What I find so dumb about naming children Khaleesi is that:

a) It’s not the name of a character anyway. Apparently a lot of casual fans thought Dany’s actual name was Khaleesi because several other characters often addressed her by her title. So there’s a good chance that either these parents are casual fans who nonetheless then misnamed their child after a character, or they are serious fans who named their child in a way that will lead other people to infer her parents were casual fans. (Nothing wrong with being a casual fan, but I’d find it a bit dumb to name my child after an IP that I was only loosely into…)

b) The child is six years old. The final episode aired only five years ago. That means they named their child before Dany’s story had even concluded. George RR Martin had been dropping hints throughout the book series that Dany might or might not end up as a genocidal mad queen like her father (the TV show had laid the groundwork for this less effectively, which is in part why the abruptness of her turn was so unpopular) and I find it bizarre that a parent would name a kid after a character who might still end up as a murderous tyrant

I think about the amount of thought and research that many of my friends have conducted when naming their children (including looking up famous real and fictional people with that name, doing word associations, etc). Then these guys come along and just say ‘fuck it, let’s just call her after that blonde girl off TV, Khaleesi I think?’

He didn’t ‘appear’ to justify the rioting.

He literally said ‘of course it’s politically justified!’ There’s no ambiguity here.

No, Russian bots lack physical form and hence aren’t able to turn up in person to in-person events. So there was probably one genuine radicalised thug in attendance.

That is obviously untrue. I’m a second-gen immigrant and hard-Remain/Rejoin, Schengen-supporting-as-an-eventual-bridge-to-global-free-movement, neoliberal shill, who disagrees hugely with Labour’s cautious official stance on immigration (although I doubt it’s what Starmer and his senior team - Remain-voting, 2nd referendum supporters to a person - actually believe).

Even I can see that Starmer is a million times better than Farage - the guy who campaigned for a freeze on all non-NHS immigration, a ban on immigrants bringing their partners and children to the UK, supported the Rwanda scheme, and more generally has made a whole career out of demonising immigrants and refugees.

Imagine being so far off to the left than you can no longer tell the difference between Keir Starmer and Nigel fucking Farage 😂

You can’t just say ‘austerity’ every time a Chancellor decides not to spend even more money…

Government spending in the UK today accounts for 45% of GDP. The state that the Tories have bequeathed to Labour represents a significantly larger share of the UK economy than it did at any point in Gordon Brown’s decade as Chancellor. The state today is bigger than it was when the Atlee government left office. In fact the only post-WW2 years in which the state has been bigger than in the Sunak years were very briefly for a couple of years in the mid-1970s and then in 2009-11. The only people in this country for whom a state of today’s size is normal relative to most of their life experiences are toddlers who were born in the Johnson/Truss/Sunak era.

By all means argue for a more massive state if you like. But we’re not living in austere times.

The 1906-22 Liberal-led governments gave the UK progressive taxation, unemployment benefits, the state pension, the first tax-funded healthcare, the end of the primacy of the House of Lords. This was one of the most transformational progressive governments in our country’s history and this is partly why they were winning by-elections in working-class seats right up to the start of the First World War.

I think you’re overestimating the existence of underlying ‘political’ causes of the rise of Labour and underestimating the pure ‘electoral’ factors around the Asquith/Lloyd George split.

Good. It’s bonkers we were handing out non-means-tested fuel benefits to pensioners living in million pound homes, while young people and families in genuine need were struggling.

Pure Tory pork-barrel politics to bribe the one generation that most reliably voted for them. Now let’s get rid of the pension triple lock next please.

Parliament could reduce annual illegal immigration to zero with a one-line piece of legislation: ‘All immigration is legalised’…

I’m not suggesting we quite go that far. But any attempt to address the problem of illegal immigration needs to start off with a recognition of how 14 years of Tory home secretaries and 13 years of authoritarian New Labour home secretaries before home (the choice of home secretaries were always the worst thing about the Blair and Brown governments) have conspired to ramp up the barriers and hurdles to a regular hardworking immigrant - someone who wants to work and pay taxes and obey the law - actually being able to legally enter the UK and work.

It depends which way the Tories go. If a) the Tories elect another extremist and if b) the Tory-Reform split nonetheless persists into a second election, FPTP makes all sorts of crazy outcomes possible.

This is essentially what happened in the 1920s that allowed Labour to displant the Liberals in the first place over the course of two elections. Looking from the position of the 1906 Liberal landslide or even coming out of the First World War when the Liberals were still the largest party, the idea of Labour replacing them as a major party would have seemed fanciful. But the Asquith/Lloyd George split led to two Liberal Parties standing against each other in the 1918 and 1922 general elections, and by the time the Liberals reunited in 1923 the damage was done - Labour had snuck through in Liberal seats to become the 2nd party and, given how relentlessly majoritarian our system is, the reunited Liberal Party was unable to reassert themselves.

What a pathetic frog-faced snowflake.

What’s astonishing here is that Priti Patel is only about the third or fourth most lunatic extremist of the current set of candidates…

Interesting. I do think The West Wing has encouraged that among American liberals, although I don’t think it originated it.

For 6 out of Bill Clinton’s 8 years as President, the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. And for the entire 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, the Democrats controlled the House. The notion that politicians need to work across party boundaries to pass legislation used to be normal in America.

The West Wing’s issue is that it prominently espoused this view just as things were changing and giving way to the modern American political culture of division and extreme partisanship on the right - and you obviously can’t cooperate with extremists who see any form of cooperation as a betrayal.

I think there are actually two distinct factors going on here.

The first is that the traditional rightward shift as you age has broken down among millennials, as you note.

The second - and I actually think this is as if not more important - is that the Tories have abandoned the field on left/right ‘economic-based’ politics anyway. Sunak presided over the highest tax burden in 70 years. The Tories’ post-2016 pitch to the electorate has always been about cultural conservativism - Brexit, immigrants, toilets for trans people, etc - not right-wing economics. And unlike left/right issues, there was never a trend for people to become more culturally conservative as they age. People just form their cultural norms and values when they’re young, and then carry these values with them through life, reacting against things that diverge from their norms.

By abandoning economics for culture wars, the Tories have built their electoral castle out of demographic sand. As the people who grew up in an overwhelming white and insular 1950s and 60s Britain give way to Millennials and Gen Zs who grew up in a ethnically diverse EU member state, the Tories have increasingly set themselves up in opposition to the cultural norms of the British electorate - and that is a stench it’s going to be hard for them to shift.

It depends what you’re looking for. As a TV drama, it’s timeless. The characters are great, the humour and wit is great.

But the politics is very much of its time - it came out relatively early in the era in which extreme partisanship in the US (and wider Western world) was taking hold, and so often hearkened back to an earlier halcyon era of bipartisan cooperation - from a modern perspective, in the age of Trump, Brexit, etc, that attitude will look quite naive.

Any government of any party would consider it to be a major breakdown in party discipline for one or more of its MPs to vote against its own Kings Speech.

That’s why they’ve been suspended. If this amendment had been tagged on to a piece of legislation then this would have just been a regular rebellion, of the sort that happens all the time in Parliament. Rebelling on your own party’s Kings Speech is an altogether different matter.

I’m sorry, were you under the impression that RuPaul’s Drag Race belongs to the sci-fi and fantasy genre…?

The reason I specified our genre is that sci-fi and fantasy audiences skew whiter and maler than the general public, and a vocal minority of online sci-fi and fantasy fans (who are deeply unrepresentative of the wider fanbases) make it their business to be vocally abusive about any online content that they consider not to be white and male enough for their liking.

I liked The Acolyte. It was not at the level of Andor or The Mandalorian, though it was dramatically better than The Book of Boba Fett. It was a solid enjoyable show and I particularly enjoyed how it expanded the canon universe by giving some love and attention to non-Jedi Force traditions (the Sith and the witches). Anecdotally that’s broadly what I hear from the Star Wars fans I know in real life too.

The attention people give to online ‘fan’ review scores always baffles me. Everyone knows these are meaningless. It’s a sad reality that most high-profile shows in our genre with prominent women, non-white and/or LGBT+ leads get review-bombed to death - we all know this. And I expect all shows will get review-boosted, because why on earth wouldn’t you do this if you were in charge of the marketing operation when it’s practically free marketing? So the ‘fan’ scores on Rotten Tomatoes etc are just the balance of a meaningless positive number against a meaningless negative number.

I don’t see where they are kowtowing to Frog Faced Farage.

Then you missed the part where she’s prattling on about illegal immigration and directing Immigration Enforcement to go harass a bunch of small businesses, instead of just making legal immigration easier. We’ve had 14 years of Tory home secretaries creating an insane mess of red tape and bureaucracy as obstacles to an act that ought to be quite simple and practical - Labour need to correct this, not lean into it.

We will ensure labour stick to their promise not to raise taxes. (paraphrased)

Labour will not increase income tax, national insurance or VAT. (cut and paste from labour.org.uk)

It is insane to me that you expect that a) a Tory spokesperson, speaking colloquially, should have to literally word-for-word quote the Labour manifesto every time they talk about Labour’s policies, b) you think that from the perspective of the average voter the quotes aren’t pretty similar anyway, and c) the BBC should be wasting its and our time obsessing over things like this in an off-the-cuff quote instead of focusing on substance.