Dutch consultant by day, interested in world history & British politics by night. Proud Hollander
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It's striking how much of the US system is not just moving away from modern liberal ideals but also from the narrow 'Rechtstaat', the often dictatorial but still constitutional state, where power is expected to abide by its own rules in transparent ways. e.g. SCOTUS is obliged to explain its rulings
Looks like Trump & Miller need to go back to Dictator School
This seems extremely stupid. To some extent the 'deploy (theoretically) politically reliable red-state troops to secure the capital was a fairly obvious test run for doing that once they really upset non-Republicans. But for that to work they need these Guardsmen enthusiastically onside.
Also this moment of abject communication failure is not the moment for one of the few natural communicators in government to be sidelined.
Relatedly the government are the one set of people who can't say the 'left shouldn't compete, fragmentation, Farage, arrgghh!' because they are in charge of the electoral system by which a switch of vote from left to further left is mostly beneficial to the hard right
It's right to remind us that the only alternative to politicians & lawyers, maligned as they both are, is the warlord.
Right, in fact they lied it *would* be free, albeit 'hard' in undefined ways. They made their bed and must lie on it
Certainly wouldn't be the best moment to lose one of the few cabinet members capable of acting & talking like a human being.
Well I hope it's that rather than a pop at Venezuala (or Baltimore, for that matter)
bsky.app/profile/secr...
I have 4 children and I will confirm that the car thing is a nightmare
My British grandad was only 22 when the war ended, lived to the ripe old age of 88 and died 15 years ago. Even his son, my dad, is in his late seventies. The Second World War is in every way history.
Also spraypainting a flag, uninvited, on other people's/public property is in fact *desecration* of that flag by using it in furtherance of a crime. (Helping out Minister Stephen Morgan here, who on Sky News seemed unable to say that was bad).
I almost don't want further investigation, she's just such a squishy, easy target. Which is perhaps the most damning thing imaginable one could say about the Leader of the Conservative & Unionist Party
My impression also. I live by Alkmaar, where it's the opposite - every shop assistant seems to speak decent English & German as well as Dutch. But we're not a big magnet for international student or business.
I was wondering too. There's grits, and other North American corn based dishes - corn is originally North American. And quite a few things from the deep South, especially African American. Fried chicken, smoked barbecue, that sort of stuff, although even they has Scottish and Spanish roots, I read
There's simply no productive discussion to be had on the topic of 'flags' so just burn it down. Delegitimise the question and the questioner.
"I love our flag, and don't like people trying to pick a summer fight about flags when the Tories have left us so many bigger problems to fix. Can we talk about those? Is that alright with you?" Bit of steel is what's needed here.
Same guy pointed out the joys of purely American food like hamburgers and hot dogs, not pausing for a moment to reflect on which continent the cities of Hamburg, Wien (Vienna) and Frankfurt are located
He needs to find some people (Rayner? Streeting? Someone...) who can field such questions in a plausibly human way and stop taking interviews.
It makes me wonder how Angela Rayner would field such questions. 'Not this badly' would have to be the starting point
Strongly reminded of this line by Douglas Adams regarding his version of the universal translator
"What countries are Hamburg, Frankfurt and Wien in, mate?"
I continue to wonder if the Administration understands, in its racist wisdom, that unleashing the American military on the cartels is not likely to be the kind of one-way process we see in e.g. Somalia. Al-Shabaab doesn't have thousands of active members either side of the US border.
I've even got lost as to which ones are Sir Humphrey style 'reviews' aka stalling for time (Social Care? Pensions?) and which ones are genuinely expected to come up with an actionable solution which the government intend to deliver
Also I appreciate that the person is all excited about 'Malay' but 'Cape' is doing actual work in that name. So much for my theory that the Balti would be allowed to be British if only called it the 'Brum'
Right, because it's practically axiomatic that the short term/operational drives out the long/strategic, preventing any work on the latter
That would definitely explain the English name. I love how food travels around the world! (Remember first running into Kare Raisu in Japan about 20 years ago, and being very puzzled by it. Love it now, sometimes make it at home)
I think it was a combination of reacting *against* Die Another Day, which was so self-parodyingly silly that it threatened the survival if the franchise, and inspired by Bourne
(And yes there's context for that, there's always context; the message is not that modern Americans should feel more guilty than modern Europeans, the point is that, as you said recently, most peoples have a problematic history and we should all be a bit humble about that)
I believe a couple of thousand of people still claim Wampanoag identity (5-10% of the 17th Century population), but a 95% kill rate is still worse than most later European colonisation.
'Europeans are worse than Americans because you're evil colonialists' - no, our predecessors in both countries were evil colonialists with an occasional passion for genocide, it's just that the Europeans were on the whole a lot less thorough. Who remembers the Lenape, or the Wampanoag?
If hundreds of thousands of civil servants working in dozens of ministries can't manage 'day-to-day delivery' without help from Number Ten, then that's quite a pickle everyone's got themselves into.
If only the later inventors of stuff had gone for names like Jubilee Chicken or Lamb Brum we wouldn't see these silly takes. (For example in Japan a classic comfort food is Kare Raisu. It's a completely Japanacised version of 'curry & rice' and no-one eating it in the West thinks 'cultural theft!'
There's a lot of layers to unpack here...!
I realised a possible need for them after...Ezra Klein, I think it was, nice, smart guy, came back to the US from a trip to France and Germany and wrote something like 'it's nice to live in a city where you don't have to think about the people murdered to make it possible", and I was, like, 😱
If they'd in general lightened up 20%, ditched & forgotten Vesper (wonderful as she was) after her film and not tried to sweat the continuity or mythology it would have been better. Craig was fine, and a bit more grittiness was essential to save the franchise
Right. Casino Royale did well at portraying an extremely capable thug, which is a plausible take, and added in some emotion (Moore/Brosnan's lack of same had become very outdated). But they overcooked that, then they had to pivot to trauma, which is just not a happy Bond feeling to carry forward
I'm actually going to take a guess that the tale started with Stanford potentially inviting her for an open day or similar (iirc her mum was a professor of biochem or similar who'd worked in the US, so that is possible) and that growing in the telling
Not even Kemi Badenoch is mad enough to take this bait “OK, fine they didn’t offer 16 yr old me a pre-med scholarship but Stanford did offer 16-year old me a biochem scholarship, in spite of the subsequent dearth of evidence that I have either the academic chops or the work ethic for such a thing”
Is this with reference to a story casting doubt on the claims that a certain politician made that they were offered a great academic honour, despite apparently having achieved rather mediocre grades throughout their academic career?
Another day in a 70 year saga: American conservatives loving capitalism but hating change. A paradox; because it's the nature of capitalism to drive change, and many of the changes they hate are driven directly by capitalism...
But the Bay Area is basically the richest place on Earth, twice as rich as here. If the maintenance budget doesn’t stretch to good roads, that’s 100% a policy choice, no?
Traffic is a bit worse than average for Europe but better than the London area or bits of Germany. In between LA and the Bay Area for severity, I think? People do still travel a lot by car for work, although we don't have the weight of shorter trips for school etc because people bike for those.
I don't think so. Dutch highways don't have potholes at all (we don't even have a word for them). It's all a matter of build quality and maintenance schedules, I guess. (Probably helps here that highways are built and maintained by the same org that does the dikes, where sloppiness is not an option)
(In particular if I were Trump I would treat the West Virginia National Guard like a treasure and put them up in my own hotels. Deep red state troops, only 4 hours drive away, are the kind of people a man playing his game needs on side.)
I must say, if I had mobilised a bunch of politically-reliable guardsmen, dragging them away from their daily lives, I wouldn't then put them on trash duty. They might not turn up next time I needed some real intimidating doing.
Some European countries have national days (Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland are three I have been to) where a bit of flag-waving is perfectly fine
In general I would be willing to back most of our baked goods. Speculaas (speculoos is the Flemish version), stroopwafels, most fruit pies, most non-cream cakes, the wide variety of St Nicholas cookies. It's not a coincidence that 'cookie' is from the Dutch.
Trump is only the 3rd president to be over 75 in office and both the others clearly had some health & cognitive difficulties in office. With 3 1/2 years to go, all sorts of issues are not just possible but likely. Wouldn't be surprised if the next amendment is for an upper age limit of 71.
Worse for us (he clearly *hates* Europeans and will more actively try and sell us to Putin), but nicer for Americans as I don't think he will retain Trump's grip on the media. Trump is an entertainment product, Vance is a dull rat in a suit.
Starting with 'Appellate court majority' doesn't soind like late night Trump. 'Democrat court wrong!!!!' would be his go to. I don't think he's dead, but an overloaded 79 year old is going to have ever more frequent health episodes, as Biden did.
Apropos of nothing, when Trump dies we'll finally get to find out if he was a legendary politician (with an afterlife measured in decades of success for his declared heirs) or a legendary entertainment product (with a productive afterlife of months). Thatcher or 'Friends'?
Also she presumably has all the very best copyright and privacy lawyers on speed dial. And when those people see who’s calling they walk right out of court to take the call
That's true. I guess we just disagree on the balance between the rare (&sane) victim like this being able to talk to a chatbot about this, and the damage caused 10x as many people having their paranoid psychosis aggravated by a system of which they don't understand the limitations.
(As opposed to: 'can my ex X track my phone?' or 'Y has a brother with the police, how could he use that?')
(More specifically, I've sadly had this conversation with a couple of unwell people during my life, as well some healthy ones - I work in relevant tech - and the specific red flag is conspiracy thinking: "the government/ phone company is helping X & Y in my life spy on me all the time")
I look forward to them explaining they tried *hard enough* to the parents of that young man. On the 2nd, on the whole untrained humans manage this. IMV the financial incentive to make these models agreeable is the problem here, the safety teams need to step up.
Apparently e.g. Anthropic are very concerned that Claude might teach users how to make bioweapons so they have trained it to not talk about detailed biology at all. Presumably such techniques can be expanded.
Not at once, but they could be given some of the same reflexes humans have - e.g. if a person starts talking about self-harm stop talking and suggest they go talk to a therapist, or if someone says they are spied on, make clear that this is extremely rare and again a good reason to talk to someone
It looks like some sort of "I'm sorry, but you *do* sound crazy" workflow needs to be urgently built into these models.
Right, whilst 1) being clubbed by the actual police and 2) being hassled by the language police are both bad, the former is a lot worse and only the latter can be solved with the 'mute' button
That's true for most British politicians. But Trump for example is neither liberal or democratic and is somewhere on an authoritarian/fascist axis. And Farage...we will see
(The fact that the British government could run this policy with that rhetoric suggests things about the corruption and stupidity of the UK discourse that I don't want to think about).
And the really unacceptable thing about that is not the immigration policy itself (although it is a very extreme one, as you say) but that they simultaneously said that immigration was bad and they were cracking down on it. Together this has created an insanely disoriented public mood on this.
"Farage is a dangerous, incompetent chaos monkey" is so clearly the obvious line of attack for even (or especially) the most rightwing plausible version of the Conservative Party, that I'm quite confused why they're not roadtesting it daily.
Right. The median US voter is a man who voted for Trump last year but is a bit disappointed by the result. i.e. an imbecile. This is why Newsom is right to copy Trump's all-caps style of drivel. It speaks to imbeciles.
I know the feeling. I'm not a practicing Catholic any more but whenever I see sermonising on the prosperity gospel, or tweets on the 'sin' of empathy, I get a terrible itch to build a very big pyre indeed.
Making a Game of Thrones knock-off which actually works is against the rules (stares pointedly at Rings of Power and later seasons of The Witcher). The only two alleged knock-offs which functioned were House of the Dragon (prequel, not knock-off) and Shogun (not a knock-off at all)
I would like to point out that this would actually *work* which means you're not cut out to make a Game of Thrones knock-off.
(Also if all voters are supposed to focus on is stopping Farage, then it seems fair to point out that the government could definitely stop Farage taking sole power by legislating for proportional representation)
Also doesn't the 'tactical voting will beat Farage' run into the fact that Reform currently have 5(?) seats and that in hundreds of the seats between them and a majority it will not really be clear whom you should vote for if all you care about is stopping Farage.
They're already fairly solidly ahead of the Tories in likely number of MPs, even with current polling, right?
You'd think they'd be nervous that a man famous for stiffing his creditors is gaining ever more unlimited power, but nope.
Someone should ask her if she remembers the UUP, another party quite recently overtaken on its right flank. Not showing much sign of recovery (unless you count going from 0 to 1 MPs.)
An interesting UK parallel is the Ulster Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, which after being overtaken by a party offering spicier form of ethnic nationalism has dropped into insignificance and shows no signs of recovery.
Paul's mates in government can scotch this scenario for good by implementing PR. If they don't, who will be to blame for his scenario: people who opposed the government in good faith, or a government who kept the system rigged to make people who hate them, vote for them?
In general an underpriced risk of the 'tactical voting will beat Farage' is that Reform is 2nd in 120 seats & 3rd or worse in over 200 seats it needs to win to get a majority, which raises this sort of questions as to whom people are supposed to tactically vote for.
Oh no, but that's the most important rule. Did they really ditch it? It's the grand divide between real Trek* and the rest of modern sci-fi, much of the latter being tiresome. * Yes, The Orville is Trek. Obviously.
You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to paint Farage as an incompetent agent of chaos, even without direct comparisons to certain unpopular orange chaos monkeys in the news. Especially as that's a framing that suits both Labour & Tories
It's a perfectly valid hypothetical- on recent polling Farage was on 33% with the others all sub-20%. In the British system that's a recipe for a very solid Reform majority.
Another way of looking at it which would make Trump sad: Putin could have taken an 11 hour flight to DC but instead took a 10 hour flight to Anchorage and made Trump take a 6 hour flight to meet him.
I wonder how that works - isn't a pane of glass what provides the underlying structure?
There's nothing wrong with politicians as a category. Someone needs to balance the many competing demands in a society, the alternative is people killing each other. But the current crop of UK MPs appear to have forgotten that persuasion and moral courage are key qualities of a good politician
That's such an interesting possible parallel. I wonder if anyone has written about it
Every business book says that 'authenticity' is a key ingredient of modern leadership. It should be kind of obvious that authenticity can't be projected by reading out a speech someone else wrote for you (partial exception for people like Reagan who are authentic actors).
Quite aside from diplomatic stuff, I think he offered Albania, Rwanda and Ascension Island as possible destinations for asylum seekers, without the editors noting that Albania will only take Albanians, Rwanda was a bust very recently, and Ascension Island has a population of 800 and no infastructure
That would seem to be the plan bsky.app/profile/equa...
It's probably a bit much this to call this a conspiracy by the UK's leading news editors, but it's either something like that or some kind of very localised mass hysteria...
This sort of things makes one want to collect the editors of almost every national news source and truck them to Manston for a very long stay in detention indeed.
At the very least she should serve the time deducted for her Guilty plea, given she's clearly done a backsies on that one
State *credibility* seems to be the main problem? Resources can rebuild capacity in time, but it will be much harder if everyone believes that a maniac will be elected in 4 yrs to trash it all again. As for diplomacy, clearly people who dealt in good faith with post-2016 US are credulous idiots.
Raises more questions about the policing strategy on this, though. The first rule in combating nonviolent civil disobedience is "don't arrest people looking like this if at all possible, it makes you look stupid & bad". Would love to read the guidance the cops have actually been issued
I don't know her deal but I'm guessing that in her previous political she was also convinced thst she was speaking for a vast unheard majority. I might even guess that she switched without even thinking too hard about the inconsistency in that.
In these cases it's not possible to offer a serious prison sentence, so only death could possibly deter.
I came a closely related thought: that I oppose the death penalty, excepting major politicalcrimes. The worst crimes must be punished with life in prison. However, for political crimes like the January 6 uprising or even the Nazis, there'll always be someone along to pardon them eventually.
Right until they get the bill for shipping food (and quite possibly water) for thousands of people across half an ocean
Thor: Love & Thunder had quite a lot of this, but died from a surfeit of winking; it's surprisingly hard to pull that style off well if you don't keep the earnestness in it somewhere. (Randomly throwing in some stage 4 cancer doesn't count).
In general the Dutch Christian parties (CDA and even more the SGP & Christenunie) are interesting in visibly being influenced by, and grappling with, the actual New Testament in their governing programmes.
