Sampson

Smiling is infectious You catch it like the flu When someone smiled at me today I started smiling too I walked around the corner And someone saw me grin When he smiled I realised I had passed it on to him I thought about the smile And then realised its worth A single smile like mine Could travel round the earth So if you feel a smile begin Don’t leave it undetected Start an epidemic And get the world infected - Spike Milligan

2nd twofer in a week. Crazy Wordle 1 668 2/6 ⬜🟩🟨⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I was playing an Arcs campaign all day today. Playing shit-talking diplomacy and politics board games all day instead of shit-talking diplomacy and politics on message boards all day.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command“

An always worthwhile reminder in these chaotic times we’re living through. Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft And you feel that you've had quite enough... Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour; That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, A sun that is the source of all our power. The sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see Are moving at a million miles a day In an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles an hour Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way. Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars; It's a hundred thousand light years side-to-side. It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand lightyears thick, But out by us it's just three thousand lightyears wide. We're thirty thousand lightyears from galactic central point; We go round every two hundred million years. And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe. The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whiz As fast as it can go--the speed of light, you know-- Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth, And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space 'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.

To don my tinhat end of the world catastrophising cloak for a minute - I think all this class, unions and trades stuff feels very 19th and 20th century. Not that they have zero importance now but we’re literally on the precipice of the majority of jobs being replaced by robots and ai, both blue collar or white collar jobs, both working and middle class jobs. And to the point individual companies will become more powerful than the UK nation state, and these things aren’t going to help us much and the UK state is not going to be powerful enough to its own enforce employment law against quadrillion dollar worldwide tech companies which can control the flow of information. Used to think population ageing and climate change were the biggest issues for us to face in the 21st century, but I think now AI and companies becoming more powerful than countries will usurp those.

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It’s a game from the 1980s called Mafia or Werewolf. There’s loads of these types of games (social deduction), the more modern ones tend you give you more concrete information to go on, but even so the idea is you play them with the same group over and over again and then you can make educated guesses based on their voting patterns, whether certain people kill people who accuse them or let them die etc. The classic thing has always been though that the first time people play have no past information to go on so accuse people because they’re too quiet or loud or too normal, which is just how people are, but they’ve never played with them before so have no comparison points.

For me the big thing is these big tech companies are essentially starting to become as rich and powerful as many prominent nation states now, and AI is only going to increase that. The argument Bill Gates used to have was “sure but we don’t have armies”. But I’m not sure they need them now individual companies can control the flow of information to individuals. You see what happens when the EU stands up to Musk, he just promotes a bunch of anti-EU parties, think that kind of thing is only going to increase. I’m not sure the UK government can really stand up to the big tech companies anymore, I think if they don’t yet, it won’t be long until those companies have more power and wealth than the UK as a nation state. All reminds me of the video game Deus Ex a bit.

It’s fair that governments don’t really know how to deal with social media. Like I’m a liberal who believes we absolutely should live in a free speech society and people make blue jokes to their friends in private all the time, there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m not an evolutionary biologist but I bet there’s some social bonding reasons behind it. Thing is as much as it’s easy to say “just don’t post it publicly” or “yes but you should be aware of the consequences” it isn’t that easy, it’s very easy just to like something or post something while your brain is on autopilot and you’re not thinking it through, because you never (rightly) had to face these consequences jokingly with mates in the past and for most people this technology has come up in living memory when those brain chemistry patterns and cultural patterns have been formed. The bigger problem though is that social media is probably the most addictive drug ever created by humans and was literally the smartest technology* humans have created to force people’s attention to it and not take their eyeballs off it to the point where people feel physically compulsed to check their phone every 5 minutes and post or google everything they think. So I don’t think it’s easy at all to tell someone just to not post, I think for some it’s harder than stopping quitting smoking. That’s how the technology is designed. Also, there’s loads of psychology experiments showing because we feel like we’re anonymous online people say things they’ll never do in real life, even though we aren’t really anonymous and that inevitably leads to misreadings or misunderstandings of people’s genuine personalities - the classic is there’s so many people we’d argue with online that we’d be great friends with if we met them in real life. I do though totally understand the argument that people listen to what is written on social media so writing things on inciting violence needs to be clamped down too. But it is a bit scary now that Big Brother doesn’t need to watch you because people’s autopilot thoughts are kind of out there already on social media posts and their google searches (and now ChatGPT questions). I don’t know what the answer is, no one knows where the balance is. The scary thing for me is just that a major cause of the 30 Years War was the Catholic Church not being able to deal with the new mass communication system of the printing press. And a major cause of Workd War II was governments not being able to deal with the new mass communication system of the radio. I think social media has undoubtedly played a sizeable role in destabilising our world order the past decade or so, where it ends or how we deal with it I hope we don’t have to have a massive war like the previous 2 mentioned to help us decide. * I say was because obviously now we have AI which is magnitudes many more times as powerful.

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Aleways thought the Meaning of Life is funnier than Life of Brian or the Holy Grail.

Nah, that’s complete revisionism imo. People kept making economic arguments for staying in the eu and were told “that’s project fear, you’re talking down to us and calling us idiots, we know what we’re voting for”, the mantra of leave voters was always that they knew what they were voting for, which I’m willing to take their word for, not that they were voting because people called them names, and if they were isn’t that the snowflake wokery they’re supposedly against? Right wing populism 101 is basically to set up this catch 22 when they’re allowed to do everything they say people on the left and centre do and when the left or centre do the same thing they say “see that exactly why I’m voting for right wing populism”, you see it all the time especially with stuff like cancel culture and freedom of speech when they completely shut down and play the snowflake victim to anyone who doesn’t agree with them while claiming they’re trying to be cancelled themselves by snowflakes playing the victim.

“We want reasoned non-hyperbolic conversation” whilst simultaneously going on about people being “anything right of far left” and “ultra left weirdos” seems pretty disingenuous to me ngl.

I think almost everyone in the uk, apart from some of those Tommy Robinson types, realise that the UK and Europe really need to build up their military and ween themselves off the US and create a much stronger and formal military alliance right now, probably seperate from NATO.

It also implies that Russia and the US are on opposite sides and that we are on the side of the US when the US have made it quite clear that is no longer the case. For all the problems with the current government can’t get my head round why anyone would want Farage in power. It’s quite obvious he’s on the side of the authoritarians and uses all their same language and ideas of smashing international institutions, bureaucrats, lawyer, judges, universities etc. to give individuals at the top of governments way more power to do what they like and essentially become a king in all but name.

Yes but it’s not about short term effects it’s about the medium-term erosion of the international institutions. It’s about showing that international institutions become nothing more than a bluff if American power isn’t behind them, which gives other regional powers more strength to control their region knowing there’s less reason to follow international law. Feels like with each one of these events we’re abandoning the post-1945 world of international institutions and we’re reverting to the pre-1914 world of military power locks and spheres of influence

One of these moments will eventually be the Franz Ferdinand moment sadly, we’re just getting too many of them nowadays and the world is becoming more and more of a melting pot. The camel can’t take much more pieces of straw. The frog in the slowly raising temperature saucepan is now approaching boiling point. I’ve run out of metaphors….

Guys, it’s New Year’s Eve. I love squabbling on here as much as the next person, but go out and get pissed and don’t think about immigration for one day of the year. You can have all the arguments about immigration you like in 2026.

Where did he say it was about if he wants or does not want him to be in the uk, he said he doesn’t want a society where we banish British citizens for words they say? The guy is a British citizen not an asylum seeker, stripping someone of their citizenship and banishing them from the country because of words they said is a legal decision that creates a legal precedent that then has to be upheld by judges in similar situations. It’s imo big brother style wokery beyond the pale. That’s how we end up down the path of breaking up millions of families and getting people killed in other countries for what society deems at the time for saying the wrong words (even if they said them decades ago) meaning none of us can say anything anymore on threat of never seeing our friends and family again (which is what I thought many on the right were supposed to be rallying against). Was it not you who ranted against the wife of a Tory MP getting prison time for allegedly encouraging people to burn down assylum hotels when there were people inside? Under the same legal system you want to set up judges would have to throw her out the country to god knows where never to see her friends and family again unless you set up legal frameworks where one thing is somehow different than the other which you won’t be svor to do because you can’t predict all the words that will be said in what way Just don’t get how so many right can genuinely want this stuff when they’re simultaneously (often rightly) so against cancel culture on the other side because they understand the legal precedent and culture it creates. I was always taught this - imagine these powers being in the hands of the worst government you can imagine, because when you’ve created these legal powers they’re now there to be used by every future government, not just the ones you like.

His mother was born in the UK, it’s nothing to do with any vetting process. He isn’t a naturalised citizen, he has his citizenship through birthright.

Sorry, I hadn't read what was said, and my system was being funny. Regardless, of how vile something is said. Stripping people of their citizenship and throwing them out the country (which is what Jenrick is suggesting publicly) based on words people say, no matter how vile, is just setting up frightening legal precedents imo and it's a frightening sign of our times that this is mainstream opinion in either the Conservative or Labour parties. That isn't democracy.

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He’s extremely consistent in his view on this, and has been since before the election - he’s on Putin’s side, not ours. People need to take him on his word for this, why would he suddenly change his viewpoint?

It's always been done though. I mean, someone from North Korea or Iraq doesn't just fill out a simple form with no checks to get a visa to visit the UK. All that's happened is what has happened to people from other diplomatically adversarial countries is now what's happening to British, French and German people. The issue is too many people are still in the October 2024 mindset that the US is a friendly diplomatic nation towards the UK, despite the fact the US has been quite open in the past few months that they see the UK and the rest of Europe as diplomatic adversaries not as allies. It is brutal for US/UK families and friends who live in both countries who are going to find it harder to see each other now, but people need to take the US at their word they're not a friendly country towards us anymore, and stop burying their head in the sand about it. Our biggest allies/closest diplomatic relationships now are the EU, Australia/NZ and Canada (maybe Japan, Singapore and S. Korea too but that's up in the air right now I'd say). We shouldn't be seeing the US as part of that anymore and if anything, realise they're actively part of the other side.