You total star!

Fewer.

How does the “60 votes” thing work?

Yeah, I think they were thinking of a barrel-roll.

There’s no such law in the UK.

Labour canvasser asked why I wasn’t voting that way at the last GE. I said, “I’m a socialist - honestly, would you*?” and he seemed within a heartbeat of agreeing. The local crowd seemed pretty depressed about chasing the Overton window back then [although obviously they will make sympathetic noises towards anyone they’re talking to, that’s part of the job].

[* This isn’t risking a Reform storm - FPTP and I’m in a solidly Labour ward, but they still bothered to knock on doors, which was eye-opening in itself]

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He rode to power on the back of not being from the party behind the least popular government in fucking ages (after 14 years of disaster). He made lots of promises to appeal to the essentially left-wing party that he’s the leader of. In any case, he wound up with a landslide parliamentary majority off the back of around a third of the actual vote.

Since then he’s put Wes Streeting in charge of the NHS and McSweeney in charge of strategy, and has chased the racist vote that’s stoked up by Nige “Brexit” Farage.

So he’s triangulating right to chase the votes of people who can’t stand him and will never vote for him, and in the space of a month has lost 34 approval points from actual Labour voters to wind up with a net -5 approval or something like that.

What’s odd is that I know people who’ve met him and worked with him personally, and they are all largely of the belief that he’s a man of deep principle. Which just goes to show his talent, because he’s hiding it incredibly well at the moment.

So you’re all for freedom of speech, but the moment someone exercises it you’d like them to up sticks to another country? Riiight. You sound unhinged.

I think hate can be self-destructive. If you’re going to punch a Nazi, do it from a place of love. But also, more power to your elbow.

You make a persuasive case that free speech, by your definition, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Why would you want to be hateful?!

Training, decent modern equipment, understanding and managing risk, gear redundancy, and wear a frickin’ helmet (esp. when belaying).

Yeah, there are some yahoos, but there’re also people who drop dead playing table-tennis.

With massive OOO pipelines, what’s the alternative?

Sounds like a really bad decision - forced error due to some other reason to back out rapidly. What an awful tragedy.

I was under the impression that Musk was going to “fix” Boeing’s delivery of AF1. I think his suggestions included relaxing the security clearance for new hires and getting everyone working 60-hour weeks.

News of that all went very quiet after the announcement though.

That’s why “at 65” comes into it. You don’t live forever, so you can afford to eat into the capital.

Tax cuts might not help for products that never make a profit.

Okay.

Definitely a poor opinion then.

My concern isn’t for my own vote. It’s for everyone; there’s a pervading notion that voting is either irrelevant, useless, or a balancing act to find the least-worst option.

I don’t recognise the “listless wandering” you describe. It’s poetic but doesn’t reflect what’s actually going on here: people aren’t looking for entertainment; they are worried how they’re going to pay the bills. It would frankly be a relative utopia to have the privilege to not care about politics and what it’s doing to people.

I’d say “democratic” rather than “consumerist”; that’s a really odd choice of term (and a poor one I think). I live in a ward that’s solidly single-party in an FPTP system. Whether I vote or not is strictly irrelevant and always will be. There is no incentive for my representative to be anything other than a party cypher.

I’d rather see a PR system in place (STV by preference, but we’d probably end up with AMS so that party sinecures are still possible). For single-seat wards, I’d sooner have ranked-choice, because at the moment people have to thread a needle in order to attempt to stave off the headbanger candidates.

Mandatory voting I’d be less keen on unless it came with a “reopen nominations” but the issue with that is that that option would win by a landslide.