Sampson

Yea and they are much more to do the latter if they aren’t unable to get a job for the rest of their life because everytime a potential employer googles them, they won’t hire them because of what they did when they were 13. They’re far more likely to have the opportunity to repent and have a better and productive life if they are aren’t publicly outed for the entire nation for the rest of their life. He doesn’t even have a developed frontal cortex yet, he literally doesn’t have the biological ability to fully use the rational part of his brain yet - that’s exactly why we have laws which give minors limited legal responsibility. Why does not naming this kid affect you so much emotionally that it “makes you feel sick” and “makes you feel tired”? It’s a bizarre thing to make you feel sick and tired about.

Migrants already live in every area in the country and are your neighbours, friends, community members and colleagues. I abhor how since the cynically named “2010 migrant crisis”, the word “migrant” has been cynically used by the British media to lump all immigrants together, be them people who have moved to the uk for refuge, work, studies, love, family or any other reason and whether they’ve filled in the paperwork or not (I hate the terms legal and illegal) and to create a negative association with the word. It’s been a large part of the systematic attempt to turn immigrants into the “big bad” of society. One moment it’s cynically used to mean refugees and people making small boat crossings to create a negative association, next it’s used casually when dropping in statistically for non-British or Irish students, workers who work in extremely high end science and technology that requires doctorate degrees or the American or German or Japanese partners of British people, it’s so cynical. Even the bbc and left leaning media sources like the guardian regularly partake in this I remember during the Brexit debates, Boris Johnson in the same article calling EU citizens living in the UK “EU migrants”, then calling British citizens living in the EU “British expats.” Because the former word had been made so much more charged by the cynically titled “migrant crisis”. 15 years later and it’s been so systematically drilled into the public discourse’s heads by this point:

Yeah Theresa May came across much better than I expected too even if I still profoundly disagree with her on Brexit. John Major also came across well. I’d like them to interview Cameron at some point to see if he profoundly regrets everything. The Clegg one was interesting because you can tell there’s certain stuff he regrets and other stuff he was kind of making excuses for.

Listened to Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell’s Leading podcast - the recent episodes with David Davies and Nick Clegg. Thought Davies came across really poorly and manipulative and was trying to sell himself as some predictive genius who was never wrong and was behind the scenes at all the pivotal moments. But Clegg actually came across better than I thought, even though I’ll probably never forgive him. Does anyone listen to other ones?

I think it’s quite an open secret who Banksy actually is iirc. It’s quite Google-able.

Elon Musk really is just getting more and more toxic. I remember him always being eccentric and outspoken but I don’t remember when he drank the alt-right koolaid.

Watching handball and it’s like an even more extreme version of everything boring about modern Guardiola-influenced football- the defending team make a horseshoe in their penalty area and the attacking team pass side to side trying to find gaps in the horseshoe. Then it goes to the other team and the same thing happens. In a way I kind of feel like all team sports have eventually evolved into this kind of thing. I often wonder whether marginal gains and more elite athletes, which a great display of what humans can do, often make sports more boring to watch.

I think the point about having zero laws on who can stay and live in the uk until the 1940s is interesting. I think we often forget that the notions of nationalism and the nation state are actually extremely modern inventions and only really from the late 19th/early 20th century and codified in their modern form after world war 2. I think the uk was staunchly against passports as late as the First World War because it considered them to be illiberal beurocracy for example

You’re right, and I suppose urbanisation is also a huge factor as more and more move to the cities and away from rural areas, we likely have too many houses in the countryside and not enough in the cities, but that’s not something I’ve read anything into to have any confidence about.

Thanks, it doesn’t quite go back to the 1940s when the baby boom and migration from the commonwealth largely started but otherwise, as expected, the population rise is smaller now, and certainly no bigger than it was in the 1950s. The main difference as far as I can see is the government hasn’t invested at all in house/flat building as it used to back then.

I’d be genuinely interested if anyone has the population growth figures for the post-war consensus period where the population also grew rapidly and the windrush generation of immigrate helped rebuild the country and how that compares to today

The 600,000 a year figure is becoming a big red herring and I wish people would stop using it and referring to it as being unsustainable, because it isn’t the reality of the long term data trends. It’s due to changes in student visas and as 85% of students move home after their 2-3 year studies are finished, it takes 2-3 years for the net migration figures to catch up when the same numbers start leaving again. The reason Kier Starmer was so happy to promise the net migration numbers will fall after he got in power during the election campaign - and he worded it specifically in that way - is because he knows they’re due to fall naturally anyway. Otherwise I would largely agree with a lot of the post above. Although the problems with population ageing and the overwhelming of the NHS and pension systems are already happening, I disagree that this is something that is 30 years away.

Thanks for the forum Mark. Hope it lasts.

Genuinely made me laugh, but probably not the thread for this.

Absolutely. Which is primarily due to population ageing and the extremely low birth rates of British residents, as in all the western world (which no country had yet been able to solve birth rates) meaning we have way more older people per tax payer than we had in the recent past and this is only going in one direction and it ultimately requires immigration from non-western countries to fix anytime soon. Even if some country were to find a way to increase the birth rate back to the 2.1-2.4 needed tomorrow , it would take 20+ years until these children could work in the public services

Like Brexit, the views of immigration are very split by age (much more so than they are by class) accord to virtually all polls - it was by far the biggest age split at the last election, and like Brexit, because of population ageing, it ends up with politicians pandering to and legitimising the view of pensioners. Immigration was considered the biggest issue amongst 65+ last election but a minor issue amongst under 50s, you can just as easily argue this is because older people don’t want to take responsibility that it was their generation voting in Thatcher, privatisation, stopping public funds in building houses and hoovering up the houses to own several homes, turning them into houses of multiple occupancy and renting them out at extortionate prices who broke the housing market, not immigrants, and that immigrants are an easy scapegoat to these problems they’ve created. But that’s just one viewpoint. Older politicians might claim this is young working class people annoyed at immigration, but almost all polls show younger people are mostly pro-immigration and it’s the over 50s (I.e. the vast majority of politician fanning the flames who are the ones overwhelmingly anti-immigration). Make of that what you will.

We’ve been playing Wandering Towers a lot recently. Really fun game.

Absolutely. I often wrestle with the opposite too, that free will is the scarier option - that if it’s all pre-planned or random and the universe is so huge then we have no control over it and all our mistakes, no matter how huge, don’t even register on the universal scale and will all be forgotten within a blink of an eye after we die anyway so may as well make the most of the ride while we’re here and accept our mistakes and faults, no matter how big. But then if it’s free will, we have a conscious responsibility to society which we have to uphold, which is kind of scarier to live up to in a way. Kurzgestadt (the channel I posted which is a great science YouTube channel), also posted something similar about how sometimes feeling small and meaningless can help set you free

Interesting explanation which helps a topic I’ve always struggled to get my head around about how time is probably just a trick of the brain. The more I learn about how the universe works the more and more I’m convinced that it’s impossible for humans to have free will. Whether the universe is random or deterministic I don’t know but I can’t see a way how our brains aren’t just governed by the same forces as everything external to them are.

I feel you man. I disagreed strongly with what you said but these arbitrary banning are absurd. It hasn’t even stopped anyone. There’s others in the thread now having the exact same discussions and not getting banned.

Nothing against you personally, I’m happy to still have conversations with you, was more a dig at this new modding system where it seems all you have to do is flag someone you disagree with regardless of what they say and they get banned without having any previous warnings. Meanwhile others discuss exactly the same issues and don’t get banned. Even leicsmac has been banned from the news thread and he’s like the nicest and most understanding person on the forum Everything is political but they’re seems to be arbitrary distinction about what is and what isn’t politics and then they just ban people without prior warning for crossing this arbitrary line when they were never told what it was. Meanwhile the exact people they were quoting and discussing with when apparently crossing this line don’t get banned. It’s bizarre.

I got banned from the new news thread without a single warning when my only post in there was saying “never a good way to start a statement” quoting a post by Dr the Singh saying “I know some people, they’re not racist but…” then saying about how Muslims get preferential treatment by the police: Of course he didn’t get banned from the thread at all so I guess the mods here disagree.

I largely agree except the bit in brackets. This isn’t what the riots are about at all. It’s nothing to do with immigration, it’s about a bunch of lunatics wanting a pure white ethno-state and wanting to beat up non-white people regardless of whether they’re British born or raised or moved from another country. The kid in Southport wasn’t an immigrant, he was born and raised in Wales. The number of people trying to bend head over heels to legitimise these riots as “concerns over immigration” is frightening. These people are attacking mosques and taxi drivers. They don’t care about whether these people are immigrants or British, they just care that they’re not white,

Are you talking to yourself?

You surely jest? I think you can surely understand the difference of someone saying “Cov scum” about one of your clubs rival football clubs on a football forum and someone actually going round smashing up mosques because of what some kid from Wales with heritage from an evangelical Christian African country did? I would hooe you are intelligent enough to see that most people saying “Cov scum” in a football context would still perfectly happily get along with a person from Coventry and certainly not actually go round setting things iin Coventry on fire and rioting in Coventry because some guy from Daventry stabbed someone and they think that anyone from a city that ends in “try” is the same thing.