Giving Ukraine a nuclear deterrent may be Netanyahu’s Churchill moment, i.e. one good action made by someone with an otherwise uniformly shitty record

Would Japan have been better had the shogunate continued?

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

The 18-24 male voters are single-issue voters, who just want to see feminism defeated and to be issued with the subservient tradwife that Andrew Tate told them is their birthright.

Not even that; 0.1% per trade would bring in a huge windfall. Even something negligible like 0.01% would bring in nontrivial amounts of revenue.

The problem is that being above paying tax has become part of the identity of being rich, and the very idea of even a negligible amount of one’s wealth being taken away to be given to your inferiors is unacceptable, and the rich will defend every fluctuating cent of their wealth as a non-negotiable matter of honour, even if it means burning down the world.

Cutting out everyone but the middleman

Finally, they can make a robo-Rogan that can radicalise young men at a fraction of the cost

The idea of a “whiteness” that Italians are outside of is largely an American one, originating from the invention of “whiteness” as a construct to rationalise racial slavery and the subsequent waves of immigration from (largely southern) Italy. (The Irish were classified as non-white for much the same reason, even though Ireland was not known for its melanin-rich complexions.)

The Italians did have a different language and traditions than the French, but they also until recently had different language and traditions than other Italians. (Italy was not a country until 1860 or so, and “Italian” as a language came into existence when Garibaldi chose the Tuscan dialect (because Dante had spoken it) and decreed it to be the new national language of the newly united nation.)

Are Jobserve and Jobsite still around in the UK?

Best of luck! You won’t find LA weather, but London is pretty vibrant and cosmopolitan, and hopefully a good redoubt.

BlueSky has already received funding from venture capital, and so will need to find a way to monetise its user base. Once enough people depend on the site for their social connections and friend circles, the promise of decentralisation will be quietly removed, APIs will be restricted (as on Reddit/Xitter), terms of service updated to ban circumvention, and the user-controlled algorithms modified to deliver your eyeballs to the advertisers and your data to data brokers, and before long, it’ll be an Instagram-style slot machine, where you mostly see ads and AI pink-slime, but keep pulling the lever in case there’s another update you care about in there somewhere.

They want a government small enough to fit in everyone’s bedroom

You know that Musk will do his best to get AfD in

Their US and Australian divisions are solid. The UK one varies, and has some decent people, but also has a persistent infestation of TERF/SWERFs. A few high-profile ones have left after their comments became irreconcilable with the paper’s ostensibly liberal/progressive line, but you still get regular Observer opinion columns about pronoun-mongers sexualising our children or other scare campaigns. There’s a rumour that the editor, Kath Viner, is herself a TERF and personally protecting them, though I haven’t seen any evidence one way or the other.

They could spin up a Mastodon instance, but given how lousy their UK editorial department is with TERFs, it would be justifiably blocked for transphobia.

America, fuck yeah!

The village on Lunt near Liverpool considered changing its name to “Launt”, because vandals kept adding a top stroke to the L in signs.

The UK did this about a decade ago by a 2-to-1 margin, on the same grounds. Commentators in Australia (which have had ranked choice voting for generations) quipped that this was final proof that Australians are smarter than Brits.

Wasn’t that also their issue with Falun Gong, which started out as an apolitical mass meditation/exercise movement, though committed the crime of challenging the Party’s monopoly on organising mass activities of any sort?

I read that as “flurry of executions”, and though “sounds plausible”

Coulsdon is the new Scunthorpe, it seems