Makom

What are you posting fixtures from the 2016/7 League 1 season for?

Eh? What would UKIP even be standing for in 2020? Do you not think there will have been an EU referendum before then? That is after all the only reason the party exists in the first place, if it's not just a vehicle for the racist protest vote.

Reboots are the spawn of the devil. There is nothing worse than having a reboot ruin the memory of a much loved and cherished childhood movie experience. Based on the godawful trailers, Mad Max appears to be about to join that very long list for me. Not only for seemingly overdosing on CGI just for the sake of it, but for completely missing the point of why the original was so compelling. I can't believe they've got him on the trailer basically telling people why he's pissed off. Idiots. I rarely go to the flicks these days anyway - I was in the Metrocentre recently, and just on the off chance I thought I'd go see what was screening. There's nothing more depressing than looking up and seeing this: * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * Avengers * a rom com * that horror about facebook Fuck off you stupid twats. I couldn't care less what the fuck the Avengers even are, so I'm unlikely to shell out the best part of £15 to find out. It's not like I'm a niche market - I'll watch any action/sci-fi/thriller/war story, just as long as it doesn't require me to find comic book characters exciting. When I was 12 I wasn't reading the fucking Beano and dreaming of being Superman, I was using my fake ID to sneak into the Terminator and then day-dreaming in school about being John Connor. I only even learned how to ride a motorbike just in case I am him.....

Well, for one, I doubt you know for sure. And two, I said "possibly" for precisely that reason. NK might well not have a nuclear capable sub, but we now know for sure that they have nuclear warheads, missiles and submarines that can fire them, which is all you need to make one.

Indeed, Kim was obviously reading Toontastic and saw the chance to scare the shit out of us. It's beyond insane that NK are possibly capable of deploying a submarine launched nuclear weapon. The only things we have to counter that sort of threat are all the bits and pieces that are the first to be dispensed with in defence cuts brought in as part of the Cold War peace dividend.

UKIP are definitely dead and buried. And wake up CT, the Tories were the 2nd party in all three Newcastle seats. Even though the tactic of picking out individual gaffes was extremely unfair, UKIP will never be able to shake the fact that the vast majority of them are just massive idiots/racists/xenophobes, and for every reasonable policy they announce, they had two other insane ones in the locker. The only way UKIP could possibly have any influence is if PR was introduced, and ironically it never will be because of this election - the previous graphic shows quite clearly that PR only rewards extremists - if we had PR today we would be looking at a Con-UKIP coalition, which is insane.

Just said as much in the Trident thread, but now I think about it, I'm wondering if the Lab/Cons (or even the Cons on their own?) forcing through a Trident replacement even though the SNP now has an almost universal mandate in Scotland might not count as one of those exceptional circumstances that Nicola Sturgeon said would make her revisit the issue of an independence referendum - she's been at pains to say that in ordinary circumstances she wouldn't be using support in this election as support for another referendum. But people who voted SNP can hardly say they didn't know about or agree with their position on Trident, and if they do they're idiots. It was obviously going to be one of their red lines if they'd had the chance to go into coalition with Labour. This seems to be another major issue that is notably missing from all this supposed 'analysis' of what this result means for the next parliament.

Well......this should be interesting now. Conservative majority vs. SNP landslide in Scotland Defence of the realm vs. representative democracy Personally, I think Trident is a worthwhile deterrent system, certainly better than any alternatives, be they nuclear based or happy thoughts based. Is it effective against modern threats like ISIS? No. But neither is anything else we have in our Armed Forces apparently. There's frankly no point measuring Trident's effectiveness or indeed cost against things it can't effect, but the value of it becomes clear when you consider the potential for conflicts unsanctioned by the international community, like Syria, Ukraine, the Falklands, to go south very fast. I've no doubt that last resort deterrent systems like Trident act as a sharp dose of strategic reality to nutjobs like Putin, who are arguably only as bold and contemptuous of international law as they are because they have nukes themselves. I certainly don't want it to ever be used, and wish nukes had never been invented, but we are where we are. It takes years to procure, design and build a replacement, less time than it took for Russia to go from Ukraine's best mate to their mortal enemy. It's ironic in the extreme that Russia persuaded Ukraine to give them back their Soviet era nukes in exchange for security guarantees. And that's a part of the world which our defence analysts supposedly knew something about, not a complete mystery like N Korea, from whose own nukes we would only protected from by one thing if Trident did not exist, distance. The same can't be said for many other states which ether have, or want to acquire, nuclear weapons.

Apparently on the birth certificate it lists father's occupation as "Prince of the United Kingdom". Nice work if you can get it I suppose. What would have been wrong with 'flying ambulance driver' though?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32650417 This comprehensive list of what BBC analysts think raises a couple of questions: 1. Who knew the BBC had so many political analysts? I thought there was just Robinson and that was it.... 2. Why the hell are they ignoring the possibility boundary changes? If they can ignore something as obviously important as that, what else are they missing? Maybe the reason they failed to spot things like the fact the polls had a systematic Con-Lab error is because they're not so much analysts, as just re-tweeters?

On a brighter note, the BNP have been wiped out, coming way behind even the Monster Raving Loony Party. While the racist vote might have moved across to UKIP, this election sees a record 41 non-white MPs elected, up from 27, including the first 'chink', a Tory no less, who won with 51%. There's also more women, including 1 in 3 MPs in Scotland.

It is a curse, this gift of mine.......

PR would actually be no better for anyone, based on this election. On a quick look, it seems that if seats were divvyed up by vote share alone, then all the Tories would have to do to gain power is to go into coalition with UKIP. They would then have more seats than the entire left block of Lab/Lib/SNP/Green. It might make people feel better represented, but it would seem to me to actually not only result in a Tory government, the same result as FPTP, but a more right wing one. And that's the result in an era where no one party seems to be dominating, the very same situation PR is supposed to fix. This seems to gel with the experience of other countries which use it, where it always seems to result in the extremists holding sway when there's no one single outright winner. And as far as I know, nobody has yet come up with an AV system that has any other ultimate result either - these so called fairer systems only seem to affect the edge cases - none of them really get around the fact that whatever system you use, it's always the people who get the most votes who get to play government.

The Greens though, what a bunch of deluded fucks. Trying to spin their measly gains in vote share as progress. After getting huge exposure in a campaign where everybody was talking as if the little parties would have influence in the coalition era. Outcome? No change in seats. They have no more influence now than they ever had. Of course, they try to blame this on the fact we don't use PR, meanwhile not having an answer to Andrew Neill when he points out that both the Lib Dems and the SNP have proven that it's possible for 'third way' parties to gain significant amounts of seats if they actually have something to offer voters that's different to Lab/Con. And if we did use PR, they would still be only the 6th largest party by seats, behind UKIP, the SNP, and even a massacred Lib Dem party. Their influence in a PR system would therefore be the same as it is in FPTP - i.e. they only matter in the extremely unlikely even that their small seat count is still influential once all the other parties had done their negotiations. They really must be high if they're at all positive right now.

The raw seat count is interesting. Conservatives: Gained 26 seats from Liberal Democrats Gained 8 seats from Labour Lost 10 seats to Labour Lost* 1 seat to UKIP Labour: Gained 12 seats from Liberal Democrats Gained 10 seats from Conservatives Lost 40 seats to the SNP Lost 8 seats to the Conservatives SNP: Gained 40 seats from Labour Gained 10 seats from Liberal Democrats Liberal Democrats: Lost 26 seats to the Conservatives Lost 12 seats to Labour Lost 10 seats to the SNP Plaid Cymru & Greens no change * for some reason they count this as a loss, even though it was already held by UKIP due to the by-election

Ed's 'Nasty Party' rhetoric turned out to be pretty ironic actually, given what happened. Looking at it extremely simplistically, the Tories won this election by completely wiping out their coalition partners, and by focusing people's minds on what the enemy of their enemy might do. If this was their strategy, then it's pretty nasty. But effective.

You know what they say.... A handfull of nuts a day, helps keep the doctor away.

Hard to say what effect Brand had really. Turnout was the same, suggesting he didn't move anyone to vote that hadn't previously. Maybe his urge to get people to vote only if they see something worth voting for helped the Greens? But since he previously argued that such votes are wasted in the current system, it merely goes on to reinforce his main position of abstentionism, in spite his late switch to milibandism. Contemplating Brand though merely brings me back to the monumental fuckup that was Ed Miliband's campaign - who the fuck schedules a meeting for Ed to try and turn Brand around only after the deadline for voters to register? Stupid wankers.

As an aside - the Fixed Term Parliament Act. You know the date of the election 5 years out. And yet they still decided to hold it the day before the VE day anniversary, thereby totally overshadowing what should be the only focus of the media for today. It wouldn't be so ironic if the victory wasn't for our democratic right to vote. Bastards.

As others have already said, the SNP didn't lose this election for Labour. Tony Blair would have won in all three elections without Scotland. All this 'Scotland never gets the government it votes for' shite is just that - neither do lots of other large parts of the UK, like the NE. It's called a majority government for a reason, parties that don't recognise that and adopt an appropriate strategy, will never win. We just seem to be doubly fucked because we don't have a credible alternative to vote for now it's becoming clear they're taking our vote for granted just as much as they did the Scots. In all three Newcastle seats, the Tories are now the 2nd party. That's just fucking insane. Can anyone ever imagine that happening in Glasgow?

Add to this the fact that the Scottish Labour leader in post before Murphy resigned after just a year because she realised that an SNP uprising of post-referendum anti-Labour anti-being taked for granted sentiment was on its way, and the Millbank leadership didn't/couldn't/wouldn't do anything about it to help her put up a fightback. The only people to blame for Labour losing Scotland, are fucking Labour. It's a total and utter disgrace to see the entire city of Glasgow turned over to the Nats. That said, fuck 'em. If that's what they wanted, then they can fucking have it. You made your beds, you lie in it. I can't see why anyone thinks that 1.5m porridge munchers should be dictating what a Westminster government does, when 9m Labour supporters can't. They can stick their 'nation' up their arse if they think that's what democracy is all about.

Yup. Baffles me why, when we've got all all these fucking pundits and commentators all over the TV for 24 hours, I've not seen one of them point out that this was probably top of David Cameron's To Do List if he got a majority. If he gets that done, he solidifies his majority and makes it even easier to win elections in future.

Has Paddy Ashdown eaten his fucking hat yet? The exit poll was correct to within 1% for every party except the SNP, and even then it hardly mattered - predicting 30% instead of 34%

Well, other than underestimating the collapse of the LibDem's, I pretty much nailed it - Ed totally fucking it up because his campaign strategy was non-existent, the shy Tory effect showing the polls up as total wank, and with the Greens/UKIP/Plaid making absolutely no difference to the result whatsoever. Completely accepting blame for this disaster is the first sensible thing Ed has done in the last 5 years. If Labour want to win an election in the next 20 years, they need to wake up and smell the fucking coffee, namely: 1. You don't win a UK election by campaigning on behalf of the poor/disadvantaged. You must do what you have to do to win, then do what you can for them once you have. 2. You don't win a UK election by casting yourselves as the party of hard working people. Anyone who denies the level of support the Tories has amongst the 'ordinary working people', are just denying reality. 3. Labour will never win a UK election with a core voter strategy. Worry about winning first, then worry about what your core support wants you to do. It's that fucking simple, numbnuts. 4. Labour will never win an election if their sole strategy is that 'we're not the Tories'. It's pretty fucking obvious that there are enough swing voters who are quite happy to vote Tory if they don't believe/trust/like what you're trying to get them to vote for. If Labour's sole strategy for the next 5 years is to blame the SNP and the press scaremongering over a Lab/SNP pact for this miserable result, then we could be looking at the first of several Tory governments. In case any of those stupid fucks have forgotten, that's what your're supposed to be preventing!!!!11

John Terry expressing his condolences to Rio. Unbelievable.