Yes, having an election is a normal thing in a democracy.

Well of course - publishing the identity of all private donors would be madness.

Small donors should be allowed to donate freely without their name appearing on the internet for all their friends, neighbours, employers, journalists, rabble-rousers, etc to see. Someone donating a few tens or hundred of euros to their local candidate doesn’t create a risk of influencing (or appearing to influence) the candidate’s political platform; and we should be positively encouraging small donors, as I’d much prefer a political system where politicians relied on many small donations to one where they relied on a handful of millionaire donors.

It’s big money donors - the ones stumping up enough money to potentially influence the candidate - that parties should be required to disclose.

Now do it with the Discovery bridge crew.

If you’re not doing great, wouldn’t it make more sense to try and weather the storm and work to make things sunnier before the next election rather than call for an election amidst the storm?

The latest possible date the election could have been is January 2025, but that was practically very unlikely as i) there is an extremely sharp generational divide in voting intentions (far sharper than in most Western democracies) and January would have meant the Tories having to get their elderly core voters to the polls in the middle of winter, and ii) a January vote would have meant a campaign running over Christmas, and everyone would have punished Sunak for that. The widespread expectation was for an autumn election.

It’s unclear why Sunak jumped earlier but likely a combination of various factors:

• them being worried the economy will not get better by the autumn (so avoids going to the polls after a summer of bad economic news);

• going early means their main opponents on the right (Reform) don’t have time to get their act together and select candidates in all seats (which they would have done by the autumn);

• their flagship immigration policy is controversial and expensive, yet likely to have an underwhelming impact on illegal immigration levels, and they’ll look like complete idiots for centring an autumn election on a ‘stop the boats’ slogan if there’s another summer of small boat arrivals in the meantime; and

• Sunak personally is fed up - he’s very much a political child of the far-right (an avowed Brexiter long before Boris Johnson or Liz Truss converted to the cause) yet the far-right of the Tory Party don’t see him as one of their own and have been constant thorns in his side throughout his leadership - he may just want out at this stage.

All of our constitutional law takes the form of Acts of Parliament that can be amended or repealed with a 50%+1 vote in Parliament - unlike most countries where the constitution sits above the parliament and changing it requires a supermajority and/or a referendum. Boris had a majority so he could change the constitution. It’s a totally messed up system.

One reason British liberals as so passionate about internationalism and the European Union is that international treaties and EU law are some of the few mechanisms we have had for constraining executive overreach, since they sit outside and above Parliament’s remit. For example, even if Parliament were to repeal the Human Rights Act, Britain remains a party to the European Convention on Human Rights (which is why some Tories now talk about withdrawing from this too). Without international safeguards external to the UK, in theory all that stands between Britain and despotism is a simple majority vote in Parliament.

It’s a corrupt convention but it wasn’t always the case. An important reform by the 2010-15 coalition government was the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which took this incredibly important decision out of the prime minister’s partisan hands and have elections on a predictable 5 year cycle (barring the government falling or a supermajority for early elections).

After Boris Johnson won the 2019 election though, he set about dismantling checks and balances such as this. He also changed the electoral system for mayoral elections to First Past the Post (with no consultation or referendum - which the Tories have always insisted was needed to change the electoral system away from FPTP…) because FPTP tends to favour Tories.

Because the Palestinian children had nothing to do with the killing of Israeli children? What you’re describing and explicitly trying to justify here is collective punishment of all of the two million Palestinians in Gaza (more than half of whom are children) for the crimes of (by Israel’s estimates) about 3,000 Hamas terrorists on 7 October.

What you’re articulating constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Convention and that’s exactly why the ICC is getting involved.

Let me try putting this another way. The population of the US state of Nebraska is about two million. Every year, there are about 6,000 violent crimes committed by Nebraskans. Should every Nebraskan be collectively punished for the crimes of those few thousand Nebraskans?

The homicide rate in the US is about 6-7 times that in the UK per 100,000 population. I’d take our situation any day of the week.

Last time I looked into this properly, knife crime in the US was actually roughly the same frequency as that in the UK. The difference is that knife-based murders stand out in the UK, whereas in the US nobody pays attention because the problem is dwarfed by the much greater problem of rampant gun crime.

The UK is a society where violent crime is pretty uncommon. The homicide rate in the UK was 1.0 per 100,000 population in 2023. That has been broadly trending downwards in recent decades, after rising during the late 20th century and hitting a peak at c1.8 per 100,000 in 2003. The US is a much more violent society: their homicide rate is around 6.4 per 100,000 population.

Killers are always going to find weapons - if you ban guns they’ll find knives, if you ban knives they’ll kill with something else. One difference is that a killer on a knife rampage is going to kill a lot fewer people before they’re stopped than a killer with a gun. I guess killing with a knife is a more ‘involved’ act than just pointing a gun and clicking the trigger, so the bar for someone stabbing with a knife is probably a bit higher than killing from several metres away with a gun.

But part of it is a societal thing - my hunch is that (in relative terms) society in the UK and most other rich Western liberal democracies just instills in people an instinctively higher value on human life. You see it in US exceptionalism in use of the death penalty, the frequency of police killings, etc. I don’t want to exaggerate the difference - the US still has far fewer murders than Colombia or South Africa or Brazil - but there are other Western countries like Canada or Finland where guns are still pretty widely owned (albeit not quite to the extent of the US) that don’t have the same problem of violence as the US.

They wouldn’t need hundreds of hours of voice recordings to replicate somebody’s voice in the 24th century. We don’t even really need that today.

Forth, and fear no darkness.

Jabba before CGI…

(In a deleted scene in ANH. Obviously he’d gone full slug by the time of his first actual on-screen appearance in RotJ.)

THERE. ARE. FOUR. LIGHTS!

-- Jean-Luc Picard

-- Frank Abatemarco

Do you know why I stuck with it through s1-s3, even though I couldn’t know if it would get better?

'CAUSE I’VE GOT FAAAAAIIITH OF THE HEART!

150 duck-sized sycamore trees or 1 sycamore-tree-sized duck?

I don’t consider Star Wars to be sci-fi. It’s a futuristic space fantasy.

Is that an unpopular opinion? Most sci-fi/fantasy fans I know would probably agree with this. I love Star Wars, but in the same way I love Lord of the Rings.

Also, Star Trek Enterprise is one of the best Trek series, IMO. Top 5.

I would say the final season of Enterprise is arguably the best single season of any Star Trek show so far. But it was a long road getting there…

The human crew (particularly Archer and Trip) were difficult to warm to in seasons 1 and 2 - I found them so much more emotional and overdramatic than an intelligent professional human would be today, and that it made it difficult for me to accept them as the bridge from today to the 23rd/24th century Starfleet we know.

Season 3 was tough for different reasons - maybe it played differently in America, but watching from outside the US a lot of it felt like post-9/11 revenge fantasy. Very proto-‘America First’.

They have duty shifts, each will have an officer in command. In a three-shift system (i.e. where each shift lasts 8 hours), you might have the captain commanding the day shift, the first officer the second shift, and another more junior officer on the night shift. Other times (like when Jellico commanded the Enterprise) there can be a four-shift system. If something important happens when the captain is off duty or asleep then the shift commander can always wake the captain - but the vast majority of the time (i.e. all the days in between episodes, which we never see) then nothing eventful happens during the night shift.

On the Enterprise D, Data often commanded the night shift since he didn’t need any sleep, but in principle any officer (even at Lt Junior Grade or Ensign) could be put in command.

I ended reading up a load on this for a Star Trek Adventures game.

It was the dawn of the third age of mankind…

I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.

Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.

I Call Modi ‘A Fucking Fascist’ Who Would Take India’s Freedom, Diversity And Democracy