I actually enjoy Mastodon because the “followers” you get or the ones you follow are few and it’s all manageable. I don’t understand the appeal of following so many that you can’t possibly keep up with what they write about or who they are.

I guess it’s punishment and redemption. The idea of “doing time” and then going back to your life is strong in British culture.

It’ll be ok as the way things are going, the readers will be AIs who will summarise and review books for Youtube channels watched by AIs who go on to write books for… dead culture. It’s ok because the masses will be watching Strictly Come Hunger Games Dancing.

Bear in mind about 50% of Greens are moderate or middle-right and only backing Polanski as long as he looks like he can extend the party. Greens are the sort you can make temporary alliances with but not for lasting change. We do need a left-wing alliance, however, and Your Party isn’t it sadly.

Going to be hard for Your Party to recover from this. It’s either a popular front which means an activist alliance of left parties and greens - or an actual small parliamentary-orientated party. At this point in the game Sultana is probably right in principle but woefully wrong in tactics.

They’ve won the propaganda war convincing the majority that low tax = freedom and prosperity. However, the period of post-World War 2 social improvement was characterised by VERY high taxes for the rich.

This is the same MP who voted against the 10 Minute Rule Bill to ban marriages between first cousins and against decrimilisation of abortion. I fear he was never going to be at home in a socialist party.

Regardless, Your Party is DoA.

The idea that attendance at the founding conference is going to be done by “sortition” (lottery) - except, of course, for the select self-chosen important people - is another sign that Your Party is not the organisation the left are looking for.

It’s a choice between ear-defenders for neurodiverse children or having your bins collected, according to Tice. He’s a choice one, eh?

I’m interested to know if anyone is using a Cloudflare tunnel to stream audio? It breaks their terms but I’ve read that they tend to ignore it.

And yet much of the organising has been done in private by the Sultana and Feinstein factions who have held secretive competing rallies and meetings up and down the country which have definitely been done behind closed doors. But that’s not what I’m talking about. The fundamentals of what the party stands for (is it socialist? left-of-centre? federalist? whatever) and how it’s run must be sorted out before supporters get to participate. These sorts of lessons - as well as going too far in the centralist way - were learned the hard way with Occupy. The passion and energy of a movement is easily dissipated by politicking. Which, I fear, is what has happened. Plus my usual belief that the state is usually involved in dismantling left groups from within.

It was foolish to think that some allegedly anti-socialist MPs and councillors could be won over to a left-of-Labour party.

It’s not what many people want though. A sense of a unified left. These sorts of rows have to happen well out of sight behind closed doors - which, to be fair was probably happening until Sultana jumped the gun and went public. People I know who were so enthused about the party seem pretty disillusioned already.

Why do we need anything “far worse”? Why not just remove them constitutionally and let them do their own thing? Smaller state and all that.

That sounds fantastic. Journiv has kick-started me into journalling before bed again. Thank you for uour work.

I’ve been running Journiv since Monday and really liking it. I’d really like to see a straightfoward means of exporting/restoring journals, though. The export says coming soon.

One of the reasons I stopped using Memos - which I thought was good - was because the devs were telling users on Discord that there was no need for backups because you should have the skill to manually locate and open up the database and export entries yourself. I think that sort of stuff makes or breaks apps like this in which people put aspects of their lives into.

Boris leading it? With an oven-ready plan to destabilise the BBC?

And yet how often do we see people who make blunders like this promoted? I work with people who’ve made catestrophic errors and been rewarded by more pay and seniority. It’s the British Way.

Ah! the old spectre of the 70s with the wailing piles of uncollected bins and rattling power cuts! Those of us who grew up then seem to have fonder memories of a happier Britain. Price controls have been used successfully in the past (particularly in the post-WW2 period up until 1954). Other countries - significantly Singapore - use price controls to manage their economies efficiently.

Ok ok I’ll accept all this “explanation” but what I’d also like to know is when fruit like apples - grown in the UK - have shrunk in size, increased by something like 100%+ and begin to rot as soon as you get them home. You could (just about) put up with massive hikes in prices because of “explanation” but prices plus increasingly worse quality of food is beyond unacceptable. We’re being ripped off here in the UK.