Rayvin

I know we talk about fascism a lot and the word probably does get thrown around too easily but for real, at what point is it actually fascism?

They're banning British rappers from Glastonbury from entering the US now. I suspect I'm currently banned from entering ffs, if they ever tied this place to me as a person. Ironically probably not banned from Israel...

I still wonder if the club has more ducks lined up than we think and is just waiting for the PSR deadline to pass. At least I desperately hope that's it. If not then IMO what has held us back this summer has been chaos in the boardroom.

"Economists and analysts at Cambridge Econometrics found that, by 2035, the UK is anticipated to have three million fewer jobs, 32% lower investment, 5% lower exports and 16% lower imports, than it would have had been. The report states that the UK will be £311bn worse off by 2035 due to leaving EU." Our old people did this to us. I also checked the yearly loss to the public purse and it's estimated to be about £25bn a year. How much of this shit we're currently doing wouldn't have been necessary if we weren't so stupid...

If they just came out and pointed the finger at Brexit, I think these conversations would be a lot easier...

I agree with you ultimately but nonetheless, these are the sorts of issues he will lose support over and I'm not seeing where he gains it otherwise. The right quite literally will never vote for him.

No, Starmer has come out droning on about trans people again but I didn't want to link it and end up in yet another back and forth about that, so I'm trying to keep it general.

I'm wondering at what point Labour are expecting things to improve for them in terms of popular support - this cannot possibly be the strategy they're going to stick to running into the next GE. All these policies and statements which seem designed to alienate young, progressive voters, how on earth is this going to benefit them? I could buy it if they were picking up votes somewhere to the right but there's no evidence that they are. It feels like the whole thing is designed to suffocate the Tories but how does that help once Reform merge/ally/flat out replace them.

If that is genuinely the reason this doesn't happen then we deserve the hellscape we're heading towards.

I honestly feel like if they just made homes affordable it would make things a lot better on this front. Labour seem to be doing absolutely nothing on that front and I've no clue why in all honesty. As for hating the country, that followed Brexit specifically so I'm not exactly too worked up otherwise, but there are no solutions to any of this in the current administration. Treating symptoms and not causes.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/uk/bridget-phillipson-britons-children-birth-rates/ Bridget calling for people to have more kids. I guess thats the inevitable flip side of cracking down on immigration. Problem is many young people aren't interested because society is so fucked. If I'd been born even ten years earlier I'm sure I would have had some myself, but its never materialised for me sadly. Money and stability just haven't permitted it even in my longer running relationships. I really do hate this country tbh. Funny how that can happen, I loved it once.

Well I read it all and I'm not sure what it tells us. All looks fairly normal stuff considering the country they're in - 4 or 5 Iranians who are now incensed at how pointless the whole thing was and disappointed it didn't topple the regime. What in there is worthy of the fabled dismissive coffee emoji We already know that 70% of Iranians wish for regime change.

I appreciate you.

I thought Man Utd had that one done... interesting. But he did get 20 goals last year..

Howe's teams work to systems though, making good players seem a lot better than they are because they're operating as part of a whole. He needs to find players who can operate in his system more than he needs world class players who can do their own thing. I get what we're saying but world class players don't grow on trees and we seem to be struggling to ensure we have the people in place to find them. I would be happy with the players discussed, it would make us a lot stronger than we are now.

This. This x 10. No idea what people are worrying about here. Fucking this.

Fucking amateur.

The real issue I have isn't with which state belongs where, it's that many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly kicked out of their actual homes. Their whole lives were stolen. Surely there was a better way. Surely integration was that way.

There was never any possibility that Iran's nuclear programme could be destroyed because they are a sufficiently educated country that the knowledge is just 'within' the state now. They are not an Islamic backwater. They seem to have decided back in the early 2000s not to pursue this anymore and genuinely must have stopped because if they didn't, they'd have achieved them by now. I strongly suspect the Iranian government uses religion to motivate people in the same way everyone does - that does not mean they would take the same risks themselves. They will see themselves as an entity that safeguards their faith. What is more important to them, preserving Islam or destroying Israel? To me, I agree with you that it's now more likely that they will develop one, but how has Israel's interest been served here then? Trump and Iran were talking, why did Israel even do this? They wanted regime change, it's the best guess I've got, and because they've failed, they've made the world more dangerous. Would you agree with that much at least?

The problem to a degree is October 7th has become something akin to the 'start of history' on this issue now, whereas I would argue Nakba was the start. 700,000 Arabs kicked out of their homes and driven out of regions of Palestine that they lived in. 15k dead. Everything that has followed has been in response to that - Hamas are monsters, but they're monsters born out of a hatred that I can understand - not justify, but understand. If my family, my community, had been purged in the way that Palestinians were - driven from their homes and ethnically cleansed - I would also likely be very hateful. That says nothing about Israel's right to exist, but simply looks at the consequences of their actions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba Since Nakba there have been 140,000 Palestinians killed by Israel. I've seen reports of small children being shot in their mother's arms by the IDF, little girls climbing over rubble and being shot twice (double tap to make sure), 10 year olds being taken out by snipers - all of this before October 7th. Just routine stuff. You do not need religion to make people hate in this situation. You just don't. The hate is automatic in response to the sorts of things the IDF have been perpetrating for decades. And to be really, really clear - if our children and families were suffering random executions, poisoned water supplies, forcible theft of property and so on.. we'd hate them too. Whoever that external force was, we'd hate them. That's why I view Hamas differently - because they're the product/consequence of that situation.

My assessment of Hamas was about as grim as I could make it, so I'm not sure what in there felt charitable about it. Iran I'm not saying are blameless actors in this, they should just make peace with the political reality of the situation of Israel existing whether they consider it to be fair or not - but regardless I do not see any evidence at all in how they act that they would pre-emptively launch a nuclear missile that would guarantee their own annihilation at the same time. Nothing about how they have conducted any of this suggests that would be true.

Yes, religion used as propaganda to motivate idiots into all sorts of things, no argument there. But then so are many other things. WMDs were used to motivate idiots (such as myself at the time, young and naive as I was) into supporting the Iraq war when it was actually about consolidation of Western regional power, encirclement of Russia, and oil. NATO has been used by Putin to justify Ukraine even though he came out the other day and proclaimed that Ukraine and Russia are all one people and that the whole country belongs to him. The fact that such governments may use religion here and there does not speak to why they do any of these things, just how they ensure at least some of their support. You make a good point about how they were sensible in choosing not to be obliterated by the US. In fact, that's the same point I was making. If we can rely on them to be sensible in that situation, and we can observe that good sense, why do we say that they would suddenly throw it out of the window if they had a nuke?

Well said although I would have been interested to hear more of his rebuttal. Not much anyone can do about it now tbh.

If you removed all religion from the Middle East tomorrow, people would still be fighting over resources and power. The things that people actually fight over in reality. I've never understood this idea that religion is the root of all conflict when we have so much conflict coming out of the US and Russia, neither of whom are doing it for religiously motivated reasons. The US has actually used nukes on people and yet we still worry about the religious doing it. Anyone is capable of it - I don't buy for a moment that Putin wouldn't launch nukes if he was backed into a corner enough incidentally, as Syed does. He said Putin wouldn't do it for fear of being killed in response... like, what? That's not a baseline concern even I would have in certain situations, let alone someone as motivated as Putin. It's speculative nonsense that assumes all non religious people are entirely rational actors, and all religious people are not. Maybe you are right and Iran would try to destroy the world the second it gets nukes, but then surely it would be doing this already anyway, surely if it was that motivated by this issue, it would have bent itself into fully. Instead it appears to be dithering around for 3 decades and just trying to look tough. To me that seems more like a political calculation than religious fervour.

But then they could just have done it by now. No one can stop Iran developing nukes if it wants to - no one. Not Israel, not the US. The best any external entity can do is try to force regime change, but that isn't a guarantee. IMO Iran is adopting the same strategy that Sadam attempted to use - he didn't have WMDs but he didn't actually tell anyone that because it was more useful for him to be in a position whereby people assumed he was dangerous than to actually justify that perception. Iran doesn't need nukes, it just needs to look like it can be close enough to getting them at any given point for Israel to leave it the fuck alone. And the reason I'm confident that this is the strategy they're working to is that they could have had nukes by now if they really wanted them. I've done a lot of reading over the past few days about the Iranian regime and its politics, and it seems that its regional militias are worth more to it than any nuclear weapon would be. Moreover, it seems to be focused more on Saudi than Israel or the West - which I would argue supports the idea that it is a politically motivated actor, not a religiously motivated one. Triggernometry is a right wing youtube channel that talks highbrow but we wouldn't cite it in any other context. EDIT - if you don't believe me on that last point, look at their most recent videos. They've interviewed Reform's chairman, they've got another view a few days earlier talking about how Britain is a nation of immigrants, South African farm murders, yet another video on immigration into the UK, the end of wokeism, how the left is to blame for creating the right, another video on UK immigration... that's going back 1 month. That's the sort of channel this is, and the one you're aligning yourself with on this point. Maybe they're right, but I don't know why I should believe they are based on the nonsense of the rest of their channel.