Debating Room

@brandonfriedman.bsky.social

5 July

"The richest in society pay a greater proportion of tax than they ever have before." Translation: The richest have increased their wealth by making the rest of society poorer, whilst finding ways to reduce their own taxes. Less money for our public services and the 99%, more money for the top 1%.

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Brandon Friedman

This seems like a big deal

showbiz411.comControversial "Musk" Documentary Pulled From Almost Every One of 472 Theaters After One Week by Newly Sold Bleecker Street Films - Showbiz411Alex Gibney's "Musk" movie is pretty much gone. Released October 9th to four theaters, it expanded to 472 last Friday. And now, one week later it's gone

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Zack Zwiezen

@zackzwiezen.com

This isn't hyperbole or a joke. Parents actually called the cops and got the black boy and his family removed and the league claimed they were trespassing because he was "putting on a show" and wasn't playing "fair."

Yours in negritude, Ryan K. Smith@mewefree.bsky.social

They called the cops on this 3-year-old Black boy because he was kickin the white kids' ass on the soccer field.

Nothing the Leave campaign did to win Brexit was innovative. In 1924, the Daily Mail published details of the Zinoviev Letter just 4 days before the General Election, where Russians encouraged British Communists to turn against their own country...

latimes.comCambridge Analytica shuts down amid scandal over use of Facebook dataCambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that worked for the Trump campaign and had come under attack for its use of personal Facebook data in other elections, announced on Wednesday it would ceas...

When scrutiny turned to Cambridge Analytica, the company then deleted huge swathes of data before shutting down. The biggest failing of modern democracy is that nobody has been held accountable for stealing elections across the world... www.latimes.com/business/la-...

Whilst political corruption continues to make millions with no subsequent punishment for those involved, then it will continue to be used to destroy democracy across the world.

The targeting of a wide range of social groups, from football fans caught up in a fake EURO football competition, animal rights activists being told that the EU was against protecting polar bears, and even left-wing socialists convinced that the EU was punishing Greece...

Cambridge Analytica had previously claimed to use honey traps, bribery stings, and prostitutes, among other tactics, to "influence" more than 200 elections globally for its clients. Nothing this company did was fair practice...

Nigel Oakes of Cambridge Analytica once stated that he uses "the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler. We appeal to people on an emotional level to get them to agree on a functional level"...

Propaganda is only used to sway people to vote against their own best interests where reasoning would be ineffective. One thing Leave campaigners did do which was new was the huge scale of the deceit. The number of bots on social media that led to the disinformation becoming mainstream...

By the time many of the lies could be challenged and disproved, the Referendum was over, giving the Leave campaign a narrow 4% win. There was the Cambridge Analytica scandal where voter data was illegally harvested. GDPR existed long before this due to corporations exploiting consumer data...

Nobody needs reminded that the scapegoating of anyone considered "other" was a key Nazi tactic. Andy Wigmore of the Leave campaign praised the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda...

As it turns out, the letter itself was fake. But its very publication helped the Conservatives to secure a win over Britain's first Labour Government. Only days before the EU Referendum, the Leave campaign dramatically increased its spending and online disinformation was prevalent...

share.googleMarvel's gem-studded Infinity Gauntlet replica heads to auction in Abu DhabiA replica of the Infinity Gauntlet, the powerful artifact featured in Marvel Comics and Marvel films, will go up for auction on ‌December 8 in Abu Dhabi, Julien's Auctions and East Continental Gems s...

It's rumoured that Elon Musk wants to buy the Infinity Gauntlet replica so that he can install a "kill switch" which will instruct AI to kill half of Earth's population. share.google/myNxFlHz8xcv...

The DWP has been handed sweeping powers to recover cash from households who owe money, as well as banning benefits claimants from driving if they don't pay back what is owed. Meanwhile, wealthy tax dodgers get to keep their private jets and passports.

theguardian.comCost of balancing Great Britain’s power grid reaches nearly £50m a dayGrid operator paying large sums to switch off windfarms in areas of excess electricity generation while turning on gas plants elsewhere

Poor investment in the national grid has led to windfall being shut off due to overproduction of electricity, whilst gas plants elsewhere are ramped up due to energy shortages. Those claiming that wind turbines aren't working half the time are often also against investment in the national grid...

Add to that the Government's plan to build many more new houses in an attempt to tackle the housing crisis. You cannot simply build new houses without providing adequate infrastructure to serve the extra demand...

sse.comWhy do we need to upgrade the national electricity grid?Why do we need to upgrade the electricity grid? And why are wind farms paid to switch off? The National Audit Office says grid bottlenecks are the issue and faster upgrades could save consumers money.

A report by the National Audit Office shows that, contrary to right-wing opinion pieces, investment in the grid will actually bring prices down for consumers. www.sse.com/news-and-vie...

The £50m cost per day to balance the national grid could have been much better invested in updating the national grid instead, but that would obviously hit the profits of fossil fuel corporations. The longer that investment is stalled, the greater the cost of energy for consumers...

As more resource hungry data/AI centres are built around the country the more difficult and expensive it becomes to meet both energy and water demands.

You know you can't trust a headline when it's forced to use quotes to avoid retraction. According to the article itself, the job involves comprehensive training and rigorous testing, with candidates expected to develop a strong working knowledge of immigration law and apply it effectively...

As a former housing benefits officer, I'd like to add that Presenting Officers fighting appeals at DWP tribunals typically have no previous legal experience or qualifications either. However, you won't hear the same kind of outrage from the Telegraph about "unqualified" civil servants in the DWP.

Land ownership is a strange human construct that no other animal recognises. Nature provides us with shared space in which we survive and thrive. The idea that people work much of their lives to claim a small piece of that land is a strange concept...

What is more strange is if a person misses several payments for that land over a short period, then they forfeit the entire land regardless of how many years they have contributed towards it. Animals must look at us and think...

Marine Le Pen, whose party has taken millions of Euros from a Russian bank in the past, wants France to cut off financial aid to Ukraine.

Professor Daniele Albertazzi@dralbertazziuk.bsky.social

If elected president, Marine Le Pen intends to cut off financial aid to Ukraine within six months of her election. The Rassemblement National (RN) leader announced this in an interview with the Financial Times, ahead of next year’s French elections.

I do feel somewhat sorry for Nigel Farage. Now that Russian data centres have been hit, he no longer has the backing of many online Reform supporters when he claims that Russia played no part in Brexit.

One sector where AI is already having huge impacts is the video games industry. Not so much because AI is being used as a tool to code many new games, but because building AI data centres has driven up hardware costs dramatically...

Gaming consoles are also hit by the same hardware price issues as PCs as they are essentially made with the same components, albeit tailored to a specific configuration. Consoles are already sold at a loss to lock in consumers, with the sales of the games themselves making up the deficit...

finance.yahoo.comVideo game hardware sales plunge to 13-year low as prices soar on memory, storage shortageVideo game console sales have plunged 13% on the memory and storage crisis.

If the majority of consumers can't afford the latest hardware, then games companies have less incentive to produce consoles and games that utilise cutting edge technology. Without this cutting edge technology, consumers are less likely to upgrade existing consoles to play newer games.

Crucial components like memory and CPU chips are in short supply because AI companies have secured exclusive long term deals with manufacturers. If you want to buy a high end gaming PC nowadays, it can even cost more than a brand new car...

One of the complaints during the Referendum campaign was that the British public never had a say in EEC/EU membership since 1972. Ironically, the same people now claim that Brexit was a once in a generation decision and that we should wait 40 years before another referendum to rejoin...

Richard Tice claims even now that Brexit is a "process" that simply needs more time. When any process has adverse effects, it's important to explain if those effects are temporary and how they can possibly be overcome...

Those who choose not to address the Brexit problems must either support the current damage being done or simply have no clue as to how to fix the mess they helped create.

But democracy doesn't work that way, of course. The reason why we didn't have a vote on EU membership previously was because there was no great public support for it. People were largely content with being in the EEC/EU which is why it was a non-issue until Farage began scapegoating EU migrants...

@firewall0011010.bsky.social

The debate about Brexit only continues because it's been an absolute failure to the point where even Brexiters critiise it, insisting that we either got the "wrong" Brexit, what was delivered isn't even Brexit at all...

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Warren A

Replying to @mrsbettybowers.bsky.social

Thank you for your attention to this treason.

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AnneMc #FBPE 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦🩵

@boof64.bsky.social

We keep being told that Reform are in a position to win the next general election. But almost every single time the public get the chance to elect a Reform MP, they decided against it! www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/ref...

thelondoneconomic.comHolborn and St Pancras: Reform suffer yet another by-election disasterReform UK have suffered another by-election disaster after they finished in fourth place in Holborn and St Pancras.

Leavers once told us that the EU looked down on us, treating us badly, and that a preferential Brexit trade deal with the EU would be easy as we held all the cards. Now they tell us that the UK is too weak to negotiate favourable terms to rejoin that would give us the same privileges we once had.

independent.co.ukBlindness charity targeted by anti-migrant protesters after being mistaken for RNLIOne person accused the blind people’s charity of ‘deliberately overfilling our great country with illegals’

I hink the RNIB should stick to helping blind British kids cross the road, not blind immigrants cross the Channel! 😆 www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

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Sathnam Sanghera

@sathnam.bsky.social

Dear tv and radio producers. Thankyou for the invitation. But, no, I do not want to appear on your show to defend the idea that I am English, after 50 years of living and working here, because the increasingly feral right want to turn this into a "debate" and you cannot see how you're being played

The problem with the Greens motion on "Zionism" and subsequent criticism of that motion it is that the word itself has become very much open to interpretation. If Zionism simply means a sanctuary for Jewish people to avoid persecution, then its hard to criticise such an ideology...

The actions of the Israeli Government suggest that the only way a Jewish state can be safe is by attacking and driving out every non-Jewish person just beyond their borders, whilst taking over the land that once belonged to those who have been displaced...

It's important to remember that many Jews both in and outside of Israel oppose the actions of Netanyahu and his Government. However, the majority of the voting electorate of Israel supported Netanyahu and as such, the nation as a whole bears collective responsibility for his Government's actions.

If it means a colonialist state that indiscriminately attacks, murders and drives others out of their own land based upon having different religious beliefs, then it becomes very easy to criticise...

By its very definition, Zionism is a form of ethno-nationalism. And yet most scholars agree that ethno-nationalism in countries like Britain and America creates deep social friction, weakens democratic institutions, and conflicts with universal human rights...

"Social" media stopped being social when it allowed private groups and private posts that shared extremist ideologies without public scrutiny. It stopped being social when algorithms promoted extremism and moderators failed to tackle the subsequent targeted hate...