Have been a bit frustrated by some of the conversation about Labour's voter coalition.
I've written about who the "Hero Voters" actually were, how we won them, and what we need to do to earn their support next time.
chriscurtismk.substack.com/p/who-actual...
I can't explain why, but I am convinced that Bridgerton is somehow evil
title: your ai slop bores me prompt: beautiful man high quality next gen large chest realistic result: pen drawing showing very highly rendered face
wow it works
New Research! This summer I went to 272 'School Streets' in Paris, generating a comprehensive picture of this massive street-pedestrianization program. I cataloged amenities, tracked their development over time, and carried a thermal camera 📸
Thread on the findings 🧵
doi.org/10.1177/0739...
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Buy less candles
Food $200
Data $150
Rent $800
Painting crossings rainbow colour $127000000000
Utility $150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my navy is dying
Demographically, most progressive defectors are frustrated lower middle class Millennials - not affluent urbanites or a PMC ‘lanyard class'. Though they have liberal social values, many are frustrated graduates; Millennials with a mortgage or rent they are struggling to afford - primary school teachers, IT support or clerical workers. In short, the face of the modern social democratic voter.
Labour is losing voters to progressive parties disproportionately.
And they are not mainly "lanyard" professional or working classes, the oppositional forces of Blue Labour and right discourse.
It's squeezed millennials in service careers. Which our politics ignores.
"Mainline conservatism is dying. In the US and UK at least, it is dead.This has been destabilizing to be sure, but let us not waste too much sympathy on it. It caused many harms and ignored many more. We should not fight for a creed that could not fight for itself."
The House of Lords Digital & Communications Committee just published their report on AI, copyright & the creative industries, and their conclusions could not be clearer.
🧵 1/5
About the rule that says sometimes you have to be the asshole. There is no rule. You don't ever have to be the asshole.
Sorry, sorry, I know this is wet, but, after seeing the below tweet, I couldn't get this out of my head until I made it
9. It can reasonably be objected that the starry-eyed advocates of LLMs are themselves cultists. Even some inside the tribe accept that it is so! But too much Bluesky AI discourse reminds me of vintage Dawkins/Harris atheism - taking up the bad intellectual habits of those they condemn. Finis.
5. There are criticisms of LLMs that are much more plausible. They are built on a large scale expropriation of the intellectual commons. Demonstrably true! They involve a radical and extremely worrying derangement of power relations in favor of a tiny number of men with weird beliefs. Also true imo.
Yeah, I’m reminded of the comparison I had relayed to me: “It’s like going to a gym and using a forklift to lift the weights.”
Weird, it seems like 'anti-immigration' voters are just racists. Who'd have thought. What a surprise.
www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
It's a shame the 'I'd give it a minute if I were you' joke was never funny even before it got old, because an AI called My Anus that promises 'complete, polished deliverables' seems like it was made up specifically for that gag
Goodwin's campaign much less successful than Reform suggest
Reform had a path to victory: win a third of the vote for themselves - and hope for a progressive split
They did not do what they needed to do for themselves to make that possible
By-electiion contender only matched national poll%
One thing I have learned: you have to attack far-right/anti-democratic voices in the places and on the issues where they appear to be the strongest. You have to remove their assumption that they have *any* easy wins. The more pointless the battle feels, the more important it is to fight it.
Well, no, they’re not just as wrong. The bigger error is not seeing that “trying to win over voters from a party on the opposite end of the spectrum, whose values your core voters oppose” is not same as “chasing voters from party on same side ideologically whose values your core voters like.”
Not to make everything 2016, but @volts.wtf wrote a good essay on how Hillary Clinton got this treatment back in 2016. Even when there was no scandal, you could always turn that into a scandal by arguing that her tone and word choice were the REAL scandal.
if I could get Starmer to understand one thing from today, it might be this.
bloc politics is here and they have to stop insulting the voters in their own bloc!
For me
The 'kind of result [...] parties of government face' is coming 2nd to your main opposition party in a 2-party system.
This was coming 3rd to the 4th and 5th parties in a 5-party system. Not the same!
Our party has just come third in Gorton and Denton, a previously safe Labour seat - an area where we haven't lost an election since 1931.
It is those running our party who are to blame. We need change at the top and serious lessons need to be learnt:
turns out McSweeney and the Blue Labour gang were wrong and the out of touch woke liberal elite Bluesky echo chamber bubble was right
the people of manchester have spoken: britain demands trans rights and drug liberalisation
Honestly this little anecdote is for me just emblematic of something I really believe: the British public are genuinely much nicer and more decent than either our political or media class are themselves, or would have you believe.
On the basis that I am unlikely ever to have to prove it, I'm going to say, yes, definitely
