In 2010 the lib dems campaigned on introducing proportional representation and dropping tuition fees. They got into coalition government with the Tories then completely dropped these issues.

None of them are going to do it. We will have fascism before proportional representation, because the wealthy, and the British establishment, prefer it.

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Nobody expects Labour to do zero positive things. That does not mean they are not red tories whose failure to address the needs of working people will eventually usher the Reform Party into power.

I inject it into the gap between my big and second toe, as if I’ve ruined the rest of my veins (even though I haven’t).

It has been red tory v blue tory for decades.

The end result of this will be reform in power. The rich won’t mind this. The poor, who vote for it, won’t benefit. But to them it will feel like the only option that might help.

It is a similar dynamic to the US playing out in different ways. Musk’s slash > privatise the government is a speed-run of what has been happening in the UK since Thatcher - the last looting of empire being the looting of the profitable bits of the British state itself on behalf of the rich/capital (call it whichever you want).

Or they could deal with the reasons why workers’ mental health is so bad.

Sorry, joking. I know the driving motivation is maximising profit, while minimising tax burden of the richest.

No.

Elon’s mother stopped him having that cage fight with Mark Zuckerberg because of his bad back. That wasn’t his fault.

Implicit in the act of voting is the giving of consent. If you don’t consent to a choice between red tory v blue tory then you can’t vote.

In the US, if you voted for the Democrats, you voted for a party that were willingly complicit in creating the explicit oligarchy we all now see.

For the record the ‘if you don’t vote you don’t have a right to complain’, big lie is almost as bad as Thatcher’s ‘trickle down economy’ big lie. If you voted, you exercised your democratic rights and implicitly accepted the choice and potential outcomes, then you don’t have the right to complain.

It didn’t stop people complaining for years about brexit, but there you go. Most people aren’t really ready to look at the neo-liberal EU in anything like an objective manner. They’ve read too much billionaire owned news media and watched too much BBC.

You might say I forgot the liberal democrats. When they got into coalition government in 2010 they immediately the dropped proportional representation they campaigned on, along with their tuition fees pledges and anything else. They showed themselves to be complete liars, and, in fact, yellow Tories.

Everyone is not ‘anti-progress’, unless the ‘progress’ you mean is the type we see Elon Musk engaging in in the US.

But wait, the combination of ‘austerity’ and privatisation both parties (red and blue Tory) have engaged in for decades now is exactly a slow-paced version of what Musk is speed-running in the US. And the UK gradually moves down the global affluence tables while the rich get richer because of it.

So I guess maybe that is why everyone is so anti ‘progress’. You just forgot the necessary quotation marks around the work ‘progress’.

It’s a meme stock, not an ‘investment’.

And now Musk has parlayed it, and his various pyramid scheme-like companies into replacing as much of the US government as he can get away with with his junk.

The US will suffer.

I think the implication is that they come from the plastic bottle.

1. Get out of this relationship.

2. Most of us have been around some kind of illegal or unlawful behaviour we wouldn’t report to the police. Anything to do with child sex abuse isn’t one of those behaviours. The only alternative to reporting him, or giving him a strictly timed opportunity to report himself that I can immediately think of, is if there is some sort of working ‘treatment’ that I am not aware of, that this person signs up for.

I am not a psychiatrist, but I imagine that somebody can become conditioned to respond to one or another type of porn and that sometimes this conditioning can be reversed. I also imagine there are people that look at certain images who it is better for everybody if they get treatment and fix themselves rather than be criminalised.

Edit - I am showing my age with how I describe this, but there are cartoons on my ‘all’ lemmy feed which are of females who have women’s bodies, but basically very young faces. (You all know them. I know I sound like a grandparent.) My point is, in terms of conditioning these could easily be a ‘gateway’ to more problematic then illegal material that millions of young people must be subject to as a matter of course. I can see there could be lots of people somewhere along that pathway that need to stop what they are doing, and change, but shouldn’t necessarily be criminalised.

Either way, get out of this relationship. Forget trying to fix them or any of that stuff. You can’t just leave a potential future abuser out there without doing something, but cut your losses and move on.

I don’t believe Nigel Farage for one second.

There is absolutely no doubt that immigration has battered poor, former working class people in the UK. From perfectly decent people of Eastern European origin taking the role of scab labour, undermining pay and conditions, leading to the misery of zero hours contracts, to difficulty getting any unskilled work, to the ‘benefits’ system and healthcare being absolutely hammered.

This simply isn’t sustainable.

The coming climate refugee crisis will make this look like a picnic. The line is going to be drawn, it is only a matter of when. We have missed all of the chances to minimise the impact of climate change, and help developing world countries achieve a demographic transition to a low birth rate future, without exploiting their fossil fuel reserves. It is too late.

Net migration to June 2024: 728,000. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/

Multiply that by ten gives you 7.28 million - nearly the number of people in London. This is primary school maths. You have wasted my time once, I will not have it wasted again.

And for the record, I am believing Oxford University, the link I provided, not Nigel Farage. Who are you believing? (This is a rhetorical question, I am not interested in an answer.)

I know that people want to feel good about themselves, and they also want a high consumption lifestyle (that is most contributing now to the future climate change refugee crisis). Political liberalism covers the hard fist of neo-liberal economics with a soft and fuzzy veneer of socially liberal policy. Neo-liberals don’t want to feel racist while consuming an amount that destroys others. Unfortunately for many people in countries like the UK, neo-liberalism’s sell by date is passing. The result in our case is the rise of Reform, Trump, and other far right parties across Europe.

You all just assume that is what I want. In fact I want the opposite.

You are currently incapable of dealing, or unwilling to deal with reality. This inability or unwillingness is contributing directly the Reform’s rise to power. This need to feel good about yourself while not only failing to be adult enough to deal with reality, while at the same time insulting and making incorrect assumptions about me is genuinely pathetic. You are an embarrassment. Most won’t be able to learn so the rise of the far right it is very likely to be. Well done.

I am aware of this, however, the reality on the ground is exactly as I described.

Nobody is going to fix capitalism in the time frame available, so deal with the world as it is, not as any of us would like it to be.

This is simple practical advice to help individuals dealing with their current problems. I’m not suggesting the nhs is ok or anything:

Speak to your GP and ask to be referred to a provider under the ‘Right To Choose’ scheme. You might be unlucky again, but I know for certain that people in another area of the country with extremely poor healthcare got assessed (via various forms and an online assessment - so local availability of services might not be a problem) in around about a year.

If you are one of the lucky people who haven’t had their lives decimated by more austerity, more benefits cuts, interspersed by bouts of meaningless ‘essential’ work (such as stacking shelves) on a zero hours contract, good for you. You can have the luxury of taking that attitude, and feel good about yourself while you do so.

But, genuinely with the best will of the world, when you are looking at not far off a London a decade, immigration is simply not sustainable. Ignoring this reality pushes Reform towards power.

Ok so a whole load of anti-vaxxers are demonstrating they have seen the error of their ways, when it looks like it might actually harm them.

You’d like to think the next time a wedge issue came up the media would refer to the turnaround anti-vaxxers demonstrated here, but they won’t because the media is owned by billionaires who profit from the good old ‘divide and rule’.

Just stop testing. Problem solved.

EU acolytes love conflating the EU with Europe.

The average Reform voter’s unhappiness isn’t a matter of ‘scapegoating an other’ over a media construct.

The consequences of the electorate refusing to accept this will only cause Reform’s voter base will grow.