Politically, this is magnificent. The Lib Dems have target seats throughout Surrey where they're typically the main challenger, they've been campaigning hard locally on water quality through most of this parliament (hasn't always got national attention but they worked out a while ago it's a very resonant issue in their target seats) and then just in time for the election Thames Water start warning people the water isn't drinkable...

Yes, having an election is a normal thing in a democracy.

Well of course - publishing the identity of all private donors would be madness.

Small donors should be allowed to donate freely without their name appearing on the internet for all their friends, neighbours, employers, journalists, rabble-rousers, etc to see. Someone donating a few tens or hundred of euros to their local candidate doesn't create a risk of influencing (or appearing to influence) the candidate's political platform; and we should be positively encouraging small donors, as I'd much prefer a political system where politicians relied on many small donations to one where they relied on a handful of millionaire donors.

It's big money donors - the ones stumping up enough money to potentially influence the candidate - that parties should be required to disclose.

If you’re not doing great, wouldn’t it make more sense to try and weather the storm and work to make things sunnier before the next election rather than call for an election amidst the storm?

The latest possible date the election could have been is January 2025, but that was practically very unlikely as i) there is an extremely sharp generational divide in voting intentions (far sharper than in most Western democracies) and January would have meant the Tories having to get their elderly core voters to the polls in the middle of winter, and ii) a January vote would have meant a campaign running over Christmas, and everyone would have punished Sunak for that. The widespread expectation was for an autumn election.

It's unclear why Sunak jumped earlier but likely a combination of various factors:

• them being worried the economy will not get better by the autumn (so avoids going to the polls after a summer of bad economic news);

• going early means their main opponents on the right (Reform) don't have time to get their act together and select candidates in all seats (which they would have done by the autumn);

• their flagship immigration policy is controversial and expensive, yet likely to have an underwhelming impact on illegal immigration levels, and they'll look like complete idiots for centring an autumn election on a 'stop the boats' slogan if there's another summer of small boat arrivals in the meantime; and

• Sunak personally is fed up - he's very much a political child of the far-right (an avowed Brexiter long before Boris Johnson or Liz Truss converted to the cause) yet the far-right of the Tory Party don't see him as one of their own and have been constant thorns in his side throughout his leadership - he may just want out at this stage.

Reminder that the Equality and Human Rights Commission is not 'the media'. It's a non-governmental public body created by a Labour government in 2006 to promote and enforce equality legislation introduced by said Labour government.

I mean, is it? Under his leadership the Labour Party broke the law in relation to racism within the party - that was the finding of the independent Equalities and Human Rights Commission investigation. It found that on Corbyn's watch, the culture of the Labour Party 'at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it'. He was the leader, he is accountable. That was his doing.

He then chose to put out a statement rejecting this and dismissing the evidence of racism suffered by Labour members as exaggerated - as a result of which he was suspended. That statement was his doing too.

And now he has chosen to stand against the Labour candidate in an election - this choice was also his doing.

So which part of this is 'their doing'?

All of our constitutional law takes the form of Acts of Parliament that can be amended or repealed with a 50%+1 vote in Parliament - unlike most countries where the constitution sits above the parliament and changing it requires a supermajority and/or a referendum. Boris had a majority so he could change the constitution. It's a totally messed up system.

One reason British liberals as so passionate about internationalism and the European Union is that international treaties and EU law are some of the few mechanisms we have had for constraining executive overreach, since they sit outside and above Parliament's remit. For example, even if Parliament were to repeal the Human Rights Act, Britain remains a party to the European Convention on Human Rights (which is why some Tories now talk about withdrawing from this too). Without international safeguards external to the UK, in theory all that stands between Britain and despotism is a simple majority vote in Parliament.

It's a corrupt convention but it wasn't always the case. An important reform by the 2010-15 coalition government was the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which took this incredibly important decision out of the prime minister's partisan hands and have elections on a predictable 5 year cycle (barring the government falling or a supermajority for early elections).

After Boris Johnson won the 2019 election though, he set about dismantling checks and balances such as this. He also changed the electoral system for mayoral elections to First Past the Post (with no consultation or referendum - which the Tories have always insisted was needed to change the electoral system away from FPTP...) because FPTP tends to favour Tories.

lily-livered

Hoist the mainsail and shiver me timbers, are they joining the Pirate Party?

The homicide rate in the US is about 6-7 times that in the UK per 100,000 population. I'd take our situation any day of the week.

Last time I looked into this properly, knife crime in the US was actually roughly the same frequency as that in the UK. The difference is that knife-based murders stand out in the UK, whereas in the US nobody pays attention because the problem is dwarfed by the much greater problem of rampant gun crime.

I don't think Starmer is stupid but I think Labour's large polling lead has - paradoxically - encouraged him to be very politically timid, to the detriment of his party and the country.

Broadly speaking the Labour leadership seems to be acting as if, if literally nothing changes between now and election day, then Labour will win a landslide. That means no genuine big new policy announcements, because any policy change is seen as a roll of the dice that could change the polling status quo. Rejoining the single market whilst staying outside the EU could be a popular policy - polling shows that even Labour Leave voters support it by a 53% to 31% margin - and would give an incoming Labour government an actual policy option to help turn around the economy, but Starmer's caution means forgoing this in favour of saying literally nothing novel. The Labour leadership think any change is a risk, and why take a risk when you're already sitting on a polling lead.

In general I'm favourable towards Starmer, and certainly in comparison to what came immediately before him. But on several issues - Europe, electoral reform, Gaza/Israel - he's adopting bad cautious positions to protect the enormous polling lead over the Tories he's stumbled into. These are going to end up doing him more harm than good in the long run.

I was replying to you (you were saying Starmer is staying quiet because he needs Brexit voters in the North).

I'm saying that if that's the case, he's thinking of the Brexit voters of 2016, not what these people think about things in 2024.

The world has moved on from the divisions of 2016. The idea that Brexit was a bad idea is now pretty common outside the political bubble. Even among Leave voters, few think Brexit has been a success.

The economic reality of what Britain outside the EU looks like and the global geopolitical realignment that has happened since that day in 2016 - Russia's warmongering in our European neighbourhood and the very real prospect of a future Republican president (if not Trump this November, then someone else 4 or 8 years later) abandoning NATO - obviously should lead (and is leading) to people who voted for Brexit rethinking Britain's relationship with the EU.

And anyway - rejoining the Single Market wouldn't be undoing Brexit, it would just be doing literally what the Brexiters promised their voters they would do in the first place.

Starmer is being dramatically too cautious about the most impactful thing he could do to improve things in Britain.

Forth, and fear no darkness.

Jabba before CGI...

(In a deleted scene in ANH. Obviously he'd gone full slug by the time of his first actual on-screen appearance in RotJ.)

The EU is a capitalist entity, why would any leftist support it?

*gestures generally at modern Britain*

Do you know why I stuck with it through s1-s3, even though I couldn't know if it would get better?

'CAUSE I'VE GOT FAAAAAIIITH OF THE HEART!

Yawn. He's a pro-Brexit, anti-net-zero, conspiracy-theory-peddling demagogue. He literally endorsed and then tried to get selected as a candidate for Nigel Farage's Brexit Party in 2019.

Why are people who claim to be on the left even giving Galloway the time of day?

I don’t consider Star Wars to be sci-fi. It’s a futuristic space fantasy.

Is that an unpopular opinion? Most sci-fi/fantasy fans I know would probably agree with this. I love Star Wars, but in the same way I love Lord of the Rings.

Also, Star Trek Enterprise is one of the best Trek series, IMO. Top 5.

I would say the final season of Enterprise is arguably the best single season of any Star Trek show so far. But it was a long road getting there...

The human crew (particularly Archer and Trip) were difficult to warm to in seasons 1 and 2 - I found them so much more emotional and overdramatic than an intelligent professional human would be today, and that it made it difficult for me to accept them as the bridge from today to the 23rd/24th century Starfleet we know.

Season 3 was tough for different reasons - maybe it played differently in America, but watching from outside the US a lot of it felt like post-9/11 revenge fantasy. Very proto-'America First'.

They've yet to try the 'pick the candidate with the most sensible policies' method.

I've found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I've had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party's next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn't ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are 'bioluminescent' - little tells like that which show it's AI generated.

Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it's just a tool, don't think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it's only as helpful as how you try to use it.

https://archive.ph/yYV7y

I Call Modi 'A Fucking Fascist' Who Would Take India's Freedom, Diversity And Democracy

Beigel Bake on Brick Lane.

I think he was pretty clearly there with the intent of his presence being antagonistic. He's not just a random Jewish man who coincidentally happened to be walking through the area at that particular time, he's a pro-Israeli activist who was hoping his presence would provoke a reaction as part of an attempt by political partisans to paint mainstream pro-Palestinian protestors as racist.

But - regardless of his intent - if the only reason the Met could point to for them believing his presence might have actually been antagonistic is his ethnicity and his religion, then on the surface he hasn't done anything wrong.

I think this episode should be read in the context of a wide-ranging assault on free speech and the right to protest by the current Conservative government, which is encouraging a pattern of overreach by the Met police in response to legitimate protest.

Greece has become the first country in Europe to announce a ban on bottom trawling in all of its national marine parks and protected areas.

It doesn't say EU, it says Europe. The Guardian is a British newspaper, they know the difference.

Brexit meant Britain left the EU, it didn't literally move Britain to a different continent.

Hasn't the UK already done this? The French are currently protesting against it.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/15/environment-conservation-france-protest-uk-ban-bottom-trawling-fishing-uk-eu-trade-deal-tca

Wait - weirdly it's the same journalist who wrote both articles. How did she manage to write an article two days ago about a UK ban, and then write again yesterday about Greece being the first European country to do this?

But ... I thought the 2009 film was an origin story?

It was literally the story of how the Kelvinverse came to exist and it followed Kirk, Spock, McCoy and co from their Academy days.

Rishi: we have a plan for tackling the cost of living crisis.

The plan:

No, they're not even proposing to replace the House of Lords here. All they're proposing is to remove the remaining 92 unelected hereditary peers (out of around 800+ total unelected peers) who survived Blair's 1999 cull of most hereditary peers.

That was my thought, I'm quite up for this. I enjoyed The Voyage Home, I enjoyed The Trouble with Tribbles - I wouldn't want all Trek to be like that but there is absolutely a place in the franchise for light-hearted takes on Trek.

No, it's member of Parliament who's not a frontbencher - i.e. who's not a government minister or an official spokesperson for their party in Parliament.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves and Ed Davey don't hold government office, since they're opposition politicians, but they're not backbenchers.

You do have to feel for these red wall Brexit voters.

Apparently they require constant visual assurance that they are in fact still in Britain, and can't just maintain this information in their heads like the rest of us.

eight member states, including Hungary and Italy

Fascists are why we can't have nice things.

https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/the-housebuilding-crisis/

Compared to the average European country, Britain today has a backlog of 4.3 million homes that are missing from the national housing market as they were never built.

[...]

Housebuilding rates in England and Wales have dropped by more than a third after the introduction of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, from 2 per cent growth per year between 1856 and 1939 to 1.2 per cent between 1947 and 2019.

This has been a key factor behind the UK’s long-standing housing crisis, which has led to inflated property prices and soaring rents in recent decades.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/JCp2k

Calling the government’s reforms a “grubby concession” to backbenchers who want to block housing development, Matthew Pennycook, shadow housing minister, has pledged that Labour would enact “mandatory targets that bite on individual local planning authorities” if it came to power.

The issue of housing and planning is set to be a point of contention in this year’s general election, with the Centre for Cities think-tank estimating that the UK has a historical backlog of 4mn unbuilt homes, with an average house in England now costing more than 10 times the average salary.

I assume that's the reaction they were going for by expressing the stat in that way, but aside from shock value it isn't that informative.

Child mortality is usually expressed as 'X per 1,000 live births' so you have some sense of scale. We'll never live in a world where zero children die before their 5th birthday (simply because of illnesses and accidents) but expressing the number of deaths per 1,000 gives you a sense of whether the number of deaths is a lot or not.

Here's a UNICEF article that provides some more context on the 4.9 million global figure for under-5 deaths: 'The global under-five mortality rate declined by 60 per cent, from 93 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 37 in 2022.' To add more context on 37 per 1,000: in San Marino that figure is about 1.5, in the United Kingdom it's about 4.1, whereas in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa it remains above 100 deaths per 1,000 live births - which I find to be a frankly much more informative and terrifying way of understanding the number.

But removing Discovery from the timeline seems to be consistent with the prime timeline post-Discovery season 2 (in TOS etc) - e.g. Spock not talking about his human adopted sister, no further use of spore drives, and so on. It's certainly explicitly the timeline of SNW (which makes multiple references to the events of Discovery s2) and therefore the timeline of Lower Decks.

That suggests the prime timeline as we know it is an altered timeline caused by Discovery's jump to the future.

In general I get that and my instinct was similarly that it was strange not to use the word. I'd use Taoiseach for Varadkar in a way I wouldn't use the native language word for other world leaders, because I think of Ireland as a primarily English-speaking country and that's the word they still use whilst otherwise speaking in English.

But then again, I can also see that British readers like you and I who follow current affairs are going to be a lot more familiar with the term Taoiseach (or, in Calamity Truss's case, the 'Tea Sock') given it's the country next door and so hugely intertwined with British politics. I could name every Taoiseach in the last quarter century just by virtue of how much those individuals have featured in UK news - through the peace process, the financial crisis and then Brexit. I couldn't do that for the leaders of any other foreign country of Ireland's size. So I think it's not unreasonable to assume the average US or other reader might not not know what a Taoiseach is.