Sampson

Christ, I’d forgotten about Kilroy-Silk and Veritas. In many ways, he was a foreshadowing of today’s social media, reality TV, always-go-one-step-more-outrageous populist politics. But back then it was still treated as a bit of a fringe joke.

Amazing how they all have the same AI generated faces either the same facial expressions with the same cropping on the same background

I have mostly lost interest. Great I got to see Leicester win the league and FA Cup and see Leicester’s greatest ever team and players between 2014-21 but I can’t be arsed with the charade anymore, too much about money, as you said, women’s football was starting to make a breakthrough when England won the Euros and felt a bit more grassroots and refreshing for a while but that’s being lost to a mixture of money or lack of it and culture wars nonsense of too many grown men moaning like babies about the coverage it was getting like too. I go out and play board and card games with friends and family most Saturday afternoons instead now and found that has replaced the communal, social and competitive neuron hits that football used to give me

Is it one guy then? I lost track of popular music 20 years ago so admit I’m out of touch here.

I have no idea who Kneecap is so if they were allegedly cheering on Hezbolla than that’s fair enough to condemn, but I just kinda think in general trying to come in with anti-liberal rhetoric in the age of populism to hold the liberal centre is what Macron tried to do and all it ended up doing was giving credence to the populists’ beliefs. If you ask me, I think the populist right are currently a far bigger threat to British democracy than Islamists are but I accept the latter is certainly also a big problem. I don’t know what the answer is, no one does, that’s why most of the west feels like it’s scrambling around like rabbit in the headlights right now trying and struggling to find solutions. But I’d hope we wouldn’t just throw out liberal democratic ideals because they might fall anyway, I’d hope we at least try to fight for them first.

Not disagreeing but I don’t know how much longer democracy itself will survive the age of ai and the internet either. I still think it’s worth fighting for though.

The alternative sounds like the route to authoritarianism that the US is currently looking like it may well go down though where criticism of the country, its allies or government are met with state intervention or enforcement. Not a path I particularly want to go down and hope the UK very much keeps its tolerant and liberal culture towards criticism of itself, its allies and its government. With any system there will always be those that exploit it, it doesn’t mean you have to throw out or change the whole system though.

Not to mention “feck off with your political shit” and trying to tell people where, when and how they want to hear “political” statements is in itself an extremely political statement - just as much a political statement as any statement by a musician.

Btw as an aside, I watched the Britain and the Blitz documentary on Netflix the other day and it’s a good documentary and I recommend it - but it did get me thinking if the world feeling like it’s spinning out of control and populism going through the roof is at least partly due the lack of catharsis at the end of Covid. I remember under the first lockdown in March 2020 all the talk and announcements from the Queen and Prime Minister and talk that “this was the current generation’s WW2”. And I remember people specifically saying - can you imagine in a couple of years when this is all over it’ll be the biggest party you’ve ever seen - but it never was, it just seemed to get pushed out the news a couple years later by Russia invading Ukraine and that was that. When I see the celebrations of like VE Day and the baby boomer and “post-war consensus” era that followed afterwards until the 1970s - also the catharsis/celebration of the fall of communism/the Berlin Wall and the “end of history”/globalisation that followed afterwards until 2008 - I wonder if the fact we never had that period of catharsis afterwards led to a lot of people going down the populist path? I definitely think more than a small number of people got led down it by Covid (not just regular people but even celebrities like Russell Brand, Matt Le Tissier, Kanye West etc. ) I do wonder how much the mental health struggles and isolation a lot of us had with never getting a payoff of catharsis to feel like it was “worth it” had led to the world’s shift to populism increasing rapidly the last 4 or 5 years (I’m of course aware it existed beforehand but has definitely noticeably increased post-pandemic). Anyway, just a pet theory after watching the documentary.

I’m with you, I thought it was the right thing to do but it became politically impossible. I struggle with these debates more and more though because I feel like there’s no real solution that isn’t just too (understandably) politically unpopular that it’s a complete non-starter. I guess I’d consider myself a wet centrist liberal but I do have some sympathy with social democratic policies and certainly agree with the theory behind having a really high social safety net and welfare system is clearly a good thing in an ideal world. I just think it’s something that was great in the decades following the post-war relieve with a young working population in the 1940s-1960s but is probably for the birds in 2020s-onwards where the population is much older and so the average person objectively and understandably needs more social benefits as they get older and the working population who support them is a smaller proportion of them - (this isn’t just economically but in terms of pure number of labourers in terms of care workers, administrators, support workers etc.). One look at UK government spending shows social benefits (most of which is the pension system and healthcare costs) are the huge albatross around government spending which they ideally want to put into housing, building new hospitals etc. Of course I don’t know what the solution is, because it’s a perfectly understandable argument that it’s hard to argue with emotionally that older more vulnerable people need more support, but how you distribute that when more and more of the population is older and requires more healthcare and social benefits through pension, and disability benefits I’m not sure. It’s also a problem that’s only going to get worse as the fertility rate remains under replacement ratio as it does for pretty much everywhere outside of Africa and the Middle East.

Sadly this isn’t far off how Kemi Badenoch conducts herself.

Related to the different viewpoints of France, UK and Germany. I reckon this poll would’ve looked radically different even 4 years ago where I think “very unlikely” would be by far the highest answer and now is less than 10%. https://yougov.co.uk/international/articles/52113-many-europeans-and-americans-think-world-war-3-is-imminent

I’m not a fan of the Mail but if it was just a factual article saying “there’s been a strike” I don’t see a problem. I assume there’s not a ban on links so I imagine there’s some keyword filter in there

According to BBC now Isreal accuses Iran of breaking cease fire and vows to “respond forcefully” This cease fire lasted long…

On the bbc it says Isreal has detected an Iranian missile just now so not sure the cease fire is holding. I tried to post the part from bbc, but for some reason it got hidden and deleted by a moderator so assumed there was some key word in it that the mods have banned.

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I think it’s obvious Starmer is on Macron’s side but is motivated so much about not upsetting Farage and being seen to be siding against Farage tbh. Almost everything Starmer seems to do these days seems to be in fear of Farage.

Russia and Iran *are* allies. Russia is just too occupied that I don’t think anyone expects them to help them right now, as was the case in Syria (also Russia’s ally).

I can’t see it quite yet. I don’t think Russia or Saudi will aid Iran and therefore this won’t quite be the straw that breaks the camel back and starts World War 3. But there’s so many crisis happening these days and in the age of populism there’s many world leaders who need this ever increasing and ratcheting up of chaos to thrive, that one of these crisis may eventually be the Gavrillo Princep moment.

While I agree there are cultural differences, the ideas will be the same, just dressed up in a way that’s more palatable for British people. But the same fundamental ideas of taking on the checks and balances that hold up democracy- the education system, the courts, the law, the HoL, random performative cruelty against immigrants, shutting down any protests with force, the peddling of conspiracy theories, anti-science, claiming to be the party of free speech while fundamentally shutting down anything “woke” or anything that opposes them, fundamentally telling people to ignore their eyes and ears and declaring any objection to be fake news, crisis actors etc. will be there.

Why in b4 the lock? This has been a perfectly civil discussion

Where are people being blase? Most polls predicted Remain to win and it was a surprise that Leave won, however most polls predict Reform to win and have them comfortably ahead in the opinion polls. I think most people would absolutely expect Farage to be our next PM if there was a GE tomorrow, all the polls show that. People are just saying that 4 years is a hell of a long time in politics these days, and the world could be a very different place then (which may even benefit Reform but also may not).

I do think Farage becoming PM and a party basically full of all but about 4 MPs with zero experience in politics or understanding how the systems works just hoisted in from nowhere does feel a bit inevitable at this point in time. Having that said, a year or so into the last government, Tories were still way ahead in the polls and Rishi Sunak was still public darling #1 for eat out to help out and furlough. The world seems to be a reality tv show nowadays that goes at breakneck speed bouncing from one crisis to another, so who knows what world we’ll be in in 4 years time? I never remember the world changing so much (/spiring out of control depending on your viewpoint) anywhere near as quickly as it does now. I think the world feels radically different today than it did 4 years ago, I think it will feel even more different in 4 years.

According to the new update on Grok AI it’s because “the great 00s fashion guru Gok Wan once declared “the most handsome and fashionable man alive” to be Emperor Elon Musk the great. And added “And he definitely has never had a hair transplant or plastic surgery”.