Sampson

Yeah Eric Idle still appears semi-regularly on The Infinite Monkey Cage science comedy show on Radio 4.

One of the most beautiful and nostalgic songs ever.

I think for people it’s too easy and you can usually get in in 5, by just going through pages of countries, how about some challenging ones that are tougher to do in 10: Geiger counter -> Revolutions of 1848 Cosmic Encounter -> Mountain Range In Rainbows -> Pauli exclusion principle pH -> Diplomacy (game) Bubonic Plague -> 2009 Leicestershire County Council election

Reform definitely seem to have peaked in the polls now, latest Yougov poll has them at 24% (also still only 10% with 18-24 year olds and only 19% with 25-49 year olds) which is their lowest in the polls since April. Mostly seems to be a lot of older voters switching back from Reform to the Tories who seem to be increasing again having bottomed out. We'll see whether Labour start doing the same after hemmoraging votes mostly to the LibDems and Greens.

That was always too easy though, as soon as you find a country you inevitably find Germany or WW2 on that country’s page.

I’m no historian but didn’t the Ottoman Empire as a kind of multicultural federation hold it together for hundreds of years despite different types of both Christianity and Islam being prevalent until it collapsed after WW1? Then it’s been a mess since then. Don’t know enough about that time in history or whether the Ottomans weren’t brutal themselves or anything.

I really wish people would not just post links without comment. I’m not clicking on a link to an Iranian website which a user has said makes them feel sick.

Yeah I had a feeling someone would have written in that the EFL Cup is sometimes dismissed as a mickey mouse cup (don’t necessarily agree for the record but thought it might be in there)

i got it in less Jon Rudkin -> Leicester City -> English League Cup -> Mickey Mouse

Yeah that’s fair, I think it worked for the LibDems last election to concentrate on local stuff. It’s also an easy way to attack Reform as their local record isn’t great. The problem is I guess people then don’t know what they stand for on a national level as happened with the LibDems.

Hopefully, but Badenoch and Jenrick need to go over to Reform for that to work then the Tories might be worth voting for again. While Badenoch and Jenrick are there they’re ultimately going to feel like Reform-lite and going after culture wars and the like. I actually think ironically the Tories best path to reemergence might be to go back to John Major/Ken Clark style conservatives and go pro-EU to try and win over the middle class, centrist dads, home counties and small business owners again.

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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

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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.