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 am expecting a bit of a LAB comeback in Scotland. Maybe they get 10 to 15 seats. It might make all the difference for the overall majority!
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 “defund the police” movement is right, it seems, in their analysis that much US policing is unreformable & needs digging out by the roots and replacing wholesale. Their actual policies & marketing are mostly terrible of course (“defund the police” for a start is beyond parody) but that seems to be the fundamental ground truth.
US policing needs to be treated like the Royal Ulster Constabulary were in Northern Ireland: disbanded & replaced with a new force that may, in some cases, draw its employees from some of the original force, but whos funding and oversight are completely overhauled.
I doubt it will ever happen though, the US seems determined to choose the option of “more violence” whenever the opportunity for change is available.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
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.
Low gun crime is one of the areas the UK is genuinely close to world leading. Given what happens in the US is often a precursor of what happens in the UK, regular reminders of their complete and utter folly on this matter helps maintain the consensus that we don't want or need more guns here.
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
There's a scary lack of the guardrails that we're used to in Britain. They're wobbly enough here, but there's some residual sense of shame when police go too far. Or at least an understanding that a surface act of repentance is the required thing.
Some American cops seem to exult in this sort of thing, with no comeback. How the hell do you get that way, and how the hell do you push back on it?
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 “defund the police” movement is right, it seems, in their analysis that much US policing is unreformable & needs digging out by the roots and replacing wholesale. Their actual policies & marketing are mostly terrible of course (“defund the police” for a start is beyond parody) but that seems to be the fundamental ground truth.
US policing needs to be treated like the Royal Ulster Constabulary were in Northern Ireland: disbanded & replaced with a new force that may, in some cases, draw its employees from some of the original force, but whos funding and oversight are completely overhauled.
I doubt it will ever happen though, the US seems determined to choose the option of “more violence” whenever the opportunity for change is available.
School shooting? Answer - armed guards Another school shooting? Answer - arm the teachers.....
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
There's a scary lack of the guardrails that we're used to in Britain. They're wobbly enough here, but there's some residual sense of shame when police go too far. Or at least an understanding that a surface act of repentance is the required thing.
Some American cops seem to exult in this sort of thing, with no comeback. How the hell do you get that way, and how the hell do you push back on it?
Qualified Immunity. You make it almost impossible to prosecute cops for whatever they do on duty. Google it. US cops are little more than legalised bandits.
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
There's a scary lack of the guardrails that we're used to in Britain. They're wobbly enough here, but there's some residual sense of shame when police go too far. Or at least an understanding that a surface act of repentance is the required thing.
Some American cops seem to exult in this sort of thing, with no comeback. How the hell do you get that way, and how the hell do you push back on it?
The cop in the Daniel Shaver killing - obviously and visibly a cold blooded psychotic murderer, was not only acquitted, he got a lifelong pension for his “PTSD” acquired during the shooting
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
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.
I think there's a lot in that, but perhaps it is more complex.
I'd see Robocop and Rambo as the more recent version of culture-heroes (phrase borrowed from Asimov's Foundation Saga) such as Wyatt Earp and Frank Hamer, via perhaps the Lone Ranger. The Righteous Man Alone Imposing Justice.
But I wonder whom Robocop is a hero for - is it everyone or mainly focussed on Caucasian communities?
Is Robocop really a hero to young boys growing up in eg gangland, to people who's dad is going out to work as an enforcer for a prostitution ring? What about young black boys? Young Muslim boys?
I don't know.
I'd say that those stereotypes feed potential and actual violence amongst the types of people who keep guns in their house for "self-defence", or drive around with guns on display in their truck, or the community around Cody Wilson's "Defence Distributed", who named the first 3d-printed firearm he made in 2013 - "The Liberator".
On a remedy, I'd say that the USA culture is locked in on itself negatively in so many ways I can't count them.
Drawing a distant parallel, I've been reading into the imposition on the USA of institutionalised car-culture (as opposed to say public transport or walking), and it's difficult to see an escape for them.
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
It's possible, but it is not likely.
If it landed in your garden and contained that much plutonium, unless you have a garden as big as Johnson's ego I'm thinking your heirs might be the chief beneficiaries.
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 “defund the police” movement is right, it seems, in their analysis that much US policing is unreformable & needs digging out by the roots and replacing wholesale. Their actual policies & marketing are mostly terrible of course (“defund the police” for a start is beyond parody) but that seems to be the fundamental ground truth.
US policing needs to be treated like the Royal Ulster Constabulary were in Northern Ireland: disbanded & replaced with a new force that may, in some cases, draw its employees from some of the original force, but whos funding and oversight are completely overhauled.
I doubt it will ever happen though, the US seems determined to choose the option of “more violence” whenever the opportunity for change is available.
School shooting? Answer - armed guards Another school shooting? Answer - arm the teachers.....
This grimly acute video by Sacha Baron Cohen - his best work - covers this quite well.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
I do wish the media would emphasise a bit more the fact the USA is a foreign country and what happens there is every bit as “exotic” as in other distant English speaking countries, like Jamaica or Singapore.
It’s the conflating of US news with what happens here, and the lack of suitable distance, that contributes to us importing the wrong American ideas about culture wars and policy solutions. Our own police forces are deeply flawed in their own special British ways, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the Met in recent years.
We have enough of our own culture wars too: Brexit, trans rights, social class.
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
It's possible, but it is not likely.
I also read that as plutonium. Plenty of willing buyers, if you can find some gloves thick enough to pick it up.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
I do wish the media would emphasise a bit more the fact the USA is a foreign country and what happens there is every bit as “exotic” as in other distant English speaking countries, like Jamaica or Singapore.
It’s the conflating of US news with what happens here, and the lack of suitable distance, that contributes to us importing the wrong American ideas about culture wars and policy solutions. Our own police forces are deeply flawed in their own special British ways, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the Met in recent years.
We have enough of our own culture wars too: Brexit, trans rights, social class.
It's not the 20th century anymore. Many of us have friends and family who live all over the globe, and we can be in touch 24.7 if we choose to.
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
It's possible, but it is not likely.
I also read that as plutonium. Plenty of willing buyers, if you can find some gloves thick enough to pick it up.
Damn, so did I.
Platinum is more plausible but I'm still thinking it would make quite a bang.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
I do wish the media would emphasise a bit more the fact the USA is a foreign country and what happens there is every bit as “exotic” as in other distant English speaking countries, like Jamaica or Singapore.
It’s the conflating of US news with what happens here, and the lack of suitable distance, that contributes to us importing the wrong American ideas about culture wars and policy solutions. Our own police forces are deeply flawed in their own special British ways, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the Met in recent years.
We have enough of our own culture wars too: Brexit, trans rights, social class.
Politics does not transfer well between countries, and the US political and cultural divide is not our political and cultural divide, even though some people act as if it were.
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
There's a scary lack of the guardrails that we're used to in Britain. They're wobbly enough here, but there's some residual sense of shame when police go too far. Or at least an understanding that a surface act of repentance is the required thing.
Some American cops seem to exult in this sort of thing, with no comeback. How the hell do you get that way, and how the hell do you push back on it?
Training, peer learning & a political environment that allow the police to get away with many, many abuses of power both small & large all combine in a toxic stew of malpractice.
Historically police forces have effectively blackmailed state lawmakers in various ways to preserve their own power & influence within the existing system & it’s very difficult to push through any kind of reform from the federal level, as policing is reserved to the states & federal law has little impact.
So the US is stuck in this godawful equilibrium where police forces are free to rain violence on the populations they supposedly “protect” whilst extracting enormous amounts of treasure from them in salaries & pensions via the implied threat of violence against state & city lawmakers who have nominal control of them but no actual power.
In the UK, the Home Office was able to drive through the Police & Criminial Evidence Act back in the 80s in response to police abuses of the 1970s & earlier. It seems impossible for a US state government to push through any law that constrains their own police forces, which tells you that the balance of power in the US is completely one-sided.
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.
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.
America has a very high tolerance for violence. It probably has its origins in how the country was created - violent insurrection against Britain and violent displacement of the native population, plus violent oppression of African slaves in the South (not to mention violent suppression of labour unions in the North). It's probably the least appealing aspect of its culture. There are TV programmes (eg the Sopranos) that my wife and I couldn't watch because we found the level of violence impossible to stomach.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
I do wish the media would emphasise a bit more the fact the USA is a foreign country and what happens there is every bit as “exotic” as in other distant English speaking countries, like Jamaica or Singapore.
It’s the conflating of US news with what happens here, and the lack of suitable distance, that contributes to us importing the wrong American ideas about culture wars and policy solutions. Our own police forces are deeply flawed in their own special British ways, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the Met in recent years.
We have enough of our own culture wars too: Brexit, trans rights, social class.
It's not the 20th century anymore. Many of us have friends and family who live all over the globe, and we can be in touch 24.7 if we choose to.
So? What about policemen killing people in all the other countries in the world? Should they not be headline news?
TimS guide to the geography of national culture wars:
USA: gun rights, abortion, race, climate change, Mexicans, Covid masks UK: social class, trans rights, small boats, British empire, Brexit Western Europe: Islam, Islam, Islam. Australia: climate change, trans rights Russia: whether to stop at Ukraine or march on Warsaw next (plus whatever they last watched on Tucker Carson) Iran: hijabs
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.
Even more disturbing is the fact that the US is not an especially violent country (although, very violent compared to the UK or most of the Continent).
Rates of homicide across Latin America and the Caribbean are way higher than in the US.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
I do wish the media would emphasise a bit more the fact the USA is a foreign country and what happens there is every bit as “exotic” as in other distant English speaking countries, like Jamaica or Singapore.
It’s the conflating of US news with what happens here, and the lack of suitable distance, that contributes to us importing the wrong American ideas about culture wars and policy solutions. Our own police forces are deeply flawed in their own special British ways, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the Met in recent years.
We have enough of our own culture wars too: Brexit, trans rights, social class.
It's not the 20th century anymore. Many of us have friends and family who live all over the globe, and we can be in touch 24.7 if we choose to.
What lucky guy said. We understate the exoticism of the US because we’ve all consumed too much Hollywood and Disney channel.
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns (in a Western context). So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
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.
Even more disturbing is the fact that the US is not an especially violent country (although, very violent compared to the UK or most of the Continent).
Rates of homicide across Latin America and the Caribbean are way higher than in the US.
That's true, but what I find disturbing in the US's case, and as people have mentioned, is the glorification of violence near the centre of an otherwise often quite progressed culture. The latin american phenomenon seems more tangential to the culture, but more physically central. I notice how often latin american gangsters and drug-runners ape US hip-hop culture, for instance.
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 am expecting a bit of a LAB comeback in Scotland. Maybe they get 10 to 15 seats. It might make all the difference for the overall majority!
The Tories doing well there in 2017 may have made the difference in terms of making a majority coalition with the DUP viable. So a recovery for Slab would be significant.
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.
Which one?
I’d guess the Sportsbike Network, or possibly the Rev Counter.
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 am expecting a bit of a LAB comeback in Scotland. Maybe they get 10 to 15 seats. It might make all the difference for the overall majority!
The Tories doing well there in 2017 may have made the difference in terms of making a majority coalition with the DUP viable. So a recovery for Slab would be significant.
I'd rather see Labour get a small overall majority, than have to depend on the SNP.
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.
Even more disturbing is the fact that the US is not an especially violent country (although, very violent compared to the UK or most of the Continent).
Rates of homicide across Latin America and the Caribbean are way higher than in the US.
That's true, but what I find disturbing in the US's case, and as people have mentioned, is the glorification of violence near the centre of an otherwise often quite progressed culture. The latin american phenomenon seems more tangential to the culture, but more physically central. I notice how often latin american gangsters and drug-runners ape US hip-hop culture, for instance.
Mexican narco music glorifies the exploits of drug lords.
But, yes, US culture does glorify lethal violence, as a manly way of settling disputes.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
I do wish the media would emphasise a bit more the fact the USA is a foreign country and what happens there is every bit as “exotic” as in other distant English speaking countries, like Jamaica or Singapore.
It’s the conflating of US news with what happens here, and the lack of suitable distance, that contributes to us importing the wrong American ideas about culture wars and policy solutions. Our own police forces are deeply flawed in their own special British ways, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the Met in recent years.
We have enough of our own culture wars too: Brexit, trans rights, social class.
It's not the 20th century anymore. Many of us have friends and family who live all over the globe, and we can be in touch 24.7 if we choose to.
So? What about policemen killing people in all the other countries in the world? Should they not be headline news?
Indeed. It's not that the UK media having a greater focus on the USA than other places is necessarily always wrong - it is the most powerful nation in earth and culturally we are very interlinked with them, we are more interested in them than other places - but the kind of live update minutiae focus on what are not, sadly, very uncommon events for the USA, is still strangely outsized.
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 am expecting a bit of a LAB comeback in Scotland. Maybe they get 10 to 15 seats. It might make all the difference for the overall majority!
The Tories doing well there in 2017 may have made the difference in terms of making a majority coalition with the DUP viable. So a recovery for Slab would be significant.
I'd rather see Labour get a small overall majority, than have to depend on the SNP.
Tories picking and choosing their preferred flavour of Labour gov is most excellent.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
It's funny. I thought Oxbridge types were meant to be a bit sniffy about the US. Growing up in the 90s it was one reason I liked the BBC. It seemed less Americanised than, say, MTV.
A narrative taking hold for Keir here, he's found a story and he's running with it.
It's just a new gloss on regional assemblies though isn't it? Which all careerist politicians have always been for, and which neatly dovetails with EU federalism. Regional assemblies come up again and again and again, despite people voting against them whenever they get the opportunity, gussied up as a solution to whatever the buzzword of the day is.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
I do wish the media would emphasise a bit more the fact the USA is a foreign country and what happens there is every bit as “exotic” as in other distant English speaking countries, like Jamaica or Singapore.
It’s the conflating of US news with what happens here, and the lack of suitable distance, that contributes to us importing the wrong American ideas about culture wars and policy solutions. Our own police forces are deeply flawed in their own special British ways, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the Met in recent years.
We have enough of our own culture wars too: Brexit, trans rights, social class.
Weaponising US stories allows some campaign groups to generate narratives around the same issues allegedly existing here when in reality it is somewhere around one or two orders of magnitude less significant.
There is a very good reason why a lot of the Black Lives Matter stuff was around American narratives borrowed for the UK, and the statistics being very creative.
Even stuff as simple as "deaths in police custody" tends to use a single number aggregated over 30 years (1990 to date) shouted so loudly as to silence awkward questions.
I think that tendency is partly an artefact of our quite partisan politics, but then we have benefits of such a system too - and generally I still support Churchill's view on those questions. I'll take partisanship over corrupt corporatism.
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.
America has a very high tolerance for violence. It probably has its origins in how the country was created - violent insurrection against Britain and violent displacement of the native population, plus violent oppression of African slaves in the South (not to mention violent suppression of labour unions in the North). It's probably the least appealing aspect of its culture. There are TV programmes (eg the Sopranos) that my wife and I couldn't watch because we found the level of violence impossible to stomach.
Even I had to give up watching Oz, it was so relentlessly brutal and grim.
There's only one book I've ever had to stop reading, because it was so awful. The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang. It made the SS look good, by comparison to the Japanese Army.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
I do wish the media would emphasise a bit more the fact the USA is a foreign country and what happens there is every bit as “exotic” as in other distant English speaking countries, like Jamaica or Singapore.
It’s the conflating of US news with what happens here, and the lack of suitable distance, that contributes to us importing the wrong American ideas about culture wars and policy solutions. Our own police forces are deeply flawed in their own special British ways, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the Met in recent years.
We have enough of our own culture wars too: Brexit, trans rights, social class.
Politics does not transfer well between countries, and the US political and cultural divide is not our political and cultural divide, even though some people act as if it were.
There are similarities and transferences. But it can be easy to spot when people are suggesting direct applicability and make no allowances for differences. Its very apparent when people here use US talking points on police killings.
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
Generally in my experience if you ask the question “why is the USA weird about issue X compared to any other comparable country in the same situation?” the answer always seems to boil down to slavery & the subsequent treatment of the black population once you drill down far enough.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
I do wish the media would emphasise a bit more the fact the USA is a foreign country and what happens there is every bit as “exotic” as in other distant English speaking countries, like Jamaica or Singapore.
It’s the conflating of US news with what happens here, and the lack of suitable distance, that contributes to us importing the wrong American ideas about culture wars and policy solutions. Our own police forces are deeply flawed in their own special British ways, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the Met in recent years.
We have enough of our own culture wars too: Brexit, trans rights, social class.
Blame various parties going into fawning mode whenever there’s a whiff of ‘special relationship’ and bewailing the absence of such the rest of the time. I’m old enough to remember the contortions various people on here went into about how marvellous Trump’s visit with Brenda was for the UK. They have no doubt self-medicated with a MiB style memory wipe.
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
I think countries just develop their own particular cultural problems and these become memetic over time. Gun violence is deeply rooted in American culture now.
Like we had for many years a particular problem with football hooliganism, the French with rioting, Italy with the mafia or Mexico with cartels. Hard to root out once it’s established.
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
Generally in my experience if you ask the question “why is the USA weird about issue X compared to any other comparable country in the same situation?” the answer always seems to boil down to slavery & the subsequent treatment of the black population once you drill down far enough.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
Maybe.
OTOH, there have been periods (and not too long ago) when Europe has been a horrifically brutal and violent place. Ditto South East Asia (which like Europe, currently enjoys very low homicide rates).
My guess is that one day, war, torture, ethnic cleansing will return to Western Europe, because brutality is a part of human nature.
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 am expecting a bit of a LAB comeback in Scotland. Maybe they get 10 to 15 seats. It might make all the difference for the overall majority!
The Tories doing well there in 2017 may have made the difference in terms of making a majority coalition with the DUP viable. So a recovery for Slab would be significant.
I'd rather see Labour get a small overall majority, than have to depend on the SNP.
Tories picking and choosing their preferred flavour of Labour gov is most excellent.
The absolute best is if Lsbour is in thrall to the Nits. They would be fucked for decades after that.
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
There's a scary lack of the guardrails that we're used to in Britain. They're wobbly enough here, but there's some residual sense of shame when police go too far. Or at least an understanding that a surface act of repentance is the required thing.
Some American cops seem to exult in this sort of thing, with no comeback. How the hell do you get that way, and how the hell do you push back on it?
I'm sorry - guardrails? Is that a typo, or am I misunderstanding?
Is the key thing to separation of powers between police and politicians? In the USA they have the problem of elected police bosses - which problem we have started in a small way here with elected PCCs. My PCC is currently banned from driving for 6 months for getting 5 speeding offences within a single month, but is still - for some weird reason - in her job. Looking at the dates, the ban may just have finished.
(On a more positive note one thing that has always quite surprised me has been the resilience of judicial independence in former British colonies. I still don't wholly understand why.)
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
I think countries just develop their own particular cultural problems and these become memetic over time. Gun violence is deeply rooted in American culture now.
Like we had for many years a particular problem with football hooliganism, the French with rioting, Italy with the mafia or Mexico with cartels. Hard to root out once it’s established.
The level of violence in Sicily, for example, in the eighties, was on a par with Mexico, today.
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
There's a scary lack of the guardrails that we're used to in Britain. They're wobbly enough here, but there's some residual sense of shame when police go too far. Or at least an understanding that a surface act of repentance is the required thing.
Some American cops seem to exult in this sort of thing, with no comeback. How the hell do you get that way, and how the hell do you push back on it?
I'm sorry - guardrails? Is that a typo, or am I misunderstanding?
Is the key thing to separation of powers between police and politicians? In the USA they have the problem of elected police bosses - which problem we have started in a small way here with elected PCCs. My PCC is currently banned from driving for 6 months for getting 5 speeding offences within a single month, but is still - for some weird reason - in her job. Looking at the dates, the ban may just have finished.
(On a more positive note one thing that has always quite surprised me has been the resilience of judicial independence in former British colonies. I still don't wholly understand why.)
Pure anecdote. Just being for coffee with a New Zealand friend (North London professional, left of centre, has never voted Conservative) who just came back from NZ.
He says NZ is a complete mess. His comment was that crime has skyrocketed and that the gangs pretty much do what they want, including in prisons, which are now seen as under gangs' control.
The main thing he mentioned though was the view that Labour did a deal with the Māori interested groups which has now led to a separate health system for Māoris as well as the Māori language now taking precedence in pretty much every official and media announcement. Apparently the term apartheid is getting bandied around a lot.
Funnily enough, he did say that JA had gotten a lot of unwarranted abuse but he described NZ at the moment as a powder keg. Reckons the far-right will do very well.
A narrative taking hold for Keir here, he's found a story and he's running with it.
It's just a new gloss on regional assemblies though isn't it? Which all careerist politicians have always been for, and which neatly dovetails with EU federalism. Regional assemblies come up again and again and again, despite people voting against them whenever they get the opportunity, gussied up as a solution to whatever the buzzword of the day is.
Every major party has included in their manifestos for years about localism or empowering communities etc. Push comes to shove I think there's not enough votes in that to genuinely happen, and they have no reason to care enough, so you get some unnecessary body proposed or weird Whitehall driven funding and that's it.
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
Generally in my experience if you ask the question “why is the USA weird about issue X compared to any other comparable country in the same situation?” the answer always seems to boil down to slavery & the subsequent treatment of the black population once you drill down far enough.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
Maybe.
OTOH, there have been periods (and not too long ago) when Europe has been a horrifically brutal and violent place. Ditto South East Asia (which like Europe, currently enjoys very low homicide rates).
My guess is that one day, war, torture, ethnic cleansing will return to Western Europe, because brutality is a part of human nature.
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
Generally in my experience if you ask the question “why is the USA weird about issue X compared to any other comparable country in the same situation?” the answer always seems to boil down to slavery & the subsequent treatment of the black population once you drill down far enough.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
Maybe.
OTOH, there have been periods (and not too long ago) when Europe has been a horrifically brutal and violent place. Ditto South East Asia (which like Europe, currently enjoys very low homicide rates).
My guess is that one day, war, torture, ethnic cleansing will return to Western Europe, because brutality is a part of human nature.
My general view is not that brutality is an inherent part of it, and that people are naturally good. However I think humans are also easily swayed and can get locked into bad habits because of our capacity to endure terrible things and keep going. So it is depressingly easy to unlock our darker side and then repetition makes it harder to lock it back up.
On a more cheerful note, I had two of the finest cocktails of my life last night. In “Asia’s 14th best bar”
Yes, that is silver leaf on ice in the first one
Which bar is that?
Vesper in Sala Daeng, right by the old patpong red light district of ping pong notoriety. Which is now suddenly become a really cool gay hipster area. Who knew?
Pure anecdote. Just being for coffee with a New Zealand friend (North London professional, left of centre, has never voted Conservative) who just came back from NZ.
He says NZ is a complete mess. His comment was that crime has skyrocketed and that the gangs pretty much do what they want, including in prisons, which are now seen as under gangs' control.
The main thing he mentioned though was the view that Labour did a deal with the Māori interested groups which has now led to a separate health system for Māoris as well as the Māori language now taking precedence in pretty much every official and media announcement. Apparently the term apartheid is getting bandied around a lot.
Funnily enough, he did say that JA had gotten a lot of unwarranted abuse but he described NZ at the moment as a powder keg. Reckons the far-right will do very well.
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 am expecting a bit of a LAB comeback in Scotland. Maybe they get 10 to 15 seats. It might make all the difference for the overall majority!
The Tories doing well there in 2017 may have made the difference in terms of making a majority coalition with the DUP viable. So a recovery for Slab would be significant.
I'd rather see Labour get a small overall majority, than have to depend on the SNP.
Tories picking and choosing their preferred flavour of Labour gov is most excellent.
The absolute best is if Lsbour is in thrall to the Nits. They would be fucked for decades after that.
"In thrall to the Nits"? That's a bit of a headscratcher.
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
"OSLO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Norwegian study has found a "substantial" amount of metals and minerals ranging from copper to rare earth metals on the seabed of its extended continental shelf, authorities said on Friday in their first official estimates."
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
Generally in my experience if you ask the question “why is the USA weird about issue X compared to any other comparable country in the same situation?” the answer always seems to boil down to slavery & the subsequent treatment of the black population once you drill down far enough.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
Maybe.
OTOH, there have been periods (and not too long ago) when Europe has been a horrifically brutal and violent place. Ditto South East Asia (which like Europe, currently enjoys very low homicide rates).
My guess is that one day, war, torture, ethnic cleansing will return to Western Europe, because brutality is a part of human nature.
If the Tories were currently in the position Labour are in and I came on here and said Labour could still turn it around, I would be laughed off this site. Indeed I was prior to GE19 (not laughed off, just laughed at).
We think it impossible because it is Labour but with each passing day, the chances the Tories can fix this reduce.
On a more cheerful note, I had two of the finest cocktails of my life last night. In “Asia’s 14th best bar”
Yes, that is silver leaf on ice in the first one
Which bar is that?
Vesper in Sala Daeng, right by the old patpong red light district of ping pong notoriety. Which is now suddenly become a really cool gay hipster area. Who knew?
If it’s gay it will be of no interest to my son! Teenage granddaughters might know about it. Soon at any rate!
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
Generally in my experience if you ask the question “why is the USA weird about issue X compared to any other comparable country in the same situation?” the answer always seems to boil down to slavery & the subsequent treatment of the black population once you drill down far enough.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
Maybe.
OTOH, there have been periods (and not too long ago) when Europe has been a horrifically brutal and violent place. Ditto South East Asia (which like Europe, currently enjoys very low homicide rates).
My guess is that one day, war, torture, ethnic cleansing will return to Western Europe, because brutality is a part of human nature.
My general view is not that brutality is an inherent part of it, and that people are naturally good. However I think humans are also easily swayed and can get locked into bad habits because of our capacity to endure terrible things and keep going. So it is depressingly easy to unlock our darker side and then repetition makes it harder to lock it back up.
I think that more people enjoy violence than we like to imagine.
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
"OSLO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Norwegian study has found a "substantial" amount of metals and minerals ranging from copper to rare earth metals on the seabed of its extended continental shelf, authorities said on Friday in their first official estimates."
Pure anecdote. Just being for coffee with a New Zealand friend (North London professional, left of centre, has never voted Conservative) who just came back from NZ.
He says NZ is a complete mess. His comment was that crime has skyrocketed and that the gangs pretty much do what they want, including in prisons, which are now seen as under gangs' control.
The main thing he mentioned though was the view that Labour did a deal with the Māori interested groups which has now led to a separate health system for Māoris as well as the Māori language now taking precedence in pretty much every official and media announcement. Apparently the term apartheid is getting bandied around a lot.
Funnily enough, he did say that JA had gotten a lot of unwarranted abuse but he described NZ at the moment as a powder keg. Reckons the far-right will do very well.
That’s not what I hear from my NZ relations.
I got one NZ friend I used to play rugby with in London in the early 00s who paints a picture somewhat like @TheKitchenCabinet but he’s an individual somewhere to the right of Attilla the Hun (in fact we used to call him Kiwi Mussolini) and none of my other NZ friends and family back him up.
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.
Even more disturbing is the fact that the US is not an especially violent country (although, very violent compared to the UK or most of the Continent).
Rates of homicide across Latin America and the Caribbean are way higher than in the US.
But aren't these things generally correlated with human development? The US is a high income, high technology modern state. Surely it stands out among such peers.
One of the things I find hardest to understand about the US is the mixture of devout Christianity and casual attitudes to violence. Kids have it drilled into them that violence is never the answer. Is the US different? Sometimes you need to have it out with someone.
This latest wheeze if bullying the over50s back to work won’t help. They’ve f***ed things up for 13 years and now, true to form, they are stigmatising the core vote. This party needs a long spell in rehab.
If the Tories were currently in the position Labour are in and I came on here and said Labour could still turn it around, I would be laughed off this site. Indeed I was prior to GE19 (not laughed off, just laughed at).
We think it impossible because it is Labour but with each passing day, the chances the Tories can fix this reduce.
I think you are misremembering because I also incorrectly thought Labour might be able to do enough to win, though the lack of movement during the campaign showed I was wrong.
And it's not that its impossible because its labour, but they are a long long way back. It should be very hard to prevent the Tories from retaining power.
So whilst I am in the camp that its done and dusted, and the Tories cannot turn it around, there is at least some reason people might feel otherwise.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
It's funny. I thought Oxbridge types were meant to be a bit sniffy about the US. Growing up in the 90s it was one reason I liked the BBC. It seemed less Americanised than, say, MTV.
Look at the stories early on weekends. Invariably there will be American domestic stories.
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 am expecting a bit of a LAB comeback in Scotland. Maybe they get 10 to 15 seats. It might make all the difference for the overall majority!
The Tories doing well there in 2017 may have made the difference in terms of making a majority coalition with the DUP viable. So a recovery for Slab would be significant.
I'd rather see Labour get a small overall majority, than have to depend on the SNP.
Tories picking and choosing their preferred flavour of Labour gov is most excellent.
The absolute best is if Lsbour is in thrall to the Nits. They would be fucked for decades after that.
"In thrall to the Nits"? That's a bit of a headscratcher.
The S family have been in thrall to the Nits this last 2 weeks. So beware up there on Telegraph Hill, it’s close by. Just the Southern Rail canyon to cross.
That article about having books in the house being smug and middle class attracted a lot of comment and derision. But it comes from a long line of "Love something? This is why it is bad" school of journalism. Thread:
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.
Even more disturbing is the fact that the US is not an especially violent country (although, very violent compared to the UK or most of the Continent).
Rates of homicide across Latin America and the Caribbean are way higher than in the US.
But aren't these things generally correlated with human development? The US is a high income, high technology modern state. Surely it stands out among such peers.
One of the things I find hardest to understand about the US is the mixture of devout Christianity and casual attitudes to violence.
Jesus may have advised to turn the other cheek but it's not as though some devout Christians have ever found it hard to partake in violence let alone tolerate casual violence. Other devout followers are more concerned of course, and do what they can.
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
Generally in my experience if you ask the question “why is the USA weird about issue X compared to any other comparable country in the same situation?” the answer always seems to boil down to slavery & the subsequent treatment of the black population once you drill down far enough.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
Maybe.
OTOH, there have been periods (and not too long ago) when Europe has been a horrifically brutal and violent place. Ditto South East Asia (which like Europe, currently enjoys very low homicide rates).
My guess is that one day, war, torture, ethnic cleansing will return to Western Europe, because brutality is a part of human nature.
My general view is not that brutality is an inherent part of it, and that people are naturally good. However I think humans are also easily swayed and can get locked into bad habits because of our capacity to endure terrible things and keep going. So it is depressingly easy to unlock our darker side and then repetition makes it harder to lock it back up.
I think that more people enjoy violence than we like to imagine.
People are naturally good and bad, I think. The temptation to appeal to the bad within our current economic system is still just quite strong. The US is not only more violent but also more harshly individualistic than Western Europe ; as the wellspring of modern ultra-capitalism, that's not a coincidence, I think.
On the other hand, the metropolitan US is much more culturally tolerant than most of Europe. So people have learnt some wrong lessons on frontier individualism and violence, but some better ones on intercultural tolerance and understanding.
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
"OSLO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Norwegian study has found a "substantial" amount of metals and minerals ranging from copper to rare earth metals on the seabed of its extended continental shelf, authorities said on Friday in their first official estimates."
That's interesting.
I've only just caught up with De Beers latest seabed diamond mining (dredging?) off Namibia. Half a million carats a year from the latest £400 million ship, it seems.
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
"OSLO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Norwegian study has found a "substantial" amount of metals and minerals ranging from copper to rare earth metals on the seabed of its extended continental shelf, authorities said on Friday in their first official estimates."
Lucky devils, all that oil wasnt enough?
If it's going to be somewhere other than the UK, Norway's about the best place.
Pure anecdote. Just being for coffee with a New Zealand friend (North London professional, left of centre, has never voted Conservative) who just came back from NZ.
He says NZ is a complete mess. His comment was that crime has skyrocketed and that the gangs pretty much do what they want, including in prisons, which are now seen as under gangs' control.
The main thing he mentioned though was the view that Labour did a deal with the Māori interested groups which has now led to a separate health system for Māoris as well as the Māori language now taking precedence in pretty much every official and media announcement. Apparently the term apartheid is getting bandied around a lot.
Funnily enough, he did say that JA had gotten a lot of unwarranted abuse but he described NZ at the moment as a powder keg. Reckons the far-right will do very well.
That’s not what I hear from my NZ relations.
As I said, it's pure anecdote. It may be because he hasn't been back to NZ for a few years. I would imagine if you live there, you become acclimated with what's happening. But it struck me because he's generally left of centre and usually someone who's not prone to hyperbole
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
It's possible, but it is not likely.
If it landed in your garden and contained that much plutonium, unless you have a garden as big as Johnson's ego I'm thinking your heirs might be the chief beneficiaries.
If 30kg of anything remains after landing from space in your back garden it is going to have made quite a big hole.
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
Generally in my experience if you ask the question “why is the USA weird about issue X compared to any other comparable country in the same situation?” the answer always seems to boil down to slavery & the subsequent treatment of the black population once you drill down far enough.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
Maybe.
OTOH, there have been periods (and not too long ago) when Europe has been a horrifically brutal and violent place. Ditto South East Asia (which like Europe, currently enjoys very low homicide rates).
My guess is that one day, war, torture, ethnic cleansing will return to Western Europe, because brutality is a part of human nature.
My general view is not that brutality is an inherent part of it, and that people are naturally good. However I think humans are also easily swayed and can get locked into bad habits because of our capacity to endure terrible things and keep going. So it is depressingly easy to unlock our darker side and then repetition makes it harder to lock it back up.
I think that more people enjoy violence than we like to imagine.
That's probably true, and people enjoy the thrill of violent seeming competition very much, in other times they would enjoy blood sport.
But as a rule of thumb I think people being good holds up, as we are not perfect and an illicit excitement from seeing a fight is not to say the soul is forever tarnished. Our capacity for violence is obviously high, and we can be trained by culture to accept it, but I don't think it's the default state, if there is such a thing.
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
"OSLO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Norwegian study has found a "substantial" amount of metals and minerals ranging from copper to rare earth metals on the seabed of its extended continental shelf, authorities said on Friday in their first official estimates."
Lucky devils, all that oil wasnt enough?
If it's going to be somewhere other than the UK, Norway's about the best place.
For maximum aggro and handbags at dawn of course just off the coast of the Falklands would be the best place.
All Starmer has to do is lie low and say nuffin. To be fair, he's basically doing that. There's a growing feeling that 'It's their turn now.'
Short of Corbyn returning, or a major catastrophe being averted by Rishi in a superman costume, this will play to its close.
“All Starmer has to do is lie low and say nuffin.“
Wasn’t that Their idea in 1992 election? So I disagree.
You must always be aggressive in rebuttal, and work on your perceived weaknesses in eyes of voters. They need to turn Starmer into Uncle Starmer - man of the people. It’s easy, just work on his human side, where he grew up, etc. AND They need to get policy idea’s out there. Lots more policy idea’s. If some are nicked by Tories that just hurts the Tories.
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
It's possible, but it is not likely.
If it landed in your garden and contained that much plutonium, unless you have a garden as big as Johnson's ego I'm thinking your heirs might be the chief beneficiaries.
If 30kg of anything remains after landing from space in your back garden it is going to have made quite a big hole.
There is perhaps a "be careful what you wish for" element to that analogy. If you are a Tory (and not just a beneficiary of the current grifters) then the grifters and incompetents winning again may be just as destructive as a 30kg meteorite landing on your property.
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
Generally in my experience if you ask the question “why is the USA weird about issue X compared to any other comparable country in the same situation?” the answer always seems to boil down to slavery & the subsequent treatment of the black population once you drill down far enough.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
Maybe.
OTOH, there have been periods (and not too long ago) when Europe has been a horrifically brutal and violent place. Ditto South East Asia (which like Europe, currently enjoys very low homicide rates).
My guess is that one day, war, torture, ethnic cleansing will return to Western Europe, because brutality is a part of human nature.
My general view is not that brutality is an inherent part of it, and that people are naturally good. However I think humans are also easily swayed and can get locked into bad habits because of our capacity to endure terrible things and keep going. So it is depressingly easy to unlock our darker side and then repetition makes it harder to lock it back up.
I think that more people enjoy violence than we like to imagine.
That's probably true, and people enjoy the thrill of violent seeming competition very much, in other times they would enjoy blood sport.
But as a rule of thumb I think people being good holds up, as we are not perfect and an illicit excitement from seeing a fight is not to say the soul is forever tarnished. Our capacity for violence is obviously high, and we can be trained by culture to accept it, but I don't think it's the default state, if there is such a thing.
I'm just an optimist.
Interesting book called “why we fight” by war studies lecturer and Ukraine war blogger Mike Martin, which looks at this topic.
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.
And if a meteorite lands in your back garden and turns out to be 30kg of platinum you are a millionaire.
"OSLO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Norwegian study has found a "substantial" amount of metals and minerals ranging from copper to rare earth metals on the seabed of its extended continental shelf, authorities said on Friday in their first official estimates."
Lucky devils, all that oil wasnt enough?
If it's going to be somewhere other than the UK, Norway's about the best place.
For maximum aggro and handbags at dawn of course just off the coast of the Falklands would be the best place.
If we'd invested like the Chinese do and built some islands off the coast of Norway it could now be Scottish waters. Failed by Westminster again.
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.
Why is this a big British story? Because, as I may have ranted before, the Oxbridge educated news interns who get stuck with weekend night shifts slavishly follow American media, and it is a big story in America.
I do wish the media would emphasise a bit more the fact the USA is a foreign country and what happens there is every bit as “exotic” as in other distant English speaking countries, like Jamaica or Singapore.
It’s the conflating of US news with what happens here, and the lack of suitable distance, that contributes to us importing the wrong American ideas about culture wars and policy solutions. Our own police forces are deeply flawed in their own special British ways, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the Met in recent years.
We have enough of our own culture wars too: Brexit, trans rights, social class.
It's not the 20th century anymore. Many of us have friends and family who live all over the globe, and we can be in touch 24.7 if we choose to.
So? What about policemen killing people in all the other countries in the world? Should they not be headline news?
Oh to live in a world where all 8 billion of us all equal. That's not the world we live in. We live in a world where people being murdered in Jersualem is news and people being murdered in Jenin isn't.
FWIW I was at a black tie event last night, with a fair few wealthy Brits. One of the poshest, double-barrelled, very public school, became quite disruptive at various points of the evening bellowing "Boris Johnson is a C&nt", "The Tories are all a$$holes", and much else in like mood. It is not just that the Conservatives have lost support, they are actually despised and loathed. Swimming against that hatred is more or less impossible,
I think that Sunak slightly reminds me of the Czar or of Louis XVI, they themselves were not particularly brutal, indeed they were rather timid, even insipid figures, but they were heirs to regimes that were cruel and nasty...
Sunak in the tumbril? Perhaps unfairly, he does seem to be facing an appointment with Madame La Guillotine.
It certainly feels like the country will not be happy until the Tories are defeated, and quite possibly obliterated.
All Starmer has to do is lie low and say nuffin. To be fair, he's basically doing that. There's a growing feeling that 'It's their turn now.'
Short of Corbyn returning, or a major catastrophe being averted by Rishi in a superman costume, this will play to its close.
“All Starmer has to do is lie low and say nuffin.“
Wasn’t that Their idea in 1992 election? So I disagree.
You must always be aggressive in rebuttal, and work on your perceived weaknesses in eyes of voters. They need to turn Starmer into Uncle Starmer - man of the people. It’s easy, just work on his human side, where he grew up, etc. AND They need to get policy idea’s out there. Lots more policy idea’s. If some are nicked by Tories that just hurts the Tories.
"Wasn’t that Their idea in 1992 election? So I disagree."
The fabled triumphlist Festival Of Kinnock Stadium-Sized Campaign Event would suggest that wasn't quite the plan. Even without the impromptu "we're all right"ing.
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
Generally in my experience if you ask the question “why is the USA weird about issue X compared to any other comparable country in the same situation?” the answer always seems to boil down to slavery & the subsequent treatment of the black population once you drill down far enough.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
Maybe.
OTOH, there have been periods (and not too long ago) when Europe has been a horrifically brutal and violent place. Ditto South East Asia (which like Europe, currently enjoys very low homicide rates).
My guess is that one day, war, torture, ethnic cleansing will return to Western Europe, because brutality is a part of human nature.
My general view is not that brutality is an inherent part of it, and that people are naturally good. However I think humans are also easily swayed and can get locked into bad habits because of our capacity to endure terrible things and keep going. So it is depressingly easy to unlock our darker side and then repetition makes it harder to lock it back up.
I think that more people enjoy violence than we like to imagine.
That's probably true, and people enjoy the thrill of violent seeming competition very much, in other times they would enjoy blood sport.
But as a rule of thumb I think people being good holds up, as we are not perfect and an illicit excitement from seeing a fight is not to say the soul is forever tarnished. Our capacity for violence is obviously high, and we can be trained by culture to accept it, but I don't think it's the default state, if there is such a thing.
I'm just an optimist.
Interesting book called “why we fight” by war studies lecturer and Ukraine war blogger Mike Martin, which looks at this topic.
The perennially angry of Tunbridge Wells can vote for him at the next election.
FWIW I was at a black tie event last night, with a fair few wealthy Brits. One of the poshest, double-barrelled, very public school, became quite disruptive at various points of the evening bellowing "Boris Johnson is a C&nt", "The Tories are all a$$holes", and much else in like mood. It is not just that the Conservatives have lost support, they are actually despised and loathed. Swimming against that hatred is more or less impossible,
I think that Sunak slightly reminds me of the Czar or of Louis XVI, they themselves were not particularly brutal, indeed they were rather timid, even insipid figures, but they were heirs to regimes that were cruel and nasty...
Sunak in the tumbril?
Sunak = Louis XVI and Nadine Dorries = Marie Antoinette?
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.
The issue is everyone has access to that but Americans have unique levels of gun violence, even compared to other places with guns. So it simply cannot be the primary cause. People can argue there's too much of it, but I think the consensus had reasoning behind it given if we have less of that cinematic violence in say, Canada, it's not by that much given how influenced they are by American culture.
Generally in my experience if you ask the question “why is the USA weird about issue X compared to any other comparable country in the same situation?” the answer always seems to boil down to slavery & the subsequent treatment of the black population once you drill down far enough.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
Maybe.
OTOH, there have been periods (and not too long ago) when Europe has been a horrifically brutal and violent place. Ditto South East Asia (which like Europe, currently enjoys very low homicide rates).
My guess is that one day, war, torture, ethnic cleansing will return to Western Europe, because brutality is a part of human nature.
My general view is not that brutality is an inherent part of it, and that people are naturally good. However I think humans are also easily swayed and can get locked into bad habits because of our capacity to endure terrible things and keep going. So it is depressingly easy to unlock our darker side and then repetition makes it harder to lock it back up.
I think that more people enjoy violence than we like to imagine.
That's probably true, and people enjoy the thrill of violent seeming competition very much, in other times they would enjoy blood sport.
But as a rule of thumb I think people being good holds up, as we are not perfect and an illicit excitement from seeing a fight is not to say the soul is forever tarnished. Our capacity for violence is obviously high, and we can be trained by culture to accept it, but I don't think it's the default state, if there is such a thing.
I'm just an optimist.
Interesting book called “why we fight” by war studies lecturer and Ukraine war blogger Mike Martin, which looks at this topic.
The perennially angry of Tunbridge Wells can vote for him at the next election.
The party need to build on their recent local election success there in May to give him some momentum. I think he stands an outside chance.
Pure anecdote. Just being for coffee with a New Zealand friend (North London professional, left of centre, has never voted Conservative) who just came back from NZ.
He says NZ is a complete mess. His comment was that crime has skyrocketed and that the gangs pretty much do what they want, including in prisons, which are now seen as under gangs' control.
The main thing he mentioned though was the view that Labour did a deal with the Māori interested groups which has now led to a separate health system for Māoris as well as the Māori language now taking precedence in pretty much every official and media announcement. Apparently the term apartheid is getting bandied around a lot.
Funnily enough, he did say that JA had gotten a lot of unwarranted abuse but he described NZ at the moment as a powder keg. Reckons the far-right will do very well.
This was kind of believable until the last sentence. NZ doesn’t really have a “far right” in the European sense.
We do have NZF who are kind of Faragiste populists - albeit led by Winston Peters, who is Māori. They are currently out of Parliament but some are tipping their return. Not a huge amount of polling evidence for it.
FWIW I was at a black tie event last night, with a fair few wealthy Brits. One of the poshest, double-barrelled, very public school, became quite disruptive at various points of the evening bellowing "Boris Johnson is a C&nt", "The Tories are all a$$holes", and much else in like mood. It is not just that the Conservatives have lost support, they are actually despised and loathed. Swimming against that hatred is more or less impossible,
I think that Sunak slightly reminds me of the Czar or of Louis XVI, they themselves were not particularly brutal, indeed they were rather timid, even insipid figures, but they were heirs to regimes that were cruel and nasty...
Sunak in the tumbril? Perhaps unfairly, he does seem to be facing an appointment with Madame La Guillotine.
It certainly feels like the country will not be happy until the Tories are defeated, and quite possibly obliterated.
Sunak as Louis XVI is exquisite. Chapeau. Or, even, la tête.
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;
Unless the Tories win most seats even in a hung parliament Labour probably wouldn't need the nationalists. It would probably need the LDs though.
As that chart shows even if Sunak cuts the Labour lead to 9% we are in hung parliament territory
I don’t believe the chart. Labour lead 10% to be close to a majority, and 6% lead to be largest party?
Kelner is playing pro Labour politics setting such high bars.
Like me explain it like this. 2019? Mike Smithson says the biggest factor was Corbyn. That’s no longer the biggest factor for next time. The Tory’s havn’t got at Starmer and tackled him at all.
So what’s the biggest factor 2024? Brexit. All Tory’s lost to the party because of Brexit, so many on this forum and add Rod Stewart etc, no longer have to vote Tory to save us from Corbyn. The biggest factor 2024 is rage against the Party who inflicted Brexit on this huge set of Tory voters.
And that’s the player Kelner is leaving off his chart, how that plays into tactical votes.
Pure anecdote. Just being for coffee with a New Zealand friend (North London professional, left of centre, has never voted Conservative) who just came back from NZ.
He says NZ is a complete mess. His comment was that crime has skyrocketed and that the gangs pretty much do what they want, including in prisons, which are now seen as under gangs' control.
The main thing he mentioned though was the view that Labour did a deal with the Māori interested groups which has now led to a separate health system for Māoris as well as the Māori language now taking precedence in pretty much every official and media announcement. Apparently the term apartheid is getting bandied around a lot.
Funnily enough, he did say that JA had gotten a lot of unwarranted abuse but he described NZ at the moment as a powder keg. Reckons the far-right will do very well.
That’s not what I hear from my NZ relations.
As I said, it's pure anecdote. It may be because he hasn't been back to NZ for a few years. I would imagine if you live there, you become acclimated with what's happening. But it struck me because he's generally left of centre and usually someone who's not prone to hyperbole
Funny how all your anecdotes are about how terrible left-wing politicians are at running things.
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 am expecting a bit of a LAB comeback in Scotland. Maybe they get 10 to 15 seats. It might make all the difference for the overall majority!
The Tories doing well there in 2017 may have made the difference in terms of making a majority coalition with the DUP viable. So a recovery for Slab would be significant.
I'd rather see Labour get a small overall majority, than have to depend on the SNP.
Tories picking and choosing their preferred flavour of Labour gov is most excellent.
The absolute best is if Lsbour is in thrall to the Nits. They would be fucked for decades after that.
"In thrall to the Nits"? That's a bit of a headscratcher.
The S family have been in thrall to the Nits this last 2 weeks. So beware up there on Telegraph Hill, it’s close by. Just the Southern Rail canyon to cross.
In my long ago, working life, I spent happy hours helping to organise anti-nit campaigns!
I do wonder if Mr Starmer wins the next election, just how short his honeymoon will be.
As I see it, the Tories are going to give us either 1 - 1992, 2 - reverse-1992 (just a Labour win or Labour largest party), or 3 - 1997.
Looking at Mr Hunt's 5 goals:
I think that most of those are baked in, but that it will not be enough to convince and that there is not enough time.
1 will happen. 2 will be happening but only modestly. 3 will have turned the corner but no significant reduction. Some figures say it has already been happening for countries in Europe as %GDP. 4 has already started last year at the long wait end, but is being set back by strikes. 5 I can't call.
Listening to Rachel Reeves after the Hunt speech, she was playing the "All the Tory's fault, failed policies, highest ever tax burden, it needs a Decade of National Recovery" normal tune, skating entirely over COVID. And not answering *any* questions about policy or how she would fund it.
But I wonder if she and Mr Starmer have *any* room for manoeuvre at all? And how will that play out?
The one upside I can see is the John Major to Tony Blair one - Tories may have done some of the necessary retrenchment work, and RR / KS may get the benefit.
I wouldn't want to be owning an electric car at the next election, however. Owners are going to get soaked.
FWIW I was at a black tie event last night, with a fair few wealthy Brits. One of the poshest, double-barrelled, very public school, became quite disruptive at various points of the evening bellowing "Boris Johnson is a C&nt", "The Tories are all a$$holes", and much else in like mood. It is not just that the Conservatives have lost support, they are actually despised and loathed. Swimming against that hatred is more or less impossible,
I think that Sunak slightly reminds me of the Czar or of Louis XVI, they themselves were not particularly brutal, indeed they were rather timid, even insipid figures, but they were heirs to regimes that were cruel and nasty...
Sunak in the tumbril? Perhaps unfairly, he does seem to be facing an appointment with Madame La Guillotine.
It certainly feels like the country will not be happy until the Tories are defeated, and quite possibly obliterated.
Sentiments I share but that sounds like yet more arrogant public school toss-pottery.
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;
Unless the Tories win most seats even in a hung parliament Labour probably wouldn't need the nationalists. It would probably need the LDs though.
As that chart shows even if Sunak cuts the Labour lead to 9% we are in hung parliament territory
I don’t believe the chart. Labour lead 10% to be close to a majority, and 6% lead to be largest party?
Kelner is playing pro Labour politics setting such high bars.
Like me explain it like this. 2019? Mike Smithson says the biggest factor was Corbyn. That’s no longer the biggest factor for next time. The Tory’s havn’t got at Starmer and tackled him at all.
So what’s the biggest factor 2024? Brexit. All Tory’s lost to the party because of Brexit, so many on this forum and add Rod Stewart etc, no longer have to vote Tory to save us from Corbyn. The biggest factor 2024 is rage against the Party who inflicted Brexit on this huge set of Tory voters.
And that’s the player Kelner is leaving off his chart, how that plays into tactical votes.
The evidence was quite clear that Corbyn was a big factor last time. But I think hindsight is making him an even bigger factor this time, which is good for Labour.
By which I mean, at least some voted Tory in 2019 to get Brexit done (ie get it over with and move on). But now that Brexit is becoming deeply unfashionable, it suits people to tell themselves the reason they voted Conservative was fear of Corbyn. Especially since he’s also become much more deeply unfashionable since.
That means when people head to the voting booth next time they will be following a logic that says I voted Tory to keep Corbyn out, now Corbyn’s gone there’s no reason to vote for them again, so I’ll vote for the other lot.
Comments
The video is unspeakable. Be warned
https://youtu.be/VBUUx0jUKxc
US policing needs to be treated like the Royal Ulster Constabulary were in Northern Ireland: disbanded & replaced with a new force that may, in some cases, draw its employees from some of the original force, but whos funding and oversight are completely overhauled.
I doubt it will ever happen though, the US seems determined to choose the option of “more violence” whenever the opportunity for change is available.
Some American cops seem to exult in this sort of thing, with no comeback. How the hell do you get that way, and how the hell do you push back on it?
Another school shooting? Answer - arm the teachers.....
It's possible, but it is not likely.
I'd see Robocop and Rambo as the more recent version of culture-heroes (phrase borrowed from Asimov's Foundation Saga) such as Wyatt Earp and Frank Hamer, via perhaps the Lone Ranger. The Righteous Man Alone Imposing Justice.
But I wonder whom Robocop is a hero for - is it everyone or mainly focussed on Caucasian communities?
Is Robocop really a hero to young boys growing up in eg gangland, to people who's dad is going out to work as an enforcer for a prostitution ring? What about young black boys? Young Muslim boys?
I don't know.
I'd say that those stereotypes feed potential and actual violence amongst the types of people who keep guns in their house for "self-defence", or drive around with guns on display in their truck, or the community around Cody Wilson's "Defence Distributed", who named the first 3d-printed firearm he made in 2013 - "The Liberator".
On a remedy, I'd say that the USA culture is locked in on itself negatively in so many ways I can't count them.
Drawing a distant parallel, I've been reading into the imposition on the USA of institutionalised car-culture (as opposed to say public transport or walking), and it's difficult to see an escape for them.
Unspeakable horror. The milgram experiment being played out in real time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkXeMoBPSDk
It’s the conflating of US news with what happens here, and the lack of suitable distance, that contributes to us importing the wrong American ideas about culture wars and policy solutions. Our own police forces are deeply flawed in their own special British ways, as we’ve seen repeatedly with the Met in recent years.
We have enough of our own culture wars too: Brexit, trans rights, social class.
Yes, that is silver leaf on ice in the first one
Apparently one of them has had to flee to the Phillipines to escape the anger. Not good enough. Should be rotting in a himax jail til he expires
Platinum is more plausible but I'm still thinking it would make quite a bang.
Historically police forces have effectively blackmailed state lawmakers in various ways to preserve their own power & influence within the existing system & it’s very difficult to push through any kind of reform from the federal level, as policing is reserved to the states & federal law has little impact.
So the US is stuck in this godawful equilibrium where police forces are free to rain violence on the populations they supposedly “protect” whilst extracting enormous amounts of treasure from them in salaries & pensions via the implied threat of violence against state & city lawmakers who have nominal control of them but no actual power.
In the UK, the Home Office was able to drive through the Police & Criminial Evidence Act back in the 80s in response to police abuses of the 1970s & earlier. It seems impossible for a US state government to push through any law that constrains their own police forces, which tells you that the balance of power in the US is completely one-sided.
USA: gun rights, abortion, race, climate change, Mexicans, Covid masks
UK: social class, trans rights, small boats, British empire, Brexit
Western Europe: Islam, Islam, Islam.
Australia: climate change, trans rights
Russia: whether to stop at Ukraine or march on Warsaw next (plus whatever they last watched on Tucker Carson)
Iran: hijabs
Rates of homicide across Latin America and the Caribbean are way higher than in the US.
A narrative taking hold for Keir here, he's found a story and he's running with it.
But, yes, US culture does glorify lethal violence, as a manly way of settling disputes.
There is a very good reason why a lot of the Black Lives Matter stuff was around American narratives borrowed for the UK, and the statistics being very creative.
Even stuff as simple as "deaths in police custody" tends to use a single number aggregated over 30 years (1990 to date) shouted so loudly as to silence awkward questions.
I think that tendency is partly an artefact of our quite partisan politics, but then we have benefits of such a system too - and generally I still support Churchill's view on those questions. I'll take partisanship over corrupt corporatism.
There's only one book I've ever had to stop reading, because it was so awful. The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang. It made the SS look good, by comparison to the Japanese Army.
It’s the USA’s original sin that seems to infect everything. They could move past it, but that would mean admitting that the wrong-doing of the past continues to echo into the present & doing that seems to be impossible.
I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily any better at this - look at how difficult some people find admitting that the empire was not an unalloyed good thing for the grateful beneficiaries of our largesse! (ahem) But it seems to be worse in the US somehow.
Like we had for many years a particular problem with football hooliganism, the French with rioting, Italy with the mafia or Mexico with cartels. Hard to root out once it’s established.
OTOH, there have been periods (and not too long ago) when Europe has been a horrifically brutal and violent place. Ditto South East Asia (which like Europe, currently enjoys very low homicide rates).
My guess is that one day, war, torture, ethnic cleansing will return to Western Europe, because brutality is a part of human nature.
Is the key thing to separation of powers between police and politicians? In the USA they have the problem of elected police bosses - which problem we have started in a small way here with elected PCCs. My PCC is currently banned from driving for 6 months for getting 5 speeding offences within a single month, but is still - for some weird reason - in her job. Looking at the dates, the ban may just have finished.
(On a more positive note one thing that has always quite surprised me has been the resilience of judicial independence in former British colonies. I still don't wholly understand why.)
He says NZ is a complete mess. His comment was that crime has skyrocketed and that the gangs pretty much do what they want, including in prisons, which are now seen as under gangs' control.
The main thing he mentioned though was the view that Labour did a deal with the Māori interested groups which has now led to a separate health system for Māoris as well as the Māori language now taking precedence in pretty much every official and media announcement. Apparently the term apartheid is getting bandied around a lot.
Funnily enough, he did say that JA had gotten a lot of unwarranted abuse but he described NZ at the moment as a powder keg. Reckons the far-right will do very well.
My 4 for the day.
1.20 Cheltenham - Edwardstone
2.25 Cheltenham - Protektorat
2.40 Doncaster - The Wounded Knee
3.15 Doncaster - Tea For Free
"OSLO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Norwegian study has found a "substantial" amount of metals and minerals ranging from copper to rare earth metals on the seabed of its extended continental shelf, authorities said on Friday in their first official estimates."
If the Tories were currently in the position Labour are in and I came on here and said Labour could still turn it around, I would be laughed off this site. Indeed I was prior to GE19 (not laughed off, just laughed at).
We think it impossible because it is Labour but with each passing day, the chances the Tories can fix this reduce.
If it’s gay it will be of no interest to my son! Teenage granddaughters might know about it. Soon at any rate!
Hard to imagine these scenes at a cricket match.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI6htG4uigM
One of the things I find hardest to understand about the US is the mixture of devout Christianity and casual attitudes to violence. Kids have it drilled into them that violence is never the answer. Is the US different? Sometimes you need to have it out with someone.
And it's not that its impossible because its labour, but they are a long long way back. It should be very hard to prevent the Tories from retaining power.
So whilst I am in the camp that its done and dusted, and the Tories cannot turn it around, there is at least some reason people might feel otherwise.
That article about having books in the house being smug and middle class attracted a lot of comment and derision. But it comes from a long line of "Love something? This is why it is bad" school of journalism. Thread:
https://twitter.com/darrenjohnson66/status/1618914242840911872?s=46&t=l1bLK0JWnS-zXnB5B3XV5A
On the other hand, the metropolitan US is much more culturally tolerant than most of Europe. So people have learnt some wrong lessons on frontier individualism and violence, but some better ones on intercultural tolerance and understanding.
I've only just caught up with De Beers latest seabed diamond mining (dredging?) off Namibia. Half a million carats a year from the latest £400 million ship, it seems.
https://www.debeersgroup.com/media/company-news/2022/worlds-most-advanced-diamond-recovery-vessel-to-start-operating-in-namibia
But as a rule of thumb I think people being good holds up, as we are not perfect and an illicit excitement from seeing a fight is not to say the soul is forever tarnished. Our capacity for violence is obviously high, and we can be trained by culture to accept it, but I don't think it's the default state, if there is such a thing.
I'm just an optimist.
Wasn’t that Their idea in 1992 election? So I disagree.
You must always be aggressive in rebuttal, and work on your perceived weaknesses in eyes of voters. They need to turn Starmer into Uncle Starmer - man of the people. It’s easy, just work on his human side, where he grew up, etc.
AND They need to get policy idea’s out there. Lots more policy idea’s. If some are nicked by Tories that just hurts the Tories.
I think that Sunak slightly reminds me of the Czar or of Louis XVI, they themselves were not particularly brutal, indeed they were rather timid, even insipid figures, but they were heirs to regimes that were cruel and nasty...
Sunak in the tumbril? Perhaps unfairly, he does seem to be facing an appointment with Madame La Guillotine.
It certainly feels like the country will not be happy until the Tories are defeated, and quite possibly obliterated.
The fabled triumphlist Festival Of Kinnock Stadium-Sized Campaign Event would suggest that wasn't quite the plan. Even without the impromptu "we're all right"ing.
We do have NZF who are kind of Faragiste populists - albeit led by Winston Peters, who is Māori. They are currently out of Parliament but some are tipping their return. Not a huge amount of polling evidence for it.
Kelner is playing pro Labour politics setting such high bars.
Like me explain it like this. 2019? Mike Smithson says the biggest factor was Corbyn. That’s no longer the biggest factor for next time. The Tory’s havn’t got at Starmer and tackled him at all.
So what’s the biggest factor 2024? Brexit. All Tory’s lost to the party because of Brexit, so many on this forum and add Rod Stewart etc, no longer have to vote Tory to save us from Corbyn. The biggest factor 2024 is rage against the Party who inflicted Brexit on this huge set of Tory voters.
And that’s the player Kelner is leaving off his chart, how that plays into tactical votes.
As I see it, the Tories are going to give us either 1 - 1992, 2 - reverse-1992 (just a Labour win or Labour largest party), or 3 - 1997.
Looking at Mr Hunt's 5 goals:
I think that most of those are baked in, but that it will not be enough to convince and that there is not enough time.
1 will happen. 2 will be happening but only modestly. 3 will have turned the corner but no significant reduction. Some figures say it has already been happening for countries in Europe as %GDP. 4 has already started last year at the long wait end, but is being set back by strikes. 5 I can't call.
Listening to Rachel Reeves after the Hunt speech, she was playing the "All the Tory's fault, failed policies, highest ever tax burden, it needs a Decade of National Recovery" normal tune, skating entirely over COVID. And not answering *any* questions about policy or how she would fund it.
But I wonder if she and Mr Starmer have *any* room for manoeuvre at all? And how will that play out?
The one upside I can see is the John Major to Tony Blair one - Tories may have done some of the necessary retrenchment work, and RR / KS may get the benefit.
I wouldn't want to be owning an electric car at the next election, however. Owners are going to get soaked.
By which I mean, at least some voted Tory in 2019 to get Brexit done (ie get it over with and move on). But now that Brexit is becoming deeply unfashionable, it suits people to tell themselves the reason they voted Conservative was fear of Corbyn. Especially since he’s also become much more deeply unfashionable since.
That means when people head to the voting booth next time they will be following a logic that says I voted Tory to keep Corbyn out, now Corbyn’s gone there’s no reason to vote for them again, so I’ll vote for the other lot.