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And now for something completely different – politicalbetting.com
And now for something completely different – politicalbetting.com
Who should play Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer in the movie of their lives?https://t.co/jBlv7RVlRQ pic.twitter.com/cD5bXA1QpJ
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Leon said:
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I was pointing more to the narrative than the facts (and I should have said that, apologies)
One reason Trump is doing well is the PERCEPTION the country is going to shit in multiple ways. Now from some angles it is true: Biden really has lost control of the border (with help from treacherous republicans)
In other ways it is not true at all. Biden’s economic record is excellent - and yet he doesn’t get credit for it
In other fields - law and order - the picture is mixed. Ditto foreign policy. Sure Biden is strong in Ukraine but the bald fact is: there weren’t any of these wars when Trump was in power
I said:
I agree with the perception point. Trump, of course, does a lot to build these perceptions but they are false.
Whilst Trump was in power wars were still going on in Afghanistan. Casualties there is something else he lied about:https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-trump-afghanistan-troops-killed-659053265479
It was Biden that bit the bullet and got America out of there, not Trump. And the Ukraine war is expensive but it is not producing a lot of US body bags (there have been some due to volunteers, not regular army).
The border is a major problem for Biden, probably his biggest, but the sinking of a cross party bill on Trump's instructions has hopefully defused it somewhat.
Edit - That last word wasn't actually deliberate. I'm pondering now whether it shows I'm a bad person full of unintentional prejudice.
Like Sunak...
Even if I went the whole way by pedalo.
To muppets.
The competition would be fierce.
There's no likeness between Firth and Starmer. What about Gary Oldman? (in the unlikely circumstancs the part was going).
Speaking of strange polls, is anyone the wiser about this poll in the Mail on Sunday? All I can glean from the article is it was paid for "by corporate business" and shows Labour heading for a majority of between 50 and 250 seats.
There's no sign of a VI, no sign of any data tables but apparently it was conducted "in every constituency".
Survation are the Mail on Sunday's usual pollsters but strange how this poll is reported in that "newspaper" and nowhere else.
Back on topic, I know there are people who make good money by looking like someone famous. There was a very good Prince William out there and no doubt others but can you imagine anyone trying to make a living by looking like Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer or Ed Davey or Richard Tice or Nigel Farage?
Me neither.
In Las Vegas, on The Strip, someone looking very much like Austin Powers wanted me to have my photo taken with them for $25 so I did my best Austin Powers English accent. The poor man stopped dead in his tracks - his accent was pure midwestern. We talked for a moment and he said in his drawl "with your voice and my looks, we'd own this town".
Ricky Gervais.
"No, it's ALL bad".
Heck. I could have told them that for a tenth of the price.
Horror after horror. From the Journale du Dimanche
49% of French Muslims want Catholics to convert to Islam
36% percent want churches to be transformed into mosques...
25% of French Muslims said that the word "France" is a word they reject.
17% of French Muslims admit that they hate Jews.
39% say they have a bad, or very bad, opinion of Judaism
45% of French Muslims say they want the total destruction of Israel. An equivalent number of French Muslims define the massacre rape, torture, beheadings and burning alive of Jews by Hamas terrorists in Israel on October 7, 2023, as an "act of resistance".
42% of French Muslims place respect for Islamic Sharia law above respect for the laws of the French republic (the percentage rises to 57% among young Muslims aged 18 to 25).
70% of French prisoners are Muslim
https://www.lejdd.fr/societe/sondage-dans-la-tete-des-musulmans-de-france-141612
And its the young who are the most radical and Islamist
A terrible reckoning is coming. I imagine it will start with President Le Pen
I'd like to think they have just enough sense of the absurd not to vote blue this time round. Their loyalty, always going back even when they knew the show would be terrible, appealed to me as a child.
I was a strange child.
Win the Tories an election when 20 points behind in the polls.
France has a Muslim population of about six million, just under 9% of the country
If 17% of them “hate Jews” that’s exactly one million Jew haters. In France. And these are the ones willing to admit it! And the younger are MORE likely to be radical and anti-Semitic
And nearly 3 million French Muslims want Israel completely destroyed
The centre cannot hold
Oh don't start that again.
Boyish grin, positive, hopeless, similar height
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ub4MRxHxcA
Nonetheless I'd question if they are all fully fit. United 3/1?????
It 99.965% and I’ll die on that hill.
Do you think that YOU might be the inadequate here?
She’s cleverly detoxed herself and now poses as the solidly patriotic right winger. She’s even dropped some of her Putin-love
If I was to make a bet today, I would bet on her winning
3 million want to see your homeland - Israel - destroyed entirely
Meanwhile half of them want Islam to take over France and impose shariah law on all France
Would you, as a Jew, feel safe in France?
I was born only eight years after Neil Armstrong stood on the moon, but it might as well have been 80 years for all I remember of it!
Or south east Asia. No history of anti Semitism
If I was Jewish and rich I’d move to Singapore, if I was less rich I’d move to Cambodia or Thailand
https://thediplomat.com/2022/02/opening-of-indonesian-holocaust-museum-met-with-islamist-backlash/
But in the days after its opening, a number of Indonesian Muslim leaders, including several senior members of the influential Indonesian Council of Ulama (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI) declared that the museum should be shut down, on the grounds that it could cause “communal tensions.” MUI Vice President Muhyidin Junaidi opined that “the presence of the museum is politically tendentious and a provocation to cause uproar among the people.”
I hardly need to mention Pakistan and other places in South Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Pakistan
I'd suggest the root cause here is certain "revealed by God" attitudes / values which are foundational in Islam. A tricky one to deal with in less than 500 years.
Large swathes of the US are fiercely and proudly anti-woke, and no more so than the Lone Star State, where vegetarianism is strictly reserved for homosexuals in Austin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_Family_House
It’s a Church, a Synagogue, and a Mosque, all on the same site, from where people can learn about other faiths and understand that their similarities are more than their differences.
Oh, and trade. People don’t go to war with places with whom they trade.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-10-most-anti-semitic-countries/
Ditto Paris or any number of Western European cities
What a tragic thing we have done
Though it's only recently that the last ACW pension ceased being paid.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/07/irene-triplett-last-person-american-civil-war-pension-dies
There’s always that possibility, as well, alongside your dribbling nonsense which presumably consoles you
Was it here?
Concentration camp history
In 1971, president Salvador Allende declared Chacabuco a Historic Monument of Chile, at which point restoration began. But in 1973, after the military coup, Pinochet turned it into a concentration camp until the end of 1974.[3] As a concentration camp, it held up to 1,800 prisoners many of whom were doctors, lawyers, artists, writers, professors and workers from all over Chile.
Chacabuco today
By the 1990s, Chacabuco was in need of extensive restoration and several international organizations began the restoration of parts of Chacabuco. In 1991, a former political prisoner of Chacabuco, Roberto Saldívar, returned to Chacabuco in order to live in the abandoned town and guard it against vandalism and pillaging. He lived there almost completely alone until January 2006. Pedro Barreda replaced Roberto when he left as caretaker of Chacabuco. Currently living in Chacabuco alone, Pedro considers himself to be Roberto's apprentice and remains dedicated to the cause Roberto started.
It wouldn’t be a very exciting film though. Something involving Cameron, Johnson, Truss and Kwarteng, Cummings, Corbyn, cameos from May and Swinson, and a walk on clown role for Richard Burgon, much more fun.
My place - yungay - is actually quite well known to science. Because it is the “dead-est” place on earth with zero rain it has been closely studied by NASA as they believe it is a good match for the surface of Mars
"Don't forget to scan your ClubCard!"
https://x.com/carolvorders/status/1769039478381846795
Can't unsee it...
ETA Paris has been problematic for years, in a way London has not and is not.
I live about 200 yards from the Jewish museum in Camden (now sadly closed). I watched over the years as security there got tighter and more overt. By the end they sometimes had semi-permanent guards
As for london being safe for Jews you maybe missed this video
“A man just attacked Jewish people with a large knife in a Jewish neighbourhood of London. This is absolutely terrifying. Jews are under violent attack everywhere. What brave men holding him off and stopping him hurting anyone.
@Shomrim”
https://x.com/heidibachram/status/1751979758592684427?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
And finally having that conversation - “where do we go next”?
We talk about getting out — just not there
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/05213b76-7a59-11ee-b861-bff63f5f7486?shareToken=8b91cdd056f73ffe6fb1789d29abda81
The idea that British Jews all feel safe and fine is insulting. They do not. They talk about leaving - like Coren here
I know that makes lefties uncomfortable and they don’t want to talk about it because reasons but it is the case
I basically don't like people who don't think, can't see through a dogma, don't use common sense and don't have rationality.
It's why I generally like being here I guess. Brits are pretty good at that, all things considered.
I sense she'll just use harder words. She can't actually do anything about it.
However if there is any country with a sufficient sense of itself and a willingness to fight for its
identity, France is right up there in the list
Also, the crisis cannot be averted forever. In the end the collision between secular liberal democracy and conservative Islam will come. And only one will prevail as Islam does not accommodate and compromise
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/golders-green-kosher-supermarket-knife-man-arrested-antisemitism-london-b1135577.html
He sadly looks a bit fecked nowadays. I believe ‘don’t let the old man in‘ is one of his phrases, well, he’s given the old bugger the keys to the mansion.
Huge injustices would be done by this. But could we ever see a European country go this far, as opposed to just turnbacks on the way in?
The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/17/birmingham-britain-state-cuts-austerity-local-services
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the differences between the Conservatives and Labour (and the Lib Dems) are wafer thin, and principally concern fringe culture wars issues. When it comes to everything that matters, all they're really interested in is the preservation and inflation of asset wealth (principally residential property,) and endlessly jacking up the state pension to appease the grey vote. Running down and winding up everything else in the process of shoring up those causes is wholly acceptable to them.
The parties are functionally identical, and that means we'll be in a far worse state in five years' time than we are now. Watch.
With the major caveat that all of this might well - probably is - gonna be irrelevant due to AI…
Yes I think in the end there will be quite violent civil strife in one or more European countries and probably attempts at deportations. Because there will come a point when the Muslim populations of Europe get so large they threaten to change these nations entirely - introducing sharia law, making homosexuality illegal etc etc etc etc
This is not the “fault” of Muslims - it is just the nature of Islam. It doesn’t do compromise. It seeks to rule every nation - that’s in the DNA of the faith
And it a great and noble religion which gives profound purpose to the lives of billions of people, so it’s not gonna disappear either. Nor is it gonna secularise or have an enlightenment, these are forlorn daydreams from people who don’t want to face the uncomfortable facts
So I fear in the end it could easily get brutal, and monumentally cruel, in the manner you describe
Maybe it’s better if the AI takes over now