Okay, apologies for the repetition, but I feel this requires it:

This isn’t ‘Labour’. This is from the Blue Labour campaign group, membership: four MPs.

Actual Labour, the leadership and the government, is currently in the process of strengthening the Equalities Act!

McSweeney is very bad, but he’s not part of Blue Labour and this didn’t come from him! It came from the four (count 'em!) MPs who call themselves the Blue Labour Campaign Group.

Decided to blame immigrants for all the country’s problems.

You are absolutely right. There’s empirical evidence that these kinds of ‘accommodationist’ policies only increase support for the far right. These polls are further evidence that the Starmer strategy is counter-productive.

I’m still a member for now, but I’m not surprised people feel that way.

Heh. Yeah, I can’t really hold up a country backsliding on trans rights as an example of an effective constitutional monarchy.

I think taking a broad view, there are quite a lot of constitutional monarchies that are really great places to live (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Canada, the Bahamas, Japan, to name a few). There are also quite a lot of republics that can claim the same. So, from a sort of human development POV, I don’t think it really matters very much.

[EDIT: Should’ve added that there are also plenty of republics and monarchies that are disasters, too. My point is that there’s no consistent pattern of one works and the other doesn’t.]

Sure, monarchies are a bit daft but I think ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is quite a good rule. Especially since spending time on fixing things that ain’t broke is time you could be spending on fixing things that are broke. I live in the UK and we have a lot of major problems that need our attention. It’s better to focus on those than have a big argument about the King when, as we can see from international comparisons, the King isn’t really the issue.

Ridiculous.

I’m glad the results at the locals have led to at least some MPs finding their voices. Haigh, Whittome and Trickett have all spoken out, but they’re sort of the usual suspects. This guy is at least a bit new!

Objectively, both things are true! But I tend to think Labour is the one with the power and so they’re the ones who should be changing, not the relatively powerless seven voters.

100%. Point is that if Labour had appealed to their left flank, they’d have held the seat!

Assuming we’re going back far enough, antibiotics. Cure one person of the bubonic plague or tuberculosis and people will start taking you seriously.

I bet there were more than seven votes for the Greens and Lib Dems combined.

The BMA residents conference did pass the motion, but it won’t be official policy unless it passes at the annual meeting this year:

Resident doctors working in the NHS also condemned the supreme court’s ruling on gender as having “no basis in science or medicine”. Medics at the British Medical Association’s (BMA) resident doctors conference in London passed a motion stating that “attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine”. While the motion was passed at the conference it will not become BMA policy unless voted on at the union’s annual meeting later this year.

This is it. The temptation to slap on reciprocal tariffs is obvious but it’s generally self-defeating. Much better to do things this way and free up trade elsewhere.

Her instincts are the worst. Imagine being a conservative and not being able to exploit a ‘rally round the flag’ moment!

Good question.

The Newer Forest.

Always makes me laugh that the ‘New’ Forest is getting on for a thousand years old.

Again, you’ve written quite a long comment, almost none of which is pertinent.

Music is not math. Some aspects of it can be expressed mathematically, yes, but that’s not the same thing.

Imagining the idea ‘I’d like to see an image of a lemming’, which is what you’ve done, does require some imagination. However, the output is not art because the process used to go from your ‘prompt’ to the image was not a creative one. (Also, this isn’t entirely pertinent, but the image output is really bad. If it had been made by a person and otherwise looked like this, I would still say that it was just ugly, bad art.)

You may well be a creative and imaginative person; I don’t know you and I wouldn’t want to judge! However, your image of a lemming was not the result of a creative process and so is not art.

Current AI is lacking both.

Only word wrong here is ‘current’. AI will never have creativity or craftmanship. It’s impossible.