Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
Sure, you are quite within your rights to still have a poor opinion of the guy. I said on the previous thread that reading his apology brought Leon to mind. Make of that what you will.
But we don't have to like everyone who is a British citizen to get along peaceably.
The Guardian article about his apology references an essay he had written addressing these tweets following the withdrawal of his nomination for that prize, so that suggests many of those who supported him felt he had apologised and disowned them already.
The Guardian article is really just a friendly defence piece for AAF about how he feels and not, in any way, scrutiny of what he said or what he thinks.
Reputation management.
‘ He included a chapter in his book of essays setting out why he had written about armed struggle against Israel. The book had been sent to most MPs, including the prime minister and the then foreign secretary, David Lammy, but the chapter in the book did not fully address some of the most aggressive and shocking tweets, or their sheer volume.’
He is a British citizen, unfortunately, so we have to accept that and hopefully, as I say, he will become a productive hard working contributor and not a burden.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
Sure, you are quite within your rights to still have a poor opinion of the guy. I said on the previous thread that reading his apology brought Leon to mind. Make of that what you will.
But we don't have to like everyone who is a British citizen to get along peaceably.
The Guardian article about his apology references an essay he had written addressing these tweets following the withdrawal of his nomination for that prize, so that suggests many of those who supported him felt he had apologised and disowned them already.
Worth adding that the Guardian article has this to say about that earlier "apology".
He included a chapter in his book of essays setting out why he had written about armed struggle against Israel. The book had been sent to most MPs, including the prime minister and the then foreign secretary, David Lammy, but the chapter in the book did not fully address some of the most aggressive and shocking tweets, or their sheer volume.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
Sure, you are quite within your rights to still have a poor opinion of the guy. I said on the previous thread that reading his apology brought Leon to mind. Make of that what you will.
But we don't have to like everyone who is a British citizen to get along peaceably.
The Guardian article about his apology references an essay he had written addressing these tweets following the withdrawal of his nomination for that prize, so that suggests many of those who supported him felt he had apologised and disowned them already.
The Guardian article is really just a friendly defence piece for AAF about how he feels and not, in any way, scrutiny of what he said or what he thinks.
Reputation management.
‘ He included a chapter in his book of essays setting out why he had written about armed struggle against Israel. The book had been sent to most MPs, including the prime minister and the then foreign secretary, David Lammy, but the chapter in the book did not fully address some of the most aggressive and shocking tweets, or their sheer volume.’
He is a British citizen, unfortunately, so we have to accept that and hopefully, as I say, he will become a productive hard working contributor and not a burden.
I am kinda amused that we picked out the same paragraph from the Guardian article.
Interesting piece in the Guardian on an European YouGov poll on state pensions
Most Europeans think state pensions will become unaffordable, polling shows YouGov survey finds many say payments are too low and oppose reforms such as raising retirement age or cuts
Most Europeans believe their country’s state pension system will soon become unaffordable – but they also think the current scheme is not generous enough, and do not support options for overhauling it such as raising the retirement age.
As populations age and fertility rates decline, Europe’s “pay as you go” state pension systems, cornerstones of the welfare state that have always relied on people in work paying the retirees’ pensions, are coming under increasingly heavy pressure.
With attempts to reform them meeting stiff and sometimes violent resistance in countries including France, Germany, Spain and Italy, a six-country YouGov poll reveals the extent of the public-opinion problem governments face.
Many people acknowledge state pension schemes are in trouble: majorities of between 61% and 52% in Italy, France, Germany and Spain said theirs was already unaffordable, as well as 45% of respondents in Poland. In the UK the figure was 32%.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
Sure, you are quite within your rights to still have a poor opinion of the guy. I said on the previous thread that reading his apology brought Leon to mind. Make of that what you will.
But we don't have to like everyone who is a British citizen to get along peaceably.
The Guardian article about his apology references an essay he had written addressing these tweets following the withdrawal of his nomination for that prize, so that suggests many of those who supported him felt he had apologised and disowned them already.
The Guardian article is really just a friendly defence piece for AAF about how he feels and not, in any way, scrutiny of what he said or what he thinks.
Reputation management.
‘ He included a chapter in his book of essays setting out why he had written about armed struggle against Israel. The book had been sent to most MPs, including the prime minister and the then foreign secretary, David Lammy, but the chapter in the book did not fully address some of the most aggressive and shocking tweets, or their sheer volume.’
He is a British citizen, unfortunately, so we have to accept that and hopefully, as I say, he will become a productive hard working contributor and not a burden.
I am kinda amused that we picked out the same paragraph from the Guardian article.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
Yes, when we have millions upon millions of people who apparently want to become British to choose from, it baffles me that we choose to bring in the ones who apparently don't like Britain very much.
Interesting piece in the Guardian on an European YouGov poll on state pensions
Most Europeans think state pensions will become unaffordable, polling shows YouGov survey finds many say payments are too low and oppose reforms such as raising retirement age or cuts
Most Europeans believe their country’s state pension system will soon become unaffordable – but they also think the current scheme is not generous enough, and do not support options for overhauling it such as raising the retirement age.
As populations age and fertility rates decline, Europe’s “pay as you go” state pension systems, cornerstones of the welfare state that have always relied on people in work paying the retirees’ pensions, are coming under increasingly heavy pressure.
With attempts to reform them meeting stiff and sometimes violent resistance in countries including France, Germany, Spain and Italy, a six-country YouGov poll reveals the extent of the public-opinion problem governments face.
Many people acknowledge state pension schemes are in trouble: majorities of between 61% and 52% in Italy, France, Germany and Spain said theirs was already unaffordable, as well as 45% of respondents in Poland. In the UK the figure was 32%.
Pensions and health. We can't afford either in line with people's current expectations.
Trouble brewing for whoever are our overlords. But there will be no honesty on either subject from politicians going into the next election. Theresa May tried that - and ended up relying on Ulstermen for her tenure in 10 Downing Street.
Interesting piece in the Guardian on an European YouGov poll on state pensions
Most Europeans think state pensions will become unaffordable, polling shows YouGov survey finds many say payments are too low and oppose reforms such as raising retirement age or cuts
Most Europeans believe their country’s state pension system will soon become unaffordable – but they also think the current scheme is not generous enough, and do not support options for overhauling it such as raising the retirement age.
As populations age and fertility rates decline, Europe’s “pay as you go” state pension systems, cornerstones of the welfare state that have always relied on people in work paying the retirees’ pensions, are coming under increasingly heavy pressure.
With attempts to reform them meeting stiff and sometimes violent resistance in countries including France, Germany, Spain and Italy, a six-country YouGov poll reveals the extent of the public-opinion problem governments face.
Many people acknowledge state pension schemes are in trouble: majorities of between 61% and 52% in Italy, France, Germany and Spain said theirs was already unaffordable, as well as 45% of respondents in Poland. In the UK the figure was 32%.
Pensions and health. We can't afford either in line with people's current expectations.
Trouble brewing for whoever are our overlords. But there will be no honesty on either subject from politicians going into the next election. Theresa May tried that - and ended up relying on Ulstermen for her tenure in 10 Downing Street.
In the UK we do though have more with private pensions that most OECD nations. We need to build those up so state pensions are only relied on mainly by the poorest pensioners and means test the triple lock ultimately just for them
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
If he'd make so many 'jokes' about genociding any group other than white people, I'm fairly sure none of those people would have touched his case with a barge pole.
Isn't there a song that Blair used to use which seemed to say the reverse?
yes and people stupidly believed him
Scotland's Tony Blair.
Scottish my arse
C'mon, nothing like several years at Fettes to confirm one's Scottishness.
That notwithstanding, he seemed to have a vast lack of comprehension of Scotland. Turns out George Robertson wasn't the only 'Devolution will kill nationalism stone dead' numpty in New Labour.
'NEWLY released cabinet papers reveal that Tony Blair believed Labour’s devolution settlement had "lanced the boil of separatism" in Scotland and Wales. In a 2004 cabinet discussion on extending powers to Wales, the then prime minister dismissed calls for full law-making authority for the Welsh Assembly, arguing there was “no appetite” in either Wales or Scotland for further devolution. Blair claimed that Labour’s reforms had already “lanced the boil of separatism”.'
It didn't of course, though Scots and Welsh voters can't complain as much when the UK has a Tory government now they have their own parliaments for much domestic policy.
If the split on the right sees the Tories and Reform combined win a narrow majority in England but with Labour winning a plurality of English seats and a UK majority with SNP and LD support then I suspect calls for an English parliament will start to grow again too
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
The question is perhaps the other way around. If there are few Reform backers in a fairly pluralist site like this one, could it be that voters are being hoodwinked by media astroturfing? That actually, Reform does not have the same kind of supporters as other parties. In which case, of course it is foolish to try to create "balance", because no such balance exists.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
If he'd make so many 'jokes' about genociding any group other than white people, I'm fairly sure none of those people would have touched his case with a barge pole.
If they knew his social media history, 90%+ of the political class wouldn't have been anywhere near him either.
So the question stands - how should politicians know about our social media history from many years ago?
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
The question is perhaps the other way around. If there are few Reform backers in a fairly pluralist site like this one, could it be that voters are being hoodwinked by media astroturfing? That actually, Reform does not have the same kind of supporters as other parties. In which case, of course it is foolish to try to create "balance", because no such balance exists.
No, more Reform is strongest amongst the white working class and most on here are upper middle class and graduates
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
The question is perhaps the other way around. If there are few Reform backers in a fairly pluralist site like this one, could it be that voters are being hoodwinked by media astroturfing? That actually, Reform does not have the same kind of supporters as other parties. In which case, of course it is foolish to try to create "balance", because no such balance exists.
We had a real election where Reform got 30 percent of the vote. Just because Reform voters do not post here, does not mean they do not exist.
Xi clear faces a significant struggle to maintain control over the Party, and there is evidence that he will not maintain his grip for much longer.
What's this evidence? (Not at all saying you're wrong, this is just the first time I've heard about him struggling to maintain control of his party.)
There was quite the commentary around the forth plenum that almost all of the PLA Generals that were purged were allies of/appointed by Xi, whereas General Zhang Youxia was successfully creating a cadre of Generals in general opposed to Xi's policies.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
The question is perhaps the other way around. If there are few Reform backers in a fairly pluralist site like this one, could it be that voters are being hoodwinked by media astroturfing? That actually, Reform does not have the same kind of supporters as other parties. In which case, of course it is foolish to try to create "balance", because no such balance exists.
We had a real election where Reform got 30 percent of the vote. Just because Reform voters do not post here, does not mean they do not exist.
They also have more party members than the Tories if you are drawing a distinction between "supporters" and "voters"
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
Agreed.
Though in my view that is partly a feature of Reform supporters being (currently) relatively low-information voters.
For example I am bang in the target market as a Green voter (and have been so in the past) but don't currently vote for them because despite all my biases pointing towards them, I try not to disengage from economic reality in such a way as would be needed to tick their box.
This site is (mostly) full of realists and it is hard to be both a realist and a Reform (or Green) voter.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
Thanks for sharing the interview.
I agree with him on it and have raised this point myself many times. It is also (and I would not expect him to mention this) Reform Party policy to cease paying commercial banks interest on their QE holdings.
Listening to the rest of the interview is somewhat frustrating, as I think his narrative about climate change is disingenuous. But that isn't unique to him - it is pretty much across the board with those of like mind.
He also doesn't address the mobility of wealth - or simply its foreign ownership. He raises the case of the Cargill family profiteering from poor cocoa harvests - that family is American. What are we to do about it? The best thing we can really do in this instance is attract their wealth by making Britain a playground for them. But that's so far from the red/green prescription it's in another galaxy.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
I suspect the West might see a private sector solution, though the US is making a start on a public-private partnership with the data-scraping requirements at the border. We already have credit reference agencies, which when you take a step back to think about them are quite a remarkable intrusion into people's privacy and control over their own data.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
If he'd make so many 'jokes' about genociding any group other than white people, I'm fairly sure none of those people would have touched his case with a barge pole.
If they knew his social media history, 90%+ of the political class wouldn't have been anywhere near him either.
So the question stands - how should politicians know about our social media history from many years ago?
They could stop funding the kind of NGOs that were aware of the kind of things he posted and didn't think they were disqualifying.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
I suspect the West might see a private sector solution, though the US is making a start on a public-private partnership with the data-scraping requirements at the border. We already have credit reference agencies, which when you take a step back to think about them are quite a remarkable intrusion into people's privacy and control over their own data.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Depends what sort of cookie. If it isn't the Good Housekeeping kind ...
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
The question is perhaps the other way around. If there are few Reform backers in a fairly pluralist site like this one, could it be that voters are being hoodwinked by media astroturfing? That actually, Reform does not have the same kind of supporters as other parties. In which case, of course it is foolish to try to create "balance", because no such balance exists.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
If he'd make so many 'jokes' about genociding any group other than white people, I'm fairly sure none of those people would have touched his case with a barge pole.
If they knew his social media history, 90%+ of the political class wouldn't have been anywhere near him either.
So the question stands - how should politicians know about our social media history from many years ago?
They could stop funding the kind of NGOs that were aware of the kind of things he posted and didn't think they were disqualifying.
How on earth would that help the politicians know what he posted?
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
If he'd make so many 'jokes' about genociding any group other than white people, I'm fairly sure none of those people would have touched his case with a barge pole.
If they knew his social media history, 90%+ of the political class wouldn't have been anywhere near him either.
So the question stands - how should politicians know about our social media history from many years ago?
Well its not just his online history he wrote a mea culpa when barred from an award he’d been nominated for.
Businesses check the online history of candidates for possible reputational issues. Politicians have researchers who should do this when they’re looking to heartily endorse them.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 - free speach has limits. See the famous “Shouting fire in a theatre” example.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
If he'd make so many 'jokes' about genociding any group other than white people, I'm fairly sure none of those people would have touched his case with a barge pole.
If they knew his social media history, 90%+ of the political class wouldn't have been anywhere near him either.
So the question stands - how should politicians know about our social media history from many years ago?
They could stop funding the kind of NGOs that were aware of the kind of things he posted and didn't think they were disqualifying.
How on earth would that help the politicians know what he posted?
They wouldn't have needed to know what he posted. He would never have been on their radar as a cause célèbre in the first place.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
The question is perhaps the other way around. If there are few Reform backers in a fairly pluralist site like this one, could it be that voters are being hoodwinked by media astroturfing? That actually, Reform does not have the same kind of supporters as other parties. In which case, of course it is foolish to try to create "balance", because no such balance exists.
We had a real election where Reform got 30 percent of the vote. Just because Reform voters do not post here, does not mean they do not exist.
They also have more party members than the Tories if you are drawing a distinction between "supporters" and "voters"
I suspect if they dared to post here they’d get a hostile welcome
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
If he'd make so many 'jokes' about genociding any group other than white people, I'm fairly sure none of those people would have touched his case with a barge pole.
If they knew his social media history, 90%+ of the political class wouldn't have been anywhere near him either.
So the question stands - how should politicians know about our social media history from many years ago?
Well its not just his online history he wrote a mea culpa when barred from an award he’d been nominated for.
Businesses check the online history of candidates for possible reputational issues. Politicians have researchers who should do this when they’re looking to heartily endorse them.
Given the furore when some civil servants deigned to buy some chairs last week, I can just imagine the headlines when they start paying researchers to snoop on our tweets from a decade ago.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
I suspect the West might see a private sector solution, though the US is making a start on a public-private partnership with the data-scraping requirements at the border. We already have credit reference agencies, which when you take a step back to think about them are quite a remarkable intrusion into people's privacy and control over their own data.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Depends what sort of cookie. If it isn't the Good Housekeeping kind ...
The simplest cookie recipe I know is this one.
Peanut butter cookies. 1 cup peanut butter 1 egg 3/4 cup sugar 8-10 minutes at 180C
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 - free speach has limits. See the famous “Shouting fire in a theatre” example.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
Yes, of course there are limits. Personally, I don't think Lucy Connolly's Tweet met the threshold for a custodial sentence. AAF's combined Tweets are worse, and potentially would meet it, but they aren't current and weren't done here (not sure what that means legally), so he doesn't clear the bar either.
It was extremely foolish to have the sort of luvvie public campaign around him, foolish to give him British citizenship as part of this campaign, foolish to post gushing Tweets about it when he entered the country. The whole thing is a grubby episode - and is an echo of the grubbiness of the whole Arab Spring.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
If he'd make so many 'jokes' about genociding any group other than white people, I'm fairly sure none of those people would have touched his case with a barge pole.
If they knew his social media history, 90%+ of the political class wouldn't have been anywhere near him either.
So the question stands - how should politicians know about our social media history from many years ago?
Well its not just his online history he wrote a mea culpa when barred from an award he’d been nominated for.
Businesses check the online history of candidates for possible reputational issues. Politicians have researchers who should do this when they’re looking to heartily endorse them.
Given the furore when some civil servants deigned to buy some chairs last week, I can just imagine the headlines when they start paying researchers to snoop on our tweets from a decade ago.
Why ?
I have the impression that a large proportion of spads already spend most of their time on twatter.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 - free speach has limits. See the famous “Shouting fire in a theatre” example.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
It is worth reminding ourselves of what Connolly said, in the midst of a riot: "Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care."
I think you'd have to have an exceptionally liberal view on freedom of speech to think that is acceptable in the midst of a riot, when there really was a decent chance that people would be burnt alive in these hotels. Indeed, in the current climate, I remain astonished that she and those that actually did try to burn them down weren't prosecuted under the Terrorism Act. It makes other arrests under that legislation look trivial in comparison.
The one thing I entirely disagree with is the "naughty tweets" narrative. I think saying something like that on public social media, with a potentially enormous audience, is far far worse than in a private whatsapp group or with friends at the pub. Together with how febrile the atmosphere was at that time, it's well across the line in my view. The same goes for that Labour councillor who was acquitted.
(I haven't bothered to look a this other individuals's tweets in context.)
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
If he'd make so many 'jokes' about genociding any group other than white people, I'm fairly sure none of those people would have touched his case with a barge pole.
If they knew his social media history, 90%+ of the political class wouldn't have been anywhere near him either.
So the question stands - how should politicians know about our social media history from many years ago?
Well its not just his online history he wrote a mea culpa when barred from an award he’d been nominated for.
Businesses check the online history of candidates for possible reputational issues. Politicians have researchers who should do this when they’re looking to heartily endorse them.
Given the furore when some civil servants deigned to buy some chairs last week, I can just imagine the headlines when they start paying researchers to snoop on our tweets from a decade ago.
Interesting piece in the Guardian on an European YouGov poll on state pensions
Most Europeans think state pensions will become unaffordable, polling shows YouGov survey finds many say payments are too low and oppose reforms such as raising retirement age or cuts
Most Europeans believe their country’s state pension system will soon become unaffordable – but they also think the current scheme is not generous enough, and do not support options for overhauling it such as raising the retirement age.
As populations age and fertility rates decline, Europe’s “pay as you go” state pension systems, cornerstones of the welfare state that have always relied on people in work paying the retirees’ pensions, are coming under increasingly heavy pressure.
With attempts to reform them meeting stiff and sometimes violent resistance in countries including France, Germany, Spain and Italy, a six-country YouGov poll reveals the extent of the public-opinion problem governments face.
Many people acknowledge state pension schemes are in trouble: majorities of between 61% and 52% in Italy, France, Germany and Spain said theirs was already unaffordable, as well as 45% of respondents in Poland. In the UK the figure was 32%.
Pensions and health. We can't afford either in line with people's current expectations.
Trouble brewing for whoever are our overlords. But there will be no honesty on either subject from politicians going into the next election. Theresa May tried that - and ended up relying on Ulstermen for her tenure in 10 Downing Street.
The problem is often that 'reform options' include increasing taxes on workers and means testing state pensions for those with personal pensions.
One reform I would suggest is that anyone who opts out of enrolment in their workplace pension is deemed to have opted out of any state benefits when in retirement.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 - free speach has limits. See the famous “Shouting fire in a theatre” example.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
It is worth reminding ourselves of what Connolly said, in the midst of a riot: "Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care."
I think you'd have to have an exceptionally liberal view on freedom of speech to think that is acceptable in the midst of a riot, when there really was a decent chance that people would be burnt alive in these hotels. Indeed, in the current climate, I remain astonished that she and those that actually did try to burn them down weren't prosecuted under the Terrorism Act. It makes other arrests under that legislation look trivial in comparison.
The one thing I entirely disagree with is the "naughty tweets" narrative. I think saying something like that on public social media, with a potentially enormous audience, is far far worse than in a private whatsapp group or with friends at the pub. Together with how febrile the atmosphere was at that time, it's well across the line in my view. The same goes for that Labour councillor who was acquitted.
(I haven't bothered to look a this other individuals's tweets in context.)
LC pleaded guilty. She got the minimum sentence for the offence.
She cannot complain.
It wasn’t just the Labour councillor acquitted. Others have been both left and right.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
While agreeing with some of what you said, I would note that LC didn’t make just one comment. She also had a long track record of bigotry, IIRC.
AAF should not be held responsible for his sister’s comments. I don’t want to be held responsible for my sister’s and she won’t for mine!
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
You get sneered at or hounded on here if you challenge the groupthink on immigration, state spending, Trump or Ukraine. I only drop in occasionally now for that reason. I expect once the lull of having nothing to do between xmas and ny is over, I’ll be off for a while again too.
It’s a shame as it can be an unparalleled resource for understanding the world but it does need plurality of thought. I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short). Without Byronic (?) incessantly plugging away with the doom narrative I doubt I’d have made the trade in time. It’s a much much poorer place for Leon’s absence.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
While agreeing with some of what you said, I would note that LC didn’t make just one comment. She also had a long track record of bigotry, IIRC.
AAF should not be held responsible for his sister’s comments. I don’t want to be held responsible for my sister’s and she won’t for mine!
What did her 'track record of biggotry' consist of? Had she committed crimes, or just the crime of holding and expressing views that you disagree with?
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
Thanks for sharing the interview.
I agree with him on it and have raised this point myself many times. It is also (and I would not expect him to mention this) Reform Party policy to cease paying commercial banks interest on their QE holdings.
Listening to the rest of the interview is somewhat frustrating, as I think his narrative about climate change is disingenuous. But that isn't unique to him - it is pretty much across the board with those of like mind.
He also doesn't address the mobility of wealth - or simply its foreign ownership. He raises the case of the Cargill family profiteering from poor cocoa harvests - that family is American. What are we to do about it? The best thing we can really do in this instance is attract their wealth by making Britain a playground for them. But that's so far from the red/green prescription it's in another galaxy.
In turn thanks for giving up your time to listen to it.
Yes very much to your credit imv you have consistently raised BoE QE holdings, I confess until now I have never put in the time to fully understand the mechanisms by which this is costing us money (and I still don't fully understand the implications for our future creditworthiness of ceasing to pay interest).
Agreed on your other points. Though I would note he does better than most left-wing economists in at least acknowledging that, whatever we do with our 2% of global GDP, we need to fit with the economic realities created by the other 98%. I'd also add a critique that he doesn't really offer a coherent solution to the economic problems of the current government.
But, as I'm sure you'll be able to appreciate as a fellow radical, cogent arguments that I agree with are thin on the ground so one has to make the most of slim pickings.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
You get sneered at or hounded on here if you challenge the groupthink on immigration, state spending, Trump or Ukraine. I only drop in occasionally now for that reason. I expect once the lull of having nothing to do between xmas and ny is over, I’ll be off for a while again too.
It’s a shame as it can be an unparalleled resource for understanding the world but it does need plurality of thought. I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short). Without Byronic (?) incessantly plugging away with the doom narrative I doubt I’d have made the trade in time. It’s a much much poorer place for Leon’s absence.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
I suspect the West might see a private sector solution, though the US is making a start on a public-private partnership with the data-scraping requirements at the border. We already have credit reference agencies, which when you take a step back to think about them are quite a remarkable intrusion into people's privacy and control over their own data.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Depends what sort of cookie. If it isn't the Good Housekeeping kind ...
The simplest cookie recipe I know is this one.
Peanut butter cookies. 1 cup peanut butter 1 egg 3/4 cup sugar 8-10 minutes at 180C
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 - free speach has limits. See the famous “Shouting fire in a theatre” example.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
It is worth reminding ourselves of what Connolly said, in the midst of a riot: "Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care."
I think you'd have to have an exceptionally liberal view on freedom of speech to think that is acceptable in the midst of a riot, when there really was a decent chance that people would be burnt alive in these hotels. Indeed, in the current climate, I remain astonished that she and those that actually did try to burn them down weren't prosecuted under the Terrorism Act. It makes other arrests under that legislation look trivial in comparison.
The one thing I entirely disagree with is the "naughty tweets" narrative. I think saying something like that on public social media, with a potentially enormous audience, is far far worse than in a private whatsapp group or with friends at the pub. Together with how febrile the atmosphere was at that time, it's well across the line in my view. The same goes for that Labour councillor who was acquitted.
(I haven't bothered to look a this other individuals's tweets in context.)
In a piece of symmetry one of the tweets made by Alaa Abd El-Fattah was during the 2011 riots where he suggested rioters should attack the police and Downing Street instead of high streets.
If he'd been in Britain at the time you'd certainly expect that to have led to a custodial sentence on the same basis as Lucy Connolly, for all that sarcasm has been used as a defence for that 2011 tweet.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
Thanks for sharing the interview.
I agree with him on it and have raised this point myself many times. It is also (and I would not expect him to mention this) Reform Party policy to cease paying commercial banks interest on their QE holdings.
Listening to the rest of the interview is somewhat frustrating, as I think his narrative about climate change is disingenuous. But that isn't unique to him - it is pretty much across the board with those of like mind.
He also doesn't address the mobility of wealth - or simply its foreign ownership. He raises the case of the Cargill family profiteering from poor cocoa harvests - that family is American. What are we to do about it? The best thing we can really do in this instance is attract their wealth by making Britain a playground for them. But that's so far from the red/green prescription it's in another galaxy.
In turn thanks for giving up your time to listen to it.
Yes very much to your credit imv you have consistently raised BoE QE holdings, I confess until now I have never put in the time to fully understand the mechanisms by which this is costing us money (and I still don't fully understand the implications for our future creditworthiness of ceasing to pay interest).
Agreed on your other points. Though I would note he does better than most left-wing economists in at least acknowledging that, whatever we do with our 2% of global GDP, we need to fit with the economic realities created by the other 98%. I'd also add a critique that he doesn't really offer a coherent solution to the economic problems of the current government.
But, as I'm sure you'll be able to appreciate as a fellow radical, cogent arguments that I agree with are thin on the ground so one has to make the most of slim pickings.
Ceasing to pay interest would only be on the money that the BOE printed and gave the commercial banks, that they then deposited with the BOE. Not on their own deposits with the Bank. This money is basically a bung to the banking industry.
Its withdrawal will have an impact - depriving an industry of £20bn is always going to have an impact, just as tightening up Motability will harm car dealerships. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, and done now. That money could be paid off the national debt.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
I suspect the West might see a private sector solution, though the US is making a start on a public-private partnership with the data-scraping requirements at the border. We already have credit reference agencies, which when you take a step back to think about them are quite a remarkable intrusion into people's privacy and control over their own data.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Depends what sort of cookie. If it isn't the Good Housekeeping kind ...
Searching social media isn’t hard. It’s basic due diligence for anyone you are dealing with professionally.
In a previous job, we had lots of fun interviewing a candidate who’d been big on “Kill The Banksters” - until he wanted a job in investment banking.
Various companies will do such background checks for you for a fixed fee - along with court judgements and all the other stuff.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
While agreeing with some of what you said, I would note that LC didn’t make just one comment. She also had a long track record of bigotry, IIRC.
AAF should not be held responsible for his sister’s comments. I don’t want to be held responsible for my sister’s and she won’t for mine!
What did her 'track record of biggotry' consist of? Had she committed crimes, or just the crime of holding and expressing views that you disagree with?
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 - free speach has limits. See the famous “Shouting fire in a theatre” example.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
It is worth reminding ourselves of what Connolly said, in the midst of a riot: "Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care."
I think you'd have to have an exceptionally liberal view on freedom of speech to think that is acceptable in the midst of a riot, when there really was a decent chance that people would be burnt alive in these hotels. Indeed, in the current climate, I remain astonished that she and those that actually did try to burn them down weren't prosecuted under the Terrorism Act. It makes other arrests under that legislation look trivial in comparison.
The one thing I entirely disagree with is the "naughty tweets" narrative. I think saying something like that on public social media, with a potentially enormous audience, is far far worse than in a private whatsapp group or with friends at the pub. Together with how febrile the atmosphere was at that time, it's well across the line in my view. The same goes for that Labour councillor who was acquitted.
(I haven't bothered to look a this other individuals's tweets in context.)
In a piece of symmetry one of the tweets made by Alaa Abd El-Fattah was during the 2011 riots where he suggested rioters should attack the police and Downing Street instead of high streets.
If he'd been in Britain at the time you'd certainly expect that to have led to a custodial sentence on the same basis as Lucy Connolly, for all that sarcasm has been used as a defence for that 2011 tweet.
Yep - on the face of it that should be a custodial sentence. It does happen to be the kind of thing I would say to my friends though, e.g. with JSO wrecking paintings in the National Gallery instead of, say, a petrol station. If the other tweets are in a similar sarcastic or humourous tone then might acquit on that basis.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
I suspect the West might see a private sector solution, though the US is making a start on a public-private partnership with the data-scraping requirements at the border. We already have credit reference agencies, which when you take a step back to think about them are quite a remarkable intrusion into people's privacy and control over their own data.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Depends what sort of cookie. If it isn't the Good Housekeeping kind ...
Searching social media isn’t hard. It’s basic due diligence for anyone you are dealing with professionally.
In a previous job, we had lots of fun interviewing a candidate who’d been big on “Kill The Banksters” - until he wanted a job in investment banking.
Various companies will do such background checks for you for a fixed fee - along with court judgements and all the other stuff.
Interesting piece in the Guardian on an European YouGov poll on state pensions
Most Europeans think state pensions will become unaffordable, polling shows YouGov survey finds many say payments are too low and oppose reforms such as raising retirement age or cuts
Most Europeans believe their country’s state pension system will soon become unaffordable – but they also think the current scheme is not generous enough, and do not support options for overhauling it such as raising the retirement age.
As populations age and fertility rates decline, Europe’s “pay as you go” state pension systems, cornerstones of the welfare state that have always relied on people in work paying the retirees’ pensions, are coming under increasingly heavy pressure.
With attempts to reform them meeting stiff and sometimes violent resistance in countries including France, Germany, Spain and Italy, a six-country YouGov poll reveals the extent of the public-opinion problem governments face.
Many people acknowledge state pension schemes are in trouble: majorities of between 61% and 52% in Italy, France, Germany and Spain said theirs was already unaffordable, as well as 45% of respondents in Poland. In the UK the figure was 32%.
Pensions and health. We can't afford either in line with people's current expectations.
Trouble brewing for whoever are our overlords. But there will be no honesty on either subject from politicians going into the next election. Theresa May tried that - and ended up relying on Ulstermen for her tenure in 10 Downing Street.
The problem is often that 'reform options' include increasing taxes on workers and means testing state pensions for those with personal pensions.
One reform I would suggest is that anyone who opts out of enrolment in their workplace pension is deemed to have opted out of any state benefits when in retirement.
Easier to reform the triple lock, change it to earnings as a first stage.
Means testing the triple lock is ridiculous. Just have a basic pension that indexes with wage induction and top ups for the poorest
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
You get sneered at or hounded on here if you challenge the groupthink on immigration, state spending, Trump or Ukraine. I only drop in occasionally now for that reason. I expect once the lull of having nothing to do between xmas and ny is over, I’ll be off for a while again too.
It’s a shame as it can be an unparalleled resource for understanding the world but it does need plurality of thought. I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short). Without Byronic (?) incessantly plugging away with the doom narrative I doubt I’d have made the trade in time. It’s a much much poorer place for Leon’s absence.
Stopped clocks come to mind.
I’ve never made that sort of money from any other tips on here, or in fact been moved to risk any beyond pocket change. I staked every bit of short term liquidity I had on that trade, and it was thanks largely to the prior avatar of Leon and Alastair Meeks, who come at life from very different directions but both called that spot on.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 - free speach has limits. See the famous “Shouting fire in a theatre” example.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
It is worth reminding ourselves of what Connolly said, in the midst of a riot: "Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care."
I think you'd have to have an exceptionally liberal view on freedom of speech to think that is acceptable in the midst of a riot, when there really was a decent chance that people would be burnt alive in these hotels. Indeed, in the current climate, I remain astonished that she and those that actually did try to burn them down weren't prosecuted under the Terrorism Act. It makes other arrests under that legislation look trivial in comparison.
The one thing I entirely disagree with is the "naughty tweets" narrative. I think saying something like that on public social media, with a potentially enormous audience, is far far worse than in a private whatsapp group or with friends at the pub. Together with how febrile the atmosphere was at that time, it's well across the line in my view. The same goes for that Labour councillor who was acquitted.
(I haven't bothered to look a this other individuals's tweets in context.)
In a piece of symmetry one of the tweets made by Alaa Abd El-Fattah was during the 2011 riots where he suggested rioters should attack the police and Downing Street instead of high streets.
If he'd been in Britain at the time you'd certainly expect that to have led to a custodial sentence on the same basis as Lucy Connolly, for all that sarcasm has been used as a defence for that 2011 tweet.
For fun - given that Twatter is “published” in the U.K., he could be prosecuted for the 2011 twats.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 - free speach has limits. See the famous “Shouting fire in a theatre” example.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
It is worth reminding ourselves of what Connolly said, in the midst of a riot: "Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care."
I think you'd have to have an exceptionally liberal view on freedom of speech to think that is acceptable in the midst of a riot, when there really was a decent chance that people would be burnt alive in these hotels. Indeed, in the current climate, I remain astonished that she and those that actually did try to burn them down weren't prosecuted under the Terrorism Act. It makes other arrests under that legislation look trivial in comparison.
The one thing I entirely disagree with is the "naughty tweets" narrative. I think saying something like that on public social media, with a potentially enormous audience, is far far worse than in a private whatsapp group or with friends at the pub. Together with how febrile the atmosphere was at that time, it's well across the line in my view. The same goes for that Labour councillor who was acquitted.
(I haven't bothered to look a this other individuals's tweets in context.)
LC pleaded guilty. She got the minimum sentence for the offence.
She cannot complain.
It wasn’t just the Labour councillor acquitted. Others have been both left and right.
Pleading guilty in court seems to be as unwise a course of action as accepting a police caution.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
I suspect the West might see a private sector solution, though the US is making a start on a public-private partnership with the data-scraping requirements at the border. We already have credit reference agencies, which when you take a step back to think about them are quite a remarkable intrusion into people's privacy and control over their own data.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Depends what sort of cookie. If it isn't the Good Housekeeping kind ...
The simplest cookie recipe I know is this one.
Peanut butter cookies. 1 cup peanut butter 1 egg 3/4 cup sugar 8-10 minutes at 180C
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
Thanks for sharing the interview.
I agree with him on it and have raised this point myself many times. It is also (and I would not expect him to mention this) Reform Party policy to cease paying commercial banks interest on their QE holdings.
Listening to the rest of the interview is somewhat frustrating, as I think his narrative about climate change is disingenuous. But that isn't unique to him - it is pretty much across the board with those of like mind.
He also doesn't address the mobility of wealth - or simply its foreign ownership. He raises the case of the Cargill family profiteering from poor cocoa harvests - that family is American. What are we to do about it? The best thing we can really do in this instance is attract their wealth by making Britain a playground for them. But that's so far from the red/green prescription it's in another galaxy.
In turn thanks for giving up your time to listen to it.
Yes very much to your credit imv you have consistently raised BoE QE holdings, I confess until now I have never put in the time to fully understand the mechanisms by which this is costing us money (and I still don't fully understand the implications for our future creditworthiness of ceasing to pay interest).
Agreed on your other points. Though I would note he does better than most left-wing economists in at least acknowledging that, whatever we do with our 2% of global GDP, we need to fit with the economic realities created by the other 98%. I'd also add a critique that he doesn't really offer a coherent solution to the economic problems of the current government.
But, as I'm sure you'll be able to appreciate as a fellow radical, cogent arguments that I agree with are thin on the ground so one has to make the most of slim pickings.
Ceasing to pay interest would only be on the money that the BOE printed and gave the commercial banks, that they then deposited with the BOE. Not on their own deposits with the Bank. This money is basically a bung to the banking industry.
Its withdrawal will have an impact - depriving an industry of £20bn is always going to have an impact, just as tightening up Motability will harm car dealerships. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, and done now. That money could be paid off the national debt.
Or could be spend on climate change adaptation 😋.
Thanks. It has only taken me about 5 years but you should be pleased that your efforts on this front have educated at least one person on here.
I shall await our Reform overlords with just a modicum less foreboding.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 - free speach has limits. See the famous “Shouting fire in a theatre” example.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
It is worth reminding ourselves of what Connolly said, in the midst of a riot: "Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care."
I think you'd have to have an exceptionally liberal view on freedom of speech to think that is acceptable in the midst of a riot, when there really was a decent chance that people would be burnt alive in these hotels. Indeed, in the current climate, I remain astonished that she and those that actually did try to burn them down weren't prosecuted under the Terrorism Act. It makes other arrests under that legislation look trivial in comparison.
The one thing I entirely disagree with is the "naughty tweets" narrative. I think saying something like that on public social media, with a potentially enormous audience, is far far worse than in a private whatsapp group or with friends at the pub. Together with how febrile the atmosphere was at that time, it's well across the line in my view. The same goes for that Labour councillor who was acquitted.
(I haven't bothered to look a this other individuals's tweets in context.)
LC pleaded guilty. She got the minimum sentence for the offence.
She cannot complain.
It wasn’t just the Labour councillor acquitted. Others have been both left and right.
Pleading guilty in court seems to be as unwise a course of action as accepting a police caution.
In this case it was and I’d be very wary of accepting a caution too. If it ever came to it
Interesting piece in the Guardian on an European YouGov poll on state pensions
Most Europeans think state pensions will become unaffordable, polling shows YouGov survey finds many say payments are too low and oppose reforms such as raising retirement age or cuts
Most Europeans believe their country’s state pension system will soon become unaffordable – but they also think the current scheme is not generous enough, and do not support options for overhauling it such as raising the retirement age.
As populations age and fertility rates decline, Europe’s “pay as you go” state pension systems, cornerstones of the welfare state that have always relied on people in work paying the retirees’ pensions, are coming under increasingly heavy pressure.
With attempts to reform them meeting stiff and sometimes violent resistance in countries including France, Germany, Spain and Italy, a six-country YouGov poll reveals the extent of the public-opinion problem governments face.
Many people acknowledge state pension schemes are in trouble: majorities of between 61% and 52% in Italy, France, Germany and Spain said theirs was already unaffordable, as well as 45% of respondents in Poland. In the UK the figure was 32%.
Pensions and health. We can't afford either in line with people's current expectations.
Trouble brewing for whoever are our overlords. But there will be no honesty on either subject from politicians going into the next election. Theresa May tried that - and ended up relying on Ulstermen for her tenure in 10 Downing Street.
And, deep-down, people recognise this but they don't want to be the generation that makes the sacrifice; instead, they'd rather squeeze the last few drops of juice out of the fruit.
I don’t know if anyone listened to Philp on Today this morning about the tweety racist chap but my god it was cringe inducing for the reason he kept calling the guy a “scumbag”. Now if he had done it once it would have been fair enough but he did it three times in such a way it seemed completely forced.
It doesn’t help that Philp sounds like a wet lettuce trying to sound tough but “scumbag” is a bit of a weak attack word and the whole thing ended up blunting his attack and making himself sound a bit silly.
He's overcompensating.
"Scumbag" is quite interesting. To me it feels Anglo-Saxon, as in one of those few insults that the Free Speech Fundamentalists at Youtube have not started censoring yet to protect the delicate blossoms in their audience, but as a pejorative it seems to be from the USA in the 1970s.
I would have tended to think it was of US origin in a hard boiled cop show sort of way. On checking I find it was slang for a condom (1939), and earlier part of a sugar refining process.
Scumsucker was a term, rather unpleasant given that origin of scumbag, used by eighties late night TV icon, Inspector Sledge Hammer.
I always experience whiplash when I see the actor in serious roles (eg Succession). I keep expecting him to pull out a large gun.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 - free speach has limits. See the famous “Shouting fire in a theatre” example.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
It is worth reminding ourselves of what Connolly said, in the midst of a riot: "Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care."
I think you'd have to have an exceptionally liberal view on freedom of speech to think that is acceptable in the midst of a riot, when there really was a decent chance that people would be burnt alive in these hotels. Indeed, in the current climate, I remain astonished that she and those that actually did try to burn them down weren't prosecuted under the Terrorism Act. It makes other arrests under that legislation look trivial in comparison.
The one thing I entirely disagree with is the "naughty tweets" narrative. I think saying something like that on public social media, with a potentially enormous audience, is far far worse than in a private whatsapp group or with friends at the pub. Together with how febrile the atmosphere was at that time, it's well across the line in my view. The same goes for that Labour councillor who was acquitted.
(I haven't bothered to look a this other individuals's tweets in context.)
LC pleaded guilty. She got the minimum sentence for the offence.
She cannot complain.
It wasn’t just the Labour councillor acquitted. Others have been both left and right.
Pleading guilty in court seems to be as unwise a course of action as accepting a police caution.
In this case it was and I’d be very wary of accepting a caution too. If it ever came to it
You stand a better chance of being acquitted by a jury, and the evidence is tested further too.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
Group three for me. Lucy Conolly should not have recieved a custodial sentence, and nor should AAF.
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 - free speach has limits. See the famous “Shouting fire in a theatre” example.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
It is worth reminding ourselves of what Connolly said, in the midst of a riot: "Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care."
I think you'd have to have an exceptionally liberal view on freedom of speech to think that is acceptable in the midst of a riot, when there really was a decent chance that people would be burnt alive in these hotels. Indeed, in the current climate, I remain astonished that she and those that actually did try to burn them down weren't prosecuted under the Terrorism Act. It makes other arrests under that legislation look trivial in comparison.
The one thing I entirely disagree with is the "naughty tweets" narrative. I think saying something like that on public social media, with a potentially enormous audience, is far far worse than in a private whatsapp group or with friends at the pub. Together with how febrile the atmosphere was at that time, it's well across the line in my view. The same goes for that Labour councillor who was acquitted.
(I haven't bothered to look a this other individuals's tweets in context.)
LC pleaded guilty. She got the minimum sentence for the offence.
She cannot complain.
It wasn’t just the Labour councillor acquitted. Others have been both left and right.
Pleading guilty in court seems to be as unwise a course of action as accepting a police caution.
In this case it was and I’d be very wary of accepting a caution too. If it ever came to it
Never accept a caution until it’s been signed off by an experienced* solicitor.
Operation Womble Update: Second big black bin bag filled this morning. Two bottles of vodka with a toothpaste tube by a country lane lay-by. Quite a lot of empty bags of Skips. And what smelled and look like a glass bottle of faeces.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I was going to say that all the Reform-leaning posters here seem variously disconnected from reality. Climate change denial is one example.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
I suspect the West might see a private sector solution, though the US is making a start on a public-private partnership with the data-scraping requirements at the border. We already have credit reference agencies, which when you take a step back to think about them are quite a remarkable intrusion into people's privacy and control over their own data.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Depends what sort of cookie. If it isn't the Good Housekeeping kind ...
Searching social media isn’t hard. It’s basic due diligence for anyone you are dealing with professionally.
In a previous job, we had lots of fun interviewing a candidate who’d been big on “Kill The Banksters” - until he wanted a job in investment banking.
Various companies will do such background checks for you for a fixed fee - along with court judgements and all the other stuff.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
Thanks for sharing the interview.
I agree with him on it and have raised this point myself many times. It is also (and I would not expect him to mention this) Reform Party policy to cease paying commercial banks interest on their QE holdings.
Listening to the rest of the interview is somewhat frustrating, as I think his narrative about climate change is disingenuous. But that isn't unique to him - it is pretty much across the board with those of like mind.
He also doesn't address the mobility of wealth - or simply its foreign ownership. He raises the case of the Cargill family profiteering from poor cocoa harvests - that family is American. What are we to do about it? The best thing we can really do in this instance is attract their wealth by making Britain a playground for them. But that's so far from the red/green prescription it's in another galaxy.
In turn thanks for giving up your time to listen to it.
Yes very much to your credit imv you have consistently raised BoE QE holdings, I confess until now I have never put in the time to fully understand the mechanisms by which this is costing us money (and I still don't fully understand the implications for our future creditworthiness of ceasing to pay interest).
Agreed on your other points. Though I would note he does better than most left-wing economists in at least acknowledging that, whatever we do with our 2% of global GDP, we need to fit with the economic realities created by the other 98%. I'd also add a critique that he doesn't really offer a coherent solution to the economic problems of the current government.
But, as I'm sure you'll be able to appreciate as a fellow radical, cogent arguments that I agree with are thin on the ground so one has to make the most of slim pickings.
Ceasing to pay interest would only be on the money that the BOE printed and gave the commercial banks, that they then deposited with the BOE. Not on their own deposits with the Bank. This money is basically a bung to the banking industry.
Its withdrawal will have an impact - depriving an industry of £20bn is always going to have an impact, just as tightening up Motability will harm car dealerships. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, and done now. That money could be paid off the national debt.
If you have a time machine handy, go back a year and invest your SIPP in bank shares. Lloyds, Barclays and NatWest have all risen by 50 to 75 per cent.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He could be a bore, at times, but the site has become immeasurably more boring with his absence. The ecosystem is predictable and largely monochrome.
It reads like a Bluesky thread far too often. Different perspectives and insights are now very limited.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
I suspect the West might see a private sector solution, though the US is making a start on a public-private partnership with the data-scraping requirements at the border. We already have credit reference agencies, which when you take a step back to think about them are quite a remarkable intrusion into people's privacy and control over their own data.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Depends what sort of cookie. If it isn't the Good Housekeeping kind ...
Searching social media isn’t hard. It’s basic due diligence for anyone you are dealing with professionally.
In a previous job, we had lots of fun interviewing a candidate who’d been big on “Kill The Banksters” - until he wanted a job in investment banking.
Various companies will do such background checks for you for a fixed fee - along with court judgements and all the other stuff.
Palantir do work for the U.K. police on this….
"Please! I like Banksters!"
The graphic and detailed stuff on his social media would have had people calling Prevent, these days.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I was going to say that all the Reform-leaning posters here seem variously disconnected from reality. Climate change denial is one example.
I don’t think a great many people are climate change denialists. But different people place a different emphasis on things. I don’t for example put it in the top 10 of things to worry about, even though it’s pretty obvious to me that anthropogenic carbon releases do impact the climate.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
I suspect the West might see a private sector solution, though the US is making a start on a public-private partnership with the data-scraping requirements at the border. We already have credit reference agencies, which when you take a step back to think about them are quite a remarkable intrusion into people's privacy and control over their own data.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Depends what sort of cookie. If it isn't the Good Housekeeping kind ...
Searching social media isn’t hard. It’s basic due diligence for anyone you are dealing with professionally.
In a previous job, we had lots of fun interviewing a candidate who’d been big on “Kill The Banksters” - until he wanted a job in investment banking.
Various companies will do such background checks for you for a fixed fee - along with court judgements and all the other stuff.
Palantir do work for the U.K. police on this….
"Please! I like Banksters!"
The graphic and detailed stuff on his social media would have had people calling Prevent, these days.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I was going to say that all the Reform-leaning posters here seem variously disconnected from reality. Climate change denial is one example.
I don’t think a great many people are climate change denialists. But different people place a different emphasis on things. I don’t for example put it in the top 10 of things to worry about, even though it’s pretty obvious to me that anthropogenic carbon releases do impact the climate.
Fair enough if it doesn't rank as important to you, but there are some climate change deniers, like @Luckyguy1983 and Donald Trump and lots of people funding Reform UK.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
...I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short)...
@moonshine , the biggest winner on PB by my recollection was @Dromedary who claimed to have won 6/7 figures on Brexit. So your statement of "100k dollars in 2020" gladdens my heart. Consequently I would be grateful if you could expand on your winning bet please. Starting with what the "S&P short" was...
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I was going to say that all the Reform-leaning posters here seem variously disconnected from reality. Climate change denial is one example.
I don’t think a great many people are climate change denialists. But different people place a different emphasis on things. I don’t for example put it in the top 10 of things to worry about, even though it’s pretty obvious to me that anthropogenic carbon releases do impact the climate.
Yes, it became politicised in an unhelpful and counterproductive way rather than, say, just being a fact that's accepted - like the industrial revolution- with the debate being about what to do to manage or mitigate it.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
I suspect the West might see a private sector solution, though the US is making a start on a public-private partnership with the data-scraping requirements at the border. We already have credit reference agencies, which when you take a step back to think about them are quite a remarkable intrusion into people's privacy and control over their own data.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Depends what sort of cookie. If it isn't the Good Housekeeping kind ...
Searching social media isn’t hard. It’s basic due diligence for anyone you are dealing with professionally.
In a previous job, we had lots of fun interviewing a candidate who’d been big on “Kill The Banksters” - until he wanted a job in investment banking.
Various companies will do such background checks for you for a fixed fee - along with court judgements and all the other stuff.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
The question is perhaps the other way around. If there are few Reform backers in a fairly pluralist site like this one, could it be that voters are being hoodwinked by media astroturfing? That actually, Reform does not have the same kind of supporters as other parties. In which case, of course it is foolish to try to create "balance", because no such balance exists.
We had a real election where Reform got 30 percent of the vote. Just because Reform voters do not post here, does not mean they do not exist.
They also have more party members than the Tories if you are drawing a distinction between "supporters" and "voters"
I suspect if they dared to post here they’d get a hostile welcome
It depends. Eg I would be very patient and empathetic with a Reform supporter who came on here looking to improve their knowledge and understanding of the world.
Operation Womble Update: Second big black bin bag filled this morning. Two bottles of vodka with a toothpaste tube by a country lane lay-by. Quite a lot of empty bags of Skips. And what smelled and look like a glass bottle of faeces.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I was going to say that all the Reform-leaning posters here seem variously disconnected from reality. Climate change denial is one example.
I don’t think a great many people are climate change denialists. But different people place a different emphasis on things. I don’t for example put it in the top 10 of things to worry about, even though it’s pretty obvious to me that anthropogenic carbon releases do impact the climate.
Yes, it became politicised in an unhelpful and counterproductive way rather than, say, just being a fact that's accepted - like the industrial revolution- with the debate being about what to do to manage or mitigate it.
Yes, the Industrial Revolution was entirely an accepted fact at the time with no controversies at all.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I was going to say that all the Reform-leaning posters here seem variously disconnected from reality. Climate change denial is one example.
I don’t think a great many people are climate change denialists. But different people place a different emphasis on things. I don’t for example put it in the top 10 of things to worry about, even though it’s pretty obvious to me that anthropogenic carbon releases do impact the climate.
I have found it dropping down my list of priorities, personally.
In part that is because I think we are probably past the point when we will be able to have a meaningful chance of preventing self-reinforcing feedback systems of warning.
In part I think it has been displaced by more immediate priorities: sustaining democracy, national security, inequality, the broken nature of our economic system.
In part I can recognise that concern about climate change is a privileged concern - whilst it is likely to have some fairly catastrophic effects, these only really register if one is right at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, not least because most of the impacts are still in the future.
I still think it will be the defining historical narrative of the 21st century but am much more fatalistic about it than I used to be.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
...I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short)...
The biggest winner on PB by my recollection was @Dromedary who claimed to have won 6/7 figures on Brexit. So your statement of "100k dollars in 2020" gladdens my heart. Consequently I would be grateful if you could expand on your winning bet please. Starting with what the "S&P short" was...
I bought a strip of out the money put options. At the time my financial affairs were split between two countries but I didn’t have a sterling brokerage account. So with my sterling liquidity I did the same trade but with spread bets.
I let the bet run until I hit $100k profit across the two accounts, living US trading hours for the duration of the bet (I had recently taken voluntary redundancy). My timing was fortuitous because the Fed big bazooka was unleashed the very next day.
IG Index then took weeks to honour the bet. At the time I was worried they were suffering a liquidity event, I wrote to their senior management to enquire as such. At it was, I think I raised an AML flag - a British citizen resident overseas that opened an account, turned over a huge profit in a week or two and then immediately closing it.
The shame was that I didn’t have more cash on hand as I would have bet even bigger - my host country had locked off my salary to settle tax obligations the moment I signed my redundancy papers the month or two before.
Isn't there a song that Blair used to use which seemed to say the reverse?
yes and people stupidly believed him
Scotland's Tony Blair.
Scottish my arse
As O'Connell said of the Dublin born Iron Duke of Wellington "Being born is a stable doesn't make you a horse", but then Blair never really claimed to be Scottish. Meanwhile one of likeliest possible birthplaces of Robert the Bruce is Writtle near Chelmsford, so being born somewhere, just to be close to your mother doesn't seem to mean that much. Otherwise no true Scot could be born outside of Ayrshire... ;-)
It does consist of a bit more than Ayrshire though and as TUD said , a few years at Fettes does not a Scot make.
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I was going to say that all the Reform-leaning posters here seem variously disconnected from reality. Climate change denial is one example.
I don’t think a great many people are climate change denialists. But different people place a different emphasis on things. I don’t for example put it in the top 10 of things to worry about, even though it’s pretty obvious to me that anthropogenic carbon releases do impact the climate.
Fair enough if it doesn't rank as important to you, but there are some climate change deniers, like @Luckyguy1983 and Donald Trump and lots of people funding Reform UK.
Just to note that Lucy Connolly and Alaa Abdel Fattah together provide a nice tribal test. More or less:
LC is a good but slightly overzealous patriot and AAF is a scumbag AAF is a good but slightly overzealous activist and LC is a scumbag Both LC and AAF are appalling but for liberals free speech is free speech Both LC and AAF are appalling and for liberals the rule of law means that speech can have consequences like prison and losing rights.
No doubt other sub groups exist. I am with the fourth group.
I would propose another subgroup.
People are capable of change and shouldn't necessarily have past actions held against them in perpetuity. AAF has apologised for his tweets from ~10 years ago, so I am willing to give him a second chance and judge him on subsequent actions. LC has served her time and deserves a chance to demonstrate that she has learned from the experience.
AAF’s apology was hardly fulsome though. It was heavily caveated and he even used the Alf Garnett defence. I hope I never hear of him again and he goes on to be a useful, productive and hard working member of society and a net contributor and not another leech on the hard pressed taxpayer.
His sister, does she live here, has tweeted in support of Hamas too.
LC is out on parole so is still serving her sentence. She said a stupid comment. With AAF he had a long track record of bigotry. I don’t know if she did or the comment was a one off. She’s not a hero. She also, as people keep forgetting, confessed her crime by pleading guilty. Reform makes an error platforming her.
Quite frankly this goes beyond him. It’s more a reflection of the charities who lobbied for him and the political class and celebs who supported him even knowing what was known about his social media commentary and he even had his nomination for an award withdrawn due to his anti semitism?
How are the political class supposed to know the online chat history of us all? Ministry for Social Media Scoring?
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
If he'd make so many 'jokes' about genociding any group other than white people, I'm fairly sure none of those people would have touched his case with a barge pole.
If they knew his social media history, 90%+ of the political class wouldn't have been anywhere near him either.
So the question stands - how should politicians know about our social media history from many years ago?
They could stop funding the kind of NGOs that were aware of the kind of things he posted and didn't think they were disqualifying.
How on earth would that help the politicians know what he posted?
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
You get sneered at or hounded on here if you challenge the groupthink on immigration, state spending, Trump or Ukraine. I only drop in occasionally now for that reason. I expect once the lull of having nothing to do between xmas and ny is over, I’ll be off for a while again too.
It’s a shame as it can be an unparalleled resource for understanding the world but it does need plurality of thought. I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short). Without Byronic (?) incessantly plugging away with the doom narrative I doubt I’d have made the trade in time. It’s a much much poorer place for Leon’s absence.
I think it can be very hard to express minority opinions in any setting. It's not unreasonable for people in the majority to disagree with you, but even if they do so in a reasonable and measured way, everyone wants to have their say, and it feels like a pile-on. Normally subsequent contributors feel the need to dial things up so that their contribution is more noticeable, and that makes things worse.
But then, if we do disagree we're going to want to say so.
This happens in contexts that are trivial, just as much as places like this, where things can feel a bit more charged because the subject matter is more important.
For example, I was once the target of a pile-on in a Warhammer discord because I expressed the minority opinion that I didn't have a problem with the apparent unreality of a specific fantasy miniature that is regularly the subject of derision online.
If you say things I disagree with I may well tell you why I disagree with them. I hope I do not make it a personal attack, and I also hope we could have a mutually enlightening exchange of views so that we'd understand each other's opinions better
Gosh. That cannot be doing us much good at all. A factor in our low productivity?
It defines bread as ultraprocessed. And yet:
"A number of studies show that although UPFs in general are associated with higher health risks, there exists a large heterogeneity among UPF subgroups. For example, although bread and cereals are classified as UPFs, a large 2023 study published in The Lancet finds them inversely associated with cancer and cardiometabolic diseases in the European population (hazard ratio 0.97)."
It seems to have some use as a categorisation, but also some buzzword tendencies.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
...I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short)...
The biggest winner on PB by my recollection was @Dromedary who claimed to have won 6/7 figures on Brexit. So your statement of "100k dollars in 2020" gladdens my heart. Consequently I would be grateful if you could expand on your winning bet please. Starting with what the "S&P short" was...
I bought a strip of out the money put options. At the time my financial affairs were split between two countries but I didn’t have a sterling brokerage account. So with my sterling liquidity I did the same trade but with spread bets.
I let the bet run until I hit $100k profit across the two accounts, living US trading hours for the duration of the bet (I had recently taken voluntary redundancy). My timing was fortuitous because the Fed big bazooka was unleashed the very next day.
IG Index then took weeks to honour the bet. At the time I was worried they were suffering a liquidity event, I wrote to their senior management to enquire as such. At it was, I think I raised an AML flag - a British citizen resident overseas that opened an account, turned over a huge profit in a week or two and then immediately closing it.
The shame was that I didn’t have more cash on hand as I would have bet even bigger - my host country had locked off my salary to settle tax obligations the moment I signed my redundancy papers the month or two before.
Which currency were you betting against and what were your reasons for betting against it?
Can I recommend to you all a thoroughly interesting 45 minute conversation between Polanski and James Medway, one of the economists I respect most: https://pca.st/episode/aa464011-8ea3-4f3f-8903-0cef76bf3481. Even if Polanski is not your cup of tea (and he isn't mine economically), Meadway is both very intelligent and an excellent communicator.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question: 1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear. 2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
The fact everyone has stopped talking about it shows just how fickle and faddish most public opinion is.
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
I will still talk about climate change, but I have asymptotically approached my personal limit on the number of times I am willing to have the same fruitless "debate" with people who deny the science.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
I was going to say that all the Reform-leaning posters here seem variously disconnected from reality. Climate change denial is one example.
I don’t think a great many people are climate change denialists. But different people place a different emphasis on things. I don’t for example put it in the top 10 of things to worry about, even though it’s pretty obvious to me that anthropogenic carbon releases do impact the climate.
I have found it dropping down my list of priorities, personally.
In part that is because I think we are probably past the point when we will be able to have a meaningful chance of preventing self-reinforcing feedback systems of warning.
In part I think it has been displaced by more immediate priorities: sustaining democracy, national security, inequality, the broken nature of our economic system.
In part I can recognise that concern about climate change is a privileged concern - whilst it is likely to have some fairly catastrophic effects, these only really register if one is right at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, not least because most of the impacts are still in the future.
I still think it will be the defining historical narrative of the 21st century but am much more fatalistic about it than I used to be.
I take the view that we’ll either be replaced by AI by the time it matters, or the AI will have helped us solve it.
Operation Womble Update: Second big black bin bag filled this morning. Two bottles of vodka with a toothpaste tube by a country lane lay-by. Quite a lot of empty bags of Skips. And what smelled and look like a glass bottle of faeces.
Where do you dispose of your collected litter?
My own bin so far. Although today a random chap did offer his, but I was not yet done.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
...I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short)...
The biggest winner on PB by my recollection was @Dromedary who claimed to have won 6/7 figures on Brexit. So your statement of "100k dollars in 2020" gladdens my heart. Consequently I would be grateful if you could expand on your winning bet please. Starting with what the "S&P short" was...
I bought a strip of out the money put options. At the time my financial affairs were split between two countries but I didn’t have a sterling brokerage account. So with my sterling liquidity I did the same trade but with spread bets.
I let the bet run until I hit $100k profit across the two accounts, living US trading hours for the duration of the bet (I had recently taken voluntary redundancy). My timing was fortuitous because the Fed big bazooka was unleashed the very next day.
IG Index then took weeks to honour the bet. At the time I was worried they were suffering a liquidity event, I wrote to their senior management to enquire as such. At it was, I think I raised an AML flag - a British citizen resident overseas that opened an account, turned over a huge profit in a week or two and then immediately closing it.
The shame was that I didn’t have more cash on hand as I would have bet even bigger - my host country had locked off my salary to settle tax obligations the moment I signed my redundancy papers the month or two before.
Which currency were you betting against and what were your reasons for betting against it?
I was betting on US stocks crashing, when they inevitably suffered the same mass panic.
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
...I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short)...
The biggest winner on PB by my recollection was @Dromedary who claimed to have won 6/7 figures on Brexit. So your statement of "100k dollars in 2020" gladdens my heart. Consequently I would be grateful if you could expand on your winning bet please. Starting with what the "S&P short" was...
I bought a strip of out the money put options. At the time my financial affairs were split between two countries but I didn’t have a sterling brokerage account. So with my sterling liquidity I did the same trade but with spread bets.
I let the bet run until I hit $100k profit across the two accounts, living US trading hours for the duration of the bet (I had recently taken voluntary redundancy). My timing was fortuitous because the Fed big bazooka was unleashed the very next day.
IG Index then took weeks to honour the bet. At the time I was worried they were suffering a liquidity event, I wrote to their senior management to enquire as such. At it was, I think I raised an AML flag - a British citizen resident overseas that opened an account, turned over a huge profit in a week or two and then immediately closing it.
The shame was that I didn’t have more cash on hand as I would have bet even bigger - my host country had locked off my salary to settle tax obligations the moment I signed my redundancy papers the month or two before.
Nice one. How much did you risk losing if things had gone against you?
This is why I stick to healthy natural food and eat fish and chips every day.
But do UPFs really make that much difference? The map suggests latitude is a confounding factor, with warmer countries eating less UPF so we need to be a bit more canny. What outcome is it that doubles or halves between Portugal (10.2) and Spain (20.3) for instance?
It's all down to the timing of the AI bubble bursting. If it happens this year, then there is no fig leaf for Republicans. It will be brutal.
In an alternative version of 2026 being a bad one, what if 2026 is the year that emergent consciousness arises in AI labs…
Welcome back Leon, we've missed you
I do for one miss Leon’s perspective. He’s still on X of course but he’s a little more restrained on there.
I think the site has improved immeasurably since he left. He was a bore, and he was relentless. He killed every conversation. Now there is a much healthier ecosystem and the ratio of interesting to annoying is much better.
He was though one of the few Reform backers here as well as being a good writer even if he liked to stir.
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
You get sneered at or hounded on here if you challenge the groupthink on immigration, state spending, Trump or Ukraine. I only drop in occasionally now for that reason. I expect once the lull of having nothing to do between xmas and ny is over, I’ll be off for a while again too.
It’s a shame as it can be an unparalleled resource for understanding the world but it does need plurality of thought. I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short). Without Byronic (?) incessantly plugging away with the doom narrative I doubt I’d have made the trade in time. It’s a much much poorer place for Leon’s absence.
Stopped clocks come to mind.
I’ve never made that sort of money from any other tips on here, or in fact been moved to risk any beyond pocket change. I staked every bit of short term liquidity I had on that trade, and it was thanks largely to the prior avatar of Leon and Alastair Meeks, who come at life from very different directions but both called that spot on.
I'm intrigued and impressed.
I wasn't on the site at the time but would love to know how you were able to filter out all the wrong predictions and yet bet the farm on the right one.
Though Alastair Meeks converging on the prediction would add weight, I agree.
Comments
Reputation management.
‘ He included a chapter in his book of essays setting out why he had written about armed struggle against Israel. The book had been sent to most MPs, including the prime minister and the then foreign secretary, David Lammy, but the chapter in the book did not fully address some of the most aggressive and shocking tweets, or their sheer volume.’
He is a British citizen, unfortunately, so we have to accept that and hopefully, as I say, he will become a productive hard working contributor and not a burden.
He included a chapter in his book of essays setting out why he had written about armed struggle against Israel. The book had been sent to most MPs, including the prime minister and the then foreign secretary, David Lammy, but the chapter in the book did not fully address some of the most aggressive and shocking tweets, or their sheer volume.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/29/british-egyptian-rights-activist-alaa-abd-el-fattah-apologises-for-hurtful-tweets
He wouldn't be the first British citizen to make a series of half-hearted and self-justifying apologies for similar behaviour.
Two points, a trigger warning and a question:
1. One of the things I respect most about Meadway is that, almost uniquely amongst left-wing economists, he engages with the reality of the power of the bond markets in the UK, resisting the simplistic 'just borrow more' that Polanski wants to hear.
2. Meadway laces his conversation about economics with an understanding of the current and likely future impacts of climate change. At a time when it feels like everyone has just stopped talking about this, that's really refreshing.
The trigger warning: Meadway was economic adviser to McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor. If your thinking goes McDonnell=Corbyn=Antisemitism=Evil, maybe spend your scarce 45 mins elsewhere. But if you're interested in a coherent left-wing critique of our economic system it's worth your time.
The question: particularly for @Luckyguy1983 as I know you have views on this, but also for any right of centre person interested in economics - what do you make of Meadway's arguments (first 10 mins of the podcast) about how the BoE deals with its ownership of government debt?
Most Europeans think state pensions will become unaffordable, polling shows
YouGov survey finds many say payments are too low and oppose reforms such as raising retirement age or cuts
Most Europeans believe their country’s state pension system will soon become unaffordable – but they also think the current scheme is not generous enough, and do not support options for overhauling it such as raising the retirement age.
As populations age and fertility rates decline, Europe’s “pay as you go” state pension systems, cornerstones of the welfare state that have always relied on people in work paying the retirees’ pensions, are coming under increasingly heavy pressure.
With attempts to reform them meeting stiff and sometimes violent resistance in countries including France, Germany, Spain and Italy, a six-country YouGov poll reveals the extent of the public-opinion problem governments face.
Many people acknowledge state pension schemes are in trouble: majorities of between 61% and 52% in Italy, France, Germany and Spain said theirs was already unaffordable, as well as 45% of respondents in Poland. In the UK the figure was 32%.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/53791-europeans-and-americans-say-state-pension-systems-are-unaffordable-but-dont-support-reform-options
However, he should also not have been granted citizenship in the first place. We don't need to import problems.
Trouble brewing for whoever are our overlords. But there will be no honesty on either subject from politicians going into the next election. Theresa May tried that - and ended up relying on Ulstermen for her tenure in 10 Downing Street.
To be fair that is we will eventually get, but we shouldn't want it!
We are seriously short of Reform posters on here now given Reform currently lead the polls, if anyone knows any Reform voters who want to post please do suggest it! This site has always been good as it has tended to represent all views, with plenty of Tories, Labour and LDs and even a few Greens and Scots Nats but support for Farage here is very limited
If the split on the right sees the Tories and Reform combined win a narrow majority in England but with Labour winning a plurality of English seats and a UK majority with SNP and LD support then I suspect calls for an English parliament will start to grow again too
So the question stands - how should politicians know about our social media history from many years ago?
https://x.com/cphilpofficial/status/2005570004553544065?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Though in my view that is partly a feature of Reform supporters being (currently) relatively low-information voters.
For example I am bang in the target market as a Green voter (and have been so in the past) but don't currently vote for them because despite all my biases pointing towards them, I try not to disengage from economic reality in such a way as would be needed to tick their box.
This site is (mostly) full of realists and it is hard to be both a realist and a Reform (or Green) voter.
I agree with him on it and have raised this point myself many times. It is also (and I would not expect him to mention this) Reform Party policy to cease paying commercial banks interest on their QE holdings.
Listening to the rest of the interview is somewhat frustrating, as I think his narrative about climate change is disingenuous. But that isn't unique to him - it is pretty much across the board with those of like mind.
He also doesn't address the mobility of wealth - or simply its foreign ownership. He raises the case of the Cargill family profiteering from poor cocoa harvests - that family is American. What are we to do about it? The best thing we can really do in this instance is attract their wealth by making Britain a playground for them. But that's so far from the red/green prescription it's in another galaxy.
I can easily imagine a social acceptability reference agency, which would return a score to prospective employers, etc, based on your social media history of whether you have said something likely to damage the reputation of your future employer, or whoever. Unlike the data collected by credit reference agencies, social media data is in the public domain.
I don't suppose it's technically that difficult for companies like google or facebook to connect a person's pseudonymous postings on a place like PB.com with their phone number, location, email address, etc, so it would all be there.
Would adding a cookie recipe to the end of this post improve my rating?
Businesses check the online history of candidates for possible reputational issues. Politicians have researchers who should do this when they’re looking to heartily endorse them.
Personally think Lucy Connolly should have been put on remand for the duration of the riots. Then given a conviction. That would have felt with the immediacy issue.
As to this twat, get him out of Egyptian prison, put him on a work visa - no passport. The work visa is incredibly specific - a job cleaning racist graffiti off buildings.
Peanut butter cookies.
1 cup peanut butter
1 egg
3/4 cup sugar
8-10 minutes at 180C
It was extremely foolish to have the sort of luvvie public campaign around him, foolish to give him British citizenship as part of this campaign, foolish to post gushing Tweets about it when he entered the country. The whole thing is a grubby episode - and is an echo of the grubbiness of the whole Arab Spring.
I have the impression that a large proportion of spads already spend most of their time on twatter.
In news that should surprise no one, HS2 makes an appearance
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c997d7lkjv8o.amp
I think you'd have to have an exceptionally liberal view on freedom of speech to think that is acceptable in the midst of a riot, when there really was a decent chance that people would be burnt alive in these hotels. Indeed, in the current climate, I remain astonished that she and those that actually did try to burn them down weren't prosecuted under the Terrorism Act. It makes other arrests under that legislation look trivial in comparison.
The one thing I entirely disagree with is the "naughty tweets" narrative. I think saying something like that on public social media, with a potentially enormous audience, is far far worse than in a private whatsapp group or with friends at the pub. Together with how febrile the atmosphere was at that time, it's well across the line in my view. The same goes for that Labour councillor who was acquitted.
(I haven't bothered to look a this other individuals's tweets in context.)
One reform I would suggest is that anyone who opts out of enrolment in their workplace pension is deemed to have opted out of any state benefits when in retirement.
She cannot complain.
It wasn’t just the Labour councillor acquitted. Others have been both left and right.
AAF should not be held responsible for his sister’s comments. I don’t want to be held responsible for my sister’s and she won’t for mine!
It’s a shame as it can be an unparalleled resource for understanding the world but it does need plurality of thought. I made 100k dollars in 2020 because of this place (S&P short). Without Byronic (?) incessantly plugging away with the doom narrative I doubt I’d have made the trade in time. It’s a much much poorer place for Leon’s absence.
Yes very much to your credit imv you have consistently raised BoE QE holdings, I confess until now I have never put in the time to fully understand the mechanisms by which this is costing us money (and I still don't fully understand the implications for our future creditworthiness of ceasing to pay interest).
Agreed on your other points. Though I would note he does better than most left-wing economists in at least acknowledging that, whatever we do with our 2% of global GDP, we need to fit with the economic realities created by the other 98%. I'd also add a critique that he doesn't really offer a coherent solution to the economic problems of the current government.
But, as I'm sure you'll be able to appreciate as a fellow radical, cogent arguments that I agree with are thin on the ground so one has to make the most of slim pickings.
If he'd been in Britain at the time you'd certainly expect that to have led to a custodial sentence on the same basis as Lucy Connolly, for all that sarcasm has been used as a defence for that 2011 tweet.
Its withdrawal will have an impact - depriving an industry of £20bn is always going to have an impact, just as tightening up Motability will harm car dealerships. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, and done now. That money could be paid off the national debt.
In a previous job, we had lots of fun interviewing a candidate who’d been big on “Kill The Banksters” - until he wanted a job in investment banking.
Various companies will do such background checks for you for a fixed fee - along with court judgements and all the other stuff.
Palantir do work for the U.K. police on this….
Trump has blocked it on the Right and the Left has decided that Gaza offers a far better social bonding experience.
Means testing the triple lock is ridiculous. Just have a basic pension that indexes with wage induction and top ups for the poorest
https://youtu.be/FN2RM-CHkuI
Thanks. It has only taken me about 5 years but you should be pleased that your efforts on this front have educated at least one person on here.
I shall await our Reform overlords with just a modicum less foreboding.
As fruitless internet debates go it has nearly a 15 year head start on Brexit, for example.
*not your wills-and-mortgages chap.
It reads like a Bluesky thread far too often. Different perspectives and insights are now very limited.
Some way to go in the British food revolution I fear.
https://x.com/amazingmap/status/2005257207135580494?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
In part that is because I think we are probably past the point when we will be able to have a meaningful chance of preventing self-reinforcing feedback systems of warning.
In part I think it has been displaced by more immediate priorities: sustaining democracy, national security, inequality, the broken nature of our economic system.
In part I can recognise that concern about climate change is a privileged concern - whilst it is likely to have some fairly catastrophic effects, these only really register if one is right at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, not least because most of the impacts are still in the future.
I still think it will be the defining historical narrative of the 21st century but am much more fatalistic about it than I used to be.
I let the bet run until I hit $100k profit across the two accounts, living US trading hours for the duration of the bet (I had recently taken voluntary redundancy). My timing was fortuitous because the Fed big bazooka was unleashed the very next day.
IG Index then took weeks to honour the bet. At the time I was worried they were suffering a liquidity event, I wrote to their senior management to enquire as such. At it was, I think I raised an AML flag - a British citizen resident overseas that opened an account, turned over a huge profit in a week or two and then immediately closing it.
The shame was that I didn’t have more cash on hand as I would have bet even bigger - my host country had locked off my salary to settle tax obligations the moment I signed my redundancy papers the month or two before.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/dec/29/third-of-reform-uk-council-leaders-express-vaccine-sceptic-views
But then, if we do disagree we're going to want to say so.
This happens in contexts that are trivial, just as much as places like this, where things can feel a bit more charged because the subject matter is more important.
For example, I was once the target of a pile-on in a Warhammer discord because I expressed the minority opinion that I didn't have a problem with the apparent unreality of a specific fantasy miniature that is regularly the subject of derision online.
If you say things I disagree with I may well tell you why I disagree with them. I hope I do not make it a personal attack, and I also hope we could have a mutually enlightening exchange of views so that we'd understand each other's opinions better
"A number of studies show that although UPFs in general are associated with higher health risks, there exists a large heterogeneity among UPF subgroups. For example, although bread and cereals are classified as UPFs, a large 2023 study published in The Lancet finds them inversely associated with cancer and cardiometabolic diseases in the European population (hazard ratio 0.97)."
It seems to have some use as a categorisation, but also some buzzword tendencies.
But do UPFs really make that much difference? The map suggests latitude is a confounding factor, with warmer countries eating less UPF so we need to be a bit more canny. What outcome is it that doubles or halves between Portugal (10.2) and Spain (20.3) for instance?
I wasn't on the site at the time but would love to know how you were able to filter out all the wrong predictions and yet bet the farm on the right one.
Though Alastair Meeks converging on the prediction would add weight, I agree.