General News Thread

[CornwallFox]

48 minutes ago, Foxin_Mad said:

The problem is globalism and globalist corporations. The majority of small to medium sized businesses can not afford better pensions or pay, many companies in the country are in the brink. Tax is high, rates are high, energy is high ,wages keep going up etc etc. For many businesses in the economy there isn’t much extraction. I don’t really understand the left wing view that all businesses are extracting extreme wealth from the economy. It’s simply untrue. 

 

The globalist corporations are using tax avoidance schemes are the ones doing well and maximising profits for shareholders. It’s a global problem, but it’s difficult for UK policy to change global business. Meanwhile we kill our manufacturing and end import the same things made in worse conditions made with coal from overseas.

 

The whole tax system is broken. I too have worked in the public sector and I personally could see why it’s very wasteful and ineffective, to the point I left, I liked serving the public but some of the waste and incompetence in middle management was unreal imo.

The left doesn't think all businesses are extracting huge wealth. That's where you're going wrong in trying to understand the left. 

The left thinks that huge wealth is being extracted by very small numbers of people. Huge wealth. Unimaginable sums that are large enough to effect economies. 

There's a reason why tax rates have increased despite spending cuts - what money there is had been squirreled away by the super rich who don't wish by the same economic roles as you or I. Unless something is done about this tax rates for individuals or businesses won't get much better.

[Super_horns]

Maybe prevented a very serious situation here.

 

And certainly better to be safe than sorry?

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g4xkw87p5o

[Foxin_Mad]

9 hours ago, CornwallFox said:

The left doesn't think all businesses are extracting huge wealth. That's where you're going wrong in trying to understand the left. 

The left thinks that huge wealth is being extracted by very small numbers of people. Huge wealth. Unimaginable sums that are large enough to effect economies. 

There's a reason why tax rates have increased despite spending cuts - what money there is had been squirreled away by the super rich who don't wish by the same economic roles as you or I. Unless something is done about this tax rates for individuals or businesses won't get much better.

I agree that something needs to be done globally. It’s for individuals and big corporations. Many of the biggest problems are American. My view is if the tax system were reformed and simplified with loopholes closed there would be less reason to avoid it. Also people and businesses who don’t invest and only extract should pay a much higher rate to do this. Whatever the system is it needs to be done in a way it’s difficult to move money out of the country, as the problem with the wealthy is the will and can move quite easily. It probably reds an international treaty. 

[Foxin_Mad]

9 hours ago, ajthefox said:

I'm not sure that that view (bolded) is particularly widely held.

 

I think most somewhat left leaning people similar to myself (not speaking to the extreme) would agree with a lot of what you have said and that it is the big global corporates that are the primary issue.

 

Sure there are plenty of other problems, but they wouldn't be so much of a problem if the money wasn't all heading up the chain into fewer and fewer pockets as time passes.

It may not be the case which is why talking is important. I get the impression that was the view but probably from the more radical left wing. Largely I think people agree more than disagree. For me there are good policies on either side. Perhaps I am a dreamer but I believe business, particularly local small to medium businesses can be a force for good in communities, but they have to be ran by real people and able to operate in a fair market place. One example that is crazy for example British based supermarket Iceland paid more tax in 1 year that Amazon did in 10.

[leicsmac]

I think the ineptitude is pretty clear now, but...

 

 

[Lionator]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj9pn2v7m2wo
 

This is such a minefield but banning these marches would be chillingly dumb. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve been on a couple and the 99.9% obviously want Jewish people in the UK to feel safe. There are bad eggs that need rooting out. But also you can’t use this to suppress outrage at the crimes of Netanyahu. 

[davieG]

He's gendering some good support

 

AND with a proper English accent! At this point I'm willing to send an apology note on behalf of the colonies and ask if we can come back...

[leicsmac]

28 minutes ago, Lionator said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj9pn2v7m2wo
 

This is such a minefield but banning these marches would be chillingly dumb. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve been on a couple and the 99.9% obviously want Jewish people in the UK to feel safe. There are bad eggs that need rooting out. But also you can’t use this to suppress outrage at the crimes of Netanyahu. 

The whole matter on which these marches are based, from start to finish, is pretty dumb tbh.

 

Humanity at its worst no matter which side it believes it's on.

[Lionator]

17 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

The whole matter on which these marches are based, from start to finish, is pretty dumb tbh.

 

Humanity at its worst no matter which side it believes it's on.

The problem is that the most vocal people on either side here and the ones with the most entrenched views, whereas the matter is so incredibly nuanced. The things that isn’t nuanced is that everyone should be arguing against violence.

[st albans fox]

3 hours ago, Lionator said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj9pn2v7m2wo
 

This is such a minefield but banning these marches would be chillingly dumb. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve been on a couple and the 99.9% obviously want Jewish people in the UK to feel safe. There are bad eggs that need rooting out. But also you can’t use this to suppress outrage at the crimes of Netanyahu. 

 

If they’re discussing limiting the number of times a single issue can be mass demonstrated in the same area within a month then surely that’s not unreasonable ?   Policing chants within an enormous group is ridiculous and unenforceable. no court is going to convict someone for using phrases which are vague and have multiple meanings.  (And as we’ve seen with PA, an attempt to criminalise words which the public don’t agree with will result in masses of people breaking said law). 
 

And I’d pedantically take issue with your maths (10 in every 100,000) ….

 

[Lionator]

1 minute ago, st albans fox said:

 

If they’re discussing limiting the number of times a single issue can be mass demonstrated in the same area within a month then surely that’s not unreasonable ?   Policing chants within an enormous group is ridiculous and unenforceable. no court is going to convict someone for using phrases which are vague and have multiple meanings.  (And as we’ve seen with PA, an attempt to criminalise words which the public don’t agree with will result in masses of people breaking said law). 
 

And I’d pedantically take issue with your maths (10 in every 100,000) ….

 

None of these people committing acts have any links to these marches though? 
 

It’s an infringement on free speech and expression to ban them. It would be a disgrace just like banning any other political march. 

[st albans fox]

Just now, Lionator said:

None of these people committing acts have any links to these marches though? 
 

It’s an infringement on free speech and expression to ban them. It would be a disgrace just like banning any other political march. 

Re point 1 ). Ive no idea 

re point 2). Yes it is but you also need to take into account the lives of those who live and work in the areas where the demos are taking place. they also have freedoms to be protected.  surely one demo every month in the same location is sufficient?  You can protest somewhere else weeks 2,3 and 4 ??

[leicsmac]

Internet find:

 

A EULOGY FOR THE WORST THAT HAS EVER DRAWN BREATH

By Tom Wellborn

Being a Complete and Unflinching Account of the Most Loathsome Specimen Ever to Consume Resources, Occupy Space, and Insult the Patience of a Universe That Deserved So Much Better.

There are villains, and then there are monsters, and then there are creatures so cosmically, transcendently, almost admirably terrible that language itself recoils from the task of describing them. Grammar buckles. Syntax weeps. The thesaurus slams itself shut and refuses to cooperate. He is this thing. He is the thing past the thing past the thing. He is the sub-basement of the human condition, the moldy crawlspace beneath that sub-basement, and the writhing centipede beneath that.

To call him despicable is to call the sun “a little warm.” To call him hatable is to say that the Black Death was “somewhat inconvenient.” He does not merely inspire hatred. He manufactures it, industrializes it, ships it wholesale to people who had never previously experienced a single negative emotion in their lives. Buddhists who have spent forty years meditating toward unconditional love have encountered him briefly and immediately relapsed into pure, screaming fury. Pacifists clench their fists. Quakers throw things. He has caused more apostasy, more broken vows, more abandoned philosophies than any theological crisis in recorded history, simply by existing in the same zip code as decent people.

He has no morals. Not a single one. Not even the bad morals that at least imply a moral framework: the corrupt cop who loves his dog, the mob boss who goes to church. No. He exists in a morality vacuum so total that ethicists have proposed naming it after him. Philosophy departments around the world now use him as a thought experiment: “Imagine a being entirely without moral content. Not evil, because evil requires intention. Simply absent of the entire apparatus.” He is the null set of conscience. A moral negative space shaped vaguely like a man.

He has no empathy. Scientists have confirmed this. They put him in a brain scanner and watched his amygdala just sit there, inert, like a raisin, unmoved by footage of suffering, by crying children, by injured animals, by literally anything. The researchers wept. He asked if there were snacks.

He has no sympathy either, which is worse, because sympathy doesn’t even require feeling. It only requires pretending. He cannot manage the performance. He cannot fake it. When people around him suffer, his face rearranges itself into an expression that experts have described as “a beige wall trying to look interested.” He is incapable of the most basic social theater that even sociopaths manage. He makes sociopaths look like Florence Nightingale.

His regard for human life is so nonexistent that physicists have theorized it may be negative. He is somehow subtracting regard from the universe’s fixed supply, leaving decent people fractionally less capable of caring about one another, because he is consuming their collective empathy like a moral black hole, bending the very fabric of human decency around his grotesque gravitational pull.

He takes without asking. He takes everything without asking. He takes things that aren’t takeable. He takes the goodwill of strangers. He takes credit for things he didn’t do. He takes years off the lives of people who have to deal with him. He takes the oxygen out of rooms. He took someone’s lunch once, a sad and modest lunch that a tired person had been quietly looking forward to all morning, and he didn’t even enjoy it. He took it on principle. The principle being: I can.

He steals right out in the open with the brazen, unembarrassed confidence of a man who has never once considered that other people are real. He doesn’t steal in the dark. He doesn’t steal furtively. He steals the way you pick up your own mail: casually, boredly, without a single spike of adrenaline or guilt. Guilt would require believing that the person he’s stealing from has standing, has claims, has feelings that matter. He does not believe this. He has never believed this. He was not built to believe this.

He is stupid in a way that is almost majestic. His stupidity is not the ordinary kind, the forgivable, relatable kind that all of us carry in patches and compartments. His is total. Unified. A stupidity that has achieved something like integrity. There is not one chamber of his mind operating at even a remedial level of insight. He has been wrong about everything, always, without exception, without a single accidental correct answer slipping through, which statistically should be impossible and yet here he is, a living rebuke to probability. If you put him in a room with a hundred doors and told him the exit was behind one of them, he would find the ninety-nine wrong ones first, in sequence, and then stand in front of the last door and walk into the wall beside it.

He is callous the way concrete is callous: not through malice, not through choice, but through an utter material inability to register the soft pressure of another person’s pain. You could hand him a book of tragedies, and he would complain about the font. You could show him the face of grief, and he would wonder aloud if there was parking nearby. He does not process human suffering as data. It does not reach him. It never has.

He is vicious without the interesting parts of viciousness. Without cunning, without strategy, without even the cold competence of a true predator. He is vicious the way a blunt instrument is vicious: through sheer, undirected force, through the momentum of his own awfulness carrying him forward into collisions that leave damage everywhere and leave him untouched, unmarked, unaware. Animals that bite have reasons. He does not have reasons. He has trajectory.

He is physically unhealthy in ways that feel karmic, as though his body is attempting to file a formal complaint against his soul. His constitution has mutinied. His own biology is staging a protest.

He is untempered. He has never been tempered. He came out of whatever process produced him without the crucial step: the cooling, the shaping, the refinement that turns raw material into something useful. He is still raw. He will always be raw. He is smelted fury with no purpose, unforged, unbent, uselessly molten.

He is, in the final and most complete assessment, a disgusting anomaly. A statistical outlier so extreme that evolution seems to be embarrassed by him, a glitch in the long project of civilization, a misprint in the human genome so catastrophic that it somehow achieved sentience and got a driver’s license. He is proof that the universe has no quality control. He is what happens when the worst possible combination of traits clears every filter, slips through every gate, and arrives, blinking and unconcerned, into a world that never prepared for anything quite like him.

And the most horrifying part, the detail that keeps philosophers up at night, staring at the ceiling, reconsidering everything, is that he will never know any of this. He will never know what he is. He will go to his grave certain that he was, in fact, pretty good. Maybe even great.

That is the final insult. That is the thing that cannot be forgiven.

 

.....

 

Oh... you think he was referring to you?
 

 

 

[StanSP]

Tommy Robinson's right hand man detained under the Terrorism Act at Heathrow. 

Not hearing much about it for some reason... 

[CornwallFox]

9 hours ago, StanSP said:

Tommy Robinson's right hand man detained under the Terrorism Act at Heathrow. 

Not hearing much about it for some reason... 

His right hand man? Is he the one that strokes Yaxley-Lennon's ego? He is a massive 🍆 after all

[Sampson]

You have to wonder why Farage, a guy who was allegedly so anti Britain adopting the Euro because of the tradition and patriotism of the pound, is so pro the movement towards crypto over fiat currencies like the pound… What is patriotic and traditional about crypto?

 

 

Edited 3 May by Sampson

[Sly]

Has Trump honestly said they’ll take Cuba on the way back from Iran?!? 

[Zear0]

1 hour ago, Sly said:

Has Trump honestly said they’ll take Cuba on the way back from Iran?!? 

It is on the way back to Norfolk tbf

[CosbehFox]

Boat crossings down 42% this year on the same period last year. 
 

Weather be a factor in that but the Times article reporting a number of other reasons too 

[Sly]

7 minutes ago, CosbehFox said:

Boat crossings down 42% this year on the same period last year. 
 

Weather be a factor in that but the Times article reporting a number of other reasons too 

Another reason is they’ve realised that it’s no longer worth it! 

[Trav Le Bleu]

On 01/05/2026 at 22:50, Super_horns said:

Maybe prevented a very serious situation here.

 

And certainly better to be safe than sorry?

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/clyjervxjnwo

[Trav Le Bleu]

35 minutes ago, CosbehFox said:

Boat crossings down 42% this year on the same period last year. 
 

Weather be a factor in that (gaaaaarrr!) but the Times article reporting a number of other reasons too 

Well, I guess a pirate would know.

[Clogger_]

48 minutes ago, CosbehFox said:

Boat crossings down 42% this year on the same period last year. 
 

Weather be a factor in that but the Times article reporting a number of other reasons too 

Ah! A newspaper noticed. Turns out the amount of people trying to cross into UK is directly proportional to those having crossed into *Europe*. Unless devoid of capability to reason, one realises this cannot be addressed from UK perspective without closer European collaboration, and a bit of thought to developments in the wider world

[leicsmac]

21 minutes ago, Clogger_ said:

Ah! A newspaper noticed. Turns out the amount of people trying to cross into UK is directly proportional to those having crossed into *Europe*. Unless devoid of capability to reason, one realises this cannot be addressed from UK perspective without closer European collaboration, and a bit of thought to developments in the wider world

... it's almost as if this is an issue that can't be solved without considering the wider world instability problems (unless one considers simply considering it "not my problem" and therefore the death and suffering of countless millions of people is morally acceptable).

 

Funny, that. 

[Lionator]

This seems like it should be illegal but I don’t know why? It’s like a low key form of manipulation/coercion?