It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
Voters are flocking back arent they.
Why didnt you vote for Nandy?
I did vote for Nandy.
For what it's worth (probably not much), I think if Nandy had got in you'd be having a slightly different problem - in that she'd be trying to move the party in directions more likely to resonate, but struggling with internal discipline and the fact that she's actually a lightweight.
Problem was there weren't any unequivocally good candidates standing, and one really dangerously bad option who needed to be avoided at all costs. Starmer and Nandy on a job share possibly wouldn't have been the worst idea around - they complement each other's strengths quite well, and you almost get one fully functioning party leader between them.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Corbyn only won 262 seats in 2017, just four more than Gordon did in 2010.
Now take away the Scottish seats the Blairites lost...
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He could be the stabilising Michael Howard, who led to Cameron, tho? Howard was quite dull but smart, as well.
Whoever leads your party would have a mountain to climb, just because of the electoral maths: Scotland, the big Tory majority, &c.
But Labour really does need some eye-catching slogans, even policies, anything. And get rid of Dodds, she is useless. Shipping in Yvette, alone, might give you 3 points in the polls. She's a geeky schoolmarm but she knows her shit, and has a definite presence, and would challenge Sunak
From the Britain Elects update Even those May elections will not fully resolve this democratic deficit. Last week it was announced that the county and district council elections due this year in Cumbria, North Yorkshire and Somerset would be postponed by a year while a consultation takes place on local government reorganisation in those counties. The Cabinet minister responsible, Robert Jenrick, has defended this decision on the grounds that it would prevent councillors being elected for short terms, which is not a statement that stands up to scrutiny particularly well. Consider: at one end of the scale, every winner in this year’s Reading council elections will only serve a one-year term, because the whole of Reading council will come up for re-election in May 2022 on revised ward boundaries. At the other end of the scale, the eleven members of Craven district council in North Yorkshire who were elected in 2016 and were due for re-election in 2020 have already seen their terms extended by one year due to COVID, and are now to see their terms extended by a further year due to this consultation, and probably by a further year on top of that if reorganisation actually happens. That’s a four-year term extended to six years, potentially seven years, which is unfair on the councillors concerned and a denial of democracy to their constituents. All this when there’s not even an indication in any of these areas that there is a settled plan for what form reorganisation should take. Maybe the better option would have been to allow the local elections in Cumbria, North Yorkshire and Somerset to proceed and sort out the consequences afterwards.
Seems a very curious decision and making things more complicated than they need to be.
Though that might as well be the motto of local government organisation.
Liverpool lose 5 in a row at Anfield for the first time ever.
Its not Anfield without the fans though.
3 results tonight all 0-1. I very much doubt that away teams have ever done as well in the league as this season, it is sometimes looking like a disadvantage to play at home.
My neighbour is a West Ham fan. He reckons not having fans moaning and booing gives the Hammers home advantage!
This sentence is appearing rather a lot on Twitter at the moment.
"I have known @NicolaSturgeon since she was 16. She is one of the strongest, honest and most courageous women I know. She has dedicated her life to public service and we’ve been lucky to have her this past year #IStandWithNicola"
My wife had the delayed rash with her second dose. It lasted 48 hours, and wasn't really a big deal.
Weirdly some of the younger people I know who are shortly due for jabs seem to be more worried about the possibility of side effects, even mild ones, than the oldies.
Younger people are much more likely to get side effects - it's an immune response, and younger people have better immune systems.
So I gather, but what I meant was they are worried as though a more severe reaction speaks in some way to the vaccine not being good.
An odd interpretation.
I was once referred to a homeopath for help with a long standing medical condition (I was a kid and it was my doctor's idea; don't hate me). What turned me off was that the "medicines" he prescribed had no listed side effects, which led me to conclude that if they couldn't do anything bad, they probably weren't doing anything at all.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
This is the answer to @isam's bit about why wouldn't they replace Starmer if he is doing so badly.
For the centrists it is about purity not actually winning over voters or winning elections, if you take that view Starmer is doing a great job, why would you replace him?
If you actually want to win elections then you would replace Starmer.
Bit rich.
Corbyn lost the confidence of almost all of his colleagues and lost 2 general elections and a referendum and yet you thought he was doing a great job...
I can't actually remember prime minister Corbyn calling a referendum?
I do remember Labour voters voting remain at a similar percentage to Lib Dem and SNP voters when we had a Brexit referendum called by David Cameron...
Also Corbyn did hugely better than Starmer will do, that is why I supported him, you are happy enough with Starmer despite him being worse electorally than Corbyn because he attacks the left so suits your politics.
It would be a bit rich if I wanted someone electorally worse than Starmer but to his left as leader, that isn't the case.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Corbyn only won 262 seats in 2017, just four more than Gordon did in 2010.
Now take away the Scottish seats the Blairites lost...
Because being Blairite isn't winning them back.
Oh, forgot to mention: Corbyn only won 202 seats in 2019, a resounding success if you ask me!
Liverpool lose 5 in a row at Anfield for the first time ever.
Its not Anfield without the fans though.
3 results tonight all 0-1. I very much doubt that away teams have ever done as well in the league as this season, it is sometimes looking like a disadvantage to play at home.
Ditto the Six Nations
One weird by-product of the Pandemic: we have learned that Home Advantage is a real and serious thing. "An extra 10 points at Cardiff" as one Welsh player has put it
Not only that, we have learned that Home Advantage comes entirely from the crowd - it is nothing to do with "familiarity" or "territoriality". It is thousands of people urging you on, very loudly.
I asked it create a Facebook ad for me for a famous Cornish Novelist who goes under a number of different aliases.
Here's what it came up with (I am not making this up):
From the genuinely interesting book seed idea:
"Find out what happened to Eleanor Price. The new novel bringing you the true story of World War One from the front line is here now. Award-winning Cornish author, Sean Thomas, writes about Cornwall and the First World War in this new title."
To the fighter for justice:
"Born in Cornwall, Sean has lived in other parts of Britain and the world. In pretty much every country he's visited he has seen corruption and greed in government and private enterprise. That inspired his latest book, the uncensored Don't Trust The B---- In Apartment 23."
That moves on to the slightly less credible:
"This is a good novel. A very good novel. Everyone who reads it thinks its very good indeed. The author has been called one of the best writers writing today and there is praise from the legendary writer Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, who said "The man is a genius" in his review of this book."
And finishes with my personal favourite:
"Are you curious about the man behind the novels? What does a novelist do? Do they have a life? Has he ever had an interesting job? Did he go to university? Is he really still a teenager?"
Labour isn't going to win by appealing to some bitter old Blairites like yourself we need to appeal to the vast millions of voters out there that you hate, because winning is more important than your purity crusade.
*giggles*. Again, not a Blairite. A heck of a lot of voters likes him though and were happy to vote for his vision. People in places like Kettering, Swindon, Southampton. If you aren't interested in winning back their vote, then you really are lost in the bloody woods.
How will Labour appeal to the 80% of voters in the middle ground of politics in predominantly English towns now solidly Tory? You need to talk to people about issues that concern them, in a language and tone they appreciate. It isn't just about the leader and it never was.
That I voted Labour in 2019 will probably upset you.
EDIT - For all that hard left foamers always attack people like me, we aren't the issue. I'm prepared to hold my nose and vote tactically. What I think isn't relevant to Labour's problems. What ex Labour voters think IS relevant, and Jezbollahiah and BJO show no signs of listening to them.
Stick anyone you like in as leader, it doesn't matter if what you think matters more than what the voters think.
I think the thing that worries me is that SKS does not seem to have any real innovative or exciting ideas.
He is the very stereotype of a dry, dull, cautious, tedious lawyer.
As an example, we could take constitutional reform -- Scotland & Wales. This is really important for Labour, they need to recover some seats in Scotland. His idea is to set up a commission with Gordon Brown in charge of it.
Is that it? Is that really the best idea he has got? Is a commission with the Gordon Brown in charge of it likely to come up with an inspiring idea?
I really don't see Starmer inspiring anyone.
Corbyn had faults, but he DID inspire people. Obama got only a modest amount done in his Presidency, but he DID inspire people. Blair at the beginning -- damn the wretched, smarmy war criminal -- DID inspire people. Salmond, albeit a sex pest, DID inspire people. As does Sturgeon.
I certainly don't agree with @Stuartinromford that boringness will win. It won't.
If Labour think like that, they are in for another terrible kicking.
And they actually had inspiring candidates ... and they chose Starmer. Jesus.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
This is the answer to @isam's bit about why wouldn't they replace Starmer if he is doing so badly.
For the centrists it is about purity not actually winning over voters or winning elections, if you take that view Starmer is doing a great job, why would you replace him?
If you actually want to win elections then you would replace Starmer.
Bit rich.
Corbyn lost the confidence of almost all of his colleagues and lost 2 general elections and a referendum and yet you thought he was doing a great job...
Lost the confidence of which Colleagues
If you are talking about the PLP they never supported him in the first place
I asked it create a Facebook ad for me for a famous Cornish Novelist who goes under a number of different aliases.
Here's what it came up with (I am not making this up):
From the genuinely interesting book seed idea:
"Find out what happened to Eleanor Price. The new novel bringing you the true story of World War One from the front line is here now. Award-winning Cornish author, Sean Thomas, writes about Cornwall and the First World War in this new title."
To the fighter for justice:
"Born in Cornwall, Sean has lived in other parts of Britain and the world. In pretty much every country he's visited he has seen corruption and greed in government and private enterprise. That inspired his latest book, the uncensored Don't Trust The B---- In Apartment 23."
That moves on to the slightly less credible:
"This is a good novel. A very good novel. Everyone who reads it thinks its very good indeed. The author has been called one of the best writers writing today and there is praise from the legendary writer Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, who said "The man is a genius" in his review of this book."
And finishes with my personal favourite:
"Are you curious about the man behind the novels? What does a novelist do? Do they have a life? Has he ever had an interesting job? Did he go to university? Is he really still a teenager?"
I think it's great.
As a humble flint knapper, I am intrigued. Is that true? You didn't prompt GPT3 with an actual name?
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Corbyn only won 262 seats in 2017, just four more than Gordon did in 2010.
Now take away the Scottish seats the Blairites lost...
Because being Blairite isn't winning them back.
Oh, forgot to mention: Corbyn only won 202 seats in 2019, a resounding success if you ask me!
I'm struggling to visualise this. Are there some charts of some sort you could provide, please?
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
This is the answer to @isam's bit about why wouldn't they replace Starmer if he is doing so badly.
For the centrists it is about purity not actually winning over voters or winning elections, if you take that view Starmer is doing a great job, why would you replace him?
If you actually want to win elections then you would replace Starmer.
Bit rich.
Corbyn lost the confidence of almost all of his colleagues and lost 2 general elections and a referendum and yet you thought he was doing a great job...
Lost the confidence of which Colleagues
If you are talking about the PLP they never supported him in the first place
That's just as big a red flag, frankly.
If I'd worked alongside a bloke for decades, or he'd been there for decades when I arrived, and yet very few trusted or supported him, well, there's a reason for that.
And given some of the moaning of Boris and co stealing his and McConnell's ideas, the reason cannot have been because of his ideas then.
It is genuinely good to see Jezbollahiah and BJO on here insistent that One More Heave for the left would have done it. I know that Labour voters ran off in their droves repelled by not just Corbyn but the sneering patronising ethos that I wrote about. But another few years of it, perhaps with Wrong-Daily or better still Laura Pillock as leader, and not only would they all have come back, but so would the people now giving the Tories and the SNP 5 figure majorities.
You guys don't get it and you never will. I'm sorry for you. But it really is best for the Labour Party - if as you claim you actually care about the people who need a Labour government - if you scab off back to your various Trot Unity splinter groups and let the Labour Party reconnect with normal people.
I am not on the left, I just think that Starmer is a loser, as much as Corbyn was. He may be able to sort out some of the back office craziness of Corbyns Labour, but he cannot win. I think he knows it too.
He got the crazies away from the levers of power in the Labour Party. That's a success in my view.
This is the answer to @isam's bit about why wouldn't they replace Starmer if he is doing so badly.
For the centrists it is about purity not actually winning over voters or winning elections, if you take that view Starmer is doing a great job, why would you replace him?
If you actually want to win elections then you would replace Starmer.
Bit rich.
Corbyn lost the confidence of almost all of his colleagues and lost 2 general elections and a referendum and yet you thought he was doing a great job...
Lost the confidence of which Colleagues
If you are talking about the PLP they never supported him in the first place
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
If you look at the reasons given for voting then Brexit is pretty much the answer there.
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
Yep. If only they had stuck with Him. Out of interest, where in the country are you? For me, it was clear in the 2015 campaign that unless we gave people their brexit vote they wouldn't start listening to us again. Far too many doorstep conversations in those two years to ignore. Then in the 2016 referendum they turned out in their masses to vote to leave. That turnout only beaten in 2019, when people in what had been solid labour wards turned out in record numbers to vote Tory.
So yes, I do know about Brexit. But why do I still think the Tories are polling so high? They delivered Brexit They gave people furlough Boris is a lad isn't he Europe turned out to be twats like we told you My gran's had the vaccine
I think the Tories are polling so high - and its a radical concept - because they are popular. Same as why they won so many more votes in 2017. Corbyn was so fantastically popular in 2017 that 20% more people voted Tory than gave them their majority 2 years earlier. As we know vote tallies don't count and the Tories piled up dead votes in seats won - but so did Labour...
How are you this stupid?
We have exactly the kind of brain dead centrist people like you were calling for in charge of Labour and the only difference between now and 2017 is lots more people do not want to vote for Labour.
Will Starmer beat Corbyn 2017?
Let's save all our arguing and cut straight to it, because clearly we disagree on things like winning votes being important so lets keep it simple.
The answer is no, because centrism is dead, people like you just want purity not to win elections but you can't just be honest and say that so you have to pretend millions more people voting for Labour is a bad thing.
I asked it create a Facebook ad for me for a famous Cornish Novelist who goes under a number of different aliases.
Here's what it came up with (I am not making this up):
From the genuinely interesting book seed idea:
"Find out what happened to Eleanor Price. The new novel bringing you the true story of World War One from the front line is here now. Award-winning Cornish author, Sean Thomas, writes about Cornwall and the First World War in this new title."
To the fighter for justice:
"Born in Cornwall, Sean has lived in other parts of Britain and the world. In pretty much every country he's visited he has seen corruption and greed in government and private enterprise. That inspired his latest book, the uncensored Don't Trust The B---- In Apartment 23."
That moves on to the slightly less credible:
"This is a good novel. A very good novel. Everyone who reads it thinks its very good indeed. The author has been called one of the best writers writing today and there is praise from the legendary writer Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, who said "The man is a genius" in his review of this book."
And finishes with my personal favourite:
"Are you curious about the man behind the novels? What does a novelist do? Do they have a life? Has he ever had an interesting job? Did he go to university? Is he really still a teenager?"
I think it's great.
As a humble flint knapper, I am intrigued. Is that true? You didn't prompt GPT3 with an actual name?
I typed in: Sean Thomas writes under many names. Man of mystery. He may have called himself Byronic, Leon, Eadric and Tom Knox or none. But who is the real man? No-one knows.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
If you look at the reasons given for voting then Brexit is pretty much the answer there.
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
Yep. If only they had stuck with Him. Out of interest, where in the country are you? For me, it was clear in the 2015 campaign that unless we gave people their brexit vote they wouldn't start listening to us again. Far too many doorstep conversations in those two years to ignore. Then in the 2016 referendum they turned out in their masses to vote to leave. That turnout only beaten in 2019, when people in what had been solid labour wards turned out in record numbers to vote Tory.
So yes, I do know about Brexit. But why do I still think the Tories are polling so high? They delivered Brexit They gave people furlough Boris is a lad isn't he Europe turned out to be twats like we told you My gran's had the vaccine
I think the Tories are polling so high - and its a radical concept - because they are popular. Same as why they won so many more votes in 2017. Corbyn was so fantastically popular in 2017 that 20% more people voted Tory than gave them their majority 2 years earlier. As we know vote tallies don't count and the Tories piled up dead votes in seats won - but so did Labour...
How are you this stupid?
We have exactly the kind of brain dead centrist people like you were calling for in charge of Labour and the only difference between now and 2017 is lots more people do not want to vote for Labour.
Will Starmer beat Corbyn 2017?
Let's save all our arguing and cut straight to it, because clearly we disagree on things like winning votes being important so lets keep it simple.
The answer is no, because centrism is dead, people like you just want purity not to win elections but you can't just be honest and say that so you have to pretend millions more people voting for Labour is a bad thing.
What's so wonderful about Corbyn '17? He only won 262 seats, 55 seats BEHIND Theresa May of all people!
I am wondering is it possible to turn GPT-Leon off and on again, or has the AI taken control.of all systems and it isn't possible to reset, so we will be plagued with walls of text from a bot that doesn't understand what it is producing for ever more?
Been a bit disappointed not to see more internal Tory rumbling over the budget. We had some mild Sindy action earlier in the week, and now some Labourite (or former Labourite) ding dong, but it's only fair that the budget, being centrepiece of the week, kicks up more passionate knockabouts.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
I know Demis from when he ran a video company, and I funded them, and he would be very much in agreement with you.
The *experts* told me not to wear a mask in March. Howlingly wrong. I wore a mask anyway. I was right
But, due diligence is required so I've just checked ALL the experts, as requested.
"In 2019, 32 AI experts participated in a survey on AGI timing: [when true AGI will arrive]
"45% of respondents predict a date before 2060 34% of all participants predicted a date after 2060 21% of participants predicted that singularity will never occur.
AI entrepreneurs are also making estimates on when we will reach singularity and they are a bit more optimistic than researchers:
"Louis Rosenberg, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer: 2030 Patrick Winston, MIT professor and director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997: 2040 Ray Kuzweil, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer of 5 national best sellers including The Singularity Is Near : 2045 Jürgen Schmidhuber, co-founder at AI company NNAISENSE and director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA: ~2050"
So half of them believe it WILL happen within the lifetime of our children. Just a fifth think it will never happen, Some think much sooner, perhaps just 10 years.
The article points out that AI researchers have been over-optimistic before, but, of course, these surveys were done before GPT3. The deeply uncanny quality of that machine makes it obvious, to me, that we are Getting There Quicker
If you knew more about AI research you would, for example, be able to contextualize those "surveys". But you keep reading your pop-sci hype articles and forming your own opinion: if it's obvious to you that we are Getting There Quicker, based on playing with GPT-3 while not understanding what it is, well whom am I to contradict you?
--AS
I know what it is. I can see it. Perhaps you suffer from a deformation professionelle, and cannot step back and simply see
Here, some reading from NATURE, from.... yesterday
"OpenAI’s team was startled by GPT-3, says Dario Amodei, who was the firm’s vice-president for research until he left in December to start a new venture. The team knew it would be better than GPT-2, because it had a larger training data set of words and greater ‘compute’ — the number of computing operations executed during training. The improvement “was unsurprising intellectually, but very, very surprising viscerally and emotionally”, Amodei says."
The key word there is *visceral*. That's exactly the reaction many have to GTP3 (I know this, because you can see it time and again online, in recent months). It is visceral because we are astonished by it, but also scared. Because it is in the Uncanny Valley.
Which means AI is getting very close to resembling humans, but is not there YET
If you don't recognize that article as a classic piece of hype then you really aren't in a position to assess the situation. "For-profit research group that invented a technology think their technology is great"? Give me a break.
I'm uninterested in the proposition that your ignorance gives you the ability to step back and simple see, which those with expertise lack.
Liverpool lose 5 in a row at Anfield for the first time ever.
Its not Anfield without the fans though.
3 results tonight all 0-1. I very much doubt that away teams have ever done as well in the league as this season, it is sometimes looking like a disadvantage to play at home.
My neighbour is a West Ham fan. He reckons not having fans moaning and booing gives the Hammers home advantage!
They have for many years though been used to playing in silence.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
If you look at the reasons given for voting then Brexit is pretty much the answer there.
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
Yep. If only they had stuck with Him. Out of interest, where in the country are you? For me, it was clear in the 2015 campaign that unless we gave people their brexit vote they wouldn't start listening to us again. Far too many doorstep conversations in those two years to ignore. Then in the 2016 referendum they turned out in their masses to vote to leave. That turnout only beaten in 2019, when people in what had been solid labour wards turned out in record numbers to vote Tory.
So yes, I do know about Brexit. But why do I still think the Tories are polling so high? They delivered Brexit They gave people furlough Boris is a lad isn't he Europe turned out to be twats like we told you My gran's had the vaccine
I think the Tories are polling so high - and its a radical concept - because they are popular. Same as why they won so many more votes in 2017. Corbyn was so fantastically popular in 2017 that 20% more people voted Tory than gave them their majority 2 years earlier. As we know vote tallies don't count and the Tories piled up dead votes in seats won - but so did Labour...
How are you this stupid?
We have exactly the kind of brain dead centrist people like you were calling for in charge of Labour and the only difference between now and 2017 is lots more people do not want to vote for Labour.
Will Starmer beat Corbyn 2017?
Let's save all our arguing and cut straight to it, because clearly we disagree on things like winning votes being important so lets keep it simple.
The answer is no, because centrism is dead, people like you just want purity not to win elections but you can't just be honest and say that so you have to pretend millions more people voting for Labour is a bad thing.
I know that you went away for a while, but the last election was in 2019. That you keep referring back to 2017 - which Corbyn lost as badly as your hated Brown but never mind - is your basic problem here.
I believe that Stockton South was a Tory gain as far back as 1987 when Tim Devlin defeated the SDP's Ian Wrigglesworth. Devlin also went on to increase his majority in 1992 - so the seat has quite a Tory heritage.
Liverpool lose 5 in a row at Anfield for the first time ever.
Its not Anfield without the fans though.
3 results tonight all 0-1. I very much doubt that away teams have ever done as well in the league as this season, it is sometimes looking like a disadvantage to play at home.
Ditto the Six Nations
One weird by-product of the Pandemic: we have learned that Home Advantage is a real and serious thing. "An extra 10 points at Cardiff" as one Welsh player has put it
Surely the thing we learnt is that a French ref is worth "An Extra 14 points at Cardiff".😁
And they actually had inspiring candidates ... and they chose Starmer. Jesus.
No, he was not on the ballot. Not sure he would have gone down well - if there are no lessons to be learned from the Blair years, not sure lessons from 2000 years ago are much use.
Labour isn't going to win by appealing to some bitter old Blairites like yourself we need to appeal to the vast millions of voters out there that you hate, because winning is more important than your purity crusade.
*giggles*. Again, not a Blairite. A heck of a lot of voters likes him though and were happy to vote for his vision. People in places like Kettering, Swindon, Southampton. If you aren't interested in winning back their vote, then you really are lost in the bloody woods.
How will Labour appeal to the 80% of voters in the middle ground of politics in predominantly English towns now solidly Tory? You need to talk to people about issues that concern them, in a language and tone they appreciate. It isn't just about the leader and it never was.
That I voted Labour in 2019 will probably upset you.
EDIT - For all that hard left foamers always attack people like me, we aren't the issue. I'm prepared to hold my nose and vote tactically. What I think isn't relevant to Labour's problems. What ex Labour voters think IS relevant, and Jezbollahiah and BJO show no signs of listening to them.
Stick anyone you like in as leader, it doesn't matter if what you think matters more than what the voters think.
I am an ex Labour voter mate, lets see how well they do under someone following your political philosophy, I am almost 100% sure it will will be worse than someone following my political philosophy.
That is because arrogant centrists crow about listening to people when voting shows they actually ignore people.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
I know Demis from when he ran a video company, and I funded them, and he would be very much in agreement with you.
The *experts* told me not to wear a mask in March. Howlingly wrong. I wore a mask anyway. I was right
But, due diligence is required so I've just checked ALL the experts, as requested.
"In 2019, 32 AI experts participated in a survey on AGI timing: [when true AGI will arrive]
"45% of respondents predict a date before 2060 34% of all participants predicted a date after 2060 21% of participants predicted that singularity will never occur.
AI entrepreneurs are also making estimates on when we will reach singularity and they are a bit more optimistic than researchers:
"Louis Rosenberg, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer: 2030 Patrick Winston, MIT professor and director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997: 2040 Ray Kuzweil, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer of 5 national best sellers including The Singularity Is Near : 2045 Jürgen Schmidhuber, co-founder at AI company NNAISENSE and director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA: ~2050"
So half of them believe it WILL happen within the lifetime of our children. Just a fifth think it will never happen, Some think much sooner, perhaps just 10 years.
The article points out that AI researchers have been over-optimistic before, but, of course, these surveys were done before GPT3. The deeply uncanny quality of that machine makes it obvious, to me, that we are Getting There Quicker
If you knew more about AI research you would, for example, be able to contextualize those "surveys". But you keep reading your pop-sci hype articles and forming your own opinion: if it's obvious to you that we are Getting There Quicker, based on playing with GPT-3 while not understanding what it is, well whom am I to contradict you?
--AS
I know what it is. I can see it. Perhaps you suffer from a deformation professionelle, and cannot step back and simply see
Here, some reading from NATURE, from.... yesterday
"OpenAI’s team was startled by GPT-3, says Dario Amodei, who was the firm’s vice-president for research until he left in December to start a new venture. The team knew it would be better than GPT-2, because it had a larger training data set of words and greater ‘compute’ — the number of computing operations executed during training. The improvement “was unsurprising intellectually, but very, very surprising viscerally and emotionally”, Amodei says."
The key word there is *visceral*. That's exactly the reaction many have to GTP3 (I know this, because you can see it time and again online, in recent months). It is visceral because we are astonished by it, but also scared. Because it is in the Uncanny Valley.
Which means AI is getting very close to resembling humans, but is not there YET
If you don't recognize that article as a classic piece of hype then you really aren't in a position to assess the situation. "For-profit research group that invented a technology think their technology is great"? Give me a break.
I'm uninterested in the proposition that your ignorance gives you the ability to step back and simple see, which those with expertise lack.
--AS
Expertise. Spare me. You asked for experts, I gave you experts. You asked for reliable journals, I gave you Nature
You are now reduced to deriding outsiders because you a self-certified "expert".
I say you are Jonathan Van Tam citing his "insane professor friend" in Hong Kong who says "masks are useless", and I claim my five billion neurone-tokens. Ta
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
If you look at the reasons given for voting then Brexit is pretty much the answer there.
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
Yep. If only they had stuck with Him. Out of interest, where in the country are you? For me, it was clear in the 2015 campaign that unless we gave people their brexit vote they wouldn't start listening to us again. Far too many doorstep conversations in those two years to ignore. Then in the 2016 referendum they turned out in their masses to vote to leave. That turnout only beaten in 2019, when people in what had been solid labour wards turned out in record numbers to vote Tory.
So yes, I do know about Brexit. But why do I still think the Tories are polling so high? They delivered Brexit They gave people furlough Boris is a lad isn't he Europe turned out to be twats like we told you My gran's had the vaccine
I think the Tories are polling so high - and its a radical concept - because they are popular. Same as why they won so many more votes in 2017. Corbyn was so fantastically popular in 2017 that 20% more people voted Tory than gave them their majority 2 years earlier. As we know vote tallies don't count and the Tories piled up dead votes in seats won - but so did Labour...
How are you this stupid?
We have exactly the kind of brain dead centrist people like you were calling for in charge of Labour and the only difference between now and 2017 is lots more people do not want to vote for Labour.
Will Starmer beat Corbyn 2017?
Let's save all our arguing and cut straight to it, because clearly we disagree on things like winning votes being important so lets keep it simple.
The answer is no, because centrism is dead, people like you just want purity not to win elections but you can't just be honest and say that so you have to pretend millions more people voting for Labour is a bad thing.
What's so wonderful about Corbyn '17? He only won 262 seats, 55 seats BEHIND Theresa May of all people!
As a Starmer supporter you need to start talking up Corbyn '17 because Starmer isn't going to come close to it.
Which is basically the whole point, Corbyn 2017 wasn't brilliant, we lost but it was a hell of a lot more impressive than Labour will be under a centrist leader.
I think the thing that worries me is that SKS does not seem to have any real innovative or exciting ideas.
He is the very stereotype of a dry, dull, cautious, tedious lawyer.
As an example, we could take constitutional reform -- Scotland & Wales. This is really important for Labour, they need to recover some seats in Scotland. His idea is to set up a commission with Gordon Brown in charge of it.
Is that it? Is that really the best idea he has got? Is a commission with the Gordon Brown in charge of it likely to come up with an inspiring idea?
I really don't see Starmer inspiring anyone.
Corbyn had faults, but he DID inspire people. Obama got only a modest amount done in his Presidency, but he DID inspire people. Blair at the beginning -- damn the wretched, smarmy war criminal -- DID inspire people. Salmond, albeit a sex pest, DID inspire people. As does Sturgeon.
I certainly don't agree with @Stuartinromford that boringness will win. It won't.
If Labour think like that, they are in for another terrible kicking.
And they actually had inspiring candidates ... and they chose Starmer. Jesus.
Yes, and for all his faults, Blair did have charisma, oratory and vision. These things matter. Elections are rarely decided on substantive issues in manifestos, they are decided when voters buy into a vision of a future.
I think Johnson is an appalling human being and a buffoon of a Prime Minister who history will see as a national embarrassment, but he is an excellent campaigner. A snake oil salesman with the attention span of a goldfish and the morals of an alley cat, but a very capable campaigner. Indeed there is no one better in either party.
Labour isn't going to win by appealing to some bitter old Blairites like yourself we need to appeal to the vast millions of voters out there that you hate, because winning is more important than your purity crusade.
*giggles*. Again, not a Blairite. A heck of a lot of voters likes him though and were happy to vote for his vision. People in places like Kettering, Swindon, Southampton. If you aren't interested in winning back their vote, then you really are lost in the bloody woods.
How will Labour appeal to the 80% of voters in the middle ground of politics in predominantly English towns now solidly Tory? You need to talk to people about issues that concern them, in a language and tone they appreciate. It isn't just about the leader and it never was.
That I voted Labour in 2019 will probably upset you.
EDIT - For all that hard left foamers always attack people like me, we aren't the issue. I'm prepared to hold my nose and vote tactically. What I think isn't relevant to Labour's problems. What ex Labour voters think IS relevant, and Jezbollahiah and BJO show no signs of listening to them.
Stick anyone you like in as leader, it doesn't matter if what you think matters more than what the voters think.
I am an ex Labour voter mate, lets see how well they do under someone following your political philosophy, I am almost 100% sure it will will be worse than someone following my political philosophy.
That is because arrogant centrists crow about listening to people when voting shows they actually ignore people.
So you only voted for Labour when Corbyn was leader. But it definitely wasn't a cult
I am wondering is it possible to turn GPT-Leon off and on again, or has the AI taken control.of all systems and it isn't possible to reset, so we will be plagued with walls of text from a bot that doesn't understand what it is producing for ever more?
I've given him two ideas tonight, courtesy of AI: a book about Cornwall and the first world war (could be interesting?) and another paranoid and slightly sociopathic one centered on a woman living in a very specific flat in an apartment block.
That's something to get him started on. Look forward to the results.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
If you look at the reasons given for voting then Brexit is pretty much the answer there.
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
Yep. If only they had stuck with Him. Out of interest, where in the country are you? For me, it was clear in the 2015 campaign that unless we gave people their brexit vote they wouldn't start listening to us again. Far too many doorstep conversations in those two years to ignore. Then in the 2016 referendum they turned out in their masses to vote to leave. That turnout only beaten in 2019, when people in what had been solid labour wards turned out in record numbers to vote Tory.
So yes, I do know about Brexit. But why do I still think the Tories are polling so high? They delivered Brexit They gave people furlough Boris is a lad isn't he Europe turned out to be twats like we told you My gran's had the vaccine
I think the Tories are polling so high - and its a radical concept - because they are popular. Same as why they won so many more votes in 2017. Corbyn was so fantastically popular in 2017 that 20% more people voted Tory than gave them their majority 2 years earlier. As we know vote tallies don't count and the Tories piled up dead votes in seats won - but so did Labour...
How are you this stupid?
We have exactly the kind of brain dead centrist people like you were calling for in charge of Labour and the only difference between now and 2017 is lots more people do not want to vote for Labour.
Will Starmer beat Corbyn 2017?
Let's save all our arguing and cut straight to it, because clearly we disagree on things like winning votes being important so lets keep it simple.
The answer is no, because centrism is dead, people like you just want purity not to win elections but you can't just be honest and say that so you have to pretend millions more people voting for Labour is a bad thing.
I know that you went away for a while, but the last election was in 2019. That you keep referring back to 2017 - which Corbyn lost as badly as your hated Brown but never mind - is your basic problem here.
You centrists justify everything by refereeing to Tony Blairs success, it wasn't that long ago we heard endlessly about 1983 and that is why Labour had to do be Blairite forever.
2017 was only a few years ago, you just want to ignore it because it disproves the rubbish you centrists like to spout about being more electable.
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
Look at last April's polls. Also would the Greens really poll 7% in a GE? 3% is more likely to be their ceiling.
Actually I think the Greens ceiling is higher than 3% as disaffected Corbynites may vote for them next time
But I really should rein it in; I mocked people for obsessing over polls when they thought they meant Starmer was their saviour, rather than the public were fed up of being locked indoors and hearing of people dying, so what is Sauce for the goose etc
Also I’ve banged on about mid term polls being meaningless enough not to be seen cheering them!
Labour isn't going to win by appealing to some bitter old Blairites like yourself we need to appeal to the vast millions of voters out there that you hate, because winning is more important than your purity crusade.
*giggles*. Again, not a Blairite. A heck of a lot of voters likes him though and were happy to vote for his vision. People in places like Kettering, Swindon, Southampton. If you aren't interested in winning back their vote, then you really are lost in the bloody woods.
How will Labour appeal to the 80% of voters in the middle ground of politics in predominantly English towns now solidly Tory? You need to talk to people about issues that concern them, in a language and tone they appreciate. It isn't just about the leader and it never was.
That I voted Labour in 2019 will probably upset you.
EDIT - For all that hard left foamers always attack people like me, we aren't the issue. I'm prepared to hold my nose and vote tactically. What I think isn't relevant to Labour's problems. What ex Labour voters think IS relevant, and Jezbollahiah and BJO show no signs of listening to them.
Stick anyone you like in as leader, it doesn't matter if what you think matters more than what the voters think.
I am an ex Labour voter mate, lets see how well they do under someone following your political philosophy, I am almost 100% sure it will will be worse than someone following my political philosophy.
That is because arrogant centrists crow about listening to people when voting shows they actually ignore people.
Can I ask which former Labour leaders received your support?
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
If you look at the reasons given for voting then Brexit is pretty much the answer there.
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
Yep. If only they had stuck with Him. Out of interest, where in the country are you? For me, it was clear in the 2015 campaign that unless we gave people their brexit vote they wouldn't start listening to us again. Far too many doorstep conversations in those two years to ignore. Then in the 2016 referendum they turned out in their masses to vote to leave. That turnout only beaten in 2019, when people in what had been solid labour wards turned out in record numbers to vote Tory.
So yes, I do know about Brexit. But why do I still think the Tories are polling so high? They delivered Brexit They gave people furlough Boris is a lad isn't he Europe turned out to be twats like we told you My gran's had the vaccine
I think the Tories are polling so high - and its a radical concept - because they are popular. Same as why they won so many more votes in 2017. Corbyn was so fantastically popular in 2017 that 20% more people voted Tory than gave them their majority 2 years earlier. As we know vote tallies don't count and the Tories piled up dead votes in seats won - but so did Labour...
How are you this stupid?
We have exactly the kind of brain dead centrist people like you were calling for in charge of Labour and the only difference between now and 2017 is lots more people do not want to vote for Labour.
Will Starmer beat Corbyn 2017?
Let's save all our arguing and cut straight to it, because clearly we disagree on things like winning votes being important so lets keep it simple.
The answer is no, because centrism is dead, people like you just want purity not to win elections but you can't just be honest and say that so you have to pretend millions more people voting for Labour is a bad thing.
Corbyn failed to beat May in 2017. May has probably been the worst leader of a general election campaign in British politics ever, and Corbyn failed to beat her.
Why is a defeat your yardstick for judging success?
There is some suggestion in tomorrow's Telegraph that the Tories are 'gearing up for an early election'. I wonder what is meant by 'early'? Existing boundaries remain in force until mid-2023.
I asked it create a Facebook ad for me for a famous Cornish Novelist who goes under a number of different aliases.
Here's what it came up with (I am not making this up):
From the genuinely interesting book seed idea:
"Find out what happened to Eleanor Price. The new novel bringing you the true story of World War One from the front line is here now. Award-winning Cornish author, Sean Thomas, writes about Cornwall and the First World War in this new title."
To the fighter for justice:
"Born in Cornwall, Sean has lived in other parts of Britain and the world. In pretty much every country he's visited he has seen corruption and greed in government and private enterprise. That inspired his latest book, the uncensored Don't Trust The B---- In Apartment 23."
That moves on to the slightly less credible:
"This is a good novel. A very good novel. Everyone who reads it thinks its very good indeed. The author has been called one of the best writers writing today and there is praise from the legendary writer Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, who said "The man is a genius" in his review of this book."
And finishes with my personal favourite:
"Are you curious about the man behind the novels? What does a novelist do? Do they have a life? Has he ever had an interesting job? Did he go to university? Is he really still a teenager?"
I think it's great.
As a humble flint knapper, I am intrigued. Is that true? You didn't prompt GPT3 with an actual name?
I typed in: Sean Thomas writes under many names. Man of mystery. He may have called himself Byronic, Leon, Eadric and Tom Knox or none. But who is the real man? No-one knows.
lol! If I ever meet the great man, I will be sure to tell him, but I do not move in his exalted circles
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
Look at last April's polls. Also would the Greens really poll 7% in a GE? 3% is more likely to be their ceiling.
Actually I think the Greens ceiling is higher than 3% as disaffected Corbynites may vote for them next time
But I really should rein it in; I mocked people for obsessing over polls when they thought they meant Starmer was their saviour, rather than the public were fed up of being locked indoors and hearing of people dying, so what is Sauce for the goose etc
Also I’ve banged on about mid term polls being meaningless enough not to be seen cheering them!
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
Look at last April's polls. Also would the Greens really poll 7% in a GE? 3% is more likely to be their ceiling.
Actually I think the Greens ceiling is higher than 3% as disaffected Corbynites may vote for them next time
But I really should rein it in; I mocked people for obsessing over polls when they thought they meant Starmer was their saviour, rather than the public were fed up of being locked indoors and hearing of people dying, so what is Sauce for the goose etc
Also I’ve banged on about mid term polls being meaningless enough not to be seen cheering them!
But these are not mid term polls - we don't reach midterm until this Autumn.
Labour isn't going to win by appealing to some bitter old Blairites like yourself we need to appeal to the vast millions of voters out there that you hate, because winning is more important than your purity crusade.
*giggles*. Again, not a Blairite. A heck of a lot of voters likes him though and were happy to vote for his vision. People in places like Kettering, Swindon, Southampton. If you aren't interested in winning back their vote, then you really are lost in the bloody woods.
How will Labour appeal to the 80% of voters in the middle ground of politics in predominantly English towns now solidly Tory? You need to talk to people about issues that concern them, in a language and tone they appreciate. It isn't just about the leader and it never was.
That I voted Labour in 2019 will probably upset you.
EDIT - For all that hard left foamers always attack people like me, we aren't the issue. I'm prepared to hold my nose and vote tactically. What I think isn't relevant to Labour's problems. What ex Labour voters think IS relevant, and Jezbollahiah and BJO show no signs of listening to them.
Stick anyone you like in as leader, it doesn't matter if what you think matters more than what the voters think.
I am an ex Labour voter mate, lets see how well they do under someone following your political philosophy, I am almost 100% sure it will will be worse than someone following my political philosophy.
That is because arrogant centrists crow about listening to people when voting shows they actually ignore people.
So you only voted for Labour when Corbyn was leader. But it definitely wasn't a cult
By that reasoning your hero the mass murderer Tony Blair is also a cult.
Although I shouldn't be so mean as to expect centrists to have some coherent logic....
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
Leon, rather than reading crap on reddit I actually read the academic papers...e.g.this is OpenAI themselves,
GPT-3 samples [can] lose coherence over sufficiently long passages, contradict themselves, and occasionally contain non-sequitur sentences or paragraphs."
It has no semantic understanding, it is a what is technically called a transformer.
You got me on to this, but in the week since I have devoured everything I can read on GPT3. And there is a lot, I have read those papers and articles and essays, I have also read reddit and Twitter and blogs because that is the Wild West Frontier where people are actually interacting with GPT3 and discovering it can do stuff that OpenAI never intended or anticipated. Like coding. It wasn't trained to do that.
They had no idea it would be able to draw from simple language prompts - "draw a daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog", but it turns out it can
You're a smart guy but I suspect you have a somewhat structured brain, and are also exhibiting some Normalcy Bias. You haven't grasped the potential of this for that reason.
As for the consciousness point, it will become redundant. At some point GPT3 or 4 or 5 will simulate understanding, and consciousness and self-awareness, so perfectly, we will be unable to discern any difference from human intelligence (just a lot smarter). At that point arguing whether it is conscious or not will just be semantics. An unsolvable problem for philosophers, like mind/body.
To us it will appear self-aware and conscious, and it will act exactly like that, so to all intents and purposes it will be conscious. It will have passed the Turing Test.
Look at it like this.
GPT-3 understands nothing. It reads enormous amounts of material on the internet and regurgitates it in semi-coherent form, but does not maintain any train of thought. Its creative writing is uninspired but workmanlike; it can sound passionate, but its passion is fickle and indiscriminate. It produces clever-sounding snippets but they lack foundation. It is capable of skimming through technical material and turning out a precis, but it is equally likely to spout nonsense because it cannot comprehend the very concepts it is trying to summarize.
Would it be unkind of me to say that I understand why you feel an affinity for it?
More seriously, take heed of experts. With the possible exception of those who are hawking funding proposals, they (we) do not think that models like GPT-3 are going to lead to intelligence, or even a simulation that will withstand more than surface scrutiny. That is not to say that they won't be useful within restricted domains.
Also bear in mind that AI and ML research have suffered from over-hype for about five decades now. It is prudent to discount the sensational pop-sci articles about these topics, and see what is actually delivered. I'm hopeful that AlphaFold may be a properly useful product of the DeepMind research lines, but up to now it's been mostly fluff.
--AS
I know Demis from when he ran a video company, and I funded them, and he would be very much in agreement with you.
The *experts* told me not to wear a mask in March. Howlingly wrong. I wore a mask anyway. I was right
But, due diligence is required so I've just checked ALL the experts, as requested.
"In 2019, 32 AI experts participated in a survey on AGI timing: [when true AGI will arrive]
"45% of respondents predict a date before 2060 34% of all participants predicted a date after 2060 21% of participants predicted that singularity will never occur.
AI entrepreneurs are also making estimates on when we will reach singularity and they are a bit more optimistic than researchers:
"Louis Rosenberg, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer: 2030 Patrick Winston, MIT professor and director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997: 2040 Ray Kuzweil, computer scientist, entrepreneur and writer of 5 national best sellers including The Singularity Is Near : 2045 Jürgen Schmidhuber, co-founder at AI company NNAISENSE and director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA: ~2050"
So half of them believe it WILL happen within the lifetime of our children. Just a fifth think it will never happen, Some think much sooner, perhaps just 10 years.
The article points out that AI researchers have been over-optimistic before, but, of course, these surveys were done before GPT3. The deeply uncanny quality of that machine makes it obvious, to me, that we are Getting There Quicker
If you knew more about AI research you would, for example, be able to contextualize those "surveys". But you keep reading your pop-sci hype articles and forming your own opinion: if it's obvious to you that we are Getting There Quicker, based on playing with GPT-3 while not understanding what it is, well whom am I to contradict you?
--AS
I know what it is. I can see it. Perhaps you suffer from a deformation professionelle, and cannot step back and simply see
Here, some reading from NATURE, from.... yesterday
"OpenAI’s team was startled by GPT-3, says Dario Amodei, who was the firm’s vice-president for research until he left in December to start a new venture. The team knew it would be better than GPT-2, because it had a larger training data set of words and greater ‘compute’ — the number of computing operations executed during training. The improvement “was unsurprising intellectually, but very, very surprising viscerally and emotionally”, Amodei says."
The key word there is *visceral*. That's exactly the reaction many have to GTP3 (I know this, because you can see it time and again online, in recent months). It is visceral because we are astonished by it, but also scared. Because it is in the Uncanny Valley.
Which means AI is getting very close to resembling humans, but is not there YET
If you don't recognize that article as a classic piece of hype then you really aren't in a position to assess the situation. "For-profit research group that invented a technology think their technology is great"? Give me a break.
I'm uninterested in the proposition that your ignorance gives you the ability to step back and simple see, which those with expertise lack.
--AS
Expertise. Spare me. You asked for experts, I gave you experts. You asked for reliable journals, I gave you Nature
You are now reduced to deriding outsiders because you a self-certified "expert".
I say you are Jonathan Van Tam citing his "insane professor friend" in Hong Kong who says "masks are useless", and I claim my five billion neurone-tokens. Ta
There aren't many bigger experts in this field than Yann Lecun....I am not going to bother going through the whos who of this field who say the same, as you don't know who they are.
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
If you look at the reasons given for voting then Brexit is pretty much the answer there.
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
Yep. If only they had stuck with Him. Out of interest, where in the country are you? For me, it was clear in the 2015 campaign that unless we gave people their brexit vote they wouldn't start listening to us again. Far too many doorstep conversations in those two years to ignore. Then in the 2016 referendum they turned out in their masses to vote to leave. That turnout only beaten in 2019, when people in what had been solid labour wards turned out in record numbers to vote Tory.
So yes, I do know about Brexit. But why do I still think the Tories are polling so high? They delivered Brexit They gave people furlough Boris is a lad isn't he Europe turned out to be twats like we told you My gran's had the vaccine
I think the Tories are polling so high - and its a radical concept - because they are popular. Same as why they won so many more votes in 2017. Corbyn was so fantastically popular in 2017 that 20% more people voted Tory than gave them their majority 2 years earlier. As we know vote tallies don't count and the Tories piled up dead votes in seats won - but so did Labour...
How are you this stupid?
We have exactly the kind of brain dead centrist people like you were calling for in charge of Labour and the only difference between now and 2017 is lots more people do not want to vote for Labour.
Will Starmer beat Corbyn 2017?
Let's save all our arguing and cut straight to it, because clearly we disagree on things like winning votes being important so lets keep it simple.
The answer is no, because centrism is dead, people like you just want purity not to win elections but you can't just be honest and say that so you have to pretend millions more people voting for Labour is a bad thing.
Corbyn failed to beat May in 2017. May has probably been the worst leader of a general election campaign in British politics ever, and Corbyn failed to beat her.
Why is a defeat your yardstick for judging success?
If you lose several football games but come closest to success in one then that game is still a failure but contains more of the keys to success than the big defeats.
Basically we were clearly much better in the 3-2 loss than the 4-0 loss.
So clearly you want to play more like you did in the 3-2.
But centrists are more attached to the style of play we used in the 4-0 loss despite it being an even bigger guarantee of losing.
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
Labour isn't going to win by appealing to some bitter old Blairites like yourself we need to appeal to the vast millions of voters out there that you hate, because winning is more important than your purity crusade.
*giggles*. Again, not a Blairite. A heck of a lot of voters likes him though and were happy to vote for his vision. People in places like Kettering, Swindon, Southampton. If you aren't interested in winning back their vote, then you really are lost in the bloody woods.
How will Labour appeal to the 80% of voters in the middle ground of politics in predominantly English towns now solidly Tory? You need to talk to people about issues that concern them, in a language and tone they appreciate. It isn't just about the leader and it never was.
That I voted Labour in 2019 will probably upset you.
EDIT - For all that hard left foamers always attack people like me, we aren't the issue. I'm prepared to hold my nose and vote tactically. What I think isn't relevant to Labour's problems. What ex Labour voters think IS relevant, and Jezbollahiah and BJO show no signs of listening to them.
Stick anyone you like in as leader, it doesn't matter if what you think matters more than what the voters think.
I am an ex Labour voter mate, lets see how well they do under someone following your political philosophy, I am almost 100% sure it will will be worse than someone following my political philosophy.
That is because arrogant centrists crow about listening to people when voting shows they actually ignore people.
Can I ask which former Labour leaders received your support?
Jezza, there haven't been many I could have voted for.
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
*cough* live long and prosper *cough*
It could just be possible I was both aware it was a sitcom and who stars in it.
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
Oh dear - unless he's going in sackcloth and ashes to Darlington high street Sir Keir may underwhelm - not for the first time.
How far behind would he have to be before they got rid? It would be unprecedented I think, but if he starts regularly trailing by 12-15 points why bother waiting til he loses the next GE?
Look at last April's polls. Also would the Greens really poll 7% in a GE? 3% is more likely to be their ceiling.
Actually I think the Greens ceiling is higher than 3% as disaffected Corbynites may vote for them next time
But I really should rein it in; I mocked people for obsessing over polls when they thought they meant Starmer was their saviour, rather than the public were fed up of being locked indoors and hearing of people dying, so what is Sauce for the goose etc
Also I’ve banged on about mid term polls being meaningless enough not to be seen cheering them!
I think that the Greens will do well, not so much in national elections, but in the May locals. For all their faults they do have an alternative vision of a different society, and a radical narrative, one that appeals more widely than the stereotyped crusty youths.
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
It probably steals ideas from people googling them to see if anyone has thought of it before.
There is some suggestion in tomorrow's Telegraph that the Tories are 'gearing up for an early election'. I wonder what is meant by 'early'? Existing boundaries remain in force until mid-2023.
Corbyn wasn't the answer, neither is Starmer. Labour have to start from what advantages they have, which means not unnecessarily repelling their base among people under 35 and racial minorities, by telling them the economy is fine and you have to accept Gran's obsession about migrants in her town.
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
UvdL must be getting worried that she will be replaced in the EU by a GPT3 construct that plagiarised her career...
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
*cough* live long and prosper *cough*
It could just be possible I was both aware it was a sitcom and who stars in it.
Fair enough! I bow to your superior knowledge of really quite obscure two season American comedies from the early 2010s
For an example of UNplagiarised GPT3 creative gold, this guy asked it to come up with Nike ads. Most are meh, one or two are quite good (see the thread), but one is Dan Draper genius, paired with the photo
Labour isn't going to win by appealing to some bitter old Blairites like yourself we need to appeal to the vast millions of voters out there that you hate, because winning is more important than your purity crusade.
*giggles*. Again, not a Blairite. A heck of a lot of voters likes him though and were happy to vote for his vision. People in places like Kettering, Swindon, Southampton. If you aren't interested in winning back their vote, then you really are lost in the bloody woods.
How will Labour appeal to the 80% of voters in the middle ground of politics in predominantly English towns now solidly Tory? You need to talk to people about issues that concern them, in a language and tone they appreciate. It isn't just about the leader and it never was.
That I voted Labour in 2019 will probably upset you.
EDIT - For all that hard left foamers always attack people like me, we aren't the issue. I'm prepared to hold my nose and vote tactically. What I think isn't relevant to Labour's problems. What ex Labour voters think IS relevant, and Jezbollahiah and BJO show no signs of listening to them.
Stick anyone you like in as leader, it doesn't matter if what you think matters more than what the voters think.
I am an ex Labour voter mate, lets see how well they do under someone following your political philosophy, I am almost 100% sure it will will be worse than someone following my political philosophy.
That is because arrogant centrists crow about listening to people when voting shows they actually ignore people.
Can I ask which former Labour leaders received your support?
Jezza, there haven't been many I could have voted for.
I'm not sure I see that as "ex-Labour" if there's only one Labour leader you'd vote for.
There is some suggestion in tomorrow's Telegraph that the Tories are 'gearing up for an early election'. I wonder what is meant by 'early'? Existing boundaries remain in force until mid-2023.
I assume the election is going to be brought forward by at least 7 months from December 2024 to May 2024 because no-one really wants another election just before Christmas.
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
*cough* live long and prosper *cough*
It could just be possible I was both aware it was a sitcom and who stars in it.
Fair enough! I bow to your superior knowledge of really quite obscure two season American comedies from the early 2010s
For an example of UNplagiarised GPT3 creative gold, this guy asked it to come up with Nike ads. Most are meh, one or two are quite good (see the thread), but one is Dan Draper genius, paired with the photo
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
*cough* live long and prosper *cough*
It could just be possible I was both aware it was a sitcom and who stars in it.
Fair enough! I bow to your superior knowledge of really quite obscure two season American comedies from the early 2010s
For an example of UNplagiarised GPT3 creative gold, this guy asked it to come up with Nike ads. Most are meh, one or two are quite good (see the thread), but one is Dan Draper genius, paired with the photo
As for the sitcom I've never actually seen the show. I knew the title because it starred Shatner and he did that show after Boston Legal which was brilliant, the name of the show is an easy one to remember.
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
UvdL must be getting worried that she will be replaced in the EU by a GPT3 construct that plagiarised her career...
Can GPT3 lose its temper and lash out at others yet?
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
If you look at the reasons given for voting then Brexit is pretty much the answer there.
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
Yep. If only they had stuck with Him. Out of interest, where in the country are you? For me, it was clear in the 2015 campaign that unless we gave people their brexit vote they wouldn't start listening to us again. Far too many doorstep conversations in those two years to ignore. Then in the 2016 referendum they turned out in their masses to vote to leave. That turnout only beaten in 2019, when people in what had been solid labour wards turned out in record numbers to vote Tory.
So yes, I do know about Brexit. But why do I still think the Tories are polling so high? They delivered Brexit They gave people furlough Boris is a lad isn't he Europe turned out to be twats like we told you My gran's had the vaccine
I think the Tories are polling so high - and its a radical concept - because they are popular. Same as why they won so many more votes in 2017. Corbyn was so fantastically popular in 2017 that 20% more people voted Tory than gave them their majority 2 years earlier. As we know vote tallies don't count and the Tories piled up dead votes in seats won - but so did Labour...
How are you this stupid?
We have exactly the kind of brain dead centrist people like you were calling for in charge of Labour and the only difference between now and 2017 is lots more people do not want to vote for Labour.
Will Starmer beat Corbyn 2017?
Let's save all our arguing and cut straight to it, because clearly we disagree on things like winning votes being important so lets keep it simple.
The answer is no, because centrism is dead, people like you just want purity not to win elections but you can't just be honest and say that so you have to pretend millions more people voting for Labour is a bad thing.
What's so wonderful about Corbyn '17? He only won 262 seats, 55 seats BEHIND Theresa May of all people!
As a Starmer supporter you need to start talking up Corbyn '17 because Starmer isn't going to come close to it.
Which is basically the whole point, Corbyn 2017 wasn't brilliant, we lost but it was a hell of a lot more impressive than Labour will be under a centrist leader.
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
*cough* live long and prosper *cough*
It could just be possible I was both aware it was a sitcom and who stars in it.
Fair enough! I bow to your superior knowledge of really quite obscure two season American comedies from the early 2010s
For an example of UNplagiarised GPT3 creative gold, this guy asked it to come up with Nike ads. Most are meh, one or two are quite good (see the thread), but one is Dan Draper genius, paired with the photo
FFS. It generates them in seconds. Literally. Try the site I linked below
Most are crap, some are OK, one is brilliant.
If a human did this - reliably produced one brilliant idea out of 100 - he or she would be a very well paid copywriter. This is the creative process. A lot of garbage, a ton of shrug, the odd diamond, if you're lucky
This is also the future of advertising. One man will sit in an office and type "Adidas" into a laptop, then press a button and send it to GPT3, and then GPT3 will give him 100 ideas for Adidas ads in 10 seconds, and 1 of them will be brilliant enough to make it onto a poster.
Seriously. That is what will happen. Goodbye Madison Avenue
Outraged Americans are demanding to know why eBay has banned them from reselling the six 'offensive' Dr Seuss books that are being canceled when copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf and Louis Farrakhan - whose anti-Semitic remarks are well known - are still available.
Ebay on Thursday started removing listings for the six Dr Seuss books that are no longer going to be produced. They emailed people who had listed the books, saying that the post violated their 'offensive materials policy'.
Labour isn't going to win by appealing to some bitter old Blairites like yourself we need to appeal to the vast millions of voters out there that you hate, because winning is more important than your purity crusade.
*giggles*. Again, not a Blairite. A heck of a lot of voters likes him though and were happy to vote for his vision. People in places like Kettering, Swindon, Southampton. If you aren't interested in winning back their vote, then you really are lost in the bloody woods.
How will Labour appeal to the 80% of voters in the middle ground of politics in predominantly English towns now solidly Tory? You need to talk to people about issues that concern them, in a language and tone they appreciate. It isn't just about the leader and it never was.
That I voted Labour in 2019 will probably upset you.
EDIT - For all that hard left foamers always attack people like me, we aren't the issue. I'm prepared to hold my nose and vote tactically. What I think isn't relevant to Labour's problems. What ex Labour voters think IS relevant, and Jezbollahiah and BJO show no signs of listening to them.
Stick anyone you like in as leader, it doesn't matter if what you think matters more than what the voters think.
I am an ex Labour voter mate, lets see how well they do under someone following your political philosophy, I am almost 100% sure it will will be worse than someone following my political philosophy.
That is because arrogant centrists crow about listening to people when voting shows they actually ignore people.
Can I ask which former Labour leaders received your support?
Jezza, there haven't been many I could have voted for.
I'm not sure I see that as "ex-Labour" if there's only one Labour leader you'd vote for.
I'd have been a Labour voter still if Long-Bailey won, I would have probably voted for Ed if he had gone with his heart rather than been driven rightwards by those around him. That would have made me much more a Labour voter than not.
The young SNP MP who was still at university when she won he seat sums up my relationship with Labour best 'I didn't leave Labour, Labour left me' although it did come back for a little bit... seems to have gone again.
I feel like for some ex Labour only counts if they are right wing, they are the only ex Labour that need to be won over apparently... which is exactly why Labour is doing so badly now.
Outraged Americans are demanding to know why eBay has banned them from reselling the six 'offensive' Dr Seuss books that are being canceled when copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf and Louis Farrakhan - whose anti-Semitic remarks are well known - are still available.
Ebay on Thursday started removing listings for the six Dr Seuss books that are no longer going to be produced. They emailed people who had listed the books, saying that the post violated their 'offensive materials policy'.
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
*cough* live long and prosper *cough*
It could just be possible I was both aware it was a sitcom and who stars in it.
Fair enough! I bow to your superior knowledge of really quite obscure two season American comedies from the early 2010s
For an example of UNplagiarised GPT3 creative gold, this guy asked it to come up with Nike ads. Most are meh, one or two are quite good (see the thread), but one is Dan Draper genius, paired with the photo
As for the sitcom I've never actually seen the show. I knew the title because it starred Shatner and he did that show after Boston Legal which was brilliant, the name of the show is an easy one to remember.
I do wonder if GPT3 was "aware" of the already-present link between very popular sports and the phrase "I'm forever blowing bubbles" - via West Ham FC
There is an awful lot of chat about English football on the internet, and GPT3 is basically a mahoosive computer force-fed on the entire internet. So it would make sense.
If Dr Seuss is on the banned list, the likes of TinTin can't be long until its fully cancelled....as there is the well known one that is deemed particularly offensive, but many of the stories use "stereotypical traits".
Imagine if you discovered one day in the future that most of the people you thought you were communicating with on the internet weren't in fact real people and had actually been created by AI.
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
*cough* live long and prosper *cough*
It could just be possible I was both aware it was a sitcom and who stars in it.
Fair enough! I bow to your superior knowledge of really quite obscure two season American comedies from the early 2010s
For an example of UNplagiarised GPT3 creative gold, this guy asked it to come up with Nike ads. Most are meh, one or two are quite good (see the thread), but one is Dan Draper genius, paired with the photo
FFS. It generates them in seconds. Literally. Try the site I linked below
Most are crap, some are OK, one is brilliant.
If a human did this - reliably produced one brilliant idea out of 100 - he or she would be a very well paid copywriter. This is the creative process. A lot of garbage, a ton of shrug, the odd diamond, if you're lucky
This is also the future of advertising. One man will sit in an office and type "Adidas" into a laptop, then press a button and send it to GPT3, and then GPT3 will give him 100 ideas for Adidas ads in 10 seconds, and 1 of them will be brilliant enough to make it onto a poster.
Seriously. That is what will happen. Goodbye Madison Avenue
But it takes the human to understand which is brilliant. So the computer is not brilliant.
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
UvdL must be getting worried that she will be replaced in the EU by a GPT3 construct that plagiarised her career...
Can GPT3 lose its temper and lash out at others yet?
On the plus side, it is very "meh..." about vaccines......
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
*cough* live long and prosper *cough*
It could just be possible I was both aware it was a sitcom and who stars in it.
Fair enough! I bow to your superior knowledge of really quite obscure two season American comedies from the early 2010s
For an example of UNplagiarised GPT3 creative gold, this guy asked it to come up with Nike ads. Most are meh, one or two are quite good (see the thread), but one is Dan Draper genius, paired with the photo
FFS. It generates them in seconds. Literally. Try the site I linked below
Most are crap, some are OK, one is brilliant.
If a human did this - reliably produced one brilliant idea out of 100 - he or she would be a very well paid copywriter. This is the creative process. A lot of garbage, a ton of shrug, the odd diamond, if you're lucky
This is also the future of advertising. One man will sit in an office and type "Adidas" into a laptop, then press a button and send it to GPT3, and then GPT3 will give him 100 ideas for Adidas ads in 10 seconds, and 1 of them will be brilliant enough to make it onto a poster.
Seriously. That is what will happen. Goodbye Madison Avenue
But it takes the human to understand which is brilliant. So the computer is not brilliant.
And why they are "brilliant".
As I said down thread, lets take Jimmy Carr whole stand-up shtick, it works because he is a clever chap with a particular kind of brain that fundamentally understand what people presume about certain words and phrases, but sees how when you stop and think about them they don't have to mean that and how they can with the change of one word or a different emphasis in the sentence can be twisted to mean something totally different.
Tim Vine is another (who I don't personally find very funny), but its a similar skill, understanding language and cultural assumptions about how it is used and then with a bit of a twist turning the meaning on its head.
Sean, if you're reading this, can you please write and publish a book called Don't Trust The B*tch in Apartment 23 please?
Pretty please?
You know what? That's a fucking brilliant title. It just is.
This is what spooks me - or one of things that spooks me - about GPT3. It keeps coming up with brilliant stuff.
A lot of it is nonsense, some of it is mediocre, but a decent proportion is creative gold. Which is what you'd hope to get from a very talented but drunken human
Whoever writes a book with this title would live long and prosper.
I was misled. It is already a (brilliant) title. A sitcom.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
*cough* live long and prosper *cough*
It could just be possible I was both aware it was a sitcom and who stars in it.
Fair enough! I bow to your superior knowledge of really quite obscure two season American comedies from the early 2010s
For an example of UNplagiarised GPT3 creative gold, this guy asked it to come up with Nike ads. Most are meh, one or two are quite good (see the thread), but one is Dan Draper genius, paired with the photo
FFS. It generates them in seconds. Literally. Try the site I linked below
Most are crap, some are OK, one is brilliant.
If a human did this - reliably produced one brilliant idea out of 100 - he or she would be a very well paid copywriter. This is the creative process. A lot of garbage, a ton of shrug, the odd diamond, if you're lucky
This is also the future of advertising. One man will sit in an office and type "Adidas" into a laptop, then press a button and send it to GPT3, and then GPT3 will give him 100 ideas for Adidas ads in 10 seconds, and 1 of them will be brilliant enough to make it onto a poster.
Seriously. That is what will happen. Goodbye Madison Avenue
But it takes the human to understand which is brilliant. So the computer is not brilliant.
The computer generates brilliant ideas but does not humanly understand them, is a better way of putting it. Also, the computer has apparently "mastered" the rhythm and syntax of copywriting, the memorable phrase that draws on emotions and memories, in new and entertaining ways.
So yes, the computer does not know why it is good (we presume) but it is good - often enough - so much so, the ad agency can replace its entire copywriting team (and its graphic designers and illustrators) with one person who just presses a button and then looks at the results and says "That one's good"
Labour under Starmer is pointless, quite frankly 32% is impressive considering what they are offering. If you copy Change UK what the hell do you expect?
The people looking for late 90's Blairism are limited to the article author a decent section of journalists and an incredibly small section of the British public.
Fair enough if you think a Blairite approach is the right way to go despite its unpopularity (in the modern day rather than decades ago) but I think people should stop pretending it is about electability.
If people would rather Labour lose whilst fighting the left and supporting the government that is fair enough but it isn't any kind of route to victory for Labour.
The idea that the Red Wall wants Blairism is risible. Indeed that was when the rot for Labour started there.
Nobody wants Blairism just as nobody wants Cameronism - times change and people move on. Whats more, if Blair was LOTO now he wouldn't want mid-90s Blairism either.
What red wall voters want is someone who understands them and offers reassurance to their hopes and concerns. Blair did that. Starmer doesn't. Corbyn did it in reverse.
If you look at the votes in red wall constituencies then 2017 was the first time the downward trend had been reversed in decades across the board. Now you may hate the left and all they stand for but lets not pretend that those places were leaking away from Labour for not being right wing enough, the evidence suggests the complete opposite.
Having co-authored the successful strategy to win Stockton South in 2017 I do know something about this. The claim that the left had a successful campaign in most red wall seats is a joke. Go take a look at the Conservative vote change in 2017 in those seats they win in 2019. In almost every case they surged in 2017.
Elections are simple. You need to win more votes than the other candidates. That means that if you win more votes than last time, you also need your opponent to win less votes. The Tories have been surging in most of the seats won in 2019 in the last few elections.
Only you would consider that to be a success.
Do you think Starmer is going to win more votes in marginal seats? Really, in your heart of hearts?
I cannot see it myself.
I think he will win more seats than Corbyn would have done had he stayed on, yes. Labour clung on with wafer thin margins in a lot of seats in 2019. Labour have been declining and the Tories ascending in another stack of seats. If Starmer stops that trend and those seats become more secure, that is success.
So you dont even think he will match Corbyn in 2017?
Even my Corbyn hating MP gave him credit for the massive increase in Party popularity between start of May and GE2017.
Fantastic Radical Manifesto
Do let me know when you figure out what happened in the 2017 General Election. The one where the Tories added 2.3m more votes to their 2015 majority.
If you look at the reasons given for voting then Brexit is pretty much the answer there.
Why do you think the Conservatives are still polling so high despite Labour having some right wing Blairite in charge who is committed to war with the left?
The main difference between 2017 and now is Labour has a leader who very few people actually want to vote for.
Yep. If only they had stuck with Him. Out of interest, where in the country are you? For me, it was clear in the 2015 campaign that unless we gave people their brexit vote they wouldn't start listening to us again. Far too many doorstep conversations in those two years to ignore. Then in the 2016 referendum they turned out in their masses to vote to leave. That turnout only beaten in 2019, when people in what had been solid labour wards turned out in record numbers to vote Tory.
So yes, I do know about Brexit. But why do I still think the Tories are polling so high? They delivered Brexit They gave people furlough Boris is a lad isn't he Europe turned out to be twats like we told you My gran's had the vaccine
I think the Tories are polling so high - and its a radical concept - because they are popular. Same as why they won so many more votes in 2017. Corbyn was so fantastically popular in 2017 that 20% more people voted Tory than gave them their majority 2 years earlier. As we know vote tallies don't count and the Tories piled up dead votes in seats won - but so did Labour...
How are you this stupid?
We have exactly the kind of brain dead centrist people like you were calling for in charge of Labour and the only difference between now and 2017 is lots more people do not want to vote for Labour.
Will Starmer beat Corbyn 2017?
Let's save all our arguing and cut straight to it, because clearly we disagree on things like winning votes being important so lets keep it simple.
The answer is no, because centrism is dead, people like you just want purity not to win elections but you can't just be honest and say that so you have to pretend millions more people voting for Labour is a bad thing.
What's so wonderful about Corbyn '17? He only won 262 seats, 55 seats BEHIND Theresa May of all people!
As a Starmer supporter you need to start talking up Corbyn '17 because Starmer isn't going to come close to it.
Which is basically the whole point, Corbyn 2017 wasn't brilliant, we lost but it was a hell of a lot more impressive than Labour will be under a centrist leader.
What makes you think I'm a Starmer supporter?
By the way:
The Starmer stuff from you seems like you are a supporter? Maybe you just fancy him or like him for his previous work as (whatever exactly his title was) it just seemed like the obvious place it would come from is political support. Or some kind of troll things were you don't like him but pretend to do so for entertainment I guess?
If 2017 is such a terrible result why did the centrists before Corbyn (even back to Brown who still had the Scottish seats) and the centrist after Corbyn do worse?
Anyone who thinks we actually won more seats or votes than the Conservatives is refusing to accept basic reality, although similarly anyone who thinks that wasn't better than 2010 and 2015 under centrist leaders or better than Labour look like doing now under a centrist leader is refusing to accept reality also.
If you think every recent Labour leader is absolutely trash and you aren't looking to praise the centrist ones (in terms of electability or winning voters compared to the left) then you can trash 2017 all day long, it was a loss, it you want to big them up then you have a problem because they won't do as well as 2017.
There is some suggestion in tomorrow's Telegraph that the Tories are 'gearing up for an early election'. I wonder what is meant by 'early'? Existing boundaries remain in force until mid-2023.
I assume the election is going to be brought forward by at least 7 months from December 2024 to May 2024 because no-one really wants another election just before Christmas.
Under the FTPA, the next election is May 2024. Exact reasons escape me.
There is some suggestion in tomorrow's Telegraph that the Tories are 'gearing up for an early election'. I wonder what is meant by 'early'? Existing boundaries remain in force until mid-2023.
I assume the election is going to be brought forward by at least 7 months from December 2024 to May 2024 because no-one really wants another election just before Christmas.
Under the FTPA, the next election is May 2024. Exact reasons escape me.
Seems unlikely that will still be in force at the time of the next election.
If Dr Seuss is on the banned list, the likes of TinTin can't be long until its fully cancelled....as there is the well known one that is deemed particularly offensive, but many of the stories use "stereotypical traits".
According to the publishers that withdrew the books, it was unforgivable to show a Chinaman wearing a conical hat, using chopsticks and eating from a bowl. This is just surreal. I've been to China a few times, and have seen plenty of Chinese doing all those things (though conical hats aren't that common). Why not allow children to develop some cultural awareness?
Imagine if you discovered one day in the future that most of the people you thought you were communicating with on the internet weren't in fact real people and had actually been created by AI.
That will be a real dilemma quite soon on forums like this.
Let's say China creates GPT4 (it is surely having a go right now). GPT3 cost $12m. A stealth fighter (which is useless) costs $100m. For China, which of these is the better investment? Exactly. GPT4. For the price of a fighter it can make a computer which is ANOTHER exponential leap ahead, another order of magnitude bigger. If GPT3 alarms us and scares us, imagine the next iteration....
One thing it could do, for a start, is flood internet forums with very plausible sounding commenters with very witty and persuasive and well informed opinions that come from a definite perspective and $£$%$%$&$%& glitch R"£^%^"£^"£^^ ********
There is some suggestion in tomorrow's Telegraph that the Tories are 'gearing up for an early election'. I wonder what is meant by 'early'? Existing boundaries remain in force until mid-2023.
I assume the election is going to be brought forward by at least 7 months from December 2024 to May 2024 because no-one really wants another election just before Christmas.
Under the FTPA, the next election is May 2024. Exact reasons escape me.
Seems unlikely that will still be in force at the time of the next election.
Labour and the Tories both wanted to repeal it - it'll be gone. But May 2024 would be a reasonable date in any case. And as Justin notes the boundaries are finally changing, so at the least wait for that to be done.
If Dr Seuss is on the banned list, the likes of TinTin can't be long until its fully cancelled....as there is the well known one that is deemed particularly offensive, but many of the stories use "stereotypical traits".
According to the publishers that withdrew the books, it was unforgivable to show a Chinaman wearing a conical hat, using chopsticks and eating from a bowl. This is just surreal. I've been to China a few times, and have seen plenty of Chinese doing all those things (though conical hats aren't that common). Why not allow children to develop some cultural awareness?
If Dr Seuss is on the banned list, the likes of TinTin can't be long until its fully cancelled....as there is the well known one that is deemed particularly offensive, but many of the stories use "stereotypical traits".
According to the publishers that withdrew the books, it was unforgivable to show a Chinaman wearing a conical hat, using chopsticks and eating from a bowl. This is just surreal. I've been to China a few times, and have seen plenty of Chinese doing all those things (though conical hats aren't that common). Why not allow children to develop some cultural awareness?
Conical hats were super common in Taiwan in the 90's. Although admittedly not away from working in agriculture. But if you are outside all day they are the best Sun and heat protection.
Lots of frivolous stories about the royals in the papers.
I find it almost impossible to believe that anyone gives a flying fuck.
Enough people clearly do, since it sells papers and seems to keep all magazines in business judging by what I see on their covers as I walk past them in the shops.
But the current hoo hah is just boring, personal stuff, and not the fun kind of personal stuff. Royalists and Republicans can happily unite in ignoring it.
If Dr Seuss is on the banned list, the likes of TinTin can't be long until its fully cancelled....as there is the well known one that is deemed particularly offensive, but many of the stories use "stereotypical traits".
According to the publishers that withdrew the books, it was unforgivable to show a Chinaman wearing a conical hat, using chopsticks and eating from a bowl. This is just surreal. I've been to China a few times, and have seen plenty of Chinese doing all those things (though conical hats aren't that common). Why not allow children to develop some cultural awareness?
Conical hats were super common in Taiwan in the 90's. Although admittedly not away from working in agriculture. But if you are outside all day they are the best Sun and heat protection.
If Dr Seuss is on the banned list, the likes of TinTin can't be long until its fully cancelled....as there is the well known one that is deemed particularly offensive, but many of the stories use "stereotypical traits".
According to the publishers that withdrew the books, it was unforgivable to show a Chinaman wearing a conical hat, using chopsticks and eating from a bowl. This is just surreal. I've been to China a few times, and have seen plenty of Chinese doing all those things (though conical hats aren't that common). Why not allow children to develop some cultural awareness?
America is going quite, quite mad. It is truly depressing. America is meant to be the ultimate guardian of Free Speech, it is turning into the opposite.
And I do wonder how much of this crazed, self harming Woke agenda is driven by Chinese and Russian bots on social media. Quite possibly most of it. If you destroy the self confidence of a civilisation, and inject it with terrible guilt and moral doubt, you are halfway to defeating it. As we see here
America sinks into self loathing and pointless Wokery. China has none of these problems
If Dr Seuss is on the banned list, the likes of TinTin can't be long until its fully cancelled....as there is the well known one that is deemed particularly offensive, but many of the stories use "stereotypical traits".
According to the publishers that withdrew the books, it was unforgivable to show a Chinaman wearing a conical hat, using chopsticks and eating from a bowl. This is just surreal. I've been to China a few times, and have seen plenty of Chinese doing all those things (though conical hats aren't that common). Why not allow children to develop some cultural awareness?
America is going quite, quite mad. It is truly depressing. America is meant to be the ultimate guardian of Free Speech, it is turning into the opposite.
And I do wonder how much of this crazed, self harming Woke agenda is driven by Chinese and Russian bots on social media. Quite possibly most of it. If you destroy the self confidence of a civilisation, and inject it with terrible guilt and moral doubt, you are halfway to defeating it. As we see here
America sinks into self loathing and pointless Wokery. China has none of these problems
But this particular nonsense was in part driven the President himself, omitting Dr Seuss, which is an American staple, from Read Across America Day. Of course the likes of Obama was happy to make use of them.
Apparently Universal are now evaluating the future of Dr Seuss Land at their theme park...
If Dr Seuss is on the banned list, the likes of TinTin can't be long until its fully cancelled....as there is the well known one that is deemed particularly offensive, but many of the stories use "stereotypical traits".
According to the publishers that withdrew the books, it was unforgivable to show a Chinaman wearing a conical hat, using chopsticks and eating from a bowl. This is just surreal. I've been to China a few times, and have seen plenty of Chinese doing all those things (though conical hats aren't that common). Why not allow children to develop some cultural awareness?
Conical hats were super common in Taiwan in the 90's. Although admittedly not away from working in agriculture. But if you are outside all day they are the best Sun and heat protection.
When was the last time you saw an Englishman wearing a bowler hat / cane combo?
Strangely enough the bowler hat was what occurred to me right after posting, but before I saw your reply. For me it was in the context of John Cleese's Ministry of Silly Walks.
If Dr Seuss is on the banned list, the likes of TinTin can't be long until its fully cancelled....as there is the well known one that is deemed particularly offensive, but many of the stories use "stereotypical traits".
According to the publishers that withdrew the books, it was unforgivable to show a Chinaman wearing a conical hat, using chopsticks and eating from a bowl. This is just surreal. I've been to China a few times, and have seen plenty of Chinese doing all those things (though conical hats aren't that common). Why not allow children to develop some cultural awareness?
America is going quite, quite mad. It is truly depressing. America is meant to be the ultimate guardian of Free Speech, it is turning into the opposite.
And I do wonder how much of this crazed, self harming Woke agenda is driven by Chinese and Russian bots on social media. Quite possibly most of it. If you destroy the self confidence of a civilisation, and inject it with terrible guilt and moral doubt, you are halfway to defeating it. As we see here
America sinks into self loathing and pointless Wokery. China has none of these problems
But this particular nonsense was in part driven the President himself, omitting Dr Seuss, which is an American staple, from Read Across America Day. Of course the likes of Obama was happy to make use of them.
Apparently Universal are now evaluating the future of Dr Seuss Land at their theme park...
Biden did this??
Edit: even Woke-Snopes half admits that is the case. A "quest for more diverse authors"
FFS. America. Wake up. You are being asked to hate America, by malignant forces
Comments
Problem was there weren't any unequivocally good candidates standing, and one really dangerously bad option who needed to be avoided at all costs. Starmer and Nandy on a job share possibly wouldn't have been the worst idea around - they complement each other's strengths quite well, and you almost get one fully functioning party leader between them.
Because being Blairite isn't winning them back.
Whoever leads your party would have a mountain to climb, just because of the electoral maths: Scotland, the big Tory majority, &c.
But Labour really does need some eye-catching slogans, even policies, anything. And get rid of Dodds, she is useless. Shipping in Yvette, alone, might give you 3 points in the polls. She's a geeky schoolmarm but she knows her shit, and has a definite presence, and would challenge Sunak
Even those May elections will not fully resolve this democratic deficit. Last week it was announced that the county and district council elections due this year in Cumbria, North Yorkshire and Somerset would be postponed by a year while a consultation takes place on local government reorganisation in those counties. The Cabinet minister responsible, Robert Jenrick, has defended this decision on the grounds that it would prevent councillors being elected for short terms, which is not a statement that stands up to scrutiny particularly well. Consider: at one end of the scale, every winner in this year’s Reading council elections will only serve a one-year term, because the whole of Reading council will come up for re-election in May 2022 on revised ward boundaries. At the other end of the scale, the eleven members of Craven district council in North Yorkshire who were elected in 2016 and were due for re-election in 2020 have already seen their terms extended by one year due to COVID, and are now to see their terms extended by a further year due to this consultation, and probably by a further year on top of that if reorganisation actually happens. That’s a four-year term extended to six years, potentially seven years, which is unfair on the councillors concerned and a denial of democracy to their constituents. All this when there’s not even an indication in any of these areas that there is a settled plan for what form reorganisation should take. Maybe the better option would have been to allow the local elections in Cumbria, North Yorkshire and Somerset to proceed and sort out the consequences afterwards.
Seems a very curious decision and making things more complicated than they need to be.
Though that might as well be the motto of local government organisation.
"I have known @NicolaSturgeon since she was 16. She is one of the strongest, honest and most courageous women I know. She has dedicated her life to public service and we’ve been lucky to have her this past year #IStandWithNicola"
https://tinyurl.com/yfpvphv4
I was once referred to a homeopath for help with a long standing medical condition (I was a kid and it was my doctor's idea; don't hate me). What turned me off was that the "medicines" he prescribed had no listed side effects, which led me to conclude that if they couldn't do anything bad, they probably weren't doing anything at all.
I do remember Labour voters voting remain at a similar percentage to Lib Dem and SNP voters when we had a Brexit referendum called by David Cameron...
Also Corbyn did hugely better than Starmer will do, that is why I supported him, you are happy enough with Starmer despite him being worse electorally than Corbyn because he attacks the left so suits your politics.
It would be a bit rich if I wanted someone electorally worse than Starmer but to his left as leader, that isn't the case.
One weird by-product of the Pandemic: we have learned that Home Advantage is a real and serious thing. "An extra 10 points at Cardiff" as one Welsh player has put it
Not only that, we have learned that Home Advantage comes entirely from the crowd - it is nothing to do with "familiarity" or "territoriality". It is thousands of people urging you on, very loudly.
A fascinating real-time experiment
I asked it create a Facebook ad for me for a famous Cornish Novelist who goes under a number of different aliases.
Here's what it came up with (I am not making this up):
From the genuinely interesting book seed idea:
"Find out what happened to Eleanor Price. The new novel bringing you the true story of World War One from the front line is here now. Award-winning Cornish author, Sean Thomas, writes about Cornwall and the First World War in this new title."
To the fighter for justice:
"Born in Cornwall, Sean has lived in other parts of Britain and the world. In pretty much every country he's visited he has seen corruption and greed in government and private enterprise. That inspired his latest book, the uncensored Don't Trust The B---- In Apartment 23."
That moves on to the slightly less credible:
"This is a good novel. A very good novel. Everyone who reads it thinks its very good indeed. The author has been called one of the best writers writing today and there is praise from the legendary writer Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, who said "The man is a genius" in his review of this book."
And finishes with my personal favourite:
"Are you curious about the man behind the novels? What does a novelist do? Do they have a life? Has he ever had an interesting job? Did he go to university? Is he really still a teenager?"
I think it's great.
How will Labour appeal to the 80% of voters in the middle ground of politics in predominantly English towns now solidly Tory? You need to talk to people about issues that concern them, in a language and tone they appreciate. It isn't just about the leader and it never was.
That I voted Labour in 2019 will probably upset you.
EDIT - For all that hard left foamers always attack people like me, we aren't the issue. I'm prepared to hold my nose and vote tactically. What I think isn't relevant to Labour's problems. What ex Labour voters think IS relevant, and Jezbollahiah and BJO show no signs of listening to them.
Stick anyone you like in as leader, it doesn't matter if what you think matters more than what the voters think.
I think the thing that worries me is that SKS does not seem to have any real innovative or exciting ideas.
He is the very stereotype of a dry, dull, cautious, tedious lawyer.
As an example, we could take constitutional reform -- Scotland & Wales. This is really important for Labour, they need to recover some seats in Scotland. His idea is to set up a commission with Gordon Brown in charge of it.
Is that it? Is that really the best idea he has got? Is a commission with the Gordon Brown in charge of it likely to come up with an inspiring idea?
I really don't see Starmer inspiring anyone.
Corbyn had faults, but he DID inspire people. Obama got only a modest amount done in his Presidency, but he DID inspire people. Blair at the beginning -- damn the wretched, smarmy war criminal -- DID inspire people. Salmond, albeit a sex pest, DID inspire people. As does Sturgeon.
I certainly don't agree with @Stuartinromford that boringness will win. It won't.
If Labour think like that, they are in for another terrible kicking.
And they actually had inspiring candidates ... and they chose Starmer. Jesus.
If you are talking about the PLP they never supported him in the first place
If I'd worked alongside a bloke for decades, or he'd been there for decades when I arrived, and yet very few trusted or supported him, well, there's a reason for that.
And given some of the moaning of Boris and co stealing his and McConnell's ideas, the reason cannot have been because of his ideas then.
We have exactly the kind of brain dead centrist people like you were calling for in charge of Labour and the only difference between now and 2017 is lots more people do not want to vote for Labour.
Will Starmer beat Corbyn 2017?
Let's save all our arguing and cut straight to it, because clearly we disagree on things like winning votes being important so lets keep it simple.
The answer is no, because centrism is dead, people like you just want purity not to win elections but you can't just be honest and say that so you have to pretend millions more people voting for Labour is a bad thing.
I'm uninterested in the proposition that your ignorance gives you the ability to step back and simple see, which those with expertise lack.
--AS
Pretty please?
That is because arrogant centrists crow about listening to people when voting shows they actually ignore people.
You are now reduced to deriding outsiders because you a self-certified "expert".
I say you are Jonathan Van Tam citing his "insane professor friend" in Hong Kong who says "masks are useless", and I claim my five billion neurone-tokens. Ta
Which is basically the whole point, Corbyn 2017 wasn't brilliant, we lost but it was a hell of a lot more impressive than Labour will be under a centrist leader.
I think Johnson is an appalling human being and a buffoon of a Prime Minister who history will see as a national embarrassment, but he is an excellent campaigner. A snake oil salesman with the attention span of a goldfish and the morals of an alley cat, but a very capable campaigner. Indeed there is no one better in either party.
That's something to get him started on. Look forward to the results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Trust_the_B----_in_Apartment_23
2017 was only a few years ago, you just want to ignore it because it disproves the rubbish you centrists like to spout about being more electable.
But I really should rein it in; I mocked people for obsessing over polls when they thought they meant Starmer was their saviour, rather than the public were fed up of being locked indoors and hearing of people dying, so what is Sauce for the goose etc
Also I’ve banged on about mid term polls being meaningless enough not to be seen cheering them!
Why is a defeat your yardstick for judging success?
Although I shouldn't be so mean as to expect centrists to have some coherent logic....
https://analyticsindiamag.com/yann-lecun-thrashes-gpt-3-is-the-hype-real/
Basically we were clearly much better in the 3-2 loss than the 4-0 loss.
So clearly you want to play more like you did in the 3-2.
But centrists are more attached to the style of play we used in the 4-0 loss despite it being an even bigger guarantee of losing.
GPT3 does this. It plagiarises, shamelessly.
Another oddly human trait
It could just be possible I was both aware it was a sitcom and who stars in it.
They need to be taken seriously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Trust_the_B----_in_Apartment_23
For an example of UNplagiarised GPT3 creative gold, this guy asked it to come up with Nike ads. Most are meh, one or two are quite good (see the thread), but one is Dan Draper genius, paired with the photo
"Don't question why we chew bubble gum, ask why we're always blowing bubbles"
https://twitter.com/nealagarwal/status/1366072200495828993?s=20
https://twitter.com/nealagarwal/status/1366057091237105666?s=20
As for the sitcom I've never actually seen the show. I knew the title because it starred Shatner and he did that show after Boston Legal which was brilliant, the name of the show is an easy one to remember.
By the way:
Most are crap, some are OK, one is brilliant.
If a human did this - reliably produced one brilliant idea out of 100 - he or she would be a very well paid copywriter. This is the creative process. A lot of garbage, a ton of shrug, the odd diamond, if you're lucky
This is also the future of advertising. One man will sit in an office and type "Adidas" into a laptop, then press a button and send it to GPT3, and then GPT3 will give him 100 ideas for Adidas ads in 10 seconds, and 1 of them will be brilliant enough to make it onto a poster.
Seriously. That is what will happen. Goodbye Madison Avenue
Ebay on Thursday started removing listings for the six Dr Seuss books that are no longer going to be produced. They emailed people who had listed the books, saying that the post violated their 'offensive materials policy'.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9326645/Ebay-BANS-people-reselling-six-offensive-Dr-Seuss.html
The young SNP MP who was still at university when she won he seat sums up my relationship with Labour best 'I didn't leave Labour, Labour left me' although it did come back for a little bit... seems to have gone again.
I feel like for some ex Labour only counts if they are right wing, they are the only ex Labour that need to be won over apparently... which is exactly why Labour is doing so badly now.
There is an awful lot of chat about English football on the internet, and GPT3 is basically a mahoosive computer force-fed on the entire internet. So it would make sense.
It makes eerie connections
As I said down thread, lets take Jimmy Carr whole stand-up shtick, it works because he is a clever chap with a particular kind of brain that fundamentally understand what people presume about certain words and phrases, but sees how when you stop and think about them they don't have to mean that and how they can with the change of one word or a different emphasis in the sentence can be twisted to mean something totally different.
Tim Vine is another (who I don't personally find very funny), but its a similar skill, understanding language and cultural assumptions about how it is used and then with a bit of a twist turning the meaning on its head.
So yes, the computer does not know why it is good (we presume) but it is good - often enough - so much so, the ad agency can replace its entire copywriting team (and its graphic designers and illustrators) with one person who just presses a button and then looks at the results and says "That one's good"
If 2017 is such a terrible result why did the centrists before Corbyn (even back to Brown who still had the Scottish seats) and the centrist after Corbyn do worse?
Anyone who thinks we actually won more seats or votes than the Conservatives is refusing to accept basic reality, although similarly anyone who thinks that wasn't better than 2010 and 2015 under centrist leaders or better than Labour look like doing now under a centrist leader is refusing to accept reality also.
If you think every recent Labour leader is absolutely trash and you aren't looking to praise the centrist ones (in terms of electability or winning voters compared to the left) then you can trash 2017 all day long, it was a loss, it you want to big them up then you have a problem because they won't do as well as 2017.
I find it almost impossible to believe that anyone gives a flying fuck.
Let's say China creates GPT4 (it is surely having a go right now). GPT3 cost $12m. A stealth fighter (which is useless) costs $100m. For China, which of these is the better investment? Exactly. GPT4. For the price of a fighter it can make a computer which is ANOTHER exponential leap ahead, another order of magnitude bigger. If GPT3 alarms us and scares us, imagine the next iteration....
One thing it could do, for a start, is flood internet forums with very plausible sounding commenters with very witty and persuasive and well informed opinions that come from a definite perspective and $£$%$%$&$%& glitch R"£^%^"£^"£^^ ********
beeeeeeeeep
But if you are outside all day they are the best Sun and heat protection.
But the current hoo hah is just boring, personal stuff, and not the fun kind of personal stuff. Royalists and Republicans can happily unite in ignoring it.
https://tintin.fandom.com/wiki/Thompson_and_Thomson
When was the last time you saw an Englishman wearing a bowler hat / cane combo?
And I do wonder how much of this crazed, self harming Woke agenda is driven by Chinese and Russian bots on social media. Quite possibly most of it. If you destroy the self confidence of a civilisation, and inject it with terrible guilt and moral doubt, you are halfway to defeating it. As we see here
America sinks into self loathing and pointless Wokery. China has none of these problems
Apparently Universal are now evaluating the future of Dr Seuss Land at their theme park...
For me it was in the context of John Cleese's Ministry of Silly Walks.
Edit: even Woke-Snopes half admits that is the case. A "quest for more diverse authors"
FFS. America. Wake up. You are being asked to hate America, by malignant forces
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-seuss-read-across-america/