Sampson

Eh? Reform councils had it is one of their highest priorities when they came in to try and set rules to demand people to actively stop people flying LGBT, Ukraine and Palestine flags on government buildings. It went further than simply questioning the intent.

The civil service does not drive policy, they follow the law. The government changes that law after vetting through the House of Lords and the Minister can decide what to focus on within the law. The civil service is there as an important check and balance in democracy to ensure the law is followed and individual parties or ministers do not have the power to completely do what they want. The reason so many right wing populists want to gut the civil service is to give them the power to do what they like without pushback. It *should* be hard for ministers to do what they like and the civil service *should* have the expertise and right to tell a Minister what they can and can’t do in a democracy without legal changes through the proper vetting process.

I would’ve vehemently disagreed in the past, but I’m starting to come round to the idea the world was no worse off when different religions were a person’s main identity and the main model for governance instead of nation states and national identity. Even as a Athiest who could never understand why people believe the stories and thinks a lot of the ancient morals are repressive and weird, I’m starting to see the benefit of religion and the church as a binder of communities and bringing together different people every Sunday in a social space almost like a Meetup group for the local community - that part of religion has never been replaced. The lack of it feels like it’s making people more and more insular these days. And I think a lot of alienation about the world and people feeling lost comes from just how hard it is to make friends and meaningful social relationships after you leave school/university these days and the church used to provide that for people. I don’t know. Maybe thinking if there was more an activity day in every area people were compelled to go to every Sunday for fear of spending all eternity burning and wearing a Coventry City shirt instead.

I’ve got bored of it all tbh. The immigration and trans debates are so inane. I get they are problems for some people but they are such small fry compared to climate change, population ageing (in fact immigration is largely just a symptom of this) and the war in Ukraine and the fact the UK seems to be completely losing its mind over these issues just feels so out of proportion. Ive never been a fan of Starmer, but Farage is the most manipulative and anti-British politician I’ve ever known. All he ever does is go on about what a shithole the country is and exaggerates Britain’s negatives to get power. He waves a flag but never has an actual good word to say about the country. That said, I’ve accepted he’s getting into power in 2029 now. I’ve accepted he’s going to get us to leave the ECJ and ECHR and therefore give him full licence to plant his own judges in the Supreme Court, gut the civil service and therefore gutting the legal checks and balances that hold up democracy, centralise government departments and also destroy the ideas of the separation of powers that hold up democracy all in the idea of “getting things done” and “cutting bureaucracy” without having the pesky ECJ having the power to hold these balances as they did in Poland. And what’s worse is people will cheer it on because it will allow him to deport a few thousand extra people - people will cheer on the erosion of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism so they can deport more people. Probably worth just accepting it at this point.

This is why the Tories purging all the moderate MPs in their party under Boris Johnson to get Brexit through has backfired for them so massively. Reform gave firmly captured the right vote now and they’re never going to out-Farage Farage under Badenoch or Jenrick but there is a hole in the centre which a liberal Wet Tory party could’ve filled.

I’ve had it happen to me before. You make one mistake of clicking on some post about Trump on a completely different site and suddenly your YouTube feed is flooded with “10 times Jordan Peterson destroyed the libs” videos.

I think you’re confusing me with Bellend Sebastian. Which is understandable as I am a bellend but sadly not a pun on the excellent 90s and 00s Scottish indie pop band (although I have seen them live back in the day).

I suppose it’s what you mean by left if you’re grouping left and liberals together. As I was always taught liberals were centrists. I was always taught in politics class in school that socialists were left, social democrats were centre-left, liberals were centrists, conservatives were centre-right and reactionary conservatives were right. Not trying to cause an argument just interested in the theory behind the thing that people are using as their left:right ratios.

Tbh I completely lost my interest in watching football since we won the FA Cup. Just feels very little to get excited about anymore. Ended up getting into board games and tabletop RPGs after the pandemic and often do that on Saturdays now instead or go out with my partner. Only really watch Leicester if there's nothing else to do and have completely stopped watching games with other teams in as a neutral. I found board games/tabletop RPGs give me that same feeling of camradarie, competitiveness and scratch the same social itch in my brain that football used to.

Will never understand the number of people who complain about the state of the country but then complain if you say we might need to raise taxes in order to fix it. You can’t have your cake and eat it. If you want to fix public services, infrastructure; buildings, fix roads etc. then we all have to be prepared to pay for it.

In the latest weird turn of events in the UK political system since it turned from a 2 party system to a 5 party system (while it creaks under a FPTP voting system designed for 2 parties), it seems the real centrist dads are apparently the 18-25 years old, as the Liberal Democrats are now topping the polls in the youngest age group in the latest yougov poll.

Agree. Rory Stewart & Alistair Campbell did a good podcast series on him recently that’s worth a listen. I can’t work him out either, Vance was on record calling Trump a fascist back in 2016 and having some sympathy with immigrants and was more of a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” type Conservative of the stop blaming everything on immigrants and circumstance go out and get a job type. His wife is also a 2nd generation Indian immigrant ex-Democrat who got birthright citizenship that the MAGA crowd are trying to stop. He is clearly smarter than Trump as said too. I do wonder whether he’s genuine MAGA or is just following the way to wind blows to get power - I also wonder whether he’s more of a “tech bro” Republican who just want a Libertarian economy and the ability to let their algorithms run free but deep down probably actually quite like the cheap labour of mass undocumented immigration.

Absolutely I would. I hate this wave of authoritarian populism much more than I care about left or right wing divide, I dislike both Corbyn and Farage for that same reason and I absolutely hate all this slow creep towards shutting down protests, I said it on here several times since the crime act got pushed through years ago - the right to peaceful protest should be sacrosanct in a democracy and all we’re doing by eroding away these freedoms is setting up laws and powers which if some populist does get into power will be so incredibly easy to abuse. If someone is not whipping up violence then of course I’d be saying the same if some peaceful right wing 89 year old was arrested for holding a placard that said “reduce immigration” or “cut funding to the nhs” or something - we should all hope those rights are protected in a democracy.

Someone posted about it being hard to hire new policemen and you have to wonder what’s going through the policemen’s heads when they’re forced to arrest an 89 year old woman sitting peacefully with a placard, no wonder people leave the force, they’d need to be not human to actually not have second thoughts about whether this is the right thing to do - and if they don’t then what kind of humans are we making in our police force? I always thought our police felt much more human and friendly than say US police for example, I don’t think it’s good for our society to try and change that and try and turn our police into mindless, inhuman drones. The government making the law don’t have to deal with the human contact on the ground like the police do - and history has shown that “I was just doing my job/following orders” is neither a legitimate legal nor moral excuse.

Nm.

Funny I used to be anti-royal when I was younger but the institution of it has grown on me more and more over the decades now and now I’m a fairly big fan of the monarchy as an institution, and I think constitutional monarchies are holding up against the rise of populism and democratic backsliding better than the republics are right now.

You’re having a separate conversation and one which has personal and emotional anecdotal evidence to you though and trying to try it together with things it shouldn’t be tied to which is exactly why I feel politicians have an impossible job to bring it up in a democracy. I’m talking about you stating your point is one of “balance”, saying “she’s not the only one” “not all old people are a drain on public finances” as a balance on the average costs of an ageing population and the increasing pension, health care and public service costs to the government and the shrinking ratio of tax payers and the shrinking ratio of people fit to do jobs which require taxing physical or mental labour or that require higher levels of concentration - I just don’t think it’s balance because it’s irrelevant to the discussion, but it’s a common logical fallacy used which make it a political impossibility to discuss. Saying the average older person objectively costs more and it will be unsustainable for the state to fund is not at all saying “all old people are a drain on resources”, so there is nothing there to “balance”. The ageing population, pension system, rising healthcare and public services becoming unsustainable as the average age rises is a profound challenge to all western economies round the world, probably the most profound economic challenge we will face in the 21st century. That isn’t saying “all old people are a drain on politics” and trying to argue emotional individual stories are somehow a balancing argument to that is exactly why no politician wants to discuss such profound changes to our society and way of living, which humanity has never faced before and no one really has much of a clue of what to do with it, with a bargepole As for the “nothing new” again, I think that’s intellectually dishonest and trying to deflect the conversation because demographic change like this *is* extremely new - humans have never faced a situation like this before where the birth rate has dropped way below 2.0 children per women for decades while increasing life expectancy. We’ve always had societies where a large number of younger and middle aged people support a very small relative number of older people before, we’ve never faced societies where a relatively small number of younger and middle aged people have to support a large number of older people before.

And this is the exact problem why politicians can’t do anything about it - because people “balance” individual stories against macro economic trends. It’s not a “balancing” argument providing one anecdotal example against government budgets or clear world trends. And it’s not just about care costs, another example being as people grow older they are less likely to drive and require more public transport which is funded by the tax payer while making them less likely to pay road tax, and there are loads of these other small examples that older people tend to use tax funded services more on average. The types of jobs that are done are also dependent on having enough younger people as part of a demographic - I would guess your mother-in-law does not do the kind of physically demanding work or work which requires hours of concentration of say care workers, nurses or bus drivers which an ageing population increases the need for. These are the OS’ own average findings of how much the average person contributes on tax drops as they get older but the amount they use tax payer funded goods and services in terms of benefits (I.e. pension and disability benefits) and public services (be they nhs, public transport or whatever) This isn’t personal against anyone and nor is it a slight on your mother-in-law who I’m sure works hard but she isn’t an average case spread across a 70million population and these are economic realities which politicians have kind of a political impossibility in talking about exactly because people start taking it personally and like it’s an attack on their elderly family members There is no “balance” to that. To use a Farage-ism - it’s just common sense politics - the older a population and the older the average age gets - the more that on average over a population of 70 million people- the more its working age people are going to struggle to support the older population. How do you sustain a population of seniors (which is the way it is going given no country has successfully been able to reverse birth rates being on the floor) both economically and in terms of just pure number and types of labour needed? https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/ageing/articles/howwouldyousupportourageingpopulation/2019-06-24

Yeah Imperial Japan’s forays into China were utterly brutal and dehumanising of the Chinese people and they killed millions. We overlook it often in the West concentrating on Germany but Imperial Japan were brutal. The bomb was also considered by some as just the next iterative step at the time. The Allies ratcheted up the attacks on Japan after the war had turned in 1944 and 45. Tokyo was completely carpet bombed only a few months before killing 100,000 people to try and get Japan to surrender in “Operation Meetinghouse” which supposedly killed more than Nagasaki or Hiroshima and they carried on. Not convinced Japan could’ve been contained if they got the bomb first.

I honestly think squabbling over whether the Tories or Labour screwed up the country’s economy is missing the point considering population ageing is crippling virtually every western economy. Well now it seems like there’s a good chance Farage will get into power in 2029 (albeit with the huge caveat that both national and world events and crisis take over and these crisis seem to happen with a ridiculous regularity in the modern world), I think a lot of his voters are going to be in for a rude awakening when it turns out there’s no magic money tree where they can just throw money at things to “get things done” and that the real albatross around the government’s neck is the ageing population and that the majority of government spend goes on more and more unsustainable pension, health and care systems because older people objectively cost a hell of a lot more to the state than younger or middle aged people and the ratio of older people to tax payers is becoming more and more out of whack (the pension system alone which was designed for a small proportion of the population to have a gift for 5 years after retirement and not for having 1/3rd of the population draw from it for 20-30 years costs more to the government than education, housing and defence combined). And this isn’t even mentioning the thing Farage is most responsible for that thing politicians aren’t allowed to mention anymore when Farage spent years whipping people up to vote away billions off the country’s economy and government’s income every year.

never mind, deleted a longer post because I just can’t be arsed with this Americanised culture war nonsense that Farage sells anymore. If you really need to go on tv to virtue signal about a company going bust over the most generic and inoffensive tv ad ever which most people in the real world will barely notice and have forgotten they’ve seen it 5 seconds later, it’s probably worth self reflecting on who the real snowflakes who get offended over nothing and peddlers of cancel culture are tbh.

Let’s not use generic AI slop talking with meaningless generality about “in many jurisdictions” I’m not saying you’re right or wrong but this is how AI can easily convince people with scary misinformation and is not a good habit to allow this stuff for the forum. You need to actually search specific legal precedent in the UK legal system.

Yeah but if you eat their shit you get mind reading powers. And we can sell their shit as a spice to control the world economy

Tbf I hate Farage and he’s proving once again that he is the biggest snowflake and cancel culture-er in parliament and the most likely to scream “that’s offensive”. I also think the irony is that he is the one most trying to promote a highly beurocratic (now there’s one word I can never spell) “papers please” big brother style government, but I think I’m with him on this one on this law being a mess waiting to happen and far too easy to bypass anyway.