Youse guys wanna play stickball?

Yes I mean, he’s not wrong but his thing about Ukraine is driven by his Churchill obsession, not by real world ethics

Absolutely

Global warming’ gave us that senator with the snowball

In an ideal world we wouldn’t have to moderate accurate terms to prevent bad actors making dumb arguments

But this is clearly not an ideal world

Individual politicians and political parties routinely use count a vote as approval. In that way, if no other, voting does serve to support the existing system.

I don’t think that tracks.

The highest turnout in any US election since 1908 was 62% in 2020, and at no point has a party won an election and been like ‘look at all the people who didn’t vote, I guess we don’t have a mandate to govern’

Parties win elections and govern in power with less than 50% of voters backing them all the time, it’s literally the standard. A low turnout will not change the way any party acts once in power.

I love them all*, but the IT Crowd is at the top for me

(*Graham Linehan is a prick)

I never actually watched dead set, but I remember it was airing at the same time I had a Media Studies project at school about zombies so the tutors kept bringing it up

I see your point but again I’d say it’s because of the US’s winner-take-all system, as well as 50 states vs 650 seats

Farage posed enough of a perceived risk to the Tories that they moved in his direction to avoid losing votes to UKIP. UKIP never would have won more than a handful of seats, let alone a majority, but by splitting the right vote Labour could have beat the Tories in swing seats

And yes, that could be broadly true of a ‘spoiler’ candidate in the US presidential election, except that:

1. Only 50 states, and therefore a tiny amount of swing seats compared to the UK

2. more population per state than per British seat. By a whole huge margin. So its not enough to potentially appeal to 8,000 people to ‘spoil’ a seat

3. The above leads to funding issues. Not only is there more money generally in the US elections, but because you have to flip a big state not a small constituency, you have to spend way way more to make an impact. You can’t focus a small budget on one tiny area and win a seat

4. Winner-takes-all means that as long as a campaign thinks it will win a state, and then a presidency, who cares if some counties went to a spoiler candidate?

I’d love to be wrong, and I do think that there’s probably also a cultural/historical element to the US’s two party dominance. But that said, its just a different system, different processes, different outcomes, different challenges than in the UK

There are 650 MPs in the UK, and unlike ind the US it isn’t winner-takes-all; if you win one of the 650 seats you get to be an MP

In the US presidential election, there are 50 states for a bigger population and even then winning one while losing the others achieves nothing

In the senate and house elections, which are more analogous to the UK, independent candidates are viable, right? There’s at least a few. But it’s not comparable to the Presidential elections

FPTP is fucked, but it’s only one element of why the USA is deadlocked into the two major parties being the only contenders. The electoral college, the winner-takes-all nature… all sorts

I think it means + more than zero but less than one

So like, +(between 0.01 and 0.99)

They’re using it as (+0<1), there’s no - here bc that would be + (the other candidate)

‘There’s no point voting against Hitler right now because the opposition is right leaning and may one day grow into Hitler’

In the UK, you can’t decide whether to ‘press charges’ or not, the decision is the CPS’s.

But in practice, saying you aren’t interested in pursuing a conviction often ends it, because:

1 - the prosecution must be ‘in the public good’ which is undermined if the victim isn’t interested

2 - a lot of the time the testimony and cooperation of the victim is key to the prosecution case

3 - the system is horribly underfunded so if they can justify dropping it they will

I read in the paper today that a bankruptcy court is going to take 40% of Katie Price’s OnlyFans income

When i saw this headline my brain skipped to Rudy Giuliani’s OnlyFans income

Has Rudy Giuliani considered OnlyFans?

I’d like to recommend The Trojan Horse Affair. Its a limited series and a few years old now, but a a really interesting listen

Its about the scandal in the UK in 2013, where an anonymous letter ‘exposed’ an Islamist conspiracy in Birmingham schools to radicalise children.

The investigation in the podcast is helmed by two people; a rookie journalism grad who is muslim, and an experienced white journalist. The contrast in perspectives and emotion between them adds to it

And yeah it’ll probably make you angry, and for those not in the UK it might key you in a bit on the tensions that do and don’t exist with British Muslims, how they’re viewed and treated by lots of parties here (including the Government)

“Yes, I lost this election, but I’m young, beautiful, and rich as f**k,” she concluded. She lost her job at Purina dog food over her extreme rhetoric and her campaign was unable to purchase ads.

She came 6th. Its funny, but I think she was never a real candidate and hasn’t learned anything

Just in the spirit of pedantry, its not really true to say that the US system predated most parliaments.

Like, maybe its technically true now due to the expansion of democratic and republic systems in the post-colonial era, but parliaments in Western Europe were plentiful and long-established in 1776.

The first American government was notable in that is was completely divorced from a hereditary Monarch, and I don’t wanna downplay that, but a system in which a representitive body of land-owners is elected by an enfranchised class to decide policy and even pass legislation existed in, for example, Iceland since the 10th Century, Catalonia since the 12th, England since the 13th. It was arguably the standard during the enlightenment in Europe.

My two cents, the US system does seem to be remarkably inflexible. I guess it’s complicated to unpack why exactly, but a combination of myth-making, bad-faith originalists, and the sheer size of the country probably all play a part in it

It’s very debatable if trump’s EO would have capped the price of Insulin or Epipens in a meaningful way - and its factually wrong that it was the same cap and legislation that Biden put into place.

Trump’s EO meant that Federally Qualified Health Centers would have to offer Insulin and Epinephrine to “Low Income Individuals” without health insurance "at the discounted price paid by the FQHC grantee or sub-grantee under the 340B Prescription Drug Program” plus a “minimal” fee.

From your own link, FQHCs already had a requirement to not charge anything to people in poverty, so “If ‘low income’ is defined as under 100% of poverty, this may not really change anything. Even if the income level is set somewhat higher, most patients likely would still have been protected by the sliding fee scale without this change”.

This link, like your others, is from 2020. I don’t know how “low income” would actually have been defined since it wasn’t scheduled to come into place until Jan 22nd - during Biden’s administration.

It’s true that Biden froze this - as others have mentioned in this thread, he put a 60 day freeze on all pending legislature when taking office, which is a fairly standard practice.

Biden’s own Insulin cap was part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and capped the price of Insulin to $35 monthly for products covered by Medicare D.

So yeah I concede that it’s an oversimplification to say that Trump did nothing and Biden did everything, but… the Insulin cap is Biden’s legislation. Trump did not cap Insulin or Epipen prices during his 4 years in office.

The last time I was in Berlin, the year before Covid, they had set ups in some of the parks which were like painted lines and ‘boxes’ on the floor

Weed dealers were allowed to sell within these lines (probably not actually legally, but with an understanding that the police would leave them be? Not sure of the specific rules) but not outside of them

This meant that people who weren’t interested wouldnt have their park time marred by shady people coming up and trying to sell them drugs, and people who were interested could just go to one of the dealers in the lines

It was just a better, safer way of doing things. Everybody won.

Actual legalisation is the next step of course. Criminalisation of something as minor of weed just creates crime and danger, it doesnt reduce it. So this is good news

I mean, unless there was a hoax that led to widespread belief that they were gonna launch a bomb

Its suspicious if its out of nowhere, but less so if its in response to an existing rumour

No sitting president has ever lost their party’s primary

LBJ dropped out of his party’s primary, and although it was far too soon to say if he would have lost, he faced strong opposition in New-Politic anti-war candidates Kennedy and McCarthy. He is on record as worrying about the primary and it doubtless played a big part of his dropping out

Kennedy of course got shot, and the more conservative Humphrey ended up with the nomination over McCarthy (or late entry McGovern), sparking riots at the DNC. The situations and systems were quite different, but i think there’s some parallels with Biden/Clinton vs Bernie there

I think Truman also dropped out rather than fight a tough primary, but i don’t know so much about that