I don’t want for a Labour loss at the next General, but we pay a price as a nation when the primary opposition is a shambles. Right now the Tory disarray is handing legitimacy and weight to an even further right, even less competent alternative.

Years ago I might have said the same. The MS is utter guff now and has been for a while.

No, we don’t. We have a trickle of illegal immigrants and until this month a batshit plan to fly the ones that got caught to Rwanda if they tried to claim asylum.

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, Farage is the party, and though they lulled, Farage is so closely associated with the party people are often looking past the party just to him.

Reform is basically rebranded UKIP, and that’s been around since 1993. (Or 1991 if you want to go with the founding of the original anti-Federal Europe group).

We’ll see about Suffragette. The Metropolitan has two more syllables and doesn’t get abbreviated, but Lizzie does, and that has one less than Metropolitan.

I would say Liberty is the weakest by far. The rest I’m fairly happy with (after initially wondering why they didn’t bring back East London Line, or North London Line)

Nothing to add here but you’ve had a bunch of great answers; thanks to all the respondents and to OP for being super candid. This thread was a great read!

I listen to mostly upbeat stuff.

Surrealist/Absurd Comedy

• The Beef and Dairy Network
• Regular Features

Dungeons & Dragons

• Dungeons and Daddies
• The Adventure Zone

Star Trek

• The Greatest Generation
• Greatest Trek

I wouldn’t read into it; Deadline end most articles that mention a production with a small synopsis.

I think you’ve got some wonderful answers here already so I just want to add something that a few points brought to mind.

In my opinion one can authentically play a trait without playing a diagnosis. A great example of this is Drax in the MCU. He isn’t “the autistic one” he’s the guy with hyper literal interpretation. That autistic (amongst other classes) people relate that and feel seen isn’t because he’s “being autistic” but because he sees things like them; the other characters regard that and it somewhat authentically shows the outcomes one such person might have in these wild tales.

You can represent elements of neurodivergence without going all in on an ND character that might only serve to entrench stigma.

My parents started calling me it about thirty years ago; it’s either an allusion to the fact I have broken so many bones, or a tacit admission that I was an unplanned pregnancy. Or both.

The hivemind is an analogy for the way the average person had turned on the war and viewed it as a national disgrace. Just watch that opening act of Rambo, the soldiers returning from Nam late in the conflict came home to joblessness and derision. A far cry from the parades and support of the GI bill the generation before had.

Haldeman is trying to show a universal truth of long wars, at some point the home you left stops existing, and you return to a place that isn’t what you fought for in the first place, though of course Haldeman takes this to absurdity almost. Like many vets of Vietnam Mandela and his fellow soldiers are now so feared and removed that society doesn’t have a mechanism for integration. Haldeman uses genetic and cultural shifts to represent the more subtle social ones.

Forever War and Forever Free are an amazing duo. I don’t think they are amateurish though, Haldeman writes these exactly as they need to be to represent the difficulty Vietnam vets faced returning home.

Edit: I confused the novels Forever Free and Forever Peace. Forever Free is the duet to Forever War, while Forever Peace is disconnected but plays with similar themes as both Forever War and Ender’s Game.

Aye, they added a fair bit of salt to their tea that day!

Just to be clear, asking people to confirm they agree to Israel’s right to exist is not the same as pledging loyalty. I don’t know if it’s a translation error or a deliberate attempt to make the point seem worse.

It’s radical to me that someone things tying people’s naturalisation to a foreign policy position is a good idea, is seems a pretty shitty one, but they aren’t asking for a blood oath.

This photo was taken years and years ago, look how young Neil Gaiman is in it.

It’s my general opinion that you’re right. Specifically I think Blair had questions and raised them with the closest Cabinet member to the issue; it was Mandelson’s responsibility to have someone look into it at length.

Ultimately, and I believe this of all PMs, we can’t afford as a nation for them to be in the business of bug tracking. They have to have some trust their governmental departments are on top of the tech. This goes double the further back you go, general computer literacy drops. I can’t hold Blair, or Major, to account for not understanding the broad reach of these sorts of flaws.

What I can’t understand is how the Post Office and Fujitsu got away without a pen test on the software; especially when their core argument was “it is impossible to remotely access”.

My P1 teacher recognised me at 32…

Did they, or has he taken Rustic Hospitality?