UKMT Autumn 2023 - Things have got worse. - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > UKMT Autumn 2023 - Things have got worse.

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Tesseraction posted:

This is the the 11th September since the 2012 Olympics, the last time Britain was Great.

I have a vague memory of being in Leicester Square and there were a bunch of oversized bronze medals hanging from the trees to symbolise the medals we'd won in the Games and I was like: Ok, that's a thing then, I guess.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 00:30

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 01:14

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

I'm honestly surprised that the Notting Hill carnival wasn't banned years ago, considering that it takes place in an area now full of very wealthy and influential people. Perhaps now is the moment: could you see Labour defending the carnival if the Tories announced they were bringing in legislation to outlaw it?

# ¿ Sep 2, 2023 21:13

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

That BBC disinformation specialist lied on her CV once and got caught out lol.

https://order-order.com/2023/09/08/bbc-disinformation-correspondents-cv-fakery/

# ¿ Sep 8, 2023 13:53

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Nothingtoseehere posted:

Spook? Why not just a faildaughter with family connections.

Her reaction to being caught out was very telling: instead of immediately withdrawing from the job app with what little dignity she had left, she was all: "Oh hey, I only lied once! You're not seriously gonna hold that against little 'ol me, are ya??"

Very much the reaction of someone who's never had to face consequences before.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2023 20:01

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Boo, I'm disappointed, I was hoping he had a better plan than: sneak out of prison, then ???

# ¿ Sep 9, 2023 15:09

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

I was thinking about this: bloody hard to hide these days, if you don't have people willing to help you out and conceal you.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2023 15:18

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Weird, that arsehole Nick Timothy has written a column that I... mostly... agree with:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/10/worry-if-the-grown-ups-take-back-control/

quote:

If the grown-ups take back control, it really will be time to get worried

Centrists who claim to have moved beyond ideology are in practice the most enslaved to dogma

Look out: the technocrats and self-styled moderates are back. In the Conservative Party, liberal centrists warn against fighting the culture war and tell their colleagues to learn to love immigration. In the Labour Party, Keir Starmer is purging the hard Left and making weekly calls to Tony Blair.

Among those used to getting their way � until the Brexit referendum, which they sought to thwart, and the 2019 election, which stopped them doing so � the relief is palpable. In the words of Janan Ganesh, the Financial Times columnist, �the UK has become pragmatic again�, now it has party leaders he calls �conscientious adults who know that government is about trade-offs and half-loaves�.

This is, for liberals, a tempting narrative. It allows the crises Britain has faced in the past decade and a half to be blamed not on their beloved centrist experts and technocrats, but on the supposed demagogues and populists who committed the cardinal sin of listening to the masses. Not that anybody ever wants to put it that way, of course. It is far better to mutter about misinformation, dark money and fascism than be honest about elite distaste for public opinion.

Examine the narrative of crises and blame for just a moment and it becomes obvious that the truth is far more complex than the notion that the adults are returning to clear up the mess of a political experiment resembling the Lord of the Flies.

Just this month, we learnt that the British economy recovered far more strongly during Covid than official statistics had previously shown. Using more reliable mortality statistics, we now also know that Britain performed better through the pandemic than critics had claimed. The idea that �plague island� was an outlier � as liberal critics claimed � was debunked. Fewer excess deaths than Italy and America, better growth than Germany or Spain: we were, broadly speaking, average in our performance.

The same is true with various other hysterical narratives. Boris Johnson was widely condemned for not joining the European Union vaccine programme, but Britain�s own initiative proved more successful. Rishi Sunak was pilloried for blocking the Scottish Government�s transgender law, with critics saying he was stoking the culture war and playing into the hands of Nicola Sturgeon. But Scottish opinion backed Sunak, the Nationalists backed down, and within a month Sturgeon announced she was retiring.

And what of the track record of the so-called grown-ups? Included in their number are those who took Britain into not one but two intractable, unwinnable wars. In Iraq, we were given the dodgy dossier and the claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction against British forces within 45 minutes.

In Afghanistan, the defence secretary deployed British troops to Helmand, despite intelligence reports warning they would face fierce fighting, saying, �we would be perfectly happy to leave without firing one shot�.

The grown-ups deregulated the banks, dismantled the Bank of England�s oversight of the City, and ran a structural budget deficit. They let our manufacturing base wither, cosied up to China, and decided quaint concerns such as the trade deficit no longer mattered.

They wrote off technical education, hooked business on mass immigration, and passed the Human Rights Act. They gave us pension reforms which cut off investment in British equities, and funny money monetary policy, which inflated asset prices, hurt those with less, and slowed the circulation of money through the economy.

They decided against transitional immigration controls for central Europeans, reneged on their promise to hold a referendum on the European Constitution, eventually giving us one on the EU itself � before doing everything possible to overturn it.

The idea that technocracy means competence, or that centrism means common sense, is self-serving nonsense. It is, however, an old trick that has proved effective for many years. Those who belong to the centre, liberals say, stand for moderation, and those who �abandon� the centre-ground give in to extremists and ideologues, surrendering their right to hold power. But what is meant by the centre is in fact three different, contradictory, things.

First, the centre is taken to mean political moderation: a middle ground between Right and Left, in which experts pursue supposedly non-ideological, evidence-based policies. Second, the centre is used to mean majority, or mainstream opinion. And third, it is used to mean social and economic liberalism.

It is not difficult to see why liberals like to elide all three meanings. At once, their beliefs are deemed to be moderate, rejecting, as they say they do, more ideological alternatives. And popular, representing, as they claim, the beliefs of most voters. But this is nonsense. For as is now well-rehearsed, mainstream majority opinion actually lies slightly to the Left on economic questions like spending, and to the Right on issues of identity and culture � the precise opposite of social and economic liberalism.

And from the effects of mass immigration and the reality of global trade policies to the consequences of widespread low pay, we have seen how technocratic impact assessments � held up like holy scripture by many so-called centrists � are skewed by the ideological assumptions of their authors and the choice and availability of datasets included.

There is rarely a single �correct� answer in politics. Yet the greatest achievement of liberalism is the pretence of its neutrality and inevitability: the breathtaking claim that liberalism alone represents the world as it naturally is, not the world it has created, and that liberalism alone has the answers that others simply cannot provide.

To contest this claim is not to say that there is no place for experts, nor that liberals must always be wrong. But the idea that there is no alternative to liberal, technocratic presumptions � to mass immigration, for example, global free trade, a rehabilitative not punitive criminal justice system, and more � is simply not true.

On Right and Left, the answers to our problems lie in breaking out of our ideological box, not locking ourselves even more tightly within it.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2023 06:51

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Tijuana Bibliophile posted:

From whatever the West is threatened by of course. You can probably BYOB (last B for bigotry)

I miss the era when the West was in a fundamental clash of civilisations with militant Islam and all the gobshite commentators on TV were constantly holding forth about how, unlike Europe, the Arab world never had a Reformation, which helps to explain why etc etc etc.

A simpler, easier time

# ¿ Sep 11, 2023 13:51

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/12/privacy-lawsuit-against-labour-over-antisemitism-report-dropped

Not sure if good or bad, you always have to do so much reading between the lines with these stories.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2023 13:31

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Well, that sucks. Very sorry to hear.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2023 20:45

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Had a grim chuckle at Rory Stewart attempting to reinvent himself as a Sensible Centrist, apparently without comprehending that a full-throated, unconditional condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn is a necessary component of that.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2023 09:01

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Jedit posted:

Your grandfather or great-grandfather probably wore pink as a child. It was a boy's colour right up to the 1940s.

I've seen a gorgeous portrait of a 17th century mercenary in a pink silk outfit but can't find it on Google, so here's something from the 18th century, when pink could be worn by both men and women:

# ¿ Sep 14, 2023 09:00

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Sunak's ultimately just a soft rich person, he's got no real fight in him. If the Tories had a proper bruiser as leader,who was determined to win no matter what, I've no doubt they could wipe the floor with Keith's non-offering and at least survive with a small majority.

The Tories have given up and Labour is going for the safe electoral stance of: "Meh, might as well give us ago this time" :shrug:

# ¿ Sep 15, 2023 06:14

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

I would NEVER have guessed that Russell Brand might be a sleazy sex addict!

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 11:16

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Guavanaut posted:

https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1703434171715137821

I thought "why won't the city stop for my convenience" was the height of entitlement, but some of her responses...

It's all viral marketing. Everything like this is always viral marketing.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2023 20:32

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

The point is to generate viral clips and have a constant presence pushing that point of view, I guess. Doesn't need to be profitable in the short term: it's the long game that matters.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2023 21:39

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Lol at Sunak calling for "clarity" about when the Met are and aren't allowed to shoot people.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2023 10:43

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

I think it's relevant to post some extracts from Baroness Casey's recent report on the Met, specifically about the Met's firearms unit:

Baroness Casey Review posted:

Resourcing and restructuring challenges in frontline Met policing and Public
Protection stand in stark contrast to what we saw in examining two of the Met�s
specialist units: the Specialist Firearms (MO19) and Parliamentary and Diplomatic
Protection (PaDP) Commands. Well resourced, with elitist attitudes and toxic
cultures of bullying, racism, sexism and ableism, normal rules do not seem to
apply or be applied in MO19. Junior ranking officers and trainers hold
disproportionate power in their relationships with senior officers because of the
importance of their �blue card� firearms status to Met operations.

...

Undoubtedly, we are indebted to those police officers who train and work in one of
the most challenging areas of policing. Carrying a firearm that can be discharged on
home soil and directed at a fellow citizen is extraordinary, and pressured in its own
way, with enormous responsibilities to the public at large. We are fully aware of that,
and thank and admire those that step up to that responsibility.
This is why we were so concerned with what we encountered.

...

Working in MO19 is seen as a prestigious and �elite� part of the Met. In a survey of
people who had left MO19, �prestige of the role� was the most common reason
officers reported as a reason for joining MO19. 80 to 90% of respondents rated
prestige as an important reason for joining the Command.
This has led to a widely held view in the Command and in the rest of the Met that
firearms officers �need to be allowed� to bend or break the rules because they are
volunteers who could at any point decide not to carry a firearm or �hand in their blue
card�.
We were told of one senior Met officer telling others in their chain of command that it
was alright to �colour outside the lines� � to bend and break rules � because firearms
officers are harder to replace than other officers and need to be cherished.

You can read the whole thing here:

https://www.met.police.uk/SysSiteAs...march-2023a.pdf

Being sceptical about the Met shooting people has to be seen in this context.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2023 19:48

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

fuctifino posted:

loving hell, the fascism dial has been turned up to 10 this morning after Cruella's speech yesterday...

https://twitter.com/TalkTV/status/1706934421939499136

It's racist to stand up to fascism now...

Suella's so blatantly positioning herself as the obvious option for Tory leader, once Rishi eats poo poo at the next GE lol.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2023 09:52

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

She's obviously betting that the future of the Tory party lies in reaction and culture war rather than any attempt to re-establish the party as a reliable defender of business interests and 'government as usual'.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2023 09:54

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

I'll PM you something later but at work right now.

Meanwhile

Full on rehabilitation of the Nazis going on on twitter at the expense of the Russian/ Soviet role in WW2.
.
Won't post links but sure you can find it if you need to.

I'd never have thought we'd get to the point where there's liberal centrists "Well, actually"ing the literal SS, and yet here we are!

# ¿ Sep 27, 2023 11:30

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

keep punching joe posted:

Rickman is great in in, and Freeman gets to spend a lot of scenes raising his eyebrows at the primitive Christains, theres an evil witch, what's not to love.

The funniest thing about that film was all the other actors taking it super-seriously, then Rickman's stealing every scene carrying on like a pantomime villain in a Christmas production.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2023 15:53

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Also, why the gently caress did Robin Hood's dad not just go back inside the castle, bar the gate and wake the servants when those hooded assassins turned up at the start of the film??? Aargh, I'm getting angry about it thinking about it now.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2023 15:56

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

How do you fuckers all have such easy access to drugs.

I don't know any drug dealers

am I just boring

# ¿ Sep 29, 2023 10:02

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

forkboy84 posted:

Fighting to be in charge of the Titanic as it sinks is certainly a choice. But if there's one thing the Tories hate as much as they hate the poor, foreigners, ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ+ community, workers, the unemployed, students, parents, the environment & probably some other things I'm forgetting it's the Tories.

Braverman clearly has a long term plan: raise her profile in the party pre-election and establish herself as the red meat, anti-woke candidate; after the Tories lose, lambast Sunak for his supposed soggy liberalism and win the leadership election on a platform of pulling the party to the hard right like the silent majority of voters supposedly want; wait for a directionless, uninspiring Labour party to lose public support as they do absolutely zero to improve ordinary people's lives, then sweep back to power in 5 years time at the next election.

It's at least a coherent plan and I don't see any other Tory moving as decisively as she is.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2023 09:06

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Gonna get homeopathically shitfaced rn by dissolving a shot of vodka in 2 litres of tapwater.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2023 10:39

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Mebh posted:

I just don't get how both Parties are so aggressively loving bad at literally everything.

Is it just really as simple that they're always trying to hide how shittily corrupt and bought they all are, but they're just a bit too thick to pretend to be genuine about anything?

It's structural, I guess: power in this country is arranged in a way that means people like that end up running the country. I mean, look at what happens to people who don't fit that pattern (Jeremy Corbyn). If you're a sinister billionaire/ giant corporation, you want politicians who are easily corruptible and also too dumb and lazy to get their own ideas and start trying to wiggle the levers of power on their own account.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2023 06:25

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

hyper from Pixie Sticks posted:

It's a Seismic Victory! (copyright every news channel)

starmers labour have recovered from the worst result in labour history in 2019 by...getting less votes in Rutherglen than Corbyn's labour candidate did! Hooray for sensible adults in charge!

Yeah, just been looking: that constituency was created in 2005; there's been 6 general elections there and Labour's 2023 victory, with 17,845 votes is the lowest number of votes they've ever had in that constituency. What this election was really about was the collapse in support for the SNP, who went from 23,775 in 2019 to just 8,399 this time round.

It does support the gloomy hypothesis that the next election will be a low-energy, low-turnout one, with Labour limply farting their way into power simply through having their vote decline less sharply than everybody else's.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2023 09:11

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

NotJustANumber99 posted:

Rip tweetman

It's a trap

You just nudged me to check Weetman's Twitter account and, god, she's gone from eccentric to completely raving lunatic since I last looked at it. What happens to people to do this

# ¿ Oct 6, 2023 20:22

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Huh, Hamas has launched a massive surprise attack and invaded Israel. Wasn't expecting to wake up to that this morning.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2023 07:57

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

smellmycheese posted:

Lickspittle Lammy leaps in�.

https://twitter.com/davidlammy/status/1710570750434750836?s=46&t=m_nNbkNoHG4lLitcpyHReg

Christ. So utterly shameless.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2023 10:30

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

7 Israeli towns now under Hamas control (according to Israeli news channels). The Ukrainians should be taking lessons from them in how to liberate territory lol.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2023 10:49

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

They've captured an Israeli General, what an extraordinary day it is.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2023 12:24

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Beefeater1980 posted:

It would be nice if it resulted in Israel not speedrunning fascism but I don�t see it. If anything the opposite seems likely: Bibi using this to say �see, I was right all along, the Other really does want to come into your house and kill you or worse and it�s just those pesky judges / opposition politicians who are preventing us from keeping you really safe.�

To me it shows an Israel all out of ideas and stuck in a dead end. The Occupation does not ensure security for Israel - quite the opposite - but their racism and fascism precludes them from doing or trying anything else: treating the Palestininans as equal human beings is literally unthinkable for them. So all that's left is the tired, failed counter of hitting back even harder, in the hope that this time, the Palestinians will be left so bloody and demoralised that they'll finally accept their lives of permanent oppression. It won't work, it's never worked but Israel is so constituted that they simply can't formulate any other response.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2023 08:27

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Jakabite posted:

I don’t see why everyone on the telly is pretending this is in any way not the exact same thing any person who’s grown up in prison would do upon meeting the guards and their families.

The purpose of people on the telly is to reinforce existing power structures. That means cheering when our allies do bad poo poo and booing when our opponents do bad poo poo. Every UK presenter knows without being told what line they have to take in Israel/ Palestine if they want to keep their jobs.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2023 14:54

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Bobby Deluxe posted:

To be fair I can also be a wildly inconsistent dick.

I just feel like this is all so profoundly hosed, and there's a solutely nothing we can do? Not just the situation but the situation surrounding the situation. Not being able to say anything after the antisemitism witch hunt against Corbyn. The stuff about prevent a few days ago. And all of these dickheads who don't know anything about politics or the complexity of the territorial conflict who have boiled it down to "Israel are the goodies and if you don't put their flag up you're doing an antisemitism."

Bunch of clueless dipshits lecturing to us from a book they're visibly holding upside down.

This is a drawback with the internet and 24hr news: there's always some poo poo going on somewhere in the world and these days you can't ignore it even if you want to, 'cos it's continually shoved in your face, along with demands that you engage with it and care very much about it.

If it's genuinely getting you down, there's nothing wrong with switching off from current events that you didn't cause and can't do anything to either help or hinder.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2023 08:12

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Dabir posted:

Any chance of getting Ofcom involved

Surely appealing to the referee will get this abuse of power rectified!

# ¿ Oct 12, 2023 13:55

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

yeah, the consent manufacturing machine is in full overdrive right now, presumably for some spectacularly nasty action that Israel has planned for the near future.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2023 18:18

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

The Wicked ZOGA posted:

Don't the adaptations usually leave out the zombie paedophile

Yes, so far. The zombie paedophile awaits the director brave enough to portray him in his full glory :colbert:

# ¿ Oct 13, 2023 22:42

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 01:14

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

crispix posted:

i tried making my own hummus once but it had the consistency of playdough and the taste of playdough

Chickpeas
Garlic
Tahini
Olive oil
Lemon juice
Salt
Cumin

Whizz it all together in a blender, add a splash of water if needed, stick it in a pot with clingfilm over the top and leave it in the fridge to chill for a bit. It's easy! The hardest bit is cleaning the blender afterwards.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2023 14:56

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