The Harris campaign seem to be enjoying themselves!

Based af!

What I find so dumb about naming children Khaleesi is that:

a) It’s not the name of a character anyway. Apparently a lot of casual fans thought Dany’s actual name was Khaleesi because several other characters often addressed her by her title. So there’s a good chance that either these parents are casual fans who nonetheless then misnamed their child after a character, or they are serious fans who named their child in a way that will lead other people to infer her parents were casual fans. (Nothing wrong with being a casual fan, but I’d find it a bit dumb to name my child after an IP that I was only loosely into…)

b) The child is six years old. The final episode aired only five years ago. That means they named their child before Dany’s story had even concluded. George RR Martin had been dropping hints throughout the book series that Dany might or might not end up as a genocidal mad queen like her father (the TV show had laid the groundwork for this less effectively, which is in part why the abruptness of her turn was so unpopular) and I find it bizarre that a parent would name a kid after a character who might still end up as a murderous tyrant

I think about the amount of thought and research that many of my friends have conducted when naming their children (including looking up famous real and fictional people with that name, doing word associations, etc). Then these guys come along and just say ‘fuck it, let’s just call her after that blonde girl off TV, Khaleesi I think?’

March.

He didn’t ‘appear’ to justify the rioting.

He literally said ‘of course it’s politically justified!’ There’s no ambiguity here.

Repeated and urgent counsel that far-right extremists were exploiting gaps in the law to foment violence on social media had been ignored while top-rank politicians over a number of administrations sought to gain advantage by waging culture wars, Khan said, in a damning intervention.

“The writing was clearly on the wall for some time,” Khan told the Guardian. “All my reports have shown, in a nutshell that, firstly, these extremist and cohesion threats are worsening; secondly, that our country is woefully unprepared. We’ve got a gap in our legislation which is allowing these extremists to operate with impunity.

I think the online bombardment is about laying the groundwork. If every day you’re getting a torrent of fake news in your feed demonising immigrants and refugees to an exceptional degree and telling you that mainstream politicians and media are hiding these truths from you, it gradually warps your worldview until you’re pliable to join in when your mate from work starts ranting about Muslims and then another guy down the pub who just got out of prison says he’s going to a ‘protest’ about some incident involving an immigrant (fake news, but you don’t know that) that popped up on all your Twitter feeds and he says the media aren’t covering.

I’ve seen exactly the same happen with people I know in relation to Israel and Palestine - people who have always felt a reasonable and human sympathy for the Palestinians’ awful plight then joining community WhatsApp groups, following certain Twitter accounts, and so on until six months later they’re suddenly weirdly aware of which public figures or their partners are Jewish and you notice them using the word ‘Zionist’ in everyday speech (without, I suspect, actually knowing what one is) - all without them realising they’re getting slowly radicalised.

I think the point is that the resurgence in far-right violence experienced in the UK this summer is linked to them being allowed back onto major social media platforms, particularly Musk’s decision to let Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and co back onto Twitter. The article points out that the far-right in the UK don’t operate through a central organisation but instead rely on bombarding easily-influenced segments of the population with daily propaganda and misinformation as a means of radicalising them to take violent actions locally - that strategy depends on far-right figures having access to the mainstream platforms that their target audience can be found on.

No, Russian bots lack physical form and hence aren’t able to turn up in person to in-person events. So there was probably one genuine radicalised thug in attendance.

That’s their worst feature.

Agree with all this. This is clearly not a good faith criticism.

I think the Biden administration have been far far too soft on Netanyahu and his thugs and their abuses, and I’m looking to see a Harris administration take a much tougher line. But I don’t think something Josh Shapiro wrote when he was 20 tells me much at all about his views on Israel and Palestine today.

I’m so supportive of this. Lime bikes are an absolute menace.

Round my neighborhood, I constantly find them just lying on the floor blocking the whole pavement. Especially at this time of year, I find them literally every time I walk to the shops and back, every time I go for a run, every time I walk to the Tube station, etc. I regularly find myself picking them and moving them off the pavement because we have lots of families with push chairs in the area, my elderly neighbour uses a mobility scooter, etc.

It really pisses me off that the people using these bikes are so selfish. The designated parking pay solution seems like a fair compromise to support use of these bikes but only when used in a responsible way - you just don’t see this problem with the Santander bikes.

So who does this community want as Kamala’s VP?

With the presidential contest already being the prosecutor vs the felon, I think there’d be a nice symmetry to then have the VP contest as the guy who went to space vs the guy who’s from another fucking planet.

That is obviously untrue. I’m a second-gen immigrant and hard-Remain/Rejoin, Schengen-supporting-as-an-eventual-bridge-to-global-free-movement, neoliberal shill, who disagrees hugely with Labour’s cautious official stance on immigration (although I doubt it’s what Starmer and his senior team - Remain-voting, 2nd referendum supporters to a person - actually believe).

Even I can see that Starmer is a million times better than Farage - the guy who campaigned for a freeze on all non-NHS immigration, a ban on immigrants bringing their partners and children to the UK, supported the Rwanda scheme, and more generally has made a whole career out of demonising immigrants and refugees.

Imagine being so far off to the left than you can no longer tell the difference between Keir Starmer and Nigel fucking Farage 😂

You can’t just say ‘austerity’ every time a Chancellor decides not to spend even more money…

Government spending in the UK today accounts for 45% of GDP. The state that the Tories have bequeathed to Labour represents a significantly larger share of the UK economy than it did at any point in Gordon Brown’s decade as Chancellor. The state today is bigger than it was when the Atlee government left office. In fact the only post-WW2 years in which the state has been bigger than in the Sunak years were very briefly for a couple of years in the mid-1970s and then in 2009-11. The only people in this country for whom a state of today’s size is normal relative to most of their life experiences are toddlers who were born in the Johnson/Truss/Sunak era.

By all means argue for a more massive state if you like. But we’re not living in austere times.

The 1906-22 Liberal-led governments gave the UK progressive taxation, unemployment benefits, the state pension, the first tax-funded healthcare, the end of the primacy of the House of Lords. This was one of the most transformational progressive governments in our country’s history and this is partly why they were winning by-elections in working-class seats right up to the start of the First World War.

I think you’re overestimating the existence of underlying ‘political’ causes of the rise of Labour and underestimating the pure ‘electoral’ factors around the Asquith/Lloyd George split.

The chart is the betting-implied probability (=1/the odds). There’s a direct relationship between the two. I reckon most people would understand this given the chart of clearly labelled as the probability.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/5xowG

Good. It’s bonkers we were handing out non-means-tested fuel benefits to pensioners living in million pound homes, while young people and families in genuine need were struggling.

Pure Tory pork-barrel politics to bribe the one generation that most reliably voted for them. Now let’s get rid of the pension triple lock next please.