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Should the Liz Truss Honours list be blocked? – politicalbetting.com

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  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,957

    Met Police say they are investigating an alleged assault in Soho in 2003

    By anyone in particular?
  • Leon said:

    isam said:

    DavidL said:

    isam said:

    nico679 said:

    isam said:

    nico679 said:

    Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .

    If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?

    Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
    People might think it’s pervy dating a 16 year old but the law is the law . I find it strange that any woman would find Brand attractive .
    Bit of an inopportune day for Lucy Powell to be going on about it being legal for 16yo to have sex, when the headlines are about the grooming of a 16yo.

    Yes, I can’t stand him, but a lot of women seem(ed) to be desperate to have sex with him.
    My eldest daughter was very fond of him at one point and her friend even more so. She kept trying to get me to read the Booky Wooky. Sadly, I never got around to it. My loss, no doubt.
    A girl I was seeing likes him, and so as not to be a complete fun sponge, I tried reading that nonsense - it was nonsense, I got to about page twenty

    A friend of mine used to date Russell Brand’s make up artist - it shows how easily people are dazzled by fame, Brand drew a picture of a Willy on my mates arm with their names next to it, & my normally sensible ish friend thought it was absolutely hilarious, getting quite upset with me when I said I didnt see what was funny about it, and neither would he if one of the blokes in the pub had drawn it
    Actually, Brand is capable of writing beautiful prose - in very short bursts

    He did a travel piece about snorkelling/scuba - in the Maldives? Guardian? - maybe 10-15 years ago and I remember thinking the first three of four paragraphs were inspired. He’s not an idiot, he’s clever and talented. He is quite possibly an evil predator as well but it is foolish to dismiss him as some imbecile that got lucky

    I never liked his comedy, that said. Just not funny
    He was (is?) funny being interviewed. He's witty. It's widely known that he's (was?) a predatory shagger. He survived 'Me too', so I question the hype behind his dirty linen being aired now.
    Emily Maitlis on 2017 Russell Brand interview: "I went in ready to loathe him, but I was mesmerised"

    I went to the interview prepared to loathe him.

    I remember him being late and having his own make up room, and I thought, "what a narcissist". I hate people who do the power play thing by making an interviewer wait for no apparent reason.

    And then he walked into the room and he is mesmerising, he is funny, smart, he is linguistic, his language is magnetic and he is charismatic. He charmed me

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgH1k1MR1zc (2 minutes video)
    Someone being 'linguistic' is a new (and not very welcome) one on me.
    That is the trouble with unscripted speech. It is said that Hansard sometimes checks with MPs what they meant to say.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,153
    TOPPING said:

    Met Police say they are investigating an alleged assault in Soho in 2003

    By anyone in particular?
    Yes.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,153
    Leon said:

    TOPPING said:

    God the news wires really are creating a new swathe of Brand fans.

    All of a sudden we now have the concept of something being "technically legal", used when referencing his relationship with a 16-yr old when he was 30.

    It’s also the case that the girl almost certainly got a massive buzz out of dating Russell Brand: handsome, funny TV star who probably took her to lots of fun parties, enabling her to boast to her friends

    Now she says she was ‘groomed’. Really? She wasn’t groomed, she was seduced, and it seems was happy to go along with it

    So much puritanical, hypocritical tosh. Again this is not to diminish the allegations of rape and abuse. Those are serious and need investigating
    What's the difference between grooming and seduction?
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,134
    edited September 2023

    Leon said:

    isam said:

    DavidL said:

    isam said:

    nico679 said:

    isam said:

    nico679 said:

    Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .

    If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?

    Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
    People might think it’s pervy dating a 16 year old but the law is the law . I find it strange that any woman would find Brand attractive .
    Bit of an inopportune day for Lucy Powell to be going on about it being legal for 16yo to have sex, when the headlines are about the grooming of a 16yo.

    Yes, I can’t stand him, but a lot of women seem(ed) to be desperate to have sex with him.
    My eldest daughter was very fond of him at one point and her friend even more so. She kept trying to get me to read the Booky Wooky. Sadly, I never got around to it. My loss, no doubt.
    A girl I was seeing likes him, and so as not to be a complete fun sponge, I tried reading that nonsense - it was nonsense, I got to about page twenty

    A friend of mine used to date Russell Brand’s make up artist - it shows how easily people are dazzled by fame, Brand drew a picture of a Willy on my mates arm with their names next to it, & my normally sensible ish friend thought it was absolutely hilarious, getting quite upset with me when I said I didnt see what was funny about it, and neither would he if one of the blokes in the pub had drawn it
    Actually, Brand is capable of writing beautiful prose - in very short bursts

    He did a travel piece about snorkelling/scuba - in the Maldives? Guardian? - maybe 10-15 years ago and I remember thinking the first three of four paragraphs were inspired. He’s not an idiot, he’s clever and talented. He is quite possibly an evil predator as well but it is foolish to dismiss him as some imbecile that got lucky

    I never liked his comedy, that said. Just not funny
    He was (is?) funny being interviewed. He's witty. It's widely known that he's (was?) a predatory shagger. He survived 'Me too', so I question the hype behind his dirty linen being aired now.
    Emily Maitlis on 2017 Russell Brand interview: "I went in ready to loathe him, but I was mesmerised"

    I went to the interview prepared to loathe him.

    I remember him being late and having his own make up room, and I thought, "what a narcissist". I hate people who do the power play thing by making an interviewer wait for no apparent reason.

    And then he walked into the room and he is mesmerising, he is funny, smart, he is linguistic, his language is magnetic and he is charismatic. He charmed me

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgH1k1MR1zc (2 minutes video)
    Striking looks, catchy way of talking, disinhibited, strong sense of the absurd; he's a charismatic package. But I remember seeing him on QT about ten years ago and from the way he talked to the Tory woman on there you could tell he was something else too - a misogynist. He got a big cheer (he was attacking Austerity hence hitting the buttons for lots of the audience) and this made it all the more nauseating to watch. Thought at the time, Not A Good Egg. Powerful 'persona' allowing the person behind it to get away with stuff that others wouldn't. This is a theme with such people. It's why I don't like or trust them.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 22,075

    Someone being 'linguistic' is a new (and not very welcome) one on me.

    He was being cunning.

  • rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    TOPPING said:

    God the news wires really are creating a new swathe of Brand fans.

    All of a sudden we now have the concept of something being "technically legal", used when referencing his relationship with a 16-yr old when he was 30.

    It’s also the case that the girl almost certainly got a massive buzz out of dating Russell Brand: handsome, funny TV star who probably took her to lots of fun parties, enabling her to boast to her friends

    Now she says she was ‘groomed’. Really? She wasn’t groomed, she was seduced, and it seems was happy to go along with it

    So much puritanical, hypocritical tosh. Again this is not to diminish the allegations of rape and abuse. Those are serious and need investigating
    What's the difference between grooming and seduction?
    Irregular verb.

    I seduce
    You groom
    He is being investigated under the Sexual Offences Act 2003
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,153
    Sandpit said:

    Is Russell Brand of the Left or of the Right? That's what we need to establish.

    If you’re of the left, he’s of the right.
    If you’re of the right, he’s of the left.
    He's a LibDem then?
  • 148grss said:

    TOPPING said:

    148grss said:

    TOPPING said:

    God the news wires really are creating a new swathe of Brand fans.

    All of a sudden we now have the concept of something being "technically legal", used when referencing his relationship with a 16-yr old when he was 30.

    I mean, the claims were not hat he was having relationships with underaged women - the claims are that he sexually assaulted them, abused them, and, in some cases, raped them. That he had multiple relationships with women much younger than him just says, to me, that he was interested in relationships with inexperienced women who may not be as aware of healthy relationships and the confidence in calling out his behaviour. There is an inherent power imbalance when a 30 year old is going out with a 16 year old that, when taken in the context of the other allegations, puts them in a different light.
    Of course but, notwithstanding the abuse and rape claims, so what? Relationships are complicated and "inherent power imbalances" common for one reason or another.

    Review what you wrote, take out the abuse/rape element (not that this should be done irl) and you are just describing behaviour you don't approve of. So what.
    I personally have specific age gap hang ups due to me and my little sister having an atypically large age gap; but that doesn't affect how I typically judge other peoples' relationships.

    The accusations of abuse are integral to why the 14 year old age gap is a concern - it suggests a recognition on the part of Brand that his behaviour was unacceptable and was targeting women who, whilst were consenting adults, would be less experienced with sexual relationships and therefore less able to counter his abusive tactics. I'm not saying that anyone in a relationship with a 14 year old age gap is a predator; but if someone is credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults then his pattern of relationships with much younger women are contextually different.
    The age gap is perhaps not that significant with Brand or other celebrities. Fame, money and often power gaps are far more important. The fact is that in any relationship where you've heard of one partner but not the other, there will be an imbalance of some sort, be that footballers and WAGs, rock stars and groupies, or Russell Brand and many of his partners. (The law recognises it in some instances, such as recent bans on teachers with sixth formers, or professional rules against doctors with patients.)
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    TOPPING said:

    God the news wires really are creating a new swathe of Brand fans.

    All of a sudden we now have the concept of something being "technically legal", used when referencing his relationship with a 16-yr old when he was 30.

    It’s also the case that the girl almost certainly got a massive buzz out of dating Russell Brand: handsome, funny TV star who probably took her to lots of fun parties, enabling her to boast to her friends

    Now she says she was ‘groomed’. Really? She wasn’t groomed, she was seduced, and it seems was happy to go along with it

    So much puritanical, hypocritical tosh. Again this is not to diminish the allegations of rape and abuse. Those are serious and need investigating
    What's the difference between grooming and seduction?
    Let’s start with: if the girl (or boy) is underage, it’s ALWAYS grooming. But in this case she wasn’t
  • Surely Truss has the self awareness to realise how ridiculous this looks: after *that speech* plainly not.

    Is this the future opposition Tory party? Oh god...
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,153
    The CCTV footage is not good for Ms Boebert. In particular, her strenuous denials that she wasn't vaping.
  • stodgestodge Posts: 13,874

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
  • Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    With the exception of raising the retirement age, isn't that fairly consistent with the agenda of the Mail/Telegraph? Again with the exception of the retirement thing, it's all got a decent chance of being in the 2029 manifesto.

    It's not my version of Conservatism, but mine broke off the party a while back.
    Quite. How a set of relatively bland Toryish policies like the above can inspire such outraged horror in anyone who has ever voted Tory is baffling to me. Makes Truss's point for her really.
  • 148grss said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    Because it is the logical conclusion of the neoliberal consensus - it's just something other politicians refuse to say out loud.
    What's neoliberal about leaving the world's biggest free market?
  • Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    With the exception of raising the retirement age, isn't that fairly consistent with the agenda of the Mail/Telegraph? Again with the exception of the retirement thing, it's all got a decent chance of being in the 2029 manifesto.

    It's not my version of Conservatism, but mine broke off the party a while back.
    Quite. How a set of relatively bland Toryish policies like the above can inspire such outraged horror in anyone who has ever voted Tory is baffling to me. Makes Truss's point for her really.
    The policies are far from bland and certainly unrealistic politically

    The fact neither Truss or yourself understands this says more about her and your political awareness
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155

    148grss said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    Because it is the logical conclusion of the neoliberal consensus - it's just something other politicians refuse to say out loud.
    What's neoliberal about leaving the world's biggest free market?
    The idea that that free market prevents you from accessing the entire market freely.
  • Truss: "And it’s not because I’m keen to be back in Downing Street. I’m certainly not."

    Yeh, right.

  • FairlieredFairliered Posts: 4,931
    Barnesian said:

    DavidL said:

    148grss said:

    Omnium said:

    148grss said:

    Truss' complete disregard for the impact of her mini-budget, alongside the occasional person commenting that she wasn't given long enough to see if she was proven right, feels to me like the future of the Tory party is in the hands of Tufton Street. The consensus before she got in that she would be the change that was needed and the way many in right wing media have insulated her and have tried to help her with this rehabilitation tour is worrying to me.

    I think it's clear that she was on her way to clown school when somehow she found herself elected as an MP. Quite how she managed to progress from there is baffling. (I'd not even venture a guess)
    Because she knows the right people in the right places and parrots their words back to them. Did someone who went to uni with her not say that she was a LibDem until she started chatting to the political crowd there and then said that the only way to make a career out of politics was to join the Tories, so she did?
    Rory Stewart is far from a neutral observer, but he recounts being narked that Truss (same 2010 intake) was getting promoted so quickly when we wasn't. The reason the whips gave him was apparently that Truss was much better at fluently promoting the party line.
    I miss Rory. But he was never a blind parrot. He had a tendency to think about things.
    On today's The Rest is Politics, Rory and AC interviewed the two Andys (Manchester and West Midlands). Rory confessed to missing being in politics. Perhaps there's hope of a come back.
    If only he hadn’t said nasty things about Liz Truss he could have been looking forward to a seat in the Lords.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,582

    Leon said:

    isam said:

    DavidL said:

    isam said:

    nico679 said:

    isam said:

    nico679 said:

    Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .

    If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?

    Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
    People might think it’s pervy dating a 16 year old but the law is the law . I find it strange that any woman would find Brand attractive .
    Bit of an inopportune day for Lucy Powell to be going on about it being legal for 16yo to have sex, when the headlines are about the grooming of a 16yo.

    Yes, I can’t stand him, but a lot of women seem(ed) to be desperate to have sex with him.
    My eldest daughter was very fond of him at one point and her friend even more so. She kept trying to get me to read the Booky Wooky. Sadly, I never got around to it. My loss, no doubt.
    A girl I was seeing likes him, and so as not to be a complete fun sponge, I tried reading that nonsense - it was nonsense, I got to about page twenty

    A friend of mine used to date Russell Brand’s make up artist - it shows how easily people are dazzled by fame, Brand drew a picture of a Willy on my mates arm with their names next to it, & my normally sensible ish friend thought it was absolutely hilarious, getting quite upset with me when I said I didnt see what was funny about it, and neither would he if one of the blokes in the pub had drawn it
    Actually, Brand is capable of writing beautiful prose - in very short bursts

    He did a travel piece about snorkelling/scuba - in the Maldives? Guardian? - maybe 10-15 years ago and I remember thinking the first three of four paragraphs were inspired. He’s not an idiot, he’s clever and talented. He is quite possibly an evil predator as well but it is foolish to dismiss him as some imbecile that got lucky

    I never liked his comedy, that said. Just not funny
    He was (is?) funny being interviewed. He's witty. It's widely known that he's (was?) a predatory shagger. He survived 'Me too', so I question the hype behind his dirty linen being aired now.
    Emily Maitlis on 2017 Russell Brand interview: "I went in ready to loathe him, but I was mesmerised"

    I went to the interview prepared to loathe him.

    I remember him being late and having his own make up room, and I thought, "what a narcissist". I hate people who do the power play thing by making an interviewer wait for no apparent reason.

    And then he walked into the room and he is mesmerising, he is funny, smart, he is linguistic, his language is magnetic and he is charismatic. He charmed me

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgH1k1MR1zc (2 minutes video)
    That says a lot more about Emily Maitlis, than it does about Russell Brand.
  • eristdooferistdoof Posts: 5,065

    Met Police say they are investigating an alleged assault in Soho in 2003

    We need a bit more information here. There is an assault in Soho every evening.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,812

    DavidL said:

    Sandpit said:

    Met Police said to be investigating allegation of sexual assault against Russell Brand.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/18/russell-brand-rape-allegations-latest/

    From 20 years ago, how can that be proved?

    In the same way the deferred sentence I dealt with this morning was. 3 or more complainers describe a very similar course of conduct and hey, presto, its proved. Today's case involved allegations from the early 2000s as well.
    Does that not leave the legal system open to abuse where 2 or 3 people could come together and agree a plan to stitch someone up. If they all give the police the same story about an event 20 years ago then case proved, with no evidence other than their statements.
    Maybe, but they need to persuade a jury that they are telling the truth first
  • Sandpit said:

    Met Police said to be investigating allegation of sexual assault against Russell Brand.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/18/russell-brand-rape-allegations-latest/

    From 20 years ago, how can that be proved?

    How can any old allegation of sexual impropriety be proved? And in many cases its A vs B where A says its was consensual and B says it wasn't.

    The best that can be hoped for a defendant is conclusive proof that they were elsewhere on dates given (e.g. a gig in Liverpool on the night of an alleged attack in New York).
    The beyond reasonable doubt hurdle would be very difficult to get over , although Rolf Harris was found guilty of a sex offence from the late 60s in 2014 which i found puzzling, how can you prove something from 46 years ago..
    The justice system seeks to establish patterns of behaviour. If Rolf was provably guilty of X, Y, and Z, then the jury can infer that this other offence is similar enough to warrant a guilty verdict even if the evidence trail is incomplete. Fwiw it can sometimes seem a bit too close to no smoke without fire especially when the crimes are particularly repellent such as raping or murdering children. Is it justice? Is it all right to convict a known blagger of the Barclays Bank robbery because he turned over Lloyds and NatWest?
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,812

    Surely Truss has the self awareness to realise how ridiculous this looks: after *that speech* plainly not.

    Is this the future opposition Tory party? Oh god...

    Who could possibly deny @williamglenn his moment of glory?
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,812
    rcs1000 said:

    Sandpit said:

    Is Russell Brand of the Left or of the Right? That's what we need to establish.

    If you’re of the left, he’s of the right.
    If you’re of the right, he’s of the left.
    He's a LibDem then?
    No, no, they are the other way around. They have principles and, if you don't like them, they have others.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,134
    148grss said:

    Is Russell Brand of the Left or of the Right? That's what we need to establish.

    He had a theory of capital that arguably be called left wing - he just took it to the illogical conclusion that many right wingers do that there must be a conspiracy of elites controlling things and making things worse on purpose instead of just accepting that class interest doesn't require a conspiracy. He fell into covid trutherism and other conspiratorial stuff during lockdown, that has made a lot of his audience a lot more right wing then he used to claim to be. He seems to be another manifestation of some white men specifically who have legitimate criticisms of capitalism but who still feel culturally alienated by feminism and intersectionality (who could think why?) and therefore start making political content that aims to legitimise red/brown alliances. The "the only war is class war, so stop talking about race and gender and sexuality" types who ignore that to unite the working class requires us to talk about race and gender and sexuality precisely because class and those things intersect so significantly. A similar thing happened to a few US lefty types (Jimmy Dore being the most noticeable),
    'Stop banging on about race and gender and get back to banging on about class.'

    Many on the Right offer this advice to the Left. Which is nice of them, isn't it.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 63,032
    edited September 2023
    eristdoof said:

    Met Police say they are investigating an alleged assault in Soho in 2003

    We need a bit more information here. There is an assault in Soho every evening.
    Met Police are investigating an alleged sexual assault by Brand of a woman in Soho who reported it to them yesterday and dates from 2003
  • DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    Sandpit said:

    Met Police said to be investigating allegation of sexual assault against Russell Brand.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/18/russell-brand-rape-allegations-latest/

    From 20 years ago, how can that be proved?

    In the same way the deferred sentence I dealt with this morning was. 3 or more complainers describe a very similar course of conduct and hey, presto, its proved. Today's case involved allegations from the early 2000s as well.
    Does that not leave the legal system open to abuse where 2 or 3 people could come together and agree a plan to stitch someone up. If they all give the police the same story about an event 20 years ago then case proved, with no evidence other than their statements.
    Maybe, but they need to persuade a jury that they are telling the truth first
    Every miscarriage of justice involves a jury returning the wrong verdict.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,419
    edited September 2023
    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,812

    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    Sandpit said:

    Met Police said to be investigating allegation of sexual assault against Russell Brand.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/18/russell-brand-rape-allegations-latest/

    From 20 years ago, how can that be proved?

    In the same way the deferred sentence I dealt with this morning was. 3 or more complainers describe a very similar course of conduct and hey, presto, its proved. Today's case involved allegations from the early 2000s as well.
    Does that not leave the legal system open to abuse where 2 or 3 people could come together and agree a plan to stitch someone up. If they all give the police the same story about an event 20 years ago then case proved, with no evidence other than their statements.
    Maybe, but they need to persuade a jury that they are telling the truth first
    Every miscarriage of justice involves a jury returning the wrong verdict.
    True, but it is a very important safeguard for us all. My experience of juries has increased my respect for their judgment.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860

    TOPPING said:

    God the news wires really are creating a new swathe of Brand fans.

    All of a sudden we now have the concept of something being "technically legal", used when referencing his relationship with a 16-yr old when he was 30.

    Brand is going to have a field day, taking on the hypocrites in the media. As much as his being a latter-day libertine, rake and dandy has meant many were aware of his excesses, he will not be without his own fund of stories about those now professing to clutch their pearls and have a fit of the vapours. Many witnessed at first hand.

    As long as he can continue to keep his platform on YouTube, I suspect life could get very uncomfortable for those who have chosen to pile on. One thing he will do very well is mocking them.
    Can you YouTube from prison, I wonder?
  • stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Truss wants to increase benefits by wage level increase and not inflation to reduce their increase.

    Meanwhile in today's Telegraph: "The latest figures saw the three monthly year-on-year rate of pay inflation edge up from 8.4pc to 8.5pc"

    That's higher than the 6.9% inflation figure.

    Truss economic thinking in a nutshell.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,812

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Truss wants to increase benefits by wage level increase and not inflation to reduce their increase.

    Meanwhile in today's Telegraph: "The latest figures saw the three monthly year-on-year rate of pay inflation edge up from 8.4pc to 8.5pc"

    That's higher than the 6.9% inflation figure.

    Truss economic thinking in a nutshell.
    It suggests the speech is more than a month old. And that her prediction of trends is somewhat shorter.
  • stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    The human 4% is being added to the in-balance natural co cycle. And being added to each year. That's what causes the heating issue.
  • stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Truss wants to increase benefits by wage level increase and not inflation to reduce their increase.

    Meanwhile in today's Telegraph: "The latest figures saw the three monthly year-on-year rate of pay inflation edge up from 8.4pc to 8.5pc"

    That's higher than the 6.9% inflation figure.

    Truss economic thinking in a nutshell.
    To be fair her own pay has dropped by 50% for some mysterious reason, most likely the fault of the establishment.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 53,812
    rcs1000 said:

    The CCTV footage is not good for Ms Boebert. In particular, her strenuous denials that she wasn't vaping.
    Nice dress though.
  • 148grss148grss Posts: 4,155
    kinabalu said:

    148grss said:

    Is Russell Brand of the Left or of the Right? That's what we need to establish.

    He had a theory of capital that arguably be called left wing - he just took it to the illogical conclusion that many right wingers do that there must be a conspiracy of elites controlling things and making things worse on purpose instead of just accepting that class interest doesn't require a conspiracy. He fell into covid trutherism and other conspiratorial stuff during lockdown, that has made a lot of his audience a lot more right wing then he used to claim to be. He seems to be another manifestation of some white men specifically who have legitimate criticisms of capitalism but who still feel culturally alienated by feminism and intersectionality (who could think why?) and therefore start making political content that aims to legitimise red/brown alliances. The "the only war is class war, so stop talking about race and gender and sexuality" types who ignore that to unite the working class requires us to talk about race and gender and sexuality precisely because class and those things intersect so significantly. A similar thing happened to a few US lefty types (Jimmy Dore being the most noticeable),
    'Stop banging on about race and gender and get back to banging on about class.'

    Many on the Right offer this advice to the Left. Which is nice of them, isn't it.
    I mean, they are being disingenuous. They are actually arguing against working class unity because they frame the working class as only encompassing white working class men.
  • Caroline Dinenage on Sky has just said Truss should not have an honours list
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,957

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
  • Caroline Dinenage on Sky has just said Truss should not have an honours list

    House of Lords = House of Unelected Has-Beens.
  • Every post office operator whose wrongful conviction over the Horizon IT scandal has been overturned will receive £600,000 in compensation from the government, ministers have announced.

    The Horizon scandal, described as “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history”, resulted in more than 700 post office operators being prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft, fraud and false accounting because of faulty accounting software installed in the late 1990s.

    The government said that to date 86 postmasters have had their wrongful convictions overturned and £21m has been paid in compensation.

    “This is about righting a wrong and providing some form of relief to those wrongfully caught up in this scandal,” said Kevin Hollinrake, the business department minister with responsibility for the Post Office.

    The government said that the compensation offer is in addition to paying for all reasonable legal fees, and any post office operator who does not want to accept this offer can continue with the existing legal process.

    Any post office operator who has already received initial compensation payments, or has reached a settlement with the Post Office of less than the £600,000 offer announced on Monday will be paid the difference.

    “Too many postmasters have suffered and for too long, which is why the government remains committed to seeing this through to the end until it is resolved and ensuring this cannot ever happen again,” Hollinrake said.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/18/post-office-horizon-scandal-victims-compensation
  • stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    The human 4% is being added to the in-balance natural co cycle. And being added to each year. That's what causes the heating issue.
    I'm prepared to go with that as an overarching theory (though not an unchallenged religion), but if it is the case, we should be looking at how to do 'big numbers' to get carbon out of the atmosphere, rather than the very slow and borderline ineffective process of dismantling our economy and freedoms, and impoverishing everyone, to reduce fuel consumption. Especially because we will still need the 'things' we used to, and they will just be shipped over from coal burning China.

    We need to be looking at spreading fields with rock dust, changes in agricultural feed to vastly reduce methane emissions by cows, reliable renewables like tidal that require no gas backup, small nuclear reactors, and more direct geo-engineering solutions like cloud brightening. That's why it's wrong that 'net-zero' is included in the Department for Energy - it should be its own department and work across departments. It shouldn't be about freezing the grannies.
  • TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    NASA:


    Before humans began emitting significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the atmospheric uptake and loss of carbon dioxide was approximately in balance. "Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remained pretty stable during the pre-industrial period," said Gregg Marland of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. "Carbon dioxide generated by human activity amounts to only about four percent of yearly atmospheric uptake or loss of carbon dioxide, but the result is that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been growing, on average, by four-tenths of one percent each year for the last 40 years. Though this may not seem like much of an influence, humans have essentially tipped the balance of the global cycling of carbon . Our emissions add significant weight to one side of the balance between carbon being added to the atmosphere and carbon being removed from the atmosphere.

    https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco/news/oco-20090113.html#:~:text="Carbon dioxide generated by human,for the last 40 years.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860

    Every post office operator whose wrongful conviction over the Horizon IT scandal has been overturned will receive £600,000 in compensation from the government, ministers have announced.

    The Horizon scandal, described as “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history”, resulted in more than 700 post office operators being prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft, fraud and false accounting because of faulty accounting software installed in the late 1990s.

    The government said that to date 86 postmasters have had their wrongful convictions overturned and £21m has been paid in compensation.

    “This is about righting a wrong and providing some form of relief to those wrongfully caught up in this scandal,” said Kevin Hollinrake, the business department minister with responsibility for the Post Office.

    The government said that the compensation offer is in addition to paying for all reasonable legal fees, and any post office operator who does not want to accept this offer can continue with the existing legal process.

    Any post office operator who has already received initial compensation payments, or has reached a settlement with the Post Office of less than the £600,000 offer announced on Monday will be paid the difference.

    “Too many postmasters have suffered and for too long, which is why the government remains committed to seeing this through to the end until it is resolved and ensuring this cannot ever happen again,” Hollinrake said.


    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/18/post-office-horizon-scandal-victims-compensation

    So if you'd been prosecuted in 2003 that's £30k per year.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,553
    edited September 2023
    "The fall of Russell Brand is no victory for women
    Our attitudes towards sex have changed profoundly over the past two decades – and not always for the better.

    Joanna Williams

    You have to hand it to Channel 4. Two decades ago, the broadcaster helped fuel Russell Brand’s rise to fame. Now, it has removed all of the old programmes that feature him from its website. Back in the 2000s, Channel 4 gained viewers and revenue from Brand’s lewd antics. Today, it is winning plaudits for its Dispatches documentary, which features women accusing Brand of rape and sexual assault. No matter what else can be said about the quality of its output, Channel 4 clearly still excels at riding the cultural zeitgeist."

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/18/the-fall-of-russell-brand-is-no-victory-for-women/
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,829
    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    That's a bit like saying that a 4m increase in sea level isn't important because the tides go up and down that much in the UK on avewrage. (The analogy is not exact, scientifically. But the deliberate fallacy is politically analogous.)
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,553
    The New Statesman invited Russell Brand to guest edit the magazine in 2013.

    "Russell Brand on revolution: “We no longer have the luxury of tradition”
    But before we change the world, we need to change the way we think
    By Russell Brand

    When I was asked to edit an issue of the New Statesman I said yes because it was a beautiful woman asking me. I chose the subject of revolution because the New Statesman is a political magazine and imagining the overthrow of the current political system is the only way I can be enthused about politics."

    https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2013/10/russell-brand-on-revolution
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860
    Andy_JS said:

    "The fall of Russell Brand is no victory for women

    Our attitudes towards sex have changed profoundly over the past two decades – and not always for the better.

    Joanna Williams

    You have to hand it to Channel 4. Two decades ago, the broadcaster helped fuel Russell Brand’s rise to fame. Now, it has removed all of the old programmes that feature him from its website. Back in the 2000s, Channel 4 gained viewers and revenue from Brand’s lewd antics. Today, it is winning plaudits for its Dispatches documentary, which features women accusing Brand of rape and sexual assault. No matter what else can be said about the quality of its output, Channel 4 clearly still excels at riding the cultural zeitgeist."

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/18/the-fall-of-russell-brand-is-no-victory-for-women/

    Soooo... they shouldn't have run the Dispatches investigation and should keep his stuff up on the site?
  • ...

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Truss wants to increase benefits by wage level increase and not inflation to reduce their increase.

    Meanwhile in today's Telegraph: "The latest figures saw the three monthly year-on-year rate of pay inflation edge up from 8.4pc to 8.5pc"

    That's higher than the 6.9% inflation figure.

    Truss economic thinking in a nutshell.
    To be fair her own pay has dropped by 50% for some mysterious reason, most likely the fault of the establishment.
    I presume you mean risen by about 400%.
  • Buckingham Palace was alerted to concerns about Boris Johnson’s behaviour at the height of the Covid crisis, according to a new documentary.

    Senior officials are said to have expressed fears about the former prime minister’s conduct in the hope that Queen Elizabeth II would take up the matter with him.

    The claims are featured in the second episode of Laura Kuenssberg: State Of Chaos, which explores the turmoil in Westminster between 2016 and 2022.

    Mr Johnson’s team maintains that the Government’s actions were entirely legal and constitutional, and neither the monarch nor any member of the Royal family raised any such issues with him.

    As Britain battled the first Covid wave in May 2020, tensions between the Number 10 political team and the Civil Service were spilling over.

    Helen MacNamara, a former deputy cabinet secretary, told the BBC there was “extreme” talk in the Johnson camp about the failings of Whitehall after he was treated in hospital for the virus

    They were taking a “kind of smash everything up, shut it all down, start again” attitude, she said, adding: “We were systematically in real trouble.”

    Sources told the documentary that senior officials voiced concerns about Mr Johnson’s conduct to the palace in the hope the late Queen would speak to him about the concerns. They even discussed suggesting this course of action to the monarch, the BBC said.

    Government figures are said to have held a number of phone calls and communications with the palace that went beyond routine contact. One source claimed Mr Johnson “had to be reminded of the constitution”, but this was denied by his team.


    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2023/09/18/officials-palace-concerned-boris-johnson-behaviour-covid/
  • Buckingham Palace was alerted to concerns about Boris Johnson’s behaviour at the height of the Covid crisis, according to a new documentary.

    Senior officials are said to have expressed fears about the former prime minister’s conduct in the hope that Queen Elizabeth II would take up the matter with him.

    The claims are featured in the second episode of Laura Kuenssberg: State Of Chaos, which explores the turmoil in Westminster between 2016 and 2022.

    Mr Johnson’s team maintains that the Government’s actions were entirely legal and constitutional, and neither the monarch nor any member of the Royal family raised any such issues with him.

    As Britain battled the first Covid wave in May 2020, tensions between the Number 10 political team and the Civil Service were spilling over.

    Helen MacNamara, a former deputy cabinet secretary, told the BBC there was “extreme” talk in the Johnson camp about the failings of Whitehall after he was treated in hospital for the virus

    They were taking a “kind of smash everything up, shut it all down, start again” attitude, she said, adding: “We were systematically in real trouble.”

    Sources told the documentary that senior officials voiced concerns about Mr Johnson’s conduct to the palace in the hope the late Queen would speak to him about the concerns. They even discussed suggesting this course of action to the monarch, the BBC said.

    Government figures are said to have held a number of phone calls and communications with the palace that went beyond routine contact. One source claimed Mr Johnson “had to be reminded of the constitution”, but this was denied by his team.


    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2023/09/18/officials-palace-concerned-boris-johnson-behaviour-covid/

    The second episode of Laura Kuenssberg: State Of Chaos is on iplayer now for PBers who cannot wait until 9pm (and for Telegraph journalists).
  • AlistairM said:

    Following the earlier discussions on Ukraine.

    ⚡️As a result of 🇺🇦Ukraine's successful actions, the enemy's defense line near Bakhmut was breached, - Commander of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Sirskyi

    In the battles in the direction of Bakhmut, the Defense Forces of Ukraine completely defeated the three most prepared brigades of the 72nd, 83rd and 31st brigades of the Russian army.

    Fierce fighting continues in the Bakhmut region. the Russians are conducting numerous counterattacks, unsuccessfully trying to regain their positions.

    The liberation of Klishchiivka and Andriivka allowed the Armed Forces of Ukraine to break through the enemy's defensive line stretching from Bakhmut to Horlivka.

    https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1703769463244362231?s=20

    When Ukraine started regaining ground around Bakhmut, I asked Phillips O'Brien several times to predict how long he thought it would take for Ukraine to roll back the advances Russia had made in the area since taking Popasna (at the time he was ridiculing how little Russia had gained over many months). He did not make such a prediction, but I'd guess that Ukrainian progress has been slower than he expected.

    I think that what you have quoted is an example of unhelpful hyperbole. It creates the expectation of imminent rapid Ukrainian gains. The words "break through" are used, but is it really the case that the Ukrainians will be in Zaitseve tomorrow and have Bakhmut encircled by the end of the week, as would be implied by an actual breakthrough?
    A breakthrough can move the line forward by 10 miles, or 2 miles or half a mile.

    Its not a case of a breakthrough meaning war is over.

    If the line has moved forwards, that is a breakthrough.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,051
    Ghedebrav said:

    Sandpit said:

    isam said:

    nico679 said:

    Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .

    If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?

    Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
    When Brand was in his 30s, and sending a BBC car to pick her up from school, yes.

    Ditto Philip Schofield and and his legal-but-not-moral boyfriend who worked with him.
    Have we started the full-throated 'This is why the BBC is not fit for purpose!' stuff yet? How many days of decorum do the Mail/Express/Sun allow usually?
    The BBC fired Brand. They then fired the person who had hired Brand. The BBC's track record on firing Brand is a lot better than Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, 20th Century Studios, HBO, Rumble, etc.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,986
    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
  • TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,134
    148grss said:

    kinabalu said:

    148grss said:

    Is Russell Brand of the Left or of the Right? That's what we need to establish.

    He had a theory of capital that arguably be called left wing - he just took it to the illogical conclusion that many right wingers do that there must be a conspiracy of elites controlling things and making things worse on purpose instead of just accepting that class interest doesn't require a conspiracy. He fell into covid trutherism and other conspiratorial stuff during lockdown, that has made a lot of his audience a lot more right wing then he used to claim to be. He seems to be another manifestation of some white men specifically who have legitimate criticisms of capitalism but who still feel culturally alienated by feminism and intersectionality (who could think why?) and therefore start making political content that aims to legitimise red/brown alliances. The "the only war is class war, so stop talking about race and gender and sexuality" types who ignore that to unite the working class requires us to talk about race and gender and sexuality precisely because class and those things intersect so significantly. A similar thing happened to a few US lefty types (Jimmy Dore being the most noticeable),
    'Stop banging on about race and gender and get back to banging on about class.'

    Many on the Right offer this advice to the Left. Which is nice of them, isn't it.
    I mean, they are being disingenuous. They are actually arguing against working class unity because they frame the working class as only encompassing white working class men.
    Slightly more exclusive even - the right sort of WWC men only.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,134

    Ghedebrav said:

    Sandpit said:

    isam said:

    nico679 said:

    Greg Hands whining about Labour giving votes to 16 and 17 year olds . Accusing them of vote rigging ! From the party who brought in new voter ID which was aimed at disenfranchising opposition voters .

    If you can join the army , have sex and work why are you too young to vote ?

    Strange that there is so much horror about the BBC getting a car for Russell Brand’s 16yo girlfriend really
    When Brand was in his 30s, and sending a BBC car to pick her up from school, yes.

    Ditto Philip Schofield and and his legal-but-not-moral boyfriend who worked with him.
    Have we started the full-throated 'This is why the BBC is not fit for purpose!' stuff yet? How many days of decorum do the Mail/Express/Sun allow usually?
    The BBC fired Brand. They then fired the person who had hired Brand. The BBC's track record on firing Brand is a lot better than Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, 20th Century Studios, HBO, Rumble, etc.
    Yes. Not a major Beeb scandal, this one, I wouldn't have thought.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,633

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    TOPPING said:

    God the news wires really are creating a new swathe of Brand fans.

    All of a sudden we now have the concept of something being "technically legal", used when referencing his relationship with a 16-yr old when he was 30.

    It’s also the case that the girl almost certainly got a massive buzz out of dating Russell Brand: handsome, funny TV star who probably took her to lots of fun parties, enabling her to boast to her friends

    Now she says she was ‘groomed’. Really? She wasn’t groomed, she was seduced, and it seems was happy to go along with it

    So much puritanical, hypocritical tosh. Again this is not to diminish the allegations of rape and abuse. Those are serious and need investigating
    What's the difference between grooming and seduction?
    Ah, the wonderful, lost art of seduction.

    Roses, chocolates, whispering sweet nothings, telling them not to tell their parents, getting them to record your number in their phone under a false name, sending a driver to collect them from school and bring them to your flat. It's magical really.
    It's seduction if white, grooming if the person and the taxi driver are Muslims.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,419
    edited September 2023

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Truss wants to increase benefits by wage level increase and not inflation to reduce their increase.

    Meanwhile in today's Telegraph: "The latest figures saw the three monthly year-on-year rate of pay inflation edge up from 8.4pc to 8.5pc"

    That's higher than the 6.9% inflation figure.

    Truss economic thinking in a nutshell.
    No, that was her policy during her time in Government, where she'd also have had significant levers to apply wage restraint in the public sector. Unless you feel she'd also have reduced inflation quicker than Sunak - possibly true.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,633

    Buckingham Palace was alerted to concerns about Boris Johnson’s behaviour at the height of the Covid crisis, according to a new documentary.

    Senior officials are said to have expressed fears about the former prime minister’s conduct in the hope that Queen Elizabeth II would take up the matter with him.

    The claims are featured in the second episode of Laura Kuenssberg: State Of Chaos, which explores the turmoil in Westminster between 2016 and 2022.

    Mr Johnson’s team maintains that the Government’s actions were entirely legal and constitutional, and neither the monarch nor any member of the Royal family raised any such issues with him.

    As Britain battled the first Covid wave in May 2020, tensions between the Number 10 political team and the Civil Service were spilling over.

    Helen MacNamara, a former deputy cabinet secretary, told the BBC there was “extreme” talk in the Johnson camp about the failings of Whitehall after he was treated in hospital for the virus

    They were taking a “kind of smash everything up, shut it all down, start again” attitude, she said, adding: “We were systematically in real trouble.”

    Sources told the documentary that senior officials voiced concerns about Mr Johnson’s conduct to the palace in the hope the late Queen would speak to him about the concerns. They even discussed suggesting this course of action to the monarch, the BBC said.

    Government figures are said to have held a number of phone calls and communications with the palace that went beyond routine contact. One source claimed Mr Johnson “had to be reminded of the constitution”, but this was denied by his team.


    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2023/09/18/officials-palace-concerned-boris-johnson-behaviour-covid/

    I can't help but wonder why such a senior political reporter didn't report this at the time.

    What could possibly be the reason 🤔
  • TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    More that it's an accurate answer to the wrong question.

    If the natural cycles of CO2 in and out of the atmosphere are roughly (terms and conditions apply) in balance, and we add to the inputs, it doesn't matter if our additions are a small percentage of the whole. It's still taking the total over the top.

    (And yes, if there are cheap, scalable, no bad side effects, ways of removing CO2 from the atmosphere as well, great. The enhanced weathering thing looks interesting. And then we can include them in the net total, of course. But how about we insulate granny's house so she isn't cold as well?)
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,553

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    Most of those ideas are worth discussing IMO.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,986

    TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    True like every year’s deforestation is only x% of the Amazon, or “most schools won’t collapse”, yes.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277
    Foxy said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    TOPPING said:

    God the news wires really are creating a new swathe of Brand fans.

    All of a sudden we now have the concept of something being "technically legal", used when referencing his relationship with a 16-yr old when he was 30.

    It’s also the case that the girl almost certainly got a massive buzz out of dating Russell Brand: handsome, funny TV star who probably took her to lots of fun parties, enabling her to boast to her friends

    Now she says she was ‘groomed’. Really? She wasn’t groomed, she was seduced, and it seems was happy to go along with it

    So much puritanical, hypocritical tosh. Again this is not to diminish the allegations of rape and abuse. Those are serious and need investigating
    What's the difference between grooming and seduction?
    Ah, the wonderful, lost art of seduction.

    Roses, chocolates, whispering sweet nothings, telling them not to tell their parents, getting them to record your number in their phone under a false name, sending a driver to collect them from school and bring them to your flat. It's magical really.
    It's seduction if white, grooming if the person and the taxi driver are Muslims.
    Wait, are you actually admitting that Muslim taxi drivers groom and rape underage white girls?

  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,153

    TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    Is it?

    Or are you only seeing what you want to see?
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,986
    Andy_JS said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    Most of those ideas are worth discussing IMO.
    Most of them are either Luddism (net zero, gas boilers) or Unicornism (diverge properly from EU) or anachronistic (reduce benefits). The only two worth considering are increasing retirement age, which is a no brainer, and abolishing the windfall tax - should be replaced by a less political more automatic and more symmetrical ratchet mechanism.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,829

    TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    More that it's an accurate answer to the wrong question.

    If the natural cycles of CO2 in and out of the atmosphere are roughly (terms and conditions apply) in balance, and we add to the inputs, it doesn't matter if our additions are a small percentage of the whole. It's still taking the total over the top.

    (And yes, if there are cheap, scalable, no bad side effects, ways of removing CO2 from the atmosphere as well, great. The enhanced weathering thing looks interesting. And then we can include them in the net total, of course. But how about we insulate granny's house so she isn't cold as well?)
    I was taught about metabolism, population dynamics etc. when I were a lad etc at uni. What I recall is how horribly sensitive those cycles are, as a matter of basic mathematics. Indeed, an environmental version of Micawberism as Stuartinromford says - it's great if a lot comes in so long as a lot goes out, it can keep the net total surprisingly small. But a small change in the input or output has a massively disproportionate effect on a net total which was normally relatively small. So just because humans are "only" adding 4% to the current input side of the cycle doesn't mean we don't have a serious situation pdq. Which is, as it happens, the case with the actual situation.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,986

    TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    More that it's an accurate answer to the wrong question.

    If the natural cycles of CO2 in and out of the atmosphere are roughly (terms and conditions apply) in balance, and we add to the inputs, it doesn't matter if our additions are a small percentage of the whole. It's still taking the total over the top.

    (And yes, if there are cheap, scalable, no bad side effects, ways of removing CO2 from the atmosphere as well, great. The enhanced weathering thing looks interesting. And then we can include them in the net total, of course. But how about we insulate granny's house so she isn't cold as well?)

    TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of
    Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    More that it's an accurate answer to the wrong question.

    If the natural cycles of CO2 in and out of the atmosphere are roughly (terms and conditions apply) in balance, and we add to the inputs, it doesn't matter if our additions are a small percentage of the whole. It's still taking the total over the top.

    (And yes, if there are cheap, scalable, no bad side effects, ways of removing CO2 from the atmosphere as well, great. The enhanced weathering thing looks interesting. And then we can include them in the net total, of course. But how about we insulate granny's house so she isn't cold as well?)
    SkS (the other one) useful resource on things like this:

    https://skepticalscience.com/How-we-know-human-CO2-emissions-have-disrupted-carbon-cycle.html
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277
    Cobalt clouds over Cathar Country: rainstorms say Return, return



  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,829
    Leon said:

    Cobalt clouds over Cathar Country: rainstorms say Return, return



    What, to the EU?
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,051
    .
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    TOPPING said:

    God the news wires really are creating a new swathe of Brand fans.

    All of a sudden we now have the concept of something being "technically legal", used when referencing his relationship with a 16-yr old when he was 30.

    It’s also the case that the girl almost certainly got a massive buzz out of dating Russell Brand: handsome, funny TV star who probably took her to lots of fun parties, enabling her to boast to her friends

    Now she says she was ‘groomed’. Really? She wasn’t groomed, she was seduced, and it seems was happy to go along with it

    So much puritanical, hypocritical tosh. Again this is not to diminish the allegations of rape and abuse. Those are serious and need investigating
    What's the difference between grooming and seduction?
    The person being seduced knows they are being seduced. The person being groomed does not know they are being groomed.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,553
    Just seen this.

    "Election Maps UK
    @ElectionMapsUK
    Mid Bedfordshire By-Election Voting Intention:

    LAB: 29% (+7)
    CON: 29% (-31)
    LDM: 22% (+9)
    RFM: 7% (New)
    IND: 6% (New)

    Via
    @Survation
    , 12-14 Sep.
    Changes w/ GE2019."

    https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1703046374407680508
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277
    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Cobalt clouds over Cathar Country: rainstorms say Return, return



    What, to the EU?
    I heard their young hearts crying
    Loveward above the glancing oar
    And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
    No more, return no more!

    O hearts, O sighing grasses,
    Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
    No more will the wild wind that passes
    Return, no more return.
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,376
    Post Office Horizon victims to be offered 600K each.

    Doesn’t seem a lot for people who lost homes, we’re jailed, lost marriages and reputations or worse.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66843548
  • rcs1000 said:

    TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    Is it?

    Or are you only seeing what you want to see?
    I assume that Nasa have crunched their numbers accurately - if you have counter information by all means share.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,401
    Andy_JS said:

    Just seen this.

    "Election Maps UK
    @ElectionMapsUK
    Mid Bedfordshire By-Election Voting Intention:

    LAB: 29% (+7)
    CON: 29% (-31)
    LDM: 22% (+9)
    RFM: 7% (New)
    IND: 6% (New)

    Via
    @Survation
    , 12-14 Sep.
    Changes w/ GE2019."

    https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1703046374407680508

    Just seen the tweet or the poll?
    Was discussed at length the other day.
    (Surprisingly enough, it was a good poll for all three main parties, depending on the political persuasion of the poster).
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,051

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    The human 4% is being added to the in-balance natural co cycle. And being added to each year. That's what causes the heating issue.
    I'm prepared to go with that as an overarching theory (though not an unchallenged religion), but if it is the case, we should be looking at how to do 'big numbers' to get carbon out of the atmosphere, rather than the very slow and borderline ineffective process of dismantling our economy and freedoms, and impoverishing everyone, to reduce fuel consumption. Especially because we will still need the 'things' we used to, and they will just be shipped over from coal burning China.

    We need to be looking at spreading fields with rock dust, changes in agricultural feed to vastly reduce methane emissions by cows, reliable renewables like tidal that require no gas backup, small nuclear reactors, and more direct geo-engineering solutions like cloud brightening. That's why it's wrong that 'net-zero' is included in the Department for Energy - it should be its own department and work across departments. It shouldn't be about freezing the grannies.
    People are looking at all those things. That’s how you’ve heard about them.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,829
    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Cobalt clouds over Cathar Country: rainstorms say Return, return



    What, to the EU?
    I heard their young hearts crying
    Loveward above the glancing oar
    And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
    No more, return no more!

    O hearts, O sighing grasses,
    Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
    No more will the wild wind that passes
    Return, no more return.
    The skies they were ashen and sober;
    The leaves they were crispéd and sere—
    The leaves they were withering and sere;
    It was night in the lonesome October
    Of my most immemorial year;
    It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
    In the misty mid region of Weir—
    It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
    In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,419
    edited September 2023
    TimS said:

    TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    True like every year’s deforestation is only x% of the Amazon, or “most schools won’t collapse”, yes.
    I'm not aware of any injuries caused by the aerated concrete, ever, and my Dad (in the construction industry for 50 years) thinks the urgency of the situation is largely a case of structural engineering consultancies lining their own pockets, so the climate crisis in microcosm essentially.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,553
    dixiedean said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Just seen this.

    "Election Maps UK
    @ElectionMapsUK
    Mid Bedfordshire By-Election Voting Intention:

    LAB: 29% (+7)
    CON: 29% (-31)
    LDM: 22% (+9)
    RFM: 7% (New)
    IND: 6% (New)

    Via
    @Survation
    , 12-14 Sep.
    Changes w/ GE2019."

    https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1703046374407680508

    Just seen the tweet or the poll?
    Was discussed at length the other day.
    (Surprisingly enough, it was a good poll for all three main parties, depending on the political persuasion of the poster).
    I was out of contact with PB a couple of days ago. So both.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 23,485
    Andy_JS said:

    Just seen this.

    "Election Maps UK
    @ElectionMapsUK
    Mid Bedfordshire By-Election Voting Intention:

    LAB: 29% (+7)
    CON: 29% (-31)
    LDM: 22% (+9)
    RFM: 7% (New)
    IND: 6% (New)

    Via
    @Survation
    , 12-14 Sep.
    Changes w/ GE2019."

    https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1703046374407680508

    As I predicted, sheer naivety from Labour and the Liberals not doing a deal - they deserve to lose.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,051

    TimS said:

    TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    True like every year’s deforestation is only x% of the Amazon, or “most schools won’t collapse”, yes.
    I'm not aware of any injuries caused by the aerated concrete, ever, and my Dad (in the construction industry for 50 years) thinks the urgency of the situation is largely a case of structural engineering consultancies lining their own pockets, so the climate crisis in microcosm essentially.
    Your approach of declaring that everything isn’t really a problem and we don’t need to spend any money on it would probably serve you well if you wanted to be an advisor to Rishi Sunak. The rest of the country, however, can see it hasn’t worked.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,663

    TimS said:

    TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    True like every year’s deforestation is only x% of the Amazon, or “most schools won’t collapse”, yes.
    I'm not aware of any injuries caused by the aerated concrete, ever, and my Dad (in the construction industry for 50 years) thinks the urgency of the situation is largely a case of structural engineering consultancies lining their own pockets, so the climate crisis in microcosm essentially.
    "...consultancies lining their own pockets..." sounds like private enterprise in microcosm to me.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,401
    Andy_JS said:

    dixiedean said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Just seen this.

    "Election Maps UK
    @ElectionMapsUK
    Mid Bedfordshire By-Election Voting Intention:

    LAB: 29% (+7)
    CON: 29% (-31)
    LDM: 22% (+9)
    RFM: 7% (New)
    IND: 6% (New)

    Via
    @Survation
    , 12-14 Sep.
    Changes w/ GE2019."

    https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1703046374407680508

    Just seen the tweet or the poll?
    Was discussed at length the other day.
    (Surprisingly enough, it was a good poll for all three main parties, depending on the political persuasion of the poster).
    I was out of contact with PB a couple of days ago. So both.
    Ah OK.
    I think general opinion in this order.
    Best for Labour. Clear challenger.
    Second LD's. Not out of it at all.
    Third Tories. Shocking collapse in share. But noted. High Independent Reform to squeeze, and a heck of a lot of don't knows (presumably Tory, as most voters were last time).
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277
    i don’t think it’s “rage”, I think it’s derisive laughter

    They CRIED over Brexit. Lol



  • TazTaz Posts: 14,376

    Andy_JS said:

    Just seen this.

    "Election Maps UK
    @ElectionMapsUK
    Mid Bedfordshire By-Election Voting Intention:

    LAB: 29% (+7)
    CON: 29% (-31)
    LDM: 22% (+9)
    RFM: 7% (New)
    IND: 6% (New)

    Via
    @Survation
    , 12-14 Sep.
    Changes w/ GE2019."

    https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1703046374407680508

    As I predicted, sheer naivety from Labour and the Liberals not doing a deal - they deserve to lose.
    The general election polling for the seat, as opposed to by election polling, has the yellow team much further back.

  • kamskikamski Posts: 5,190

    rcs1000 said:

    TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    Is it?

    Or are you only seeing what you want to see?
    I assume that Nasa have crunched their numbers accurately - if you have counter information by all means share.
    Co2 currently about 420 ppm compared to pre-industrial 280. That increase is caused by humans. Or do you really believe only 4% of that increase is caused by humans? If so please offer some evidence.
  • Taz said:

    Post Office Horizon victims to be offered 600K each.

    Doesn’t seem a lot for people who lost homes, we’re jailed, lost marriages and reputations or worse.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66843548

    Seems a lot when the Government has no money
  • CookieCookie Posts: 13,792
    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Cobalt clouds over Cathar Country: rainstorms say Return, return



    What, to the EU?
    I heard their young hearts crying
    Loveward above the glancing oar
    And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
    No more, return no more!

    O hearts, O sighing grasses,
    Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
    No more will the wild wind that passes
    Return, no more return.
    There once was a man from Looe
    Who pretended to hate the EU
    All knew he was lying -
    That man's always flying
    To Berlin, Milan, and Bayeux
    Very good.
    But, tiresomely, I'd have to point out that you don't have to dislike Europe to think membership of the EU is sub-optimal for the UK.
    cf our Scot Nat friends, who simply dislike the fact that Scotland is part of the UK, and have nothing at all against England ;-)
  • kamskikamski Posts: 5,190

    rcs1000 said:

    TimS said:

    TOPPING said:

    stodge said:

    Truss

    "Reduce benefits, raise retirement age, start fracking, abolish the windfall tax, diverge properly from the EU, delay net zero commitments, abandon replacing gas and oil boilers. This will not be easy but it will be worth doing."

    How on earth she thought this would receive any form of acceptance by the public shows her real delusion

    What part of that do you actually feel is bad?
    There's a strong anti-Green streak running through most of that - there's no doubt the climate is changing and while there old argument "China's not doing about it so why should we?" gets trotted out, it's not an excuse. The above measures would need to be counterbalanced by a significant R&D investment into further reducing usage of fossil fueld and mitigating the damage the global environment has suffered.

    The Critic also trots out the tired old line about a very small number of people paying a lot of the tax. Put it another way - 99% of the population pay 72% of the tax - and it sounds and feels different.

    Truss lost me at "Reduce Benefits" - if I'd heard "cut defence spending and raise taxes for the wealthy" I might have swallowed the rest of the guff but her fundamental flaw was it failed the modern test of "fairness". The idea most of us should get a little richer if a very small number get a lot richer is as passe as Corbyn's socialism - we need to move on from seeing economic growth purely in terms of wealthy people getting wealthier and look at different ways of promoting growth.
    Human-caused CO2 emissions are about 4% of total CO2 emissions. Of that 4%, what is it, 1% are ours? Committing economic suicide to
    reduce that meaningfully via reduced consumption is ludicrous. We need creative responses to climate change, not punitive anti-human policies aimed at punishing people for their nasty carbon consuming ways. The people pushing these policies are sociopaths.
    It is interesting that the 4% number is gaining currency around and about (social media, where I have seen it several times, and I don't visit sites particularly one way or another wrt climate change). I wonder if it will take off more broadly and if so what political implications it might have.
    It's a very old chestnut, one of those shrivelled vinegar-soaked conkers that's been through dozens of fights. There are pretty clear rebuttals on this topic from the "Skeptical Science" site from the early noughties. That's the thing with sceptic talking points - they are like whack-a-mole, no matter how often they are knocked on the head by data (other examples being undersea volcanoes, the AMOC, sunspot cycles, urban heat islands, you name it) they always come back, usually unchanged.

    The good news is I spent a lot more time back in the noughties worriedly engaging on social media over these talking points than I need to now. They've gone from a period when especially in America the climate sceptic belief system was pretty powerful, led by the likes of Wattsupwiththat, to one where it's pretty fringe.
    Long winded way to say it's true.
    Is it?

    Or are you only seeing what you want to see?
    I assume that Nasa have crunched their numbers accurately - if you have counter information by all means share.
    Here is what NASA say

    "Human activities have raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50% in less than 200 years."

    https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

    Hope that helps.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277
    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Cobalt clouds over Cathar Country: rainstorms say Return, return



    What, to the EU?
    I heard their young hearts crying
    Loveward above the glancing oar
    And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
    No more, return no more!

    O hearts, O sighing grasses,
    Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
    No more will the wild wind that passes
    Return, no more return.
    There once was a man from Looe
    Who pretended to hate the EU
    All knew he was lying -
    That man's always flying
    To Berlin, Milan, and Bayeux
    Not bad. But the first line is all wrong, not enough syllables, and doesn’t flow. Looe is divided into East and West, so you can use that; and you should also include an insult, therefore

    There was an old man from West Looe

    Is a much better opening line
  • Taz said:

    Post Office Horizon victims to be offered 600K each.

    Doesn’t seem a lot for people who lost homes, we’re jailed, lost marriages and reputations or worse.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66843548

    Seems a lot when the Government has no money
    The government has loads of money. Shedloads. Highest tax take since Jeremy Corbyn was a twinkle in his father's eye. The trouble is, it has some pretty big bills to pay.
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,376

    Taz said:

    Post Office Horizon victims to be offered 600K each.

    Doesn’t seem a lot for people who lost homes, we’re jailed, lost marriages and reputations or worse.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66843548

    Seems a lot when the Government has no money
    The govt has plenty of money. It just doesn’t manage it very well.

  • RattersRatters Posts: 1,076
    Rule number one of politics: know how to count.

    Rule number two: ensure you have a political mandate for widespread changes.

    Rules number three: try not to be incompetent.

    Truss was given a chance to stamp her brand of politics on the nation. But she failed at all three, disastrously. So she deserves to be paid a similar amount of attention as the leader of a local council that has run out of money.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,663
    Leon said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Cobalt clouds over Cathar Country: rainstorms say Return, return



    What, to the EU?
    I heard their young hearts crying
    Loveward above the glancing oar
    And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
    No more, return no more!

    O hearts, O sighing grasses,
    Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
    No more will the wild wind that passes
    Return, no more return.
    There once was a man from Looe
    Who pretended to hate the EU
    All knew he was lying -
    That man's always flying
    To Berlin, Milan, and Bayeux
    Not bad. But the first line is all wrong, not enough syllables, and doesn’t flow. Looe is divided into East and West, so you can use that; and you should also include an insult, therefore

    There was an old man from West Looe

    Is a much better opening line
    Your argument rings very true.

    PS I was trying to think of a better city than Bayeux to rhyme with Looe/EU. Couldn't immediately think of one (Chateauroux has too many syllables) so I asked ChatGPT, which came up with this gem:

    Me: Can you think of a European city name that rhymes with 'you'?

    ChatGPT: Certainly! The city name that rhymes with "you" is "Dublin," which is the capital of Ireland.


    So bad it's rather splendid.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,663
    Cookie said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Cobalt clouds over Cathar Country: rainstorms say Return, return



    What, to the EU?
    I heard their young hearts crying
    Loveward above the glancing oar
    And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
    No more, return no more!

    O hearts, O sighing grasses,
    Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
    No more will the wild wind that passes
    Return, no more return.
    There once was a man from Looe
    Who pretended to hate the EU
    All knew he was lying -
    That man's always flying
    To Berlin, Milan, and Bayeux
    Very good.
    But, tiresomely, I'd have to point out that you don't have to dislike Europe to think membership of the EU is sub-optimal for the UK.
    cf our Scot Nat friends, who simply dislike the fact that Scotland is part of the UK, and have nothing at all against England ;-)
    You scuppered your argument with your own evidence there I see.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 13,792

    Leon said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Cobalt clouds over Cathar Country: rainstorms say Return, return



    What, to the EU?
    I heard their young hearts crying
    Loveward above the glancing oar
    And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
    No more, return no more!

    O hearts, O sighing grasses,
    Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
    No more will the wild wind that passes
    Return, no more return.
    There once was a man from Looe
    Who pretended to hate the EU
    All knew he was lying -
    That man's always flying
    To Berlin, Milan, and Bayeux
    Not bad. But the first line is all wrong, not enough syllables, and doesn’t flow. Looe is divided into East and West, so you can use that; and you should also include an insult, therefore

    There was an old man from West Looe

    Is a much better opening line
    Your argument rings very true.

    PS I was trying to think of a better city than Bayeux to rhyme with Looe/EU. Couldn't immediately think of one (Chateauroux has too many syllables) so I asked ChatGPT, which came up with this gem:

    Me: Can you think of a European city name that rhymes with 'you'?

    ChatGPT: Certainly! The city name that rhymes with "you" is "Dublin," which is the capital of Ireland.


    So bad it's rather splendid.
    But a bad rhyme is sometimes funnier than a good one! Particularly if you were to pronounce it 'Bayoo'.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,663

    Leon said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    Cobalt clouds over Cathar Country: rainstorms say Return, return



    What, to the EU?
    I heard their young hearts crying
    Loveward above the glancing oar
    And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
    No more, return no more!

    O hearts, O sighing grasses,
    Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
    No more will the wild wind that passes
    Return, no more return.
    There once was a man from Looe
    Who pretended to hate the EU
    All knew he was lying -
    That man's always flying
    To Berlin, Milan, and Bayeux
    Not bad. But the first line is all wrong, not enough syllables, and doesn’t flow. Looe is divided into East and West, so you can use that; and you should also include an insult, therefore

    There was an old man from West Looe

    Is a much better opening line
    Your argument rings very true.

    PS I was trying to think of a better city than Bayeux to rhyme with Looe/EU. Couldn't immediately think of one (Chateauroux has too many syllables) so I asked ChatGPT, which came up with this gem:

    Me: Can you think of a European city name that rhymes with 'you'?

    ChatGPT: Certainly! The city name that rhymes with "you" is "Dublin," which is the capital of Ireland.


    So bad it's rather splendid.
    The conversation is descending into surrealism:

    Me: I hate to point this out but Dublin doesn't rhyme with 'you' at all.

    ChatGPT: I apologize for the mistake. You are absolutely correct; Dublin does not rhyme with "you." I misunderstood your question. A European city name that rhymes with "you" is "Marseille," a city in France. Thank you for pointing that out.


    Given ChatGTP can run off a rhyming sonnet in seconds, I find this failure bizarre.
This discussion has been closed.