Sampson

Would be interested to see what happened if the LibDems and Greens formed an election pact and stood down for each other what would happen. Most polls show their combined number of votes would be enough to win, but how that would translate to seats I don't know. Also whether their very differing views on the economy would be too much to of a gap to bridge to form an alliance, despite agreeing on a lot of social policy and both wanting to reject the US and get closer to Europe. I think with both parties very in favour of PR and both fiercely anti-Farage, I do think an anti-Reform election pact and then first thing first is pushing through PR for future elections could actually be feasible though.

You can't. Which is why it's ridiculous the DG and head of news have resigned over 10 seconds in an externally made programme that it took anyone over a year to recognise there was anything wrong with.

Why are the Mail and Telegraph celebrating a foreign leader attacking our national broadcaster? Think what you like about the BBC, but it's the British state broadcaster not the American one. The right wing press have become so obsessed with American political culture it's like they want us to become a 51st state and have tied themselves so bizarrely to a foreign leader in Trump that they will happily attack Britain itself and British institutions if it feels like it's pro-Trump to do so. If the Guardian did this with a left-leaning world leader they'd be outcry of a foreign takeover of our press and rightly so.

It’s everywhere . Can barely go a week here without this kind of Farage-ist virtue signalling these days.

The thing that gets me is Reform call themselves conservatives but they’re extremely radical and the exact opposite of conservatives in many ways. Conservatism under Thatcher, Major, Cameron and May always used to be the strength of institutions, free trade and international cooperation, and about the individual taking responsibility for their actions, not blaming others if you’re unemployed or struggling for example but going out there, thinking positively, go and do some studies or taking any job you can and not relying on the state and doing anything you can to “pull yourself up from the bootstraps”. I didn’t always agree with it, but it was a perfectly understandable viewpoint. Farage-ism is the exact opposite of that - it’s about constantly telling Britain or British people that they don’t need to take responsibility, all the ever do is play the victim and virtue signal when someone says something bad about them and it’s always the fault of the EU, international institutions, courts, the lawyers etc. or if you’re unemployed it’s the immigrants taking your jobs etc. So much of their messaging is the exact opposite to telling people to go out there and make it happen themselves, it’s all about telling people to play the victim. I’m surprised by how many Tories voters have jumped ship to Reform because Reform represent everything the Tories used to hate.

Second this, doesn't have to be those games specifically but just tabletop or analogue games in general, be them card games, board games, pub games, parlour games, word games, tabletop RPGs or whatever. Getting back into board and card games since the pandemic has been a massive help for mentally. It also helped see my old university friends way more than I used to again as well as help me make new friends again (which is always way harder than it should be as an adult in modern times). We used to love playing games in our 20s but then people started settling down, having partners, kids etc. so we just got out the habit - and you know what happens, going to the pub and just talking gets boring because you run out of things to talk about in adult life because things don't really change fromm week to week and no one wants to talk about politics with how divisive it is these days. But we'd mentioned a few times over the years how missed it, so we just set up one night a week as a "boys games night" since 2021 and it's been great. We'd been seeing each other like once every few months for years and it's gone to once a week for some of us again and is always a good laugh, also gives you something to look forward to to break up the week after work. Started trying some meetups as well for different games and made some good friends there as well in recent years, and I'm sure we all know how tough it is to make friends after school and university for many of us, the games give you an automatic ice breaker and jumping off point.

So what do you guys reckon: The plan with this war in Venezuela is to be manafactured so MAGA can use it to cancel next years mid terms and the 2028 election or not?

If you put the LibDems and Green votes together they’d have the most votes in most polls. I wonder if we’ll start seeing them doing some informal anti-Reform coalition where they sit out of certain by elections/local elections over the next few years

Oh I cba to read through the last pages of this nonsense. I’m glad some of you still have the energy to debate this stuff, glad some of you are still in the bargaining phase. I’ve given up and am in the acceptance phase of grief for liberal democracy, scientific consensus and the international rules based order. Clear as day now that enough of the population want to ignore scientific reality on climate change and want Farage to rule them like a king and smash the checks, balances, institutions, legal systems and bureaucracy that thousands of years of European history have taught us are needed to hold up democracy. Sideshow Bob had it right all along when he running for mayor of Springfield.

Peston’s quote feels very optimistic and based on current AI and not what it will look like in 20 years though. Similar to what people thought about the internet when we were all getting those AOL CD-ROMs through our doors in the late 90s/early 00s - “it’s just a tool for communication”. Now 25 years later it’s literally profoundly affected just about every job, our news, our attention span, our travel, our politics, our legal system, how we talk to each other, the amount of sex or friends people have on average in ways no one could’ve even thought about when those AOL CD-ROMs were being sent through our letter boxes. AI feels like an even more society shifting example of that, in 10 years time if not sooner I reckon no one will be able to tell the difference between real videos, audio clips, documents and photos and fake ones, how do you have a legal and political system then when “proof” and “truth” are impossible to tell apart from lies and forgeries?

Plus it gives leaders a chance to dodge responsibility - which I would guess is a pretty natural thing to want to do if you’re leader of a country where you know many decisions mean life or death or splitting up of families for thousands of your people - “it was just the AI not me who came up with that idea”

How widespread do you reckon AI useage is in governments already? Even only a couple of years after its popularity. And how about in 5, 10 or 20 years time when AI is exponentially better? I know there was some articles a couple of months back where the Swedish prime minister admitted he and his colleagues ask AI for advice on difficult questions quite often. I would hazard a guess it’s pretty rampant already in the governments of most western countries. You do have to wonder what AI means for democracy long term if whoever is in power just governs by asking AI, we’re no longer then governed by humans. Feels like the computer game Deus Ex from 25 years ago where some billionaire adventure capitalists built up AI, originally releasing it as a funny carnival attraction because people liked being judged by some supposed objective being, but the goal was always that humans ended up giving up everything to the AI and let it govern them. And humans gave up those freedoms with very little pushback in the end.

This is still one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen about trying to hope within the darkness and when your brain chemistry is at its lowest. It’s about 20 minutes long but I’ve rewatched it quite a few times when I’m feeling down and it helps.

I definitely hanker after days before the social internet tbf.

I think this kind of faux outage over everything so people feel so much pressure to never make a mistake is what’s causing our mental health crisis much more than trying to tell parents they’re poisoning their child’s mind by letting them put on green face point and stick a pointy hat on their head once a year.

To get on Bovril's train, it's just the ultimate result of the Americanisation of British and European politics. Because, unlike the rest of the world, America never had a socialist movement and so its divisions were just cultural ones rather than economic debates about the private sector vs the public sector and how much control and intervention the state get into politics. And it's a very sort of reality tv style of politics rather than discussing economic theory And so now because of social media and even before that I also think the success of US tv shows with its very American and black-and-white cultural politics like South Park played a role in it. I think Sarah Palin was a big turning point because she got so much coverage online and on the comedy panel shows in the UK back in the day for her very American cultural views that really were extremely unknown in the UK or European politics at the time, stuff like abortion was just never actual political issues in the UK and now I hear very Americanised arguments for the opposition of it and campaign groups outside abortion clinics that just never would've existed in the UK a generation ago. A big obvious example of it is how you see people call liberals "lefties" in the UK nowadays which would've been unheard of in the UK 25 years ago as Liberalism was always about freedom from the state and generally very pro-markets and private enterprise and liberals always used to be considered centrists or right of centre here (John Major and Tony Blair were probably the ultimate liberal PMs in post-war UK politics and they was always considered centre or right of centre back in the day in the UK whenever people were polled).

Yeah I’ve had it happened to very inoffensive and innocuous posts which is why I think there’s just a key word in there that triggers it

It’s happened to me a couple of times on this thread and the old general news thread - I’m convinced there’s a key word filter that triggers it.

I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that a lot ot people actually want the structure an authoritarian government with no free press, no opposition nor grey lines which rules out of fear of doing something wrong, because it gives them structure etc. I remember Angela Merkel saying that when Germany reunited and she went from an authoritarian regime in East Germany to a liberal democracy, it took her years to actually get her head round that she had more choice and could do things she couldn’t previously without fear, because she had been programmed growing up that you’re only allowed to do certain things. I’ll see if I can find the interview but she said it was actually quite frightening to have that much freedom to actually hold opposing opinions etc.

Not agreeing or disagreeing but isn’t that just changing the subject to try and deflect into more criticism of the government? Feels like Starmer and Reeves are set up to fail here. They actually start to get the economy growing, which seems like a good first step and suddenly it’s not enough because we’re not at step 4, or it’s “well it’s easy to grown from a poor position” or “well other things are more important”. Don’t we all want the country to grow and do well under this government? Shouldn’t this be something that we almost universally agree is a good start of things moving in the right direction?

Yeah I don’t get that either. Surely it’s easier to keep something going than it is to kickstart something struggling?

Good video. Scares the crap out of me tbh. 80% of the data is good but it just makes up 20% of the data and then humans use it in videos, websites, articles and even research papers, so it becomes “truth”. Then when AI next pulls data it pulls from this data and uses the new human made things as the source. Creating a vicious cycle of fake “truth”. 4 years of this shit before the 2029 elections will be frightening.

There once was a thread, General News. Where the mods could only lose-lose. Bans and quarrels amok, And in came the lock, When the talk was on Muslims and Jews.

Am I missing something here, I don’t get either.

There’s definitely a word filter in play around certain political topics. I’ve had innocuous posts deleted because I used certain words - some even got “pre-moderated” with red text saying “we are waiting for a moderator to approve or deny this post’ before inevitably being deleted.