juanpabloangel18

2 hours ago, Seat68 said:

Indie is reporting that Electoral Commission has doubts Tories may not hand over postal vote applications

Someone might be able to explain why these applications are being sent to the tories.

Saw a few Tw@ts about this recently:

 VillaTalk Off Topic section

Shoutout 2010/11:

• Gerard Houllier appointed after MON left us in the lurch
• Milner / Ireland swap deal, great stuff
• Instant transition from counter attack to absolute crap possession style football
• Relegation threatened
• Liverpool away Houllier love-in, ignored the fans
• Spunked all our money on Darren Bent in January who then scored bags despite being a largely bad player
• Won our final few games and finished 9th

RIP x

28 minutes ago, PussEKatt said:

Putin is carrying on much worse than Hitler

Steady on

1 hour ago, MakemineVanilla said:

Transgenderism does seem like the predictable consequences of post-war existentialism, where the individual believes they have an 'authentic' self they need to discover.

The thinking on the subject does seem to follow on from Heidegger's concept of "thrownness" (Geworfenheit).

Atheism is the necessary starting point, as if there is no omniscient Creator and only the random interaction of genes, according to the theory, might create a mismatch between body and temperament.

The argument against the genetic basis of transgenderism, would be to ask the question, why these genes have not been eliminated due to the fact that the individuals would surely be less likely to reproduce and pass on those genes.

We are told that most female ancestors passed on their genes and most males did NOT, and yet most of those who transition are male to female.

Sociological causes may include the decline of the traditional male role in the division of labour, and the lessening of its importance to the economy; other causes might be the increasing monetisation of healthcare, which leads to over-diagnosis due to the profit motive.

Politicians lack the courage to deal with the resulting issues about minors and no doubt when the damage has been done and regretted, the issue will be decided and established in court by tort.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history

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Transgender people (including non-binary and third gender people) have existed in cultures worldwide since ancient times. The modern terms and meanings of "transgender", "gender", "gender identity", and "gender role" only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s.

Roman emperor Elagabalus (d. 222 AD) preferred to be called a lady (rather than a lord) and sought sex reassignment surgery.

And when people talk about an upswing in trans-identified people, show them this:

59 minutes ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

If I had to guess,  I can see Raynor doing or saying something between now and the election.

If she looked and talked Posh she wouldn't be in the shadow cabinet IMO.

Eh? Are you saying she's not there on merit? And that she's a loose cannon? Because:

1) She's been heavily stigmatised for being a working class northern young mother, and done very well (IMO) to get where she is

2) She seems to have learnt a lot from the 'tory scum' incident and generally polished up her media performances subsequently

I wonder what she's making of authoritarian Starmer though - seems to have been a bit quiet recently

1 hour ago, desensitized43 said:

I guess I'm a Tory then...

I had to have a word with my neighbour (or more accurately her uneducated layabout son) who was smoking weed in his bedroom while my 2 year old daughter was asleep in the adjoining house (their rooms share a common wall in a semi-deteched house) and I could literally taste the stuff.

I've always been pretty relaxed about legalising as much as you sensibly can do, particularly in the privacy of your own house but I wasn't exactly happy about a 2 year old having to sleep in a room where you can smell second hand weed.

That is really annoying/distressing, although bit confused how weed smoke can travel through a wall?

Your nuisance aside, we don't ban music just because people often play it loudly at the annoyance of their neighbours. Weed is already banned anyway. It just really annoys me how Starmer keeps finding things to completely swivel on because .... who even knows any more? He's always been an authoritarian-minded establishment Thatcherite?

And there we go. My opinion of Starmer could not get much lower.

Then: "I have supported schemes where cannabis possession does not result in arrest/prosecution"

Now: "Cannabis is ruining lives"

Anyone thinking we were getting a centre-left UK government any time soon can put the bubbles back in the fridge

On 14/02/2023 at 10:02, StefanAVFC said:

That second one is a banger

I'd hazard a guess this whole affair has millions more people appreciating the problem of a cabal of right wing Tories running the national broadcaster.

4 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

So every one that comes over on a small boat goes through the system, yes?

I don't know. But here's evidence from a Home Affairs Committee in 2020 that 98% of people who crossed went on to claim asylum:

https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/793/default/

Quote

Abi Tierney: I will start again. Of those crossing this year, 98% claimed asylum, as Dan said. That was a very large majority. To date, 50% of those claims have been considered. Of those, 20% of those have been granted, 10% have been refused and a further 71% have been refused because we are not the responsible country, i.e., they have travelled through a safe country before they came here. 

Or research from 2022 that at least 60% of people making the crossing would succeed in gaining refugee status

https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/latest/news/majority-of-people-on-small-boats-crossing-channel-last-year-are-refugees-new-analysis-shows/#:~:text=Over 25%2C000 men%2C women and,all who made the journey.

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At least six out of ten (60%) of all those who made the dangerous Channel crossing to the UK in small boats last year will be recognised as refugees through the asylum process, new analysis from the Refugee Council shows.

But I doubt you'll even bother to read the above or consider that you might have something to learn on this topic.

Side note, I'm increasingly of the view that some people that are a total waste of time, I never used to think that way though

4 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

No, I've actually spoke about both, that illegals also come over on small boats, an they don't all enter the system.

Hang on. Are you saying asylum seekers don't enter the system?

1 hour ago, foreveryoung said:

Why do I always need to quote sources on this forum

You’re so close to a eureka moment

Won’t hold my breath

14 hours ago, bickster said:

"You can't make spurious human rights claims"

What on earth is meant by that?

It means human rights law would no longer apply to a certain group of people - plainly in breach of the ECHR.

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States that have ratified the Convention, also known as “States Parties”, have undertaken to secure and guarantee to everyone within their jurisdiction, not only their nationals

There's no way this gets through the courts, but a right wing tabloid war with 'woke lefty judges' as the enemy is probably the end goal.

What a pathetic, small man, in every sense

8 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

In 15 years time the ‘Gen X’ line will be where the ‘boomer’ line is and that upturn in the ‘Millennial’ line will take it towards the National Average while the ‘Zoomer’ line will appear in their place.

The whole thing carries on as before. 

The whole point of the piece is that millennials and Gen-Z are bucking the 'eternal' trend that people go more conservative as they age

Quote

 

The pattern has held remarkably firm. By my calculations, members of Britain’s “silent generation”, born between 1928 and 1945, were five percentage points less conservative than the national average at age 35, but around five points more conservative by age 70. The “baby boomer” generation traced the same path, and “Gen X”, born between 1965 and 1980, are now following suit.

Millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — started out on the same trajectory, but then something changed. 

Let’s start with age effects, and the oldest rule in politics: people become more conservative with age. If millennials’ liberal inclinations are merely a result of this age effect, then at age 35 they too should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history.

On to period effects. Could some force be pushing voters of all ages away from the right? In the UK there has certainly been an event. Support for the Tories plummeted across all ages during Liz Truss’s brief tenure, and has only partially rebounded. But a population-wide effect cannot completely explain millennials’ liberal exceptionalism, nor why we see the same pattern in the US without the same shock.

So the most likely explanation is a cohort effect — that millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.

This is borne out by US survey data showing that, having reached political maturity in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, millennials are tacking much further to the left on economics than previous generations did, favouring greater redistribution from rich to poor.

Similar patterns are evident in Britain, where millennials are more economically leftwing than Gen-Xers and boomers were at the same age, and Brexit has alienated a higher share of former Tory backers among this generation than any other. Even before Truss, two-thirds of millennials who had backed the Conservatives before the EU referendum were no longer planning to vote for the party again, and one in four said they now strongly disliked the Tories.

The data is clear that millennials are not simply going to age into conservatism

 

5 hours ago, bickster said:

a lot of their voters to put it bluntly may actually be dead before they get a shot at power again

Also

https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4

Like how much Facebook brain rot must you have suffered to think a pedestrianised walkable city centre a) benefits 'the Davos elite / WEF' and b) and bad thing?

As far as I can tell a 15 minute city is what every single city on the planet was, prior to about 80 years ago.

Walking & cycling are inherently anti-capitalist and I suspect there's some dark money behind these weird-ass protests

On 11/02/2023 at 07:57, Mandy Lifeboats said:

I definitely think the current loses are Wagner being sacrificed to stop them trying to grabbing power when Putin dies.  

A few places reported recently that Wagner are sending out wave after wave of conscripts as human sacrifices to identify where the Ukrainian forces are, from their fire.

Grim

Anyone pretending this was about protecting young girls is either gaslighting or thick.

Fascists have long used 'protection of our women from invaders' as an excuse to commit racist violence. When really, these men are far more likely to be predators  themselves. Just look at who Tommy Robinson hangs out with.

As a fan of the EU project in principle, am taking some solace in the fact Brexit has had the opposite effect of what many thought it would (multiple member states following suit and leaving).

They've all taken one look at the state of us and said 'no thanks'. 

Good news if you believe in a united Europe IMO

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/how-brexit-made-the-eu-stronger/

Quote

 

Interestingly, the EES survey further found an increase in emotional attachment to the EU. In Finland, strong emotional attachment rose to 58.7% from 46%. Perhaps most curious of all, in Hungary (a country engaged in a bitter dispute with Brussels) it increased from 60% to 70.3%. 

Brexit has achieved the opposite of its aim. In hoping to delegitimise the EU as an institution and hasten its break-up, it merely increased its popularity with its remaining members in the same way that when Brexiteers pledged to make Britain more prosperous and globally respected in leaving the EU, the reverse happened.