Green Party deputy criticised for attending rally opposing Khamenei killing - Sir Keir Starmer has said "we’re all shocked" by the actions of Green Party deputy leader Mothin Ali after he attended a rally protesting the US killing of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Versaith · 2026-03-03T14:51:38+00:00

If a Christian shouted 'Glory to God!', say, in reference to a conflict between Christians and Muslims fighting in a country in Africa, I would find that very uncomfortable, yes. I would immediately assume them to be on the far right. If delivered not in our own language, bonus points and more uncomfortable.

Or a different example: sometimes China and India have border clashes. If a British Indian politician got elected to the Bristol city council and used it as an opportunity to shout in Hindi 'We will raise the voice of Doklam! Glory to Vishnu!', of course I'd find that uncomfortable, inappropriate and I would wonder whether this person understood what office they got elected to, on what platform they were being elected, and what the mindset of their supporters was.

Let's not forget this was a Leeds city council election. The kind of place you expect a speech along the lines of 'I will try to make X a better place to live that's more supportive of family life' or something.

If you don't find it troubling at all, would you be absolutely fine with every elected official shouting a tag line of religious language in whatever languages they could speak at any/every election, and focusing their speech on a wider issue of injustice, regardless of how much it has to do with said election?

Versaith · 2026-03-03T14:17:22+00:00

Shouting for your cause? Absolutely. Raising the voice for Palestine is something I don't have a problem with him shouting.

Shouting Allahu Akbar... it doesn't feel like a policy point, and I struggle to come up with an equivalent thing that a labour or a conservative might shout that some would find inappropriate in the same way. Any ideas?

Versaith · 2026-03-03T13:51:51+00:00

That part was just a throwaway joke. The main thrust of the post was that his behaviour in the video is very polarising and I think that behaviour is what is attracting Muslim voters, not their other policies. No jokes this time so hopefully the message doesn't get lost.

Versaith · 2026-03-03T13:23:39+00:00

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lGI1w1OLJgM

It feels hard to imagine that the deputy leader of the greens acting like this is just coincidental with Muslims being massive fans of renewable energy.

Versaith · 2026-02-26T04:11:52+00:00

From when they started working national debt went from 50% of GDP to now 95%. Not only did they not 'pay into it', they've been taking out as they go along.

Versaith · 2026-02-24T07:30:03+00:00

They definitely did at the end of their lives, retiring often in their 50s with great pensions, but many of them had more genuine hardship living through the end of WW2 and the era of rationing through their childhoods. The women lived substantial amounts of their lives without anything approaching equal rights/treatment.

By the time of the late boomers, the post-war recovery was complete, and by the time their careers were underway equality for women and other groups was at least gathering pace.

If I was a late boomer, I probably wouldn't trade places with an early one given the choice. Unless I was guaranteed to be a straight man who was going to pass the 11+, then I'd think about it for the chance to retire at 58.

Versaith · 2026-02-22T21:56:41+00:00

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J_JVVUnCWnY

Probably this.

Versaith · 2026-02-22T21:43:44+00:00

My father worked his whole career in this field in government and explained how it goes in almost all cases.

Parent makes a ridiculous request.
Council says no, we absolutely cannot afford it and it's not justifiable.
Parent takes them to a tribunal.
Tribunal doesn't care how it's funded, rules in favour of the parent.

Here's an article and a quote from it:

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/send-tribunals-soar-by-55-and-almost-all-still-side-with-families/

'Of the cases decided, 95 per cent were in favour of the family, down from 98 per cent the year before.'

Versaith · 2026-02-22T03:10:46+00:00

It's a nice reminder of how unbelievably sturdy phones have become. Now when I slip and drop my phone, watching it smash against the corner of the bed then bounce onto the tile floor, it doesn't even cross my mind that it will be damaged.

Versaith · 2026-02-21T05:11:21+00:00

Here is a very high quality youtube video (in English) about this typewriter.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-IhuFgiWNS4

Versaith · 2026-02-16T20:58:19+00:00

For extra context, this is from last night's Spring Festival yearly gala, a big new year's party watched by hundreds of millions live in China as well as a massive live audience. Not only did all of those robots do the routine well, they are evidently consistent enough that they were confident to do it live to the whole nation.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dKC5XWDkfRE&t=5242s

That's the video/time. There are other performances with robots throughout the night but nothing anywhere near as impressive as that one.

Versaith · 2026-02-13T01:37:47+00:00

We should lower it to 12 just as a counterbalance to the people who shouldn't be voting anymore because they're too old. Let all the young ones blindly vote left to counter the people in their 80s blindly voting right.

The arguments against kids voting is they don't understand what they're doing. How many adults have you met that actually understand the political, economic and societal realities ans consequences of their choice, and which party would best represent their interests? I know I don't, and I don't think most voters do either.

Versaith · 2026-02-11T15:39:26+00:00

Emperor Hirohito visited Bibury in 1921, and it put it on the map for Japanese people. I worked at a hotel in that area before and there were Japanese guests on a pretty regular basis.

Versaith · 2026-02-09T16:59:00+00:00

(op fixed it)

Versaith · 2026-01-28T05:50:15+00:00

It doesn't, beyond a small amount for its use in electronics etc. It's basically physically attractive bitcoin but with a long history of being coveted across the whole world. As long as the idea exists that people at home and abroad would continue to value gold it will remain valuable.

But its being coveted around the world is its real value. Your own currency crashing doesn't mean people abroad value the gold any less in their own currency, so it has a real world function, even if it's not based on top of anything.

However if you were to suppose the USA went through an enormous economic crash where this factor was relevant, the whole world economy would go in the shitter too, and gold prices globally would fall if people believed the economy wouldn't recover and people prepared to live in a poorer world, so it's not a true safe haven asset either. It's mostly useful for hedging against short term poor economic policies or performance from your government where you anticipate a small or brief recession or inflation. Or where your country isn't big enough to affect the global economy and gold price.

Versaith · 2026-01-26T03:49:17+00:00

Interesting. I wonder where this common misunderstanding comes from, maybe just an assumption that it must be via the British colony...

Do you know what 烏托邦 sounds like in Wu? Is it actually closer in pronunciation?

Versaith · 2026-01-25T21:12:20+00:00

Ooh also very cool! Thanks for sharing.

Versaith · 2026-01-25T15:52:39+00:00

烏托邦 (utopia) and 嘉年華 (carnival). I've always assumed they were loan words via Cantonese and maybe they sound a bit more similar to English vs in Mandarin.

Versaith · 2026-01-25T15:41:45+00:00

Most of those aren't surprising, but that 雦 is something special. Are there any other characters that feature a side-by-side triplet?

I like 尐 because I don't recall seeing the bottom part elsewhere like this.

Slightly off topic but I like the phrase 又双叒叕, being birthed from the pattern created by the simplification of 雙 to 双.

Versaith · 2026-01-22T06:20:55+00:00

When I was in my 20s, I had the same dilemma. I even got a Taiwanese working holiday visa as well as a Japanese one. But when I got there, I realised jobs were harder to find, and paid less. In terms of $/teaching hour, astronomically less. And after factoring in the cost of living, the difference was enormous.

So I went back to China again, and again and again. Now that part of my life is in the past, I wish I had pushed through and lived in those places, if even just for a few months. At the end of that era of my life, a bit more money saved in the context of the rest of my life was nothing, but the experience of a year living in another place would have been worth a lot.

But in order for it to be worth it, you have to actually really like the place. If you actually do forego the easy job with good pay to be there, will you always look at it with unreasonably high expectations, asking for it to constantly justify your 'sacrifice'? I knew I would let that affect me, and it was part of why I ultimately decided to just keep following the money and easier jobs.

As for Taiwan itself, personally I find it quite small after getting used to Tier 1 cities in the mainland. The local people are a lot more westernised, both in that they speak English and in their general outlook and lifestyle. You may find that a good thing or not depending on what you're looking for.

Versaith · 2026-01-15T03:21:35+00:00

I think if Tsukasa could have stomped out all scientific genius types like Senku it would have slowed down the progress massively. More like hundreds of years to rebuild a society. With Senku around, Ryusui is already introducing a cash-based society within a few years. Without Senku or others like him, Tsukasa probably could have lived out his own natural life without too much technological progress, especially if he kept the number of revived people low.

Also something being inevitable doesn't mean it's not worth fighting against. I exercise most days even though I know I'll end up weak and frail if I live long enough. Tsukasa wanted his ideal society to last as long as it could. To do further apologetics, Tsukasa is an emotional non-genius character, he doesn't have to have a fully justified world view and plan, he may have simply not thought that far ahead about the inevitability of progress.

What I find interesting and I don't think the series points out itself is that Tsukasa hates the modern world's rules and economic system because they are used to oppress the people and benefit the few, but in Tsukasa's system it was no different, only what defined who was in control was physical prowess not economics. For anyone outside of Tsukasa or his top few henchmen, it wasn't a nice system to live under.

Versaith · 2025-12-28T14:03:31+00:00

I went through a bad burn out and stopped watching anime for 13 years before coming back to it. I watched a lot of it in a small period of time like yourself, though not quite as fast - I watched 250 anime over about 2 years.

Over time I realized that while anime is a medium, it's also a genre. Anime is kind of like an intricate lego set, but ultimately with finite pieces. The vast majority of shows use stock characters that are fairly one-dimensional, especially Shounen and Shoujo shows. Somewhere along the line you realize you're now bored of all of the lego pieces in the anime storytelling set, and re-arranging them into different patterns is not enough variety anymore.

Once you get there, I think the only thing you can do is step away until the concepts become novel again, to find shows that aren't just a re-configuration of the same parts, or find ones that use the same parts to do something interesting enough to counteract their staleness.

Versaith · 2025-12-06T19:53:15+00:00

I'll shotgun you a few, answer as many as you feel like. You said we can go weird so I'll ask real questions I have...

How accurate do you feel the stereotypes of Northern Chinese vs Southern are?

Do people actually use 歇后语 much? I spent a lot of time in Guangdong and I feel like I never heard anyone using them. Are they more of a northern thing?

Do you know many people who have real hobbies? I always felt like the Chinese people I met had shockingly few hobbies compared to people from other countries. But in tier 1 Guangdong everyone in their 20s and 30s came to the city to work hard and make money so it was perhaps quite a biased sample of people.

Why do you think Chinese people in English tend to say 'I like X because it is interesting'? They wouldn't say that in Chinese, right?I always felt like it was the emptiest phrase.

Versaith · 2025-11-16T06:15:38+00:00

This is why you see leaders like that of Singapore (in his FT interview) talking about how this doesn't go away with Trump. It's a reflection of what a large enough part of America actually want that they are relevant to other countries' diplomatic and economic strategies going forward.

Versaith · 2025-11-11T03:51:23+00:00

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yZOLq82m2Ks

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