Young Republicans drawn to Holocaust denial and racism – politicalbetting.com
Young Republicans drawn to Holocaust denial and racism – politicalbetting.com
The Manhattan Institute has done a detailed poll of Republican Party supporters and the different groups they might fall into. The whole thing is worth reading, but one result that jumps out is on conspiracy theories.
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Here’s a musical treat
https://youtu.be/4D6_IhZA9Cg?si=mGkjask2j_u08dCV
I wonder if there is some confusion somewhere - much as those Tories used to claim how inflation had dropped, immediately after prices had increased by around 10% the previous year, and it didn't seem to work on the public.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_KXvjOJ7YA
Nor do people understand how much the government spends on different things. Asked which were the top three things on which their tax money is spent, 22% still picked MPs expenses – 15 years after that scandal broke and despite the fact IPSA’s current budget represents roughly 0.001% of all government spending. Meanwhile 27% of the population and 24% of Labour 2024 voters said that migrants and asylum seekers were one of the top three items the government spends the most on.
https://portland-communications.com/uk-politics/budget-build-up-why-labour-is-on-a-collision-course-with-voters-on-tax/
And that's in the UK, where our news media still aren't as bad as they are Stateside.
On a similar note, for the Black Sabbath-inclined among us (feel forward to start at 0.30): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMA-D9LLiuk&list=RDGMA-D9LLiuk&start_radio=1
Apparently there are two massive cocks on the video and it tripped the filter.
How can a historically documented event, with video and picture evidence it happened simply be debunked by anyone other than fringe cranks ?
The thing I took away is like a lot of the leaders of the extremes they aren’t stupid but also aren’t remotely as clever as they think they are. This isn’t the good news people would hope for as we’ve seen through history that a lot of the big extreme leaders through history aren’t super brains but they tap into that market where enough people think they have the answers and they don’t expose themselves to proper scrutiny and so look like they are the answer. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin etc weren’t known for being philosopher kings.
And if you don't know anyone who voted Democrat, how could they possibly have won the election?
This tendency was kept in check for a long time, because we had a succession of leaders who were prepared to tell their own supporters the truth.
Now we have a leader who tells people what they want to hear: it's not your fault, you were robbed, etc.
Unfortunately, it's unbelievably corrosive.
You're bang on with exotic shops and restaurants of course.
Most people's local hotels aren't full of asylum seekers but my guess is that most people know a local hotel which is - and they are a very visible reminder of immigrants.
Mass popular participation in opinion about world things is extremely new. I very much doubt if our current media climate is especially good at curating it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mbUdsQfSq0
Senility isn't kind, is it?
There weren't any local asylum hotels, so he invented one out of thin air.
What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What about the GULAG? What about the Bengal Famine? What about Jim Crow?
Those arguments will suffice for stupid people.
And another gulf too; the gulf between those interested in truth and facts in themselves, and those whose passion is knowing their stuff so that they can know how to monetise and manipulate them especially to an audience of the less well informed.
And all so that horny technerds could see pictures of naked ladies.
ETA: It's not just stupid people- it's also busy people, or people confronted with stuff they don't know much about. And when push comes to shove, it's pretty easy to manipulate clever people as well.
To give an example from today, Trump calling Sadiq Khan a "horrible, vicious, disgusting mayor". None of this is true, even if one doesn't like London's mayor or his politics. But, no doubt amplified by Musk, it will become "the truth" to a majority of people who don't know better. I find this frightening.
Seems par for the course, not ironic.
Tarquin would approve.
I can’t emphasize enough how much you need to watch this until the end
https://bsky.app/profile/cooperlund.online/post/3m7kzpgr7e22l
When social media became popular, he embraced it with enthusiasm as it provided him with justification and support for his wacky beliefs as well as providing a platform for him to spread his pearls of wisdom. Of late, though, things seem to have taken a more sinister turn. Twitter and the like have convinced him that he actually is the great intellectual that he always considered himself to be and that the modesty of his achievements are actually due to suppression and conspiracies by others. My once slightly dippy but amiable friend has now become a constantly angry bundle of rage and suspicion who is gradually alienating all of his old pals. It's all very sad.
There are many things, that the truth just no longer matters. Just keep repeating the lie and the truth goes away.
Being told I will be given one for work and must use it rather than my own Macbook - security etc. Only really using it for web access + Google voice.
Any experience?
Is there no actual bollocks you can quote to "whatabout"? If not, then making up your own is just bullshit.
I would generally recommend if you are primarily using the browser, have an Android phone to share apps and data with and don't need Windows specific applications, eg Office. You get a lot more performance per £ than Apple and avoid the Windows upgrade nightmares.
My view on conspiracy theories is quite simple - given humanity's general stupidity and incompetence, the likelihood of complex interconnected events as part of a larger plan is so implausible as to be not worth considering. Post hoc ergo propter hoc may be a nice way for some to explain the world and how it works but it doesn't work for me.
I incline more to the view most things are the result of ineptitude rather than insight and if we do something good or positive it's usually by accident rather than design. I know when I was working most of what I achieved was through accident - not all, some insight was involved but by no means all.
On to what we're here for and Trump and his gang seem to think they have some kind of moral crusade to conduct about "Europe" which is apparently in a kind of decadence and decline comparable to 4th century Rome. I don't see that at all - Trump's entitled to his opinion but he's entitled to be wrong and it's interesting to hear this kind of language because it was the language of many, incliding intelllectuals, in the 1920s - a sense of moral and political decline for which a new modernity of political thought was the answer and that applied wherever you felt the answer existed.
A century on and for all its faults, liberal democracy has done most people well. There are still challenges - child poverty, mental health and addiction woule count among my first three (but that's me) - but nothing I've heard from others suggests they have anything approaching solutions or anything which will improve the lives of most.
The objection is not to the flow but rather to the presence of immigrants at all.
Hence all the discussion of mass deportation on the right.
I would have to give up PB if I wasn’t allowed to post under a nom de guerre.
Many of these arguments simply follow from the current bien pensant view that Churchill was a terrible racist who is responsible for famine in Bengal, that the Americans were (and presumably still are) white supremacists…and we haven’t even got to the Zionist part.
I like @viewcode idea that anything more complicated than chronological order for comments and posts means editorial control by the hosting company.
Maybe they should be forced to show examples of harm at the top of the page like cigarette packets.
"Steve lost all his friends, his marriage and his job after going down a far-right racist rabbit hole here."
"Emma committed suicide after being bullied on our platform for months"
Etc
Personally I would say either Open Mind or Market are reasonable assessments on the evidence. Personally I would call it for Market because there is quite strong evidence for it, but this is not a situation where we must make decisions off the back of incomplete knowledge so we could decide to keep it completely open.
We tax so many things which are not negative externalities extremely highly. Yet shy away from heavily taxing something which clearly does harm to many in society. They are global so we can't tax profits - so tax revenues.
I appreciate the difficulty around banning anonymity etc. But it feels like we're at the "well we've tried nothing, and that hasn't worked, so we're all out of ideas" stage.
Heavy tax and health warnings reduces smoking usage. Do the same for social media. We either raise lots of revenue, reduce social media usage, or a bit of both. All good outcomes.
Rather weirdly he kept his enthusiasm for Lee "Scratch" Perry. Possibly he was just following the trajectory of most skinheads, from Ska to White Power. He died of bowel cancer in his fifties.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/12/09/chocolate-prices-jump-by-a-fifth-in-run-up-to-christmas/ (£££)
Not just RAM, apparently. Of course, earlier this year some chocolate biscuit brands reduced their cocoa content so much they can no longer call themselves chocolate biscuits.
Either that or he's having a fit about not being able to get the Peace prize as it moves out with his reach. He'll just have to make do with FIFA's award.
The experiences of people in their communities counts for far more than Government numbers and the widespread perception remains of an immigration system which is out of control and of preferential treatment being afforded (literally) to asylum seekers to the detriment of the indigenous population. Add to that the sense of cultural and economic identity being threatened and undermined by "outsiders" and you can see why the debate is where it is and talk of wholesale deportations of individuals and even social groups is in the mainstream.
This has worked to the advantage of individuals and groups whose view on migrants is somewhere between unfriendly and downright hostile but this view has been aided and abetted by the failure of successive Governments to be seen to be acting in what the indigenous population considers a "fair" manner. I think if you asked a lot of people whether migrants should be housed in 4-star hotels, old army camps or in tents in fields, the Canvas Party would likely win a majority.
At work we have been talking to Google about various things, and one of them is the Secure Enterprise Browser. The pitch is that since (almost) everything you need to do at work is via a browser, if you put all your security controls in the browser you can do away with an entire stack of network gear, all of which is required just to stop bad things happening at your machine.
I will be surprised if we go that route since we are currently a Microsoft shop, but if the price is right...
We need to stop expecting taxpayers to fund the state broadcaster. Let it seek its funding in the marketplace.
Trump: It was an understanding that Ukraine would not be going into NATO. This was long before Putin, in all fairness.
And now they pushed, you know, when Zelensky first went in and first met Putin, he said, “I want two things. I want Crimea back and we’re going to be a member of NATO.” He didn’t say it in a very nice way either.
https://x.com/SavchenkoReview/status/1998355621947596859
Zelensky said the exact opposite, on both issues, when he met Putin (for the only time) in 2019 - offering referendums in both Crimea and Donbass.
Putin's public causus belli was, of course, Ukraine's wish to join the EU.
He took a slight hit in the credibility when he described probability as being the same as frequency and put out a one line exercise in algebra (which he got wrong) as a proof.
Not terribly surprising when you realise the only training he had in Bayesian statistics was a three day course in how to manage sonar equipment when he was a technician in the US Coastguard.
I rarely watch TV news, I’m not alone there, and what little I do BBC News is just as crap as ITV News.
There is no justification for the license fee in this day and age and has not been for a while. This is something I have argued for, the abolition of it, for over three decades. We will win eventually
Okay, we were viewing what an employee had viewed on his laptop before we decided to terminate him or not.
On direction of travel, I agree you will win.