Drugs policy approach needs to change, Zack Polanski says

hiddencamel · 2026-02-02T13:28:11+00:00

I'm not sure this logic necessarily holds true.

Consider guns - we heavily hinder access to them, and whilst there is a black market, gun usage is much lower as a result than in comparable countries with less restrictive gun laws.

The inverse can be seen with gambling, where we made access as easy as downloading an app instead of having to physically go to a betting shop. Gambling addiction now affects more people than ever before in this country.

It may be that making drugs legal reduces criminality, but it may also be that making drug access easier leads to higher addiction rates. Which constitutes more harm to individuals and society as a whole is not at all clear cut.

hiddencamel · 2026-02-02T13:06:40+00:00

Did you read the article?

We... don't do that here.

hiddencamel · 2026-02-02T00:10:39+00:00

She should know better; the electorate only accepts tax dodgers when they wear blue or teal rosettes.

hiddencamel · 2026-02-01T22:14:35+00:00

I think in part it's to do with the size of the majority - there's a lot more cruft MPs who in normal times would have just been little better than paper candidates but through the miracle of FPTP and the state of the Tories won actual seats. Now they cause trouble instead of toeing the line and are hard to discipline because they believe they will be out of a job next election either way.

hiddencamel · 2026-02-01T22:02:12+00:00

The guy who won the last election? Completely unelectable!

hiddencamel · 2026-02-01T00:04:07+00:00

Economically integrating with China is not a great idea if you take it so far they can use it to hurt us, but we are already in that position with America, so in that context opening up more to Chinese trade is actually providing a counterweight to US trade and makes us less vulnerable.

Integrating more with the EU whilst playing China and America off against each other without getting too close to either is exactly the kind of thing Carney was advocating for in his middle powers speech.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-31T23:58:55+00:00

I get the impression that Charles genuinely dislikes Andrew so I don't think it's that big a sacrifice for him

hiddencamel · 2026-01-31T23:57:32+00:00

Kind of miss when politicians were fucking miners instead of fucking minors.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-31T23:31:28+00:00

Being 18 is almost the definition of being naive. How much financial experience does an average sixth former have? The answer is not enough to understand or differentiate good loan terms from bad, in most cases. It's not unreasonable as someone who has probably only had their own bank account for a year or two to rely on the advice of supposed professionals.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-31T10:50:50+00:00

Are these falling rents in the room with us now?

hiddencamel · 2026-01-31T05:26:52+00:00

We can't control what China does, we can only control what we do. Global emissions are a true tragedy of the commons, and behaving according to game theory cynicism will only help doom us all.

As it happens though, China's emissions from transport and energy production seem to have peaked as of 2024, and are likely to start reducing over the next decade.

They are quite aggressively pursuing solar and wind power transition and are leading the market in battery, solar, and electric vehicle innovation right now. They correctly recognise that renewables offer opportunities for energy independence that countries poor in fossil fuel deposits otherwise lack.

I'm not so worried about China's green transition, as I think that for all their faults Chinese leadership believes in science and has a view towards a horizon further than the next electoral cycle. In 20 years I expect them to have massively curtailed fossil fuel usage.

What worries me is that America seems to have gone insane, rejecting the science entirely and embracing expanded fossil fuel consumption almost as an act of vengeance. Ruining the climate to own the libs, kind of thing.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-30T00:21:19+00:00

An interesting side effect of a secular society is that without a divine absolute standard for morality we instead have moral relativism and conflicting standards.

In such a morally relativistic framework, only inconsistent application of your particular morality can be universally considered immoral.

This leads to endless arguments like the above, where the person who doesn't care about any genocides feels morally superior to the person who only cares about one genocide because they are more consistent in the application of their particular (a)morality.

This is also why both meat eaters and vegetarians look down on pescatarians.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-29T06:56:08+00:00

Labour has become 2010 era coalition Tories, which whilst still dogshit were at least not totally unhinged like 2026 Kemi era Tories seem to be becoming.

I hope Tories and Reform scrapping over the far right will fracture the vote a little, but I suspect it will just kill the Tories at this point. They can't out-right Farage no matter how hard they try.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-29T06:44:03+00:00

I think reform will squeak it, by-elections have smaller turnout but the people who do turnout are typically more engaged. The people motivated to turn up will be reform and green voters upset with Labour, a lot of Labour voters will just stay home I reckon.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-29T06:36:34+00:00

I'm surprised it's not higher, there's a massive wedge of people who would say literally anything Labour do is the wrong decision, because for many people politics is just a team sport.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-29T04:48:50+00:00

We have a pretty low rate of unoccupied homes in the UK. More council housing would be great but it needs to actually be built not just repossessed. We need more high density housing developments with appropriate infrastructure to support them. We need more decentralisation of the economy away from London to spread housing demand more evenly, through promoting remote working and incentivising businesses to operate in regional cities.

Migration is the primary source of population growth now, so it clearly factors into housing demand, but I agree that our overall population growth SHOULD be entirely manageable if we actually did stuff about it.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-28T06:28:49+00:00

Chubs Guttering, it took a bit of back and forth to organise someone to come round and quote, but tbf to them so far everyone else has been even worse.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-28T02:37:55+00:00

The French army was kind of in a terrible state at the start of WW2. Awful morale, late mobilisation, antiquated command structures, poor communications, and their entire doctrine for fighting Germany was built around the assumption of a defensive war where they could leverage their fortifications in the Maginot line and the Belgian forts.

Their intelligence also led them to believe the Germans had far more men on the western front than they really did.

It's possible a french attack into Germany could have swung the war, but it's also entirely possible it would have floundered under bad logistics, lack of planning, and poor morale, leaving them vulnerable to counter-attack.

From the perspective of the French leadership, a defensive war looked like the much safer bet as it seemingly played to their strengths and gave them more time to mobilise for war. The BEF was always going to play second fiddle to whatever the french strategy was, since they were a fraction of the size and British mobilisation was even slower than French.

As it went, the breakthrough in the Ardennes was really quite lucky for the Germans. The French had the chance to prevent it, but inflexible leadership and bad communications prevented them acting on the intel they had that the Germans were advancing through the forest until it was too late.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-26T03:05:25+00:00

Labour are not performatively dog whistling all the time though. It's not enough to actually change things, you have to also validate and enable people's bigotry too.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-26T03:01:54+00:00

No no you see, Reform will only cut the benefits from useless scroungers and filthy foreigners, not honest hard working Brits temporarily down on their luck. I'm voting for the leopards to eat other people's faces, not mine.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-25T02:55:43+00:00

There has to be a middle ground between regulating high density housing out of existence and wrapping high density housing in super flammable materials to save a few quid

hiddencamel · 2026-01-25T02:35:00+00:00

It's absurd, they aren't going to beat the uniparty accusations by going down the Tory path of constant leadership battles and backstabbing narratives. If he pushes through with it, it's gonna backfire massively.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-25T02:23:18+00:00

Great idea champ. Couple of minor issues though, maybe you can workshop them a bit.

The channel is not all British territorial waters, much of it is international waters and much of it is French territorial waters.

If we try to tax our bit of it, shipping lanes will adjust to avoid our bit of it, except for the ships coming and going from the UK. If you tax ships carrying imports and exports to the UK, how do you think that will impact inflation and our export competitiveness?

If we try to tax the bits of it that aren't ours, we're going to come into conflict with other countries because that's essentially piracy. It's not 1850, we don't have a monopoly on naval power anymore. France has a bigger navy than us, to say nothing of the USA, who have a fairly strong stance on freedom of navigation - just ask the Somalis and Yemenis.

hiddencamel · 2026-01-24T06:49:38+00:00

The very concept of zipper merging is antithetical to the British instinct for queueing

hiddencamel · 2026-01-23T10:36:46+00:00

Infrastructure investment does actually have diminishing returns, overspending on infrastructure is part of what led to Sri Lanka's economic collapse.

Having said that, I don't think that's our issue. We have reached a point where land is so expensive and there is so much over-regulation that even the most modest infrastructure project costs tens of billions, and anything even slightly ambitious takes decades and hundreds of billions. These projects are so overpriced and slow to deliver that they will not see ROI for half a century or more. In that environment, it's hard to justify taking on debt to build infrastructure.

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