Sampson

Match of the Day still gets more viewers than 90% of live matches - for the record only 10 PL live matches reached 3million viewers last season (which was actually the most in a season on record) whereas MOTD regularly gets that. Last weekend it still got over 3miion views. This idea that it’s on its last legs doesn’t actually match up to viewing habits. Just because some forever online people don’t watch it anymore because they watch it on YouTube, it’s still a large watched programme and will continue for a long time yet. https://www.barb.co.uk/viewing-data/most-viewed-programmes/

I wouldn’t take a couple of cynical posters on here to be “plenty of our fanbase”. Every Leicester fan in real life I’ve ever spoken to loves the man.

Works the other way too though. Got to say I find that centrists and moderates thinking everyone on the left thinks that “anyone who doesn’t share their trope is a fascist” is much more common trope than the actual people left of centre thinking anyone who doesn’t share their views is a fascist/stupid these days. The centrists and moderates constantly talking down to the left and inferring they are stupid and calling them people who won’t listen and meltdown is definitely a much more common in political discourse these days than people on the left actually accusing others of being stupid or fascists.

This just strikes me as standard “enlightened centrist” rhetoric personally. Trump isn’t offering nuanced arguments on immigration saying we aren’t building the infrastructure or integrating so need to reduce numbers while still accounting for population ageing and demographic change. He’s literally saying “America for Americans”, saying immigrants eat pets and saying he’s going to bring about mass deportation. Call me a delusional lefty all you like, but I can’t see how whipping up hate against immigrants by saying the eat people’s pets is something “moderates” should be wooed by and how that is somehow the left’s fault that they are if they are pushing back against that kind of thing. The idea that Trump is the moderate vote and the Democrats are somehow less moderate and more divorced from reality than Trump like that I think is a strange argument about where you want a “moderate” position to lie. The left absolutely should be pushing back against that kind of rhetoric if you want the moderate and centre ground to stay at a reasonable place.

Genuinely can’t get my head round why people keep parroting this argument, as Putin will be gleeful Trump won tonight. Everything Trump has said on Ukraine and Putin points to not only would Putin still have done it, but the financial support from Ukraine would be much less under Trump as it woulld be “Americans first”. Trump is not on the side of Ukraine in this ffs, he’s made that quite openly clear. Putin was already at war in the crimea and Trump did nothing. And all Trump will do is avert funding from Ukraine and let Putin take Ukraine. Trump wants to “make peace” by appeasing Putin and helping Ukraine to surrender and leaving Europe on its own. He doesn’t give a shit about Europe, that’s what “American first” means, this is not a good result for us as Europeans at all.

In a way it could bring UK back closer to the EU. If UK joins the EU in supporting Ukraine “in defence of European values”. We’ll see though. I’m not sure how much UK and EU can realistically find Ukraine on their own sadly.

There’s definitely a trend of the “enlightened centrist” or the “I’m a lefty but” who always defend right wing views and attack the left in many ways over the past decade or so. Rogan and Musk are both definitely part of that. The political centre has been moving gradually to the right since the 1980s in the west really. The right seem to generally much better at the “I’m actually a centrist” shtick to help push the needle further and further right.

Yeah don’t listen to the naysayers, encourage her to go for it for sure. Plus, let’s face it, people often poo poo the soft benefits of university as being wish washy nonsense, but as a parent you just want to see your children happy. Having a secure income can be a part of that but it’s only really a small part as a parent (and let’s be honest, with technology development there’s very few jobs we know will still be viable jobs in 20-30 years time). Plenty who go to university even if they don’t “use their degree” for work still find it helps them become independent as a young adult, make friends, interact with people and ideas they wouldn’t have otherwise etc. Plus let’s be honest, it’s can be hard for young people to move out of home and feel that independence without going to uni these days.

I can’t get my head round the appeal of Elon Musk. Whenever I hear him speak I just think he sounds extremely awkward and a dreadful public speaker, almost Truss-esque. Yet a scary number of people seem to hang on his every word and consider him a genius.

There isn’t. You don’t pay back your student loan until you earn over a certain amount. It doesn’t really saddle anyone with a debt that forces them to work as if you never work you don’t pay a penny back, it’s just an income tax masquerading as a loan.

This is why I took up board gaming as a hobby. As well as a great way to make friends as an adult (a horrendously hard thing to do in general), playing board games is one of the few times when I just feel totally content with life , not interacting with technology or the modern world and not thinking about anything other than enjoying myself and enjoying spending time with other people

Absolutely no one is saying the old are the problem - actually quite the opposite, people are saying the problem is that people aren’t having enough children so the older can’t be supported. No one is blaming the old or saying they should be happy to die or not be supported by the state, or that they haven’t paid into the system. The fact people are trying to spin discussions on population ageing and the demographic crisis as that is exactly one of the problems as to why populists get an easy win off it and why the political optics of the discussion are so difficult. You’re completely misunderstanding the debate. It’s simply undeniable fact that the older a person is, the more on average they cost the health service, claim disability benefits or pensions, these stats are publishers on the ONS every year and can be found on the government website each year, last I remember a retired person costs the UK government more than twice as much as a working age person every year on average in terms of healthcare, pensions and disability benefits. That is absolutely not a moral judgement on that or to say they didn’t “earn” that by working hard. The issue isn’t the old people, it’s that people in western countries are not having enough children so the population is becoming made up not just a small proportion of older people as had always previously been the case, but becoming a population of a majority of older people and there are not enough working people now to pay into the system to support the older people.

Even if you manage to get higher birth rates today (which no western country has still been able to do despite a myriad of different policies in different countries trying), it takes about a quarter of a century for anyone born today to be able to become a trained nurse or doctor for example and that if we really push for higher birth rates that likely even takes many parents, especially mothers out of the workforce for a few years whilst they’re caring for their children’s. So it’s not something you can solve anytime soon. You can increase retirement age of course, but even then many companies will simply not hire 68 year olds and it’s very difficult for older people to find work or they are unable to work for medical or health reasons, so in a lot of cases you’re just moving the public outgoings from pension to job seeker or disability benefits which doesn’t solve anything either. It’s also very difficult to even do this politically, as we saw with the fallout for the winter fuel allowance here or the riots in France for raising retirement age by 2 years - it’s an easy win for populists to rally against and claim is a disgrace etc. It’s something which no country seems able to solve and even if they knew how, the political optics of it are extremely difficult too. I think just our modern individualistic lifestyles are just not really compatible with high birth rates and everyone having 2.4 children tbh and there’s not really a lot wrong with that from an individual point of view, even if it’s a huge problem society has to face. No one owes their country children and we all only live once, more and more people and couples prefer to prioritise other things than spending their 30s and 40s raising 3 children, in that case I don’t know even if financial encouragement for having more children would really solve much.

It’s the same in every western country tbh and even many developing nations now too (see how China’s pension system is bankrupt in many regions for example) No country no knows how to deal with population ageing and no country has been able to successfully get the birth rate up. Meanwhile, no country has been able to deal with the political fall out of the immigration that’s needed to successfully deal with population ageing or the populists who are using endless anti-immigrant rhetoric for their own ends. Reality is, older people are naturally the ones who use the majority of public money - be it healthcare, disability benefits or pensions, and when most of your country is over 50, you don’t have enough workers to generate that public money and even the richest country isn’t going to be able to afford it.

But he was only good for about half a season before the injury. The season before that everyone thought he was out his depth and wanted him sold. So I don’t think it’s about the injury really. I think the reality is more that he’s been here about 5 years now, and he had one great half a season and 4 1/2 crap ones, but that was very much the exception to the role.

I’m not having any revisionism on Sunak. His campaigning during the election was vile, repeating outright lies about how much certain things would cost, demeaning trans people, treating international institutions like the ECJ as bogeyman. Just because he’s not as cruel as Jedenak or Badenoch or as weird as Boris or Truss, doesn’t make him still not an awful leader, and he is still incredibly weird and unrepeatable even for a billionaire politician

I don’t think Trump gives one hoot about Europe so I doubt it matters much what the UK does. The idea of “the west” being important with the US, Canada, Western & Central Europe have past now I think. The US cares a lot more about the goings on and trying to get on with Asia far more than Europe nowadays.

But do you ebleive it?

At 4:14, that’s clearly the trucks fault for pulling out on a roundabout without looking right, the Golf has clear right of way. Dunno why the commentator has a go at someone for going on a roundabout as intended and the car can’t just emergency stop on a roundabout, could cause a cascade of accidents, swerving round the truck is the safest thing to do in that situation.

Yeah and the US as an English speaking former colony helped prop up our economy through foreign aid and workers from the former British colonies in the Caribbean from the wind rush generation came to help rebuild the country in exchange for the promise and draw of lifelong residency in the UK. Not to mention UK forced labour camps existed still in for example Kenya long after WW2 ended. I think you’re being naive (somewhat deliberately I would guess, as I know you’re an intelligent person) if you can’t see how a a not insignificant amount of wealth for both the UK and other western nations came from and still continues comes from our place in the world built on former empires, colonialism and/or slavery - even if it comes through more nuanced soft influence such as selling romantic visions of our big cities to tourists built on resources which weren’t fairly compensated for to countries who had their resources directed away so the UK and other western nations could industrialise first. It takes 100s of years to build up a nation and an average British person has a lot more than an average person in sub Saharan Africa for example, there are many reasons why, but a percentage of it, which is certainly not a non-existent percentage, is undoubtedly down to empire building, colonialism and slavery. Of course it’s impossible to quantify so it will never happen, but I still have extreme sympathy for the nations who still are at the economic disadvantage caused by empire building and to say that the loot of empire doesn’t exist anymore is clearly just being wilfully provocative.

I think things like corruption, democratic backsliding and populism win in the end, bit by bit, over generations. Like, we saw how angry Labour and many Labour supporters were at the last Tory governments bills which let them revoke citizenship from people who have dual citizenship and to give the Home Secretary the power to shut down any protest they like and to send protesters to prison, but they’ve done nothing to indicate they’re planning on reversing these changes now they’re in power. These policies are likely in place for the long run now.

Except even Farage was selling campaigning as us becoming like Norway (who still have freedom of movement but not freedom of goods) in the lead up to the referendum and Boris campaigned saying UK citizens would still be able to go through the EU passport controls booths at airports after Brexit. I think it was yourself who said recently most of us seem to have blocked out what some of the pre-referendum campaigning actually was like (another one I remember were billboards about 80million Turkish people coming to the UK even though Turkey has zero chance of ever joining the EU while Erdogan is in charge). All the “Brexit means Brexit” stuff only came afterwards. In fact many of the leaver’s arguments even from the likes of Farage, Johnson, Gove and other big names of vote Leave during the referendum were that the plan was just to become like Norway, Switzerland or Iceland and probably still stay in the EEA if we left.

That’s why I said 33%+. I know people at the place I worked at the time who were not unintelligent people and who followed the news who just said they were voting leave because “we give them too much money” and didn’t understand what the basics of freedom of movement for goods, services and people even was or meant or the reasons why their passports didn’t get stamped or why they could buy alcohol and cigarettes or expensive clothes or their holiday in the algarve and no one at customs checked it

I don’t really see what reducing partner visas for international post-grad students does apart from drive away international talent though. They already couldn’t apply for bachelors students so these are masters and doctorate students which means highly specialised people that very likely aren’t taking any jobs away from your average Joe in the street. Closing out routes for visas for partners and children I guess are the easiest way to get numbers down but also the most inconsequential or retroactive type of immigration to go after. The whole point of those visas is they live with their partner/parent and they have to show they have adequate housing and resources to support them and they can’t claim benefits. So when people complain about immigration taking up housing or benefits getting these visas down are inconsequential. I think this is a big problem with the migration debate. It’s obsessed with numbers and so much of the media tries to equate all migrants with people claiming asylum rather than talking about the different categories of immigration based on the reason people come to live in the uk (I.e. work, studies, asylum, love, family reasons etc.)