The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
That's good. I can relax.
I suspect political obsessives see patterns that they want to see rather than are actually there.
How many people do you reckon know who Rupert Lowe is, let alone hear his pronouncements.
Vs how many people see increased security measures in supermarkets and fare evasion on public transport.
There is a difference between believing low level crime such as the above has increased. (But Fraser Nelson told us we’ve never had it so good !) and people buying into the low trust society all being down to migrants.
Clearly the authorities don’t care greatly about some low level crimes.
But do we, as a nation, give a flying one? Are we prepared to pay for more police, courts, custody and probation? All the evidence is that we're not. Not really. So we get the police focussing on the huge crimes of violence, which have to be the priority and where they're not doing badly. And the things that are cheap and easy to do- motoring offences and social media don't exactly need Inspector Morse to solve.
And discussion of the state of the nation has to start with the observation that a lot of it is the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
One little-noticed problem with the police is they do an awful lot of stewarding. Look at any demo or the aftermath of any road accident and there are lots of police who are not available to nick shoplifters.
For those who didn’t know - years back, a certain U.K. law firm (and some fellow firms) started selling “libel tourism”.
That is, anything published on the web is visible in the U.K.
So under this bit of judicial activism, anyone on the planet could sue for libel in U.K. courts, if it is published online. No problems with the 1st Amendment in the US.
Big fees would result….
A cross party group in the US Congress passed a law making the results of any such judgements null and void in the US.
The U.K. law firms and Mr Justice Cocklecarrot* were very upset.
*See Private Eye for real name
That’s been the case even since foreign magazines started to be imported in small numbers.
For all the politisation and polarisation in the US, one of few things on which all of the politicians agree is that the US is not a fan of foreign courts having jurisdiction over anything or anyone American.
Quite right too.
It is undemocratic.
A country should be able to enforce its laws. The “no assets or operations” is a false logic - according to that theory it’s fine for a North Korean hacking cooperative to rob a French bank
A country should be able to enforce its laws on its own citizens or those acting in its own country.
A country should not be able to enforce its laws on citizens of another country acting in another country.
That becomes the realm of foreign relations instead.
You indeed can't enforce French laws on North Koreans acting and living in North Korea.
Quite rightly too the inverse is true, the North Korean dictatorship can't enforce its authoritarian laws on French citizens living in France, nor should it be able to do so.
The issue becomes “what is acting”.
Disseminating a message in the UK is “acting” in my view. If 4chan were to, for example, call for violent revolution in the UK and execution of all members of the government, I think that should be illegal and something that could be enforced against.
May be it’s a simple as requiring companies to have a responsible agent - as I believe they do in Brazil - in the country.
The servers are in America, it is being disseminated in America. If people choose to go online and view American websites then that's their choice, and our government could choose to firewall foreign sites, as the Chinese do, but not enforce laws on people abroad who have had no right to vote on those laws.
It is undemocratic to apply a law to someone who has no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
In Russia it is a criminal act to criticise their military or decision to go to war against Ukraine. Should Russia be entitled to enforce that law on its critics abroad?
Or does its jurisprudence end and its borders thank goodness.
BREAKING: France's president Emmanuel Macron and Finnish president Alexander Stubb are the latest European leaders to say they will attend Zelenskyy and Trump's meeting
Is that a good thing? Is this a Z/T meeting or a meeting at which Z/T are among the participants?
Nobody, including and perhaps least of all, the attendees has any fucking clue. It's make-it-up-as-go-along school of statecraft.
It's probably a combination of FOMO from the European leaders, nobody wants to be the first lift sanctions on Russia but also they definitely don't want to be the last, and DJT enjoying summoning them across the Atlantic so he can be rude/incomprehensible to them.
I think they should all send body doubles.
But really shit ones, like the rubbish waxworks of famous people in those Madame Tussaud’s rip-offs.
Maybe they could send Mark Kermode for Keir Starmer.
That's quite a good one. Definitely close enough to fool Trump, I think.
Kermode would be found out to be an imposter as soon as he said something interesting.
So never then?
I think he's an interesting film reviewer.
The Kermode and Mayo film review "show" after they left R5 isn't very good. Its all a bit sad now seeing them both in their back bedrooms doing the podcast.
He still has a R4 slot.
The R5 show was iconic though.
Back in the road warrior days, that show was a great way to spend Friday afternoons stuck in traffic. Great radio.
I remember many years ago listening to his review of Bridewars as I was driving along the M5. I almost crashed the car I was laughing so much. And here it is: https://youtu.be/ao5fW6VUYxo
Have we talked about the Reform UK football shirts? Have we questioned whether they fall foul of the Public Order Act 1936 Section 1?
To the former yes, to the latter no. But feel free to crack on.
I think the Reform football shirts are an inspired piece of political craft - they are going to be everywhere.
Two problems 1) The racist loons will also be wearing them whilst doing racist look stuff. Farage will have to deny a lot of thugs are his supporters despite them wearing the uniform 2) Is a football shirt worn in the context of supporting a political movement a "uniform"? Because political uniforms remain illegal in England, Wales and Scotland thanks to the Public Order Act of 1936 Section 1
It would take a lunatic activist barrister to try and prosecute this. But we have several to choose from...
Scotland also? We already have a blue football shirt for the fashy Brit tendency, I think the they’ll see the turquoise as a bit..er..camp.
Farage said Reform were "Top of the Leaderboard" in the advert.. bit of a tell that he isn't a massive football fan, although he professes to support Crystal Palace
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
That's good. I can relax.
I suspect political obsessives see patterns that they want to see rather than are actually there.
How many people do you reckon know who Rupert Lowe is, let alone hear his pronouncements.
Vs how many people see increased security measures in supermarkets and fare evasion on public transport.
There is a difference between believing low level crime such as the above has increased. (But Fraser Nelson told us we’ve never had it so good !) and people buying into the low trust society all being down to migrants.
Clearly the authorities don’t care greatly about some low level crimes.
But do we, as a nation, give a flying one? Are we prepared to pay for more police, courts, custody and probation? All the evidence is that we're not. Not really. So we get the police focussing on the huge crimes of violence, which have to be the priority and where they're not doing badly. And the things that are cheap and easy to do- motoring offences and social media don't exactly need Inspector Morse to solve.
And discussion of the state of the nation has to start with the observation that a lot of it is the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
We’re always paying more yet nothing improves. Every year in Durham my Police precept goes up well above inflation every year yet little seems to improve and yet the solution is just more money.
Whenever they dare mentions cuts it is always ‘front line personnel’ they talk about cutting.
Isn't the police precept mostly to fund police pensions ?
But it puts a financial link between the council tax payer and the local police force. So you’re paying for the service. I doubt anyone thinks, or knows, it to pay for some retired plod to sit at home and watch daytime TV
Except that, for decades, past us promised coppers, teachers, nurses, bureaucrats et cetera pretty nice pensions, mostly without worrying too much about how future us were going to pay them. And got all those people to work for less than they would have cost otherwise. Unfortunately, now those bills have come due.
Like I said, a lot of our current problems are the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
I don’t doubt that’s right but no one seems to want to bite the bullet and the solution just seems to be throwing ever more money from the productive economy at it.
Those pensions should have been reformed further as they are becoming unaffordable.
The Civil Service pension is now a career average revalued scheme and pays out at 67. So has indeed been reformed. It also no longer has the big "compulsory early retirement" top-ups it used to have for redundancy, you now get a redundancy payment and can claim an unenhanced pension if you want (and are over 55)
Yeah, I know that as that’s one of my wife’s NHS pensions, I am suggesting further reviews. A move to a DC pot.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
That's good. I can relax.
I suspect political obsessives see patterns that they want to see rather than are actually there.
How many people do you reckon know who Rupert Lowe is, let alone hear his pronouncements.
Vs how many people see increased security measures in supermarkets and fare evasion on public transport.
There is a difference between believing low level crime such as the above has increased. (But Fraser Nelson told us we’ve never had it so good !) and people buying into the low trust society all being down to migrants.
Clearly the authorities don’t care greatly about some low level crimes.
But do we, as a nation, give a flying one? Are we prepared to pay for more police, courts, custody and probation? All the evidence is that we're not. Not really. So we get the police focussing on the huge crimes of violence, which have to be the priority and where they're not doing badly. And the things that are cheap and easy to do- motoring offences and social media don't exactly need Inspector Morse to solve.
And discussion of the state of the nation has to start with the observation that a lot of it is the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
We’re always paying more yet nothing improves. Every year in Durham my Police precept goes up well above inflation every year yet little seems to improve and yet the solution is just more money.
Whenever they dare mentions cuts it is always ‘front line personnel’ they talk about cutting.
Isn't the police precept mostly to fund police pensions ?
But it puts a financial link between the council tax payer and the local police force. So you’re paying for the service. I doubt anyone thinks, or knows, it to pay for some retired plod to sit at home and watch daytime TV
Except that, for decades, past us promised coppers, teachers, nurses, bureaucrats et cetera pretty nice pensions, mostly without worrying too much about how future us were going to pay them. And got all those people to work for less than they would have cost otherwise. Unfortunately, now those bills have come due.
Like I said, a lot of our current problems are the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
I don’t doubt that’s right but no one seems to want to bite the bullet and the solution just seems to be throwing ever more money from the productive economy at it.
Those pensions should have been reformed further as they are becoming unaffordable.
You can’t really reform them easily because there’s so much variation in individual contracts. Not impossible of course, but an enormous pain & means explicitly breaking existing contracts which liberal governments generally regard as a very bad idea.
What is perfectly doable is cutting National Insurance rates whilst simultaneously increasing income tax rates, which will shift some tax burden from the young to the old & reduce the net cost of pensions paid out of government tax income.
No pension contract binds the government to specific future tax rates on that pension income.
Effectively you end up reforming future entitlement which happens with the move from 97 to 08 scheme and then the 15 scheme.
Yes move from Ni to'income tax although they’ve boxed themselves in by ruling out any tax increases.
Marco Rubio: "Life in America on a daily basis will be largely unaffected whether there's peace in Ukraine or not. That's just a fact. We have a lot of issues we're focused on not just at home, but around the world."
An interesting take from the SoS in charge of foreign affairs.
How is he wrong ?
He's not massively wrong. If he's trying to communicate the message that the US has zero interest in Europe, then it would be far better to say that directly.
Zero interest apart from giving deranged sermons on how Europe, the cradle of civilisation, is descending into totalitarian hell. Perhaps little Marco is so MAGAfied that he believes if he said it directly Europe would stop giving those sermons serious consideration.
Despite deranged sermons I do not know how it could be clearer that current USA policy is that they wish to progress to Europe being for the Europeans to sort, and that Europe is two power blocs, west and east, and exactly where the dividing line is constitutes a little local difficulty about which the USA does not have strong opinions and is not worth the life of a single USA soldier; any more than European NATO seems to think it is worth the life of a single NATO one.
USA is not (or not only) the grotesque cabal in charge at the moment, I’m pretty sure loads of USonians have strong opinions about the fate of Europe, some of them are friends of mine. Of course if you think this cabal is going to be in charge for the foreseeable future there’ll be even bigger problems than the fate of Ukraine hurtling towards us.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
For those who didn’t know - years back, a certain U.K. law firm (and some fellow firms) started selling “libel tourism”.
That is, anything published on the web is visible in the U.K.
So under this bit of judicial activism, anyone on the planet could sue for libel in U.K. courts, if it is published online. No problems with the 1st Amendment in the US.
Big fees would result….
A cross party group in the US Congress passed a law making the results of any such judgements null and void in the US.
The U.K. law firms and Mr Justice Cocklecarrot* were very upset.
*See Private Eye for real name
That’s been the case even since foreign magazines started to be imported in small numbers.
For all the politisation and polarisation in the US, one of few things on which all of the politicians agree is that the US is not a fan of foreign courts having jurisdiction over anything or anyone American.
Quite right too.
It is undemocratic.
A country should be able to enforce its laws. The “no assets or operations” is a false logic - according to that theory it’s fine for a North Korean hacking cooperative to rob a French bank
A country should be able to enforce its laws on its own citizens or those acting in its own country.
A country should not be able to enforce its laws on citizens of another country acting in another country.
That becomes the realm of foreign relations instead.
You indeed can't enforce French laws on North Koreans acting and living in North Korea.
Quite rightly too the inverse is true, the North Korean dictatorship can't enforce its authoritarian laws on French citizens living in France, nor should it be able to do so.
The issue becomes “what is acting”.
Disseminating a message in the UK is “acting” in my view. If 4chan were to, for example, call for violent revolution in the UK and execution of all members of the government, I think that should be illegal and something that could be enforced against.
May be it’s a simple as requiring companies to have a responsible agent - as I believe they do in Brazil - in the country.
The servers are in America, it is being disseminated in America. If people choose to go online and view American websites then that's their choice, and our government could choose to firewall foreign sites, as the Chinese do, but not enforce laws on people abroad who have had no right to vote on those laws.
It is undemocratic to apply a law to someone who has no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
In Russia it is a criminal act to criticise their military or decision to go to war against Ukraine. Should Russia be entitled to enforce that law on its critics abroad?
Or does its jurisprudence end and its borders thank goodness.
As others have pointed out, the Offcom performative dance is about repeated fines, no response, etc.
The final step is to demand that all ISPs and VPN block the IP addresses for 4Chan. All the VPNs that don’t comply will get the same treatment.
So you have a mechanism to impose U.K. online censorship.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
The youngish righties on twitter are choosing some strange things to promote. For some reason I have Tom Harwood fans on my feed today.
Equality for discriminated against rich white pupils in private schools !!! Revolution !!!
And intellectual wing of the something or other are out and about:
Talking about self-defence.
I am in the UK, and that's straight-up bull shit.
Explain the woman in Canary Wharf getting arrested for defending her blind sister? The system's broken. Lucy connoly got arrested for a tweet yet saying it's ok to slit the throats of right wingers? That's fine, apparently... https://x.com/KyleBeesley01/status/1957117114159948083
She has a very valid point about the original offence - 22 year old from the Hotel had allegedly tricked his way into her flat, and the alleged perp has been arrested.)
'From their oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they lay waste to the land and call it peace.'
Marco Rubio: "Life in America on a daily basis will be largely unaffected whether there's peace in Ukraine or not. That's just a fact. We have a lot of issues we're focused on not just at home, but around the world."
An interesting take from the SoS in charge of foreign affairs.
How is he wrong ?
He's not massively wrong. If he's trying to communicate the message that the US has zero interest in Europe, then it would be far better to say that directly.
Zero interest apart from giving deranged sermons on how Europe, the cradle of civilisation, is descending into totalitarian hell. Perhaps little Marco is so MAGAfied that he believes if he said it directly Europe would stop giving those sermons serious consideration.
Despite deranged sermons I do not know how it could be clearer that current USA policy is that they wish to progress to Europe being for the Europeans to sort, and that Europe is two power blocs, west and east, and exactly where the dividing line is constitutes a little local difficulty about which the USA does not have strong opinions and is not worth the life of a single USA soldier; any more than European NATO seems to think it is worth the life of a single NATO one.
Marco & Co are probably turning life in the USA into a daily hell without needing any help from anyone else.
Like so much crap coming from the Right today, I don't recognise this "low-trust" society. I regularly see bikes or other high value toys left outside by kids overnight, and they are still there next day. 30 or 40 years ago they would have been pinched.
Agreed, crime in general is much lower today than it was in the 70s or 80s. But it doesn't feel like it to many people because they constantly see criminals getting away with it. Police don't even bother investigating many crimes now.
Chap I know had his motorcycle stolen. It had a tracker on it and he was able to tell the Police exactly where it was - in someone's garden. They refused to attend and told him not to try and recover the bike, just report it to his insurance. In the end he fetched a burly mate and they got the bike back without any aggro.
This is the issue. All too often crime is no longer getting punished, and that makes society feel lawless even if it is statistically safer than before.
If society is not a dystopian hell, Farage's and Ten Term Tommy's and all the other narratives fall over, and will drift away like a cloud of smoke.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
I can only presume Labour has internal polling or focus group responses that tell them that these attack lines on Reform are going to work, because they seem like transparent bullshit to me, but I’m obviously not the target voter they have in mind:
“Rayner says Farage ‘failing young women’ with plan to scrap Online Safety Act”
Either that, or they’re getting a bit panicky about the whole thing. I note in passing that 4Chan have stuck two fingers up to OFCOM after being threatened with a £20k fine plus daily penalties for being in contravention of the OSA.
It’s also notable that they’re making no effort whatsoever to defend the act itself or engage with any of the criticism of it - it’s all ad hominem attacks on the critics.
Yes, quite
They have almost certainly seen terrible polling on this. Especially with young people
Like so much crap coming from the Right today, I don't recognise this "low-trust" society. I regularly see bikes or other high value toys left outside by kids overnight, and they are still there next day. 30 or 40 years ago they would have been pinched.
Agreed, crime in general is much lower today than it was in the 70s or 80s. But it doesn't feel like it to many people because they constantly see criminals getting away with it. Police don't even bother investigating many crimes now.
Chap I know had his motorcycle stolen. It had a tracker on it and he was able to tell the Police exactly where it was - in someone's garden. They refused to attend and told him not to try and recover the bike, just report it to his insurance. In the end he fetched a burly mate and they got the bike back without any aggro.
This is the issue. All too often crime is no longer getting punished, and that makes society feel lawless even if it is statistically safer than before.
If society is not a dystopian hell, Farage's and Ten Term Tommy's and all the other narratives fall over, and will drift away like a cloud of smoke.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
The trackers built into everything allow people to track their stolen property. Nothing is ever done.
Multiple people I know have had bikes stolen with hidden trackers. Police say they won’t do anything.
Quite a few years back, a boss had his 5 figure bike lifted. Once he told the police that, they sprang into action. Apparently theft over £20k was a special kind of serious?
They caught the guy - at the magistrates he claimed it was unfair that fingerprints etc had been used for a bike theft…
I can only presume Labour has internal polling or focus group responses that tell them that these attack lines on Reform are going to work, because they seem like transparent bullshit to me, but I’m obviously not the target voter they have in mind:
“Rayner says Farage ‘failing young women’ with plan to scrap Online Safety Act”
Either that, or they’re getting a bit panicky about the whole thing. I note in passing that 4Chan have stuck two fingers up to OFCOM after being threatened with a £20k fine plus daily penalties for being in contravention of the OSA.
It’s also notable that they’re making no effort whatsoever to defend the act itself or engage with any of the criticism of it - it’s all ad hominem attacks on the critics.
It comes down to a Journalist asking what did the OSA change when it comes to Revenge Porn to make it easier to prosecute and / or punish Revenge Porn.
Like so much crap coming from the Right today, I don't recognise this "low-trust" society. I regularly see bikes or other high value toys left outside by kids overnight, and they are still there next day. 30 or 40 years ago they would have been pinched.
Agreed, crime in general is much lower today than it was in the 70s or 80s. But it doesn't feel like it to many people because they constantly see criminals getting away with it. Police don't even bother investigating many crimes now.
Chap I know had his motorcycle stolen. It had a tracker on it and he was able to tell the Police exactly where it was - in someone's garden. They refused to attend and told him not to try and recover the bike, just report it to his insurance. In the end he fetched a burly mate and they got the bike back without any aggro.
This is the issue. All too often crime is no longer getting punished, and that makes society feel lawless even if it is statistically safer than before.
If society is not a dystopian hell, Farage's and Ten Term Tommy's and all the other narratives fall over, and will drift away like a cloud of smoke.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
The trackers built into everything allow people to track their stolen property. Nothing is ever done.
Multiple people I know have had bikes stolen with hidden trackers. Police say they won’t do anything.
Quite a few years back, a boss had his 5 figure bike lifted. Once he told the police that, they sprang into action. Apparently theft over £20k was a special kind of serious?
They caught the guy - at the magistrates he claimed it was unfair that fingerprints etc had been used for a bike theft…
The criminal justice system isn't working.
We're not catching people. And even if we do catch them, they're not being successfully prosecuted.
It's an extraordinary shame that we have a PM who seems to care so little about the legal system.
Like so much crap coming from the Right today, I don't recognise this "low-trust" society. I regularly see bikes or other high value toys left outside by kids overnight, and they are still there next day. 30 or 40 years ago they would have been pinched.
Agreed, crime in general is much lower today than it was in the 70s or 80s. But it doesn't feel like it to many people because they constantly see criminals getting away with it. Police don't even bother investigating many crimes now.
Chap I know had his motorcycle stolen. It had a tracker on it and he was able to tell the Police exactly where it was - in someone's garden. They refused to attend and told him not to try and recover the bike, just report it to his insurance. In the end he fetched a burly mate and they got the bike back without any aggro.
This is the issue. All too often crime is no longer getting punished, and that makes society feel lawless even if it is statistically safer than before.
If society is not a dystopian hell, Farage's and Ten Term Tommy's and all the other narratives fall over, and will drift away like a cloud of smoke.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
The trackers built into everything allow people to track their stolen property. Nothing is ever done.
Multiple people I know have had bikes stolen with hidden trackers. Police say they won’t do anything.
Quite a few years back, a boss had his 5 figure bike lifted. Once he told the police that, they sprang into action. Apparently theft over £20k was a special kind of serious?
They caught the guy - at the magistrates he claimed it was unfair that fingerprints etc had been used for a bike theft…
Why don't the police use tracker information? You'd think it would save them much work.
Interesting 'Newsagents' about the shambles of the Trump- Putin summit. The first was a damning comment on it by Boris Johnson which was actually funny. The second were a few facts which were quite startling. The US has 25 % of the Worlds GDP. The EU also has 25% of the worlds GDP. Russia has less than 2% which is actually less than Italy.
They might have been using ballpark figures and I might have got it wrong but if not quite mind boggling......
For those who didn’t know - years back, a certain U.K. law firm (and some fellow firms) started selling “libel tourism”.
That is, anything published on the web is visible in the U.K.
So under this bit of judicial activism, anyone on the planet could sue for libel in U.K. courts, if it is published online. No problems with the 1st Amendment in the US.
Big fees would result….
A cross party group in the US Congress passed a law making the results of any such judgements null and void in the US.
The U.K. law firms and Mr Justice Cocklecarrot* were very upset.
*See Private Eye for real name
That’s been the case even since foreign magazines started to be imported in small numbers.
For all the politisation and polarisation in the US, one of few things on which all of the politicians agree is that the US is not a fan of foreign courts having jurisdiction over anything or anyone American.
Quite right too.
It is undemocratic.
A country should be able to enforce its laws. The “no assets or operations” is a false logic - according to that theory it’s fine for a North Korean hacking cooperative to rob a French bank
A country should be able to enforce its laws on its own citizens or those acting in its own country.
A country should not be able to enforce its laws on citizens of another country acting in another country.
That becomes the realm of foreign relations instead.
You indeed can't enforce French laws on North Koreans acting and living in North Korea.
Quite rightly too the inverse is true, the North Korean dictatorship can't enforce its authoritarian laws on French citizens living in France, nor should it be able to do so.
The issue becomes “what is acting”.
Disseminating a message in the UK is “acting” in my view. If 4chan were to, for example, call for violent revolution in the UK and execution of all members of the government, I think that should be illegal and something that could be enforced against.
May be it’s a simple as requiring companies to have a responsible agent - as I believe they do in Brazil - in the country.
The servers are in America, it is being disseminated in America. If people choose to go online and view American websites then that's their choice, and our government could choose to firewall foreign sites, as the Chinese do, but not enforce laws on people abroad who have had no right to vote on those laws.
It is undemocratic to apply a law to someone who has no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
In Russia it is a criminal act to criticise their military or decision to go to war against Ukraine. Should Russia be entitled to enforce that law on its critics abroad?
Or does its jurisprudence end and its borders thank goodness.
That’s just garbage.
Product regulations and all local laws are applied to people who have no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
If you want to operate in business in the UK even if via a virtual setup then you are required to abide by British laws.
4chan is selling a service to a UK customer. It doesn’t matter where services are provided from, they are required to abide by UK law or not sell their service to UK customers.
Interesting 'Newsagents' about the shambles of the Trump- Putin summit. The first was a damning comment on it by Boris Johnson which was actually funny. The second were a few facts which were quite startling. The US has 25 % of the Worlds GDP. The EU also has 25% of the worlds GDP. Russia has less than 2% which is actually less than Italy.
They might have been using ballpark figures and I might have got it wrong but if not quite mind boggling......
Not really mind boggling. My favourite stat is that -despite all its oil and gas and natural resources- Russia's exports are rather less than those of Belgium.
Like so much crap coming from the Right today, I don't recognise this "low-trust" society. I regularly see bikes or other high value toys left outside by kids overnight, and they are still there next day. 30 or 40 years ago they would have been pinched.
Agreed, crime in general is much lower today than it was in the 70s or 80s. But it doesn't feel like it to many people because they constantly see criminals getting away with it. Police don't even bother investigating many crimes now.
Chap I know had his motorcycle stolen. It had a tracker on it and he was able to tell the Police exactly where it was - in someone's garden. They refused to attend and told him not to try and recover the bike, just report it to his insurance. In the end he fetched a burly mate and they got the bike back without any aggro.
This is the issue. All too often crime is no longer getting punished, and that makes society feel lawless even if it is statistically safer than before.
If society is not a dystopian hell, Farage's and Ten Term Tommy's and all the other narratives fall over, and will drift away like a cloud of smoke.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
The trackers built into everything allow people to track their stolen property. Nothing is ever done.
Multiple people I know have had bikes stolen with hidden trackers. Police say they won’t do anything.
Quite a few years back, a boss had his 5 figure bike lifted. Once he told the police that, they sprang into action. Apparently theft over £20k was a special kind of serious?
They caught the guy - at the magistrates he claimed it was unfair that fingerprints etc had been used for a bike theft…
The criminal justice system isn't working.
We're not catching people. And even if we do catch them, they're not being successfully prosecuted.
It's an extraordinary shame that we have a PM who seems to care so little about the legal system.
Sorry, I meant to say that "Considering he's a lawyer, it's astonishing how little interest Starmer has in making the legal system work."
Like so much crap coming from the Right today, I don't recognise this "low-trust" society. I regularly see bikes or other high value toys left outside by kids overnight, and they are still there next day. 30 or 40 years ago they would have been pinched.
Agreed, crime in general is much lower today than it was in the 70s or 80s. But it doesn't feel like it to many people because they constantly see criminals getting away with it. Police don't even bother investigating many crimes now.
Chap I know had his motorcycle stolen. It had a tracker on it and he was able to tell the Police exactly where it was - in someone's garden. They refused to attend and told him not to try and recover the bike, just report it to his insurance. In the end he fetched a burly mate and they got the bike back without any aggro.
This is the issue. All too often crime is no longer getting punished, and that makes society feel lawless even if it is statistically safer than before.
If society is not a dystopian hell, Farage's and Ten Term Tommy's and all the other narratives fall over, and will drift away like a cloud of smoke.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
The trackers built into everything allow people to track their stolen property. Nothing is ever done.
Multiple people I know have had bikes stolen with hidden trackers. Police say they won’t do anything.
Quite a few years back, a boss had his 5 figure bike lifted. Once he told the police that, they sprang into action. Apparently theft over £20k was a special kind of serious?
They caught the guy - at the magistrates he claimed it was unfair that fingerprints etc had been used for a bike theft…
Why don't the police use tracker information? You'd think it would save them much work.
So, apparently a GPS location tracker isn't considered accurate enough in terms of placement to support a legal basis of entry.
For those who didn’t know - years back, a certain U.K. law firm (and some fellow firms) started selling “libel tourism”.
That is, anything published on the web is visible in the U.K.
So under this bit of judicial activism, anyone on the planet could sue for libel in U.K. courts, if it is published online. No problems with the 1st Amendment in the US.
Big fees would result….
A cross party group in the US Congress passed a law making the results of any such judgements null and void in the US.
The U.K. law firms and Mr Justice Cocklecarrot* were very upset.
*See Private Eye for real name
That’s been the case even since foreign magazines started to be imported in small numbers.
For all the politisation and polarisation in the US, one of few things on which all of the politicians agree is that the US is not a fan of foreign courts having jurisdiction over anything or anyone American.
Quite right too.
It is undemocratic.
A country should be able to enforce its laws. The “no assets or operations” is a false logic - according to that theory it’s fine for a North Korean hacking cooperative to rob a French bank
A country should be able to enforce its laws on its own citizens or those acting in its own country.
A country should not be able to enforce its laws on citizens of another country acting in another country.
That becomes the realm of foreign relations instead.
You indeed can't enforce French laws on North Koreans acting and living in North Korea.
Quite rightly too the inverse is true, the North Korean dictatorship can't enforce its authoritarian laws on French citizens living in France, nor should it be able to do so.
The issue becomes “what is acting”.
Disseminating a message in the UK is “acting” in my view. If 4chan were to, for example, call for violent revolution in the UK and execution of all members of the government, I think that should be illegal and something that could be enforced against.
May be it’s a simple as requiring companies to have a responsible agent - as I believe they do in Brazil - in the country.
The servers are in America, it is being disseminated in America. If people choose to go online and view American websites then that's their choice, and our government could choose to firewall foreign sites, as the Chinese do, but not enforce laws on people abroad who have had no right to vote on those laws.
It is undemocratic to apply a law to someone who has no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
In Russia it is a criminal act to criticise their military or decision to go to war against Ukraine. Should Russia be entitled to enforce that law on its critics abroad?
Or does its jurisprudence end and its borders thank goodness.
That’s just garbage.
Product regulations and all local laws are applied to people who have no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
If you want to operate in business in the UK even if via a virtual setup then you are required to abide by British laws.
4chan is selling a service to a UK customer. It doesn’t matter where services are provided from, they are required to abide by UK law or not sell their service to UK customers.
4chan isn't selling a service to UK customers
It's selling advertising in the US to allow those advertisers to advertise to visitors from the UK who are visiting the site but haven't actually paid anything to visit the site...
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
That's good. I can relax.
I suspect political obsessives see patterns that they want to see rather than are actually there.
How many people do you reckon know who Rupert Lowe is, let alone hear his pronouncements.
Vs how many people see increased security measures in supermarkets and fare evasion on public transport.
There is a difference between believing low level crime such as the above has increased. (But Fraser Nelson told us we’ve never had it so good !) and people buying into the low trust society all being down to migrants.
Clearly the authorities don’t care greatly about some low level crimes.
But do we, as a nation, give a flying one? Are we prepared to pay for more police, courts, custody and probation? All the evidence is that we're not. Not really. So we get the police focussing on the huge crimes of violence, which have to be the priority and where they're not doing badly. And the things that are cheap and easy to do- motoring offences and social media don't exactly need Inspector Morse to solve.
And discussion of the state of the nation has to start with the observation that a lot of it is the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
We’re always paying more yet nothing improves. Every year in Durham my Police precept goes up well above inflation every year yet little seems to improve and yet the solution is just more money.
Whenever they dare mentions cuts it is always ‘front line personnel’ they talk about cutting.
Isn't the police precept mostly to fund police pensions ?
But it puts a financial link between the council tax payer and the local police force. So you’re paying for the service. I doubt anyone thinks, or knows, it to pay for some retired plod to sit at home and watch daytime TV
Except that, for decades, past us promised coppers, teachers, nurses, bureaucrats et cetera pretty nice pensions, mostly without worrying too much about how future us were going to pay them. And got all those people to work for less than they would have cost otherwise. Unfortunately, now those bills have come due.
Like I said, a lot of our current problems are the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
I don’t doubt that’s right but no one seems to want to bite the bullet and the solution just seems to be throwing ever more money from the productive economy at it.
Those pensions should have been reformed further as they are becoming unaffordable.
You can’t really reform them easily because there’s so much variation in individual contracts. Not impossible of course, but an enormous pain & means explicitly breaking existing contracts which liberal governments generally regard as a very bad idea.
What is perfectly doable is cutting National Insurance rates whilst simultaneously increasing income tax rates, which will shift some tax burden from the young to the old & reduce the net cost of pensions paid out of government tax income.
No pension contract binds the government to specific future tax rates on that pension income.
Effectively you end up reforming future entitlement which happens with the move from 97 to 08 scheme and then the 15 scheme.
Yes move from Ni to'income tax although they’ve boxed themselves in by ruling out any tax increases.
The whole “boxed themselves in” argument is rubbish. They can do it. It just comes with a high economic cost - if they had done it right at the beginning they could have got away with it but now it’s not so easy to blame the Tories
Like so much crap coming from the Right today, I don't recognise this "low-trust" society. I regularly see bikes or other high value toys left outside by kids overnight, and they are still there next day. 30 or 40 years ago they would have been pinched.
Agreed, crime in general is much lower today than it was in the 70s or 80s. But it doesn't feel like it to many people because they constantly see criminals getting away with it. Police don't even bother investigating many crimes now.
Chap I know had his motorcycle stolen. It had a tracker on it and he was able to tell the Police exactly where it was - in someone's garden. They refused to attend and told him not to try and recover the bike, just report it to his insurance. In the end he fetched a burly mate and they got the bike back without any aggro.
This is the issue. All too often crime is no longer getting punished, and that makes society feel lawless even if it is statistically safer than before.
If society is not a dystopian hell, Farage's and Ten Term Tommy's and all the other narratives fall over, and will drift away like a cloud of smoke.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
The trackers built into everything allow people to track their stolen property. Nothing is ever done.
Multiple people I know have had bikes stolen with hidden trackers. Police say they won’t do anything.
Quite a few years back, a boss had his 5 figure bike lifted. Once he told the police that, they sprang into action. Apparently theft over £20k was a special kind of serious?
They caught the guy - at the magistrates he claimed it was unfair that fingerprints etc had been used for a bike theft…
I had a burglary and some camera equipment stolen, tracked the camera down myself, reported it to the police. There was no charge or prosecution. That was in 1991.
Police not being interested in such crimes is nothing new, even when a conviction is given them on a plate.
For those who didn’t know - years back, a certain U.K. law firm (and some fellow firms) started selling “libel tourism”.
That is, anything published on the web is visible in the U.K.
So under this bit of judicial activism, anyone on the planet could sue for libel in U.K. courts, if it is published online. No problems with the 1st Amendment in the US.
Big fees would result….
A cross party group in the US Congress passed a law making the results of any such judgements null and void in the US.
The U.K. law firms and Mr Justice Cocklecarrot* were very upset.
*See Private Eye for real name
That’s been the case even since foreign magazines started to be imported in small numbers.
For all the politisation and polarisation in the US, one of few things on which all of the politicians agree is that the US is not a fan of foreign courts having jurisdiction over anything or anyone American.
Quite right too.
It is undemocratic.
A country should be able to enforce its laws. The “no assets or operations” is a false logic - according to that theory it’s fine for a North Korean hacking cooperative to rob a French bank
A country should be able to enforce its laws on its own citizens or those acting in its own country.
A country should not be able to enforce its laws on citizens of another country acting in another country.
That becomes the realm of foreign relations instead.
You indeed can't enforce French laws on North Koreans acting and living in North Korea.
Quite rightly too the inverse is true, the North Korean dictatorship can't enforce its authoritarian laws on French citizens living in France, nor should it be able to do so.
The issue becomes “what is acting”.
Disseminating a message in the UK is “acting” in my view. If 4chan were to, for example, call for violent revolution in the UK and execution of all members of the government, I think that should be illegal and something that could be enforced against.
May be it’s a simple as requiring companies to have a responsible agent - as I believe they do in Brazil - in the country.
The servers are in America, it is being disseminated in America. If people choose to go online and view American websites then that's their choice, and our government could choose to firewall foreign sites, as the Chinese do, but not enforce laws on people abroad who have had no right to vote on those laws.
It is undemocratic to apply a law to someone who has no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
In Russia it is a criminal act to criticise their military or decision to go to war against Ukraine. Should Russia be entitled to enforce that law on its critics abroad?
Or does its jurisprudence end and its borders thank goodness.
That’s just garbage.
Product regulations and all local laws are applied to people who have no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
If you want to operate in business in the UK even if via a virtual setup then you are required to abide by British laws.
4chan is selling a service to a UK customer. It doesn’t matter where services are provided from, they are required to abide by UK law or not sell their service to UK customers.
4chan is free to view, isn't it? They're not selling a service to a UK customer.
Interesting 'Newsagents' about the shambles of the Trump- Putin summit. The first was a damning comment on it by Boris Johnson which was actually funny. The second were a few facts which were quite startling. The US has 25 % of the Worlds GDP. The EU also has 25% of the worlds GDP. Russia has less than 2% which is actually less than Italy.
They might have been using ballpark figures and I might have got it wrong but if not quite mind boggling......
Someone on here a long time ago pointed out that Russia's GDP might be smaller than expected because they give some poor people free rent. Whereas in the west we give people housing benefit which they then pay rent with. The effect is the same, but only the latter counts towards GDP.
Apologies to whoever it was if I mangled that explanation.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
That's good. I can relax.
I suspect political obsessives see patterns that they want to see rather than are actually there.
How many people do you reckon know who Rupert Lowe is, let alone hear his pronouncements.
Vs how many people see increased security measures in supermarkets and fare evasion on public transport.
There is a difference between believing low level crime such as the above has increased. (But Fraser Nelson told us we’ve never had it so good !) and people buying into the low trust society all being down to migrants.
Clearly the authorities don’t care greatly about some low level crimes.
But do we, as a nation, give a flying one? Are we prepared to pay for more police, courts, custody and probation? All the evidence is that we're not. Not really. So we get the police focussing on the huge crimes of violence, which have to be the priority and where they're not doing badly. And the things that are cheap and easy to do- motoring offences and social media don't exactly need Inspector Morse to solve.
And discussion of the state of the nation has to start with the observation that a lot of it is the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
We’re always paying more yet nothing improves. Every year in Durham my Police precept goes up well above inflation every year yet little seems to improve and yet the solution is just more money.
Whenever they dare mentions cuts it is always ‘front line personnel’ they talk about cutting.
Isn't the police precept mostly to fund police pensions ?
But it puts a financial link between the council tax payer and the local police force. So you’re paying for the service. I doubt anyone thinks, or knows, it to pay for some retired plod to sit at home and watch daytime TV
Except that, for decades, past us promised coppers, teachers, nurses, bureaucrats et cetera pretty nice pensions, mostly without worrying too much about how future us were going to pay them. And got all those people to work for less than they would have cost otherwise. Unfortunately, now those bills have come due.
Like I said, a lot of our current problems are the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
I don’t doubt that’s right but no one seems to want to bite the bullet and the solution just seems to be throwing ever more money from the productive economy at it.
Those pensions should have been reformed further as they are becoming unaffordable.
You can’t really reform them easily because there’s so much variation in individual contracts. Not impossible of course, but an enormous pain & means explicitly breaking existing contracts which liberal governments generally regard as a very bad idea.
What is perfectly doable is cutting National Insurance rates whilst simultaneously increasing income tax rates, which will shift some tax burden from the young to the old & reduce the net cost of pensions paid out of government tax income.
No pension contract binds the government to specific future tax rates on that pension income.
Effectively you end up reforming future entitlement which happens with the move from 97 to 08 scheme and then the 15 scheme.
Yes move from Ni to'income tax although they’ve boxed themselves in by ruling out any tax increases.
The whole “boxed themselves in” argument is rubbish. They can do it. It just comes with a high economic cost - if they had done it right at the beginning they could have got away with it but now it’s not so easy to blame the Tories
It comes at little economic cost - it has a big political cost if they do it in a way that voters remember at the next election and because of the "betrayal" vote for someone else.
I can only presume Labour has internal polling or focus group responses that tell them that these attack lines on Reform are going to work, because they seem like transparent bullshit to me, but I’m obviously not the target voter they have in mind:
“Rayner says Farage ‘failing young women’ with plan to scrap Online Safety Act”
Either that, or they’re getting a bit panicky about the whole thing. I note in passing that 4Chan have stuck two fingers up to OFCOM after being threatened with a £20k fine plus daily penalties for being in contravention of the OSA.
It’s also notable that they’re making no effort whatsoever to defend the act itself or engage with any of the criticism of it - it’s all ad hominem attacks on the critics.
Yes, quite
They have almost certainly seen terrible polling on this. Especially with young people
If so, it's not showing up in the public polling. This is from YouGov;
Even Club 18-24 support the measures 57-31. Which is an awful lot better than most government measures get.
Clearly there are some people who are very unhappy with the OSA, and they're all online. (Looking at the other breaks, men are much less keen than women, and Reformites less keen than other political persuasions. The brute politics might be that the attacks on Reform over the OSA are aimed at those mysterious lady types.) But even if it's a bad idea, it's a popular bad idea. Will of the people and all that.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
I can only presume Labour has internal polling or focus group responses that tell them that these attack lines on Reform are going to work, because they seem like transparent bullshit to me, but I’m obviously not the target voter they have in mind:
“Rayner says Farage ‘failing young women’ with plan to scrap Online Safety Act”
Either that, or they’re getting a bit panicky about the whole thing. I note in passing that 4Chan have stuck two fingers up to OFCOM after being threatened with a £20k fine plus daily penalties for being in contravention of the OSA.
It’s also notable that they’re making no effort whatsoever to defend the act itself or engage with any of the criticism of it - it’s all ad hominem attacks on the critics.
Yes, quite
They have almost certainly seen terrible polling on this. Especially with young people
If so, it's not showing up in the public polling. This is from YouGov;
Even Club 18-24 support the measures 57-31. Which is an awful lot better than most government measures get.
Clearly there are some people who are very unhappy with the OSA, and they're all online. (Looking at the other breaks, men are much less keen than women, and Reformites less keen than other political persuasions. The brute politics might be that the attacks on Reform over the OSA are aimed at those mysterious lady types.) But even if it's a bad idea, it's a popular bad idea. Will of the people and all that.
Like so much crap coming from the Right today, I don't recognise this "low-trust" society. I regularly see bikes or other high value toys left outside by kids overnight, and they are still there next day. 30 or 40 years ago they would have been pinched.
Agreed, crime in general is much lower today than it was in the 70s or 80s. But it doesn't feel like it to many people because they constantly see criminals getting away with it. Police don't even bother investigating many crimes now.
Chap I know had his motorcycle stolen. It had a tracker on it and he was able to tell the Police exactly where it was - in someone's garden. They refused to attend and told him not to try and recover the bike, just report it to his insurance. In the end he fetched a burly mate and they got the bike back without any aggro.
This is the issue. All too often crime is no longer getting punished, and that makes society feel lawless even if it is statistically safer than before.
If society is not a dystopian hell, Farage's and Ten Term Tommy's and all the other narratives fall over, and will drift away like a cloud of smoke.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
The trackers built into everything allow people to track their stolen property. Nothing is ever done.
Multiple people I know have had bikes stolen with hidden trackers. Police say they won’t do anything.
Quite a few years back, a boss had his 5 figure bike lifted. Once he told the police that, they sprang into action. Apparently theft over £20k was a special kind of serious?
They caught the guy - at the magistrates he claimed it was unfair that fingerprints etc had been used for a bike theft…
Why don't the police use tracker information? You'd think it would save them much work.
It means sending multiple police officers to a location. And potentially break dancing with thieves. Which risks injury. And then they get off with bail on top of the bail on top of the bail for the other offences. And when it comes to court - not much.
SMT see all of the above as bad. The line coppers tend to be up for it, but are ordered not to.
For those who didn’t know - years back, a certain U.K. law firm (and some fellow firms) started selling “libel tourism”.
That is, anything published on the web is visible in the U.K.
So under this bit of judicial activism, anyone on the planet could sue for libel in U.K. courts, if it is published online. No problems with the 1st Amendment in the US.
Big fees would result….
A cross party group in the US Congress passed a law making the results of any such judgements null and void in the US.
The U.K. law firms and Mr Justice Cocklecarrot* were very upset.
*See Private Eye for real name
That’s been the case even since foreign magazines started to be imported in small numbers.
For all the politisation and polarisation in the US, one of few things on which all of the politicians agree is that the US is not a fan of foreign courts having jurisdiction over anything or anyone American.
Quite right too.
It is undemocratic.
A country should be able to enforce its laws. The “no assets or operations” is a false logic - according to that theory it’s fine for a North Korean hacking cooperative to rob a French bank
A country should be able to enforce its laws on its own citizens or those acting in its own country.
A country should not be able to enforce its laws on citizens of another country acting in another country.
That becomes the realm of foreign relations instead.
You indeed can't enforce French laws on North Koreans acting and living in North Korea.
Quite rightly too the inverse is true, the North Korean dictatorship can't enforce its authoritarian laws on French citizens living in France, nor should it be able to do so.
The issue becomes “what is acting”.
Disseminating a message in the UK is “acting” in my view. If 4chan were to, for example, call for violent revolution in the UK and execution of all members of the government, I think that should be illegal and something that could be enforced against.
May be it’s a simple as requiring companies to have a responsible agent - as I believe they do in Brazil - in the country.
The servers are in America, it is being disseminated in America. If people choose to go online and view American websites then that's their choice, and our government could choose to firewall foreign sites, as the Chinese do, but not enforce laws on people abroad who have had no right to vote on those laws.
It is undemocratic to apply a law to someone who has no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
In Russia it is a criminal act to criticise their military or decision to go to war against Ukraine. Should Russia be entitled to enforce that law on its critics abroad?
Or does its jurisprudence end and its borders thank goodness.
That’s just garbage.
Product regulations and all local laws are applied to people who have no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
If you want to operate in business in the UK even if via a virtual setup then you are required to abide by British laws.
4chan is selling a service to a UK customer. It doesn’t matter where services are provided from, they are required to abide by UK law or not sell their service to UK customers.
If you choose to sell a product then you have had the opportunity to choose to sell it there so local laws apply, but that's not the case here.
4chan aren't selling anything to UK customers. If they do then VAT or other local taxes and laws could apply, but they're not.
UK visitors going to an American website aren't being sold anything.
If a Russian visitor reads someone in the Guardian criticising Putin should Russian laws forbidding that apply?
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
That's good. I can relax.
I suspect political obsessives see patterns that they want to see rather than are actually there.
How many people do you reckon know who Rupert Lowe is, let alone hear his pronouncements.
Vs how many people see increased security measures in supermarkets and fare evasion on public transport.
There is a difference between believing low level crime such as the above has increased. (But Fraser Nelson told us we’ve never had it so good !) and people buying into the low trust society all being down to migrants.
Clearly the authorities don’t care greatly about some low level crimes.
But do we, as a nation, give a flying one? Are we prepared to pay for more police, courts, custody and probation? All the evidence is that we're not. Not really. So we get the police focussing on the huge crimes of violence, which have to be the priority and where they're not doing badly. And the things that are cheap and easy to do- motoring offences and social media don't exactly need Inspector Morse to solve.
And discussion of the state of the nation has to start with the observation that a lot of it is the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
We’re always paying more yet nothing improves. Every year in Durham my Police precept goes up well above inflation every year yet little seems to improve and yet the solution is just more money.
Whenever they dare mentions cuts it is always ‘front line personnel’ they talk about cutting.
Isn't the police precept mostly to fund police pensions ?
But it puts a financial link between the council tax payer and the local police force. So you’re paying for the service. I doubt anyone thinks, or knows, it to pay for some retired plod to sit at home and watch daytime TV
Except that, for decades, past us promised coppers, teachers, nurses, bureaucrats et cetera pretty nice pensions, mostly without worrying too much about how future us were going to pay them. And got all those people to work for less than they would have cost otherwise. Unfortunately, now those bills have come due.
Like I said, a lot of our current problems are the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
I don’t doubt that’s right but no one seems to want to bite the bullet and the solution just seems to be throwing ever more money from the productive economy at it.
Those pensions should have been reformed further as they are becoming unaffordable.
The Civil Service pension is now a career average revalued scheme and pays out at 67. So has indeed been reformed. It also no longer has the big "compulsory early retirement" top-ups it used to have for redundancy, you now get a redundancy payment and can claim an unenhanced pension if you want (and are over 55)
Yeah, I know that as that’s one of my wife’s NHS pensions, I am suggesting further reviews. A move to a DC pot.
That works out quite expensive for a decade or two. The DB schemes would still be paid for out of government funds, with the DC contributions no longer available to do so, so in the short to medium term the government finances are significantly worse off.
Like so much crap coming from the Right today, I don't recognise this "low-trust" society. I regularly see bikes or other high value toys left outside by kids overnight, and they are still there next day. 30 or 40 years ago they would have been pinched.
Agreed, crime in general is much lower today than it was in the 70s or 80s. But it doesn't feel like it to many people because they constantly see criminals getting away with it. Police don't even bother investigating many crimes now.
Chap I know had his motorcycle stolen. It had a tracker on it and he was able to tell the Police exactly where it was - in someone's garden. They refused to attend and told him not to try and recover the bike, just report it to his insurance. In the end he fetched a burly mate and they got the bike back without any aggro.
This is the issue. All too often crime is no longer getting punished, and that makes society feel lawless even if it is statistically safer than before.
If society is not a dystopian hell, Farage's and Ten Term Tommy's and all the other narratives fall over, and will drift away like a cloud of smoke.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
The trackers built into everything allow people to track their stolen property. Nothing is ever done.
Multiple people I know have had bikes stolen with hidden trackers. Police say they won’t do anything.
Quite a few years back, a boss had his 5 figure bike lifted. Once he told the police that, they sprang into action. Apparently theft over £20k was a special kind of serious?
They caught the guy - at the magistrates he claimed it was unfair that fingerprints etc had been used for a bike theft…
I had a burglary and some camera equipment stolen, tracked the camera down myself, reported it to the police. There was no charge or prosecution. That was in 1991.
Police not being interested in such crimes is nothing new, even when a conviction is given them on a plate.
As an experiment - tell them it’s a titanium alloy framed bike. And that you, as a chemist have set up and amusing function* on the tracking system.
*titanium fires are generally regarded as inextinguishable. Magnesium is for slackers.
Barak Ravid @BarakRavid · 1h More than 200K Israelis (according to the organizers) protested tonight in Tel Aviv, calling for a deal for the release of the hostages and ending the war in Gaza (Video: Yair Palti)
Like so much crap coming from the Right today, I don't recognise this "low-trust" society. I regularly see bikes or other high value toys left outside by kids overnight, and they are still there next day. 30 or 40 years ago they would have been pinched.
Agreed, crime in general is much lower today than it was in the 70s or 80s. But it doesn't feel like it to many people because they constantly see criminals getting away with it. Police don't even bother investigating many crimes now.
Chap I know had his motorcycle stolen. It had a tracker on it and he was able to tell the Police exactly where it was - in someone's garden. They refused to attend and told him not to try and recover the bike, just report it to his insurance. In the end he fetched a burly mate and they got the bike back without any aggro.
This is the issue. All too often crime is no longer getting punished, and that makes society feel lawless even if it is statistically safer than before.
If society is not a dystopian hell, Farage's and Ten Term Tommy's and all the other narratives fall over, and will drift away like a cloud of smoke.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
The trackers built into everything allow people to track their stolen property. Nothing is ever done.
Multiple people I know have had bikes stolen with hidden trackers. Police say they won’t do anything.
Quite a few years back, a boss had his 5 figure bike lifted. Once he told the police that, they sprang into action. Apparently theft over £20k was a special kind of serious?
They caught the guy - at the magistrates he claimed it was unfair that fingerprints etc had been used for a bike theft…
The criminal justice system isn't working.
We're not catching people. And even if we do catch them, they're not being successfully prosecuted.
It's an extraordinary shame that we have a PM who seems to care so little about the legal system.
Perhaps he is just bored with it after his earlier years and would rather forget about it.
I knew I had this in my notes somewhere: last March, Meloni floated the idea of NATO-like guarantees at a European leaders summit in Brussels. The Italian premier was clear-eyed Ukraine would not join NATO anytime soon but the solution could be found “nell'arco” meaning in the sphere of the alliance - without being a member of NATO, but backed by some of its most powerful members - modeled on Article 5. In the same summit, Meloni also suggested the conclusions approved by leaders at the end of the session should carry an acknowledgement by Europe to Trump’s peace efforts (America would be needed) as well as stronger references to the transatlantic relation, per source at the time. At the time, Meloni was not onboard with some of the ideas coming out of Paris and believed this would be more useful, although there was convergence around the fact that a fair peace required the strongest of guarantees. Question was how.
Funnily enough, the idea didn’t really run far at the time on the basis that you’re either a member of NATO or you’re not. You’re either covered by article 5 or you’re not. On top of the operational questions around how far the US would back it as well as the criteria that would trigger it. The idea has been revived now. The problem? The questions around it remain largely the same. European delegation heads to Washington tomorrow, including Meloni.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
It’s quite arguable that the Empire held back development of both the U.K. and the colonies.
See the rocket like takeoff of GDP post Empire.
Russia has not realised that conquest has long since ceased to be worthwhile.
It is far cheaper to buy the natural resources we want from foreign countries than to occupy them.
And cheapest of all to deal with properly run countries with decent economies etc. See Australia.
Tim Worstall tells stories of how dodgy middlemen would try and sell him raw ore for cobalt etc. at prices far above the market rate. From all the war torn places.
It’s cheaper to buy from a properly run mine that uses machines instead of child slave labour.
Gosh. It's almost as though a load of private schools are suddenly being put up for sale very cheaply for some reason.
(And also, to be fair, Chinese investors looking for safe havens for their money.)
Businesses, not charities it seems.
Over half of private schools are businesses and always have been.
The perception otherwise is somewhat skewed by the fact that the majority of secondary school age children in private education attend schools that are charitable foundations, although the proportion has been dropping because contrary to popular belief it is not that advantageous for school to be a charity rather than a business, particularly not when it needs to borrow money.
Schools that are taken over by any company including a Chinese company automatically become businesses anyway which to judge from your comment you would approve of.
Another weekend leaving me wondering whether I ak stuck in the Red Dwarf game 'Better than Life' - perfect sunny weather, a day at the seaside culminating in a fish and chip supper and an ice cream on Friday, a long bike ride with middle daughter on Saturday then an Indian takeaway, a family walk and a picnic (which the girls had rustled up while I swept the drive) by a lake today, following which oldest daughter rustled up a plum crumble with fruit from the tree... I secretly relished it when oldest daughter was weirdly dramatic for five minutes when explaining about the plan for the picnic or when youngest daughter had a blood-sugar related mood crash just before lunch, because it confirms I'm still living in a recognisable reality rather than sone sort of simulation.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
It’s quite arguable that the Empire held back development of both the U.K. and the colonies.
See the rocket like takeoff of GDP post Empire.
Russia has not realised that conquest has long since ceased to be worthwhile.
It is far cheaper to buy the natural resources we want from foreign countries than to occupy them.
And cheapest of all to deal with properly run countries with decent economies etc. See Australia.
Tim Worstall tells stories of how dodgy middlemen would try and sell him raw ore for cobalt etc. at prices far above the market rate. From all the war torn places.
It’s cheaper to buy from a properly run mine that uses machines instead of child slave labour.
I’ve long believed that people who keep others as slaves do so because they enjoy owning slaves, rather than for economic reasons.
As long ago as 1776, Adam Smith demonstrated that free labour is more productive than slave labour.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
That's good. I can relax.
I suspect political obsessives see patterns that they want to see rather than are actually there.
How many people do you reckon know who Rupert Lowe is, let alone hear his pronouncements.
Vs how many people see increased security measures in supermarkets and fare evasion on public transport.
There is a difference between believing low level crime such as the above has increased. (But Fraser Nelson told us we’ve never had it so good !) and people buying into the low trust society all being down to migrants.
Clearly the authorities don’t care greatly about some low level crimes.
But do we, as a nation, give a flying one? Are we prepared to pay for more police, courts, custody and probation? All the evidence is that we're not. Not really. So we get the police focussing on the huge crimes of violence, which have to be the priority and where they're not doing badly. And the things that are cheap and easy to do- motoring offences and social media don't exactly need Inspector Morse to solve.
And discussion of the state of the nation has to start with the observation that a lot of it is the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
We’re always paying more yet nothing improves. Every year in Durham my Police precept goes up well above inflation every year yet little seems to improve and yet the solution is just more money.
Whenever they dare mentions cuts it is always ‘front line personnel’ they talk about cutting.
Isn't the police precept mostly to fund police pensions ?
But it puts a financial link between the council tax payer and the local police force. So you’re paying for the service. I doubt anyone thinks, or knows, it to pay for some retired plod to sit at home and watch daytime TV
Except that, for decades, past us promised coppers, teachers, nurses, bureaucrats et cetera pretty nice pensions, mostly without worrying too much about how future us were going to pay them. And got all those people to work for less than they would have cost otherwise. Unfortunately, now those bills have come due.
Like I said, a lot of our current problems are the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
I don’t doubt that’s right but no one seems to want to bite the bullet and the solution just seems to be throwing ever more money from the productive economy at it.
Those pensions should have been reformed further as they are becoming unaffordable.
The Civil Service pension is now a career average revalued scheme and pays out at 67. So has indeed been reformed. It also no longer has the big "compulsory early retirement" top-ups it used to have for redundancy, you now get a redundancy payment and can claim an unenhanced pension if you want (and are over 55)
Yeah, I know that as that’s one of my wife’s NHS pensions, I am suggesting further reviews. A move to a DC pot.
That works out quite expensive for a decade or two. The DB schemes would still be paid for out of government funds, with the DC contributions no longer available to do so, so in the short to medium term the government finances are significantly worse off.
Yes it’s a classic “wouldn’t start from here” problem.
It’s also a classic “this costs money before it saves money, in timescales longer than a Parliament” problem.
Gosh. It's almost as though a load of private schools are suddenly being put up for sale very cheaply for some reason.
(And also, to be fair, Chinese investors looking for safe havens for their money.)
Businesses, not charities it seems.
Over half of private schools are businesses and always have been.
The perception otherwise is somewhat skewed by the fact that the majority of secondary school age children in private education attend schools that are charitable foundations, although the proportion has been dropping because contrary to popular belief it is not that advantageous for school to be a charity rather than a business, particularly not when it needs to borrow money.
Schools that are taken over by any company including a Chinese company automatically become businesses anyway which to judge from your comment you would approve of.
Quite a few of the "Public Schools" of the post-Arnoldian era (1860s on) were [edit] indeed sort of shareholder businesses and commonly IIRC known as Proprietary. As I understand it, shareholders could nominate a child (though the fees still had to be paid).
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
It’s quite arguable that the Empire held back development of both the U.K. and the colonies.
See the rocket like takeoff of GDP post Empire.
Russia has not realised that conquest has long since ceased to be worthwhile.
It is far cheaper to buy the natural resources we want from foreign countries than to occupy them.
And cheapest of all to deal with properly run countries with decent economies etc. See Australia.
Tim Worstall tells stories of how dodgy middlemen would try and sell him raw ore for cobalt etc. at prices far above the market rate. From all the war torn places.
It’s cheaper to buy from a properly run mine that uses machines instead of child slave labour.
I’ve long believed that people who keep others as slaves do so because they enjoy owning slaves, rather than for economic reasons.
As long ago as 1776, Adam Smith demonstrated that free labour is more productive than slave labour.
I have a very rich guy I do some contract work for, and he regularly goes on about spending so much time dealing with domestic staff that he might as well do things himself half the time. I’m sure he actually values his own time much more highly than cooking, cleaning, and driving, no matter how much he complains.
For those who didn’t know - years back, a certain U.K. law firm (and some fellow firms) started selling “libel tourism”.
That is, anything published on the web is visible in the U.K.
So under this bit of judicial activism, anyone on the planet could sue for libel in U.K. courts, if it is published online. No problems with the 1st Amendment in the US.
Big fees would result….
A cross party group in the US Congress passed a law making the results of any such judgements null and void in the US.
The U.K. law firms and Mr Justice Cocklecarrot* were very upset.
*See Private Eye for real name
That’s been the case even since foreign magazines started to be imported in small numbers.
For all the politisation and polarisation in the US, one of few things on which all of the politicians agree is that the US is not a fan of foreign courts having jurisdiction over anything or anyone American.
Quite right too.
It is undemocratic.
A country should be able to enforce its laws. The “no assets or operations” is a false logic - according to that theory it’s fine for a North Korean hacking cooperative to rob a French bank
A country should be able to enforce its laws on its own citizens or those acting in its own country.
A country should not be able to enforce its laws on citizens of another country acting in another country.
That becomes the realm of foreign relations instead.
You indeed can't enforce French laws on North Koreans acting and living in North Korea.
Quite rightly too the inverse is true, the North Korean dictatorship can't enforce its authoritarian laws on French citizens living in France, nor should it be able to do so.
The issue becomes “what is acting”.
Disseminating a message in the UK is “acting” in my view. If 4chan were to, for example, call for violent revolution in the UK and execution of all members of the government, I think that should be illegal and something that could be enforced against.
May be it’s a simple as requiring companies to have a responsible agent - as I believe they do in Brazil - in the country.
The servers are in America, it is being disseminated in America. If people choose to go online and view American websites then that's their choice, and our government could choose to firewall foreign sites, as the Chinese do, but not enforce laws on people abroad who have had no right to vote on those laws.
It is undemocratic to apply a law to someone who has no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
In Russia it is a criminal act to criticise their military or decision to go to war against Ukraine. Should Russia be entitled to enforce that law on its critics abroad?
Or does its jurisprudence end and its borders thank goodness.
As others have pointed out, the Offcom performative dance is about repeated fines, no response, etc.
The final step is to demand that all ISPs and VPN block the IP addresses for 4Chan. All the VPNs that don’t comply will get the same treatment.
So you have a mechanism to impose U.K. online censorship.
It’s just as well that users of the 4chan website are all upstanding citizens, have no idea how one might evade content restrictions, and definitely don’t get involved in wreaking havoc just for fun…
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
It’s quite arguable that the Empire held back development of both the U.K. and the colonies.
See the rocket like takeoff of GDP post Empire.
Russia has not realised that conquest has long since ceased to be worthwhile.
It is far cheaper to buy the natural resources we want from foreign countries than to occupy them.
And cheapest of all to deal with properly run countries with decent economies etc. See Australia.
Tim Worstall tells stories of how dodgy middlemen would try and sell him raw ore for cobalt etc. at prices far above the market rate. From all the war torn places.
It’s cheaper to buy from a properly run mine that uses machines instead of child slave labour.
I’ve long believed that people who keep others as slaves do so because they enjoy owning slaves, rather than for economic reasons.
As long ago as 1776, Adam Smith demonstrated that free labour is more productive than slave labour.
I have a very rich guy I do some contract work for, and he regularly goes on about spending so much time dealing with domestic staff that he might as well do things himself half the time. I’m sure he actually values his own time much more highly than cooking, cleaning, and driving, no matter how much he complains.
To anyone with half a brain (which excludes most Confederate leaders), it was plain that the South was falling way behind the North on almost any measure, by 1860. But, that only made the village idiots more determined to cling to a system which produced “cotton, and slaves, … and arrogance.”
Interesting 'Newsagents' about the shambles of the Trump- Putin summit. The first was a damning comment on it by Boris Johnson which was actually funny. The second were a few facts which were quite startling. The US has 25 % of the Worlds GDP. The EU also has 25% of the worlds GDP. Russia has less than 2% which is actually less than Italy.
They might have been using ballpark figures and I might have got it wrong but if not quite mind boggling......
Someone on here a long time ago pointed out that Russia's GDP might be smaller than expected because they give some poor people free rent. Whereas in the west we give people housing benefit which they then pay rent with. The effect is the same, but only the latter counts towards GDP.
Apologies to whoever it was if I mangled that explanation.
Even if that were true, it could not be an order of magnitude 10x different. Away from Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia is astonishingly poor. Like mediaeval peasantry poor: no running water, intermittent power, occasional healthcare, terrible transport on dirt roads. They have a lot of subsurface mineral wealth, but most often their manufacturing would be best not done at all- famously the components of a Zhiguli- Lada- were worth more than the car itself. It is not a statistical anomaly that makes Russia poor, it is venal, corrupt and brutal leadership. Fundamentally Russia was, and remains an absolutist state in a style that was destroyed in Britain by the Civil war(s) and the Glorious Revolution of the 17th century.
P. J. O'Rourke maybe said it better: "Russia has never had a Renaissance; it has never had a Reformation. Such Industrial Revolution as it had was nipped and twisted by the Communists. Russia had no Roaring 20s, no Booming 50s, no Swinging 60s, no Me Generation. It's been just one Them Generation after another."
Russia is a weak state- "Nigeria with nuclear weapons" as some wit dubbed it. When Prigrozhin made his move, no one was prepared to defend then regime, but Prigrozhin bottled it and paid with his life. Russia started a war against a staggeringly weaker country and they have now taken in three and a half years more casualties than Britain did in the entire six years of the Second World War,
Putin, the epitome of the lazy and brain dead Brezhnev-era bureaucrat, has nevertheless become a zombie feeding on the flesh of over a million war casualties.
(I guess we all feel nostalgic towards our youth, its probably why Putin likes Brezhnev, Trump likes McCarthyism and Leon likes the 1970s bovver boys)
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
It’s quite arguable that the Empire held back development of both the U.K. and the colonies.
See the rocket like takeoff of GDP post Empire.
Russia has not realised that conquest has long since ceased to be worthwhile.
It is far cheaper to buy the natural resources we want from foreign countries than to occupy them.
And cheapest of all to deal with properly run countries with decent economies etc. See Australia.
Tim Worstall tells stories of how dodgy middlemen would try and sell him raw ore for cobalt etc. at prices far above the market rate. From all the war torn places.
It’s cheaper to buy from a properly run mine that uses machines instead of child slave labour.
I’ve long believed that people who keep others as slaves do so because they enjoy owning slaves, rather than for economic reasons.
As long ago as 1776, Adam Smith demonstrated that free labour is more productive than slave labour.
I have a very rich guy I do some contract work for, and he regularly goes on about spending so much time dealing with domestic staff that he might as well do things himself half the time. I’m sure he actually values his own time much more highly than cooking, cleaning, and driving, no matter how much he complains.
To anyone with half a brain (which excludes most Confederate leaders), it was plain that the South was falling way behind the North on almost any measure, by 1860. But, that only made the village idiots more determined to cling to a system which produced “cotton, and slaves, … and arrogance.”
Ok, I have a question about that quotation, or the bit before it.
In the film, I always hear, 'Gentlemen, you haven't got a canning factory in the whole south.' But when I watched it with subtitles the other day, it said 'Gentlemen, you haven!t got a cannon factory in the whole south.'
The latter is bollocks on stilts for all sorts of reasons, but the former would be (a) true and (b) logical.
I've never read the book - is it in there and if so, which version is it?
Like so much crap coming from the Right today, I don't recognise this "low-trust" society. I regularly see bikes or other high value toys left outside by kids overnight, and they are still there next day. 30 or 40 years ago they would have been pinched.
Agreed, crime in general is much lower today than it was in the 70s or 80s. But it doesn't feel like it to many people because they constantly see criminals getting away with it. Police don't even bother investigating many crimes now.
Chap I know had his motorcycle stolen. It had a tracker on it and he was able to tell the Police exactly where it was - in someone's garden. They refused to attend and told him not to try and recover the bike, just report it to his insurance. In the end he fetched a burly mate and they got the bike back without any aggro.
This is the issue. All too often crime is no longer getting punished, and that makes society feel lawless even if it is statistically safer than before.
If society is not a dystopian hell, Farage's and Ten Term Tommy's and all the other narratives fall over, and will drift away like a cloud of smoke.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
The trackers built into everything allow people to track their stolen property. Nothing is ever done.
Multiple people I know have had bikes stolen with hidden trackers. Police say they won’t do anything.
Quite a few years back, a boss had his 5 figure bike lifted. Once he told the police that, they sprang into action. Apparently theft over £20k was a special kind of serious?
They caught the guy - at the magistrates he claimed it was unfair that fingerprints etc had been used for a bike theft…
The criminal justice system isn't working.
We're not catching people. And even if we do catch them, they're not being successfully prosecuted.
It's an extraordinary shame that we have a PM who seems to care so little about the legal system.
Perhaps he is just bored with it after his earlier years and would rather forget about it.
You both wrong. The legal system is working just fine. According to a certain point of view.
Police offers are employed. And array of lawyers, from the least, to the highest judges. Also many, many civil servants in the justice ministries - dont forget devolved government. Great judgements are handed down. Laws passed.
All the producers of the law are happy. What else is there?
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
It’s quite arguable that the Empire held back development of both the U.K. and the colonies.
See the rocket like takeoff of GDP post Empire.
Russia has not realised that conquest has long since ceased to be worthwhile.
It is far cheaper to buy the natural resources we want from foreign countries than to occupy them.
And cheapest of all to deal with properly run countries with decent economies etc. See Australia.
Tim Worstall tells stories of how dodgy middlemen would try and sell him raw ore for cobalt etc. at prices far above the market rate. From all the war torn places.
It’s cheaper to buy from a properly run mine that uses machines instead of child slave labour.
I’ve long believed that people who keep others as slaves do so because they enjoy owning slaves, rather than for economic reasons.
As long ago as 1776, Adam Smith demonstrated that free labour is more productive than slave labour.
I have a very rich guy I do some contract work for, and he regularly goes on about spending so much time dealing with domestic staff that he might as well do things himself half the time. I’m sure he actually values his own time much more highly than cooking, cleaning, and driving, no matter how much he complains.
To anyone with half a brain (which excludes most Confederate leaders), it was plain that the South was falling way behind the North on almost any measure, by 1860. But, that only made the village idiots more determined to cling to a system which produced “cotton, and slaves, … and arrogance.”
Ok, I have a question about that quotation, or the bit before it.
In the film, I always hear, 'Gentlemen, you haven't got a canning factory in the whole south.' But when I watched it with subtitles the other day, it said 'Gentlemen, you haven!t got a cannon factory in the whole south.'
The latter is bollocks on stilts for all sorts of reasons, but the former would be (a) true and (b) logical.
I've never read the book - is it in there and if so, which version is it?
“Has any one of you gentlemen ever thought that there's not a cannon factory south of the Mason-Dixon Line? Or how few iron foundries there are in the South? Or woolen mills or cotton factories or tanneries? Have you thought that we would not have a single warship and that the Yankee fleet could bottle up our harbors in a week, so that we could not sell our cotton abroad? But—of course—you gentlemen have thought of these things."
"Why, he means the boys are a passel of fools!" thought Scarlett indignantly, the hot blood coming to her cheeks.
Evidently, she was not the only one to whom this idea occurred, for several of the boys were beginning to stick out their chins. John Wilkes casually but swiftly came back to his place beside the speaker, as if to impress on all present that this man was his guest and that, moreover, there were ladies present.
"The trouble with most of us Southerners," continued Rhett Butler, "is that we either don't travel enough or we don't profit enough by our travels. Now, of course, all you gentlemen are well traveled. But what have you seen? Europe and New York and Philadelphia and, of course, the ladies have been to Saratoga" (he bowed slightly to the group under the arbor). "You've seen the hotels and the museums and the balls and the gambling houses. And you've come home believing that there's no place like the South. As for me, I was Charleston born, but I have spent the last few years in the North." His white teeth showed in a grin, as though he realized that everyone present knew just why he no longer lived in Charleston, and cared not at all if they did know. "I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who'd be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines—all the things we haven't got. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They'd lick us in a month."
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
It’s quite arguable that the Empire held back development of both the U.K. and the colonies.
See the rocket like takeoff of GDP post Empire.
Russia has not realised that conquest has long since ceased to be worthwhile.
It is far cheaper to buy the natural resources we want from foreign countries than to occupy them.
And cheapest of all to deal with properly run countries with decent economies etc. See Australia.
Tim Worstall tells stories of how dodgy middlemen would try and sell him raw ore for cobalt etc. at prices far above the market rate. From all the war torn places.
It’s cheaper to buy from a properly run mine that uses machines instead of child slave labour.
I’ve long believed that people who keep others as slaves do so because they enjoy owning slaves, rather than for economic reasons.
As long ago as 1776, Adam Smith demonstrated that free labour is more productive than slave labour.
I have a very rich guy I do some contract work for, and he regularly goes on about spending so much time dealing with domestic staff that he might as well do things himself half the time. I’m sure he actually values his own time much more highly than cooking, cleaning, and driving, no matter how much he complains.
To anyone with half a brain (which excludes most Confederate leaders), it was plain that the South was falling way behind the North on almost any measure, by 1860. But, that only made the village idiots more determined to cling to a system which produced “cotton, and slaves, … and arrogance.”
Ok, I have a question about that quotation, or the bit before it.
In the film, I always hear, 'Gentlemen, you haven't got a canning factory in the whole south.' But when I watched it with subtitles the other day, it said 'Gentlemen, you haven!t got a cannon factory in the whole south.'
The latter is bollocks on stilts for all sorts of reasons, but the former would be (a) true and (b) logical.
I've never read the book - is it in there and if so, which version is it?
“Has any one of you gentlemen ever thought that there's not a cannon factory south of the Mason-Dixon Line? Or how few iron foundries there are in the South? Or woolen mills or cotton factories or tanneries? Have you thought that we would not have a single warship and that the Yankee fleet could bottle up our harbors in a week, so that we could not sell our cotton abroad? But—of course—you gentlemen have thought of these things."
"Why, he means the boys are a passel of fools!" thought Scarlett indignantly, the hot blood coming to her cheeks.
Evidently, she was not the only one to whom this idea occurred, for several of the boys were beginning to stick out their chins. John Wilkes casually but swiftly came back to his place beside the speaker, as if to impress on all present that this man was his guest and that, moreover, there were ladies present.
"The trouble with most of us Southerners," continued Rhett Butler, "is that we either don't travel enough or we don't profit enough by our travels. Now, of course, all you gentlemen are well traveled. But what have you seen? Europe and New York and Philadelphia and, of course, the ladies have been to Saratoga" (he bowed slightly to the group under the arbor). "You've seen the hotels and the museums and the balls and the gambling houses. And you've come home believing that there's no place like the South. As for me, I was Charleston born, but I have spent the last few years in the North." His white teeth showed in a grin, as though he realized that everyone present knew just why he no longer lived in Charleston, and cared not at all if they did know. "I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who'd be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines—all the things we haven't got. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They'd lick us in a month."
I knew I had this in my notes somewhere: last March, Meloni floated the idea of NATO-like guarantees at a European leaders summit in Brussels. The Italian premier was clear-eyed Ukraine would not join NATO anytime soon but the solution could be found “nell'arco” meaning in the sphere of the alliance - without being a member of NATO, but backed by some of its most powerful members - modeled on Article 5. In the same summit, Meloni also suggested the conclusions approved by leaders at the end of the session should carry an acknowledgement by Europe to Trump’s peace efforts (America would be needed) as well as stronger references to the transatlantic relation, per source at the time. At the time, Meloni was not onboard with some of the ideas coming out of Paris and believed this would be more useful, although there was convergence around the fact that a fair peace required the strongest of guarantees. Question was how.
Funnily enough, the idea didn’t really run far at the time on the basis that you’re either a member of NATO or you’re not. You’re either covered by article 5 or you’re not. On top of the operational questions around how far the US would back it as well as the criteria that would trigger it. The idea has been revived now. The problem? The questions around it remain largely the same. European delegation heads to Washington tomorrow, including Meloni.
Thanks. Tadeo is about right. In a nutshell, Europe cannot choose whether it is Europe's problem. It is so whether Europe likes it or not. Trumpists can choose whether it is USA's problem. And they are free to decide it isn't. Untimately they will so decide. And apart from such glory, honour and trade he can derive from it Trump has no interest in exactly where the boundary is drawn between the eastern Europe Russia bloc and the EU/UK/NATO one.
From his America First isolationist point of view why should he?
For those who didn’t know - years back, a certain U.K. law firm (and some fellow firms) started selling “libel tourism”.
That is, anything published on the web is visible in the U.K.
So under this bit of judicial activism, anyone on the planet could sue for libel in U.K. courts, if it is published online. No problems with the 1st Amendment in the US.
Big fees would result….
A cross party group in the US Congress passed a law making the results of any such judgements null and void in the US.
The U.K. law firms and Mr Justice Cocklecarrot* were very upset.
*See Private Eye for real name
That’s been the case even since foreign magazines started to be imported in small numbers.
For all the politisation and polarisation in the US, one of few things on which all of the politicians agree is that the US is not a fan of foreign courts having jurisdiction over anything or anyone American.
Quite right too.
It is undemocratic.
A country should be able to enforce its laws. The “no assets or operations” is a false logic - according to that theory it’s fine for a North Korean hacking cooperative to rob a French bank
A country should be able to enforce its laws on its own citizens or those acting in its own country.
A country should not be able to enforce its laws on citizens of another country acting in another country.
That becomes the realm of foreign relations instead.
You indeed can't enforce French laws on North Koreans acting and living in North Korea.
Quite rightly too the inverse is true, the North Korean dictatorship can't enforce its authoritarian laws on French citizens living in France, nor should it be able to do so.
The issue becomes “what is acting”.
Disseminating a message in the UK is “acting” in my view. If 4chan were to, for example, call for violent revolution in the UK and execution of all members of the government, I think that should be illegal and something that could be enforced against.
May be it’s a simple as requiring companies to have a responsible agent - as I believe they do in Brazil - in the country.
The servers are in America, it is being disseminated in America. If people choose to go online and view American websites then that's their choice, and our government could choose to firewall foreign sites, as the Chinese do, but not enforce laws on people abroad who have had no right to vote on those laws.
It is undemocratic to apply a law to someone who has no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
In Russia it is a criminal act to criticise their military or decision to go to war against Ukraine. Should Russia be entitled to enforce that law on its critics abroad?
Or does its jurisprudence end and its borders thank goodness.
That’s just garbage.
Product regulations and all local laws are applied to people who have no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
If you want to operate in business in the UK even if via a virtual setup then you are required to abide by British laws.
4chan is selling a service to a UK customer. It doesn’t matter where services are provided from, they are required to abide by UK law or not sell their service to UK customers.
4chan is free to view, isn't it? They're not selling a service to a UK customer.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
The dogs ignore the whistle, you mean? I'd like to believe so but the whistlers must think otherwise.
Right on, grandad 👍
Perhaps they’re just savvy enough to see it for what it is and not indulge it.
Well I'm not yet. But it could happen.
Ok so you're telling me that politicians like Lowe are wasting their time putting out all this anti-immigrant shit.
That's good. I can relax.
I suspect political obsessives see patterns that they want to see rather than are actually there.
How many people do you reckon know who Rupert Lowe is, let alone hear his pronouncements.
Vs how many people see increased security measures in supermarkets and fare evasion on public transport.
There is a difference between believing low level crime such as the above has increased. (But Fraser Nelson told us we’ve never had it so good !) and people buying into the low trust society all being down to migrants.
Clearly the authorities don’t care greatly about some low level crimes.
But do we, as a nation, give a flying one? Are we prepared to pay for more police, courts, custody and probation? All the evidence is that we're not. Not really. So we get the police focussing on the huge crimes of violence, which have to be the priority and where they're not doing badly. And the things that are cheap and easy to do- motoring offences and social media don't exactly need Inspector Morse to solve.
And discussion of the state of the nation has to start with the observation that a lot of it is the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
We’re always paying more yet nothing improves. Every year in Durham my Police precept goes up well above inflation every year yet little seems to improve and yet the solution is just more money.
Whenever they dare mentions cuts it is always ‘front line personnel’ they talk about cutting.
Isn't the police precept mostly to fund police pensions ?
But it puts a financial link between the council tax payer and the local police force. So you’re paying for the service. I doubt anyone thinks, or knows, it to pay for some retired plod to sit at home and watch daytime TV
Except that, for decades, past us promised coppers, teachers, nurses, bureaucrats et cetera pretty nice pensions, mostly without worrying too much about how future us were going to pay them. And got all those people to work for less than they would have cost otherwise. Unfortunately, now those bills have come due.
Like I said, a lot of our current problems are the consequence of the sum of all the decisions we have collectively taken over decades.
I don’t doubt that’s right but no one seems to want to bite the bullet and the solution just seems to be throwing ever more money from the productive economy at it.
Those pensions should have been reformed further as they are becoming unaffordable.
You can’t really reform them easily because there’s so much variation in individual contracts. Not impossible of course, but an enormous pain & means explicitly breaking existing contracts which liberal governments generally regard as a very bad idea.
What is perfectly doable is cutting National Insurance rates whilst simultaneously increasing income tax rates, which will shift some tax burden from the young to the old & reduce the net cost of pensions paid out of government tax income.
No pension contract binds the government to specific future tax rates on that pension income.
Effectively you end up reforming future entitlement which happens with the move from 97 to 08 scheme and then the 15 scheme.
Yes move from Ni to'income tax although they’ve boxed themselves in by ruling out any tax increases.
The whole “boxed themselves in” argument is rubbish. They can do it. It just comes with a high economic cost - if they had done it right at the beginning they could have got away with it but now it’s not so easy to blame the Tories
It comes at little economic cost - it has a big political cost if they do it in a way that voters remember at the next election and because of the "betrayal" vote for someone else.
I meant political but was in the middle of a coughing fit…
Alleged to be a photograph of a new Ukranian long range missile, called Flamingo, with a range of 3,000km. That’s well over the Urals from Ukraine.
Photo source appears to be AP from the watermark, and it’s being retweeted by dozens of credible Ukranian sources in the past hour. Wanting to send a signal perhaps?
I knew I had this in my notes somewhere: last March, Meloni floated the idea of NATO-like guarantees at a European leaders summit in Brussels. The Italian premier was clear-eyed Ukraine would not join NATO anytime soon but the solution could be found “nell'arco” meaning in the sphere of the alliance - without being a member of NATO, but backed by some of its most powerful members - modeled on Article 5. In the same summit, Meloni also suggested the conclusions approved by leaders at the end of the session should carry an acknowledgement by Europe to Trump’s peace efforts (America would be needed) as well as stronger references to the transatlantic relation, per source at the time. At the time, Meloni was not onboard with some of the ideas coming out of Paris and believed this would be more useful, although there was convergence around the fact that a fair peace required the strongest of guarantees. Question was how.
Funnily enough, the idea didn’t really run far at the time on the basis that you’re either a member of NATO or you’re not. You’re either covered by article 5 or you’re not. On top of the operational questions around how far the US would back it as well as the criteria that would trigger it. The idea has been revived now. The problem? The questions around it remain largely the same. European delegation heads to Washington tomorrow, including Meloni.
Thanks. Tadeo is about right. In a nutshell, Europe cannot choose whether it is Europe's problem. It is so whether Europe likes it or not. Trumpists can choose whether it is USA's problem. And they are free to decide it isn't. Untimately they will so decide. And apart from such glory, honour and trade he can derive from it Trump has no interest in exactly where the boundary is drawn between the eastern Europe Russia bloc and the EU/UK/NATO one.
From his America First isolationist point of view why should he?
Meloni’s suggestion echos the declarations of support and protection by the U.K. (and others) for Finland and Sweden, during their accession process
Very good. But. The evidence that Trump has spoken about security guarantees is weak (try finding the source), and at its highest even if true it is vague. It is possible that western leaders are talking it up trying to pin him down (good luck with that). Furthermore it is hard to imagine a Trump guarantee that will be reliably kept. Nor does it seem likely that Trump would be willing to lose a single USA soldier in this cause. The sooner Europe is in a position to accept that it is a European responsibility the better.
Alleged to be a photograph of a new Ukranian long range missile, called Flamingo, with a range of 3,000km. That’s well over the Urals from Ukraine.
Photo source appears to be AP from the watermark, and it’s being retweeted by dozens of credible Ukranian sources in the past hour. Wanting to send a signal perhaps?
I knew I had this in my notes somewhere: last March, Meloni floated the idea of NATO-like guarantees at a European leaders summit in Brussels. The Italian premier was clear-eyed Ukraine would not join NATO anytime soon but the solution could be found “nell'arco” meaning in the sphere of the alliance - without being a member of NATO, but backed by some of its most powerful members - modeled on Article 5. In the same summit, Meloni also suggested the conclusions approved by leaders at the end of the session should carry an acknowledgement by Europe to Trump’s peace efforts (America would be needed) as well as stronger references to the transatlantic relation, per source at the time. At the time, Meloni was not onboard with some of the ideas coming out of Paris and believed this would be more useful, although there was convergence around the fact that a fair peace required the strongest of guarantees. Question was how.
Funnily enough, the idea didn’t really run far at the time on the basis that you’re either a member of NATO or you’re not. You’re either covered by article 5 or you’re not. On top of the operational questions around how far the US would back it as well as the criteria that would trigger it. The idea has been revived now. The problem? The questions around it remain largely the same. European delegation heads to Washington tomorrow, including Meloni.
Thanks. Tadeo is about right. In a nutshell, Europe cannot choose whether it is Europe's problem. It is so whether Europe likes it or not. Trumpists can choose whether it is USA's problem. And they are free to decide it isn't. Untimately they will so decide. And apart from such glory, honour and trade he can derive from it Trump has no interest in exactly where the boundary is drawn between the eastern Europe Russia bloc and the EU/UK/NATO one.
From his America First isolationist point of view why should he?
There are at least 2 potential problems with Trump trying to walk away
What does he do if China invades Taiwan, or Putin wants Alaska back?
It's another thing he promised his base and didn't deliver.
Alleged to be a photograph of a new Ukranian long range missile, called Flamingo, with a range of 3,000km. That’s well over the Urals from Ukraine.
Photo source appears to be AP from the watermark, and it’s being retweeted by dozens of credible Ukranian sources in the past hour. Wanting to send a signal perhaps?
Alleged to be a photograph of a new Ukranian long range missile, called Flamingo, with a range of 3,000km. That’s well over the Urals from Ukraine.
Photo source appears to be AP from the watermark, and it’s being retweeted by dozens of credible Ukranian sources in the past hour. Wanting to send a signal perhaps?
Alleged to be a photograph of a new Ukranian long range missile, called Flamingo, with a range of 3,000km. That’s well over the Urals from Ukraine.
Photo source appears to be AP from the watermark, and it’s being retweeted by dozens of credible Ukranian sources in the past hour. Wanting to send a signal perhaps?
For those who didn’t know - years back, a certain U.K. law firm (and some fellow firms) started selling “libel tourism”.
That is, anything published on the web is visible in the U.K.
So under this bit of judicial activism, anyone on the planet could sue for libel in U.K. courts, if it is published online. No problems with the 1st Amendment in the US.
Big fees would result….
A cross party group in the US Congress passed a law making the results of any such judgements null and void in the US.
The U.K. law firms and Mr Justice Cocklecarrot* were very upset.
*See Private Eye for real name
That’s been the case even since foreign magazines started to be imported in small numbers.
For all the politisation and polarisation in the US, one of few things on which all of the politicians agree is that the US is not a fan of foreign courts having jurisdiction over anything or anyone American.
Quite right too.
It is undemocratic.
A country should be able to enforce its laws. The “no assets or operations” is a false logic - according to that theory it’s fine for a North Korean hacking cooperative to rob a French bank
A country should be able to enforce its laws on its own citizens or those acting in its own country.
A country should not be able to enforce its laws on citizens of another country acting in another country.
That becomes the realm of foreign relations instead.
You indeed can't enforce French laws on North Koreans acting and living in North Korea.
Quite rightly too the inverse is true, the North Korean dictatorship can't enforce its authoritarian laws on French citizens living in France, nor should it be able to do so.
The issue becomes “what is acting”.
Disseminating a message in the UK is “acting” in my view. If 4chan were to, for example, call for violent revolution in the UK and execution of all members of the government, I think that should be illegal and something that could be enforced against.
May be it’s a simple as requiring companies to have a responsible agent - as I believe they do in Brazil - in the country.
The servers are in America, it is being disseminated in America. If people choose to go online and view American websites then that's their choice, and our government could choose to firewall foreign sites, as the Chinese do, but not enforce laws on people abroad who have had no right to vote on those laws.
It is undemocratic to apply a law to someone who has no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
In Russia it is a criminal act to criticise their military or decision to go to war against Ukraine. Should Russia be entitled to enforce that law on its critics abroad?
Or does its jurisprudence end and its borders thank goodness.
That’s just garbage.
Product regulations and all local laws are applied to people who have no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
If you want to operate in business in the UK even if via a virtual setup then you are required to abide by British laws.
4chan is selling a service to a UK customer. It doesn’t matter where services are provided from, they are required to abide by UK law or not sell their service to UK customers.
4chan is free to view, isn't it? They're not selling a service to a UK customer.
Providing a service, sorry
In America, on American servers to American laws, yes. They're not exporting.
Should OGH and PB be liable to Russian laws if a Russian logs into this site?
Alleged to be a photograph of a new Ukranian long range missile, called Flamingo, with a range of 3,000km. That’s well over the Urals from Ukraine.
Photo source appears to be AP from the watermark, and it’s being retweeted by dozens of credible Ukranian sources in the past hour. Wanting to send a signal perhaps?
Alleged to be a photograph of a new Ukranian long range missile, called Flamingo, with a range of 3,000km. That’s well over the Urals from Ukraine.
Photo source appears to be AP from the watermark, and it’s being retweeted by dozens of credible Ukranian sources in the past hour. Wanting to send a signal perhaps?
I can only presume Labour has internal polling or focus group responses that tell them that these attack lines on Reform are going to work, because they seem like transparent bullshit to me, but I’m obviously not the target voter they have in mind:
“Rayner says Farage ‘failing young women’ with plan to scrap Online Safety Act”
Either that, or they’re getting a bit panicky about the whole thing. I note in passing that 4Chan have stuck two fingers up to OFCOM after being threatened with a £20k fine plus daily penalties for being in contravention of the OSA.
It’s also notable that they’re making no effort whatsoever to defend the act itself or engage with any of the criticism of it - it’s all ad hominem attacks on the critics.
Yes, quite
They have almost certainly seen terrible polling on this. Especially with young people
Just for the record, the OSA has widespread across all age groups according to the polling. Even a majority of Reform voters are in favour, and woman and parents by a huge majority. Weirdly, it's young people and parents who think it will be most effective, with older people more sceptical.
I think it's a pretty effective thing for Labour to pursue. There is a broad the consensus that the internet is a very bad thing for kids and some techbros making a fuss about it are unlikely to change anyone's mind about that.
The loss of our "high trust" society due to immigration. I've noticed this one taking off like a rocket in right wing populist discourse. High trust is code for something else of course.
When supermarkets are putting security tags on milk and cheese, then we have a trust problem.
If supermarkets in certain areas have to choose between looking like Haddows in Glasgow or moving to online deliveries only, then we all lose out.
Shoplifting and phone snatching is up. Most crimes and crime in general inc violent crime is down.
Somehow this is meant to support assertions that mass immigration has undermined our high-trust society.
It's dog-whistling.
Don’t worry. The PB centrist Dad brigade is out in force to Pooh-pooh it while burnishing their ‘right on’ credentials. Most people just don’t give such stuff the time of day. 👍
It's quite amusing. There's no need to pooh-pooh anything; this one is self-collapsing afaics.
The "locking down milk" photo is fake. It's from 2022 when one of the blues (Boris?) was in power, was from Tesco who said back then that the security tags were put on by mistake. AFAICS he's pretending it's current ("now"), or perhaps he believes his stuff.
The chap seems in practice to be as gormless as Fizzy Lizzy, like most of them.
I've had a look this afternoon at Farage's right hand Tiktok man that the Guardian had a little go at this morning, and he's the same.
Is he actually his ‘right hand man’ all seems very exaggerated for effect.
Mostly by the Right Hand Man, I suspect. It's the nature of politically-ambitious 23 year olds to portray themselves as much more important than they actually are. Heck, politically-ambitious types of any age do it. So do 23 year olds, whatever their ambition.
Farage is not responsible for his followers. However, if an unusually large proportion of his close followers turn out to be fruitcakes, loons, closet racists or all three, it out to make one wonder why.
His piece is twice as long as my threader the other day (and I clipped a couple of paragraphs off that to be within a few words of the 1000). He's reasonably important - on the Farage core team, and only kept out of a job on the shoulder of the new Mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire by political appointee restrictions for the role.
Here's the piece - see what you think. To me he is building backwards from the belief that (my phrase) "Standalone UK is an Isolated Island with an Isolated Interest", and working back to a strange version of Victorian mercantilism, and a mechanistic view of Empire. There are all kinds of dodgy stats and a belief that we failed because we did not exploit the countries of the Empire hard enough. He suggests things such as we should have "developed" Ireland by doing a new mass plantation, and has a strangely superficial cherry picking of history.
He's got a 2.1 Politics degree from KCL, so I would expect some awareness from political history. There also seems to be some unchecked AI. eg:
"Britain’s subsequent involvement in the Russian Civil War was not popular at home and many thought at the time, what I am writing now, the Daily Express newspaper wrote this in January 1919:
'the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier'."
That's actually a fairly classic quote from Otto von Bizmarck. I think the whole thing is a window into how he got into this worldview; there's a lot to learn about how to argue with / persuade them.
It’s quite arguable that the Empire held back development of both the U.K. and the colonies.
See the rocket like takeoff of GDP post Empire.
Russia has not realised that conquest has long since ceased to be worthwhile.
It is far cheaper to buy the natural resources we want from foreign countries than to occupy them.
And cheapest of all to deal with properly run countries with decent economies etc. See Australia.
Tim Worstall tells stories of how dodgy middlemen would try and sell him raw ore for cobalt etc. at prices far above the market rate. From all the war torn places.
It’s cheaper to buy from a properly run mine that uses machines instead of child slave labour.
I’ve long believed that people who keep others as slaves do so because they enjoy owning slaves, rather than for economic reasons.
As long ago as 1776, Adam Smith demonstrated that free labour is more productive than slave labour.
I have a very rich guy I do some contract work for, and he regularly goes on about spending so much time dealing with domestic staff that he might as well do things himself half the time. I’m sure he actually values his own time much more highly than cooking, cleaning, and driving, no matter how much he complains.
To anyone with half a brain (which excludes most Confederate leaders), it was plain that the South was falling way behind the North on almost any measure, by 1860. But, that only made the village idiots more determined to cling to a system which produced “cotton, and slaves, … and arrogance.”
Ok, I have a question about that quotation, or the bit before it.
In the film, I always hear, 'Gentlemen, you haven't got a canning factory in the whole south.' But when I watched it with subtitles the other day, it said 'Gentlemen, you haven!t got a cannon factory in the whole south.'
The latter is bollocks on stilts for all sorts of reasons, but the former would be (a) true and (b) logical.
I've never read the book - is it in there and if so, which version is it?
“Has any one of you gentlemen ever thought that there's not a cannon factory south of the Mason-Dixon Line? Or how few iron foundries there are in the South? Or woolen mills or cotton factories or tanneries? Have you thought that we would not have a single warship and that the Yankee fleet could bottle up our harbors in a week, so that we could not sell our cotton abroad? But—of course—you gentlemen have thought of these things."
"Why, he means the boys are a passel of fools!" thought Scarlett indignantly, the hot blood coming to her cheeks.
Evidently, she was not the only one to whom this idea occurred, for several of the boys were beginning to stick out their chins. John Wilkes casually but swiftly came back to his place beside the speaker, as if to impress on all present that this man was his guest and that, moreover, there were ladies present.
"The trouble with most of us Southerners," continued Rhett Butler, "is that we either don't travel enough or we don't profit enough by our travels. Now, of course, all you gentlemen are well traveled. But what have you seen? Europe and New York and Philadelphia and, of course, the ladies have been to Saratoga" (he bowed slightly to the group under the arbor). "You've seen the hotels and the museums and the balls and the gambling houses. And you've come home believing that there's no place like the South. As for me, I was Charleston born, but I have spent the last few years in the North." His white teeth showed in a grin, as though he realized that everyone present knew just why he no longer lived in Charleston, and cared not at all if they did know. "I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who'd be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines—all the things we haven't got. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They'd lick us in a month."
So, basically, it is complete bollocks on stilts. Like much of the rest of the book.
(I mean, the largest cannon factory in the whole USA was only in Virginia...)
Thanks.
Gone With the Wind, both book and film, we're not works of historical scholarship, but rather were works to profit from and feed the "Lost Cause" mythology of the antebellum South.
This was surprisingly popular even outside the CSA, for example films like "Birth of a Nation" or "The General"
This mythology lives on, so we see MAGA Americans flying Confederate flags alongside their enemy, the Stars and Stripes.
For those who didn’t know - years back, a certain U.K. law firm (and some fellow firms) started selling “libel tourism”.
That is, anything published on the web is visible in the U.K.
So under this bit of judicial activism, anyone on the planet could sue for libel in U.K. courts, if it is published online. No problems with the 1st Amendment in the US.
Big fees would result….
A cross party group in the US Congress passed a law making the results of any such judgements null and void in the US.
The U.K. law firms and Mr Justice Cocklecarrot* were very upset.
*See Private Eye for real name
That’s been the case even since foreign magazines started to be imported in small numbers.
For all the politisation and polarisation in the US, one of few things on which all of the politicians agree is that the US is not a fan of foreign courts having jurisdiction over anything or anyone American.
Quite right too.
It is undemocratic.
A country should be able to enforce its laws. The “no assets or operations” is a false logic - according to that theory it’s fine for a North Korean hacking cooperative to rob a French bank
A country should be able to enforce its laws on its own citizens or those acting in its own country.
A country should not be able to enforce its laws on citizens of another country acting in another country.
That becomes the realm of foreign relations instead.
You indeed can't enforce French laws on North Koreans acting and living in North Korea.
Quite rightly too the inverse is true, the North Korean dictatorship can't enforce its authoritarian laws on French citizens living in France, nor should it be able to do so.
The issue becomes “what is acting”.
Disseminating a message in the UK is “acting” in my view. If 4chan were to, for example, call for violent revolution in the UK and execution of all members of the government, I think that should be illegal and something that could be enforced against.
May be it’s a simple as requiring companies to have a responsible agent - as I believe they do in Brazil - in the country.
The servers are in America, it is being disseminated in America. If people choose to go online and view American websites then that's their choice, and our government could choose to firewall foreign sites, as the Chinese do, but not enforce laws on people abroad who have had no right to vote on those laws.
It is undemocratic to apply a law to someone who has no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
In Russia it is a criminal act to criticise their military or decision to go to war against Ukraine. Should Russia be entitled to enforce that law on its critics abroad?
Or does its jurisprudence end and its borders thank goodness.
That’s just garbage.
Product regulations and all local laws are applied to people who have no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
If you want to operate in business in the UK even if via a virtual setup then you are required to abide by British laws.
4chan is selling a service to a UK customer. It doesn’t matter where services are provided from, they are required to abide by UK law or not sell their service to UK customers.
4chan is free to view, isn't it? They're not selling a service to a UK customer.
Providing a service, sorry
In America, on American servers to American laws, yes. They're not exporting.
Should OGH and PB be liable to Russian laws if a Russian logs into this site?
If they publish in Russia, then the service is subject to Russian regulation.
The whole "they shall NOT come here to enforece" is just an NY lawyer stirring a straw man he has made up.
"Farage is not selling out, he is just preparing Reform for government If the current political insurgency fails, what will follow will be genuinely nasty and truly far Right Tim Stanley"
I can only presume Labour has internal polling or focus group responses that tell them that these attack lines on Reform are going to work, because they seem like transparent bullshit to me, but I’m obviously not the target voter they have in mind:
“Rayner says Farage ‘failing young women’ with plan to scrap Online Safety Act”
Either that, or they’re getting a bit panicky about the whole thing. I note in passing that 4Chan have stuck two fingers up to OFCOM after being threatened with a £20k fine plus daily penalties for being in contravention of the OSA.
It’s also notable that they’re making no effort whatsoever to defend the act itself or engage with any of the criticism of it - it’s all ad hominem attacks on the critics.
Yes, quite
They have almost certainly seen terrible polling on this. Especially with young people
Just for the record, the OSA has widespread across all age groups according to the polling. Even a majority of Reform voters are in favour, and woman and parents by a huge majority. Weirdly, it's young people and parents who think it will be most effective, with older people more sceptical.
I think it's a pretty effective thing for Labour to pursue. There is a broad the consensus that the internet is a very bad thing for kids and some techbros making a fuss about it are unlikely to change anyone's mind about that.
My guess is that lots of people like the idea. They’re not going to like the implementation of that idea when / if it affects them directly.
The government could have come up with a anonymity preserving cryptographic token to demonstrate that you were over 18. But they’re not actually interested in anything like that because the goal isn’t to stop under 18s viewing things that under 18s probably shouldn’t - the goal has always been to use that understandable goal to gain some kind of governmental control over the hated US social media companies. That this process will inevitably throw any nascent UK ”Internet” companies under the proverbial bus in the process (admittedly there probably aren’t going to be any, but still) is a small price to pay for these people.
Gone With the Wind, both book and film, we're not works of historical scholarship, but rather were works to profit from and feed the "Lost Cause" mythology of the antebellum South.
This was surprisingly popular even outside the CSA, for example films like "Birth of a Nation" or "The General"
This mythology lives on, so we see MAGA Americans flying Confederate flags alongside their enemy, the Stars and Stripes.
I recall it was only a few years ago that freethinking PBers were desperate to see the turgid masterpiece after HBO (temporarily) pulled it from public view. How many could actually be arsed to watch it after its return is another question.
Comments
It is undemocratic to apply a law to someone who has no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
In Russia it is a criminal act to criticise their military or decision to go to war against Ukraine. Should Russia be entitled to enforce that law on its critics abroad?
Or does its jurisprudence end and its borders thank goodness.
Yes move from Ni to'income tax although they’ve boxed themselves in by ruling out any tax increases.
See the rocket like takeoff of GDP post Empire.
The final step is to demand that all ISPs and VPN block the IP addresses for 4Chan. All the VPNs that don’t comply will get the same treatment.
So you have a mechanism to impose U.K. online censorship.
Bill Kristol
@BillKristol
They say, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
— Jeremiah 6.14
https://x.com/BillKristol/status/1957136192907952401
Equality for discriminated against rich white pupils in private schools !!! Revolution !!!
And intellectual wing of the something or other are out and about:
Talking about self-defence.
I am in the UK, and that's straight-up bull shit.
Explain the woman in Canary Wharf getting arrested for defending her blind sister? The system's broken. Lucy connoly got arrested for a tweet yet saying it's ok to slit the throats of right wingers? That's fine, apparently...
https://x.com/KyleBeesley01/status/1957117114159948083
(Leaving aside Lucy Connolly and the gibberish, the other one turned up at the Britannia Hotel with a meat cleaver - self defence !
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gqwj1v0wdo .
She has a very valid point about the original offence - 22 year old from the Hotel had allegedly tricked his way into her flat, and the alleged perp has been arrested.)
(And also, to be fair, Chinese investors looking for safe havens for their money.)
'From their oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they lay waste to the land and call it peace.'
I think there was one in Scotland?
There was a PB competition entry question about that but my hazy memory only recalls one so far.
So they need to do all they can do to make it such.
See Gerry Adams in Belfast early on deliberately letting his community suffer to shore up the outrage and motivate militancy.
They have almost certainly seen terrible polling on this. Especially with young people
Reform gain from Labour after the Labour MP misunderstood what connecting with the voters meant.
Multiple people I know have had bikes stolen with hidden trackers. Police say they won’t do anything.
Quite a few years back, a boss had his 5 figure bike lifted. Once he told the police that, they sprang into action. Apparently theft over £20k was a special kind of serious?
They caught the guy - at the magistrates he claimed it was unfair that fingerprints etc had been used for a bike theft…
We're not catching people. And even if we do catch them, they're not being successfully prosecuted.
It's an extraordinary shame that we have a PM who seems to care so little about the legal system.
They might have been using ballpark figures and I might have got it wrong but if not quite mind boggling......
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bonus-episode-the-panic-driving-europes-leaders-to/id1640878689?i=1000722305549
Product regulations and all local laws are applied to people who have no opportunity to vote for the passage, repeal or amendment of that law.
If you want to operate in business in the UK even if via a virtual setup then you are required to abide by British laws.
4chan is selling a service to a UK customer. It doesn’t matter where services are provided from, they are required to abide by UK law or not sell their service to UK customers.
It's selling advertising in the US to allow those advertisers to advertise to visitors from the UK who are visiting the site but haven't actually paid anything to visit the site...
Police not being interested in such crimes is nothing new, even when a conviction is given them on a plate.
Apologies to whoever it was if I mangled that explanation.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/2025/07/31/91334/2
Even Club 18-24 support the measures 57-31. Which is an awful lot better than most government measures get.
Clearly there are some people who are very unhappy with the OSA, and they're all online. (Looking at the other breaks, men are much less keen than women, and Reformites less keen than other political persuasions. The brute politics might be that the attacks on Reform over the OSA are aimed at those mysterious lady types.) But even if it's a bad idea, it's a popular bad idea. Will of the people and all that.
It is far cheaper to buy the natural resources we want from foreign countries than to occupy them.
I have OPINIONS
Hollywood stuntman set on fire for famous album cover dies
https://x.com/SkyNews/status/1957163945082380594
SMT see all of the above as bad. The line coppers tend to be up for it, but are ordered not to.
4chan aren't selling anything to UK customers. If they do then VAT or other local taxes and laws could apply, but they're not.
UK visitors going to an American website aren't being sold anything.
If a Russian visitor reads someone in the Guardian criticising Putin should Russian laws forbidding that apply?
*titanium fires are generally regarded as inextinguishable. Magnesium is for slackers.
@BarakRavid
·
1h
More than 200K Israelis (according to the organizers) protested tonight in Tel Aviv, calling for a deal for the release of the hostages and ending the war in Gaza (Video: Yair Palti)
https://x.com/BarakRavid/status/1957139907941662934
I knew I had this in my notes somewhere: last March, Meloni floated the idea of NATO-like guarantees at a European leaders summit in Brussels. The Italian premier was clear-eyed Ukraine would not join NATO anytime soon but the solution could be found “nell'arco” meaning in the sphere of the alliance - without being a member of NATO, but backed by some of its most powerful members - modeled on Article 5. In the same summit, Meloni also suggested the conclusions approved by leaders at the end of the session should carry an acknowledgement by Europe to Trump’s peace efforts (America would be needed) as well as stronger references to the transatlantic relation, per source at the time. At the time, Meloni was not onboard with some of the ideas coming out of Paris and believed this would be more useful, although there was convergence around the fact that a fair peace required the strongest of guarantees. Question was how.
Funnily enough, the idea didn’t really run far at the time on the basis that you’re either a member of NATO or you’re not. You’re either covered by article 5 or you’re not. On top of the operational questions around how far the US would back it as well as the criteria that would trigger it. The idea has been revived now. The problem? The questions around it remain largely the same. European delegation heads to Washington tomorrow, including Meloni.
https://x.com/mariatad/status/1957166716665888772
Tim Worstall tells stories of how dodgy middlemen would try and sell him raw ore for cobalt etc. at prices far above the market rate. From all the war torn places.
It’s cheaper to buy from a properly run mine that uses machines instead of child slave labour.
The perception otherwise is somewhat skewed by the fact that the majority of secondary school age children in private education attend schools that are charitable foundations, although the proportion has been dropping because contrary to popular belief it is not that advantageous for school to be a charity rather than a business, particularly not when it needs to borrow money.
Schools that are taken over by any company including a Chinese company automatically become businesses anyway which to judge from your comment you would approve of.
As long ago as 1776, Adam Smith demonstrated that free labour is more productive than slave labour.
It’s also a classic “this costs money before it saves money, in timescales longer than a Parliament” problem.
So, farewell then, Reform UK’s little
@joseph_boam
, sacked as Deputy Leader of Leicestershire County Council.
Couldn’t do the job, didn’t do the job, never had the skills to do the job, never put in the effort.
The very epitome of yet another Reform failure.
https://x.com/jdpoc/status/1957150490526990378
You're gonna fly, you're never gonna die
P. J. O'Rourke maybe said it better: "Russia has never had a Renaissance; it has never had a Reformation. Such Industrial Revolution as it had was nipped and twisted by the Communists. Russia had no Roaring 20s, no Booming 50s, no Swinging 60s, no Me Generation. It's been just one Them Generation after another."
Russia is a weak state- "Nigeria with nuclear weapons" as some wit dubbed it. When Prigrozhin made his move, no one was prepared to defend then regime, but Prigrozhin bottled it and paid with his life. Russia started a war against a staggeringly weaker country and they have now taken in three and a half years more casualties than Britain did in the entire six years of the Second World War,
Putin, the epitome of the lazy and brain dead Brezhnev-era bureaucrat, has nevertheless become a zombie feeding on the flesh of over a million war casualties.
(I guess we all feel nostalgic towards our youth, its probably why Putin likes Brezhnev, Trump likes McCarthyism and Leon likes the 1970s bovver boys)
In the film, I always hear, 'Gentlemen, you haven't got a canning factory in the whole south.' But when I watched it with subtitles the other day, it said 'Gentlemen, you haven!t got a cannon factory in the whole south.'
The latter is bollocks on stilts for all sorts of reasons, but the former would be (a) true and (b) logical.
I've never read the book - is it in there and if so, which version is it?
Police offers are employed. And array of lawyers, from the least, to the highest judges. Also many, many civil servants in the justice ministries - dont forget devolved government. Great judgements are handed down. Laws passed.
All the producers of the law are happy. What else is there?
"Why, he means the boys are a passel of fools!" thought Scarlett indignantly, the hot blood coming to her cheeks.
Evidently, she was not the only one to whom this idea occurred, for several of the boys were beginning to stick out their chins. John Wilkes casually but swiftly came back to his place beside the speaker, as if to impress on all present that this man was his guest and that, moreover, there were ladies present.
"The trouble with most of us Southerners," continued Rhett Butler, "is that we either don't travel enough or we don't profit enough by our travels. Now, of course, all you gentlemen are well traveled. But what have you seen? Europe and New York and Philadelphia and, of course, the ladies have been to Saratoga" (he bowed slightly to the group under the arbor). "You've seen the hotels and the museums and the balls and the gambling houses. And you've come home believing that there's no place like the South. As for me, I was Charleston born, but I have spent the last few years in the North." His white teeth showed in a grin, as though he realized that everyone present knew just why he no longer lived in Charleston, and cared not at all if they did know. "I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who'd be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines—all the things we haven't got. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They'd lick us in a month."
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200161h.html
(I mean, the largest cannon factory in the whole USA was only in Virginia...)
Thanks.
From his America First isolationist point of view why should he?
https://x.com/zelenskyyua/status/1956813600300958028
Photo source appears to be AP from the watermark, and it’s being retweeted by dozens of credible Ukranian sources in the past hour. Wanting to send a signal perhaps?
https://x.com/ukraine_map/status/1957161930168365461
Looks interesting. The basic airframe looks ballistic, but with an air breathing engine pod…. Hmmm…
Edit - looks like some of heavy cruise missile projects from the 50s. Which were ditched in favour of full ballistic missiles.
What does he do if China invades Taiwan, or Putin wants Alaska back?
It's another thing he promised his base and didn't deliver.
https://x.com/maks_nafo_fella/status/1957162120262648109
Ground launched, jet powered with rocket assistance, 1,000kg warhead, 3,000km range, endurance 4 hours @900km/h, weight 6,000kg, wingspan 6,000mm.
Looks suitably nasty.
Should OGH and PB be liable to Russian laws if a Russian logs into this site?
Would be a shame if their new Flamingos were heading for the Kerch Bridge.
Which is why Scud missiles look very like a V2
Because they were designed by the designers of the V2 and used their plans for bigger and better follow ons.
The Soviet cruise missile projects were all from that stuff.
The US looked at this for a while, as well. Then Minuteman and Polaris came good and changed the game
I think it's a pretty effective thing for Labour to pursue. There is a broad the consensus that the internet is a very bad thing for kids and some techbros making a fuss about it are unlikely to change anyone's mind about that.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-age-checks-are-sceptical-effectiveness-and-unwilling-share-id
I can see a dozen blue and yellow ones out of my window as I type.
Job done for Trump 2.0 aides.
This was surprisingly popular even outside the CSA, for example films like "Birth of a Nation" or "The General"
This mythology lives on, so we see MAGA Americans flying Confederate flags alongside their enemy, the Stars and Stripes.
The whole navy will end up in Vladivostok.
The whole "they shall NOT come here to enforece" is just an NY lawyer stirring a straw man he has made up.
ChatGPT is driving people mad
AI software is fuelling paranoid episodes in users – some of which have ended in tragedy
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/17/chatgpt-is-driving-people-mad/
"Farage is not selling out, he is just preparing Reform for government
If the current political insurgency fails, what will follow will be genuinely nasty and truly far Right
Tim Stanley"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/17/farage-not-selling-out-just-preparing-reform-for-government
The government could have come up with a anonymity preserving cryptographic token to demonstrate that you were over 18. But they’re not actually interested in anything like that because the goal isn’t to stop under 18s viewing things that under 18s probably shouldn’t - the goal has always been to use that understandable goal to gain some kind of governmental control over the hated US social media companies. That this process will inevitably throw any nascent UK ”Internet” companies under the proverbial bus in the process (admittedly there probably aren’t going to be any, but still) is a small price to pay for these people.