robfordmancs.bsky.social
Politics Professor, University of Manchester.
Author of "Brexitland" and "The British General Election of 2019"
My Substack, "The Swingometer", is here: https://swingometer.substack.com/
https://www.robertford.net/
3,967 posts
49,242 followers
3,117 following
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Swift had it right. And Swift was merciless in his satire of the Twitter racists of his time and their bigotry towards Irish Catholics www.azquotes.com/picture-quot...
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Trump isn’t Saruman. Miller isn’t Sauron. If they want to get things done they have to get people in institutions to do them. Do this stuff, while not the be all and end all, still matters. Is still a cause for some hope.
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Or to put it more succinctly: people who say blatantly racist stuff should be shunned. Immediately, loudly, by everyone. No ifs, no buts.
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Don’t tell him, Pike
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Personally I find any attempt at social interaction from strangers on public transport mortifying. Possibly a result of many West Coast Mainline trips, living in fear of the “4 lads, 12 cans, 11am” nightmare scenario.
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NGL I would love to be sat next to the pair of you at dinner if you were to launch into a long explainer to David G on the whole Harry Potter tv show business
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Depends - did anyone laugh at your Eurovision jokes?
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If a very tall, very intense white man with a posh accent started randomly telling me jokes at a London bus stop I’d smile awkwardly while trying to order an Uber without him noticing
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Our third session concerned the electoral system in a multiparty era.
@delivering4crawley.bsky.social, Frances Foley and @robfordmancs.bsky.social debated whether First Past the Post should be replaced.
Watch a recording 👇
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And our third panel concerned the electoral system in a multiparty era.
@delivering4crawley.bsky.social, Frances Foley and @robfordmancs.bsky.social debated whether First Past the Post should be replaced.
Watch it 👇
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That’s true, and for me at least the boredom factor as much as anything else is why I’m now seldom on there. If X still helped me find interesting conversations I might put up with the garbage. But it doesn’t anymore. It’s like Facebook but with added Nazis.
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Exactly. Anon fascist apologists will be blocked.
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British love enforcing petty rules
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The Farage right at the time tried to push lockdown scepticism - a total flop
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One of the already forgotten lessons of COVID was the exceptionally high public trust in all the professionals involved - medics, public health experts, scientists - and very high compliance with their advice. Vaccine and lockdown scepticism were niche pursuits of cranks. Not like that everywhere!
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Best of luck with whatever comes next Adam!
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Nige! Nige! NIGE!
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And lots of people are going to pay lots of fines and/or do jail time for listening to plausible sounding internet brains, while the architects of these brains disavow any responsibility for the consequences of people listening to services constantly being pushed on them as a time saving ‘solution’.
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Fair enough, replies have introduced enough doubt and it’s too late at night for me to research this properly so I’m deleting it.
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OTOH do we really need more “what does Gen Z want?” dreck from anyone, let along NYT?
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But fair point I don’t know for sure when the screen grab was taken or if/how it has been clipped
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If you’re on the US edition front page not international it should be second story imho, arguably first. And the NYT has sadly a long track record of linguistic euphemising and downplaying Trump’s autocratic behaviour so this isn’t a first offense.
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Sadly yes. What grim times we face.
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While, thankfully, in Britain we do not have the problem of mass gun ownership, that reduces the threat of violence but does not eliminate it. Two MPs have died violently in the last decade, more than died in the previous three decades before that. Many face constant threats, have panic rooms etc.
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The only people who will choose to put themselves forward in such circumstances are the corrupt, the foolish and the fanatical. Then when governments built from such unpromising material inevitably fail or go rotten, the anger against politicians which drives away everyone else only grows.