mattiloy
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Posts posted by mattiloy
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1 hour ago, Ozanne said:
What happens when a poster is one driving people away from the site? Hypothetically speaking of course.
Lmao. He says without a hint of irony. Old fishy bollocks’ posts are just about the only variation in what would otherwise be an endless stream of dreary centrist twitter reposts. If there is anybody guilty of stinking out this thread then you probably want to take a good hard look in the mirror.-
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8 minutes ago, Barry Fish said:
Makes me feel sick.
Fairplay.Lets hope it stops as soon as possible.
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15 minutes ago, Barry Fish said:
Like you struggling to call Hamas terrorists...
The October 7th attacks were inhuman, disgusting.But what do you think of all the dead kids in Gaza Fishlad?
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5 minutes ago, Neil said:
if we can dip in and out then we can choose to dip into the things which interest use - probably why you're less interested in Swedish news - cos a lot of it means nothing to you without some research, like this building law.
I am fluent in Swedish. I just read less of their news because there is no bbc news and the better news sites are behind paywalls. The issue is that the onus is on the citizen to endlessly read (often commercial) news to understand what is happening with their laws. Why is that acceptable with government but with no other industry? If we change the Ts and Cs (the contract law that governs our relationship with our customers) we have to inform them and the onus is on us to do so. Which is right. But why for the govt does that responsibility lie with the voter to consume all the info via usually partisan sources. Isnt that a bit f**ked?
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One thing that has struck me living in Sweden is that I’m just not as invested or engaged in the politics news cycle over here as I was in the uk politics/news cycle - I’ve got sort of 3/4 of a foot in the uk and 1/4 of a foot in Sweden in terms of engagement.
Today by chance I heard about a change in a law proposed by the right wing govt to reform the strandskydd law (shoreline protection law) which prevents new building within a few hundred metres of the shoreline.
Since this is something that I am really strongly against, and how I only heard about it by chance, it dawned on my how out of touch with it all I am here. And then it dawned on me how now I’m like an average Joe out of touch guy in the uk but here, if you catch my drift.
Basically, I am just grasping how difficult it is to reach most of the population. Most things wont cut through. I’m a busy dad of a 2 year old and a foreigner so I dont keep abreast of everything but I am nonetheless very interested and want to be as informed as possible. And yet important things can pass me by.
So I thought about my own job in the bank. Whenever we change our rates or terms and conditions we are obliged to directly inform our customers. Often it is at great expense as we have to send physical letters out to most.
Why should governments be any different?
Why should we have to consume basically all the news, scroll endlessly through twitter, to find out whats changing with the laws in our countries?
I think if each outgoing government had to produce a physical document describing all the changes they’d made to laws and deliver that into the postboxes of every citizen in the country well ahead of election day they wouldnt get away with half of much shite as they do.
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4 minutes ago, Ozanne said:
Please post on topic otherwise the mods will have to delete more of your posts.
miss! missss!
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https://x.com/damocrat/status/1733624799056761020?s=46
Disgraceful. The inevitable conclusion of a country where even the nominally ’centre Left’ party leans into the mean spiritedness towards those who are down on their chips to pander to the fascist press.
Little wonder then when a new labour guy pops up in the comments with something like this:
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18 hours ago, steviewevie said:
or being Jewish isn't a religion, it's a race. Same as being Arab.
Well, genetic studies show that much of the dna of european jews is european. And much of the rest is almost indiscernible from palestinians. So… -
41 minutes ago, steviewevie said:
sorry for reacting like I did, bit angry and emotional.
41 minutes ago, Barry Fish said:So am I.... I don't call you tons of nasty stuff...
You haven't got a monopoly on being angry and emotional...
And then they kissed 💋-
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1 hour ago, steviewevie said:
Gone off PR a bit recently. We'd just end up with Farage as PM.
Isnt that whats gonna happen anyway when he rejoins to Tory party?First past the post encourages extremism by making people feel like they have no voice.
I’d rather have farage as PM leading a far right party on 20% with his wings clipped by a coalition than farage as PM with a tory majority and carte blanche to do what he likes.
The Sverige Democrats propping up the Swedish govt here is preferable to a Trump, Bolsonaro, Milei situation.
What I hear is that the far right is on the rise, liberals arent so enamoured with democracy anymore. I heard some centrist podcast praising the French system lately basically because Macron was able to win and has a lot of executive power. But what happens when Le Pen wins next time and has the same executive power?
Rigging democracy to give you the result you want only works for so long. So short sighted.
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1 minute ago, mattiloy said:
Not long until we’re in hung parliament territory 😁
Maybe Starmer really is playing 4D chess. Maybe he really wants PR and is deliberately trying to squeeze the Labour vote to ensure a hung parliament. A bit conspiratorial but what else can explain how sh*t he is? -
30 minutes ago, steviewevie said:
Not long until we’re in hung parliament territory 😁 -
1 hour ago, kalifire said:
If there is an economic drain, it's not because of the numbers of asylum seekers (which make up a tiny proportion of new arrivals in Britain), it's because the system is incapable of processing their claims efficiently. That said, around 75% of asylum claims are granted protection early on.
Since you disagree, I'd be interested to read the official sources and statistics which substantiate your claims. Please do share.
Actually it depends.
Here meta studies are generally showing that migration from outside of Europe has a net fiscal cost.
I know that there is also a lot of diversity in net fiscal contribution between groups here in Sweden too. And thats part of the integration challenge - in particular for certain groups of people of overseas origin for whom females never enter the workforce and they have lots of kids- in that case the average welfare spend is relatively high and the average tax receipt is relatively low.
Then again, if those kids are successfully integrated themselves then over several generations I guess the initial decision to accept their parents as migrants eventually pays dividends.
But then there is also evidence that high immigration to a locality leads to higher property prices in that locality. Then there is also evidence that rising property prices suppresses birth rates (because people are priced out of growing their families).
Point being - the economics of migration is complex.
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On 12/4/2023 at 9:21 AM, steviewevie said:
In other words - fix the sh*tty legacy of Thatcher/Blair/Cameron and definitely don’t do it all over again. -
23 hours ago, squirrelarmy said:
As a Northerner who grew up in Thatchers era I’ve witnessed firsthand the effects of the mines being shut not that long after the closure of the mills
She is a hated figure up here still but she knew changes had to be made, the mining era had to end at some point. My city changed from being a centre of the wool trade to a telecoms hub in the 80s
The old mining towns are still feeling the effects even though they’re now becoming commuter hubs for those working in the city. It’s only the older generations still being bitter.
Yes, there was light at the end of the tunnel for those communities. 30 years later they were to become hollowed out commuter towns whose utility is measured in how close they are to the motorway. Brilliant. Thanks Maggie!I wonder if Olaf Scholtz mentioned how much meaningful change the fella with the moustache made ahead of his election campaign.
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23 hours ago, lost said:
Interesting article on labours plans for the NHS:
Australia also with a lower median age and much less income and wealth inequality.A large and increasing share of the NHS budget goes on managing chronic illnesses that are often basically caused by poverty.
You cant solve the NHS’ problems without solving the social problems that blight the uk, and the best way to do that is by reducing inequality.
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3 hours ago, Barry Fish said:
But until this stops being wishful literature written by day dreaming Greenpeace types who need a good bath and a proper job, we will need to stick to the reality that we still need reliable 24 / 7 energy supply that so far has only come from coal or nuclear.
Except that it doesnt. Nuclear still comes with scheduled refuelling outages and occasional unplanned outages usually due to technical/safety issues.Here some data on unplanned outages in the US by year to 2018.
There is nothing ’wishful’ about the literature- its pretty simple stuff- the problem of irregular generation from renewables is solveable with existing technologies. It basically just requires greater coverage and variety in both type and geography and a great leap forward in improving efficiencies in terms of consumption and in the infrastructure- the national grid and electricity storage (batteries).
Nuclear wasnt on the agenda as a solution to climate change for most western countries until very recently. Then Ukraine happened and now we’re here. And it’s nothing to do with solving the oil price shock. These things take decades to build and the oil shock from Ukraine is already over. It’s because China controls something like 70% of the world’s trade in rare earths and the US doesn’t like China and tells the rest of the west to forget about renewables- nuclear is back baby
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4 hours ago, Barry Fish said:
No energy is truly clean. It takes a lot of carbon admissions to make a wind turbine. But obviously it pays you back.
Same can be said for nuclear.
Wind and tidal is just too variable. We need something that is a constant producer like nuclear instead of coal.
Nuclear mixed with the likes of wind and solar is the only game in town and its green enough.
There is now a wealth of literature suggesting that renewables combined with greater efficiency would be sufficient alone.The real problem is that rare metals required for the green transition are located mainly in countries that are competitors to the west, whilst uranium reserves are located in either friendly or at least malleable countries.
Thats why the venn diagram between people horny for nuclear power and people horny for NATO is a circle.
The issues with nuclear are the cost and time before putting it into production and the cost and hazards of decommissioning.
Its just kicking a great big barrel of nuclear waste into the long grass. You invite limited liability companies to come in and generate electricity and maximise their profits on the promise that they’ll clean up after themselves, they pinky promise, make a stack of cash, pay it out in dividends and then when the partys over they go out of business and the govt is left with the bill for tidying it up.
The Sellafield decommissioning has already cost the taxpayer over 100bn. Meanwhile its also had various incidents leaking tens of thousands of gallons of radioactive waste water into the irish sea.
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1 hour ago, steviewevie said:
far right libertarian nutjob has won presidency of Argentina.
cool dude
Was just reading about this guy. Sounds like an absolute nutcase. Besides the insane politics he also claims he has spoken to God in visions, is a tantric sex teacher and cloned his dog.Argentina has long been a basket case. I guess the natural reaction to that must be to elect the oddest person you can find?
It will be interesting anyway. If he implements the sort of pure austrian economics he claims to believe in then when that fails then maybe we can at least point to that as being an example of how all and any attempts at free market economics dont work in the way that folk on the right use the extreme and irrelevant example of the soviet union as to why even moderate democratic socialism cant work.
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8 minutes ago, steviewevie said:
we heard before there were going to be resignations, and there were.
With that vote the Tories were playing politics, as were SNP - they know this is a problem for Starmer. sh*tty world of politics that does nothing to actually help anyone in the middle east.
Thats one way to view it. The other way to view it is that the SNP just want a ceasefire in gaza and that Starmer made a miscalculation in both his assessment of where popular opinion lies within the labour base and in his ability to whip his MPs to go against that.We have come to expect a cold rationality to Starmer’s positions but the bandwidth that politicians have to effect change is ultimately afforded to them by public confidence. If you aren’t also sensitive to the emotional aspect of public opinion then you will end up alienating your voters.
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Only anecdotal but.. my family has always voted Labour, parents and my siblings, but they are generally more centre to centre left than myself and have generally been pretty supportive of Starmer to varying degrees (a bit unhappy with his conservative approach to NHS pay disputes and unimpressed with Streeting as shadow health as they all work in the NHS, but besides that, generally seeing his underwhelming performance from a progressive standpoint as being ’for the greater good’).
Anyway, without any comment from me, the family whatsapp has been going off this afternoon/evening with my sisters and mum in particular raging at the lack of support for a ceasefire and expressing their anguish at the fate of the kids in gaza in particular.
Obviously its only a few people but it has surprised me a bit. The penetration of the issue to people with quite differing levels of political engagement and the strength of feeling towards it. One of my sisters has even said she’ll vote green rather than for their local MP who abstained.
So I’m wondering with this handful of datapoints whether it could be a bigger moment than its hitherto been credited as.
Tempered a bit by the lack of an alternative mainstream non genocidal party for the alienated to vote for and the fact that we’re still a way to go until an election. But it could be that Starmer has miscalculated the roll emotions play for many voters and that this is so emotive, and that perception is that an abstention on the ceasefire amendment is perceived as tacit approval of continued bombing.
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2 hours ago, steviewevie said:
plenty of genocide and ethnic cleansing going on in Sudan at moment but no one gives a f**k. Maybe they should ask Israel to get involved.
Or Russia.
Or Syria.
Many conflicts get a lot of coverage. Many dont. Sphere of influence, geopolitical importance, having journos and that on the ground.
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Inflation figures lower than expected, getting spanked in PMQs and then a hefty rebellion.
A tough day at the office for Sir Spam Head.
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1 hour ago, steviewevie said:
Maybe its a bit snobby of me and there is no evidence to suggest that MPs are smarter than anybody else, in fact all evidence points to the contrary, but I find it amost incredible how poor her written English is.
news & politics:discussion
in Discussions
Posted
A couple of days ago I read of a palestinian baby with cerebral palsy. Starved to death because he needed special food that he wasn’t able to get, couldnt tolerate other food.
Yesterday I read of unarmed, shirtless hostages being shot by the IDF.
Today I read of another airstrike against a refugee camp and of a lib dem MPs family trapped in a catholic church, with anyone leaving being shot by snipers.
Is it okay to criticise Israel yet?