I almost think this is the wrong question. Anyone can name a bunch of reasons why he is disliked; the confusion is from trying to reconcile how the Labour base feel thoroughly betrayed yet his opponents still see him as literal Stalin (and how he’s not strong enough to ignore the latter)
As I’ve seen it pithily put elsewhere, they’re human rights not good person rights
This all circles back to the old talking point that the Arab Spring was in fact a priori bad because “yes whilst the toppled leaders were all dictators, at least they were keeping all the savages in check”
Think the bit of this I find most contemptible is those who pretzel themselves into arguing that Sisi must actually have had perfectly good reasons for detaining him. Sorry but you’d have to be a complete mark to believe this however repellent his views
I think this gets back to "what actually is AI" because I am broadly skeptical of LLMs as a technology with a broader use, but I have seen incredible uses of AI in data analysis, document review, and threat intervention.
Was just reading White Hot by Matt Roller/Tim Wigmore and it’s striking how often the interviewees say it was very tough getting English cricket to throw off its innate conservatism; many snap back to it so quickly even when the problems lie elsewhere
A lottery pitch where it’s seaming all over the shop and you’ll have one with your name on it eventually seems like the exact conditions where this approach makes most sense. Just look at all the batters who were more cautious and didn’t get going at all (e.g. Root)
Oh yeah it’s him who has the sex tourism Substack isn’t it
I’m not sure it’s wise to morally justify/downplay gunning down a bunch of Jews, including a 10 year-old girl, out of opposition to Zionism
I would take a deep breath and think this logic through again
I mean the 2001 election was delayed due to the foot-and-mouth outbreak and that wasn’t viewed as especially egregious
Another long-running rumour is that he suffered a nasty back injury in 2009 after falling off a horse (he has admitted the incident itself actually happened) that left him with chronic pain requiring ongoing medical management from his doctors. It would possibly explain his occasionally weird gait
This is something that can be very explicitly tied to the pandemic and the knock-on effects of certain mitigation efforts amongst the right in particular. Just a catastrophic lost of trust in institutions
The argument against e.g. consent workshops at universities used to be that it was patronising to the teenagers involved, whereas now it’s that some groups of men are just genetically predisposed to understand the concepts or not
You can argue whether these kinds of classes will work in the first place, but surely a successful intervention to prevent misogynistic values calcifying at an early age is a good outcome for children of all cultural backgrounds
Plus even if the 11 year-old boys aren’t committing the violence now, I would assume the point is to prevent those susceptible further down the line from getting to that point.
I probably run in the wrong circles, but their being from Ipswich is still funny to me as aside from one dog-eared concert poster I’ve never heard any acknowledgment of their origins here
Point has been made to death but I think her biggest unforced error was not distancing herself from Biden more definitively, as she could have more convincingly pitched herself as a fresh face rather than just his continuity
Also, I think we’ve learnt by now that an action being irrational is no guaranteed safeguard against Russia actually doing it, and there’s no obvious reason to think their military capability will remain relatively ineffective if NATO’s deterrence is insufficient
“In general” can mean many things here. Sure, Russia can’t roll tanks into Berlin or Warsaw without getting the Kremlin turned into a crater, but that’s not much consolation to Riga or Tallinn with far smaller armies to defend them, and thus are more tempting targets
Personally I think we can start a proper discussion about how to combat Islamist extremism when people’s imaginations are able to extend to solutions beyond “the Arabs must be cleansed from our homeland”
I mean I’ll take the intense cringe of calling it “silly sausage Britain” over furiously invoking the Yookay everyone time a brown person does anything in public
I’m actually not hugely convinced by the original piece as an argumentative strategy as it’s too Paddington/CasualUK brained to win over good-faith sceptics, but it definitely doesn’t merit this kind of mental reaction that isn’t the UK I recognise either
Pretty sure this tweet would have been career-ending not so long ago.
In fact the piece only has two paragraphs about politics and much of the rest is just her bizarre delusions of grandeur
Everyone is understandably focused on the Reform stuff but the part where she calls Andrew Mountbatten “a bit of a lad” who should come to her next event to “keep him out of trouble” is equally eyebrow-raising. Just a thoroughly weird person
One preys on vulnerable and often young men by reinforcing their prejudices with easy answers about the wider world, and the other is Bonnie Blue etc. etc.
Yeah it’s been striking reading some of the initial reactions that many people straight up don’t know how maritime law works
