Everything posted by Brett-Butler
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Who is your political hero?
I find it really hard to find political figures to idolise, especially those still living. Having said that, it recent times I've been drawn to the writings of Dorothy Day, who combined her Catholic faith with her radical social activism as part of the Catholic Workers movement. Her autobiography "The Long Loneliness" makes for fascinating reading of the labour movement in the United States in the early-mid 20th Century, and her role within it. Well worth reading, even if you're not interesting in the Catholic-y bits, I imagine a lot of you will find the parts about the labour movement really eye-opening.
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Baddiel, Skinner & Lightning Seeds - Three Lions 2022
If it's anything like the Three Lions 2010 version with Russell Brand, I dread it won't be that good. Although it seems like this one will be credited to Baddiel, Skinner & The Lightning Seeds, which is smarter in that the original versions will be combined for chart purposes.
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iTunes Weekly Thread w/c 2nd April 2021
Helloween, now there’s a band I never thought I’d see in the iTunes chart, especially with a new song. “I Want Out” takes me back to Limewire days.
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Coronavirus Discussion
45-49 year olds now being offered the vaccine in Northern Ireland. Inching ever closer to me getting a prick.
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Louis Theroux
He’s met Joe Exotic in the past for a prior documentary, albeit not focusing exclusively on him, so it could be showing us more footage from that, adding more context with things that have happened since then.
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By-elections 2024
NIP are running Thelma Walker, who lost her seat in Colne Valley in 2019 whilst running for Labour. With Hilton Dawson running for the North East Party, there are now 3 ex-Labour MPs due to run in Hartlepool.
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Should Scotland get an indyref2?
From my understanding of the Scottish voting system, Alba are more likely to funnel support away from Labour/Tories/Greens due to the way the voting system works in Scotland. As the SNP are likely to hoover up a lot of the individual constituency votes in the election (which runs on the 1st past the post system), it makes it harder for the party to then pick up seats on the List system, which used the d'Hondt system, which first takes into account seats one in FPTP before starting its reallocation. Alba are only standing on the lists, which mean that they are less likely to split the vote in the part of the vote the SNP are likely to do incredibly well in, so voting for the SNP in the list system is somewhat of a waste, hence what Alba are intending to do by encouraging indie supporters to vote for them in the list to try to get more pro-Independence MSPs in Holyrood. Also, having now educated myself on the Scottish electoral system, I must say it is a rather silly, nonsensical system, particularly its constituency/list split. I very much prefer the STV form of PR as per Stormont/the Dail.
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The Official Labour Foot-Shoot Thread, Mk II
Dodds has the problem that she was made Shadow Chancellor during a pandemic, so of course she's not going to have built up a profile over the past few months, so have no idea why people suddenly think that she's the problem. When things return to near normality, if she has the same issues that I could understand, but for now seems a bit of a nothing burger.
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Irish General Election
It will stumble its way to there by May 2022, but with massive blowups along the way once the COVID restrictions end.
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Coronavirus Discussion
Moderna has been approved. It's the J&J one that hasn't yet.
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By-elections 2024
You wait ages for a by-election and 2 come along at once. Neil Gray of the SNP has resigned his seat in Airdre & Shotts to run for Holyrood. This one will be an uneventful SNP hold.
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Coronavirus Discussion
Sceptical Brett remains sceptical about this story. Seems like there’s more to it than has been reported.
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Line of Duty • Series 6
Very close! It’s just off the Cavehill Road. The bookies featured in that scene is actually a fitness centre in real life.
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Line of Duty • Series 6
Literally the first scene of the series!
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By-elections 2024
The NIP claim to be filling the void that Corbyn left, seeing themselves as a socialist-style party, and appear to have tried to get Momentum on board with their campaign, so will be interesting to see if that happens (which I doubt), and how many votes they get if they do indeed run - I'd say that breaking 3 figures would be a better than expected result. Although at the moment they are still trying to register as a party, so in Hartlepool their candidate may be forced to stand as an independent. As I've implied before, if Labour wants to win seats outside of the big cities where their support is strongest, their candidates would need to be tailored to that area, so redistributive on economic issues, and more "socially conservative", or at the very least sending signals in that direction. Although as I've mentioned before, it is much easier for the Tories to move left on economics than it is for Labour to even move a small fart to the right on cultural issues.
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By-elections 2024
I see one party has already announced it's standing for the first time - the Northern Independence Party, who's main policy is for the north of England to secede from the south of England and become an independent nation. How quaint.
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By-elections 2024
I'm surprised that it's taken as long as it has for any seats to become vacant since the last general election given COVID and the age profile of many MPs. Will be interesting to see how the pandemic and the end of the Brexit process has affected support for the major parties If Labour lose the seat, I'd think that it would be likely due to the Reform Party pulling support away from them (their leader stood their last time, so I imagine he'll stand again).
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Coronavirus Discussion
I think it's partially down to less opportunity - the COVID guidelines have effectively made having sex with someone who doesn't live in your household illegal (Catholicism intensifies), so there is less chance of getting pregnant. Conversely, within my own circle of friends, five of them have had or are having babies within the period of November - July this year, although in all those cases they are either married or long-term relationships, plus they're all around the age (late 20s/early 30s) where they would be expecting to have children. There might also be some subtle peer pressure there, as it is shown that if one person in a peer group has a child, it is very likely that other members of that circle will have children. I do think that there's also the psychological impact that many people don't want to have children during times of great peril, so I'd say the interesting month to look out for is 9 months after the restrictions are finally over.
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Coronavirus Discussion
There's research being carried out to see whether there is a link between COVID-19 and Type 1 Diabetes. I wouldn't have thought that one could cause the other, but then again until relatively recently we didn't realise there was a link between heading a football and dementia, so will be following this study with interest.
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Yay! The economy!
They already do, to an extent. If you're buying a second+ house, then you begin to pay stamp duty at 3% on the entire amount of the house, rather than just on amounts above £125k (outside the current stamp duty holiday). I'm still surprised that it was George Osborne of all people that brought that in.
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Yay! The economy!
One of the announcements in the budget that I found out afterwards is that the quasi-public sector body that I work for is now no longer liable for corporation tax, which means a) there will be more money to spend on council homes in Northern Ireland, and more importantly b) my job just got slightly easier as I no longer have to compute my places corporation tax. I'm pretty sure that the introduction of a progressive corporation tax as per today's budget was one of my ideas when we did the political party teams task on BJ. I'm not saying that Rishi Sunak is a member of Buzzjack and takes his ideas from me, but I'm not saying that Rishi Sunak is not a member of Buzzjack and has never taken any direction from me.
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Coronavirus Discussion
Northern Ireland has released its coming out of lockdown roadmap. No dates are included as to when the restrictions are to ease, much to many people's annoyance, as it means planning for reopening will be tricky. The next review of restrictions will be on March 16th.
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BBC3 is to return as a real channel!!
The licence also covers radio and the BBC iPlayer (you can’t use the latter without it).
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BBC3 is to return as a real channel!!
To quote myself when this was rumoured: “ Great stuff, it will keep the riff-raff away from BBC4.”
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Coronavirus Discussion
Northern Ireland's opening up vaccines to 60-64 year olds, so my girlfriend's mum will be able to sign up for it, which I'm grateful for.