Sampson

I knew it was happening during the election campaign tbh. Starmer had abandoned all his principles on the EU, voting reform and green energy. Problem is all Starmer did was spend the entire election campaign saying what he wouldn’t do and has painted himself in a corner when he’s ruled out basically everything out of fear of Tory attacks. It’s early days but it definitely feels considerably further to the right than Blair and Brown so far and Starmer continues to sell short term pain and zero future optimism. It’d be a lot more palatable if we were sold what yet another period of austerity is for and what we’ll get on the other side of it

It’s an interesting and somewhat frightening topic for sure, although I’d argue that the demographics seems to change from western nation to western nation, demographics shows in the uk the popularity of the hard right is largely amongst voters aged 50-70 and the right of centre vote has collapsed amongst those under 40 overwhelmingly (doesn’t mean an authoritarian populist left party can’t capture that in the future). My understanding in Germany that it’s very much an east/west split and that the authoritarian and populist parties are far more popular in East Germany where many still feel left behind and feel the optimism and promise of reunification hasn’t really been fulfilled much as many of the most economically active East Germans just went westwards in search of the better paying jobs and left many struggling ghost towns in the east. In France it’s definitely more of a movement amongst younger people, not sure about Spain. Maybe it’s more amongst younger people because as you said, the Franco days don’t feel relevant to their generation

I guess the counter argument would be why should residents be more entitled to certain areas of climate or areas of natural beauty than people not resident there, just because they were in the right place at the right time to live there previously? And that given that we only live once no one is going to want to stay in the same piece of land their whole life and not see other parts of the world I’m almost certain those complaining about tourism are tourists themselves during the year elsewhere and a lot of it is nimbyism and comes from a place of “do as I say not as I do” Going round shooting water pistols at tourists having a meal at restaurant is pretty pathetic tbh

I feel you. I understand why people try and offer platitudes like “try to be grateful/mindful” or “try not to focus on things you can’t control” but when I feel low or anxious I find it’s some of the worst things people can say to me. Fact is things out of our control and the overwhelming amount of things that affect how ourselves and our loved ones live our lives that I just find it a gratingly unreasonable suggestion.

I’m not sure if it’s what you’re looking for but there is a recorded version Con te partirò by Bocelli on Apple Music. I haven’t checked if it’s the same song but I think that’s the original Italian title.

But it’s not banning smoking outdoors. All it means in Sweden where these laws exist is people go out the front of the pub to smoke and so those sitting in pub gardens don’t have to smell the smoke and yes you absolutely can come home with clothes stinking of smoke as a non-smoker in a pub garden, most are tight high-walled areas with plastic awning over, hardly open space. It doesn’t really change smokers habits, it just means they go out the front and those enjoying the pub garden don’t have to have someone smoking on the table next to them. I hardly think walking in a different direction to smoke outside is going to decimate the hospitality industry.

The law anlready exists in a few other European countries, its only a good thing in my eyes. Don’t think it’s that hard to sell, very few under 40s smoke nowadays anyway. It’s not difficult to enforce, same reason as smoking in pubs isn’t, as you just make it the pubs” responsibility and say you can revoke their alcohol licence if they don’t enforce it. The illiberal arguments are the same ones people made about the original smoking ban in the 00s. After about 6 months most people just got on with their lives and nowadays few would go back

I’m pretty sure you get the bail back when you appear in court. Took me years to realise this. I always assumed it was just a one off payment but it’s more of an insurance deposit to the state.

There’s an awful lot of truth in what you say. No surprise birth rates are on the floor and no one wants to bring children into this world anymore either. Of course we have better medicine etc. now and live longer but I do often wonder if humans were actually happier back in hunter gatherer times.

For the record - I’m not bashing Starmer at all. I said pre-election that I would love him to just admit to voters taxes need to go up if you want to fix the country’s broken public services. The biggest problem I had with Starmer’s campaign that he was constantly ruling things out in order to placate Sunak’s attacks. And that meant that he boxed himself in so much and has given himself way too few levers to pull.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c0rw9edy00zt#player Live now. As many predicted pre-election he’s going to pull the same thing as George Osbourne in 2010 and after promising no tax rises say “we looked at the finances and we need tax rises”

I think a bit problem is that you can’t really express how you feel in language so discussing it can feel insufficient or anti-climactic. I’m not saying people shouldn’t talk and get help btw. Just that really, we try and think, rationalise and speak aloud how and why we feel certain ways in the English language (or the language you primarily speak) and this in reality is quite bad at being able to explain the way our neurons fire and even our thought processes or how our thoughts work (and the voice in our head we think of as our thoughts speaks already in an artificial man-made language to begin with) Like I often have slumps and have brief periods of anxiety and I’ll rationalise in hindsight its because of xyz because we have to tell a story to explain it to others, but if I actually admit it it’s because my mind unconsciously had a thought about x for some unknown reason which unconsciously triggered a thought about y which unconsciously made me think about z, sometimes if I think about it the change in my brain chemistry comes from something I ate or a song I heard in the background of a cafe or something else. Sometimes I have no idea where it comes from. If I try to explain to someone I’m feeling anxious and how that feels like and why it just feels like a garbled mess and I’ll often pin some tangible reason to it in my head in order to rationalise it when that probably has nothing to do with why my neurons decided to fire that way today.

It’s harder and harder or almost impossible to protect children from the realities of the adult world today I think. Neither can the shut off from bullies or the harshness of the playground after school. Honestly, I’d hate to be a child or teenager growing up today since the invention of social media. 10 years ago I thought the internet on balance was a force for good but since 2016 I’ve probably flipped the other way.

They announced the 15 year old isn’t the suspected perpetrator but potentially someone who knew about the plans in advance.

According to bbc website it’s due to “following complaints about workplace conduct” which sounds more like complaints of bullying/discrimination than anything to me.

5 years is a long time tbf. Think about between the 2019-2024 elections - we left the European Union, there was the biggest pandemic in anyone’s lifetime, the cost of living crisis and war in Europe. All these events radically shaped the trajectory of the country on their own, and we essentially had 4 of them. Hard to know whether the leader will last until 2029. The world is more volatile now than I ever remember it previously.

Albrighton vs Sevilla. Can’t find a good video on it but you all know the one.

Tbh, with the Tories it’s of their own making really, so I’m not convinced “we get the politicians we deserve” applies to them right now. They chose to have a referendum, they chose to purge their party of all its moderates and focus on its populists. There have been 3 or 4 different pivotal junctions the Tory party categorically did not need to go down since 2015, but in each case it chose to placate the Farage-style right wing populists to try and gain voters from them (and looking at UKIP similar 2015 and Reform 2024 election numbers, all these choices haven’t worked at all). And by this point, the party has made it very difficult for probably a generation for anyone but a brexiteer on the right of the party and with populist style campaigning techniques to become party leader.

He still achieved winning the FA Cup though, you argued he achieved nothing with us. You’re changing the goalposts of your argument now. Really? He mostly just got a warm applause to acknowledge he was a good player for us, that was it. It was nothing like the great appreciation Albrighton got in his final game of last season for us as a comparison. I don’t think it was anything like what someone like Vardy would get on coming back to play us either. You seem to have a weird mindset where just because someone isn’t being actively booed they’re being put on a pedestal. He was a very good player for us, he got a warm applause to appreciate that fact, Barnes and Dewsbury-Hall will probably get the same later in the season (even though KDH was nowhere as good for us as the other 2 were for us). That’s pretty much the whole story. It’s such a weird thing and he’s such a weird player to get so worked up about.

It’s just a game, buddy. Football is not worth raising your blood pressure like this and dying early over. Much less get so worked up some 20-something guy you’re never going to meet who was a good player for us.

I don’t get Badenoch either. She’s comes across as a student politician ranting endlessly about culture wars and immigration and nothing else, I just can’t see her doing anything in a position of responsibility going through actual legal legislation. She doesn’t seem to care about that, she just seems to want to debate about how “woke” people are bad all the time. She reminds me a bit of when Jo Swinson became LibDem leader and it was like a student politician just talking about movements and the overarching philosophy what liberalism means all the time as if she was a 19th century philosopher rather than actual concrete legislation and ideas in a 21st century post-industrialist economy.

I’d recommend therapy mate. It’s a much better solution than this kind of needless and irrational anger. Some people’s irrational anger at Maddison is just bizarre. It’s like he attacked their family member or something. He was a very good player here. He achieved plenty here, won the FA Cup, finished 5th twice, reached a European semi final, got capped by England on merit, that’s far more than all but a handful of Leicester players have achieved. No one is saying he is the best Leicester player ever and didn’t have slumps, but overall he was unquestionably a very good player for us and certainly feels like a weird player to get so worked up over. He was far from a major reason for our relegation, reality was that him and Barnes were the only 2 players who had reasonable seasons, it was Rodgers stubborn insistence on playing Ward and Amartey that cost us far more, if we’d have had bog standard PL keeper and centre backs we’d have stayed up with ease. And regardless even if you think he was a key member of the relegation side, he gets way more irrational hate than the likes of Barnes, Dewsbury-Hall, Daka, Iheanacho, Amartey, Ndidi, Justin, Evans, Mendy, Tete or whoever else all do. I fully expect you’ll be frothing at the mouth for the same reasons if Evans, Iheanacho, Barnes or KDH come up against this season, right? Mind you, some of our fans seem to bizarrely hate Mahrez which I just cannot get my head round at all, so I just never understand the mindset I guess.

Why? He was a very good player for us and life’s too short to get wound up over players who were very good for us.

Seems to be in the news very little and there’s a good chance it will be back to the obscurity of The Hague/IDS years but still worth discussing. Cleverly seems to be favourite atm. James Cleverly wins head-to-head against all 5 rivals in @techneUK poll of Tory members Wins against Priti Patel 45-39 Robert Jenrick 49-28 Kemi Badenoch 51-28 Tom Tugendhat 54-23 Mel Stride 59-15

Still can’t get my head around that Craig Shakespeare has died. Just reading that brought back listening to his pre match interviews on RL in the Pearson era before they fell out with Stringer