Iz 🌟

On the one hand you have them unironically having a 'Strikes in Yemen 👊🇺🇲💥' groupchat on a public application, and then someone within that group of bright sparks decides to add a journalist to it... I'm sure anyone who's worked in a corporate setting will know to keep discussions around business to company-approved applications (which always made it hilarious whenever the odd Tory Whatsapp story was leaked), so I would think that goes many orders of magnitude more for people at the top of the most powerful military in the world. If they weren't idiotic amateurs. Saw that Vance had another go at Europe in private too - if we needed any more proof that this administration isn't a friend of Western democracy.

damn that's a heartbreaking pair of non-qualifiers, couldn't have helped Eastovka any more though I did call it and I was really thinking Terra would be just fine :(

Very pleased to see Elsiane through from the other semi too, NQ predictions didn't make any sense there.

Fantastic to be through, thank you! 🏴‍☠️

Starmer... hasn't really gone against everything he's ever said. Take a look at the government tracker for pledges they made prior to this election. Most of what the government pledged to do is on track to be met. Full FactGovernment Tracker - Full FactFull Fact is monitoring the government’s delivery on its promisesI'll grant you he's drifted a lot from his initial pledge to the Labour membership, and as a left-winger, I'm still mad about that, that this government won't be as transformative or bold as it needs to be. But as far as the promises he made for getting him and his party into government, they're mostly on track, haven't gone against what they said they'll do in their latest electoral manifesto, and anything that they have to change plans on mostly comes with a caveat of needing to adjust due to circumstances. Underpromise - possibly with underdelivery, but in as far as delivering what people in 2024 voted for, his government is on track 6 months in. The flipside is that I don't see how Farage or Reform's team at this point have a hope in hell of creating a comprehensive plan like Labour have and actually following it through, they're getting most of their support through feelings and negative polarisation, and there isn't a Reform team beyond Farage really.

Sure, you shouldn't dismiss anyone's political opinions as being invalid, I wouldn't say the anger towards low-information voters is unjustified though either. If you're going to take part in the democratic process, it's good form to be educated on what has happened, what your various political options stand for and have done in the past, and what they're likely to do should one's vote help them into government. We've seen the damage that's happened from votes being treated as 'any change from the status quo because the status quo sucks'. Anyone who knows any voters like these, please, do your best to get them following reputable political sources and actually understanding what happens with one's vote. It does them no good to throw it away to, as Jupiter says, an 'obvious con artist'. The last bolded sentence doesn't follow from the previous ones. This is a localised focus group in one of the most fertile breeding grounds for Reform/anti-system votes in the country and a relatively deprived area, of which 50% of interviewed voters were non-voters. There's no real indication this is out of line with national polls, which show an electorally untested Reform jockeying for position with other parties, not a widespread supported one. It's an interesting and indeed quite worrying focus group, and eastern seaboard towns like Grimsby stand a good chance of being Reform gains in the future, but overegging the conclusions beyond that I wouldn't say is valid right now.

It's quite important to myself, and I hope everyone who contributes to a political discussion subform of an entertainment forum that anything we're talking about is based in reality and facts, and not based on the narrative we've heard from a tabloid rag or some influencer with a bad faith agenda. I'm going to pin this thread, and essentially I want the first post to be a list of ordered links to useful political sites such as legislation, parliament specific, credible and/or specialist news sites, studies, infographics, anything else that might be useful to consult in debates. How useful it is, remains to be seen, but a one-stop linking shop of a pinned thread can at times be quite useful. And of course even if some of these links may be obvious to political veterans, that (hopefully) isn't all we have browsing this forum and it'd be great to share the resources we use. It can be a work in progress and collaborative. I will keep this topic open, but only for suggestions of resources to add, off-topic political discussions will be deleted. Recommended news siteshttps://www.reuters.com/ - Reuters https://apnews.com/ - AP News https://www.theguardian.com/uk https://edition.cnn.com/ - CNN https://www.bbc.co.uk/ - BBC https://www.aljazeera.com/ - Al Jazeera I've chosen the above as news sites as they all have no paywall or a very limited one, tend to report international news, and are focused on reporting news largely as a matter of record, and while some among them have bias, are not captured by it. Reading about a news story on these sites is likely to give you most of the relevant facts. United Kingdom-focusedgov.uk - just in general tbh, though every British citizen should already know how good it is. Politics-related, they have a whole section below 'Services and Information' on the main page which can lead you to Department pages, policy papers, research and other useful sources to find out what the government is actually up to. https://www.ons.gov.uk/ - National statistics collected through ONS. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ - The official home for all UK laws and their full wording. https://www.parliament.uk/ - The site for Parliament publications, also https://hansard.parliament.uk/ which is a record of all Parliamentary debates. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/constituency-dashboard/ - Localised data for every constituency in the UK. https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ - A record of all MP votes on various bills, as well as any other activities notable enough to record (such as public appearances). Note that many MPs will be whipped with their party on key votes, but still a useful indication of an individual MP's priorities. https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/homepage.html - Electoral predictions and MRP models. Tends to use uniform swing but a useful outlook at the current snapshot of polls into reality. https://fullfact.org/ - A prominent fact-checking site. https://yougov.co.uk/ - One of our most prominent pollsters, also a repository for one source of public opinion on politicians, but also anything else, like TV shows or football clubs. https://wheredoesitallgo.org/ - A visualisation of current UK spending, using OBR data in a pretty pie chart. Hopefully gets maintained. United States-focusedhttps://www.congress.gov/ - A library of US federal laws. https://www.politico.com/ - Analysis and news on day-to-day political stores in the US. https://www.270towin.com/ - An site on simulating upcoming elections in the US. ROTWCanadian, Australian, French, German, anywhere else: sites to go here. Can't think of anything right now. Got this idea after seeing wheredoesitallgo on r/ukpolitics and wanting somewhere to store links to things like this (and hopefully use it more in debates without trawling around on centralised search engines for ages). Any suggestions for things I've missed, very welcome.

Grimsby is 95% white. Most of these people do not have personal experience of immigration. It's a scapegoat that they have latched onto because they live in an area that sadly has seen no investment from businesses or the government and has left it quite poor, so 'all the money must be going somewhere else'*. Reform won't solve their problems, and ideally they would have been lead to an honest, justice-seeking politician, but a grifter has become their most familiar anti-establishment politician, so that's who they gravitate towards. Their assessment of what has gone wrong for the country is flawed, but this is why politicians need to do their best to inform, it's why every Labour politician repeats the government lines of what they've been up to to the point where it's repetitive, they need people to hear what they have done. *for this part of the internet at least, I have an idea to combat such misinformation.

Trump is eliminating the Department Of Education. but worry not, I'm sure there'll be a reasonable explanation for why the Republicans want to fuck up the education of American students any minute now.

(bit odd to randomly bump a year-old ranking thread like that but hey-ho) I normally do a May ranking as well as a March ranking, shame, I would have put Doomsday Blue at a far and away #1, at nearly a year later I'm still blown away by how good that performance was. Might be my favourite Eurovision entry of the 20s so far.

I mean, I agree, I prefer to stick to the facts and there is no evidence of any wide-scale vote rigging in the 2024 election, and left-wing people who insist there was, a thankfully small number, lose the high ground a bit from Trump's couping lot from Jan 6. What is undeniable though is that Elon poured a lot of money into helping Trump get elected, as well as basically swing the central operating apparatus of a large social media site into campaigning for him, which is somewhat against the spirit if not the rules of fair elections and coming from a UK political background with strict campaigning spending limits, has me pretty aghast. The common argument is that 'he's a private citizen', but most private citizens do not have the resources to spend so much, and he seems unique among billionaires in his recent obsession (without too much psychoanalysis, getting divorced and clearly being narcissistic has helped this), plus even the biggest donors normally don't tend to end up with huge roles in the resulting administration which adds to the feeling that he bought it. It's a problem with American media in general, they're slavish towards their ideological benefactors without holding truth to power in the way European broadcast media tends to, and they essentially turn regular consumers of their media content into electoral zombies. But really, far better use of energy to look towards what's next and in America that seems to be a choice between Schumer's defeatism and inability to grasp the scale of the problem Tim Walz is doing a decent set of town halls though, he's clearly doing his best to set himself out as a leader of some kind within the Democratic party, which they sorely need. also re the above clip, lel

Japan first nation through to the 2026 WC today! as usual of course due to their strength compared to most Asian teams and the early dates of the qualifiers but I have this impression they are doing well potentially for the finals.

(or it could even have been page 27 being the last page for over a year because now I've started a new page it doesn't seem to be there? people post in my NT more thx)

I had noticed this, when rejigging my first post to get rid of all the links that had been turned into embeds (I will rebuild them once I get a spare moment). Bøtanikkä's thread is even older and doesn't have this issue, so it's probably just some formatting thing that's on the first page of mine. I'll see if I can fix it up, I'd rather keep the thread going in perpetuity if thread post limits aren't a thing because then I have my country's whole history easily accessible. until then, avoid the first page if that bothers you (but it seems to fix itself if you click off to the forums)

Patty Gurdy - Peg Leg Silly-Billy (feat. Christopher Bowes) It's about that time of year where I get swept away by a nautical ditty, and Patty Gurdy, the folksy German pop singer with expertise on the obscure instrument known as a gurdy has provided. She also has connections with a bunch of artists in the European folk metal space that she collabed on her latest release Tavern, including Marko Hietala, formerly of Nightwish, Adaya of Faun, and of course Christopher Bowes of Alestorm, who joined her on my entry, 'Peg-Leg Silly-Billy'. Her previous BJSC entry 'Brighter Days Come' is also on this album. 'Peg-Leg Silly Billy' is a very good, if light-hearted, addicting track and I love the way Christopher's incremental verses give the energy for Patty's incredible chorus. Actually I first became aware of Patty prior even to her appearance in Germany's Eurovision selection process, it was when she sang on one of Alestorm's career highlights so far (out of MANY), 2020's 'Zombies Ate My Pirate Ship', a heartwrenching Alestorm "ballad" about xylophagic undead causing terror to an honest pirate - listen below if you want more collabs in this fashion (and this isn't the only other one they've done! she also collabed with them on a 2024 song)