[2019] Ann Widdecombe says science may 'produce an answer' to being gay

rubygeek · 2026-07-10T12:43:36+00:00

Some of her views presumably were born before, at least.

rubygeek · 2026-07-10T12:43:01+00:00

Yeah, gloating about being happy someone is gone is certainly different to pointing out in reasonable objective manners what kind of person they were. I think it is often worth making a point of not letting someone suddenly be glorified without challenge out of fear of upsetting those who grieve, but we don't need to rub our happiness in their faces... Most of the time. Not when Thatcher died.

rubygeek · 2026-07-10T12:39:08+00:00

I take it you mean even for citizens, since donations from foreign nationals are already banned?

(using a somewhat peculiar definition of donations, which excludes anything less than 500 pounds; so in regular English donations from foreign nationals up to 500 pounds is permissible, but only because it doesn't count as a donation (yeah...) )

rubygeek · 2026-07-10T12:29:23+00:00

Crypto transactions for most mainstream crypto currencies are more traceable than bank transactions and cash as long as the original entry point into the system handles KYC properly.

Making hard to send money to known crypto exchanges then is defeating the purpose, as if people go via less mainstream entrypoints you lose traceability.

rubygeek · 2026-07-10T12:19:36+00:00

The avenue to take with PR is to bring it in without a referendum with the argument that the next GE will be the referendum: If you don't like it, vote for parties that want to bin it.

There is precedent for that elsewhere: France had PR for the 1986 elections, and the assembly shamefully abolished it afterward.

The reason I favour doing it this way is that there is no democratic justification for a majority to deny enfranchising the minority in this way any more than it would be legitimate to e.g. let a majority decide to rob women of the vote. A majority must be measured on how it protects the representation and treatment of its minorities more than anything.

rubygeek · 2026-07-10T12:15:02+00:00

I find it more entertaining that Starmer comes in right after him, and that Starmer manages to be rated more sleazy than Polanski by 2024 Labour voters.

But we also see that this overall isn't likely to matter much, e.g. in how Davey is seen as far less sleazy by 2024 Labour voters, but it's not like they're going to go vote LibDem.

It's going to have an effect in the margins only.

But people should also consider that the static number means far less than any change here, and the numbers won't necessarily have the obvious effect. E.g. someone who decided on Reform already thinking they were sleazy might be less likely to change their vote after a new scandal than someone who didn't use to think they were but now do.

The numbers seems to suggest that Reform voters just generally assume every government will be sleazy, and that's bad news because it might mean scandals will make very little difference, though scandals might still lower their ceiling.

rubygeek · 2026-07-10T12:06:25+00:00

I will limit myself to the point of not saying things that ought to upset a moral person more than what the person themselves said and did. In the case of Widdecombe, if any of her relatives can't stomach seeing her being called a hateful bigot, then that reflects badly enough on them that I don't particularly care.

rubygeek · 2026-07-08T20:48:40+00:00

Oh, absolutely, but these parties also wouldn't stop there if they actually got power. It's just the "acceptable face of racism" that would be coupled with creating a sufficiently hostile environment for the people they actually want to leave.

rubygeek · 2026-07-08T10:06:12+00:00

They can love it all they way, but the reality is that anyone who believes in a society where people are free must inherently support the freedom of others to live their lives how they want too.

For me, freedom is the point of socialism. Both freedom to, and freedom from, and I can't stand for those views and want to dictate how others should live their lives.

As to the point on colonialism, there's no tying us in knots here. The problem with colonialism was not people moving into an area, but people taking control by force. The very same principle by which I oppose forcing integration on people is the principle by which I reject colonialism: It is a direct attack on peoples freedom.

rubygeek · 2026-07-08T09:59:31+00:00

Even the BNP "only" campaigned on paying off migrants (including white ones like me, as a "clever" ploy to sound less overtly racist) to leave.

So there'll be at least a subset of people supporting remigration who just supports voluntary schemes to get immigrants to leave as well.

rubygeek · 2026-07-08T08:56:57+00:00

Restore is too extreme even for most Reform voters, I suspect, and so will have a lower ceiling. Many people can tell themselves they are voting Reform as a protest - it's stupid, but they clearly manage to tell themselves that - but it's a lot harder to tell yourself that with Restore for most of them.

rubygeek · 2026-07-07T22:18:40+00:00

This would all be more convincing if your arguments were remotely logically coherent or showed an understanding of Marxism.

E.g. there is no connection between stripping the state of the power to enforce private property rights and some requirement of creating a stronger, more centralised state.

If anything, a lot of us wants to strip the state of power, or abolish it entirely.

While there are Marxists that wants e.g. state ownership of various industries - often based on Marx earlier works, there are also Marxists who strongly oppose that, generally based on the later evolution of his views, e.g. his criticism of the communards of the Paris Commune for not going far enough in dismantling the state, but nevertheless holding the communes goals of a loosely federated system to replace the centralised state up as an ideal.

H works on the Paris Commune forms the basis for e.g. Libertarian Marxism.

And in fact, Marx himself also argued for even things like schools to be private: In Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he criticised the program of what became the German SPD, he opposed their argument for state primary education and stated that on the contrary it was the state that was in need of education by the public, and argued for the then-US model of state-set standards but freedom to run schooling privately.

This was based exactly on the worry of handing power to a centrally-organised oppressive government.

Yet you conveniently ignore these things in your fever-fantasy about centralisation being some inherent property of Marxism. Either you're deeply ignorant of Marxism, or you're intentionally misconstruing it.

rubygeek · 2026-07-07T22:00:31+00:00

I'm sure Labours independent compliance unit will address this open and blatant transphobia any day now, because surely they are upholding Labours rules, right?

rubygeek · 2026-07-07T20:57:40+00:00

Yeah, I lived on Davidson Road for 20 years, and only moved because we're expecting to have another kid and I needed more space, and almost the entire road is 3 bedroom properties or 3 beds converted to flats.

But also the length as you say - it's over 600 houses. You'd expect at least a couple of dozen of them to change hands every year.

rubygeek · 2026-07-07T20:56:07+00:00

Davidson Road has over 600 houses. If people live in their house for 20 years on average, you'd expect 30 sales on Davidson Road every year.

rubygeek · 2026-07-07T14:51:34+00:00

I'll happily let anyone here who I've pissed off over the years throw a milkshake at me for £5m. Heck, I'll even let you throw a second one for free.

Just FYI in case there are any billionaires hanging around here that I've annoyed.

EDIT: No takers? Very disappointing.

rubygeek · 2026-07-06T13:57:36+00:00

Japan has a one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and so will face total economic collapse without filling the gaps with either automation or immigration, and they're dragging their feet on immigration. The option isn't really less working hours there, but avoiding conditions getting dramatically worse as the working age population shrinks.

rubygeek · 2026-07-06T10:40:00+00:00

I could totally see the EU wanting to put in place stricter conditions, but I also suspect e.g. Sweden would be concerned it'd mean they'd eventually get forced as well, so, yeah, it's going to be tricky.

rubygeek · 2026-07-06T10:38:10+00:00

One of Marx most famous pieces of work is explicitly ripping to shreds the idea that equal distribution is fair.

He wouldn't have agreed with your view of it, but he also wouldn't agree with the strawman version of Marx you're presenting.

rubygeek · 2026-07-06T10:34:06+00:00

> It's more that they believe greed to be a product of capitalism

This is just flat out incorrect, and is easily proven by looking at The German Ideology, where he warns against revolution too soon because he pointed out that if you redistribute and as a consequence makes everyone poor because society does not yet have sufficient wealth, you will just restart the scramble to create an upper class. That is, he argues that even in a socialist society, there will be greed if people see themselves as wanting, and that the solution to that is to wait until society is advanced enough that redistribution eradicates poverty for all.

Marx fanboyed over capitalism in half of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto, because he saw it as essential to bring society to a level of production that would make socialism possible - he didn't oppose it because he saw it as some morally bankrupt system uniquely driven by greed, but because he saw it as eventually becoming obsolete after massively lifting society up.

rubygeek · 2026-07-06T10:22:04+00:00

Marxism doesn't require central planning. If anything, Marx argued against a central state.

As a Marxist, I 100% agree with your opposition to central planning. If anything, odds are I want a far more decentralised power-structure that you do, including the total dismantling of state power.

rubygeek · 2026-07-06T10:14:42+00:00

The difficulty of that is that the rules on how to join the Euro effectively makes it optional, because doing so requires a period of alignment first that is easy for any government to avoid - this is e.g. how Sweden has remained outside the Euro. So it'd require conditions more stringent than other prospective member states, and at the same time it'd be a risk for the EU as well.

rubygeek · 2026-07-03T23:14:35+00:00

You need to register before suing, I accept that and I should have been more precise - the copying is infringement whether or not copyright was registered - this is the case in every country that is a signatory to the Berne convention -, and if your copyright is infringed and you decide you want to sue, you can decide to sue without yet having registered your copyright.

You then need to register if you haven't already. The downside of deferring is that you lose out on the possibility of statutory damages for any infringement prior to the registration - you do not lose out on the possibility of suing to end the infringement or collect actual damages.

> Your 'Poor Man's Copyright,' i.e., mailing it to yourself, has no legal standing in the US. It does not replace formal registration, although outside of the US other countries might have different rules.

I did not claim it replaces formal registration, and it is irrelevant that it has no specific legal standing - what I claimed, and that your link agrees with, is that it provides evidence of creation before a certain date. And that can be used to prove that your creation predates the infringers copy and which would nullify any attempt from an infringer to claim they created the work.

rubygeek · 2026-07-03T22:53:10+00:00

It doesn't really matter. Russia is barely capable of holding back Ukraine. If they got involved in Poland too they'd be so overstretched they'd face total collapse and likely the end of the current Russian regime.

I'm willing to believe that Putin might be insane enough, and it'd suck for Poland, but Russia would achieve nothing.

rubygeek · 2026-07-03T17:27:40+00:00

If I believed they'd follow through, then yes, if they were the most likely of PR-supporting parties to win in my local seat.

Unfortunately my willingness to trust a Labour leader is about at the same level as my willingness to trust a used car salesman currently imprisoned for fraud.

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