers, makes massive sense. But would *really* annoy some people. Perhaps the right people...
(1); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_States
But the idea that the Tories are going to be saved from a 20-point deficit by huge numbers of voters magically returning to them on polling day seems very implausible to me.
The “defund the police” agitators are on the streets again though, several cities are expecting violent protests.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/01/27/us-edge-graphic-video-tyre-nichols-assault-released/
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9PigDK9nPfU
When it’s simply buying shares in existing companies though, it’s (as you said originally) simply taking future profits out of the country. When those profits come from government subsidies, it’s doubly bad.
The only way we get away from that cycle though, is to stop importing so much (mostly cheap tat) from abroad. Buy British.
Today, there’s a story of investors looking to pick up the assets of BritishVolt. Mostly foreign companies chasing the subsidy that comes with the factory.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/01/27/collapsed-battery-maker-britishvolt-triggers-bidding-war/
The easiest way to address that would be much tougher regulation of some of the utilities. Industry is a harder one.
All of that, though, is somewhat orthogonal to the government debt issue.
Violence and gun murders are now normalized , this de-sensitization of the population leads to the de-humanizing of people .
And yet in the land where more people have died as a result of gun violence than the combined total of all the wars the country has been involved in all we hear is platitudes wheeled out and candle light vigils.
In the last week we’ve seen mass shootings and a person beaten to death by the police .
I know there are many Americans who are appalled at what’s happening to their country but there’s no sign of any concrete policies being enacted to combat this .
Flybe: Regional carrier ceases trading and cancels all flights
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64436500
Which can mean only one thing.
The editor has finally flipped.
Which isn’t happening short of an actual violent revolution.
Sure, you could have better education systems, and reverse the militarisation of the police. That would have, in the medium term, some impact. But as long as there are that many guns around there will be mass shootings, and as long as the Americans cling to their ludicrous constitution as though it was God-given there will be guns.
I’m not surprised most people aren’t even making the effort anymore.
At the close to of the meeting I played A las Barricadas on my phone to remind them all why we are there: the violent destruction of the state.
The other day in the pub I overheard the barmaid telling a regular that she hasn't had her thermostat over 15 all winter, and is still faced with energy bills of £260 a month, up from £80 a month last year. Almost completely spontaneously, other people in the pub started chiming in with their own bills and how shocked they were. The atmosphere was bordering on mutinous.
They say a society is only three meals away from revolution, I suspect it's only one good cold snap away, too. Imagine paying as much as a quarter of your monthly take home pay to heat your house to an unsatisfactorily cold level. Being cold and miserable all the time, and paying through the nose to be unhappy, too.
This government will continue to get hammered in the polls for as long as the energy crisis continues. Everything else is noise.
This creates an inbuilt reaction on both “sides” where the police just start to assume they need heavy force to anything and the innocent target or perpetrator knows they are going to use maximum force and so react in a not calm way and ends up a giant shitshow.
The only way to stop it would be to magic away all the guns in the US so the police know that one Bobby can turn up and deal with an incident and everyone stays calmer but that isn’t going to happen so nothing will change - if you are a police officer you are unlikely to take a risk with your life and just talk sternly with whoever you have apprehended.
The contrast when you watch UK police docs where they go into situations without guns is amazing because the chances are slim that someone is going to pull a gun on them.
There is no racial element to the story, so why no just report that a man has been murdered?
We will never end racism while some persist in flagging race when there is no need.
Short of Corbyn returning, or a major catastrophe being averted by Rishi in a superman costume, this will play to its close.
Frankly I will laugh my head off if Starmer doesn't get a majority and has to rely on the loony nationalists and possibly a few Lib Dems.....recipe for disaster and infighting. What fun.
This was his only chance to be PM. It will only be for 2 years, but it's something.
I'm not a fan of his politics, but what an unenviable job he has at the moment.
Not an easy feat, one would think, yet here we are.
Consider countries like Israel or Switzerland - due to compulsory military service, distribution of firearms combined with personal weapon ownership, anyone the police meets there is very likely trained in using a fully automatic weapon and probably has access to one.
Which is *beyond* the levels of “threat” you see in the US.
Yet both countries have gun violence orders of magnitude less than the U.S.
Police violence and deaths from police action are also vastly less.
Meanwhile, that Peter Kellner has come up with a neat swingometer for next time;
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-next-general-election-will-be-labours-to-lose
Switzerland does of course have national service and they keep their rifle at home however they don’t keep ammunition at home and speaking to my Swiss friends when I lived there the training doesn’t seem to have been much more than CCF so the general population aren’t all trained marine commandos. You do get a lot of domestic shootings there though with non-military guns.
Israel the guns are there against a very defined “enemy” so again a big cultural difference.
When I was living in East London, the local newsagent had a rack of DVDs - straight to video stuff. The glory of being an American street thug, essentially. He told me the young men from the estate adored this stuff - to them, it’s aspirational. Meanwhile they ride push bikes because their drug dealing doesn’t make that much money. And they can’t get / afford an Uzi.
The Glory! Of! The! Deed!
Very D'Annunzio
The UK media are a little puzzled as to how to handle it. Why exactly is this a big UK story? It wouldn't be if it was Philippines or Paraguay.
One structural difficulty in the UK is the selective use of race based stories. It is much easier to run stories about how victims of murder are disproportionately of ethnic group X than the same about perpetrators being ethnic group X. The data isn't available.
BTW to look at coverage and rhetoric you would assume that most UK murder victims are women. You would be wrong.
As that chart shows even if Sunak cuts the Labour lead to 9% we are in hung parliament territory
The US - shootings are over 1,000 and their custody death rate is several thousand more.
5 times the population - so the US police kill people at 100 times the rate the U.K. police does.
A house you can heat and food you can afford to eat. At the moment, a heck of a lot of people have neither of those things. Until those problems are fixed, the government of the day is going to be hated.
Ms. (Mr.?) Algakirk, indeed, the media's content with the idea of women as victims and men as perpetrators. But most victims of violence are men. This is not reflected in the way reporting happens.
Likewise, while female victims at Rotherham were the clear majority, over 100 boys were abused and are almost never mentioned. This view of men as potential perpetrators but not victims, and women as potential victims but not perpetrators, is deeply unhealthy.
The lunatic 'believe her' slogan, dismembering the notion of people being innocent until proven guilty (provided they're male and therefore deemed inherently less trustworthy than a female accuser...) was a perfect example of this madness.
In both countries, the barrier to a North Hollywood bank robbery style event is much much lower than the US. Yet it is much, much rarer. Let alone the mass murder shootings - yes, we have the sad case in Israel at the moment. But given the levels of hate, and the levels of access to weapons it is still vastly rarer than the US.
When I was growing my dad used to joke about the 'tory government' stock response, where no matter what was asked the then Labour government would divert to saying how what we should be talking about was the previous Tory government.
There was truth to it - Brown even attempted to use it occasionally in 2010. It didn't work because that was 13 years prior.
The Tories made ample use of the same argument in the years since 2010. But it too has been 13 years.
When things are shit telling people it would be worse like some body or party from near on a decade and a half ago will have limited effect. It's not something they can hinge a campaign on.
They need to offer something too. And they don't have anything.
Admittedly, I don’t get out at all nowadays; no sitting in the pub listening to the conversation.
However, reading round, I don’t get the impression that it’s just the total bog that has been made of the economy, but the general cesspit which is today’s Conservative Party which is putting people off.
Once it becomes obvious there's no choice of economic policy available to the electorate then politics will completely degenerate into a Yank-style culture war. There's only one side that's going to win from that and it's not the one based in the more fashionable boroughs of North London.
The Tories may not lose from that group to others, so much as cause them to stay at home. See 97.
One thing that may actually cause change is if Starmer manages to get a swing back (ha!) in the Red Wall. Will Labour actually try and do something there, economically? Labour lost out there, previously, from neglect. Levelling Up?
The main reason that Gordo's failings don't matter is that Liz Truss is perceived to have done even worse, even more rapidly.
It was a slip of the tongue, but one that was both unfortunate and revealing.
https://youtu.be/7iPaiylUYW0
Whether or not he saved the world in the long-term is rather a different point, as the opportunity was not taken to change the way the role of investment banks in global financial flows operates.
IIRC the majority of “problematic” deaths in the US from the police are of white people. Because they are the biggest population group. The *rate* at which this happens to black people is much higher than their share of the population, though
Of course, I imagine Kellner has assumed another SNP sweep in Scotland, which does look like a near certainty right now. If that did change, he'd need to re-work all his sums...
The other takeaway is how much difference a co-ordinated effort with the LibDems would make - something Labour won't like but ought to be concentrating their minds.
Kennedy then grilled Bjelkengren on whether she knew about “purposivism” — an approach to interpreting statutory law that “maintains that the legal effect of a statute should be determined by the objective purpose of the statute,” according to Legal Theory Blog.
Bjelkengren did not know what “purposivism” was either.
“In my 12 years as an assistant attorney general, in my nine years as a judge, I was not faced with that precise question,” she said. “We are the highest trial court in Washington state, so I’m frequently faced with issues that I’m not familiar with, and I thoroughly review the law, I research, and apply the law to the facts presented to me.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-kennedy-stumps-biden-judicial-nominee-basic-questions-constitution-rcna67703
The Good ol' US of A (yee-ha!) on the other hand, is supposed to be the leading light of the west and the beacon of freedom and hope - the modern day Jerusalem. Instead it appears to be politically polarised, verging on highly corrupt with untouchable cops (qualified immunity) who can simply stop you on the road and take all your money (civil asset forfeiture) and if you get tossed into prison they usually just throw the key away even if it is obvious that you are innocent. The place is awash with guns and a large percentage of the population has a opiate addiction.
Even Hollywood would struggle to come up with that as a dystopian concept!
In 2021 Switzerland had 8 gun related homicides. That is 0.09 per 100,000 of population.
By comparison:
The US had over 20,000 - 6 per 100,000
Canada had 297 - 0.67 per 100,000
The biggest issue in Switzerland is accidental firearms deaths and suicides but even there it was around 200 in Switzerland compared to 29,000 in the US in 2021.
Ugh
In the Floyd video the cop at least looked like he was attempting restraint (albeit with a negligence tantamount to murder)
The worst video of all is that weeping pleading white guy getting shot (by white cops) as he begs for his life. An outright execution. I forget the poor victim’s name probably because I want to forget the whole thing. One of the worst videos of intimate human violence I have ever witnessed