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mormont

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Posts posted by mormont

  1. 1 hour ago, Centrist Simon Steele said:

    At some point this whole, "let's get past this one more election" wears thin for voters the democrats need. I think the same advice applies to them (the old-school liberal leadership): "you want to cling to your power and corruption, but you're going to have to let it go before Trump gets elected again." 

    Not picking on Simon but this, for me, sums up the problem.

    There is no division here. 'The voters the Democrats need' makes it sound like these voters are passive, an unshaped mass that is separate to the party and therefore not part of the solution. That's flat wrong.

    Those voters are part of 'the Democrats'. If they don't like their choices, they need to change them. Policies, candidates, processes. Starting tomorrow and continuing for years to come.

    If 'the voters the Democrats need' are sitting waiting for 'the Democrats' to give them what they want, they're part of the problem as much as the party higher-ups are.

    Trump is vile, but he has power because he inspired a lot of his voters to get involved in the Republican party at lower levels. But it is not up to the higher levels of the Democrat party to go out and find a unique individual who can do the same. That's like asking them to come up with magic beans. The boring truth of the matter is that the party can't (not won't) do better until the voters do the work.

    And it's way too late to do that now. The candidates in this election are already picked. If you think there's any way to ditch Biden that's not an electoral catastrophe, you're kidding yourself. But you can get involved now if you want to see a better candidate in 2028, or 2032. If you don't change things, you can't expect change.

  2. If we're doing a general sitcom discussion, I will offer my personal spicy take, which is:

    Fawlty Towers has aged badly and has more problems than you remember. (For one, nearly everything Basil says about Manuel is shown to be objectively true.) If you want to watch a classic British sitcom that does the 'pompous unlikeable lead who is the author of his own misfortunes, but at the same time put upon by the world in general', watch Rising Damp. It helps that Leonard Rossiter was easily twice the comic actor that John Cleese is. And that's no slam on Cleese: Rossiter was simply unbelievably good. 

  3. I think it is actually a 'reasonable person' standard in these cases, and while they can be complicated, judges do have published guidance and pre-established case law to guide them. Most things judges deal with are complicated, one way or the other.

    Anyway, passing aside the Hunt budget (steal all Labour's fundraising ideas and spend the cash on tax cuts - and people wonder why opposition parties don't set out their policies in detail before an election?), the Tories are running into the inevitable issues with trying to be the most free speech and also the most hype against 'extremism'.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/05/senior-tories-criticise-no-10-plans-to-broaden-extremism-definition
     

    Quote

    Downing Street is facing a backlash from Conservative MPs and peers over moves to create a broader of definition of extremism in response to what Rishi Sunak describes as the threat of “mob rule”.

    Michael Gove, the communities secretary, is expected to unveil plans next week that would allow the government, universities and local authorities to cut off links to groups identified as “extremist”.

    Miriam Cates is obviously someone with whom I have quite a serious difference of views on most topics, but she at least sees the problem:
     

    Quote

    The rightwing Tory MP Miriam Cates and Lord Frost, the high-profile rightwing peer, are among those who have expressed opposition amid concerns that the move could have an inadvertent impact on anti-abortion groups, advocates for socially conservative causes and those opposed to transgender rights.

    “Any attempt to define extremism or fundamental British values is very risky because one person’s extremism is another person’s sincerely held and lawful belief,” Cates told the Guardian.

    “An obvious is example is where I regularly call trans rights activists extremists for believing a man can be a woman just because he says he is, and that this gives him the right to enter women-only spaces, but equally I am called an extremist for believing there are only two biological sexes and that you can’t change sex.”

    “These are debates that we should be able to have lawfully in society. We should be able to call each other extremists, but it also means those views should not be banned,” said the MP, one of the leaders of the New Conservatives grouping of Tory MPs.

    But the Tories need something to campaign on, so they're going to try to ride these two horses at once. And civic groups will be asked, again, to do two contradictory things - uphold the right to free speech, but also not engage with anyone who says perfectly legal things that the government has decided are objectionable. Under threat of punishment for being unable to square that circle. It's madness.

  4. So here's a little story.

    https://www.bindmans.com/knowledge-hub/news/minister-forced-into-climb-down-over-academic-comments-on-gaza/

    Michelle Donelan, currently Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, alleged on Twitter that two members of the EDI board of UK Research and Innovation were radical extremists who had expressed sympathy for Hamas in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks. She publicly suggested they should be removed from their roles.

    After a lengthy and detailed investigation, it turns out that she was talking complete bollocks, had not done any checking of the claim but had simply accepted and repeated it at face value, and had seriously defamed both these women.

    She has now retracted her comments in the face of a libel suit, and paid compensation.

    Wait. No. We paid compensation. The taxpayer paid it.

    Tomorrow, the Chancellor will complain about wasteful public spending.

  5. 2 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

    Interesting.  Because that's exactly how I feel about Friends. As mentioned above, Friends was one of the whitest of white shows and had an air of its own superiority about it. I never could understand how they were actually Friends.

    Nobody else would hang out with them.

    You know all those people you see in the apartment when they throw a party, who never show up or are referred to ever again? Those are the folks the cast want to be friends with. But those folks can't stand them. They only show up to their parties to get free drinks. So the cast only have each other to hang out with. 

    That's my headcanon anyway. 

  6. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/tories-labour-sunak-hunt-starmer-budget-support-record-low-poll-b1142921.html?fbclid=IwAR2Zi4sdUFAjCG8plVB-c-u8d7EwfqhfUEzfXZs6w4JaaWsaNJNgsN6YuaI
     

    Quote

    The Tories hit rock bottom today with support for their party across Britain falling to a record low of just 20 per cent, according to a new poll.

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/tories-general-election-labour-nhs-cost-poll-b1142977.html
     

    Quote

    The state of public services more generally could be a real Achilles heel for the Conservatives at the coming election. 78% told us last year that public services had got worse in the last 5 years.

    In today’s poll the public think that Labour has the best policies over the Conservatives ‘for public services generally’ by an almost 4 to 1 margin. Perhaps this why the Conservatives would rather not talk about them – but at some point they will need to.

     

  7. For the record, again, I’m British and I find the idea that nobody on this side of the pond knew or cared that the Gellers were Jewish to be weird. I guess it’s possible that folks had never knowingly met a Jewish person or watched any sitcom or film set in New York before?

    ps no less a source than the Friends fandom wiki:

    https://friends.fandom.com/wiki/Ross_Geller
     

    Quote

    Despite being financially secure, Ross is notoriously cheap.


    https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllJewsAreCheapskates

    Quote

    Ross Geller from Friends. At times also his sister, Monica, as in "The One Where Rosita Dies" where Phoebe Buffay refers to the Geller siblings as "the worst tippers in the world" after having them as massage clients.

    An academic citation!

    https://eloncdn.blob.core.windows.net/eu3/sites/153/2018/12/04-Maoz.pdf

    Quote

    A second stereotype is that of the cheap Jew […] while Ross makes a good wage as a palaeontologist at a museum, he still displays moments of the stereotypical cheap Jew

    And yeah I did waste my time actually looking this up! :D

  8. 19 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

    And that's irrelevant to my point, the Jewish references would be lost for the overwhelming majority of the UK. Cos most people don't give a shit  

    Which is in turn irrelevant to DMC’s point. If the writers, who certainly knew the characters were Jewish, wrote them in a way that evoked negative stereotypes arbour Jewish folks, it’s not a defence to say ‘I missed that and I think others would have missed it too’. It’s still there

  9. 32 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

    If you asked 100 people in the UK what religion the gellers were, your average response would be I have no idea/who cares. 

    It's not just their religion, and I'm fairly sure you're wrong. If it wasn't already clear, it's referenced repeatedly in the series.

  10. 8 minutes ago, DMC said:

    Rachel moved in with Phoebe at the beginning of season six when Monica and Chandler moved in together.  This mostly went without incident until the end of the season, where in which there was a fire in Phoebe and Rachel's apartment that led to the latter moving in with Joey.  Also, of course, Phoebe was Monica's roommate immediately before the timeline of the show.

    I wouldn't count that as justifying the original comment, particularly as the whole reason Phoebe moved out of Monica's place was that she couldn't tolerate living with Monica, but sure, for a small period compared to the whole run, Rachel lived with Phoebe.

    Quote

    As for the Phoebe "theory," I hadn't heard that one before.  It's pretty entertaining to think about -- especially imagining the flashbacks of her having conversations in Central Perk with herself.

    It's one of those dumb faux-deep sitcom 'theories' but yes, fun to think about!

  11. 2 hours ago, DMC said:

    The three women also live with each other throughout the show.

    They did not. Phoebe mostly lived alone. This is a big part of the Phoebe theory, that the whole series is her fantasy of being friends with these folks she sees in the Central Perk. Also it's the apogee of the 'how the hell did these people afford to live in New York?'

    ETA - although on the latter point, I forgot she was subletting from her grandma and later inherited the place.

  12. 7 hours ago, DMC said:

    The internet's been over this, but Ross sucks hard.  Not only is he an apparently absentee father, but also horrifically and admittedly bad at his job, of course just generally boring, and most importantly for the show - a pretty shitty friend.

    They're all pretty shitty friends, and pretty shitty people tbqh. But that's a sitcom problem. You need conflict to drive plot. If they were all really good friends, there would be no storylines.

    Still, I wouldn't want to hang with any of them.

  13. 1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

    The left thinks the bbc gives the right an easy ride and the right think the bbc is woke as fuck. They are clearly doing something correct. 

    This is a fallacy I've been tackling in my professional life recently. It makes you feel better when you're being criticised. But most of the time, when both sides are saying you're wrong, you're clearly doing something wrong.

    (Not a comment on the BBC in particular. I just find this notion of 'we must be doing something right if we've pissed everyone off' to be dumb and complacent.)

  14. 2 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

    @Kyoshi, a couple of articles re the NYT have been posted here but we still have a moratorium on the topic of the war in the Middle East. I assume the NYT’s bad reporting issues falls outside of that moratorium but I am not sure. 
     

    Another article:

    https://www.commondreams.org/news/anat-schwartz
     

    It does not, to be clear. The topic is clearly covered by the moratorium, and I can't for a moment imagine why anyone would think it isn't. 

    If anybody wants to discuss this further, they can take it to PM. As ever, that is the only appropriate place to raise questions or comments about moderator decisions. 

  15. It’s worth noting also, particularly for non UK posters, that:

    - Galloway certainly picked up votes he would not otherwise have got because Labour effectively did not have a candidate.

    - Galloway did campaign on local issues such as hospital provision, regeneration of the area and even the future of the football club. He has little chance of delivering on these, but he didn’t run a single issue campaign.

    - Galloway will almost certainly be ejected at the general election in a few months.

    - the Conservatives and Reform also basically lost their votes to the independent candidate who came second. 

  16. Not quite sure what that’s supposed to mean but it’s a pretty silly thing to say whichever way I slice it. Gaza is very much the issue most affecting many of these voters right now. Galloway may be a vain, pompous blowhard in an incel hat, but those who voted for him had the right to. 

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