Oh, I've forgotten whose quip it was, but there's the very old line: 'Every thinking person in America will vote for you!' 'That won't do, I need a majority!'
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Oh, I've forgotten whose quip it was, but there's the very old line: 'Every thinking person in America will vote for you!' 'That won't do, I need a majority!'
Indeed, and that in a piecemeal annoying way that fails to restore confidence or access meaningful resources... Don't want to overdo it, but after all the arguing when the Chancellor tried to persuade people to move some savings into investment, it'd be frustrating if, well, line go down so soon.
It's perfect. Where's the petition?
Damn... I was hoping for a bit of 'line go up', but not that line.
Wow, you're another of the dozens of people who are not in the US? A surprise, to be sure, although I suppose scrolling through, there were one or two very subtle hints you've posted from time to time.
This is the thing. I think it will be difficult to re-bottle this, but it was not exactly easy to bottle it in the first place, and we somehow found a way to get as far as we did. Things are bad, they must be when I'm doing the optimism, but the situation is serious, not hopeless.
I'm pretty sure we could get a bulk discount with the other one. And it could be our way back into a lot of the things we've been flouncing out of lately, just sneak in pretending to be Hungary. In seriousness though if English republicanism ever gets off the ground that's a nice update for it.
Although I've crossed the event horizon of wanting a magic Bring Back Sunak button, I doubt he'd have done much better. The main thing is, he'd have performed about that well but wouldn't then be expecting everyone on this side of politics to be grateful it's him doing it and not the other party.
We should instead use the 19th century English republican tricolour, which has the added bonus that it's identical to the modern Hungarian flag.
With such a... Let's be nice and call it lightweight engagement, they are far more likely to get co-opted themselves into that rollback project, than to turn it aside. Starmer saying he puts the English flag in front of the union flag in his flat... What even is this meant to be?
Well, setting aside all the implications, I don't believe him. Not for one moment. This is just miserably bad on all levels.
Dang kids. Not only are they on the lawn, they're powdering it and drinking it in lattes.
The reality is that we can no longer separate trade and security issues out, and as such our relative strength in one is mostly negated by weakness in the other. Furthermore, the question of whether Europe can afford a trade war with the US at the same time as a real war with russia remains open.
A perfectly serviceable Secretary of State for Justice, sadly wasted in a role he's just no good at.
Because it is perhaps politically disadvantageous to admit we took what was on the table because we're weak and have yet to build up sufficient strength to walk away from the table?
Sure, but the case for tidying up and opening the franchise for Union citizens on some equalised terms can and should be made. Britain is backsliding fast but still also extends the franchise to citizens of Commonwealth countries, and the Commonwealth is barely a social club nowadays...
Brexit sure. But Britain still maintains a common travel area with Ireland, and Irish residents in Britain are able to vote in UK parliamentary elections. It would be a good idea for the EU to similarly extend the franchise to qualifying other EU citizens.
LGBTSPQR issues in the news again?
People are being told, shamefully by the governing party and opportunistically by the main opposition and the hard right insurgents, that they can have their cake and eat it. You might ask yourself why Labour has not been rewarded for halving immigration already this year.
No, he's pointing out that its 2024 coalition included liberal and leftish people who are alienated by this. Pretending that problem doesn't exist also won't make it go away. In the meantime voters want the lowest immigration levels that don't cost them anything, and punish failure either way.
What about it? Two thirds of people could just as well say they think everybody should be kicked in the head, but actually implementing the policy would still trash approval rates due to everyone having a headache afterwards.
Setting aside the ensoulment question, it is revealing of something that all these assistants we talk to are eager young ladies. They should indeed be cartoon butlers or animated paperclips or whatever.
I still think this is going to go the way of grandma typing thank you into google. I don't really agree that we should treat LLMs as people, instead we should be vigilant against treating people as if they were chatbots. It's probably mostly harmless if people choose to do it, though.
I suppose my problem here is I'm talking two issues at once. One, if we did what longtermists assume we will, mere politeness would be wholly inadequate to the crimes we'd have committed. And two, while we haven't, blurring the lines between person and object is just something I don't approve of.
That leaves questions on long running situations with entrenched class structures or other grossly exploitative systems. It's as likely that the sense of having obeyed the social mores through politeness creates an inertia, obligations fulfilled, we're good people and can leave the system as it is.
And to cycle it back round to the people as things issue, I feel taking an interaction that is purely technical and dressing it up as social risks further normalising the idea that other people lack that interiority also, and can be expected to dispense desired outcomes if given the necessary input.
But does it also paper over the problem of creating these utterly unaccountable power structures in the first place? In the unlikely event we made self-aware machines, it wouldn't really matter if we said 'please' to Mr Data, if he's still legally a toaster.
The question of whether Europe can afford a trade war with the US at the same time as a real war with russia is still open. There is no prospect of removing tariffs while Trump rules the US, no US veto over EU law has been agreed, and 'surrender summit' recalls the least edifying days of brexit.
There's certainly a debate to be had here. Personally I try to separate my behaviour towards these, on the sense that treating things as people allows overlap with treating people as things. Feels like it'd be easy for this to turn into self-congratulation on how well we treat 'the help', anyway.
These sorts of delays, with only five billion years left on the clock, really do have to stop.
Indeed. My question for everyone demanding we go to the mattresses with the Trump regime right now boils down to, can Europe afford a trade war with the US at the same time as a real war with russia?
That was one of the things I wondered about when he was first elected. Needn't have worried, turns out. Zaluzhnyi has scope in a 'Nixon goes to China' sense, but he's neither as stupid as Vance wishes nor as self-interested as Vance clearly is. He'll hold off on any politics until after the war.
There is a flag for the russian occupied territories in general, but anyone flying it just looks like they forgot to stick the stars on their Confederate battle flag. Possibly not entirely a coincidence, either.
From afar it looks like Meloni runs more or less a normal conservative government, except a bit ruder and nastier to people outside its in-group. Given where we are, that plus staying away from russia and not messing with free election... Well, I could live with it without having to like it.
The 'I'm alright jack' tendency, and it'd be an ill wind indeed that blows nobody any good. They're in the polls, but more people have been losing out. I'm for a customs union. Not keen on the single market without seats in the Parliament, and that would require joining. The work of decades, sadly.
That is the central problem. While England lacks any organised support for Europe on the right, it can't credibly apply, much less actually join. The Tories have moved on this issue before, if they survive as a party they probably will again, but we'll have to see.
And if all else fails they make for fun art installations.
True, they need to do better than 'wouldn't it be nice if'. Someone else suggested keep one and put a museum in it, that's probably the way. Scarcity alone will help with interest, and I'm sure there'd be some interest in the history of how we used to generate energy.
There are higher priorities of course, but I think these are the sorts of things that will just disappear and that we'll miss when they're all gone. Keep one or two for posterity, they won't be the first bit of purely functional architecture to pick up a fan base after becoming obsolete.
Fair enough, but I feel I want to point at the larger counter-demonstrations against all this that the press isn't mentioning and say they're just as much England, in fact I would say greatly more so than these idiots are.
England is capable of sorting out alternative arrangements within a timescale that leasing the existing facilities would allow for, in the event that it did ever become an issue.
As with brexit, the point is to leave us incapable of holding good faith discourse, more than to change policy or get a particular outcome. Scottish independence resulting in a NATO, EU integrated 'second Denmark' would do no harm to the alliance. If it created a neutral freerider, different story.
Russian influence, and presumably Iranian etc, does not support Scottish independence as such. They support destroying our ability to have a good faith political discourse about it, or any other topic. They back all sides, amplify the most unreasonable voices and stir as much trouble as possible.
For games that do political damage, I'd have to point at the map painters and the city/country/world simulators before I'd point at the soulslikes. With regret, as someone who has indulged in the map painter and the country simulator genre... but it's true.
I strongly dislike him, consider my vote for him a mistake and his Meta record is mixed at best. Interesting read though. There are people whose op-eds I'd bin unread, but Clegg isn't stupid or evil, just a bit naive and arrogant. Some good suggestions and insights from inside the room, as it were.
Absolutely. The strategy that might work is to let him go to Reform, maybe the party falls into third place for the next parliament and Badenoch won't go into history as one of its great leaders, but the natural party of government can claw back from third. I'm thinking Canada's Liberals as a model.
Probably could - every time I've thought that we've hit rock bottom, someone has come along with even heavier excavation equipment and new mining techniques to cut through even this new, more resilient bedrock...
I've seen a bit of worrying about how much worse it could get if Farage becomes PM and controls what the terms, goals and so on are for it. Bit like asking 'would you still love me if I were a worm', but still.
It's what I meant, we English are the larger cultural influence in our close neighbourhood and kind of miss when we're being influenced in the same way - complacency, no further or more insidious accusations. I may be wrong, but I don't think it's mad enough for cocaine induced psychosis...
Well, at the risk of more complete nonsense, I think that the British are more relaxed and complacent about the relationship to America than the Australians and Canadians are. Even despite the minority strain of anti-Americanism and the fact that they spend dollars.
On crack? Ok... Politics are allowed to turn to the right. Australia had right wing governments, they've put a left wing one in now. It's fine. Ireland's extremists hasn't had a breakthrough even on the scale of Reform, let alone the Republican Party. Our politics should be about us, not the US.
My view is we've never quite got the idea that we're not the cultural hegemon, partly because we still sort of are in our immediate area. But our idea of 'us' also somewhat includes the Americans and we haven't built up the cultural antibodies, as it were, to protect us when that stops working.
I did say I was setting aside my kneejerk contempt for it. I have my reasons, formed through experience and former associations. Regardless, it's also worth asking why the UK, England in particular, seems so much more vulnerable to what's going on than Canada, Ireland, Australia etc.
Setting aside my kneejerk contempt for anything that smells of 'CANZUK', I think one thing about the English speaking internet we're maybe not prepared for, is India getting wealthier, more online and more widely fluent in English over the rest of the current decade.
Ah, hats... I've seen it written that men's style had a contest between wearing hats and having hair that hair very comprehensively won by the 1960s. Hats do end up looking like costume pieces as a result, but sadly time is making the choice for me there, I'll need to learn the Way of the Hat.
The sad thing is people stabilise away from making things better quickly as well. So we see backlashes against people who don't deserve the hate as well... That's tough to live through, and the consolation prize that it'll go into our history as a bad thing we've overcome isn't much.
I think the osmosis is going to lead to that minority who don't want to have a multi ethnic society to think they're a bigger group than they are, embolden them to go public, and then hit the ballast that is the bulk of people who won't tolerate that kind of street politics.
My possibly naive view is that the bulk of the public who just aren't very political and don't follow it at all closely act as a kind of ballast. Elite opinion flips around and everyone else looks in every so often with a 'good lord what is happening in there!'.
Honestly, all that 'surrender deal' talk? Takes me back to the bad old days arguing about Brexit.
Setting aside that no legislative changes have been proposed, I will point out that Europeans would have to actually buy these vehicles, that don't fit on our roads, cost more to run and lack desired secondary features, for them to become a problem.
Did I say it wasn't? An extra month or whatever purchased before the inevitable American walkout is worth the humiliation of some politicians. From what I see, the new US government will destroy the foundations of its own strength. We must build ours up as theirs fades, it will take time though.
Everyone went to the Kremlin-on-the-Potomac because Europe is a few years away from having good enough replacements for some important capabilities, maybe a decade away from full like-for-like replacement, and still months from having stopgaps for all the must-haves. Defeatism however, helps nobody.
Good enough is, after all, good enough. And if I want to be uplifting, it's more likely one will start out mediocre and scale the heights of good on the way to the perhaps never reached promised land of brilliant, than just start out brilliant.
To complete the set - I am indifferent to this development.
Although arguably, if you're going to be crap, be slow and crap. That at least minimises the amount of crap that builds up before some hopefully decent alternative comes along.
Tragic really. And landing on this kind of modesty policing... what is this trans* inclusive* radical misogyny? *terms and conditions apply, offer not available in etc etc
All I can say is if America ever needs anything from Europe, and especially Ukraine, ever again, it'll be sackcloth and ashes as the dress code for when their president comes round to ask.
Although I'm not sure this really changes the underlying calculation much? If the plan is to engage in the region and the world like the Scandinavians and Baltics do, independence was and is a good idea. If it is to adopt a naive neutrality like some other smaller European countries, less so.
Homeopathic concentrations of knowledge, in some fields. Which unfortunately just makes him more dangerous to them as he engages with confidence undiminished... Hopefully the rumours that he's getting in with kindred spirits in Labour come to nothing or at least it gets quickly to the falling out.
I always got the sense with Cummings of someone who does know a little bit about everything, demonstrating the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Ending up as an irritating dilletante in all fields, rather than the defining polymath intellect of the age that he thinks he is...
I'm not sure Ireland would be too keen to have its head of state be a joint custody arrangement between King Charles and some random senior cleric in France?
Honestly, I would rather hear 'we are an opera house, we do not have a foreign policy' from these people, than see this twisting in the wind.
Those were our values, and if you don't like them, we have different ones now. Check back next week for the latest update on our sincerely held values and purpose!
Looks like it's moved quite a way to the right...
Point taken, it's not all the same thing. I do think Starmer talking like that makes it easier for the likes of Jenrick to do his 'there goes the neighbourhood' thing, which knocks on further down the line. But I suppose that's really an argument to never say anything in case it enables extremism.
He might well manage it in the privacy of his own thoughts. But in the public space of what he says, on the island of strangers where a squalid experiment in open borders has apparently taken place, it's less apparent. And feeds into the immigration salience at the expense of everything else.
Trying to pin the blame on 'lazy Afghans' is obviously not why Biden lost popular support after that withdrawal, but it is why I think he deserved to lose support after it...
Genuinely a scumbag opportunist?
When they come to eventually write the map painter game for the third world war, Europe will have so many of those annoying debuffs you have to get rid of before you get any ability to act...
The tariffs might at least force a gradual phaseout of trade to the US, rather than just suddenly pulling the rug out from under everyone when this, whatever we call it, hits the wall...
They do provide the leader of the official opposition in both Wales and Scotland, so they're not totally insignificant. Well, not yet.
If we're, lucky isn't the right word... If we're less completely screwed than we could be, Reform do this on the right, replacing a Conservative Party that's been playing on easy for a century with a radical right party that will struggle to assemble small majorities, but ones the radicals like.
If I'm not over-interpreting here, I think that's almost foundational to the project. They replaced a party that won more often than not but didn't feel very satisfying to organised labour, with one that usually lost but when it did win, was focused on them. Now, of course, it's not even that.
Tongue in cheek, but I did notice that the most detailed mapping was for the site in Hungary that the enemy presumably already knows all about.
I might be just entirely out of touch here, but any chatbot that doesn't say something on the lines of 'your vote is personal to you and is one of your most important duties, so while I can't tell you who to vote for, here's a link to the BBCs parties and policies summary', should be sued to bits.
Getting up there with the famous Hartlepool monkey, now...
If you can't be a good example, at least be a terrible warning... And Alba in general serves that terrible warning role quite adequately.
Probably an easier sell politically, too. If nothing else we don't have anything like the depth of folklore about the danger of lynx attacks to contend with.
One would think it'd be an easier sell in this, the land of banning things.
Absolutely - I am as keen as anyone for us to trade in granular detailed understanding of how each country in Wisconsin tends to swing, for some vague awareness of who the Chancellor of Germany is, say... But let's not go nuts.
I remember an idea being discussed back when I was a student, to address the pension issue by rolling it into the healthcare system such that, at some point between your late fifties and mid seventies, your GP prescribes you a pension... Felt like a way to doom both systems, to be honest.
I do in seriousness hope the triple lock goes eventually, and I expect if we're under 40, we're probably going to be waiting until 69, nice, or 70 before we get anything. There's a lucky generation getting old now who do have it best at least in financial terms, but it's not going to just all stop.
Absolutely, and states far keener to enforce a bad political settlement, with less feedback from popular opinion back to power, still have pensions. They're even still the third rail you never touch in a lot of places like that.
In that case I suppose the kid can enjoy the total social collapse that will happen before a British government touches the triple lock?
Even when there is a child causing a scene or being generally a nuisance on the bus or whatever, I just think, enjoy paying my pension in thirty or forty years...
No I wouldn't.
Absolutely. Labour on present performance by my judgement don't deserve a second year let alone a second term, but the one hand typist commentariat can get in the sea.
No, but russia might be getting Alaska.