Rayvin

The thing that annoys me a bit in all this is that the reports at the start of the season were that he was pushing us to sign a new deal, and we were dragging our feet because of how long he had left. That does make sense in a way but it's not worked out very well.

He's now asking for all of Ukraine's energy, minerals and natural resources, with no security guarantees...

That looks like the print edition, it was nowhere to be seen on the online one. I'm also going to add, although you'll know this, that they've made the focus on everything other than the cuts which she has, in the small print, been 'forced' to do. It's about tax rises and the economy failing to kick on. In other words it's all selectively critical and ignoring the things that they should be happy about. This supports the what I said - pandering to these people is pointless, none of them actually care about reality.

The reports are that he turned down our first offer of a new contract, though as ever these are just reports rather than anyone seemingly stating fact. We've subsequently shelved it again, perhaps waiting to see where we finish in order to determine what can be offered based on how high we finish. I don't think that's necessarily any great cause for concern, but we'll see I guess.

Went and checked the Guardian for how these cuts (and now further tax rises) are being reported - absolute outrage from everyone in sight. No worries though, it's not aimed at winning over the enemy middle class lefties. It's aimed at winning over Reform voting morons...! Onwards to the Daily Mail then! Wait... there's nothing here? Top story about a submarine accident, something about Prince Harry, couple of things about Trump... celebrity tat.. Nothing on Labour and these policies. How surprising. It's almost like the people they're trying to win over are disingenuous and don't give a fuck. Weird.

Fair. Completely fair. I really hope you and your wife don't get caught in this though.

Once this fiasco is over with, how do the Democrats respond? Do they go back and imprison all these people again? Do they lock up the Trump administration. I personally think optics be damned, they should go for the entire fucking platform - but then I suppose it means the next time this comes up, Trump 2.0 will just do the same thing, like it normalises it.

I sometimes think about going into it but between what you've outlined and the fact that it would take over my entire life until I die, I just don't think I'm prepared to 'give' that much of my life for this country. And yes they'll all be under orders to toe the line at the moment, I refuse to believe all these people are this small minded. Which somehow actually makes it all the more sad.

Like, who do Labour think they're kidding on this shit. Seriously. None of the right wing culture war losers are going to look at any of this and think 'actually, maybe Labour are my cup of tea after all'. It is never, ever going to happen. This posturing achieves absolutely nothing.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/mar/26/university-of-sussex-fined-freedom-of-speech-investigation-kathleen-stock University of Sussex fined half a million for protecting trans people Bridget out in front claiming that Free Speech is a must. They might be right tbh, but in this climate I'm sorely tempted to assume they aren't.

I actually don't have a very informed view of Rogan, but people talk about him like he's the arbiter of common sense. He seems hugely significant in politics now in an almost Oprah like way.

Yeah and he always kinda was, but the reality at the heart of it is that they are speaking to a genuine issue, just in a really unhelpful way. They would hold up the most extreme "woke" positions, suggest they were literally around the corner for lived reality, and then tear them apart. And on that stuff, they were right... but that stuff is like super fringe, really unrepresentative material. In the end my view was that both sides were extreme positions who needed each other to survive, and I think that remains the case even now. Trump is always harping on about the radical left, it's just that he's thrown that blanket over a lot more people than actually exist within it. I mean I didn't wake up from that and realise that the other side was right, I just woke up and realised that neither side were living in reality. Peterson for me at least was a difficult one because a lot of his psych stuff was genuinely helpful to me. I mean he's a wreck now anyway, all this has totaled him mentally. I don't actually think he was really one of the ringleaders or anything, just someone who tried to ride the wave and was consumed. The other seductive aspect to all this is the harnessing of a very real and very frustrated desire to just change the shit that we live in. I think that resonates for a lot of people - the right harnessed it, the left were beaten back.

I'm going to add that when I first joined here in my mid 20s, I was leaning toward all of this noise. I had my own insecurities from various childhood traumas that some of this anti-feminist/SJW stuff fed into and I found it quite validating at the time to see people push back against things that made me feel attacked. In the end it was actually Brexit that saved me from it tbh - that was the first time I really appreciated how many of these people were just straight up lying to me. Once the mask slipped I found I could suddenly see all of it for what it was, I went into therapy and properly dealt with my insecurity and the warped perspectives it could sometimes take me to. But I suspect it's that basic issue across a lot of people that makes this stuff so successful. It validates them when they feel attacked. Anyway, some of these guys ended up with huge platforms off the back of all of it, and several of them were amongst those exposed as having been on Russian payroll a year or so ago. I guess we don't know exactly when that started but even so, Russia either saw a huge opportunity in this or instigated it.

Right, so the easiest way to explain it from the mainstream point of view, is that it was a large group of male gamers attacking a female developer/other women out of misogyny. The media sticks to this line but it really doesn't do it justice. The gamergate group at the time claimed that it was about ethics in video games journalism and a protest against mass collusion of media outlets. It wasn't that - I mean that's a legitimate point even now, but that's not what this was about. The gamergaters explain their position per the following video - please note it's written for adolescent gamers and you may find the delivery annoying, but in terms of setting out the actual sequencing of events, it covers everything and explains how it became the culture war - be warned, you'll be amazed at how petty and insignificant the whole thing feels, at least from its origins: The short version is - a guy and a girl who were prominent in the gaming community broke up. The girl cheated on the guy. He wrote a blog post about how awful she was. A section of the gaming community said some mean things about her. She complained to gaming journalists/media people she was friends with - they all came together/colluded to attack the wider gaming community for being incels/misogynists. The wider gaming community lost its shit about being called out like that and the notion of "SJW" was defined for the first time and an organised resistance to it was created. This became a months long pitched battle that consumed a large percentage of gamers in some form or another, and as we now know, the anti-SJW side won. Because it's their ongoing narrative that now shapes the culture war even outside the online space. The whole pushback against wokeism is the same exact phenomenon, and has its roots in gamergate. Youtube became the key battleground and it's where lots of prominent content creators were set up to discuss these anti-feminists/anti-SJW talking points. Sargon of Akkad was a key one, he's still going and now runs a private media channel that supports Reform. Jordan Peterson could not have become prominent without this, in fact the movement adopted him more than he adopted it. The whole community leaned into and supported people like Joe Rogan, so he became aligned with those values. Shapiro is another one, but there were plenty of them. Not all of them still exist but they were the guys who did the original work laying the foundations for people like Andrew Tate. It's also why they dominate social media, because they've been doing this for 11 years now. Gamergate was the first battle we lost, and we lost it because when the real media picked it up, they went with the 'all gamers are incels' line and alienated a lot of people immediately. It never really stopped after that point, it just morphed into other things. The Alt Right came from it. MAGA. I think it probably even did enough to tip Brexit tbh (all the talking heads it spawned were anti-EU, all getting millions of views). I know it's stupid and ridiculous given what it was about, but... butterflies and hurricanes.

@PaddockLad https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddit-twitter-cec/index.html I've long attached gamergate to modern culture war as the original flashpoint, but it dawns on me now that this was also most likely a Russian Psyop/the start of all this on their end too? It involved a lot of the people who at least eventually became funded through the right wing back channels on social media. Cadwalladr mentions 2014 being the start of the information war because of Crimea, but Gamergate was the same year and it literally did lay the foundations online for all of this. Nice to see CNN catching up there 11 years after the fact. Think I was onto that analysis around the first time Trump was elected...

Maybe they're waiting on the timing. Make people feel the pain now and then turn around and point the finger at Brexit based on economic realities nearer the time and when Trump has pushed everyone into a more pro-EU stance - then at Reform from that point on. If they couple that with the good start they've made on reducing immigration then maybe they get away with it - it could work if they genuinely manage to demonstrate success against immigration numbers. That's my 4D chess run at it at least.

Where is that national conversation about why we need immigration in all this? I mean there seems to be this assumption on behalf of the Reformers that immigration is being done because of left wing philosophy rather than a clear and defined need. Brexit should be used as a shining example of the consequence of Reform - vote to keep immigrants out, impoverish the nation. That's literally the trade off. Where is that conversation happening? Why is it not being screamed from the hilltops at this point? Either we take pensions and healthcare off the elderly and let them die early, or we have to keep taking immigrants. And as a few people on here have said - and increasingly in my circles - people are eyeing moving to Europe to escape the shitty quality of life that Britain now offers. We have low wages, high costs, and utterly no chance of fixing any of it while the lunatics are a constant threat on the sidelines. Just why give this country any more of our intelligence, our effort, our compassion, any of it. They're not interested man. They want to run it headlong into the ground, fucking let them. Nation states are a waste of time now anyway, ideally you'd have groupings based on likeminded people.

Reddit post I saw concerning this, which feels like it could be onto something... Weird. Another leak from inside the administration that just happens to involve JD Vance breaking ranks with the president while saying markedly more sane things in a performative way while also demonstrating his conservative bonafides. Almost like his handler Peter Thiel is trying to sanewash his protege via proxy the same way he took down Gawker.

Um... is CT shilling for his crypto empire?

Is the expectation really that 100k people turn out..? That's stunning tbh.

Fair, but then either way, I just don't see it ending well for him. Money be damned.

I reckon Musk has a very public fall from grace tbh. He's really addicted to the attention he gets, which is what seems to drive everything he does. I don't think he really believes in anything with any conviction, just latches on to things that seem to make sense to him in a particular moment and then lets his ego run wild with it. "I believe this and I'm the richest man in the world, so it must be true". There's a video doing the rounds of him balancing silverware on his finger at one of the administration dinner parties. He manages to get 3 to balance and then holds it aloft so that everyone can see, checking around to make sure people are watching. Like an actual child.

I think they were spooked by the capital flight reports when they came into power. https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/millionaires-leave-uk/

Christ, this reads like a greatest hits of my own posts from before the election... I think I have some sympathy with them in a way - we voted to be poorer, this is what being poorer looks like. There's a whole lot of Brexity chickens coming home to roost here. Someone needed to take the fantasy around Brexit and convert it into the reality, that's what Labour are doing. They can't go after the rich because it would be anti-growth, so they have to go for "efficiencies". On the other hand, New Labour backing austerity was the reason Corbyn won all those years ago, and it seems that the party remains determined to follow those principles even now in order to 'prove' that they're reliable with the economy and tough on the enemy the middle classes. The thing that boggles my mind somewhat is that they are doing all of this in favour of winning over... who? This is all too tribal now for any of this policy stuff to matter, they get painted as commies either way. They'd be far better off IMO improving people's lives with policies that all of them, and we, believe in - not this soft right bullshit that does nothing effectual anyway. Not being able to back our own policies and views when we have political power really just tells the other side that they've won. That we've surrendered the argument wholesale. And when the next election comes along, they'll still expect you and I to vote for them to keep the greater evil at bay, despite standing for almost nothing we believe in, putting our kids in permanent debt to develop an education, squeezing our wages, backing corporations replacing us with AI, and reneging on our climate change priorities. They do not deserve our vote, and didn't last time out either IMO. But admitting that and acting on it means losing to something worse.

The thing is, invading Greenland/Canada isn't even polling well in the US. It's not like Argentina doing it with the Falklands where a sense of nationalism could be inspired around it. If anything, his constant talk about this is to his detriment. That's why it seems so likely that he actually does want to do this. I am actually going to have to stop reading the news tbh, I think I'm close to beaten now on all fronts politically.