Sampson

It's the 21st century equivalent of the nuclear Arms race between the US and China in the 1950s and 60s. Just hope we in Europe decouple from it all.

Just watching a YouTube video with people in it. Checked the comments and googled and found it was AI. I wouldn't have guessed, honestly it's a bit chilling that the technology is too good to tell apart from real life now. I just don't see how the legal system, administrstion/beaurocratic systems etc. will be able to cope with it really. What's stopping someone just manufacturing evidence to frame people or manufacturing alibis with this stuff, or politicians manufacturing reasons to discredit their opponents, push through legislation or reasons to go to war?

This culture wars thing is why I find the Reform thing so weird. I think there's understandable reasons why people dislike the rapid cultural change, we can discuss it and about the causes be they immigration, technology, capitalism or whatever but that feels like a pretty basic evolutionary human emotion, but I think personally that started with the Americanisation and de-Europeanisation of the British economy, industry, political system and culture starting from when Thatcher got into power in 1979 and turned Britain into America's lapdog with an America-style tycoon economic system. And I think Farage clearly represents such a radical cultural change himself and this weird Americanisation and de-Europianisation of our culture and politics. Reform and Farage just feel so Americanised and un-British to me. All this stuff about the flag, strong man leaders whon"say it like it is" and demanding we say the Lords prayer in council meetings and this weird stuff about "Judeo-Christian values" is so Americanised to me. The traditionalist symbol of Britain has always been the monarchy, we always used to say the Americans had that weird reverence to the flag and presidents because they didn't have a monarchy as a patriotic symbol. And since when has any British person born after about 1940 cared about this Jesus stuff? I remember how when the Simpsons was one of the big symbols of Americanisation in the 90s it being a topic of discussion how weird it was for Brits to see "the average family" they were supposed to represent still going to church every Sunday in the 1990s.

My favourite was the 2nd book - that was a really great book, a proper page turner from beginning to end with a fantastic ending. (I know book 6 is supposed to be a favourite of many too though). The 1st book I really enjoyed the opening and final quarters but found the middling quarters a little hard to follow at times. I could never fully get my head round Pierce Brown's writing style in the first book of the short, sort of poetic, staccato sentences - I understand that it makes it nicer to read in your head and gets across the feeling, but I found it wasn't descriptive enough at times for me and I lost track of what was happening. He kind of abandoned that writing style after the first book. Plus I prefer the full galaxy space opera of books 2 onwards that the Martian battle royale style scenario of the first (although I know he said, the only way he could ever get the book published was to promise to do it that way due to the popularity of Hunger Games at the time). I think I would probably appreciate the 1st book more on a re-read now I know the characters, basic plot etc.

Finished Red Rising book 3 and Dungeon Crawler Carl book 8 in the past couple of weeks, both fantastic! The endings of both books really didn't go the way I expected. Currently on Red Rising book 4 about halfway through.

I've said all along Labour will lose far more voters than they gain with this anti-immigration stuff. They are chasing a demographic who hasn't voted them for 20 years with this anti-immigration stuff and is pissing off the demographics that actually have voted for them in the past decade in doing this. Farage will always change the goalpost on this - first it was 5 figure net migration, then net zero migration, then net negative migration and then it will be re-migration. The net migration figures probably will be quite small by 2029, but Farage will have moved the goalposts to being remigration by then, meanwhile Labour will have pissed off all the university educated, pro-EU, liberal gen z and millenial voters who the anti-immigration stuff doesn't play with and who were the voters who actually voted them in.

Not to mention their housing is an endless cycle of 6-month rental contracts in shared houses with strangers with shared kitchens and shared bathrooms which still take 50% of your monthly wage and then you lose a further £500 deposit every 6 months when they have to leave the house share to find a new one because of pedantic landlords finding a tiny scratch on a skirting board - which is actually what make it impossible to save, along with student loan increases on earning increases making career progression of possible not even pay. That is how most university-educated under 40s I know live, I have no idea where all these foreign holidays come from either.. What Raj describes sounds like a young 20 or 30-something adult in 2006 - pre the 2008 financial crisis - not a young 20 or 30-something adult in 2026 and sounds incredibly out of touch.

Yes, plus AI technology which humans don’t understand how it works and the ageing population - huge issues humanity has never faced before in its existence . And I still think a lot of issues and mental health problems ultimately come down to the internet creating a society which is much less social when human brains are evolutionary wired to crave social situations they way we are evolutionary wired to crave food, because that’s what helped us survive, working with and caring for other humans around us. I too fear more of the world the children today will grow up in, and what it will look like in the 2050s or 2060s

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But you can’t even do that anymore because technology and AI affects every career on earth and changes every 5 years that has meant no career is long-term viable and university riddles you with so much extra debt the more you earn that getting a good education doesn’t pay anymore. 5-10 years ago everyone was told to train and go into engineering and data analysis and all those jobs will now be gone from AI within less than a decade. Not to mention every job and cv has AI screening and is just about having a few key words on your cv nowadays I see my niece and nephew and wonder what the hell kind of jobs and education opportunities are even going to be left for them in the future.

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I don’t think it’s about looking incompetent more than them abandoning their core voter demographics to chase a voter demographic that hasn’t voted for them in a generation and was never going to vote for them. The flat-cap Yorkshireman hasn’t voted Labour in a generation. Labour voters have primarily been younger, university educated, white collar urbanite liberals for decades. And the stricter immigration rhetoric, the red-lines over rejoining the European market, the refusal to properly vocally distance ourselves from the US and the red lines on taxes on the wealthy are all massive turn offs for core Labour voters. Meanwhile even if Labour get net immigration down to 0 by 2029, it’s not going to be enough for Reform voters as Farage will just move the goalposts and say we need to kick out loads with permenant residency or even citizenship who’ve lived in the uk for decades. It was always a fools game trying to win back voters on immigration. Just reading the John Curtice analysis and it’s still very clear that despite Labour constituencies going to Reform, very few voters actually go directly to Reform. Reform instead have largely captured the former Tory over 60s vote and many who were former “do not votes”, whereas far more Labour voters have gone over to the Greens and LibDems and therefore split that vote 3 ways.

If we had PR it might mean something and we could adjust our hyperbole, but in a FPTP system, all the hyperbole is justified tbh.