Why did no one tell me about the Apple Series FOR ALL MANKIND
It's fantastic. Admittedly, I have only watched one episode, but it is brilliant
The bait and switch on the moon landing is GENIUS
I've seen 3 episodes, and although it's well done, I'm beginning to suspect that after an intriguing opening it's descending into a slow-moving soap opera that they will milk for as many episodes as they can in the typical way. So I'm probably not going any further unless I hear different.
If you're on Apple + I can highly recommend Shrinking featuring a great turn by Harrison Ford as a grumpy old man.
Ach. dammit
That is my big fear
So many series now do this. Start with great promise, then fade away HORRIBLY
I have had to abandon three dramas in recent months for this reason. GRRR
Season one was pretty good throughout, in my opinion. Season two also still fairly good and well worth watching. Season three had its moments and remained worth watching, but slower and a bit faded in comparison to the first two. Season four felt flat to me and I really only watched it through inertia.
Yeah I agree, I'm becalmed about 4 eps into season 4.
The Peter Capaldi thing on apple is quite good.
Good? Its *fantastic*
For me, I think quite good is accurate. I’m not the biggest fan of police procedurals - though it is a good example of the genre and I like its ambition and the questions it asks - but I’m not totally gripped by it.
Not like I have been with Traitors. OMFG! I don’t watch loads of reality TV - unless you class loads of YouTube as reality TV - but Traitors is amazing! I started watching season 2 when I was ill a few weeks ago and wanting something easy to watch whilst laid in bed, suffering stoically.
I’ve since burned through the two UK seasons and the two Aussie and one US season they have on iPlayer. They’re fascinating studies of the human character.
Hot tip - skip the pointless tasks they do in each episode and just mainline the good stuff when they’re a-murdering and a-banishing. Compelling TV. Reality TV for people who are too snooty to watch reality TV. Like me.
The new Gladiators lost its nostalgic novelty (oxymoron?) after 3 eps.
It’s old, but I’ve just discovered Blacklist on NetFlix. Really like James Spader
It’s a police procedural so gets a little samey after a while but am still intrigued to figure out the relationship between the two main characters
That goes on for ever. There is, literally, no end to it.
OMG I think people could be right. The golden age of TV could well be over.
If you were to put a gun to my head and say "I need to watch 10 things recommendations please" I'm not sure I would include any current series.
I note that Fargo has a new season which I am quietly confident and hopeful of because the other seasons were so masterful but other than that?
Not sure. The new Black Mirror is half strength compared with previous series, and all the other excellent series have finished. I've just got Apple so am looking forward to Slow Horses but other than that?
It's up to whichever is the new BBC police procedural. I v much wish Adeel Akhtar (note: a(nother) Four Lions graduate) had got a spin off with his sidekick for Fool Me Once and I can't think of anything else.
No more Top Boy, Fauda (although perhaps they were on location recently in a hospital setting), Boiling Point (so much better than The Bear), which have all recently finished.
Dear god I might have to watch Reacher.
Reacher season 1: solid and watchable
I am afraid season 2 is crap
The Bear is brilliant, have you seen that?
Trouble is it is only ten eps of half hour each per season. It's like a canape, too quickly consumed
Edit: I see you reference the Bear, negatively. TUT. The Bear is masterful.
I'll have to give it another go. I bailed early. Have you seen Boiling Point (the series - the film was fantastic)? Really excellent only four episodes sadly but real heart. Hence my comparison with The Bear.
Edit: and Reacher is what it is. You have certainty which sometimes makes up for quality.
You obviously know your TV and we might have similar tastes
I am checking out Boiling Point. Are you referring to the movie or the TV series, or suggesting I watch both? Aren't they the same story?
Yours, Confused of Phnom Penh
The film is the one-shot Stephen Graham vehicle and is excellent. There is also a (Stephen Graham-produced) series (4 episodes) on the BBC which is a sequel of sorts to the film (same cast plus some newbies) and is excellent. It redefines the meaning of tension.
Stephen Graham is great in almost everything he appears in (even if it's garbage).
OMG I think people could be right. The golden age of TV could well be over.
If you were to put a gun to my head and say "I need to watch 10 things recommendations please" I'm not sure I would include any current series.
I note that Fargo has a new season which I am quietly confident and hopeful of because the other seasons were so masterful but other than that?
Not sure. The new Black Mirror is half strength compared with previous series, and all the other excellent series have finished. I've just got Apple so am looking forward to Slow Horses but other than that?
It's up to whichever is the new BBC police procedural. I v much wish Adeel Akhtar (note: a(nother) Four Lions graduate) had got a spin off with his sidekick for Fool Me Once and I can't think of anything else.
No more Top Boy, Fauda (although perhaps they were on location recently in a hospital setting), Boiling Point (so much better than The Bear), which have all recently finished.
Dear god I might have to watch Reacher.
Reacher season 1: solid and watchable
I am afraid season 2 is crap
The Bear is brilliant, have you seen that?
Trouble is it is only ten eps of half hour each per season. It's like a canape, too quickly consumed
Edit: I see you reference the Bear, negatively. TUT. The Bear is masterful.
I'll have to give it another go. I bailed early. Have you seen Boiling Point (the series - the film was fantastic)? Really excellent only four episodes sadly but real heart. Hence my comparison with The Bear.
Edit: and Reacher is what it is. You have certainty which sometimes makes up for quality.
You obviously know your TV and we might have similar tastes
I am checking out Boiling Point. Are you referring to the movie or the TV series, or suggesting I watch both? Aren't they the same story?
Yours, Confused of Phnom Penh
The film is the one-shot Stephen Graham vehicle and is excellent. There is also a (Stephen Graham-produced) series (4 episodes) on the BBC which is a sequel of sorts to the film (same cast plus some newbies) and is excellent. It redefines the meaning of tension.
Stephen Graham is usually excellent in everything that he does. Which just goes to show that some Liverpudlians do have a societal contribution to make. He only has a bit part in the AppleTV film Greyhound, starring Tom Hanks, but it’s worth watching for that, nevertheless.
He is fantastic and yes nothing he's in isn't worth watching.
OMG I think people could be right. The golden age of TV could well be over.
If you were to put a gun to my head and say "I need to watch 10 things recommendations please" I'm not sure I would include any current series.
I note that Fargo has a new season which I am quietly confident and hopeful of because the other seasons were so masterful but other than that?
Not sure. The new Black Mirror is half strength compared with previous series, and all the other excellent series have finished. I've just got Apple so am looking forward to Slow Horses but other than that?
It's up to whichever is the new BBC police procedural. I v much wish Adeel Akhtar (note: a(nother) Four Lions graduate) had got a spin off with his sidekick for Fool Me Once and I can't think of anything else.
No more Top Boy, Fauda (although perhaps they were on location recently in a hospital setting), Boiling Point (so much better than The Bear), which have all recently finished.
Dear god I might have to watch Reacher.
Reacher season 1: solid and watchable
I am afraid season 2 is crap
The Bear is brilliant, have you seen that?
Trouble is it is only ten eps of half hour each per season. It's like a canape, too quickly consumed
Edit: I see you reference the Bear, negatively. TUT. The Bear is masterful.
I'll have to give it another go. I bailed early. Have you seen Boiling Point (the series - the film was fantastic)? Really excellent only four episodes sadly but real heart. Hence my comparison with The Bear.
Edit: and Reacher is what it is. You have certainty which sometimes makes up for quality.
You obviously know your TV and we might have similar tastes
I am checking out Boiling Point. Are you referring to the movie or the TV series, or suggesting I watch both? Aren't they the same story?
Yours, Confused of Phnom Penh
The film is the one-shot Stephen Graham vehicle and is excellent. There is also a (Stephen Graham-produced) series (4 episodes) on the BBC which is a sequel of sorts to the film (same cast plus some newbies) and is excellent. It redefines the meaning of tension.
Stephen Graham is great in almost everything he appears in (even if it's garbage).
Boardwalk Empire was the first I think I saw him in and is another show which was great the first few seasons. Never finished the series though as moved and didn't keep Sky so not seen the end of it.
The recent Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher was excellent - wonderfully baroque and over the top, like Seven meets Succession. From a few years ago, the German series Dark was equally complex and thought provoking. I was apoplectic when Netflix cancelled the writers' next effort, 1899, after one season. And although some didnt like it, I though the BBC drama The Gallows Pole, directed by Shane Meadows, was very good, both as a story and visually/aurally
A man has been jailed along with his parents after his wife was forced to take medication and doused with a corrosive substance, leaving her in a persistent vegetative state from which she will never recover.
Ambreen Fatima Sheikh was 30 when she was given the anti-diabetes drug glimepiride, which induced catastrophic brain injury, after she was brought to the UK from Pakistan following an arranged marriage, Leeds Crown Court heard.
Only the month before two police officers had visited the home, following concerns for her welfare, but they reported Ms Sheikh as being fit and well.
However, Judge Mrs Justice Lambert said she attached "little weight to that assessment" because Ms Sheikh spoke little English and her father-in-law was present during the visit.
Ms Sheikh's husband, Asgar Sheikh, 31, was jailed for seven years and nine months along with his father, Khalid Sheikh, 55, and his mother, Shabnam Sheikh, 52.
Just another example of the ugliness brought by religious extremist peasant families to the UK as a result of terrible immigration policies. Sunak's immigration reforms should stop this poor quality immigration. Sadly I suspect Starmer will open the flood gates again.
Down thread we have someone asking why there are negative perceptions of Muslims in this country. Apart from the beheadings, the terrorism, the quasi blasphemy laws, the cousin mariages (with ensuing birth defects in children), the arranged marriages, the homophobia, the misogyny, the massive racist rape gangs, the sharia law, the over reliance on benefits, the attacks on teachers, the niqabs and burqas, the rampant anti-Semitism, the honour killings, the drug gangs and the new tendency to melt women with acid, I cannot think of a single reason
"Muslims. It's like they're some sort of protected species. We're not even allowed to criticise them ffs."
The recent Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher was excellent - wonderfully baroque and over the top, like Seven meets Succession. From a few years ago, the German series Dark was equally complex and thought provoking. I was apoplectic when Netflix cancelled the writers' next effort, 1899, after one season. And although some didnt like it, I though the BBC drama The Gallows Pole, directed by Shane Meadows, was very good, both as a story and visually/aurally
Usher is contrived and mannered and eventually dull
gallows pole is one of the worst tv dramas ever made. Even the guardian admitted it (and they love Shane meadows). NOTHING HAPPENS and it happens very very slowly
OMG I think people could be right. The golden age of TV could well be over.
If you were to put a gun to my head and say "I need to watch 10 things recommendations please" I'm not sure I would include any current series.
I note that Fargo has a new season which I am quietly confident and hopeful of because the other seasons were so masterful but other than that?
Not sure. The new Black Mirror is half strength compared with previous series, and all the other excellent series have finished. I've just got Apple so am looking forward to Slow Horses but other than that?
It's up to whichever is the new BBC police procedural. I v much wish Adeel Akhtar (note: a(nother) Four Lions graduate) had got a spin off with his sidekick for Fool Me Once and I can't think of anything else.
No more Top Boy, Fauda (although perhaps they were on location recently in a hospital setting), Boiling Point (so much better than The Bear), which have all recently finished.
Dear god I might have to watch Reacher.
Reacher season 1: solid and watchable
I am afraid season 2 is crap
The Bear is brilliant, have you seen that?
Trouble is it is only ten eps of half hour each per season. It's like a canape, too quickly consumed
Edit: I see you reference the Bear, negatively. TUT. The Bear is masterful.
I'll have to give it another go. I bailed early. Have you seen Boiling Point (the series - the film was fantastic)? Really excellent only four episodes sadly but real heart. Hence my comparison with The Bear.
Edit: and Reacher is what it is. You have certainty which sometimes makes up for quality.
You obviously know your TV and we might have similar tastes
I am checking out Boiling Point. Are you referring to the movie or the TV series, or suggesting I watch both? Aren't they the same story?
Yours, Confused of Phnom Penh
The film is the one-shot Stephen Graham vehicle and is excellent. There is also a (Stephen Graham-produced) series (4 episodes) on the BBC which is a sequel of sorts to the film (same cast plus some newbies) and is excellent. It redefines the meaning of tension.
Stephen Graham is great in almost everything he appears in (even if it's garbage).
Boardwalk Empire was the first I think I saw him in and is another show which was great the first few seasons. Never finished the series though as moved and didn't keep Sky so not seen the end of it.
Strange, Guido and his pals were fine with ‘unsophisticated support’ for Project Brexit.
Guido posts racism about muslims shock.
My perception (which may be wrong) is that antisemitism is more pronounced in muslim communities. Are you saying that is wrong? Fine. The implication in Guido's point is that the numbers of muslims vastly outweighs Jews and thus appealing too members of the muslim community (selecting muslim candidates etc). The downside is that some seem to hold rather dodgy views.
I agree, partially. And this would be entirely true of his statement if he'd removed the words "sophisticated" and "unsophisticated".
Your point doesn't address the use of those words.
Doesn't unsophisticated and sophisticated relate to the support? I don't think he needed to bring Jewish voters into it. The point is, Labour want the Muslim block vote.
Don't you think Starmer would have been somewhat more critical of Israel and more pro-Palestinian over Gaza if this were the case? His stance has alienated many Muslim voters, for now.
Labour is more than just Starmer, the likes of Ali etc are a part of Labour too, or Ali was until a few days ago. And yes, unfortunately, some elements of Labour absolutely appeal based on antisemitic and religious desires which are unfit for 21st Century secular Britain.
Starmer recently has been better than his party. I hope that continues, but that does not mean there are not still problems within his party.
The fact that you think Starmer cracking down on antisemitism is alienating Muslim voters speaks volumes unfortunately.
Our politics will be much more healthy when the idea of appealing to "Muslim" voters is gone and buried and Muslims are treated with respect as secular individuals and not as zealots who hate Jews over mundane secular policies like education, health, tax, the economy etc.
My question wasn't aimed at you, actually. I know your views. Repeatedly.
Labour supporters, particularly those of the far left, have a problem with Jews. It is not because of Palestine. That is an excuse to hide their anti-Semitism behind that cause. The reason why many Labour supporters hate Jews is because they associate Jews with capitalism. The tropes about Soros and how the Jews control the banks are all part of this very special form of racial prejudice that is acceptable to supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and the like. They are racists, pure and simple. Evil, even.
Starmer is doing the right thing to root them out. The question is whether it is simply just window dressing.
The recent Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher was excellent - wonderfully baroque and over the top, like Seven meets Succession. From a few years ago, the German series Dark was equally complex and thought provoking. I was apoplectic when Netflix cancelled the writers' next effort, 1899, after one season. And although some didnt like it, I though the BBC drama The Gallows Pole, directed by Shane Meadows, was very good, both as a story and visually/aurally
Usher is contrived and mannered and eventually dull
gallows pole is one of the worst tv dramas ever made. Even the guardian admitted it (and they love Shane meadows). NOTHING HAPPENS and it happens very very slowly
Gives a Labour majority of 92, which would be smaller not only than Labour's majorities in 1997 and 2001 but also their majorities in 1945 and 1966. Best Tory poll for weeks
Did you forget to mention this is the Gold standard pollster too, that one that gets it right when everyone else gets it so wrong? The regular community note we give your seat numbers though, you factor in zero tactical voting?
BJO asks us to explain this -5 Labour +2 Tory huge change poll just 12% lead , I can’t. Other than it’s a movement month on month. Except to say maybe the Conservatives relentless campaigning for May 2nd General Election will show signs it’s working, swingback and closing the gap in one poll first before all others at some point.
My question to all you in the Conservative Party, are you picking up on anything that suggests May 2nd GE? My Dad isn’t, he’s convinced it’s October or Later, so doesn’t subscribe to my theory at all.
Savanta had a 14 point Labour lead a couple of weeks ago. It went up to 19 last week and has now come down again. It's basically a reversion to mean from a pollster that generally scores Labour lower. If the poll is right, the Tories should comfortably hold Wellingborough on Thursday.
I keep getting Savanta and Survation muddled 🤦♀️ I’ve got a mental block on that one.
However, I am right, if the polls “turn” one poll will report it first before all the others catch up - and we will all look at it is an outlier, not start of a trend. 😇
You are indeed correct. This Savanta may be the start of something, but we need a lot more data to tell us - and we have a couple of really good data points coming up tomorrow.
FWIW - for me, the elite pollsters are: Ipsos-Mori, Opinium and Survation. Omnisis (now We Think) got very close on the May 2023 local elections but do not have much of a track record so it's too early to tell with them. R&W, Deltapoll and Survation are the least reliable as they tend to move all over the place for no discernible reason. Then there are the hilarious Matt Goodwin polls.
As you used Survation twice and no Savanta, you have the same mental block as me? 🤗
The recent Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher was excellent - wonderfully baroque and over the top, like Seven meets Succession. From a few years ago, the German series Dark was equally complex and thought provoking. I was apoplectic when Netflix cancelled the writers' next effort, 1899, after one season. And although some didnt like it, I though the BBC drama The Gallows Pole, directed by Shane Meadows, was very good, both as a story and visually/aurally
Usher is contrived and mannered and eventually dull
gallows pole is one of the worst tv dramas ever made. Even the guardian admitted it (and they love Shane meadows). NOTHING HAPPENS and it happens very very slowly
An enormous disappointment
Gallows Pole was a pile of pretentious theatre student wank and wasted some really good actors and has probably blown the chance of them actually making a series that reflects the story which is quite a good subject.
A man has been jailed along with his parents after his wife was forced to take medication and doused with a corrosive substance, leaving her in a persistent vegetative state from which she will never recover.
Ambreen Fatima Sheikh was 30 when she was given the anti-diabetes drug glimepiride, which induced catastrophic brain injury, after she was brought to the UK from Pakistan following an arranged marriage, Leeds Crown Court heard.
Only the month before two police officers had visited the home, following concerns for her welfare, but they reported Ms Sheikh as being fit and well.
However, Judge Mrs Justice Lambert said she attached "little weight to that assessment" because Ms Sheikh spoke little English and her father-in-law was present during the visit.
Ms Sheikh's husband, Asgar Sheikh, 31, was jailed for seven years and nine months along with his father, Khalid Sheikh, 55, and his mother, Shabnam Sheikh, 52.
Just another example of the ugliness brought by religious extremist peasant families to the UK as a result of terrible immigration policies. Sunak's immigration reforms should stop this poor quality immigration. Sadly I suspect Starmer will open the flood gates again.
Starmer will open the floodgates?
Have you seen the current immigration figures? I think you’ll find the floodgates are open.
Yes, because the new system with higher thresholds hasn't come in yet. Once it does, immigration numbers will fall rapidly.
The recent Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher was excellent - wonderfully baroque and over the top, like Seven meets Succession. From a few years ago, the German series Dark was equally complex and thought provoking. I was apoplectic when Netflix cancelled the writers' next effort, 1899, after one season. And although some didnt like it, I though the BBC drama The Gallows Pole, directed by Shane Meadows, was very good, both as a story and visually/aurally
Usher is contrived and mannered and eventually dull
gallows pole is one of the worst tv dramas ever made. Even the guardian admitted it (and they love Shane meadows). NOTHING HAPPENS and it happens very very slowly
An enormous disappointment
Gallows Pole was a pile of pretentious theatre student wank and wasted some really good actors and has probably blown the chance of them actually making a series that reflects the story which is quite a good subject.
Yes, I was really looking forward to it
Shane meadows can be a genius. I love the period and the settiing and the theme. I was primed to love it
But omg. How bad was it??? It was so bad it’s kind of interesting. Something fundamental must have gone wrong. like they dropped the script down the loo and all the cast accidentally took heroin
Now Starmer is facing demands to suspend councillors who heard the anti semitism from the two hapless former labour candidates but did nothing about it.
I suppose this is fair. In the services, like the Police, people have been disciplined or dismissed not for making prejudiced comments but for not challenging them.
I totally agree with your post, except where you can’t point to any antisemitism can you, from the “hapless two”?
Go on Taz, I’m calling you out - from what’s in the public domain point to what Ali said that is antisemitic as you libelled him in your post.
Come on somebody. Anybody. If you are spinning Ali’s suspension is about antisemitism - what did he say that makes this man an anti semite?
Through all years of this issue in Labour, Ali has been an ally to the Jewish community, having set up Labour groups such as Muslims Against Antisemitism. Are You calling him antisemitic, without pointing to any evidence at all to support your accusation? That’s not really a fair thing anyone to say about anyone is it? ☹️
It could be some people are using utter hatred voiced for Netanyahu and his right wing government, and asking why the security failure in not responding to the warning signs and shared intelligence - both things are perfectly fair to voice, you don’t even have to be Muslim or left of centre - as an excuse to label those individuals and a whole party as antisemetic? that of course would not only be untrue, unfair, but it would also be against UK law.
It may be Starmer has made the biggest mistake any politician can make - a hasty knee jerk decision he has got wrong, and thrown good people onto the fire, to satisfy a baying media that you can’t actually satisfy, only feed into wanting more. And in the process of being factionally partial within his own party, he’s now handed silver bullets to the Corbynite left to shoot him down with.
We all need more evidence and truthful picture behind all this, to be sure about all this, is advice i’m giving.
A man has been jailed along with his parents after his wife was forced to take medication and doused with a corrosive substance, leaving her in a persistent vegetative state from which she will never recover.
Ambreen Fatima Sheikh was 30 when she was given the anti-diabetes drug glimepiride, which induced catastrophic brain injury, after she was brought to the UK from Pakistan following an arranged marriage, Leeds Crown Court heard.
Only the month before two police officers had visited the home, following concerns for her welfare, but they reported Ms Sheikh as being fit and well.
However, Judge Mrs Justice Lambert said she attached "little weight to that assessment" because Ms Sheikh spoke little English and her father-in-law was present during the visit.
Ms Sheikh's husband, Asgar Sheikh, 31, was jailed for seven years and nine months along with his father, Khalid Sheikh, 55, and his mother, Shabnam Sheikh, 52.
Just another example of the ugliness brought by religious extremist peasant families to the UK as a result of terrible immigration policies. Sunak's immigration reforms should stop this poor quality immigration. Sadly I suspect Starmer will open the flood gates again.
Starmer will open the floodgates?
Have you seen the current immigration figures? I think you’ll find the floodgates are open.
Yes, because the new system with higher thresholds hasn't come in yet. Once it does, immigration numbers will fall rapidly.
Yes, and a perfect formation of a large squadron of pigs has just passed my window.
Why did no one tell me about the Apple Series FOR ALL MANKIND
It's fantastic. Admittedly, I have only watched one episode, but it is brilliant
The bait and switch on the moon landing is GENIUS
I've seen 3 episodes, and although it's well done, I'm beginning to suspect that after an intriguing opening it's descending into a slow-moving soap opera that they will milk for as many episodes as they can in the typical way. So I'm probably not going any further unless I hear different.
If you're on Apple + I can highly recommend Shrinking featuring a great turn by Harrison Ford as a grumpy old man.
Ach. dammit
That is my big fear
So many series now do this. Start with great promise, then fade away HORRIBLY
I have had to abandon three dramas in recent months for this reason. GRRR
Yes, it's very annoying. And sometimes the opposite happens - eg I was still enjoying The Path after 3 seasons (though it had got a bit slushy), and they didn't make any more despite the story clearly being unfinished.
I would say For All Mankind is still entertaining after 3 episodes but 7 seasons are planned, and I don't want to get hooked into having to know what happens because it's too much of a time commitment for me...
Rotten Tomatoes - which is modestly reliable - insists it contnues well into seasons 2 and 3. I shall persist for now
The worst of the recent bunch was Money Heist, which started cleverly and elegantly, but described a perfect smooth arc of descent into inanity, plot holes, non sequiturs, stupid characters and tedious distractions
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters immediately went from quite good in episode 1 to SHITE by ep 3, and stayed there
Let us know how it goes!
It took me 2 and a half seasons to give up on Mad Men.
I've never seen an episode of Lost, or The Crown, or Game of Thrones (probably too violent for me), or Eastenders. Maybe I am commitment-phobic.
Never heard of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I saw Money Heist advertised - it looked interesting but my wife can't be bothered with subtitles, and I refuse to watch anything dubbed (if it was even available) so didn't bother. Won't now.
Mad Men was great, until about season 4 or 5 (most dramas collapse by seasons 4 or 5, if they get that far - it is an actual rule, with very few exceptions)
The first season of the Crown is superb, second jolly good, then increasingly bad
Game of Thrones is sui generis. I loved it, mostly, even while finding the plot absurdly complex and difficult to comprehend, it had that knack that, just when you felt like abandoning it for its labyrinthine complexity, it would have a brilliant scene with clever lines, or a spectacular battle sequence, or just the midget being funny
Great actors helped; also good characterisation
I thought Mad Men was brilliant all the way through. It just got the 60s perfectly from beginning to end. The Wire and the Sopranos were sustained brilliance too. Those three stand head and shoulders above all else.
Breaking Bad, too.
Better Call Saul was quality almost throughout, although for me, it ended poorly.
I loved Breaking Bad from the get-go, I was an early adopter, it is fantastic
And yet I HATED the ending, even tho most people enjoyed it. Maybe I just didn't want it to end
Endings are really hard in any genre. Paradoxically they are harder if you have made a really popular drama series, comedy series, novel sequence, etc- becaause then you have lots of fans who really CARE, and they will all have a personal preference for how it should end
You cannot please them all, often you will please few if any - like GoT
The best ending to any great drama I can remember is Spartacus (a neglected masterpiece)
They absolutely nailed it, you knew he was gonna die (it's history, and they stayed reasonably close to the basic facts) and yet they brought it off superbly. Bravo
The last episode of The Americans also hanaged to wrap up all the storylines and deliver an emotional gut-punch as well.
The recent Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher was excellent - wonderfully baroque and over the top, like Seven meets Succession. From a few years ago, the German series Dark was equally complex and thought provoking. I was apoplectic when Netflix cancelled the writers' next effort, 1899, after one season. And although some didnt like it, I though the BBC drama The Gallows Pole, directed by Shane Meadows, was very good, both as a story and visually/aurally
Usher is contrived and mannered and eventually dull
gallows pole is one of the worst tv dramas ever made. Even the guardian admitted it (and they love Shane meadows). NOTHING HAPPENS and it happens very very slowly
An enormous disappointment
Gallows Pole was a pile of pretentious theatre student wank and wasted some really good actors and has probably blown the chance of them actually making a series that reflects the story which is quite a good subject.
Yep. But they all speak like I do. That guttural, semi-legible grunting that passes for my accent. So there is that slightly redeeming feature. For me, at least.
And if anyone watched Boat Story that was recently on the BBC (which I enjoyed), some of that was filmed near me. I could take you to the very electricity pylon where (SPOILER ALERT!) they find the severed head. Glamorous.
Why did no one tell me about the Apple Series FOR ALL MANKIND
It's fantastic. Admittedly, I have only watched one episode, but it is brilliant
The bait and switch on the moon landing is GENIUS
I've seen 3 episodes, and although it's well done, I'm beginning to suspect that after an intriguing opening it's descending into a slow-moving soap opera that they will milk for as many episodes as they can in the typical way. So I'm probably not going any further unless I hear different.
If you're on Apple + I can highly recommend Shrinking featuring a great turn by Harrison Ford as a grumpy old man.
Ach. dammit
That is my big fear
So many series now do this. Start with great promise, then fade away HORRIBLY
I have had to abandon three dramas in recent months for this reason. GRRR
Yes, it's very annoying. And sometimes the opposite happens - eg I was still enjoying The Path after 3 seasons (though it had got a bit slushy), and they didn't make any more despite the story clearly being unfinished.
I would say For All Mankind is still entertaining after 3 episodes but 7 seasons are planned, and I don't want to get hooked into having to know what happens because it's too much of a time commitment for me...
Rotten Tomatoes - which is modestly reliable - insists it contnues well into seasons 2 and 3. I shall persist for now
The worst of the recent bunch was Money Heist, which started cleverly and elegantly, but described a perfect smooth arc of descent into inanity, plot holes, non sequiturs, stupid characters and tedious distractions
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters immediately went from quite good in episode 1 to SHITE by ep 3, and stayed there
Let us know how it goes!
It took me 2 and a half seasons to give up on Mad Men.
I've never seen an episode of Lost, or The Crown, or Game of Thrones (probably too violent for me), or Eastenders. Maybe I am commitment-phobic.
Never heard of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I saw Money Heist advertised - it looked interesting but my wife can't be bothered with subtitles, and I refuse to watch anything dubbed (if it was even available) so didn't bother. Won't now.
Mad Men was great, until about season 4 or 5 (most dramas collapse by seasons 4 or 5, if they get that far - it is an actual rule, with very few exceptions)
The first season of the Crown is superb, second jolly good, then increasingly bad
Game of Thrones is sui generis. I loved it, mostly, even while finding the plot absurdly complex and difficult to comprehend, it had that knack that, just when you felt like abandoning it for its labyrinthine complexity, it would have a brilliant scene with clever lines, or a spectacular battle sequence, or just the midget being funny
Great actors helped; also good characterisation
I thought Mad Men was brilliant all the way through. It just got the 60s perfectly from beginning to end. The Wire and the Sopranos were sustained brilliance too. Those three stand head and shoulders above all else.
Breaking Bad, too.
Better Call Saul was quality almost throughout, although for me, it ended poorly.
I loved Breaking Bad from the get-go, I was an early adopter, it is fantastic
And yet I HATED the ending, even tho most people enjoyed it. Maybe I just didn't want it to end
Endings are really hard in any genre. Paradoxically they are harder if you have made a really popular drama series, comedy series, novel sequence, etc- becaause then you have lots of fans who really CARE, and they will all have a personal preference for how it should end
You cannot please them all, often you will please few if any - like GoT
The best ending to any great drama I can remember is Spartacus (a neglected masterpiece)
They absolutely nailed it, you knew he was gonna die (it's history, and they stayed reasonably close to the basic facts) and yet they brought it off superbly. Bravo
The last episode of The Americans also hanaged to wrap up all the storylines and deliver an emotional gut-punch as well.
Why did no one tell me about the Apple Series FOR ALL MANKIND
It's fantastic. Admittedly, I have only watched one episode, but it is brilliant
The bait and switch on the moon landing is GENIUS
I've seen 3 episodes, and although it's well done, I'm beginning to suspect that after an intriguing opening it's descending into a slow-moving soap opera that they will milk for as many episodes as they can in the typical way. So I'm probably not going any further unless I hear different.
If you're on Apple + I can highly recommend Shrinking featuring a great turn by Harrison Ford as a grumpy old man.
Ach. dammit
That is my big fear
So many series now do this. Start with great promise, then fade away HORRIBLY
I have had to abandon three dramas in recent months for this reason. GRRR
Yes, it's very annoying. And sometimes the opposite happens - eg I was still enjoying The Path after 3 seasons (though it had got a bit slushy), and they didn't make any more despite the story clearly being unfinished.
I would say For All Mankind is still entertaining after 3 episodes but 7 seasons are planned, and I don't want to get hooked into having to know what happens because it's too much of a time commitment for me...
Rotten Tomatoes - which is modestly reliable - insists it contnues well into seasons 2 and 3. I shall persist for now
The worst of the recent bunch was Money Heist, which started cleverly and elegantly, but described a perfect smooth arc of descent into inanity, plot holes, non sequiturs, stupid characters and tedious distractions
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters immediately went from quite good in episode 1 to SHITE by ep 3, and stayed there
Let us know how it goes!
It took me 2 and a half seasons to give up on Mad Men.
I've never seen an episode of Lost, or The Crown, or Game of Thrones (probably too violent for me), or Eastenders. Maybe I am commitment-phobic.
Never heard of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I saw Money Heist advertised - it looked interesting but my wife can't be bothered with subtitles, and I refuse to watch anything dubbed (if it was even available) so didn't bother. Won't now.
Mad Men was great, until about season 4 or 5 (most dramas collapse by seasons 4 or 5, if they get that far - it is an actual rule, with very few exceptions)
The first season of the Crown is superb, second jolly good, then increasingly bad
Game of Thrones is sui generis. I loved it, mostly, even while finding the plot absurdly complex and difficult to comprehend, it had that knack that, just when you felt like abandoning it for its labyrinthine complexity, it would have a brilliant scene with clever lines, or a spectacular battle sequence, or just the midget being funny
Great actors helped; also good characterisation
I thought Mad Men was brilliant all the way through. It just got the 60s perfectly from beginning to end. The Wire and the Sopranos were sustained brilliance too. Those three stand head and shoulders above all else.
Breaking Bad, too.
Better Call Saul was quality almost throughout, although for me, it ended poorly.
I loved Breaking Bad from the get-go, I was an early adopter, it is fantastic
And yet I HATED the ending, even tho most people enjoyed it. Maybe I just didn't want it to end
Endings are really hard in any genre. Paradoxically they are harder if you have made a really popular drama series, comedy series, novel sequence, etc- becaause then you have lots of fans who really CARE, and they will all have a personal preference for how it should end
You cannot please them all, often you will please few if any - like GoT
The best ending to any great drama I can remember is Spartacus (a neglected masterpiece)
They absolutely nailed it, you knew he was gonna die (it's history, and they stayed reasonably close to the basic facts) and yet they brought it off superbly. Bravo
The last episode of The Americans also hanaged to wrap up all the storylines and deliver an emotional gut-punch as well.
Yes that was fantastic. What a great series.
I liked seasons 1 and 2 then for some reason stopped. So worth watching to the end?
Now Starmer is facing demands to suspend councillors who heard the anti semitism from the two hapless former labour candidates but did nothing about it.
I suppose this is fair. In the services, like the Police, people have been disciplined or dismissed not for making prejudiced comments but for not challenging them.
I totally agree with your post, except where you can’t point to any antisemitism can you, from the “hapless two”?
Go on Taz, I’m calling you out - from what’s in the public domain point to what Ali said that is antisemitic as you libelled him in your post.
Come on somebody. Anybody. If you are spinning Ali’s suspension is about antisemitism - what did he say that makes this man an anti semite?
Through all years of this issue in Labour, Ali has been an ally to the Jewish community, having set up Labour groups such as Muslims Against Antisemitism. Are You calling him antisemitic, without pointing to any evidence at all to support your accusation? That’s not really a fair thing anyone to say about anyone is it? ☹️
It could be some people are using utter hatred voiced for Netanyahu and his right wing government, and asking why the security failure in not responding to the warning signs and shared intelligence - both things are perfectly fair to voice, you don’t even have to be Muslim or left of centre - as an excuse to label those individuals and a whole party as antisemetic? that of course would not only be untrue, unfair, but it would also be against UK law.
It may be Starmer has made the biggest mistake any politician can make - a hasty knee jerk decision he has got wrong, and thrown good people onto the fire, to satisfy a baying media that you can’t actually satisfy, only feed into wanting more. And in the process of being factionally partial within his own party, he’s now handed silver bullets to the Corbynite left to shoot him down with.
We all need more evidence and truthful picture behind all this, to be sure about all this, is advice i’m giving.
Did you miss this bit:
'...Mr Ali, blaming "people in the media from certain Jewish quarters" for the suspension of Andy McDonald from the Labour Party.'
The idea Labour is using anti-Semitism to win Muslim votes is nutty, we've really fallen down the beergate hole.
That’s not the charge
The charge is they are willing to -*tolerate* anti-semitism as the price of those votes
The moderate end of Labour tolerate it, or sweep it under the carpet. The left wing element bask in their anti-Semitism as a badge of honour and actively encourage it.
Why did no one tell me about the Apple Series FOR ALL MANKIND
It's fantastic. Admittedly, I have only watched one episode, but it is brilliant
The bait and switch on the moon landing is GENIUS
I've seen 3 episodes, and although it's well done, I'm beginning to suspect that after an intriguing opening it's descending into a slow-moving soap opera that they will milk for as many episodes as they can in the typical way. So I'm probably not going any further unless I hear different.
If you're on Apple + I can highly recommend Shrinking featuring a great turn by Harrison Ford as a grumpy old man.
Ach. dammit
That is my big fear
So many series now do this. Start with great promise, then fade away HORRIBLY
I have had to abandon three dramas in recent months for this reason. GRRR
Yes, it's very annoying. And sometimes the opposite happens - eg I was still enjoying The Path after 3 seasons (though it had got a bit slushy), and they didn't make any more despite the story clearly being unfinished.
I would say For All Mankind is still entertaining after 3 episodes but 7 seasons are planned, and I don't want to get hooked into having to know what happens because it's too much of a time commitment for me...
Rotten Tomatoes - which is modestly reliable - insists it contnues well into seasons 2 and 3. I shall persist for now
The worst of the recent bunch was Money Heist, which started cleverly and elegantly, but described a perfect smooth arc of descent into inanity, plot holes, non sequiturs, stupid characters and tedious distractions
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters immediately went from quite good in episode 1 to SHITE by ep 3, and stayed there
Let us know how it goes!
It took me 2 and a half seasons to give up on Mad Men.
I've never seen an episode of Lost, or The Crown, or Game of Thrones (probably too violent for me), or Eastenders. Maybe I am commitment-phobic.
Never heard of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I saw Money Heist advertised - it looked interesting but my wife can't be bothered with subtitles, and I refuse to watch anything dubbed (if it was even available) so didn't bother. Won't now.
Mad Men was great, until about season 4 or 5 (most dramas collapse by seasons 4 or 5, if they get that far - it is an actual rule, with very few exceptions)
The first season of the Crown is superb, second jolly good, then increasingly bad
Game of Thrones is sui generis. I loved it, mostly, even while finding the plot absurdly complex and difficult to comprehend, it had that knack that, just when you felt like abandoning it for its labyrinthine complexity, it would have a brilliant scene with clever lines, or a spectacular battle sequence, or just the midget being funny
Great actors helped; also good characterisation
I thought Mad Men was brilliant all the way through. It just got the 60s perfectly from beginning to end. The Wire and the Sopranos were sustained brilliance too. Those three stand head and shoulders above all else.
Breaking Bad, too.
Better Call Saul was quality almost throughout, although for me, it ended poorly.
I loved Breaking Bad from the get-go, I was an early adopter, it is fantastic
And yet I HATED the ending, even tho most people enjoyed it. Maybe I just didn't want it to end
Endings are really hard in any genre. Paradoxically they are harder if you have made a really popular drama series, comedy series, novel sequence, etc- becaause then you have lots of fans who really CARE, and they will all have a personal preference for how it should end
You cannot please them all, often you will please few if any - like GoT
The best ending to any great drama I can remember is Spartacus (a neglected masterpiece)
They absolutely nailed it, you knew he was gonna die (it's history, and they stayed reasonably close to the basic facts) and yet they brought it off superbly. Bravo
The last episode of The Americans also hanaged to wrap up all the storylines and deliver an emotional gut-punch as well.
Apparently they considered a spin off with the daughter becoming a Monica Lewinsky
Why did no one tell me about the Apple Series FOR ALL MANKIND
It's fantastic. Admittedly, I have only watched one episode, but it is brilliant
The bait and switch on the moon landing is GENIUS
I've seen 3 episodes, and although it's well done, I'm beginning to suspect that after an intriguing opening it's descending into a slow-moving soap opera that they will milk for as many episodes as they can in the typical way. So I'm probably not going any further unless I hear different.
If you're on Apple + I can highly recommend Shrinking featuring a great turn by Harrison Ford as a grumpy old man.
Ach. dammit
That is my big fear
So many series now do this. Start with great promise, then fade away HORRIBLY
I have had to abandon three dramas in recent months for this reason. GRRR
Yes, it's very annoying. And sometimes the opposite happens - eg I was still enjoying The Path after 3 seasons (though it had got a bit slushy), and they didn't make any more despite the story clearly being unfinished.
I would say For All Mankind is still entertaining after 3 episodes but 7 seasons are planned, and I don't want to get hooked into having to know what happens because it's too much of a time commitment for me...
Rotten Tomatoes - which is modestly reliable - insists it contnues well into seasons 2 and 3. I shall persist for now
The worst of the recent bunch was Money Heist, which started cleverly and elegantly, but described a perfect smooth arc of descent into inanity, plot holes, non sequiturs, stupid characters and tedious distractions
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters immediately went from quite good in episode 1 to SHITE by ep 3, and stayed there
Let us know how it goes!
It took me 2 and a half seasons to give up on Mad Men.
I've never seen an episode of Lost, or The Crown, or Game of Thrones (probably too violent for me), or Eastenders. Maybe I am commitment-phobic.
Never heard of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I saw Money Heist advertised - it looked interesting but my wife can't be bothered with subtitles, and I refuse to watch anything dubbed (if it was even available) so didn't bother. Won't now.
Mad Men was great, until about season 4 or 5 (most dramas collapse by seasons 4 or 5, if they get that far - it is an actual rule, with very few exceptions)
The first season of the Crown is superb, second jolly good, then increasingly bad
Game of Thrones is sui generis. I loved it, mostly, even while finding the plot absurdly complex and difficult to comprehend, it had that knack that, just when you felt like abandoning it for its labyrinthine complexity, it would have a brilliant scene with clever lines, or a spectacular battle sequence, or just the midget being funny
Great actors helped; also good characterisation
I thought Mad Men was brilliant all the way through. It just got the 60s perfectly from beginning to end. The Wire and the Sopranos were sustained brilliance too. Those three stand head and shoulders above all else.
Breaking Bad, too.
Better Call Saul was quality almost throughout, although for me, it ended poorly.
I loved Breaking Bad from the get-go, I was an early adopter, it is fantastic
And yet I HATED the ending, even tho most people enjoyed it. Maybe I just didn't want it to end
Endings are really hard in any genre. Paradoxically they are harder if you have made a really popular drama series, comedy series, novel sequence, etc- becaause then you have lots of fans who really CARE, and they will all have a personal preference for how it should end
You cannot please them all, often you will please few if any - like GoT
The best ending to any great drama I can remember is Spartacus (a neglected masterpiece)
They absolutely nailed it, you knew he was gonna die (it's history, and they stayed reasonably close to the basic facts) and yet they brought it off superbly. Bravo
The last episode of The Americans also hanaged to wrap up all the storylines and deliver an emotional gut-punch as well.
Apparently they considered a spin off with the daughter becoming a Monica Lewinsky
Except that they probably decided that the idea sucks.
There are dozens of others, you are being insanely restrictive
The Golden Age of TV (let's hope it hasn't ended) has produced maybe 100 fantastic shows
Remember The Killing, the Danish version?
OMFG. Just absolutely compelling. not merely some of the greatest TV drama, some of the greatest drama of any form I have ever watched. You could not take your eyes off it, even tho it was bitterly harrowing. What a show
Squid Game Chernobyl Vikings
&c &c
I loved the Killing but we did not get all of it, the sub-titles gave us a couple of sentences when it was clear a lot more was going on. The same with The Bridge - there was a sustained joke in that about the way Swedes and Danes speak that was totally inaccessible to non-Danish/Swedish natives. So, these were probably even better than we thought. Chernobyl was brilliant too. I thought we were talking about multi-series examples, not one or two. But it is true I don't watch a whole heap of telly.
I speak Danish and Swedish so was able to follow them both. An issue with the subtitltes is that they were sexed up - the detectives would say something like "What exactly do you mean?" and the subtitle would say "What the fuck do you mean?" The subtitler defended the changes by saying that British audiences would think that police who don't swear were implausible, which is a bit depressing if true,
Danish actually doesn't have sexual swear words, though young Danes borrow the English words - Danish doesn't get much rougher than "shit" and "devil". Whether that relates to the famous and long-standing Danish tolerance of sexual behaviour is an interesting question - maybe if you think that most kinds of sex are just a great part of life, then saying "fuck" in a negative sense is a bit pointless?
But yes, great series anyway!
Korean is a bit like that (although they do have "fuck" etc). Because it's a language based around formality, something like "are you mad" can be swearing.
Russian appears to be the only language as good as English for swearing.
Czech perhaps, judging from The Good Soldier Svejk.
Gives a Labour majority of 92, which would be smaller not only than Labour's majorities in 1997 and 2001 but also their majorities in 1945 and 1966. Best Tory poll for weeks
Did you forget to mention this is the Gold standard pollster too, that one that gets it right when everyone else gets it so wrong? The regular community note we give your seat numbers though, you factor in zero tactical voting?
BJO asks us to explain this -5 Labour +2 Tory huge change poll just 12% lead , I can’t. Other than it’s a movement month on month. Except to say maybe the Conservatives relentless campaigning for May 2nd General Election will show signs it’s working, swingback and closing the gap in one poll first before all others at some point.
My question to all you in the Conservative Party, are you picking up on anything that suggests May 2nd GE? My Dad isn’t, he’s convinced it’s October or Later, so doesn’t subscribe to my theory at all.
Savanta had a 14 point Labour lead a couple of weeks ago. It went up to 19 last week and has now come down again. It's basically a reversion to mean from a pollster that generally scores Labour lower. If the poll is right, the Tories should comfortably hold Wellingborough on Thursday.
I keep getting Savanta and Survation muddled 🤦♀️ I’ve got a mental block on that one.
However, I am right, if the polls “turn” one poll will report it first before all the others catch up - and we will all look at it is an outlier, not start of a trend. 😇
You are indeed correct. This Savanta may be the start of something, but we need a lot more data to tell us - and we have a couple of really good data points coming up tomorrow.
FWIW - for me, the elite pollsters are: Ipsos-Mori, Opinium and Survation. Omnisis (now We Think) got very close on the May 2023 local elections but do not have much of a track record so it's too early to tell with them. R&W, Deltapoll and Survation are the least reliable as they tend to move all over the place for no discernible reason. Then there are the hilarious Matt Goodwin polls.
As you used Survation twice and no Savanta, you have the same mental block as me? 🤗
Now Starmer is facing demands to suspend councillors who heard the anti semitism from the two hapless former labour candidates but did nothing about it.
I suppose this is fair. In the services, like the Police, people have been disciplined or dismissed not for making prejudiced comments but for not challenging them.
I totally agree with your post, except where you can’t point to any antisemitism can you, from the “hapless two”?
Go on Taz, I’m calling you out - from what’s in the public domain point to what Ali said that is antisemitic as you libelled him in your post.
Come on somebody. Anybody. If you are spinning Ali’s suspension is about antisemitism - what did he say that makes this man an anti semite?
Through all years of this issue in Labour, Ali has been an ally to the Jewish community, having set up Labour groups such as Muslims Against Antisemitism. Are You calling him antisemitic, without pointing to any evidence at all to support your accusation? That’s not really a fair thing anyone to say about anyone is it? ☹️
It could be some people are using utter hatred voiced for Netanyahu and his right wing government, and asking why the security failure in not responding to the warning signs and shared intelligence - both things are perfectly fair to voice, you don’t even have to be Muslim or left of centre - as an excuse to label those individuals and a whole party as antisemetic? that of course would not only be untrue, unfair, but it would also be against UK law.
It may be Starmer has made the biggest mistake any politician can make - a hasty knee jerk decision he has got wrong, and thrown good people onto the fire, to satisfy a baying media that you can’t actually satisfy, only feed into wanting more. And in the process of being factionally partial within his own party, he’s now handed silver bullets to the Corbynite left to shoot him down with.
We all need more evidence and truthful picture behind all this, to be sure about all this, is advice i’m giving.
Did you miss this bit:
'...Mr Ali, blaming "people in the media from certain Jewish quarters" for the suspension of Andy McDonald from the Labour Party.'
Labour supporters believe that racial stereotyping of Jews is OK, or can be excused. It isn't, and it shouldn't.
Why did no one tell me about the Apple Series FOR ALL MANKIND
It's fantastic. Admittedly, I have only watched one episode, but it is brilliant
The bait and switch on the moon landing is GENIUS
I've seen 3 episodes, and although it's well done, I'm beginning to suspect that after an intriguing opening it's descending into a slow-moving soap opera that they will milk for as many episodes as they can in the typical way. So I'm probably not going any further unless I hear different.
If you're on Apple + I can highly recommend Shrinking featuring a great turn by Harrison Ford as a grumpy old man.
Ach. dammit
That is my big fear
So many series now do this. Start with great promise, then fade away HORRIBLY
I have had to abandon three dramas in recent months for this reason. GRRR
Yes, it's very annoying. And sometimes the opposite happens - eg I was still enjoying The Path after 3 seasons (though it had got a bit slushy), and they didn't make any more despite the story clearly being unfinished.
I would say For All Mankind is still entertaining after 3 episodes but 7 seasons are planned, and I don't want to get hooked into having to know what happens because it's too much of a time commitment for me...
Rotten Tomatoes - which is modestly reliable - insists it contnues well into seasons 2 and 3. I shall persist for now
The worst of the recent bunch was Money Heist, which started cleverly and elegantly, but described a perfect smooth arc of descent into inanity, plot holes, non sequiturs, stupid characters and tedious distractions
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters immediately went from quite good in episode 1 to SHITE by ep 3, and stayed there
Let us know how it goes!
It took me 2 and a half seasons to give up on Mad Men.
I've never seen an episode of Lost, or The Crown, or Game of Thrones (probably too violent for me), or Eastenders. Maybe I am commitment-phobic.
Never heard of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I saw Money Heist advertised - it looked interesting but my wife can't be bothered with subtitles, and I refuse to watch anything dubbed (if it was even available) so didn't bother. Won't now.
Mad Men was great, until about season 4 or 5 (most dramas collapse by seasons 4 or 5, if they get that far - it is an actual rule, with very few exceptions)
The first season of the Crown is superb, second jolly good, then increasingly bad
Game of Thrones is sui generis. I loved it, mostly, even while finding the plot absurdly complex and difficult to comprehend, it had that knack that, just when you felt like abandoning it for its labyrinthine complexity, it would have a brilliant scene with clever lines, or a spectacular battle sequence, or just the midget being funny
Great actors helped; also good characterisation
I thought Mad Men was brilliant all the way through. It just got the 60s perfectly from beginning to end. The Wire and the Sopranos were sustained brilliance too. Those three stand head and shoulders above all else.
Breaking Bad, too.
Better Call Saul was quality almost throughout, although for me, it ended poorly.
I loved Breaking Bad from the get-go, I was an early adopter, it is fantastic
And yet I HATED the ending, even tho most people enjoyed it. Maybe I just didn't want it to end
Endings are really hard in any genre. Paradoxically they are harder if you have made a really popular drama series, comedy series, novel sequence, etc- becaause then you have lots of fans who really CARE, and they will all have a personal preference for how it should end
You cannot please them all, often you will please few if any - like GoT
The best ending to any great drama I can remember is Spartacus (a neglected masterpiece)
They absolutely nailed it, you knew he was gonna die (it's history, and they stayed reasonably close to the basic facts) and yet they brought it off superbly. Bravo
The last episode of The Americans also hanaged to wrap up all the storylines and deliver an emotional gut-punch as well.
Yes that was fantastic. What a great series.
I liked seasons 1 and 2 then for some reason stopped. So worth watching to the end?
Another drama with one great season then shite:
The man in the high castle
It started so well!
Yes The Americans gets better and better once you have accepted the device of the geographical living arrangements.
Doesn't flag throughout the entire series and gets stronger imo.
The idea Labour is using anti-Semitism to win Muslim votes is nutty, we've really fallen down the beergate hole.
No. The idea is that Labour turns a blind eye to a range of un-Labour views to keep Muslim voters on board.
The problem goes like this -
1) Due to colonialist history and past racism, challenging non-white people about their beliefs is awkward for people of progressive belief 2) This means that when people from some communities express beliefs that are sexist, racist etc. they tend not to get challenged in some environments. 3) This normalises the expression of such beliefs, in such environments. 4) Comedy ensues.
The idea Labour is using anti-Semitism to win Muslim votes is nutty, we've really fallen down the beergate hole.
That’s not the charge
The charge is they are willing to -*tolerate* anti-semitism as the price of those votes
The moderate end of Labour tolerate it, or sweep it under the carpet. The left wing element bask in their anti-Semitism as a badge of honour and actively encourage it.
Remarkable how the extreme right is now getting away with the assertion that any criticism of Israel amounts to anti-Semitism.
Vladimir Putin must be wishing he could have pulled a trick like that.
Now Starmer is facing demands to suspend councillors who heard the anti semitism from the two hapless former labour candidates but did nothing about it.
I suppose this is fair. In the services, like the Police, people have been disciplined or dismissed not for making prejudiced comments but for not challenging them.
I totally agree with your post, except where you can’t point to any antisemitism can you, from the “hapless two”?
Go on Taz, I’m calling you out - from what’s in the public domain point to what Ali said that is antisemitic as you libelled him in your post.
Come on somebody. Anybody. If you are spinning Ali’s suspension is about antisemitism - what did he say that makes this man an anti semite?
Through all years of this issue in Labour, Ali has been an ally to the Jewish community, having set up Labour groups such as Muslims Against Antisemitism. Are You calling him antisemitic, without pointing to any evidence at all to support your accusation? That’s not really a fair thing anyone to say about anyone is it? ☹️
It could be some people are using utter hatred voiced for Netanyahu and his right wing government, and asking why the security failure in not responding to the warning signs and shared intelligence - both things are perfectly fair to voice, you don’t even have to be Muslim or left of centre - as an excuse to label those individuals and a whole party as antisemetic? that of course would not only be untrue, unfair, but it would also be against UK law.
It may be Starmer has made the biggest mistake any politician can make - a hasty knee jerk decision he has got wrong, and thrown good people onto the fire, to satisfy a baying media that you can’t actually satisfy, only feed into wanting more. And in the process of being factionally partial within his own party, he’s now handed silver bullets to the Corbynite left to shoot him down with.
We all need more evidence and truthful picture behind all this, to be sure about all this, is advice i’m giving.
Did you miss this bit:
'...Mr Ali, blaming "people in the media from certain Jewish quarters" for the suspension of Andy McDonald from the Labour Party.'
Labour supporters believe that racial stereotyping of Jews is OK, or can be excused. It isn't, and it shouldn't.
There are dozens of others, you are being insanely restrictive
The Golden Age of TV (let's hope it hasn't ended) has produced maybe 100 fantastic shows
Remember The Killing, the Danish version?
OMFG. Just absolutely compelling. not merely some of the greatest TV drama, some of the greatest drama of any form I have ever watched. You could not take your eyes off it, even tho it was bitterly harrowing. What a show
Squid Game Chernobyl Vikings
&c &c
I loved the Killing but we did not get all of it, the sub-titles gave us a couple of sentences when it was clear a lot more was going on. The same with The Bridge - there was a sustained joke in that about the way Swedes and Danes speak that was totally inaccessible to non-Danish/Swedish natives. So, these were probably even better than we thought. Chernobyl was brilliant too. I thought we were talking about multi-series examples, not one or two. But it is true I don't watch a whole heap of telly.
I speak Danish and Swedish so was able to follow them both. An issue with the subtitltes is that they were sexed up - the detectives would say something like "What exactly do you mean?" and the subtitle would say "What the fuck do you mean?" The subtitler defended the changes by saying that British audiences would think that police who don't swear were implausible, which is a bit depressing if true,
Danish actually doesn't have sexual swear words, though young Danes borrow the English words - Danish doesn't get much rougher than "shit" and "devil". Whether that relates to the famous and long-standing Danish tolerance of sexual behaviour is an interesting question - maybe if you think that most kinds of sex are just a great part of life, then saying "fuck" in a negative sense is a bit pointless?
But yes, great series anyway!
Korean is a bit like that (although they do have "fuck" etc). Because it's a language based around formality, something like "are you mad" can be swearing.
Russian appears to be the only language as good as English for swearing.
Czech perhaps, judging from The Good Soldier Svejk.
All the slavic languages have a rich vocabulary of filth, and the structure of the verbs allows the expression of concepts which are not only physically challenging, but baroque in their intensity.
In Estonian, by contrast, it is quite hard to swear at all...
Why did no one tell me about the Apple Series FOR ALL MANKIND
It's fantastic. Admittedly, I have only watched one episode, but it is brilliant
The bait and switch on the moon landing is GENIUS
I've seen 3 episodes, and although it's well done, I'm beginning to suspect that after an intriguing opening it's descending into a slow-moving soap opera that they will milk for as many episodes as they can in the typical way. So I'm probably not going any further unless I hear different.
If you're on Apple + I can highly recommend Shrinking featuring a great turn by Harrison Ford as a grumpy old man.
Ach. dammit
That is my big fear
So many series now do this. Start with great promise, then fade away HORRIBLY
I have had to abandon three dramas in recent months for this reason. GRRR
Yes, it's very annoying. And sometimes the opposite happens - eg I was still enjoying The Path after 3 seasons (though it had got a bit slushy), and they didn't make any more despite the story clearly being unfinished.
I would say For All Mankind is still entertaining after 3 episodes but 7 seasons are planned, and I don't want to get hooked into having to know what happens because it's too much of a time commitment for me...
Rotten Tomatoes - which is modestly reliable - insists it contnues well into seasons 2 and 3. I shall persist for now
The worst of the recent bunch was Money Heist, which started cleverly and elegantly, but described a perfect smooth arc of descent into inanity, plot holes, non sequiturs, stupid characters and tedious distractions
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters immediately went from quite good in episode 1 to SHITE by ep 3, and stayed there
Let us know how it goes!
It took me 2 and a half seasons to give up on Mad Men.
I've never seen an episode of Lost, or The Crown, or Game of Thrones (probably too violent for me), or Eastenders. Maybe I am commitment-phobic.
Never heard of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I saw Money Heist advertised - it looked interesting but my wife can't be bothered with subtitles, and I refuse to watch anything dubbed (if it was even available) so didn't bother. Won't now.
Mad Men was great, until about season 4 or 5 (most dramas collapse by seasons 4 or 5, if they get that far - it is an actual rule, with very few exceptions)
The first season of the Crown is superb, second jolly good, then increasingly bad
Game of Thrones is sui generis. I loved it, mostly, even while finding the plot absurdly complex and difficult to comprehend, it had that knack that, just when you felt like abandoning it for its labyrinthine complexity, it would have a brilliant scene with clever lines, or a spectacular battle sequence, or just the midget being funny
Great actors helped; also good characterisation
I thought Mad Men was brilliant all the way through. It just got the 60s perfectly from beginning to end. The Wire and the Sopranos were sustained brilliance too. Those three stand head and shoulders above all else.
Breaking Bad, too.
Better Call Saul was quality almost throughout, although for me, it ended poorly.
I loved Breaking Bad from the get-go, I was an early adopter, it is fantastic
And yet I HATED the ending, even tho most people enjoyed it. Maybe I just didn't want it to end
Endings are really hard in any genre. Paradoxically they are harder if you have made a really popular drama series, comedy series, novel sequence, etc- becaause then you have lots of fans who really CARE, and they will all have a personal preference for how it should end
You cannot please them all, often you will please few if any - like GoT
The best ending to any great drama I can remember is Spartacus (a neglected masterpiece)
They absolutely nailed it, you knew he was gonna die (it's history, and they stayed reasonably close to the basic facts) and yet they brought it off superbly. Bravo
The last episode of The Americans also hanaged to wrap up all the storylines and deliver an emotional gut-punch as well.
Yes that was fantastic. What a great series.
I liked seasons 1 and 2 then for some reason stopped. So worth watching to the end?
Another drama with one great season then shite:
The man in the high castle
It started so well!
Yes The Americans gets better and better once you have accepted the device of the geographical living arrangements.
Doesn't flag throughout the entire series and gets stronger imo.
Gratitude. I am getting some excellent tips here
I’m not sure why I stopped watching The Americans. Maybe simply coz there was so much choice
There are dozens of others, you are being insanely restrictive
The Golden Age of TV (let's hope it hasn't ended) has produced maybe 100 fantastic shows
Remember The Killing, the Danish version?
OMFG. Just absolutely compelling. not merely some of the greatest TV drama, some of the greatest drama of any form I have ever watched. You could not take your eyes off it, even tho it was bitterly harrowing. What a show
Squid Game Chernobyl Vikings
&c &c
I loved the Killing but we did not get all of it, the sub-titles gave us a couple of sentences when it was clear a lot more was going on. The same with The Bridge - there was a sustained joke in that about the way Swedes and Danes speak that was totally inaccessible to non-Danish/Swedish natives. So, these were probably even better than we thought. Chernobyl was brilliant too. I thought we were talking about multi-series examples, not one or two. But it is true I don't watch a whole heap of telly.
I speak Danish and Swedish so was able to follow them both. An issue with the subtitltes is that they were sexed up - the detectives would say something like "What exactly do you mean?" and the subtitle would say "What the fuck do you mean?" The subtitler defended the changes by saying that British audiences would think that police who don't swear were implausible, which is a bit depressing if true,
Danish actually doesn't have sexual swear words, though young Danes borrow the English words - Danish doesn't get much rougher than "shit" and "devil". Whether that relates to the famous and long-standing Danish tolerance of sexual behaviour is an interesting question - maybe if you think that most kinds of sex are just a great part of life, then saying "fuck" in a negative sense is a bit pointless?
But yes, great series anyway!
Korean is a bit like that (although they do have "fuck" etc). Because it's a language based around formality, something like "are you mad" can be swearing.
Russian appears to be the only language as good as English for swearing.
Czech perhaps, judging from The Good Soldier Svejk.
All the slavic languages have a rich vocabulary of filth, and the structure of the verbs allows the expression of concepts which are not only physically challenging, but baroque in their intensity.
In Estonian, by contrast, it is quite hard to swear at all...
Why did no one tell me about the Apple Series FOR ALL MANKIND
It's fantastic. Admittedly, I have only watched one episode, but it is brilliant
The bait and switch on the moon landing is GENIUS
I've seen 3 episodes, and although it's well done, I'm beginning to suspect that after an intriguing opening it's descending into a slow-moving soap opera that they will milk for as many episodes as they can in the typical way. So I'm probably not going any further unless I hear different.
If you're on Apple + I can highly recommend Shrinking featuring a great turn by Harrison Ford as a grumpy old man.
Ach. dammit
That is my big fear
So many series now do this. Start with great promise, then fade away HORRIBLY
I have had to abandon three dramas in recent months for this reason. GRRR
Yes, it's very annoying. And sometimes the opposite happens - eg I was still enjoying The Path after 3 seasons (though it had got a bit slushy), and they didn't make any more despite the story clearly being unfinished.
I would say For All Mankind is still entertaining after 3 episodes but 7 seasons are planned, and I don't want to get hooked into having to know what happens because it's too much of a time commitment for me...
Rotten Tomatoes - which is modestly reliable - insists it contnues well into seasons 2 and 3. I shall persist for now
The worst of the recent bunch was Money Heist, which started cleverly and elegantly, but described a perfect smooth arc of descent into inanity, plot holes, non sequiturs, stupid characters and tedious distractions
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters immediately went from quite good in episode 1 to SHITE by ep 3, and stayed there
Let us know how it goes!
It took me 2 and a half seasons to give up on Mad Men.
I've never seen an episode of Lost, or The Crown, or Game of Thrones (probably too violent for me), or Eastenders. Maybe I am commitment-phobic.
Never heard of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I saw Money Heist advertised - it looked interesting but my wife can't be bothered with subtitles, and I refuse to watch anything dubbed (if it was even available) so didn't bother. Won't now.
Mad Men was great, until about season 4 or 5 (most dramas collapse by seasons 4 or 5, if they get that far - it is an actual rule, with very few exceptions)
The first season of the Crown is superb, second jolly good, then increasingly bad
Game of Thrones is sui generis. I loved it, mostly, even while finding the plot absurdly complex and difficult to comprehend, it had that knack that, just when you felt like abandoning it for its labyrinthine complexity, it would have a brilliant scene with clever lines, or a spectacular battle sequence, or just the midget being funny
Great actors helped; also good characterisation
I thought Mad Men was brilliant all the way through. It just got the 60s perfectly from beginning to end. The Wire and the Sopranos were sustained brilliance too. Those three stand head and shoulders above all else.
Breaking Bad, too.
Better Call Saul was quality almost throughout, although for me, it ended poorly.
I loved Breaking Bad from the get-go, I was an early adopter, it is fantastic
And yet I HATED the ending, even tho most people enjoyed it. Maybe I just didn't want it to end
Endings are really hard in any genre. Paradoxically they are harder if you have made a really popular drama series, comedy series, novel sequence, etc- becaause then you have lots of fans who really CARE, and they will all have a personal preference for how it should end
You cannot please them all, often you will please few if any - like GoT
The best ending to any great drama I can remember is Spartacus (a neglected masterpiece)
They absolutely nailed it, you knew he was gonna die (it's history, and they stayed reasonably close to the basic facts) and yet they brought it off superbly. Bravo
The last episode of The Americans also hanaged to wrap up all the storylines and deliver an emotional gut-punch as well.
Yes that was fantastic. What a great series.
I liked seasons 1 and 2 then for some reason stopped. So worth watching to the end?
Another drama with one great season then shite:
The man in the high castle
It started so well!
Yes The Americans gets better and better once you have accepted the device of the geographical living arrangements.
Doesn't flag throughout the entire series and gets stronger imo.
Gratitude. I am getting some excellent tips here
I’m not sure why I stopped watching The Americans. Maybe simply coz there was so much choice
Prices were rising about 1% per month in Feb-May last year. So hard not to see a fall in the annual rate over the spring.
Agreed.
Cumulative inflation over the last 8 months has now been a total of 0.2%.
If we get relatively normal month-on-month prints over the next four months, we could easily see headline inflation fall to 2% or below.
Which is why Sunak won’t call an election in May, but it won’t be enough to save him,
🤣
The decisions made solely on inflation?
There’s lots of reasons why they chose May, easily top of the list is increase on boat crossing from last year, lack of growth in economy and covid report are second and third.
And the smaller number of Conservative councillors in autumn. It's hard to fight for the political lives of those who caused the loss of your seat.
Yes, a bad local election night on May 2nd is a consideration on timing of the GE for sure.
Of all the Conservative Party members on PB, are there any at all who think the General Election is on May 2nd? Are there any party members who want the election in May? or do you all feel with inflation falling and interest rates to follow, the Tory election prospects are going to be much better later in the year?
Put the covid incompetence and corruption out of your heads, look at how we have reduced boat crossings and turned the economy around. This is the platform the Government will fight the election on, is it not?
That platform is there and strongest for them early May… it’s completely gone by October, that election platform will be flotsam washing up on a beach and stepped over by illegal arrivals.
🗓 On February 13-14, 1945 the USA & the UK carried out barbarian bombing of Dresden.
❗️ The area of the city completely destroyed by the air raid was 4 times larger than that of Nagasaki after the US atomic bombing.
How’s about Rostov-on-Don for this year then, or is that a little too small? Pehaps Volgograd instead?
Peter the "Great" killed far more people -c 300,000- building the City of St. Petersburg in a swamp. The hypocrisy is faintly comic, and reminds us that the USSR was a formal ally of Nazi Germany for nearly 2 years until June 1941.
Russians appear to be in real denial that they were Hitler's friends for the first couple of years of WW2 (from the British/French perspective of when the war started).
The Russian invasion of Poland - in collaboration with the Nazis - at the beginning of the war is also something that seems to get skated over. I wonder how - or if - it is taught in Russian schools.
I expect that it is taught, to some extent, in the context of the greater narrative of the historical extent of Russia. I think those parts of Poland occupied in 1939 later became part of the USSR, and were, at one time or another, possibly parts of the Russian Empire.
The idea Labour is using anti-Semitism to win Muslim votes is nutty, we've really fallen down the beergate hole.
That’s not the charge
The charge is they are willing to -*tolerate* anti-semitism as the price of those votes
The moderate end of Labour tolerate it, or sweep it under the carpet. The left wing element bask in their anti-Semitism as a badge of honour and actively encourage it.
Remarkable how the extreme right is now getting away with the assertion that any criticism of Israel amounts to anti-Semitism.
Vladimir Putin must be wishing he could have pulled a trick like that.
The extreme right do and say all sorts of bad and stupid things. That kind of whataboutery doesn't let the Labour Party off the hook. The most vociferous Labour Party members on the subject claim their criticism is about the state of Israel, which is perfectly OK if it were limited to that, but for many who like to attack "Zionism" it is just code for their racist hatred of Jews and the stereotypical association of Jewry with global capitalism.
When They See Us The Night Of Fargo (all seasons, 4 was weakest) Beef (dark humour) Black Mirror The Americans Mindhunter Manhunt: Unabomber Flint Town (doc) Small Axe Superstore (for some levity, one of the funniest shows on tv)
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
I’m not sure I get this argument about dramas that “have no likeable characters”
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
Good writers are able to confuse the reader or viewer by encouraging him/her to like despicable characters. An outstanding example is Arthur Shelby in Peaky Blinders.
The idea Labour is using anti-Semitism to win Muslim votes is nutty, we've really fallen down the beergate hole.
That’s not the charge
The charge is they are willing to -*tolerate* anti-semitism as the price of those votes
The moderate end of Labour tolerate it, or sweep it under the carpet. The left wing element bask in their anti-Semitism as a badge of honour and actively encourage it.
Remarkable how the extreme right is now getting away with the assertion that any criticism of Israel amounts to anti-Semitism.
Vladimir Putin must be wishing he could have pulled a trick like that.
The extreme right do and say all sorts of bad and stupid things. That kind of whataboutery doesn't let the Labour Party off the hook. The most vociferous Labour Party members on the subject claim their criticism is about the state of Israel, which is perfectly OK if it were limited to that, but for many who like to attack "Zionism" it is just code for their racist hatred of Jews and the stereotypical association of Jewry with global capitalism.
Yep, that's true. And on the right it's the Soros references that give the game away.
I’m not sure I get this argument about dramas that “have no likeable characters”
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
The genius of Succession was that each character had a weakness hence became sympathetic at different times. You don't have to like them, but can understand their motivation.
As I mentioned I'm watching The Morning Show atm and there are no sympathetic or nice characters there and I'm struggling to find anything to latch onto. I hope they all fall into a hole.
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
I have long believed him to be a fascist. Looks like one, behaves like one and probably smells like one. Judge a man by the company he keeps my dear old mum used to say. Trump.
I’m not sure I get this argument about dramas that “have no likeable characters”
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
The problem with Ozark was that the characters were irksome, rather than not likeable.
Indeed
It occurs to me you can get away with entirely odious characters as long as they are entertainingly so - eg if they are mesmerisingly devious or cruelly funny
There are dozens of others, you are being insanely restrictive
The Golden Age of TV (let's hope it hasn't ended) has produced maybe 100 fantastic shows
Remember The Killing, the Danish version?
OMFG. Just absolutely compelling. not merely some of the greatest TV drama, some of the greatest drama of any form I have ever watched. You could not take your eyes off it, even tho it was bitterly harrowing. What a show
Squid Game Chernobyl Vikings
&c &c
I loved the Killing but we did not get all of it, the sub-titles gave us a couple of sentences when it was clear a lot more was going on. The same with The Bridge - there was a sustained joke in that about the way Swedes and Danes speak that was totally inaccessible to non-Danish/Swedish natives. So, these were probably even better than we thought. Chernobyl was brilliant too. I thought we were talking about multi-series examples, not one or two. But it is true I don't watch a whole heap of telly.
I speak Danish and Swedish so was able to follow them both. An issue with the subtitltes is that they were sexed up - the detectives would say something like "What exactly do you mean?" and the subtitle would say "What the fuck do you mean?" The subtitler defended the changes by saying that British audiences would think that police who don't swear were implausible, which is a bit depressing if true,
Danish actually doesn't have sexual swear words, though young Danes borrow the English words - Danish doesn't get much rougher than "shit" and "devil". Whether that relates to the famous and long-standing Danish tolerance of sexual behaviour is an interesting question - maybe if you think that most kinds of sex are just a great part of life, then saying "fuck" in a negative sense is a bit pointless?
But yes, great series anyway!
Korean is a bit like that (although they do have "fuck" etc). Because it's a language based around formality, something like "are you mad" can be swearing.
Russian appears to be the only language as good as English for swearing.
Czech perhaps, judging from The Good Soldier Svejk.
All the slavic languages have a rich vocabulary of filth, and the structure of the verbs allows the expression of concepts which are not only physically challenging, but baroque in their intensity.
In Estonian, by contrast, it is quite hard to swear at all...
Mum swears at me all the time in the Malayalam language, especially when I read PB at the dinner table
The idea Labour is using anti-Semitism to win Muslim votes is nutty, we've really fallen down the beergate hole.
That’s not the charge
The charge is they are willing to -*tolerate* anti-semitism as the price of those votes
The moderate end of Labour tolerate it, or sweep it under the carpet. The left wing element bask in their anti-Semitism as a badge of honour and actively encourage it.
Remarkable how the extreme right is now getting away with the assertion that any criticism of Israel amounts to anti-Semitism.
Vladimir Putin must be wishing he could have pulled a trick like that.
The extreme right do and say all sorts of bad and stupid things. That kind of whataboutery doesn't let the Labour Party off the hook. The most vociferous Labour Party members on the subject claim their criticism is about the state of Israel, which is perfectly OK if it were limited to that, but for many who like to attack "Zionism" it is just code for their racist hatred of Jews and the stereotypical association of Jewry with global capitalism.
Yep, that's true. And on the right it's the Soros references that give the game away.
Anti-Semitism is everywhere, but your argument seems to be "oh look we have found some examples in the Tory Party, so that means it is OK in the Labour Party". Shame you take this view. Labour has a MASSIVE problem with this. Starmer has not yet sorted it, by a long way
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
I have long believed him to be a fascist. Looks like one, behaves like one and probably smells like one. Judge a man by the company he keeps my dear old mum used to say. Trump.
Yep - but a lot of very prominent Tories are very happy to be seen in his company and to invite him to join their party. Antisemitism is not just a Labour problem, though it absolutely is a Labour problem.
I’m not sure I get this argument about dramas that “have no likeable characters”
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
The problem with Ozark was that the characters were irksome, rather than not likeable.
Indeed
It occurs to me you can get away with entirely odious characters as long as they are entertainingly so - eg if they are mesmerisingly devious or cruelly funny
That’s how Succession got away with it
Gus Fring, Lalo Salamanca, Al Swearingen, Batiatus, Livia, Jordan Belfort, pretty well any important character in the Sopranos, are moral lepers, but utterly compelling.
There are dozens of others, you are being insanely restrictive
The Golden Age of TV (let's hope it hasn't ended) has produced maybe 100 fantastic shows
Remember The Killing, the Danish version?
OMFG. Just absolutely compelling. not merely some of the greatest TV drama, some of the greatest drama of any form I have ever watched. You could not take your eyes off it, even tho it was bitterly harrowing. What a show
Squid Game Chernobyl Vikings
&c &c
I loved the Killing but we did not get all of it, the sub-titles gave us a couple of sentences when it was clear a lot more was going on. The same with The Bridge - there was a sustained joke in that about the way Swedes and Danes speak that was totally inaccessible to non-Danish/Swedish natives. So, these were probably even better than we thought. Chernobyl was brilliant too. I thought we were talking about multi-series examples, not one or two. But it is true I don't watch a whole heap of telly.
I speak Danish and Swedish so was able to follow them both. An issue with the subtitltes is that they were sexed up - the detectives would say something like "What exactly do you mean?" and the subtitle would say "What the fuck do you mean?" The subtitler defended the changes by saying that British audiences would think that police who don't swear were implausible, which is a bit depressing if true,
Danish actually doesn't have sexual swear words, though young Danes borrow the English words - Danish doesn't get much rougher than "shit" and "devil". Whether that relates to the famous and long-standing Danish tolerance of sexual behaviour is an interesting question - maybe if you think that most kinds of sex are just a great part of life, then saying "fuck" in a negative sense is a bit pointless?
But yes, great series anyway!
Korean is a bit like that (although they do have "fuck" etc). Because it's a language based around formality, something like "are you mad" can be swearing.
Russian appears to be the only language as good as English for swearing.
Czech perhaps, judging from The Good Soldier Svejk.
All the slavic languages have a rich vocabulary of filth, and the structure of the verbs allows the expression of concepts which are not only physically challenging, but baroque in their intensity.
In Estonian, by contrast, it is quite hard to swear at all...
I’m not sure I get this argument about dramas that “have no likeable characters”
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
The genius of Succession was that each character had a weakness hence became sympathetic at different times. You don't have to like them, but can understand their motivation.
As I mentioned I'm watching The Morning Show atm and there are no sympathetic or nice characters there and I'm struggling to find anything to latch onto. I hope they all fall into a hole.
Not so with Succession.
Yeah I struggled with the morning show. Its ok. But not remotely compelling
And yes you’re right about succession. You do find yourself sympathising with absolute rotters as they shift the focus
Also it never ebbed. I can’t remember a “bad” episode. Always good
And always so funny. Top class writing
I hope the makers have kept that writing team together to do something else. British I believe?
There are dozens of others, you are being insanely restrictive
The Golden Age of TV (let's hope it hasn't ended) has produced maybe 100 fantastic shows
Remember The Killing, the Danish version?
OMFG. Just absolutely compelling. not merely some of the greatest TV drama, some of the greatest drama of any form I have ever watched. You could not take your eyes off it, even tho it was bitterly harrowing. What a show
Squid Game Chernobyl Vikings
&c &c
I loved the Killing but we did not get all of it, the sub-titles gave us a couple of sentences when it was clear a lot more was going on. The same with The Bridge - there was a sustained joke in that about the way Swedes and Danes speak that was totally inaccessible to non-Danish/Swedish natives. So, these were probably even better than we thought. Chernobyl was brilliant too. I thought we were talking about multi-series examples, not one or two. But it is true I don't watch a whole heap of telly.
I speak Danish and Swedish so was able to follow them both. An issue with the subtitltes is that they were sexed up - the detectives would say something like "What exactly do you mean?" and the subtitle would say "What the fuck do you mean?" The subtitler defended the changes by saying that British audiences would think that police who don't swear were implausible, which is a bit depressing if true,
Danish actually doesn't have sexual swear words, though young Danes borrow the English words - Danish doesn't get much rougher than "shit" and "devil". Whether that relates to the famous and long-standing Danish tolerance of sexual behaviour is an interesting question - maybe if you think that most kinds of sex are just a great part of life, then saying "fuck" in a negative sense is a bit pointless?
But yes, great series anyway!
Korean is a bit like that (although they do have "fuck" etc). Because it's a language based around formality, something like "are you mad" can be swearing.
Russian appears to be the only language as good as English for swearing.
Czech perhaps, judging from The Good Soldier Svejk.
All the slavic languages have a rich vocabulary of filth, and the structure of the verbs allows the expression of concepts which are not only physically challenging, but baroque in their intensity.
In Estonian, by contrast, it is quite hard to swear at all...
Mum swears at me all the time in the Malayalam language, especially when I read PB at the dinner table
Now you listen to your Mother about those bad habits!
I’m not sure I get this argument about dramas that “have no likeable characters”
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
The problem with Ozark was that the characters were irksome, rather than not likeable.
Indeed
It occurs to me you can get away with entirely odious characters as long as they are entertainingly so - eg if they are mesmerisingly devious or cruelly funny
That’s how Succession got away with it
Gus Fring, Lalo Salamanca, Al Swearingen, Batiatus, Jordan Belfort, pretty well any important character in the Sopranos, are moral lepers, but utterly compelling.
The idea Labour is using anti-Semitism to win Muslim votes is nutty, we've really fallen down the beergate hole.
That’s not the charge
The charge is they are willing to -*tolerate* anti-semitism as the price of those votes
The moderate end of Labour tolerate it, or sweep it under the carpet. The left wing element bask in their anti-Semitism as a badge of honour and actively encourage it.
Remarkable how the extreme right is now getting away with the assertion that any criticism of Israel amounts to anti-Semitism.
Vladimir Putin must be wishing he could have pulled a trick like that.
The extreme right do and say all sorts of bad and stupid things. That kind of whataboutery doesn't let the Labour Party off the hook. The most vociferous Labour Party members on the subject claim their criticism is about the state of Israel, which is perfectly OK if it were limited to that, but for many who like to attack "Zionism" it is just code for their racist hatred of Jews and the stereotypical association of Jewry with global capitalism.
Yep, that's true. And on the right it's the Soros references that give the game away.
Anti-Semitism is everywhere, but your argument seems to be "oh look we have found some examples in the Tory Party, so that means it is OK in the Labour Party". Shame you take this view. Labour has a MASSIVE problem with this. Starmer has not yet sorted it, by a long way
No, my attitude is that it needs to be called out everywhere, not just where it is politically convenient, and at least Starmer is actively doing something about it inside Labour. Meanwhile, Soros conspiracy theorists are being feted by prominent Tories and selected as Tory parliamentary candidates, and Tories who write about Jews controlling the media become PM!
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
I’m not sure I get this argument about dramas that “have no likeable characters”
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
The genius of Succession was that each character had a weakness hence became sympathetic at different times. You don't have to like them, but can understand their motivation.
As I mentioned I'm watching The Morning Show atm and there are no sympathetic or nice characters there and I'm struggling to find anything to latch onto. I hope they all fall into a hole.
Not so with Succession.
Yeah I struggled with the morning show. Its ok. But not remotely compelling
And yes you’re right about succession. You do find yourself sympathising with absolute rotters as they shift the focus
Also it never ebbed. I can’t remember a “bad” episode. Always good
And always so funny. Top class writing
I hope the makers have kept that writing team together to do something else. British I believe?
Ok I’m gonna watch Boiling Point the movie!
🥂🥂
My favourite character in Succession was the grifting Englishman who married Logan Roy's first wife. A minor part in the great scheme of things but brilliantly observed and entirely revolting.
There are dozens of others, you are being insanely restrictive
The Golden Age of TV (let's hope it hasn't ended) has produced maybe 100 fantastic shows
Remember The Killing, the Danish version?
OMFG. Just absolutely compelling. not merely some of the greatest TV drama, some of the greatest drama of any form I have ever watched. You could not take your eyes off it, even tho it was bitterly harrowing. What a show
Squid Game Chernobyl Vikings
&c &c
I loved the Killing but we did not get all of it, the sub-titles gave us a couple of sentences when it was clear a lot more was going on. The same with The Bridge - there was a sustained joke in that about the way Swedes and Danes speak that was totally inaccessible to non-Danish/Swedish natives. So, these were probably even better than we thought. Chernobyl was brilliant too. I thought we were talking about multi-series examples, not one or two. But it is true I don't watch a whole heap of telly.
I speak Danish and Swedish so was able to follow them both. An issue with the subtitltes is that they were sexed up - the detectives would say something like "What exactly do you mean?" and the subtitle would say "What the fuck do you mean?" The subtitler defended the changes by saying that British audiences would think that police who don't swear were implausible, which is a bit depressing if true,
Danish actually doesn't have sexual swear words, though young Danes borrow the English words - Danish doesn't get much rougher than "shit" and "devil". Whether that relates to the famous and long-standing Danish tolerance of sexual behaviour is an interesting question - maybe if you think that most kinds of sex are just a great part of life, then saying "fuck" in a negative sense is a bit pointless?
But yes, great series anyway!
Korean is a bit like that (although they do have "fuck" etc). Because it's a language based around formality, something like "are you mad" can be swearing.
Russian appears to be the only language as good as English for swearing.
Czech perhaps, judging from The Good Soldier Svejk.
All the slavic languages have a rich vocabulary of filth, and the structure of the verbs allows the expression of concepts which are not only physically challenging, but baroque in their intensity.
In Estonian, by contrast, it is quite hard to swear at all...
Mum swears at me all the time in the Malayalam language, especially when I read PB at the dinner table
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
I’m not sure I get this argument about dramas that “have no likeable characters”
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
Good writers are able to confuse the reader or viewer by encouraging him/her to like despicable characters. An outstanding example is Arthur Shelby in Peaky Blinders.
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
It also reminds me of the classic "falling off the edge of critiques of the rich",
Soros being a billionaire who unashamedly uses his wealth to intervene in the public discourse.
So you have people criticising the power of Capital etc.
Then some of them fall over the edge of "Rich = Jews"
“Lara Trump says if she is elected as co-Chair of the Republican Party, “every single penny” of party funding will be spent toward Donald Trump”
For once a politician says something you can believe! Fingers crossed this happens, because that’s how the Republicans lose the House and maybe fail to take the Senate.
There are dozens of others, you are being insanely restrictive
The Golden Age of TV (let's hope it hasn't ended) has produced maybe 100 fantastic shows
Remember The Killing, the Danish version?
OMFG. Just absolutely compelling. not merely some of the greatest TV drama, some of the greatest drama of any form I have ever watched. You could not take your eyes off it, even tho it was bitterly harrowing. What a show
Squid Game Chernobyl Vikings
&c &c
I loved the Killing but we did not get all of it, the sub-titles gave us a couple of sentences when it was clear a lot more was going on. The same with The Bridge - there was a sustained joke in that about the way Swedes and Danes speak that was totally inaccessible to non-Danish/Swedish natives. So, these were probably even better than we thought. Chernobyl was brilliant too. I thought we were talking about multi-series examples, not one or two. But it is true I don't watch a whole heap of telly.
I speak Danish and Swedish so was able to follow them both. An issue with the subtitltes is that they were sexed up - the detectives would say something like "What exactly do you mean?" and the subtitle would say "What the fuck do you mean?" The subtitler defended the changes by saying that British audiences would think that police who don't swear were implausible, which is a bit depressing if true,
Danish actually doesn't have sexual swear words, though young Danes borrow the English words - Danish doesn't get much rougher than "shit" and "devil". Whether that relates to the famous and long-standing Danish tolerance of sexual behaviour is an interesting question - maybe if you think that most kinds of sex are just a great part of life, then saying "fuck" in a negative sense is a bit pointless?
But yes, great series anyway!
Korean is a bit like that (although they do have "fuck" etc). Because it's a language based around formality, something like "are you mad" can be swearing.
Russian appears to be the only language as good as English for swearing.
Czech perhaps, judging from The Good Soldier Svejk.
All the slavic languages have a rich vocabulary of filth, and the structure of the verbs allows the expression of concepts which are not only physically challenging, but baroque in their intensity.
In Estonian, by contrast, it is quite hard to swear at all...
No language is more joyously filthy than Yiddish.
"If I had known I was gonna meet the president, I would've worn a tie. I mean, look at me. I look like a schlemiel!"
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
I have long believed him to be a fascist. Looks like one, behaves like one and probably smells like one. Judge a man by the company he keeps my dear old mum used to say. Trump.
One of the things the right has done, fairly sucessfully, is keep the really unpleasant people and stuff at one remove. Farage and Staines are unwelcome uncles who (mostly) get shunned at family gatherings.
For various reasons, that's changed, and not in a good way. Partly because they are so useful. But only as long as the mainstream response can be "nothing to do with us, but maybe he has a point, doesn't he?"
I’m not sure I get this argument about dramas that “have no likeable characters”
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
The problem with Ozark was that the characters were irksome, rather than not likeable.
Indeed
It occurs to me you can get away with entirely odious characters as long as they are entertainingly so - eg if they are mesmerisingly devious or cruelly funny
That’s how Succession got away with it
You've got to have some reason to care.
The Eight Deadly Words are: "I don't care what happens to these people."
Gives a Labour majority of 92, which would be smaller not only than Labour's majorities in 1997 and 2001 but also their majorities in 1945 and 1966. Best Tory poll for weeks
Did you forget to mention this is the Gold standard pollster too, that one that gets it right when everyone else gets it so wrong? The regular community note we give your seat numbers though, you factor in zero tactical voting?
BJO asks us to explain this -5 Labour +2 Tory huge change poll just 12% lead , I can’t. Other than it’s a movement month on month. Except to say maybe the Conservatives relentless campaigning for May 2nd General Election will show signs it’s working, swingback and closing the gap in one poll first before all others at some point.
My question to all you in the Conservative Party, are you picking up on anything that suggests May 2nd GE? My Dad isn’t, he’s convinced it’s October or Later, so doesn’t subscribe to my theory at all.
Savanta had a 14 point Labour lead a couple of weeks ago. It went up to 19 last week and has now come down again. It's basically a reversion to mean from a pollster that generally scores Labour lower. If the poll is right, the Tories should comfortably hold Wellingborough on Thursday.
I keep getting Savanta and Survation muddled 🤦♀️ I’ve got a mental block on that one.
However, I am right, if the polls “turn” one poll will report it first before all the others catch up - and we will all look at it is an outlier, not start of a trend. 😇
You are indeed correct. This Savanta may be the start of something, but we need a lot more data to tell us - and we have a couple of really good data points coming up tomorrow.
FWIW - for me, the elite pollsters are: Ipsos-Mori, Opinium and Survation. Omnisis (now We Think) got very close on the May 2023 local elections but do not have much of a track record so it's too early to tell with them. R&W, Deltapoll and Survation are the least reliable as they tend to move all over the place for no discernible reason. Then there are the hilarious Matt Goodwin polls.
As you used Survation twice and no Savanta, you have the same mental block as me? 🤗
Ha, ha - you know what I mean!
Yes. Savanta needs to change its name to something that doesn’t begin with S 🙂
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
It also reminds me of the classic "falling off the edge of critiques of the rich",
Soros being a billionaire who unashamedly uses his wealth to intervene in the public discourse.
So you have people criticising the power of Capital etc.
Then some of them fall over the edge of "Rich = Jews"
The US right are capitalists selectively criticising the power of capital. It's just bizarre.
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
I don't think the Soros obsession is limited to the intellectually clueless right wing frother. My problem with the "whataboutery" in this discussion is this: The Labour Party, until recently had a leader who referred to Jewish people as follows: "They don't understand irony" and endorsed a mural that was so obviously anti-Semitic you would have to be blind or intensely stupid (even more so than Corbyn) not to realise. Starmer endorsed Corbyn and attempted to persuade us he should be PM.
Did Starmer not notice that Corbyn expressed these views, or did he only care about it when he realised that it would be necessary to de-toxify his brand?
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
I don't think the Soros obsession is limited to the intellectually clueless right wing frother. My problem with the "whataboutery" in this discussion is this: The Labour Party, until recently had a leader who referred to Jewish people as follows: "They don't understand irony" and endorsed a mural that was so obviously anti-Semitic you would have to be blind or intensely stupid (even more so than Corbyn) not to realise. Starmer endorsed Corbyn and attempted to persuade us he should be PM.
Did Starmer not notice that Corbyn expressed these views, or did he only care about it when he realised that it would be necessary to de-toxify his brand?
I don't really care. I'm more interested in his continuing to do the right thing than in some futile parsing of his motives.
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
It also reminds me of the classic "falling off the edge of critiques of the rich",
Soros being a billionaire who unashamedly uses his wealth to intervene in the public discourse.
So you have people criticising the power of Capital etc.
Then some of them fall over the edge of "Rich = Jews"
The US right are capitalists selectively criticising the power of capital. It's just bizarre.
They can see that capital hasn't delivered for a lot of people in the US recently, so they know that if they don't criticise the power of capital someone else will. This way they get to control the message. Surprise! It doesn't involve curtailing their power or wealth.
The idea Labour is using anti-Semitism to win Muslim votes is nutty, we've really fallen down the beergate hole.
That’s not the charge
The charge is they are willing to -*tolerate* anti-semitism as the price of those votes
The moderate end of Labour tolerate it, or sweep it under the carpet. The left wing element bask in their anti-Semitism as a badge of honour and actively encourage it.
Remarkable how the extreme right is now getting away with the assertion that any criticism of Israel amounts to anti-Semitism.
Vladimir Putin must be wishing he could have pulled a trick like that.
The extreme right do and say all sorts of bad and stupid things. That kind of whataboutery doesn't let the Labour Party off the hook. The most vociferous Labour Party members on the subject claim their criticism is about the state of Israel, which is perfectly OK if it were limited to that, but for many who like to attack "Zionism" it is just code for their racist hatred of Jews and the stereotypical association of Jewry with global capitalism.
Yep, that's true. And on the right it's the Soros references that give the game away.
Anti-Semitism is everywhere, but your argument seems to be "oh look we have found some examples in the Tory Party, so that means it is OK in the Labour Party". Shame you take this view. Labour has a MASSIVE problem with this. Starmer has not yet sorted it, by a long way
Regardless what some media outlets say, regardless what Labours political opponents say, can we agree on PB - we currently have zero evidence Azhar Ali has said anything antisemitic?
There are dozens of others, you are being insanely restrictive
The Golden Age of TV (let's hope it hasn't ended) has produced maybe 100 fantastic shows
Remember The Killing, the Danish version?
OMFG. Just absolutely compelling. not merely some of the greatest TV drama, some of the greatest drama of any form I have ever watched. You could not take your eyes off it, even tho it was bitterly harrowing. What a show
Squid Game Chernobyl Vikings
&c &c
I loved the Killing but we did not get all of it, the sub-titles gave us a couple of sentences when it was clear a lot more was going on. The same with The Bridge - there was a sustained joke in that about the way Swedes and Danes speak that was totally inaccessible to non-Danish/Swedish natives. So, these were probably even better than we thought. Chernobyl was brilliant too. I thought we were talking about multi-series examples, not one or two. But it is true I don't watch a whole heap of telly.
I speak Danish and Swedish so was able to follow them both. An issue with the subtitltes is that they were sexed up - the detectives would say something like "What exactly do you mean?" and the subtitle would say "What the fuck do you mean?" The subtitler defended the changes by saying that British audiences would think that police who don't swear were implausible, which is a bit depressing if true,
Danish actually doesn't have sexual swear words, though young Danes borrow the English words - Danish doesn't get much rougher than "shit" and "devil". Whether that relates to the famous and long-standing Danish tolerance of sexual behaviour is an interesting question - maybe if you think that most kinds of sex are just a great part of life, then saying "fuck" in a negative sense is a bit pointless?
But yes, great series anyway!
Korean is a bit like that (although they do have "fuck" etc). Because it's a language based around formality, something like "are you mad" can be swearing.
Russian appears to be the only language as good as English for swearing.
Czech perhaps, judging from The Good Soldier Svejk.
All the slavic languages have a rich vocabulary of filth, and the structure of the verbs allows the expression of concepts which are not only physically challenging, but baroque in their intensity.
In Estonian, by contrast, it is quite hard to swear at all...
Mum swears at me all the time in the Malayalam language, especially when I read PB at the dinner table
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
It also reminds me of the classic "falling off the edge of critiques of the rich",
Soros being a billionaire who unashamedly uses his wealth to intervene in the public discourse.
So you have people criticising the power of Capital etc.
Then some of them fall over the edge of "Rich = Jews"
The US right are capitalists selectively criticising the power of capital. It's just bizarre.
The US Hard Right is just bizarre. Their complete inability to understand the word hypocrisy is only a small part of it. I say Hard Right, because where do you put Romney etc?
I’m not sure I get this argument about dramas that “have no likeable characters”
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
The problem with Ozark was that the characters were irksome, rather than not likeable.
Indeed
It occurs to me you can get away with entirely odious characters as long as they are entertainingly so - eg if they are mesmerisingly devious or cruelly funny
That’s how Succession got away with it
You've got to have some reason to care.
The Eight Deadly Words are: "I don't care what happens to these people."
A similar process can happen when something is just unrelentingly bleak. With no emotional peaks or troughs a story and characters are just tedious. But hack writers think sad equals emotionally powerful.
Even Schindlers List found a few moments of humour to break things up.
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
I don't think the Soros obsession is limited to the intellectually clueless right wing frother. My problem with the "whataboutery" in this discussion is this: The Labour Party, until recently had a leader who referred to Jewish people as follows: "They don't understand irony" and endorsed a mural that was so obviously anti-Semitic you would have to be blind or intensely stupid (even more so than Corbyn) not to realise. Starmer endorsed Corbyn and attempted to persuade us he should be PM.
Did Starmer not notice that Corbyn expressed these views, or did he only care about it when he realised that it would be necessary to de-toxify his brand?
Or did he always care, but not as much as he cared about furthering his own career and climbing the greasy pole?
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
I’m not sure I get this argument about dramas that “have no likeable characters”
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
The problem with Ozark was that the characters were irksome, rather than not likeable.
I got well into Marty. The normcore look, the total lack of flamboyance, the flat deadpan way he navigated through incredibly hairy situations. You'd have thought a lead character like that would struggle to hold attention but for me it was the opposite.
- If the Tories get to within about 7 points on average polling they go straight away. It won't happen.
- If they recover a little in Spring, to within 15 points, but the party is still fractious, the push-pull of going may still determine a May election
- Any recovery to within 15 up to late April still gives the push-pull effect, discontent about May LE results would be spiked by the campaign for an early June election.
- If we get to September, we start looking more in terms of timing considerations rather than polling considerations. Are plots still afoot, can we afford the Tory conference, can we go under the shadow of the US election, what about Christmas. I tend to disregard where King Charles is in all this, feeling there are ways and means to do all the protocol stuff whenever required and that CHOGM is something of a red herring.
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
I don't think the Soros obsession is limited to the intellectually clueless right wing frother. My problem with the "whataboutery" in this discussion is this: The Labour Party, until recently had a leader who referred to Jewish people as follows: "They don't understand irony" and endorsed a mural that was so obviously anti-Semitic you would have to be blind or intensely stupid (even more so than Corbyn) not to realise. Starmer endorsed Corbyn and attempted to persuade us he should be PM.
Did Starmer not notice that Corbyn expressed these views, or did he only care about it when he realised that it would be necessary to de-toxify his brand?
I don't really care. I'm more interested in his continuing to do the right thing than in some futile parsing of his motives.
I think a legitimate question to Starmer should be: "When did you first think that Jeremy Corbyn's views might indicate he was anti-Semitic?"
With respect to "doing the right thing", I respectfully suggest that someone's motives may indicate whether they are trying to genuinely do the right thing or whether they simply consider it to be expedient to *appear* to do so. The two do not necessarily result in "the right thing" ultimately triumphing.
There is a serious chance the Guardian will disappear. That’s an enormous change in our media ecosystem
And much as I despise their woke politics and “x and x is racist” journalism-by-numbers that would be a sad loss for UK media
People don't want to pay for news, and lots of people will give out for free 'news' untethered by inconvenient facts or opinions. I'm surprised we still have any professionals left.
Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
The paranoid right obsession with Soros - particularly in the context of the numous billionaire "unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives" who finance their own favoured schemes - is barely explicable without looking in the direction of antisemitism.
It also reminds me of the classic "falling off the edge of critiques of the rich",
Soros being a billionaire who unashamedly uses his wealth to intervene in the public discourse.
So you have people criticising the power of Capital etc.
Then some of them fall over the edge of "Rich = Jews"
The US right are capitalists selectively criticising the power of capital. It's just bizarre.
Albeit in 2020 Wall Street firms gave $74 million to Biden but only $18 million to Trump.
While they may be wary of the more leftwing Sanders, Biden and Hillary are fine for big capital against the protectionist, pro tariff Trump.
Indeed the last time Wall Street gave more to the GOP nominee for President was 2012 when it gave $20 million to Romney but less than $6 million to Obama
I have just been in a card shop, in which there was - among other exercabilia - a card saying 'Happy Valentine's Day to my cat'. In a world riven by division - Gaza, Brexit, Trans, woke - here is something we can, I'm sure, fully unite around. Buying a Valentine's Day card for your cat - no matter how much you love your cat - is insane.
1. Dems are winning elections. 2. Dems control the Senate and the House, though not enough in the Senate to pass whatever legislation they like. 3. Current balance in the House: Republican 219, Democrat 213, Vacant 3. 435 seats, Maj requires 218. (3 of each side are put into non-voting positions.) 4. Vacant seats are required to be filled within approx 100 days.
Therefore there is not yet an immediate prospect of the Dems winning a majority in the short term, despite the MAGA Republicans spending so much effort on kneecapping themselves.
Comments
@Leon - it is a teensy bit woke with some clumsy stereotypes out of the kitchen but please don't let that put you off.
(An inadequate translation of the Korean 'ajussi', which is a slightly impolite word for a middle aged man.)
Stars the great Lee Sun-kyun (Parasite), who recently committed suicide.
From a few years ago, the German series Dark was equally complex and thought provoking. I was apoplectic when Netflix cancelled the writers' next effort, 1899, after one season.
And although some didnt like it, I though the BBC drama The Gallows Pole, directed by Shane Meadows, was very good, both as a story and visually/aurally
gallows pole is one of the worst tv dramas ever made. Even the guardian admitted it (and they love Shane meadows). NOTHING HAPPENS and it happens very very slowly
An enormous disappointment
Starmer is doing the right thing to root them out. The question is whether it is simply just window dressing.
Shane meadows can be a genius. I love the period and the settiing and the theme. I was primed to love it
But omg. How bad was it??? It was so bad it’s kind of interesting. Something fundamental must have gone wrong. like they dropped the script down the loo and all the cast accidentally took heroin
Through all years of this issue in Labour, Ali has been an ally to the Jewish community, having set up Labour groups such as Muslims Against Antisemitism. Are You calling him antisemitic, without pointing to any evidence at all to support your accusation? That’s not really a fair thing anyone to say about anyone is it? ☹️
It could be some people are using utter hatred voiced for Netanyahu and his right wing government, and asking why the security failure in not responding to the warning signs and shared intelligence - both things are perfectly fair to voice, you don’t even have to be Muslim or left of centre - as an excuse to label those individuals and a whole party as antisemetic? that of course would not only be untrue, unfair, but it would also be against UK law.
It may be Starmer has made the biggest mistake any politician can make - a hasty knee jerk decision he has got wrong, and thrown good people onto the fire, to satisfy a baying media that you can’t actually satisfy, only feed into wanting more. And in the process of being factionally partial within his own party, he’s now handed silver bullets to the Corbynite left to shoot him down with.
We all need more evidence and truthful picture behind all this, to be sure about all this, is advice i’m giving.
The charge is they are willing to -*tolerate* anti-semitism as the price of those votes
And if anyone watched Boat Story that was recently on the BBC (which I enjoyed), some of that was filmed near me. I could take you to the very electricity pylon where (SPOILER ALERT!) they find the severed head. Glamorous.
Pineapple flavour crisps
IIRC he needs Senate approval to sign a foreign treaty, so wouldn’t he logically also need approval to terminate one?
Another drama with one great season then shite:
The man in the high castle
It started so well!
'...Mr Ali, blaming "people in the media from certain Jewish quarters" for the suspension of Andy McDonald from the Labour Party.'
Doesn't flag throughout the entire series and gets stronger imo.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1757607786450481349
1) Due to colonialist history and past racism, challenging non-white people about their beliefs is awkward for people of progressive belief
2) This means that when people from some communities express beliefs that are sexist, racist etc. they tend not to get challenged in some environments.
3) This normalises the expression of such beliefs, in such environments.
4) Comedy ensues.
Vladimir Putin must be wishing he could have pulled a trick like that.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-book-jews-control-media-general-election-a9239346.html
In Estonian, by contrast, it is quite hard to swear at all...
I’m not sure why I stopped watching The Americans. Maybe simply coz there was so much choice
Might have to now.
Of all the Conservative Party members on PB, are there any at all who think the General Election is on May 2nd? Are there any party members who want the election in May? or do you all feel with inflation falling and interest rates to follow, the Tory election prospects are going to be much better later in the year?
Put the covid incompetence and corruption out of your heads, look at how we have reduced boat crossings and turned the economy around. This is the platform the Government will fight the election on, is it not?
That platform is there and strongest for them early May… it’s completely gone by October, that election platform will be flotsam washing up on a beach and stepped over by illegal arrivals.
I’m still 100% convinced election is May 2nd.
It can be an issue if you like to have someone to root for, but it can also be a pleasure to watch an entire cast of delicious villains
Succession is the prime example. Not a single heroic or virtuous character. Yet - for me - some of the best tv drama of the decade so far
In fact it wouid have been ridiculous if they’d suddenly introduced someone “nice”. Totally jarring
When They See Us
The Night Of
Fargo (all seasons, 4 was weakest)
Beef (dark humour)
Black Mirror
The Americans
Mindhunter
Manhunt: Unabomber
Flint Town (doc)
Small Axe
Superstore (for some levity, one of the funniest shows on tv)
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.
The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/28/jewish-groups-and-mps-condemn-nigel-farage-for-antisemitic-dog-whistles
And yet any number of Tories are happy to share platforms with him and invite him to join their party.
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-turns-swedens-home-guard-turns-recruitment-success/
https://www.thejc.com/news/theresa-mays-former-aide-accused-of-using-antisemitic-slur-in-brexit-article-on-george-soros-a8xjf9tf
As I mentioned I'm watching The Morning Show atm and there are no sympathetic or nice characters there and I'm struggling to find anything to latch onto. I hope they all fall into a hole.
Not so with Succession.
It occurs to me you can get away with entirely odious characters as long as they are entertainingly so - eg if they are mesmerisingly devious or cruelly funny
That’s how Succession got away with it
I am standing on my balcony in my shorts. I was trying to work out what kind of melanistic condor lives in Indochina and hunts nocturnally
Ah. Bats. Enormous bats
And yes you’re right about succession. You do find yourself sympathising with absolute rotters as they shift the focus
Also it never ebbed. I can’t remember a “bad” episode. Always good
And always so funny. Top class writing
I hope the makers have kept that writing team together to do something else. British I believe?
Ok I’m gonna watch Boiling Point the movie!
🥂🥂
Not that I do 😆
Soros being a billionaire who unashamedly uses his wealth to intervene in the public discourse.
So you have people criticising the power of Capital etc.
Then some of them fall over the edge of "Rich = Jews"
“Lara Trump says if she is elected as co-Chair of the Republican Party, “every single penny” of party funding will be spent toward Donald Trump”
For once a politician says something you can believe! Fingers crossed this happens, because that’s how the Republicans lose the House and maybe fail to take the Senate.
For various reasons, that's changed, and not in a good way. Partly because they are so useful. But only as long as the mainstream response can be "nothing to do with us, but maybe he has a point, doesn't he?"
The Eight Deadly Words are: "I don't care what happens to these people."
Hawkins Nat Labs will solve this thorny issue
It's just bizarre.
Did Starmer not notice that Corbyn expressed these views, or did he only care about it when he realised that it would be necessary to de-toxify his brand?
I'm more interested in his continuing to do the right thing than in some futile parsing of his motives.
“At the beleaguered @guardian online ad revenue is down 16% & are forecasting a loss of £39m.
Editor-in-chief, @KathViner has warned staff to brace themselves for redundancies.”
https://x.com/daveatherton20/status/1757691652519481474?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
There is a serious chance the Guardian will disappear. That’s an enormous change in our media ecosystem
And much as I despise their woke politics and “x and x is racist” journalism-by-numbers that would be a sad loss for UK media
Even Schindlers List found a few moments of humour to break things up.
- If the Tories get to within about 7 points on average polling they go straight away. It won't happen.
- If they recover a little in Spring, to within 15 points, but the party is still fractious, the push-pull of going may still determine a May election
- Any recovery to within 15 up to late April still gives the push-pull effect, discontent about May LE results would be spiked by the campaign for an early June election.
- If we get to September, we start looking more in terms of timing considerations rather than polling considerations. Are plots still afoot, can we afford the Tory conference, can we go under the shadow of the US election, what about Christmas. I tend to disregard where King Charles is in all this, feeling there are ways and means to do all the protocol stuff whenever required and that CHOGM is something of a red herring.
With respect to "doing the right thing", I respectfully suggest that someone's motives may indicate whether they are trying to genuinely do the right thing or whether they simply consider it to be expedient to *appear* to do so. The two do not necessarily result in "the right thing" ultimately triumphing.
While they may be wary of the more leftwing Sanders, Biden and Hillary are fine for big capital against the protectionist, pro tariff Trump.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/28/wall-street-spends-74-million-to-support-joe-biden.html
Indeed the last time Wall Street gave more to the GOP nominee for President was 2012 when it gave $20 million to Romney but less than $6 million to Obama
https://money.cnn.com/2012/11/06/investing/stocks-election-obama-romney/index.html
In a world riven by division - Gaza, Brexit, Trans, woke - here is something we can, I'm sure, fully unite around. Buying a Valentine's Day card for your cat - no matter how much you love your cat - is insane.
AIUI
1. Dems are winning elections.
2. Dems control the Senate and the House, though not enough in the Senate to pass whatever legislation they like.
3. Current balance in the House: Republican 219, Democrat 213, Vacant 3. 435 seats, Maj requires 218.
(3 of each side are put into non-voting positions.)
4. Vacant seats are required to be filled within approx 100 days.
Therefore there is not yet an immediate prospect of the Dems winning a majority in the short term, despite the MAGA Republicans spending so much effort on kneecapping themselves.
Though it is getting closer.