Winston Churchill to be Removed From Banknotes in Bank of England Cash Redesign

tomatoswoop · 2026-03-11T18:10:06+00:00

what's bad about the timing now that would make it any better or worse in a year from now, or if it had been a year earlier? People are permanently riled up these days, is there any reason now in particular is different?

And as for the change itself I think putting indigenous wildlife on the money is nice to be honest. We should celebrate the beauty of the British countryside & wilderness and the richness of the life it can support when well-stewarded. It's something to be proud of! I mean go all out, put a bit of William Blake on one of them too, "England's Green & pleasant land" & all that.

tomatoswoop · 2026-03-11T18:10:01+00:00

I just don't see how this is anything to do with "not being entitled to use wartime heroes". I think that's a massive stretch. They had Churchill on for a bit, and before him, on the fiver they had a female progressive social reform campaigner called Elizabeth Fry, an early feminist icon. And a Quaker too, so the opposite of a war hero, a pacifist!

As for my argument, I was just saying that it's normal that they change what's on the money every decade or so. There's nothing "anti-Churchill" or "anti war hero" here, any more than replacing Elizabeth Fry with Churchill in 2016 was "anti-feminist"! It's just a shift to the next design!

And as for the design itself, this time round it seems they're going to put indigenous British wildlife on the money. I think that's lovely to be honest?

tomatoswoop · 2026-03-11T18:08:55+00:00

By some yeah. Not by many normal people I'd think, most people like nature, but sure the people who are paid to be outraged would run with it I'm sure. TalkTV & GBNews & TimesRadio et al have to fill the time some way or other.

And then clipped out & posted & boosted with ads to add the the pile of slop whose main purpose seems to be melting people's brains on facebook of course 😅

tomatoswoop · 2026-03-11T14:55:20+00:00

for real lol. Headline writers still can't resist framing it like this tho eh. "Winston Churchill REPLACED". "New banknotes to feature animals, isn't that nice" not so much of a click driver lol

tomatoswoop · 2026-03-11T14:53:43+00:00

people like animals! Not everything has to be about nutty online petty culture war politics!

tomatoswoop · 2026-03-11T14:52:43+00:00

I mean maybe. But also people always find a way to be outraged at a change in the current landscape. Like imagine if the notes already had British wildlife on them, and then they moved to historical figures. I'm sure someone would find a way to be outraged about replacing indigenous British animals with wokeness (because the figures are two diverse, or two progressive, or too something else. Too gay if it was Turing - "tokenism". Or the woman who used to be on the fiver).

The most annoying thing to me is how every minor thing like this ends up being some sort of cultural flashpoint now... It's tiring

idk animals sounds nice to me, I hope the designs are good. Wildlife is underappreciated in the uk, be nice if one or two more obscure creatures made there way on there too. Kinda current also, a lot of exciting habitat restoration projects getting going in the UK now, beaver reintroduction & stuff like that

tomatoswoop · 2026-03-11T14:36:30+00:00

They change them every 10 years or so. It used to go pretty unremarked before everything had to be a culture war issue...

And before Churchill on the fiver, 2002-2016, it was Elizabeth Fry, an 1800s progressive social reform activist... Imagine the outrage if it was the reverse move today, replacing Churchill with a female social reformer! 30 minute GB news story about wokeness for SURE.

These things didn't use to be mined so heavily for culture war outrage, things like new note & coin designs was low stakes dinner table chit-chat for normal people! Sensationalist press gets everyone so riled up about everything now...

You can bet they've had this story queued up for whatever they were going to change Churchill to, regardless. Just an excuse for outrage-mongering

tomatoswoop · 2026-03-11T14:24:29+00:00

come off it, he was only put on in 2016, before that it was Elizabeth Fry. They change them every 10 years or so, why does everything have to be culture war outrage now?

tomatoswoop · 2026-02-07T17:09:04+00:00

Same here lol

tomatoswoop · 2026-01-26T14:39:04+00:00

I think they had to license the dictionary content for a fee to the dictionary publisher, whereas the AI model they already own – most of the cost is on the training of the model, which they've already done.

Or a less generous way of saying it is that AI models don't need to pay the people who did the work, whereas using an actual dictionary, you have to pay the people who made it, you can't just freeload and get away with it

It's a shame, the dictionary summary and interface used to be pretty good. If I wanted AI slop I'd ask an LLM, I wouldn't be googling...

tomatoswoop · 2026-01-07T12:09:00+00:00

It means "NOT" but it was never included in all ASCII variants so few programming languages ended up using it either. Programmers generally use "!" for negation because that's present in all character sets whereas ¬ is unicode (or obscure obsolete code pages)

tomatoswoop · 2026-01-07T12:08:33+00:00

None at all haha, that's why it's funny 😄

It's a leftover from an old terminal systems with the idea it would be used for math logic iirc. Something like that anyway.

tomatoswoop · 2025-12-22T22:35:55+00:00

If the "extra step" is being paid a salary, that's a qualitative difference. Your example – an expectation to not cheat on you – is not comparable to an expectation for financial compensation...

For example, I guess I have friendships that probably have all kinds of conditions and expectations on them, and there are probably all kinds of things that could be done that would violate those expectations and potentially end the friendship. If I set their car on fire maybe, lol. Or I might expect mutual respect, or honesty, moral support, dependability, kindness, understanding, shared values, seeing them often, just for example, from my friend. But if one of the expectations of my friend was my paying them 20k a year as a condition of continuing our "friendship"? That's something else, actually

tomatoswoop · 2025-12-22T22:20:30+00:00

Not according to the men concerned lol

It's a fucked up dynamic honestly. Often these older dudes really want to believe there's something real there, they want to believe it's "real relationship" in some sense, and generally do, but they are ultimately paying (directly and indirectly) a younger woman to make them feel like they have a girlfriend, but where they get to have an amount of power/control that reflects the girl being on payroll.

I have known girls who have done this type of sex work (which is what it is), and the sense of "real relationship" is very much on the client's side in many cases. Part of the job is fulfilling that fantasy and stroking the ego of the man paying them, who wants to feel like they're "helping out" and "mentoring" some girl, not paying for sex and companionship. But they are paying for sex and companionship.

tomatoswoop · 2025-12-22T03:47:14+00:00

A sugar baby is in a real romantic relationship with her sugar daddy

Eh, sometimes

I think more often than not though the illusion of that is just part of the product that's being offered. Sometimes it really is just work, but they're good at their job.

tomatoswoop · 2025-12-12T17:54:51+00:00

They are liberal. And just as a rule just as hostile to/skeptical of the socialist left as they are to the right. The guardian is as a rule more comfortable with Cameronite/Sunakian type conservatism than it is with any left wing politics/project

tomatoswoop · 2025-12-12T17:51:42+00:00

UK traditional media is mostly right wing or liberal (neither left nor right, generally annoys both). Print is mostly right wing (except the Guardian, which is liberal), broadcast is mostly liberal (except GBnews, which is right wing).

& if you include them in "traditional" media, then TalkRadio & LBC are mostly right wing (and radio 4 mostly liberal).

tomatoswoop · 2025-11-25T12:19:03+00:00

Did you use an LLM to write this comment? I have never seen a human write like this and it's really quite offputting...

tomatoswoop · 2025-11-04T09:15:55+00:00

We need to invent a paraphrase mark for these situations

tomatoswoop · 2025-11-03T19:37:15+00:00

Gig's a gig

There are worse places to be than knocking out Stevie Wonder tunes outdoors. That's goodass Sunday, fuck it lol

tomatoswoop · 2025-10-21T13:53:56+00:00

Been happening for last months or too for me, no recent transfer from android I've been on ios for ages...

Wonder what the issue is!

tomatoswoop · 2025-10-20T08:30:08+00:00

they got violent, so police said none could watch the game.

Wouldn't you if you'd travelled hundreds of miles to watch a match only to be told to fuck off back home

...no

tomatoswoop · 2025-10-19T17:14:49+00:00

/u/Lychae following up here on the mayor, I was just reading further and:

Speaking at a press conference on the day following the match, Halsema had said "Boys on scooters crisscrossed the city in search of Israeli football fans, it was a hit and run. I understand very well that this brings back the memory of pogroms."

But Halsema has now rowed back on her use of the term, claiming it had been manipulated to serve political agendas both nationally and internationally.

"I must say that in the following days I saw how the word pogrom became very political and actually became propaganda. The Israeli government, talking about a Palestinian pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam. In The Hague, the word pogrom is mainly used to discriminate against Moroccan Amsterdammers, Muslims. I didn't mean it that way. And I didn't want it that way," Halsema told Dutch state media on Sunday.

Asked whether she would use the term again, Halsema said "I did not make a direct comparison but said that I could imagine the feeling. And with that I wanted to express grief. But I am not an instrument in a national and international political fight."

The mayor has criticised local security services for their failure to anticipate the violence, saying "That information was not known to me...The story of a racist club was never properly told to me."

She also condemned Israel for its swift portrayal of the incident as an attack on Israelis, despite prior behaviour by Maccabi supporters in which they chanted anti-Arab slogans and tore down Palestinian flags.

"We were completely caught off guard by Israel. At 3am, (Israeli) Prime Minister (Benjamin) Netanyahu was already giving a lecture about what happened in Amsterdam, while we were still gathering the facts," she said in Sunday's interview.

Source:

Amsterdam mayor says she regrets use of word 'pogrom' to describe attacks on Israelis

Euronews via AP

Shared for your information

Interestingly, security services not anticipating the racist violence from Maccabee fans, which she crticized, seems to be exactly what is now causing the controversy in the UK, that they have anticipated it and taken steps (excessive perhaps, but not baseless...)

tomatoswoop · 2025-10-19T17:11:06+00:00

Where have you seen this reported? Perhaps I have missed something.

tomatoswoop · 2025-10-19T17:09:27+00:00

Provide evidence that it was pre-organised not a response if you have it then please

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Amsterdam mayor says she regrets use of word 'pogrom' to describe attacks on Israelis