Sampson

“Protesters” feels a little kind for people just looking for an exuse to cause violence against foreign looking people.

Easier said than done when millions of things you can’t affect control how you and your loved ones live, work, study and the mood.

Ramesses is 6,000 years old in an extremely tiny corner of universe of 14.5billion years and will be long forgotten in another 100,000 years let alone another trillion. He won’t live even 0.00001% of forever tbh. Even Jesus and Mohammed will be long forgotten in 100,000 years. And dinosaurs lived for tens of millions already, humans not even a million. This isn’t the thread for this debate tbh, but its a very narrow definition of forever and a pretty lousy coping mechanism for humans to assign much more importance to humanity than there is.

Yeah, coupled with how meaningless life is in general and how meaningless humans and the earth really are, yet we’re still there tearing each other apart. It’s hard to get your head round sometimes.

Really feeling it today. Sometimes just reminded how pointless it all is, how Earth is just a meaningless grain of sand in the universe and how humans are just a blink of an eye in the history of that grain of sands. And there we all are stabbing each other, throwing bricks at each other and treating people like they’re some kind of wrong uns because they’re from a different country.

Yeah that’s my thoughts too. Will kill his career but doesn’t feel like he’ll get prison time. But we obviously don’t know the full facts yet.

Must admit I also find my interest waning in football. Of course the Premier League and FA Cup wins and the European runs were amazing but since the FA Cup win I find myself less and less making time to watch a Leicester match. It’s getting to the point where it’s more “I’ll watch Leicester if I have nothing better to do”. The most recent Euros I only watched the final as well. It’s partly different priorities in life and partly that I just feel the game has got boring. Every team plays the same way and the same team always win the league.

Where have you seen this? I can’t see it on any news sites yet

Some of the statistics here are scary. Basically by 2018 we’re going to have thousands of more prisoners than available jail cells. Edit: I meant 2028 obviously

I think 9/11 definitely kickstarted the fears on immigration/terrorism and why western countries became obsessed with border control and security (although the 2010 migrant crisis probably did more for this. I think the 07/08 financial crisis kickstarted the economic problems which exacerbated these issues as people have stopped seeing their lives generally as improving and I think is what sewed the seeds for all these populist movements in the west.

Problem is for Starmer I think is his whole election campaign was ruling things out and saying he wouldn’t change things. So he talked himself out of basically pulling any lever he could to help improve the economy without people saying he broke his promises.

I’d recommend people listen to the Nick Clegg interview with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart. Even if I don’t think I can forgive Clegg it’s an interesting interview. He talks about the world being in a tension between the globalisation of technology and the economy and the de-globalisation of politics. And that a lot of the tension is coming from people trying to elect officials on get control of things it’s impossible to control and that the left-right electoral divide of the market vs the state has been replaced by electoral age divides which also gives populists plenty of fodder.

I wonder how the history books will write this “era”. To me it feels like a it began with the 2007/08 financial crash. At least in the western world that feels like beginning of the period of instability.

It’s the most unstable I remember the western world being. I miss the heady optimistic days of the third way in the 00s and 90s. Feels like “the long peace” and “the end of history” long since gone. Genuinely think WW3 is a possibility in my lifetime now which I would’ve laughed at 10 years ago. Also 15 years ago I was optimistic about how the internet would bring the world closer together, but it’s got to the point where I think the internet is bad for humanity overall. Too much information out there for human society to deal with what’s true and what isn’t

Thought this was AI, but CNN suggests it is real.

They’re the same copper I believe

https://news.sky.com/story/police-officer-who-kicked-and-stamped-on-suspect-at-manchester-airport-filmed-pepper-spraying-man-13184832 Another video come out now of the same policeman at Manchester airport on the same night pepper spraying a guy just standing still from about 30cms away in the link from Sky above. Even less defensible now.

I think he’s lucky the guy wasn’t killed and he’d be charged with manslaughter tbh. That’s a pretty hefty stamp on the head against the concrete floor. Can’t see much chance he’ll work as a policeman again. Think he’ll be lucky to escape jail time but I’m no legal expert.

Regardless of what the crime is, personally find it difficult to see how kicking someone in the head when they’re being tasered on the floor complying is ever justified by the police. That level of violence might be justified to apprehend someone (and I’m not convinced kicking someone in their head once they’re down is tbh) but hard to see how it is once they’re already complying. But we’ll see what comes out of it regarding context etc.

I’d rather a guilty person got a less years in jail than this kind of stigmatisation of mental health issues as being “a cop out” pervaded society tbh. Theres always people who abuse any system, it doesn’t mean we should create a society where we instantly judge mental health issues as cop outs against the advice of judges and juries. Just creates this society where people think they’ll be judged as faking it for having mental health issues.

The overseas point is an interesting one actually, because the internet is a global phenomenon and really requires globalist cooperation if you actually want to do things about the societal issues it causes. I’m not sure smaller nations could really have taken on mega corporation like Apple and Facebook in terms of tax and privacy laws in the way the EU has as a collective, as the companies would just threaten to pull out of those states altogether without probably taking too much of a financial dent into their empire, whereas pulling out of the EU as a whole would be massively damaging. However we’re at a time now where the electorate in much of the western world is rejecting globalism and turning any supra-national organisation into a bogeyman (look at the bogeyman WHO became during the pandemic or Farage’s recent rant against the World Economic Forum) so it becomes harder and harder politically to actually create the organisations and bodies we need to cooperate on the massive amount of new issues humans need to deal with on a global level with the invention of the internet. Most of these international bodies were created after WW2 when people were profoundly aware of the need of international cooperation and the need for nation states to succeed certain laws to global agreements and organisations, but that is long forgotten and doesn’t seem to be in vogue with voters anymore at a time I’d argue they’re the most needed.

I agree he clearly doesn’t believe in the economic style of the USSR, but I’m sure he’d be happy to see the landmass and geopolitical influence of the USSR back.

As LiberalFox says, how can you legally define what an influencer is so it only affects those giving out potentially dangerous advice or opinions? That feels very legally iffy and can almost certainly be exploited if certain types of parties got into power. I think this thread just shows that humans of any country or society would happily embrace authoritarianism if it’s framed against people they don’t like. You can’t shut down or monitor a person’s livelihood because of a few bad apples or you don’t consider them a traditional way to work tbh. There’s countless great educational influencers and content creators out there. I watch some YouTubers who just play video games or board games I like, I’m happy to see them earn a living off it so they can do it full time. Same with others who are educational channels who discuss a wide range of scientific topics I probably would’ve had little chance to learn about 25 years ago. Like a lot of things on the internet, humans just don’t know how to deal with and frame the overload of information. I don’t know what the answer is, none of us do, because we seem to have lost control on critical thinking and framing information and political debate to the point where everyone’s opinion is considered equal when it shouldn’t be, but I can’t really see how banning influencers is it.

You don’t think we should be giving money to Ukraine? I think the 2 child benefit cap is backwards but this is just Labour voting against an amendment because it would mean voting against the king’s speech. Not saying that Labour won’t table the same motion in the future. Regardless, I think letting Putin power through Ukraine and emboldening him will cost the UK a hell of a lot more in the future if/when he starts deciding Moldova, Finland, the Baltics, Poland are all easy targets and that the west won’t bother financially backing the defence of democratic European states. Putin has publicly said (likely multiple times) the collapse of the USSR and Eastern block was the worst thing that happened for Russia. What do you seriously think will happen if we just let him roll over Ukraine? That he’d just decide that’s him done and not continue if there’s no defence of these other countries?

Both ended up going down the same alt right rabbit holes too. Barton was talking about gay people being needed to be included in football and Brand was on QT fiercely in opposition to Farage. Brand especially seemed to do a complete 180 since Covid from being a huge Corbyn supporter to a huge Trump supporter.