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

same thing lol

Except for immigrants, queer people, black people, Muslim people, and women. For those groups it is decidedly not the fucking same

But because the Democrats aren’t going to reverse capitalism and it doesn’t affect you personally, who gives a shit, right? Fuck everybody apart from you

Putting aside questions of ecosystems etc, I think the main reason is that we just can’t - ironic since we seem to be extint-ing all the other animals

In South America they tried in the 50s and 60s, and more kept cropping up. They breed so quickly, if you miss an area they can just rebound. Then more can come in on ships and stuff

So you couldn’t really localise it, it would have to be a huge global undertaking. And it would likely require widespread use of pesticides that are at best tricksy and at worst illegal, not to mention environmentally shitty

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

‘Is it bigger or smaller than a breadbox’ was a common question in games of 20 Questions and stuff when I was a kid, although I’m not sure why or where from originally (a game show I think?)

So yeah here instead of a bread box it’s a Bread Box factory and the thing being compared is also really really big

E: yeah a game show https://boards.straightdope.com/t/origin-of-is-it-bigger-than-a-breadbox/245317

Right, I was trying to imply that it wasn’t really okay, hence the ‘okay’ in inverted commas and stuff - this obviously isn’t okay

While this prosecution was completely fucked up and was 100% linked to the criminalisation of abortion (and therefore miscarriages and pregnancy in general), the issue was that following the traumatic premature birth she didn’t immediately remove the baby from the toilet

Moving north wouldn’t have helped on paper, as the alleged crime of letting your baby drown is still illegal

That said, possibly a more progressive state might have had the good sense to not prosecute or even treat this as a criminal matter. On the other hand, the DA where this happened was a Democrat according to the article

A grand jury declined to indict her, so it ended ‘okay’, apart from all the unnecessary additional horrific trauma inflicted on a grieving mother and being a harrowing sign of dark repressive times

There was a really good article on this and unfortunately I can’t find it now to share

But the gist was that Titan exploited a bunch of loopholes, among other things. The paying customers on the sub were in fact ‘marine researchers’ who coincidently made a donation, and things like that

Some of the people who were at one point involved but left due to safety concerns raised the issue with OSHA (? - or whoever the more specific body was) who repeatedly failed to investigate or take any action

So for me, whether or not they are able to charge the company, the industry regulators and government bodies overseeing them need to face some questions and judgements too (though it would take a more knowledgeable person than me to know what exactly that looks like)

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)

They definitely didnt help, nor did the right wing media or the Labour Party centrists undermining him

But ultimately he lost because of Brexit.

In his first election, despite the pressure against him, he took the Tories to a hung parliament and forced them to make a deal with the DUP. Cos people were sick of Austerity and liked his domestic platform

But when managing Brexit became the main issue in 2019(?), Johnson had a really strong message of ‘oven-ready brexit’, ‘get it done’, and Labour didn’t have a coherent strategy. They didnt want to go full ‘reverse it’, cos lots of votes for Brexit came from Labour seats. They also didnt want to go full ‘get out deal or no deal’ because generally the left and progressive voters were anti-brexit.

Corbyn was elected to the leadership on the strength of his domestic and anti-austerity policies, and when the focus shifted to Brexit he was out of his comfort zone.

That’s my analysis anyway. I liked Corbyn’s foreign policy, but it wasn’t what built his popularity

If this is truly and legitimately where it ends - doorknocking - then its an annoyance and nothing more

But the real issue is that in the US the evangelical Christian scene has a lot of overlap with various racist/homophobic/right-wing/etcetc scenes

You can ignore ‘have you heard of our saviour Jesus Christ’ visits with a shoulder shrug, but I bet a lot of people have genuine safety concerns about this information being available to this crowd

I think partially its because evolutionarily speaking, high calorie foods like sugar and fats were rarer and useful. So the brain is like, ‘yes i need this to live, find more’

But now we live in a society that has all these resources and can exploit this, and we have to actively stop ourselves from over-indulging.

Ive heard - take it with a pinch of salt cos it might be bollocks - that thats why even as recently as a few centuries ago the western beauty standard was… plumper/chubbier. It signified wealth and prosperity, and i guess the ability to survive a lean winter

Just because you don’t highlight ‘all ages events’ doesn’t mean it’s not part of the quote