The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
I thought this was the case with YouTube, but after Mr Trump became President again the (political) videos that it presented to me changed completely. I was mostly getting right-wing youtubers (not far-right, just ordinary sensible conservative types) but as soon as his inauguration took place, it changed over to left-wing (again not far left, just ordinary sensible leftie types).
I didn't suddenly change my views, the choices YouTube was offering me suddenly changed. As though it was the most active youtubers coming up to the top of the algorithm, so to speak, and the most motivated group changed over. I'd be quite interested to know how some of those 'ordinary sensible conservative types' are responding to events, actually, but they don't get pushed at me any more & I've forgotten their identifiers.
I admit to a certain excitement at JFK files being released. The discrepancy between the trauma doctors and the official autopsy has always intrigued me.
Personally, I think most of the conspiracy theories are bollocks and a lot is just down to the chaos of the event and/or incompetence.
I think the question is, why did LHO kill Kennedy. I think there are three main options
* Self-radicalised lone gunman * The Soviets * Criminal associates of LBJ (ie the Mob)
I used to think the third was the likeliest, but of course we are now much more acquainted with the first
Half the files seem to be a re-release of the ones Biden released, and the most of the rest utterly tedious. But there is this bombshell doing the rounds.
LOL either you are winding us up @Nigelb (and if you are it is a good one) or the nutters have reached a new low. She was a completely unknown 16 year old at the time.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
I admit to a certain excitement at JFK files being released. The discrepancy between the trauma doctors and the official autopsy has always intrigued me.
Personally, I think most of the conspiracy theories are bollocks and a lot is just down to the chaos of the event and/or incompetence.
I think the question is, why did LHO kill Kennedy. I think there are three main options
* Self-radicalised lone gunman * The Soviets * Criminal associates of LBJ (ie the Mob)
I used to think the third was the likeliest, but of course we are now much more acquainted with the first
Half the files seem to be a re-release of the ones Biden released, and the most of the rest utterly tedious. But there is this bombshell doing the rounds.
LOL either you are winding us up @Nigelb (and if you are it is a good one) or the nutters have reached a new low. She was a completely unknown 16 year old at the time.
She also went by her maiden name of Rodham. But the joke remains priceless.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
I admit to a certain excitement at JFK files being released. The discrepancy between the trauma doctors and the official autopsy has always intrigued me.
Personally, I think most of the conspiracy theories are bollocks and a lot is just down to the chaos of the event and/or incompetence.
I think the question is, why did LHO kill Kennedy. I think there are three main options
* Self-radicalised lone gunman * The Soviets * Criminal associates of LBJ (ie the Mob)
I used to think the third was the likeliest, but of course we are now much more acquainted with the first
Half the files seem to be a re-release of the ones Biden released, and the most of the rest utterly tedious. But there is this bombshell doing the rounds.
LOL either you are winding us up @Nigelb (and if you are it is a good one) or the nutters have reached a new low. She was a completely unknown 16 year old at the time.
She also went by her maiden name of Rodham. But the joke remains priceless.
Isn't it sad that I didn't even think of that. I obviously went to the Inspector Clouseau Detective Acadamy.
I supported Jenrick, and have been pretty disparaging on Kemi, but yesterday she gave probably her best intervention so far, and did it in an authentically 'Kemi' way - that is to say a modern 'Ted Talk' sort of feel.
The response seems to have been very good, and it opens up a fruitful avenue of opposition as Labour begins to inflict increasing hardship to meet the Net Zero target.
The environmental and climate justification for moving to Net Zero isn’t going to go away and is likely going to get more immediate and obvious in the next decade and a half.
We can argue about how we get to Net Zero but not about whether we should and Badenoch’s response was more about pandering to the climate change deniers than dealing with the real world.
Conservatives have traditionally been pragmatic types and have adapted to a changing world when required - oddly enough I take the view Conservatives could probably get us to Net Zero quicker and easier than Labour but to pander to those unwilling or unable to accept the world is changing isn’t Conservative at all and is part of the reason why the likes of Badenoch and Jenrick are seen as irrelevant to the current debate.
Sorry but that is a total misreading of Kemi's intervention (I take it you didn't listen to the speech) and in my opinion of the debate in general.
There is no environmental and/or climate justification for the UK adopting Net Zero in isolation, if it means simply displacing economic activity to other nations who have a more carbon-intensive production methods (like coal burning China), or importing energy that has been produced in a more carbon-intensive way (like American or Saudi LNG). The only variable in those scenarios is the impoverishment of the UK. We absolutely can and should argue about it, and sensible Governments like Sweden's have been upfront about their emissions rising and explained why. Kemi's central sell is to join the ranks of the sensible, and not subject the country to crippling future hardship just to get a round of applause at COP with no underlying plan. That is conservative pragmatism.
Kemi also never questioned the validity of the climate change drive - I do question it, but she didn't.
As for 'the need' for Net Zero becoming more apparent in the years ahead, that is questionable. These things are media events. If you read in detail the causes of the Californian wildfires, they have nothing to do with climate change. Likewise floods and droughts in the UK. In both instances, the causes are traced back to decisions (lack of water infrastructure and river maintenance in one case, scrub growing out of control in the other) of the green lobby iself. If the green lobby is tackled and the media moves on, so will the events.
"Really, these conditions will mean that the probation service can pick and choose which elements of the political process I can be involved in. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to attend meetings of the Labour party, for example, or post anything to do with protesting on my social media, despite the fact that freedom of assembly and expression is protected by the European convention on human rights. Lack of cooperation results in imprisonment for the remainder of the sentence."
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
"...But here’s what I think might be new, or at least under-discussed: I am seeing mounting evidence that an increasing number of people are so used to algorithmically-generated feeds that they no longer care to have a self-directed experience that they are in control of. The more time I spend interacting with folks online, the more it feels like large swaths of people have forgotten to exercise their own agency. That is what I mean by algorithmic complacency. More and more people don’t seem to know or care how to view the world without a computer algorithm guiding what they see..."
I suppose I'm like that with YouTube, but why does it matter? In the olden days we had BBC (and later ITV too) and that was it.
If I want to know about something specific I look for it, but if I just want to be entertained/randomly informed for an hour or so I look at what I'm sent.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
Imagine if the Axis Powers had won, we'd all be driving German cars and looking and listening to Japanese consumer electronics.
Fascism has always appealed to bullies, and (more importantly), weak people who wish to share in the glory of the bully.
The curious thing is that the sort of people fascists glorify, Confederates, Nazis, Spartans, were in reality, pathetic losers. Degenerate democracies have by far, a better military record.
Fascism, including the MAGA incarnation, is all about winning over society's losers - Trump talks about this quite explicitly. Trump is a master at this - identifying points of shame, humiliation and disgust, telling a story about how malign forces - domestic and foreign - have been keeping his base down. Telling them how he will help then win - they'll get tired of winning! He will vanquish their enemies, the elites who to blame for his base's woes. It's a movement built on shame, rage and scapegoating. It's going to take us to some dark places.
Yep. It's an appeal neither to heart nor head but to baser sentiments (which we all have to varying degrees). However I do think (or perhaps I'm clinging to this) that economics is in there somewhere, specifically inequality. High levels of inequality mean that although the West is rich many of its population are struggling. Changing this requires major economic reform. That is (to put it mildly) difficult. Somewhat easier is to construct enemies (immigrants, federal penpushers, judges, woke liberals) who are supposedly to blame for everything and offer people the emotional fix of sticking it to them. The trick works too well for comfort and the populist right (esp Trump) have perfected it. What to do? I don't know. It's a bugger.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
"...But here’s what I think might be new, or at least under-discussed: I am seeing mounting evidence that an increasing number of people are so used to algorithmically-generated feeds that they no longer care to have a self-directed experience that they are in control of. The more time I spend interacting with folks online, the more it feels like large swaths of people have forgotten to exercise their own agency. That is what I mean by algorithmic complacency. More and more people don’t seem to know or care how to view the world without a computer algorithm guiding what they see..."
I never entirely trust the internet when it comes to information. What I do trust is news from TV, radio, print newspapers / books and magazines. I always forget that there are a lot of people around today who do nothing but trust information on the internet.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
I thought this was the case with YouTube, but after Mr Trump became President again the (political) videos that it presented to me changed completely. I was mostly getting right-wing youtubers (not far-right, just ordinary sensible conservative types) but as soon as his inauguration took place, it changed over to left-wing (again not far left, just ordinary sensible leftie types).
I didn't suddenly change my views, the choices YouTube was offering me suddenly changed. As though it was the most active youtubers coming up to the top of the algorithm, so to speak, and the most motivated group changed over. I'd be quite interested to know how some of those 'ordinary sensible conservative types' are responding to events, actually, but they don't get pushed at me any more & I've forgotten their identifiers.
Edited to change 2nd conservative to leftie.
OK, I'll bite. Care to share who the ordinary sensible conservative youtubers and/or ordinary sensible leftie youtubers are? You can PM me if you want to keep them private
"Really, these conditions will mean that the probation service can pick and choose which elements of the political process I can be involved in. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to attend meetings of the Labour party, for example, or post anything to do with protesting on my social media, despite the fact that freedom of assembly and expression is protected by the European convention on human rights. Lack of cooperation results in imprisonment for the remainder of the sentence."
Further to the earlier discussion on Twitter, and example of how it is acting as an engine of radicalisation, is the JFK files trend.
This has been viewable to millions who have no particular political reason to post on it, in the last few days, as a top news trend.
A couple of hardcore neo-fascists abd anti-semites have spotted one source in the thousands of speculative pages, mentioning The Jews, and now the threads on this idea have become some of the top ones on the platform, attracting millions of views.
This is because the algorithm is promoting the far-right posters on general news topic. If you look at the threads, many of the people curious about the topic, and posting may not have previously been inducted into full fascism, or antisemitism, but might have just been wanting to post about their own hobbies, and interest.
This is one of the ways that a process of radicalisation takes place, though normalisation, and Musk will be well aware of that fact.
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
Labour would have to make concessions, as would the Conservatives.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
I thought this was the case with YouTube, but after Mr Trump became President again the (political) videos that it presented to me changed completely. I was mostly getting right-wing youtubers (not far-right, just ordinary sensible conservative types) but as soon as his inauguration took place, it changed over to left-wing (again not far left, just ordinary sensible leftie types).
I didn't suddenly change my views, the choices YouTube was offering me suddenly changed. As though it was the most active youtubers coming up to the top of the algorithm, so to speak, and the most motivated group changed over. I'd be quite interested to know how some of those 'ordinary sensible conservative types' are responding to events, actually, but they don't get pushed at me any more & I've forgotten their identifiers.
Edited to change 2nd conservative to leftie.
OK, I'll bite. Care to share who the ordinary sensible conservative youtubers and/or ordinary sensible leftie youtubers are? You can PM me if you want to keep them private
Well, I would if I could but as I said, I've forgotten their identifiers. They obviously made a huge impression on me.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
And yet, my nieces know the phrase "divorced, beheaded, died" (admittedly this is because my sister's friend plays the Six album in her car...), but everyone knows about The Tudors, don't they?
Tudorism is an established cultural industry, except in Scotland, the victim of the Rough Wooing.
There are a few sites associated with Mary QoS, no?
There are sites associated with Queen Mary, but they are a bit niche except perhaps for Holyrood Palace. Lochleven Castle, Craigmillar Castle, Jedburgh, Dumbarton Castle and Carberry Hill are the ones I'm thinking of, but I have an interest in the topic.
There are probably more sites strongly associated with Mary in England. She was there for longer.
"Really, these conditions will mean that the probation service can pick and choose which elements of the political process I can be involved in. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to attend meetings of the Labour party, for example, or post anything to do with protesting on my social media, despite the fact that freedom of assembly and expression is protected by the European convention on human rights. Lack of cooperation results in imprisonment for the remainder of the sentence."
"Really, these conditions will mean that the probation service can pick and choose which elements of the political process I can be involved in. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to attend meetings of the Labour party, for example, or post anything to do with protesting on my social media, despite the fact that freedom of assembly and expression is protected by the European convention on human rights. Lack of cooperation results in imprisonment for the remainder of the sentence."
"Really, these conditions will mean that the probation service can pick and choose which elements of the political process I can be involved in. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to attend meetings of the Labour party, for example, or post anything to do with protesting on my social media, despite the fact that freedom of assembly and expression is protected by the European convention on human rights. Lack of cooperation results in imprisonment for the remainder of the sentence."
The prison service doesn't let anyone engage in the political process at all, as I understand it, so he does have more political freedom on probation than in prison.
Further to the earlier discussion on Twitter, and example of how it is acting as an engine of radicalisation, is the JFK files trend.
This has been viewable to millions who have no particular political reason to post on it, in the last few days, as a top news trend.
A couple of hardcore neo-fascists abd anti-semites have spotted one source in the thousands of speculative pages, mentioning The Jews, and now the threads on this idea have become some of the top ones on the platform, attracting millions of views.
This is because the algorithm is promoting the far-right posters on general news topic. If you look at the threads, many of the people curious about the topic, and posting may not have previously been inducted into full fascism, or antisemitism, but might have just been wanting to post about their own hobbies, and interest.
This is one of the ways that a process of radicalisation takes place, though normalisation, and Musk will be well aware of that fact.
Social media has been a total disaster for democracies.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
I thought this was the case with YouTube, but after Mr Trump became President again the (political) videos that it presented to me changed completely. I was mostly getting right-wing youtubers (not far-right, just ordinary sensible conservative types) but as soon as his inauguration took place, it changed over to left-wing (again not far left, just ordinary sensible leftie types).
I didn't suddenly change my views, the choices YouTube was offering me suddenly changed. As though it was the most active youtubers coming up to the top of the algorithm, so to speak, and the most motivated group changed over. I'd be quite interested to know how some of those 'ordinary sensible conservative types' are responding to events, actually, but they don't get pushed at me any more & I've forgotten their identifiers.
Edited to change 2nd conservative to leftie.
YouTube seems to change abruptly from time to time. Until recently I'd get daily clips from those two SNL comics (Jost & Che) but now nothing. It must be a year since it cut me off from Linus Drop Tips, even though I'm subscribed. Currently it's wall-to-wall shorts of Neville, Keane & Carragher telling the same old stories on different programmes.
And Jimmy Carr.
Carr might read pb. It is unlikely, I admit, but since I pointed out that many comics were posting their audience banter rather than their actual sets on YouTube, Jimmy has also taken to posting videos of his crowd work rather than jokes from his last tour.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
"...But here’s what I think might be new, or at least under-discussed: I am seeing mounting evidence that an increasing number of people are so used to algorithmically-generated feeds that they no longer care to have a self-directed experience that they are in control of. The more time I spend interacting with folks online, the more it feels like large swaths of people have forgotten to exercise their own agency. That is what I mean by algorithmic complacency. More and more people don’t seem to know or care how to view the world without a computer algorithm guiding what they see..."
I never entirely trust the internet when it comes to information. What I do trust is news from TV, radio, print newspapers / books and magazines. I always forget that there are a lot of people around today who do nothing but trust information on the internet.
I'm fast approaching the state of not trusting any information from anywhere. How on earth do we know about any of it?
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
Imagine if the Axis Powers had won, we'd all be driving German cars and looking and listening to Japanese consumer electronics.
Fascism has always appealed to bullies, and (more importantly), weak people who wish to share in the glory of the bully.
The curious thing is that the sort of people fascists glorify, Confederates, Nazis, Spartans, were in reality, pathetic losers. Degenerate democracies have by far, a better military record.
Fascism, including the MAGA incarnation, is all about winning over society's losers - Trump talks about this quite explicitly. Trump is a master at this - identifying points of shame, humiliation and disgust, telling a story about how malign forces - domestic and foreign - have been keeping his base down. Telling them how he will help then win - they'll get tired of winning! He will vanquish their enemies, the elites who to blame for his base's woes. It's a movement built on shame, rage and scapegoating. It's going to take us to some dark places.
Yep. It's an appeal neither to heart nor head but to baser sentiments (which we all have to varying degrees). However I do think (or perhaps I'm clinging to this) that economics is in there somewhere, specifically inequality. High levels of inequality mean that although the West is rich many of its population are struggling. Changing this requires major economic reform. That is (to put it mildly) difficult. Somewhat easier is to construct enemies (immigrants, federal penpushers, judges, woke liberals) who are supposedly to blame for everything and offer people the emotional fix of sticking it to them. The trick works too well for comfort and the populist right (esp Trump) have perfected it. What to do? I don't know. It's a bugger.
"Someone else is to blame" is, as @rcs1000 says, always the most popular political argument.
I admit to a certain excitement at JFK files being released. The discrepancy between the trauma doctors and the official autopsy has always intrigued me.
Personally, I think most of the conspiracy theories are bollocks and a lot is just down to the chaos of the event and/or incompetence.
I think the question is, why did LHO kill Kennedy. I think there are three main options
* Self-radicalised lone gunman * The Soviets * Criminal associates of LBJ (ie the Mob)
I used to think the third was the likeliest, but of course we are now much more acquainted with the first
Half the files seem to be a re-release of the ones Biden released, and the most of the rest utterly tedious. But there is this bombshell doing the rounds.
LOL either you are winding us up @Nigelb (and if you are it is a good one) or the nutters have reached a new low. She was a completely unknown 16 year old at the time.
She also went by her maiden name of Rodham. But the joke remains priceless.
Isn't it sad that I didn't even think of that. I obviously went to the Inspector Clouseau Detective Acadamy.
It's extremely sketchy, in my view, that there's not even any record of 'Hillary Clinton' existing before 1977. No wonder they call her crooked Hillary!
Staggering findings frankly.The majority of people think Farage would be a better PM than Starmer.
Just staggering levels of stupidity to be honest.
We have learnt nothing from America's fall.
It's simple: the authorities won't control the borders of the country in the way most people expect them to be, they've allowed crimes like shoplifting to get out of control, and so on.
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
The Tories, LDs and Reform all back restoring WFA so they would all no confidence a Starmer minority government unless it restored it, at least on a means tested basis so more pensioners kept it
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
"Really, these conditions will mean that the probation service can pick and choose which elements of the political process I can be involved in. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to attend meetings of the Labour party, for example, or post anything to do with protesting on my social media, despite the fact that freedom of assembly and expression is protected by the European convention on human rights. Lack of cooperation results in imprisonment for the remainder of the sentence."
The prison service doesn't let anyone engage in the political process at all, as I understand it, so he does have more political freedom on probation than in prison.
Which is wrong too. It's an obvious flaw in our democracy that those that the state locks up cannot vote or otherwise engage in politics.
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
The Tories, LDs and Reform all back restoring WFA so they would all no confidence a Starmer minority government unless it restored it, at least on a means tested basis so more pensioners kept it
You're continually fighting the last battle. I am confident that the next election wont be fought on relatively trivial issues such as restoring the WFA.
Why does it even need mentioning in a gov't contract if it's all covered by the 64 CRA ? Looks unnecessary to me tbh.
That's not how things work. If you remove a regulation preventing a thing, people take it as permission to do it, even if there are other regs.
All contracts are governed by US law (US contracts). US law prohibits segregation. Unless the CRA is unmade by Congress it doesn't change anything to my mind.
Since we are having an eclectic morning conversation, here's an article about Trumpvangelical (my word - actually driven by people of the same ilk as Trump's spiritual adviser) prayer gatherings held in support of Trump's attempts to steal the 2020 election:
Radical beliefs in 'spiritual warfare' played a major role in Jan. 6, an expert argues Religious scholar Matthew D. Taylor says the rhetoric of Christian nationalist pastors can tip over into actual violence.
Slightly lengthy quote:
On Dec. 1, in Pittsburgh, an Atlanta-based “apostolic leader” named Jacquie Tyre kept her voice at a steady, constant yell around the halfway point of a nearly three-hour political rally and religious service.
“There is rising up a militia, that is connecting to the battlefield states, that will uncover, even beginning this night, the fraud, the corruption, the infiltration of evil from Pennsylvania to Georgia, from Georgia to Nevada, from Nevada to Arizona, from Arizona to New Mexico, from New Mexico to Wisconsin, to Michigan,” Tyre roared.
“God, we declare, that the militia men, the minutemen of the kingdom of God, are rising up in this hour,” she howled. “And, Father, we declare and decree in this place that there is no demon in hell and there is no voice out of government that can topple the kingdom of our God.”
And it was all at the behest of Republican political officials in Washington, D.C, according to the leader of this effort, a pastor from South Carolina named Dutch Sheets. Little known outside his movement, Sheets would later meet with Trump administration officials at the White House on Dec. 29, 2020, a week before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters.
These meetings — and the religious philosophy that animated them — were a much bigger part of Jan. 6 than has previously been realized, argues Matthew D. Taylor, a scholar of Protestantism at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore.
It's linked to a movement called the "New Apostolic Reformation", which does 'strategic spiritual warfare', and linked to the Christian Dominionism movement I have mentioned before.
To put it mildly, this is what happens when one track minds get their categories confused and follow the rabbit hole.
Like the belief that fighting to maintain and expand slavery was the will of God.
Yes - useful comment. At the same time as some promoted slavery as blacks were 'inferior', there were those looking through a different set of Evangelical spectacles (Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect) campaigning for its abolition for a century. CF the "Am I not a man and a brother?” medallion - parallel, but that was (I presume as Wedgewood) Quaker.
To take an example from now, imo some are conditioned by rationalist modernism, so try and treat their Bibles as a history book and a literal instruction manual - which takes myth and metaphor literally rather than as myth and metaphor. That gets us Young Earth Creationism, and much of the rest.
For a contemporary example, some 'prayer walking' their area would look at an abortion clinic as a 'stronghold of evil' to be 'pulled down' - so they then go for 'pavement counselling' and silent prayer'.
Your more mainstream church 'prayer walking' the area could be treating it more as a 'getting to know our area' thing, in order to identify local needs, whether there were lots of flats so they could do a drop in Saturday lunch to be a community hub etc. So an abortion clinic might be more either protest more conventionally if it went that way, or talk to them and ask how we could support their service - eg do you want to talk to our congregation about what you do to educate and inform.
I admit to a certain excitement at JFK files being released. The discrepancy between the trauma doctors and the official autopsy has always intrigued me.
Personally, I think most of the conspiracy theories are bollocks and a lot is just down to the chaos of the event and/or incompetence.
I think the question is, why did LHO kill Kennedy. I think there are three main options
* Self-radicalised lone gunman * The Soviets * Criminal associates of LBJ (ie the Mob)
I used to think the third was the likeliest, but of course we are now much more acquainted with the first
Half the files seem to be a re-release of the ones Biden released, and the most of the rest utterly tedious. But there is this bombshell doing the rounds.
LOL either you are winding us up @Nigelb (and if you are it is a good one) or the nutters have reached a new low. She was a completely unknown 16 year old at the time.
But no-one can prove Hillary Clinton wasn't at the grassy knoll.
Why does it even need mentioning in a gov't contract if it's all covered by the 64 CRA ? Looks unnecessary to me tbh.
That's not how things work. If you remove a regulation preventing a thing, people take it as permission to do it, even if there are other regs.
All contracts are governed by US law (US contracts). US law prohibits segregation. Unless the CRA is unmade by Congress it doesn't change anything to my mind.
That is true. However, there is a difference between an action for breach of contract and an illegal act, at least in English law. You could claim a breach of (I presume is true in America) a standard "shall not breach the law" obligation but lawyers do like specific breaches.
Democracy is doomed. I’ve been saying this for some time now
Multiple forces are ranged against it. I am actually writing an article on this theme for the Knappers Gazette this afternoon. Once I have toured Montevideo old town (which should take about 5 minutes)
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
I thought this was the case with YouTube, but after Mr Trump became President again the (political) videos that it presented to me changed completely. I was mostly getting right-wing youtubers (not far-right, just ordinary sensible conservative types) but as soon as his inauguration took place, it changed over to left-wing (again not far left, just ordinary sensible leftie types).
I didn't suddenly change my views, the choices YouTube was offering me suddenly changed. As though it was the most active youtubers coming up to the top of the algorithm, so to speak, and the most motivated group changed over. I'd be quite interested to know how some of those 'ordinary sensible conservative types' are responding to events, actually, but they don't get pushed at me any more & I've forgotten their identifiers.
Edited to change 2nd conservative to leftie.
OK, I'll bite. Care to share who the ordinary sensible conservative youtubers and/or ordinary sensible leftie youtubers are? You can PM me if you want to keep them private
Well, I would if I could but as I said, I've forgotten their identifiers. They obviously made a huge impression on me.
Fair enough, thank you. The MAGA American ones I follow are Monsieur Z and WhatIfAltHist (the latter of whom is mad), the left-wing American ones are SecondThought and Steve Shives (the latter of whom is mostly Star Trek). Some of the historians I like are definitely lefty, such as Atun-Shei and The Cynical Historian. I don't know eher to place Peter Zeihan on the political spectrum, but he's vehemently anti-Trump now. More interesting links available upon request.
Why does it even need mentioning in a gov't contract if it's all covered by the 64 CRA ? Looks unnecessary to me tbh.
That's not how things work. If you remove a regulation preventing a thing, people take it as permission to do it, even if there are other regs.
All contracts are governed by US law (US contracts). US law prohibits segregation. Unless the CRA is unmade by Congress it doesn't change anything to my mind.
Congress seems irrelevant now. Since 1/20/ 2025 Executive diktat seems to be the way US government business is conducted.
Why does it even need mentioning in a gov't contract if it's all covered by the 64 CRA ? Looks unnecessary to me tbh.
That's not how things work. If you remove a regulation preventing a thing, people take it as permission to do it, even if there are other regs.
All contracts are governed by US law (US contracts). US law prohibits segregation. Unless the CRA is unmade by Congress it doesn't change anything to my mind.
Law exists nowhere but in the head of men, to be adopted and ignored at will. The policeman in the head is the most powerful.
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
The Tories, LDs and Reform all back restoring WFA so they would all no confidence a Starmer minority government unless it restored it, at least on a means tested basis so more pensioners kept it
So you think the great issue of 2029 will be WFA ?
You have a very welfarist mentality and think its the priority of every government to hand out borrowed money to favoured demographics.
Well its going into reverse now and the discussions will be which groups will lose out and by how much.
Incidentally, for any oenophiles reading, “they” are not joking about Uruguayan wine. It’s absolutely sensational. OK I’ve only had one bottle so far - a $10 Tannat from the local supermarket - but bloody hell. Superb
Further to the earlier discussion on Twitter, and example of how it is acting as an engine of radicalisation, is the JFK files trend.
This has been viewable to millions who have no particular political reason to post on it, in the last few days, as a top news trend.
A couple of hardcore neo-fascists abd anti-semites have spotted one source in the thousands of speculative pages, mentioning The Jews, and now the threads on this idea have become some of the top ones on the platform, attracting millions of views.
This is because the algorithm is promoting the far-right posters on general news topic. If you look at the threads, many of the people curious about the topic, and posting may not have previously been inducted into full fascism, or antisemitism, but might have just been wanting to post about their own hobbies, and interest.
This is one of the ways that a process of radicalisation takes place, though normalisation, and Musk will be well aware of that fact.
Which is why the only way to win is not to play. So come off Twitter. You'll survive. And probably thrive.
Incidentally, for any oenophiles reading, “they” are not joking about Uruguayan wine. It’s absolutely sensational. OK I’ve only had one bottle so far - a $10 Tannat from the local supermarket - but bloody hell. Superb
‘Now we’ve won the fight to get men in frocks out of women’s rest rooms, let’s get the blacks out of the rest rooms of white god-fearing folk!’
I would have phrased it differently but, stripped of the flummery, that appears to be the strategy. See "The Great Resegregation" piece in The Atlantic: https://archive.is/5PjMn
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
The Tories, LDs and Reform all back restoring WFA so they would all no confidence a Starmer minority government unless it restored it, at least on a means tested basis so more pensioners kept it
So you think the great issue of 2029 will be WFA ?
You have a very welfarist mentality and think its the priority of every government to hand out borrowed money to favoured demographics.
Well its going into reverse now and the discussions will be which groups will lose out and by how much.
For pensioners certainly WFA cuts are the big issue and they make up over a third of voters, for farmers it will be the family farm tax, for business owners the rise in NI, for those on welfare the cuts they face (especially if disabled), for those in NHS England the fact they have been scrapped, for the white working class immigration etc
Most of the above won't be voting Labour and for any party that backs Labour on the above
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
The Tories, LDs and Reform all back restoring WFA so they would all no confidence a Starmer minority government unless it restored it, at least on a means tested basis so more pensioners kept it
So you think the great issue of 2029 will be WFA ?
You have a very welfarist mentality and think its the priority of every government to hand out borrowed money to favoured demographics.
Well its going into reverse now and the discussions will be which groups will lose out and by how much.
For pensioners certainly WFA cuts are the big issue and they make up over a third of voters, for farmers it will be the family farm tax, for business owners the rise in NI, for those on welfare the cuts they face (especially if disabled), for those in NHS England the fact they have been scrapped, for the white working class immigration etc
Most of the above won't be voting Labour and for any party that backs Labour on the above
The country will care about other things in 4 years time. That is the last battle.
Incidentally, for any oenophiles reading, “they” are not joking about Uruguayan wine. It’s absolutely sensational. OK I’ve only had one bottle so far - a $10 Tannat from the local supermarket - but bloody hell. Superb
Why does it even need mentioning in a gov't contract if it's all covered by the 64 CRA ? Looks unnecessary to me tbh.
That's not how things work. If you remove a regulation preventing a thing, people take it as permission to do it, even if there are other regs.
All contracts are governed by US law (US contracts). US law prohibits segregation. Unless the CRA is unmade by Congress it doesn't change anything to my mind.
One thing we are seeing demonstrated are that law and respect for law are two very different things in Trump's USA.
And that law can easily be ignored, abused, or its enforcement delayed. A blatant example are current attempts to railroad deportations through ignoring legal process.
But also around elections - for example the national networks protesting the eligibility of 10s of thousands of votes to get them removed from an election to tip the result, but strangely only objecting in areas with a large proportion of ethnic minorities.
Or the removal or reduction of ballot drop boxes which are disproportionally used by different demographics.
Or the laws making voting difficult by preventing the provision of drinks of water to people standing in queues in Nebraska. Or there not being enough chairs for elderly people who have to wait.
We have 2 local by-elections today - a Lib Dem defence in Three Rivers and a Con defence in Harborough. Then tomorrow there is a double Lab defence in Glasgow, a Con defence in North Kesteven, and a Lib Dem defence in Mole Valley.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
Incidentally, for any oenophiles reading, “they” are not joking about Uruguayan wine. It’s absolutely sensational. OK I’ve only had one bottle so far - a $10 Tannat from the local supermarket - but bloody hell. Superb
Breakfast done, roll on lunch.
I’ve got a weird feeling they’re giving me steak for lunch. Just an odd hunch. Somewhere here
The excellent David Allen Green on CJ Roberts's two sentence contribution to the USA discussion on whether judges should be sacked at the whim of the POTUS. Containing a glimmer of hope in dark times.
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
The Tories, LDs and Reform all back restoring WFA so they would all no confidence a Starmer minority government unless it restored it, at least on a means tested basis so more pensioners kept it
So you think the great issue of 2029 will be WFA ?
You have a very welfarist mentality and think its the priority of every government to hand out borrowed money to favoured demographics.
Well its going into reverse now and the discussions will be which groups will lose out and by how much.
For pensioners certainly WFA cuts are the big issue and they make up over a third of voters, for farmers it will be the family farm tax, for business owners the rise in NI, for those on welfare the cuts they face (especially if disabled), for those in NHS England the fact they have been scrapped, for the white working class immigration etc
Most of the above won't be voting Labour and for any party that backs Labour on the above
The country will care about other things in 4 years time. That is the last battle.
The voters affected won't, they won't forget and will want their revenge on Labour
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
The Tories, LDs and Reform all back restoring WFA so they would all no confidence a Starmer minority government unless it restored it, at least on a means tested basis so more pensioners kept it
So you think the great issue of 2029 will be WFA ?
You have a very welfarist mentality and think its the priority of every government to hand out borrowed money to favoured demographics.
Well its going into reverse now and the discussions will be which groups will lose out and by how much.
For pensioners certainly WFA cuts are the big issue and they make up over a third of voters, for farmers it will be the family farm tax, for business owners the rise in NI, for those on welfare the cuts they face (especially if disabled), for those in NHS England the fact they have been scrapped, for the white working class immigration etc
Most of the above won't be voting Labour and for any party that backs Labour on the above
No tax, no welfare expenditure reduction, f*** business! Are you some kind of Soviet era Communist?
She does kind of have a point, or at least the basis for a joke. The United States was crucial to the liberation of Europe. Maybe Boulton's sneering should have waited for the next one.
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
The Tories, LDs and Reform all back restoring WFA so they would all no confidence a Starmer minority government unless it restored it, at least on a means tested basis so more pensioners kept it
So you think the great issue of 2029 will be WFA ?
You have a very welfarist mentality and think its the priority of every government to hand out borrowed money to favoured demographics.
Well its going into reverse now and the discussions will be which groups will lose out and by how much.
For pensioners certainly WFA cuts are the big issue and they make up over a third of voters, for farmers it will be the family farm tax, for business owners the rise in NI, for those on welfare the cuts they face (especially if disabled), for those in NHS England the fact they have been scrapped, for the white working class immigration etc
Most of the above won't be voting Labour and for any party that backs Labour on the above
The country will care about other things in 4 years time. That is the last battle.
The voters affected won't, they won't forget and will want their revenge on Labour
Trouble is, the memory of 14 years (certainly the last eight) of your government will remain fresh in the mind for a few more years yet.
Incidentally, for any oenophiles reading, “they” are not joking about Uruguayan wine. It’s absolutely sensational. OK I’ve only had one bottle so far - a $10 Tannat from the local supermarket - but bloody hell. Superb
Breakfast done, roll on lunch.
I’ve got a weird feeling they’re giving me steak for lunch. Just an odd hunch. Somewhere here
Democracy is doomed. I’ve been saying this for some time now
Multiple forces are ranged against it. I am actually writing an article on this theme for the Knappers Gazette this afternoon. Once I have toured Montevideo old town (which should take about 5 minutes)
You have been saying all sorts of doom-mongering shit for some time now. Thankfully, those of us that have a more optimistic outlook know that your observations and predictions on most subjects are based on very limited knowledge and zero insight
Try and be more positive. Be a radiator and not a drain. You might even get to like it after a while.
It's lazy ... much like the Frank Gardner one we were talking about.
Their material consists of a quote from one person from a group of 4 interviewed in a local park. I think it's one of the costs of having a prominent, noisy MP. No analysis to back it up, or thinking about overall demographics, or realising that with generally lower living costs here the pressure is perhaps likely to be on expensive places.
We had it when the Graun took a picture of three shops being refurbed in the square, ignored all the others, and ran a story about delapidated town centres.
And again when Novara came and did some public interviews at the times when everybody is at work.
Very weird. Massive drop in employment rate in Ashfield since 2021- otherwise was actually doing quite well. Anyone local know why?
Picking up this "Economic Inactivity in Ashfield" = 31.3% claim by Sky we discussed yesterday.
After a bit of digging, I'm going with lazy, incompetent journalist after a story, not carrying out the basics of journalism such fact checking , and making sure that the stats quoted are up to date an din context. It's a disgrace.
The 31.3% economic inactivity number is for 2022-2023. The more recent number 2023-2024 is 22.9%. The one for the year before is also low 20s. That looks like a Covid exception, but other similar places have a 30%+ outlier in 2021/2 or 2023/4, and the others in the low 20s. There is even data published in early 2025 on the ONS site.
"Ashfield is ..." with old data, when recent date is everywhere including the canonical ONS site, is horribly amateurish.
And that puts a question over the data series, which is very lumpy (which I did not know until More or Less this morning).
A change of 10% (8000 people) in one year is absurd (Covid excepted), and in normal stats Ashfield is usually in the 20% to 70% on the scale - balanced economy and things don't change rapidly.
Checking all of that is just the most basic of journalistic skills, which I would expect from a blogger in short trousers.
I've already posted this week's More or Less, which has a segment about how unreliable the Labour Force has been for a number of years. Why does a journo not know this?
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
Incidentally, for any oenophiles reading, “they” are not joking about Uruguayan wine. It’s absolutely sensational. OK I’ve only had one bottle so far - a $10 Tannat from the local supermarket - but bloody hell. Superb
Breakfast done, roll on lunch.
I’ve got a weird feeling they’re giving me steak for lunch. Just an odd hunch. Somewhere here
It's lazy ... much like the Frank Gardner one we were talking about.
Their material consists of a quote from one person from a group of 4 interviewed in a local park. I think it's one of the costs of having a prominent, noisy MP. No analysis to back it up, or thinking about overall demographics, or realising that with generally lower living costs here the pressure is perhaps likely to be on expensive places.
We had it when the Graun took a picture of three shops being refurbed in the square, ignored all the others, and ran a story about delapidated town centres.
And again when Novara came and did some public interviews at the times when everybody is at work.
Very weird. Massive drop in employment rate in Ashfield since 2021- otherwise was actually doing quite well. Anyone local know why?
Picking up this "Economic Inactivity in Ashfield" = 31.3% claim by Sky we discussed yesterday.
After a bit of digging, I'm going with lazy, incompetent journalist after a story, not carrying out the basics of journalism such fact checking , and making sure that the stats quoted are up to date an din context. It's a disgrace.
The 31.3% economic inactivity number is for 2022-2023. The more recent number 2023-2024 is 22.9%. The one for the year before is also low 20s. That looks like a Covid exception, but other similar places have a 30%+ outlier in 2021/2 or 2023/4, and the others in the low 20s. There is even data published in early 2025 on the ONS site.
"Ashfield is ..." with old data, when recent date is everywhere including the canonical ONS site, is horribly amateurish.
And that puts a question over the data series, which is very lumpy (which I did not know until More or Less this morning).
A change of 10% (8000 people) in one year is absurd (Covid excepted), and in normal stats Ashfield is usually in the 20% to 70% on the scale - balanced economy and things don't change rapidly.
Checking all of that is just the most basic of journalistic skills, which I would expect from a blogger in short trousers.
I've already posted this week's More or Less, which has a segment about how unreliable the Labour Force has been for a number of years. Why does a journo not know this?
I think I would give the journalist a pass here. This is on the ONS website under the relevant section, it really the ONS fault they haven't updated it with their latest data.
Also the Sky piece, they use that stat once to indicate this is an area with high levels of economic inactivity, which is still true. The vox pop interviews are the main part of the piece which I never really like, because you will always find deserving / underserving examples to skew your piece.
The problem Sky have is their "data guy" is absolute twonk who was useless during COVID.
"Really, these conditions will mean that the probation service can pick and choose which elements of the political process I can be involved in. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to attend meetings of the Labour party, for example, or post anything to do with protesting on my social media, despite the fact that freedom of assembly and expression is protected by the European convention on human rights. Lack of cooperation results in imprisonment for the remainder of the sentence."
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
Lockdown was imposed by a SAGE committee, at least one member of which was an avowed communist who OPENLY SAID she wanted to leverage Covid and lockdown to make society much more Marxist and controlled, to her liking
This is not some alt.right bugaboo, these forces really exist. Look how China used Covid to advance its surveillance state
Incidentally, for any oenophiles reading, “they” are not joking about Uruguayan wine. It’s absolutely sensational. OK I’ve only had one bottle so far - a $10 Tannat from the local supermarket - but bloody hell. Superb
Breakfast done, roll on lunch.
I’ve got a weird feeling they’re giving me steak for lunch. Just an odd hunch. Somewhere here
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
"...But here’s what I think might be new, or at least under-discussed: I am seeing mounting evidence that an increasing number of people are so used to algorithmically-generated feeds that they no longer care to have a self-directed experience that they are in control of. The more time I spend interacting with folks online, the more it feels like large swaths of people have forgotten to exercise their own agency. That is what I mean by algorithmic complacency. More and more people don’t seem to know or care how to view the world without a computer algorithm guiding what they see..."
I suppose I'm like that with YouTube, but why does it matter? In the olden days we had BBC (and later ITV too) and that was it.
If I want to know about something specific I look for it, but if I just want to be entertained/randomly informed for an hour or so I look at what I'm sent.
Spend a few hours on X, or similar, and see what you're being fed. It's not exactly random entertainment.
My main takeaway from PB this fine Montevidean morning is that, in about 2 years, the capitalisation of “b” in “Black” will start to look really odd (“why are we doing this?”) and it will be quietly abandoned
Incidentally, for any oenophiles reading, “they” are not joking about Uruguayan wine. It’s absolutely sensational. OK I’ve only had one bottle so far - a $10 Tannat from the local supermarket - but bloody hell. Superb
I don't often 'Like' Leon's posts, but, admittedly in my limited experience*, he's absolutely right this time.
*I've had a few bottles of the stuff over the past few years.
"Really, these conditions will mean that the probation service can pick and choose which elements of the political process I can be involved in. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to attend meetings of the Labour party, for example, or post anything to do with protesting on my social media, despite the fact that freedom of assembly and expression is protected by the European convention on human rights. Lack of cooperation results in imprisonment for the remainder of the sentence."
Isn't that bit the point ?
Yes. While I totally agree with him about the abysmal faults of the prison system - which ought to be 100% devoted to assisting those incarcerated to be better people as one day all except about 60 of them will be living next door to someone - he shows a grave lack of awareness and sorrow that he was put in prison for breaking the law and no understanding that he is still subject to the terms of the sentence.
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
The Tories, LDs and Reform all back restoring WFA so they would all no confidence a Starmer minority government unless it restored it, at least on a means tested basis so more pensioners kept it
So you think the great issue of 2029 will be WFA ?
You have a very welfarist mentality and think its the priority of every government to hand out borrowed money to favoured demographics.
Well its going into reverse now and the discussions will be which groups will lose out and by how much.
For pensioners certainly WFA cuts are the big issue and they make up over a third of voters, for farmers it will be the family farm tax, for business owners the rise in NI, for those on welfare the cuts they face (especially if disabled), for those in NHS England the fact they have been scrapped, for the white working class immigration etc
Most of the above won't be voting Labour and for any party that backs Labour on the above
The country will care about other things in 4 years time. That is the last battle.
The voters affected won't, they won't forget and will want their revenge on Labour
Incidentally, for any oenophiles reading, “they” are not joking about Uruguayan wine. It’s absolutely sensational. OK I’ve only had one bottle so far - a $10 Tannat from the local supermarket - but bloody hell. Superb
Breakfast done, roll on lunch.
I’ve got a weird feeling they’re giving me steak for lunch. Just an odd hunch. Somewhere here
The excellent David Allen Green on CJ Roberts's two sentence contribution to the USA discussion on whether judges should be sacked at the whim of the POTUS. Containing a glimmer of hope in dark times.
"Really, these conditions will mean that the probation service can pick and choose which elements of the political process I can be involved in. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to attend meetings of the Labour party, for example, or post anything to do with protesting on my social media, despite the fact that freedom of assembly and expression is protected by the European convention on human rights. Lack of cooperation results in imprisonment for the remainder of the sentence."
Isn't that bit the point ?
Yes. While I totally agree with him about the abysmal faults of the prison system - which ought to be 100% devoted to assisting those incarcerated to be better people as one day all except about 60 of them will be living next door to someone - he shows a grave lack of awareness and sorrow that he was put in prison for breaking the law and no understanding that he is still subject to the terms of the sentence.
It's a bit like recovering from a disease, and being in quarantine, or being 'advised' not to touch that which caused the problem, isn't it.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
The consensus is rather that it's a ham fisted measure which fails to achieve its (laudable) aims, while imposing disproportionate burdens on those who aren't big business.
Incidentally, for any oenophiles reading, “they” are not joking about Uruguayan wine. It’s absolutely sensational. OK I’ve only had one bottle so far - a $10 Tannat from the local supermarket - but bloody hell. Superb
Breakfast done, roll on lunch.
I’ve got a weird feeling they’re giving me steak for lunch. Just an odd hunch. Somewhere here
More in Common have Lab 25%, Ref 25%, Con 24%, Lib Dem 12%, Green 7%.
EC translate that into 182 seats, 168, 186, 57.
So Kemi PM with Reform confidence and supply, ironically despite the thread header
My view is that a Grand Coalition, Con, Lab, perhaps Lib Dems would be more likely.
Zero chance of any Con deal with Labour, that really would see Tories defect en masse to Reform certainly unless Starmer scrapped the family farm tax, rise in NI employers allowance and WFA cut (which the LDs would likely demand too)
No government is going to bring back WFA.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
The Tories, LDs and Reform all back restoring WFA so they would all no confidence a Starmer minority government unless it restored it, at least on a means tested basis so more pensioners kept it
So you think the great issue of 2029 will be WFA ?
You have a very welfarist mentality and think its the priority of every government to hand out borrowed money to favoured demographics.
Well its going into reverse now and the discussions will be which groups will lose out and by how much.
For pensioners certainly WFA cuts are the big issue and they make up over a third of voters, for farmers it will be the family farm tax, for business owners the rise in NI, for those on welfare the cuts they face (especially if disabled), for those in NHS England the fact they have been scrapped, for the white working class immigration etc
Most of the above won't be voting Labour and for any party that backs Labour on the above
The country will care about other things in 4 years time. That is the last battle.
The voters affected won't, they won't forget and will want their revenge on Labour
Trouble is, the memory of 14 years (certainly the last eight) of your government will remain fresh in the mind for a few more years yet.
They don't need to vote Tory, they can vote Reform, LD or Green or SNP rather than Labour
It's lazy ... much like the Frank Gardner one we were talking about.
Their material consists of a quote from one person from a group of 4 interviewed in a local park. I think it's one of the costs of having a prominent, noisy MP. No analysis to back it up, or thinking about overall demographics, or realising that with generally lower living costs here the pressure is perhaps likely to be on expensive places.
We had it when the Graun took a picture of three shops being refurbed in the square, ignored all the others, and ran a story about delapidated town centres.
And again when Novara came and did some public interviews at the times when everybody is at work.
Very weird. Massive drop in employment rate in Ashfield since 2021- otherwise was actually doing quite well. Anyone local know why?
Picking up this "Economic Inactivity in Ashfield" = 31.3% claim by Sky we discussed yesterday.
After a bit of digging, I'm going with lazy, incompetent journalist after a story, not carrying out the basics of journalism such fact checking , and making sure that the stats quoted are up to date an din context. It's a disgrace.
The 31.3% economic inactivity number is for 2022-2023. The more recent number 2023-2024 is 22.9%. The one for the year before is also low 20s. That looks like a Covid exception, but other similar places have a 30%+ outlier in 2021/2 or 2023/4, and the others in the low 20s. There is even data published in early 2025 on the ONS site.
"Ashfield is ..." with old data, when recent date is everywhere including the canonical ONS site, is horribly amateurish.
And that puts a question over the data series, which is very lumpy (which I did not know until More or Less this morning).
A change of 10% (8000 people) in one year is absurd (Covid excepted), and in normal stats Ashfield is usually in the 20% to 70% on the scale - balanced economy and things don't change rapidly.
Checking all of that is just the most basic of journalistic skills, which I would expect from a blogger in short trousers.
I've already posted this week's More or Less, which has a segment about how unreliable the Labour Force has been for a number of years. Why does a journo not know this?
I think I would give the journalist a pass here. This is on the ONS website under the relevant section.
No.
The journalist should have checked the most recent version of the data if they are going to take 2 years old stuff and make it present tense. I would also expect them to do the easy check on the sensitivity of the data, before they hang their whole article on it.
They reported 2022-2023 data. In 2023-2024 it is back down by 10%.
The sad thing is that in the news report about him on the Today programme yesterday they felt the need to explain what the Battle of Britain was.
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
I noted that, too. The sad thing is that we're getting old. Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
The Battle of Britain was 85 years ago.
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
Morning, PB.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
I think that is wrong. Twitter is not full of anything. Your twitter feed might be full of this, that or the other, but that is on account of your browsing habits (similar to the proverbial Thai hooker story).
Each person creates their own twitter universe. Not many stories pop up on your feed, I imagine, about miniature railways. Would not be the case if you were a miniature railways fan.
That used to be the case, but is no longer. The algorithm pushes Muskoid facist views, and paid for blue tick trolls.
If you want to choose your own content then BlueSky is the place.
IIUC Bluesky is subscription driven: you subscribe to people and then get fed people who subscribed to those, and so on. Various block lists are available and can be shared. This leads to the "walled gardens" that Twitter folx criticise but is more pleasant and less insane.
Twitter is algorithm driven: you spend time looking at subject X and then get fed more about subject X and associated subjects. Blocking is more difficult. This leads to the "down the rabbit hole" that affects so many people. The effect is exacerbated by i) Elon being in charge of the algorithm and able to drive whatever nonsense pricks his fancy to millions of people in minutes, and ii) bots driving the algorithm further and faster and nastier/pornier.
It's obvious at this point that algorithm-driven social media is driving us collectively nuts, but nobody is doing anything about it, aaaargh.
It’s not true that “nobody is doing anything about social media.”
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
Do stop being so puerile ffs.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
The idea that the OSA is going to prevent terrible shit being available online is for the birds.
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
The idea it's a sinister mechanism to close down speech which is 'difficult' for The Authorities is far more for the birds than the assumption that it's a good faith initiative intended (with jury out on effectiveness) to do more good than harm.
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
Lockdown was imposed by a SAGE committee, at least one member of which was an avowed communist who OPENLY SAID she wanted to leverage Covid and lockdown to make society much more Marxist and controlled, to her liking
This is not some alt.right bugaboo, these forces really exist. Look how China used Covid to advance its surveillance state
The UK government did not (as the paranoids on here said they would) keep the lockdown controls in place after the pandemic. It was not, as it turned out, a power grab for its own sake by The Authorities. It was an attempt to manage a public health crisis. This was my point.
PS: Chilean (red) is my tipple. Never had Uruguayan.
Apart from always stuffing his suppliers, how did this guy ever survive in business for more than six months ?
TRUMP: “Putin actually said to me, ‘If you don’t mind, friend, I hate to see you as my enemy.’ He said it very strongly. I had a very good relationship with Putin. I had a very good relationship with President Xi. A very good relationship with Kim Jong Un”.. https://x.com/PolymarketIntel/status/1902320166483931553
Comments
The Government is busy demolishing cycling fora which makes @kinabalu happy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/03/17/pentagon-dei-native-american-iwo-jima/
And this is getting a bit Apartheid South Africa.
https://www.wrvo.org/2025-03-18/segregated-facilities-are-no-longer-explicitly-banned-in-federal-contracts
I didn't suddenly change my views, the choices YouTube was offering me suddenly changed. As though it was the most active youtubers coming up to the top of the algorithm, so to speak, and the most motivated group changed over. I'd be quite interested to know how some of those 'ordinary sensible conservative types' are responding to events, actually, but they don't get pushed at me any more & I've forgotten their identifiers.
Edited to change 2nd conservative to leftie.
There is no environmental and/or climate justification for the UK adopting Net Zero in isolation, if it means simply displacing economic activity to other nations who have a more carbon-intensive production methods (like coal burning China), or importing energy that has been produced in a more carbon-intensive way (like American or Saudi LNG). The only variable in those scenarios is the impoverishment of the UK. We absolutely can and should argue about it, and sensible Governments like Sweden's have been upfront about their emissions rising and explained why. Kemi's central sell is to join the ranks of the sensible, and not subject the country to crippling future hardship just to get a round of applause at COP with no underlying plan. That is conservative pragmatism.
Kemi also never questioned the validity of the climate change drive - I do question it, but she didn't.
As for 'the need' for Net Zero becoming more apparent in the years ahead, that is questionable. These things are media events. If you read in detail the causes of the Californian wildfires, they have nothing to do with climate change. Likewise floods and droughts in the UK. In both instances, the causes are traced back to decisions (lack of water infrastructure and river maintenance in one case, scrub growing out of control in the other) of the green lobby iself. If the green lobby is tackled and the media moves on, so will the events.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/19/climate-activist-experience-jail-prison-uk
"Really, these conditions will mean that the probation service can pick and choose which elements of the political process I can be involved in. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to attend meetings of the Labour party, for example, or post anything to do with protesting on my social media, despite the fact that freedom of assembly and expression is protected by the European convention on human rights. Lack of cooperation results in imprisonment for the remainder of the sentence."
If I want to know about something specific I look for it, but if I just want to be entertained/randomly informed for an hour or so I look at what I'm sent.
This has been viewable to millions who have no particular political reason to post on it, in the last few days, as a top news trend.
A couple of hardcore neo-fascists abd anti-semites have spotted one source in the thousands of speculative pages, mentioning The Jews, and now the threads on this idea have become some of the top ones on the platform, attracting millions of views.
This is because the algorithm is promoting the far-right posters on general news topic. If you look at the threads, many of the people curious about the topic, and posting may not have previously been inducted into full fascism, or antisemitism, but might have just been wanting to post about their own hobbies, and interest.
This is one of the ways that a process of radicalisation takes place, though normalisation, and Musk will be well aware of that fact.
The only thing that's going to change is that those on pension credits will lose it as well at some point.
More interesting is this gravestone of a 13th century abbot with a dagger in his heart standing on top of a disemboweled man, presumably his murderer.
https://blog.historicenvironment.scot/2016/07/a-mysterious-effigy/
And Jimmy Carr.
Carr might read pb. It is unlikely, I admit, but since I pointed out that many comics were posting their audience banter rather than their actual sets on YouTube, Jimmy has also taken to posting videos of his crowd work rather than jokes from his last tour.
I tell you what, the next time a teenager commits suicide or murder because of some poisonous shit they've read online I'll pop on here and say "well at least that'll make @Malmesbury happy".
Fair enough?
To take an example from now, imo some are conditioned by rationalist modernism, so try and treat their Bibles as a history book and a literal instruction manual - which takes myth and metaphor literally rather than as myth and metaphor. That gets us Young Earth Creationism, and much of the rest.
For a contemporary example, some 'prayer walking' their area would look at an abortion clinic as a 'stronghold of evil' to be 'pulled down' - so they then go for 'pavement counselling' and silent prayer'.
Your more mainstream church 'prayer walking' the area could be treating it more as a 'getting to know our area' thing, in order to identify local needs, whether there were lots of flats so they could do a drop in Saturday lunch to be a community hub etc. So an abortion clinic might be more either protest more conventionally if it went that way, or talk to them and ask how we could support their service - eg do you want to talk to our congregation about what you do to educate and inform.
Multiple forces are ranged against it. I am actually writing an article on this theme for the Knappers Gazette this afternoon. Once I have toured Montevideo old town (which should take about 5 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/@MonsieurDean
https://www.youtube.com/@WhatifAltHist
https://www.youtube.com/@SecondThought
https://www.youtube.com/@SteveShives
https://www.youtube.com/@AtunSheiFilms
https://www.youtube.com/@CynicalHistorian
https://www.youtube.com/@ZeihanonGeopolitics
The traveller connection, the Kinahan cartel and the great golden toilet robbery: Incredible story behind unlikely Blenheim Palace heist
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14512891/burglars-convicted-stealing-lavatory-stately-home-gold-Blenheim-toilet.html
You have a very welfarist mentality and think its the priority of every government to hand out borrowed money to favoured demographics.
Well its going into reverse now and the discussions will be which groups will lose out and by how much.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/03/19/disability-benefit-70-a-week-pip-labour-minister-welfare-uc/
So come off Twitter. You'll survive. And probably thrive.
@adamboultonTABB
That’s how she’s earned the nickname “Fascist Barbie”
https://x.com/adamboultonTABB/status/1902322636895502696
Most of the above won't be voting Labour and for any party that backs Labour on the above
And that law can easily be ignored, abused, or its enforcement delayed. A blatant example are current attempts to railroad deportations through ignoring legal process.
But also around elections - for example the national networks protesting the eligibility of 10s of thousands of votes to get them removed from an election to tip the result, but strangely only objecting in areas with a large proportion of ethnic minorities.
Or the removal or reduction of ballot drop boxes which are disproportionally used by different demographics.
Or the laws making voting difficult by preventing the provision of drinks of water to people standing in queues in Nebraska. Or there not being enough chairs for elderly people who have to wait.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/georgia-voting-law-water-lawsuit-b2126654.html
It’s the triumph of bureaucracy - the true purpose is to entrench the power of the bureaucratic state by making arbitrary enforcement powers available to an unelected body which can be used as a club against anyone that doesn’t have a political roof (as the Russians like to put it) to protect them.
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g294323-d314229-r941226270-Mercado_del_Puerto-Montevideo_Montevideo_Department.html
Possibly with a glass of Tannat wine
https://davidallengreen.com/2025/03/making-sense-of-the-trump-roberts-exchange-about-impeachment/
Try and be more positive. Be a radiator and not a drain. You might even get to like it after a while.
After a bit of digging, I'm going with lazy, incompetent journalist after a story, not carrying out the basics of journalism such fact checking , and making sure that the stats quoted are up to date an din context. It's a disgrace.
The 31.3% economic inactivity number is for 2022-2023. The more recent number 2023-2024 is 22.9%. The one for the year before is also low 20s. That looks like a Covid exception, but other similar places have a 30%+ outlier in 2021/2 or 2023/4, and the others in the low 20s. There is even data published in early 2025 on the ONS site.
Ref:
https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/reports/lmp/la/1946157162/report.aspx
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/li01regionallabourmarketlocalindicatorsforcountieslocalandunitaryauthorities
"Ashfield is ..." with old data, when recent date is everywhere including the canonical ONS site, is horribly amateurish.
And that puts a question over the data series, which is very lumpy (which I did not know until More or Less this morning).
A change of 10% (8000 people) in one year is absurd (Covid excepted), and in normal stats Ashfield is usually in the 20% to 70% on the scale - balanced economy and things don't change rapidly.
Checking all of that is just the most basic of journalistic skills, which I would expect from a blogger in short trousers.
I've already posted this week's More or Less, which has a segment about how unreliable the Labour Force has been for a number of years. Why does a journo not know this?
Your take (widely shared on here, I know) reminds me a little of people who were convinced government relished Lockdown and would hang on to the special powers they assumed long after the pandemic went away. That view was also widely shared on here fwiw.
Also the Sky piece, they use that stat once to indicate this is an area with high levels of economic inactivity, which is still true. The vox pop interviews are the main part of the piece which I never really like, because you will always find deserving / underserving examples to skew your piece.
The problem Sky have is their "data guy" is absolute twonk who was useless during COVID.
Ed is also going on health sector NICs.
ETA Ed also asking about hare coursing and other rural crime, which he may have read about in the Telegraph. Kemi could have led there.
This is not some alt.right bugaboo, these forces really exist. Look how China used Covid to advance its surveillance state
It's not exactly random entertainment.
He seems to have forgotten it is PMQs by asking Kemi questions and not answering the ones she calmly asked him
*I've had a few bottles of the stuff over the past few years.
So we are certainly heading for a hung parliament on that margin of error when inputting polls into EC
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=N&CON=24&LAB=35&LIB=13&Reform=15&Green=7&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=&SCOTLAB=&SCOTLIB=&SCOTReform=&SCOTGreen=&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2024base
(As opposed to read your work.)
The journalist should have checked the most recent version of the data if they are going to take 2 years old stuff and make it present tense. I would also expect them to do the easy check on the sensitivity of the data, before they hang their whole article on it.
They reported 2022-2023 data. In 2023-2024 it is back down by 10%.
So we have (taking the quote and one either side)
1/2022-12/2022 Ashfield 16-64s "23.0% economically inactive"
2022-2023 Ashfield 16-64s "31.3% economically inactive"
10/2023-9/2024 Ashfield 16-64s "22.9% economically inactive"
Sky News:
"In a part of Nottinghamshire with a proud mining heritage, almost a third of working-age people are now economically inactive." This is a lie. Maybe a lazy media lie, but a lie.
https://news.sky.com/story/the-english-town-where-almost-a-third-of-working-age-people-are-economically-inactive-13331129
1 - They make two years ago into present tense.
2 - The number in the quote, and the whole story they build on it, is untrue.
Even the most fuckwittedly fuckwitted inexperienced teenage fuckwit in the entire London media should spot that as a matter of basic craft.
It can all be checked by a couple of clicks from the ONS page in one minute:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/li01regionallabourmarketlocalindicatorsforcountieslocalandunitaryauthorities
PS: Chilean (red) is my tipple. Never had Uruguayan.
TRUMP: “Putin actually said to me, ‘If you don’t mind, friend, I hate to see you as my enemy.’ He said it very strongly. I had a very good relationship with Putin. I had a very good relationship with President Xi. A very good relationship with Kim Jong Un”..
https://x.com/PolymarketIntel/status/1902320166483931553