Iz 🌟

_cu279B_mf0 thanks for giving me a throughline to the previous Tory thread references to honesty Kemi. Discuss the unwelcome attempts at regaining relevancy that the battered and defeated Tory party does over the next few years.

He's got a large amount of rallies in NC, the single state he's running defense in, for someone who's supposedly the favourite. He's an old man who needs put up to rest, tired and stumbling all over the place, campaigning taking its toll. In contrast, Biden is looking chipper in every public appearance now he's been freed from the burdens of running. Really been an excellent president.

I mean quite. The whole 'first X' thing is such a spurious and irrelevant criticism to level at Labour, it matters far more what each politician will do for each community now it's quite clear that anyone can make it to the top. Badenoch isn't going to have favourable policies for working class communities, many of whom are minorities. I'm funnier than that. I'll put one up though soonish.

Conservatives also tend to have four leaders in the same timeframe it takes Labour to have one. Badenoch will be awful but likely ineffectual so good stuff.

What on earth are the axes on that graph? To give some reality, it's fallen a cent against the dollar in the last 48 hours and has fallen minus seven cents since this time last year. Sure, it's reacting to borrowing (but this time needed borrowing instead of wasteful dumb-con-libertarian borrowing), but I don't think there's any signs it's irrecoverable, there are fluctuations like that all the time, the media are likely again overreacting to totally normal things and making them sound apocalyptic.

They're all about equally close, though the polls tightening and refusing to move in almost all of the swing states this last month has been suspiciously static and has caused suspicions of poll herding for those reasons you state, such that even if some polls find results different from a virtual tie, they compensate their model to adjust closer. FWIW I'm at this stage more confident about Dems winning PA than I am them winning WI. Also yes there are lots of dodgy red polls and commentators. There also seems to be a layer of 'non-partisan' ones that pride themselves on being supposedly neutral yet they always have their priors and results pointing to a Trump and Republican victory. Curious. I think drawing too many conclusions from early vote, crosstabs or poll analysis is getting yourself into the weeds, but the broader picture is that polls that aren't about intention to vote (so enthusiasm, favourability, voter grouping opinions) are looking pretty positive for the Democrats getting a good voting environment to see them over the line.

Additionally, anyone given a prominent speaker position for a campaign like that, in that manner, has language signed off by the campaign. I don't see why one would defend the Trump campaign (from anything, but specifically this for now) from being associated with this person that they chose to appear at their rally. It's not like he was the only one either, the evening was packed with white nationalists and racists, because that's who the Trump campaign is for.

Quite, any other candidate, any other campaign would have been sunk from the huge barrage of racist, fascist rhetoric that has come out, from 'she happened to turn black', to stirring up a pogrom against Haitians after the debate, to John Kelly's relating of his praising of Hitler. These are all individual campaign-ending events, and they only haven't sunk the campaign because he's Trump and the media do not do their due diligence when it comes to condemning him in the way they would do anyone else who said the offensive things he does. The Puerto Rico debacle probably only gained traction because it didn't have Trump at the centre of it, because the media have a huge blindspot for him. That and the Madison Square Garden rally was only not the most fascist thing ever done at that venue in New York because the literal Nazis went on tour there. It would be hilarious and highly deserved if it causes him to lose the big Puerto Rican diaspora states like *checks notes* Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, but something like that should have caused the media cycle to whip up in condemnation long before.

jinxed this by relistening to their discography the other week. would very much appreciate some new material from them, they have such a lineup of incredible and diverse songs even among the 4 albums we do have

Yeah, there are some decent things in the budget for public transport, like putting HS2 in Euston, future investment in certain bus and train routes, but keeping fuel duty in while allowing the very popular bus fare cap to go up is going to overshadow that part of it. The worst thing about this government so far is an inability to understand how cutting something to save a small amount of money is not worth the outcry and the comparatively huge benefits that it provides. I was never one to go to bat for the WFA because I'm not old and as much as I'm against making things mean-tested unnecessarily some wastage was clearly there, but the saving was not worth the hit to the government's reputation. Similarly, even though the government came up with figures showing that the bus cap was losing them money by only providing 71-90p's worth of investment for every pound spent, that isn't going to fly when people who use the bus now have a 50% increase of what they have to pay. For people who use buses to get to work, that's losing hundreds of pounds over the year that they may well not have to spare, and they will directly blame Labour for that. Direct example for myself as to why this is just a dumb idea, I use the bus sometimes to get into town as it's about equal cost to parking there. An increase is going to make me reconsider it and start clogging up the town centre with a vehicle that doesn't need to be there. Countries with functioning large urban areas get this right and massively subsidise public transport to make it usable and declog the centres of car traffic - and the Tories were on the right track if not perfect (should have been even cheaper) with this policy, so very disappointing Labour instantly start treating it as a fee that you just start increasing annually. That said, real positive to see income tax thresholds unfrozen and to go with inflation in the future, capital gains tax up, and the minimum wage rising. It's a much more positive budget than I was expecting and the right sort of language from a government coming out of tough economic times and providing enough investment to ensure they don't happen again. Hope that that all gets realised and it's treated relatively well by the press, who seem to have been giving Labour a slight reprieve the last few days, although that's probably because they're more interested in what's happening across the Atlantic.

Exactly all of this. This is something that we enter to show off something good from our natural music discovering journey, and while the competition is fun, people do get hung up on form, streaks, outcomes etc. instead of it being fun to do well AND an opportunity to discover music. Sucks when a song you've sent and like doesn't do well but it is not personal, it was probably just more niche or other people didn't agree. Do I think the odds/predictions affect things? Probably yes, especially if one hasn't heard the songs and then goes in with preconceived expectations, which is why if I do predict, I predict later on, and wouldn't recommend to anyone that they read the odds thread before listening. Does it matter? Probably not. This is a social thing as much as it is a game and competition and there should be more talk about what will do well, I tend to remember contests with active odds threads far more than those with dead ones.

That is a really good set of qualifiers overall - final about to come for being very strong indeed. Sorry to lose moonvampire and Joanna Newsom from the other semi but on the whole, a good night. Thanks for hosting Leww

oh excellent to see Aelandor through, that's one of their best for a while, I can never resist a bit of a pirate theme. thank you for seeing my song through :heart:

That is a really close semi damn, I have a bad feeling about this for some songs I'd like to see through.

Shame about Lotunia coming last, that was a really good song lyrically, I'd hoped it would have done a bit better than that.

there were some real fantastic songs in my semi, hope they all get through

Was going to ask you about this because that wasn't matching up with the numbers I was seeing for Clark County - taking a look into it further I was seeing the mail-in numbers where they're 40k ahead, while early-in-person is dominated by Reps. I'm not overly concerned about it though, Nevada's early signs have been bad for Dems before and they've turned it around, the lead in early in-person voting for Reps is likely to be the high-propensity voters voting anyway, and Nevada recently moved to voters being automatically registered as unaffiliated, so the young Dem voters may well indeed be registered as independents. Besides, even if all of that is wrong, it's the least important swing state as it doesn't matter for who wins the presidency in most of the likely combinations.

I wouldn't use RealClearPolling/RealClearPolitics, quite apart from having a dodgy site that breaks when I maneuver around it they don't do even the bare minimum of filtering when it comes to dodgy polls, hence for the last couple of cycles they've had a Republican bias compared to other poll aggregators - hence every polling commentator with a Republican bias (especially those that like to pretend they're 'objective') uses them religiously. At least 538 does the bare minimum there. The NYT/Siena poll that has them both on 48 is worrying though, as that is pointing to a Harris loss. Signs from early voting and limited polling on demographic breakdowns as such has me a bit more positive though, basically Republicans are early voting more than they did in 2020 and Democrats slightly less, yet the margins of party registrations are also roughly where they were in 2020 - and also independents (harder to poll), at least in states where you're automatically registered independent at 18, seem to be younger and therefore breaking for Harris more. Anyway the supposedly liberal pro-democracy Washington Post is choosing not to endorse a candidate, so we know which winner the capital class want.

+25 Bring Me The Horizon - Parasite Eve +24 My Chemical Romance - The Foundations of Decay +23 Taylor Swift & Bon Iver – Exile +22 Galantis - Runaway (U & I) +21 Blossoms - Charlemagne +20 Grimes - Kill V. Maim +19 Clean Bandit (feat. Anne-Marie & Sean Paul) - Rockabye +18 Hozier - Take Me To Church +17 Arcade Fire - Everything Now +16 Grimes - Flesh Without Blood +15 Clean Bandit (feat. Jess Glynne) - Rather Be +14 Taylor Swift - Out of The Woods +13 Ava Max - Sweet But Psycho +12 MGMT - Little Dark Age +11 ABBA - Don’t Shut Me Down +10 Let's Eat Grandma - Happy New Year +9 Dua Lipa - Break My Heart +8 Wolf Alice - Don't Delete The Kisses +7 Ariana Grande (feat. Zedd) - Break Free +6 Tones and I - Dance Monkey +5 Lil Nas X & Jack Harlow - Industry Baby +4 Christine And The Queens - Tilted / Christine +3 Dua Lipa - Love Again +2 Avicii (feat. Dan Tyminski) - Hey Brother +1 Lana Del Rey - West Coast

+25 Metric - Doomscroller +24 Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper – Shallow +23 Ghost - Mary On A Cross +22 Go_A - Shum +21 Zhu - Faded +20 Lilly Wood and The Prick - Prayer In C (Robin Schulz Remix) +19 Chainsmokers (feat. Halsey) - Closer +18 FKA Twigs - Two Weeks +17 Lorde - Team +16 Rina Sawayama - XS +15 Lil Nas X - Montero (Call Me By Your Name) +14 Mr. Probz - Waves (Robin Schulz Remix) +13 Weeknd - In Your Eyes +12 alt-J - 3WW +11 Caroline Polachek - Welcome to My Island +10 Paramore - This Is Why +9 Mark Ronson (feat. Bruno Mars) - Uptown Funk +8 Chainsmokers (feat. ROZES) - Roses +7 Little Mix - Touch +6 Noah Kahan - Stick Season +5 xx – On Hold +4 Taylor Swift - Wildest Dreams +3 Janelle Monáe - Make Me Feel +2 Måneskin - I Wanna Be Your Slave +1 Panic! At The Disco - High Hopes

For me, it's the way Trump starts alleging it's breaking election law for a few volunteers with the spare time to cross the Atlantic to add their own individual labour only to the Democratic campaign... and then meanwhile you have Elon Musk jumping around like a dipshit (credit: Tim Walz) and promising cash giveaways for votes for Trump and apparently that, which comes in at about number one of things that are illegal in UK political campaigning, apparently that's all fine. OKAY THEN

On the one hand, that he's dominating the conversation about the election in a way that Kamala isn't, nearly every talking point is framed according to Trump/Republican talking points (in part because of the IDIOTIC DNC campaign team that are allergic to challenging Republican framing), that McDonalds stunt was a rare good move from his team, and yes the polls are creeping up for him. It is certainly very possible he wins. On the other, the needle shift in the polls between now and a month ago has me, as I've detailed above, suspicious in that there's not much of an underlying cause. I don't like saying to distrust the polls, they're right more than they're not, it's their job after all but there's been enough conversation about flooding the zone and prior fundamentals etc that I at least feel reasonably confident in suspecting that if there's a polling miss at this point, it feels more likely that it will be in the Democrats' favour than the Republicans. (slightly incredulous that media both sides of the pond have chosen today to get angry at political volunteers from the UK flying themselves out to knock doors for Kamala, when it affects them too and is far from a new thing)

Lb3VKnzuDeE BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD, a highlight album track off of Canadian post-rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor's latest album NO TITLE AS OF FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD, a reference to the tragedy in Gaza, and a number that has sadly only increased in the time since that title was finalised. As with most post-rock instrumentals, the title and context surrounding the track is key to the artistic intent, hence why I've put an update in my thread subtitle. My first foray into post-rock, and something that's spurred me into getting into the whole of GY!BE's catalogue. Beyond that, I just have 13 minutes and 36 seconds* of beautiful music for you this month, do with it what you will x *almost twice as long as Jvnko Still Loves You, my previous longest entry

I've started doing some of the same! Some of their 20-minute tracks are of the sort where one listen just blows me away ('Storm') and I need some time to digest it so it might take me a while. Newest album is all incredible, I wouldn't normally think to make an entry out of this kind of thing but while going through the album I took a look at my back catalogue and realised I hadn't sent any post-rock at all and that's something that really needed to change given how often they're among my favourite entries. Father John Misty is a name I've heard a lot myself and always thought I should give a listen to but never actually done so really interested to hear yours.

I was going to see this movie but plans changed before I knew there was a following, might have to see where I can find it now it's out of my local cinema +1 🥺