thanksforallthefish
@thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe
- Comment on Trans rights activists protest Haringey debate on single-sex spaces petition 5 days ago:
“she heard chants and the word TERF being used”
Well it’s good to know she’s not deaf I guess, but are we supposed to be upset that a TERF got called out as a TERF ?
- Comment on War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready? 6 days ago:
From the article
But what is the threat? In 1940 the danger of a German invasion of the UK was very real. But the chances of Russian tanks rolling up Whitehall are surely negligible.
“It’s not the tanks you need to worry about,” says historian Margaret MacMillan, author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us.
“It’s the cutting of cables on the ocean floor. It’s the hacking into systems on which so many things depend. The possibility for asymmetric war, for cyber war, is growing by leaps and bounds.”
Russia is winning the war they’ve been in with Western Europe for the last decade. Trump is in the White House, AfD just won the Saxony election. RN are on track to take the French presidency, Farage still gets 25% polling despite the rank corruption swirling around him.
Russia won’t send troops anywhere until the country in question is deeply compromised. It’s hybrid warfare and the battle started years ago, and we’re doing a shite job of defending ourselves (because we have quislings on the inside helping them).
- Comment on Horrified children look on as lollipop man in his 70s struck by car on school crossing 6 days ago:
Edit: also Lollipop lady/man is also used in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand apparently.
Can confirm, that is correct
- Comment on Reform given record-breaking £72m by two crypto billionaires 1 week ago:
This implies that everyone else used logic to arrive at their points of view.
LOL, only if you have reading comprehension issues.
It explicitly STATES (not implies) that they (not wealthy right wing populist voters) are a member of the set of those who arrived at the position emotionally. It makes zero statement about who else might be in that same set.
The good news however is that we have academic studies have actually answered that question. In short the right is heavily supported for those who select emotionally predominantly from an underlying fear basis. And that the left predominantly operates from an analytical basis. This is the source of the (very poignant) quote about “facts having a left wing bias”
To argue that your position is grounded in logic whilst the ‘other’ group is ground in emotion is an ego-inflating fantasy.
Yeah, well, facts are uncomfortable, I get that.
People most often make decisions based on emotional reasons and then use logic to post-hoc justify them.
Oh now, that is absolutely true. Academically well supported too. You know what the next sentence is going to be though, don’t you ? It’s the right, particularly the populist right, that heavily do so.
We are all closer to reform voters than we would like to believe.
Keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep at night, meanwhile the polling shows that voting “anyone but reform” to keep reform out makes up about half of UK voters, and only 25% are willing to vote for them.
- Comment on Reform given record-breaking £72m by two crypto billionaires 1 week ago:
I think your view is the dangerous one.
It has been proved over and over, UK and overseas, that the non-millionaires/not wealthy people voting for right wing populists (MAGA, Reform, AfD, RN) are doing so for emotional not logical reasons. You can’t argue people out of a position they didnt use logic to get to.
So, are they real reasons underpinning their support, of course, in broad brush strokes it’s a combination of fear, a feeling they’ve been treated poorly, a certain amount of entitlement.
The problem with that is that a group of people are promising to fix all their problems at no cost to them (a patently false promise).
So yes, being realistic isn’t “tarnishing them” - if you don’t correctly diagnose the disease you can’t cure it.
The big problem is those who should pay the price for fixing the problems they caused (the Epstein class) have the wealth to divert attention away from them having caused the problem and its fixes
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
What evidence are you looking for ? I’ve stated the Greens have made no formal statement on it - because that’s the process when someone is suspended and their conduct is being reviewed - unlike the Mail I don’t just make shit up to make the readers happy
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
She was suspended (she hasnt yet been removed) because of a media post, not because she is toxic. I explicitly state that two lines below my opinion about her toxicity. Separate items.
Are you deliberately misreading or just seeing what you expect to see ?
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
There are several other trans members on the GPC… she didn’t get suspended for being trans, she got suspended for breaking party rules on conduct by committee members.
This is from the (trans) member whose bluesky post is elsewhere in the thread (Kat Bristow) taken from the reddit post I linked
“TheKatBristow
There’s other trans women currently on GPC, including the other co-chair of LGBTIQA+ Greens, and no action has been taken against any other trans person on GPC.
So we can safely assume that Eleonora’s suspension is unrelated to her being trans.”
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
No, that’s why I differentiated between anti zionist and anti-semitic, and yes I am very well aware of how anti-semitic has been used as a bludgeon against anyone critical of the Israeli genocide.
So let’s put a marker down, I am wholeheartedly against the genocide being perpertrated (sp?) by Israel in Palestine.
I don’t have the quote to hand, but it was with reference to wanting Iran to wipe all jews off the planet or some such far too widely sweeping statement to be an acceptable comment by a Greens office bearer.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
The Greens have not made ANY public statement on the subject - because the matter is under investigation - and you may notice if you do a quick search the ONLY publications putting out this story in the way you’re doing are right wing and far right - my search gives me hits for Daily Mail GB News and Telegraph, plus a handful of obscure right wing blogs. No greens announcement, and nothing out of the left wing (for the simple reason they dont have any facts to build a story on and unlike the Mail even terfy papers like the guardian don’t like to just make shit up)
If you can’t see “right wing attack job” written all over this then you need to look into your media literacy
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
I can’t believe anyone believes what the right wing media write about a left wing party, but be that as it may, Eleanora wasn’t suspended because she was trans, she was suspended because she made comments on social media likely to bring the Greens into disrepute while holding an official post (ordinary members can say what they like, representatives of the party can’t). The party is investigating those comments to see what disciplinary action should be taken and her role is suspended while that happens.
The comments in question were blatantly anti-semitic (as opposed to anti-zionist which I have no problem with) in my opinion, and I doubt she’ll be allowed to retain the post. I’m sure everyone on here understand the difference ? The Daily Mail certainly doesn’t though.
This reddit thread has more details from Greens party members
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
No it’s not real, it’s being misrepresented. Eleanora is suspended for reasons nothing to do with her being trans. She’s a toxic piece of work who also happens to be trans, and is trying to make that into the reason.
There are a number of transwomen in various positions in the party, including posts to be filled by women only.
She was suspended for the comments she made about Iran which were blatantly anti-semitic (anti-zionist is fine, but she well and truly crossed the line).
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
And the reason that Scottish Greens are working with Greens E&W is…they drummed the transphobes out of the party…
Yes, the Greens E&W were at one stage captured by Terfs - that’s history and no longer the case
- Comment on The BBC Is Just Nodding Along 2 weeks ago:
Its the 4th party of local government with 2324 seats (SNP with just 412 btw).
First the SNP aside. Gotta love those apples to oranges comparisons - you’re the second today.
Scotland population 5m, England population 50m, number of councils and hence total number of councillors directly proportionate to population. If you want to compare local council representation then you need to adjust for percent of the available seats held.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Political_make-up_of_local_cou…
Reform 2,368 / 18,645 SNP 414 / 1,226
Hmm. So no that doesn’t make reform more representative, it does however make them more English. Anyway, it’s an aside, the main point
4th party of local government - now ignoring the difference between your number and wikipedia’s (is that the delta of all those who keep defecting out of reform lately ?):
Firstly the 3 main parties are all around 3500 seats, so it’s a distant fourth and not all that far ahead of the Greens who are as rapidly rising as Reform have been quickly falling in the polls. So why does not the 5th party of government get, say 75% of the coverage that the 4th party gets (as opposed to the current coverage which is near enough to zero unless they can find an attack headline) ?
Secondly how does holding an eighth / 12.5% of local government seats and 1.2% of national seats warrant MORE coverage than parties who respectively hold - Labour 25% & 62%, Tories 20% & 18%, Lib Dems 18% & 11%, (and for completeness, not far behind) Greens 7.5% & 0.75%
The answer is blindingly clear - there is a bias towards Reform which is exactly what the article points out. It’s not justified on any logical grounds - the stats put the lie to your argument - it’s because the people calling the shots want to see a pro-Epstein class party in power.
The sad part is the average Reform voter is going to get as shockingly shafted as the average MAGA voter is currently getting in the US but reform voters unfortunately are getting their news from the Sun headlines and other biased media and won’t hear about it until it’s too late.
The even sadder part is their supporters have some very valid complaints which have been diverted towards hating on the furriners as the cause (in the same way it was all the EU’s fault for years of Tory austerity). Labour can’t fix 40 years of Thatcherite breakage in a couple of years even if they seriously wanted to (they don’t, they’ve been bought and sold by the Epstein class too)
- Comment on The BBC Is Just Nodding Along 2 weeks ago:
No. Not the same coverage given to the other MINOR parties. Reform has 8 seats at Westminster, same as the SNP. The BBC gave less coverage to SNP in Scotland let alone England (wasnt even covered). They get more coverage than the LibDems every day of the week despite have literally one ninth the seats (71).
There are plenty of studies, both peer reviewed and more casual showing reform gets disproportional coverage and has done for years
- Comment on US threatens Britain over Falklands 3 weeks ago:
Oil
- Comment on A pattern of negative posts about the BBC 4 weeks ago:
Given there is literally no ad hominem in my post, some introspection about what you perceive to be an insult may be helpful about why you got the reactions you did.
FWIW my post is not at all different to the rest of the posters, so that difference is in your perception, not mine, and by the upvotes/downvotes, I’m fairly confident my read is in line with the rest of the group
- Comment on A pattern of negative posts about the BBC 4 weeks ago:
it’s been shifting further and further right for the last 15 years
Coincidentally that 15 year window perfectly aligns with the timing of the Cameron govt replacing board and then senior management with Tory cronies.
Coincidence ?
- Comment on A pattern of negative posts about the BBC 4 weeks ago:
I came back to provide you the longer list of academic studies I mentioned in the earlier reply (there’s about 3 or dozen without counting them), however having skimmed through this thread I don’t think there’s any point.
If you actually want to to understand (I’m fairly confident from your comments you actually were seeking validation not understanding) then you need to first read up on what the different biases are
- Partisan balance — are parties/campaigns given proportionate airtime and equivalent challenge?
- Source and ideological range — whose voices are treated as authoritative (think tanks, economists, business, unions)?
- Framing — what is treated as the natural or common-sense way to describe an issue (e.g. the deficit as a household budget)?
- Institutional political economy — how governance, charter renewal, funding and recruitment shape output over decades.
Then look up how those biases evidence themselves - others have referenced things like “Israelis are murdered but Palestinians are killed” (diminishes the impact of the same act) , a missile from Hamas is a “terrorist attack on settlers” but a missile from the IDF is “retaliation for attacks” (one is valid one is not) etc etc.
Or for economic takes person A on a panel will be introduced as “economist A Jones” (unmentioned they are employed think tank funded by billionaires to push their interests) and the other person will be “spokeperson for left wing think tank” (unmentioned that they’re an academic, with more academic prizes than they have letters in their name). Credibility deliberately watered down.
Or even just the most egregious blatant one - Reform on every BBC panel known to man despite 5 seats (and none before the 2024 election when he was even more ubiquitous) and the Lib Dems with 65 rarely getting a look in, let alone SNP who have more seats and the Greens who have similar. Yes there was a brief moment where tearing Starmer down meant Polanski got a few appearances (still not proportional to Reform), but have you noticed that’s disappeared as the Greens voters are currently warily positive about Burnham so it doesn’t undermine Labour to have him on.
Etc etc. It goes on constantly. It’s blatant, so blatant I have dozens of academic papers on it and yet you’re on here saying you only “engage with comments I deem worth engaging with” - cool but don’t bitch when everyone tells you your self perception of being reasonable and attempting to understand is utter self serving bullshit.
TL;DR you don’t perceive bias at the BBC because either a) their bias aligns with your world view so it is not noticeable and/or b) you don’t understand the sub
- Comment on A pattern of negative posts about the BBC 4 weeks ago:
Apologies for slow response, here’s a sample, I have a bigger list coming up on my search but I’ve not curated it and it’s 11pm and need to crash, the following are peer-reviewed:
Scottish Indy ref bias
Greig, A. (2016) ‘Sentiment Analysis of the BBC’s Digital Content during the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum Campaign’, Scottish Affairs, 25(4), pp. 419–435. DOI: 10.3366/scot.2016.0150
“evidence that suggests that the BBC’s coverage, on the whole, was more favourable to the No campaign.”
Lewis, J. and Cushion, S. (2019)** ‘Think Tanks, Television News and Impartiality: The Ideological Balance of Sources in BBC Programming’, Journalism Studies, 20(4), pp. 480–499. DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2017.1389295 Content analysis of think-tank sourcing across BBC output. Right-leaning and free-market think tanks are cited more often and are less often ideologically labelled than left-leaning ones. The single most direct peer-reviewed rebuttal of the “BBC is left-wing” claim
Wahl-Jorgensen, K., Berry, M., Garcia-Blanco, I., Bennett, L. and Cable, J. (2017)** ‘Rethinking Balance and Impartiality in Journalism? How the BBC Attempted and Failed to Change the Paradigm’, Journalism, 18(7), pp. 781–800. DOI: 10.1177/1464884916648094 Finds the BBC dominated by a narrow range of elite party-political voices, with business and City sources heavily over-represented relative to labour or civil-society voices. "the BBC presents “a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world” "
Walsh, M. (2025)** ‘Constructing Impartiality in a Polarised News Environment: An Analysis of BBC Question Time Contributors 2014–2024’, Journalism. DOI: 10.1177/14648849251413467 Decade-long panel-composition analysis of the BBC’s flagship political debate programme
Berry, M. (2016)** ‘No Alternative to Austerity: How BBC Broadcast News Reported the Deficit Debate’, Media, Culture & Society, 38(6), pp. 844–863. BBC news coverage reproduced a narrow deficit-reduction consensus and marginalised alternative macroeconomic positions
Cushion, S., Lewis, J. and Groves, C. (2009)** ‘Reflecting the Four Nations? An Analysis of Reporting Devolution on UK Network News Media’, Journalism Studies, 10(5), pp. 655–671. DOI: 10.1080/14616700902797242 The peer-reviewed version of the devolution-blindness finding: UK network news systematically reported England-only policy as if it were UK-wide.
- Comment on A pattern of negative posts about the BBC 5 weeks ago:
I’m negative about the BBC because of persistent bias in their reporting caused as a result of the Tories replacing the majority of board and senior positions with their cronies.
Academic studies have shown they have a clear bias in their political reporting. They deflect the criticism by having left leaning comedians which is not exactly a counterweight.
It’s structurally rotten and I refuse to pay the TV licence while it is so.
- Comment on Asking prices for newly listed homes in UK’s richest borough fall by £100k in one month 5 weeks ago:
That is indeed a plausible reason for the oversupply and buyers market the article identifies.
Whether it is the root cause is an open question that the article doesn’t answer. There are many possible reasons for an oversupply
- Comment on The Telegraph killed Jason Arday 5 weeks ago:
For them to be ashamed would require morals and a conscience so that’s not going to happen
- Comment on Free speech 5 weeks ago:
Unfortunately true
- Comment on Benjamin Netanyahu describes UK as ‘first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon’ 5 weeks ago:
Sadly I doubt it will. The sycophants in the Labour party are bought and sold by the Israelis - they’ll roll over and show their tummy, they wouldnt want to stop those sweet sweet
bribesdonations - Comment on Benjamin Netanyahu describes UK as ‘first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon’ 5 weeks ago:
Lolwut ? I want the drugs he’s on…
Pakistani got the bomb in the 1990s and they genuinely are both a republic and a majority muslim (I’m not sure the exact definition of “Islamic Republic” he’s using.)
On the other hand a single digit percentage of the UK population are Muslim (6%), and dude, we’ve been a monarchy for all bar a couple of decades of the last 1500 years.
The Muslim thing is less a worry than trying to pretend one of the longest running monarchies around is a republic, I mean it’s just delusional.
In the last millenium England has only been a republic for the couple of decades in the 1600s when Cromwell took over and executed the king. Scotland has been a monarchy the entirety of the last millenium, Wales has been under the English monarchy since the Normans finished slaughtering them in the 1300s.
- Comment on BMW’s in-car Spider-Man ad is a warning sign: we were promised a transport revolution, instead we got cars tracking us and serving us ads 1 month ago:
LOL, someone in the BMW marketing dept just got wood reading that
- Comment on Millions in Great Britain could face emergency power cuts at short notice 1 month ago:
We have a lot of wind. Not enough yet in my opinion, but there have been days when renewables generated 100% of the consumption and many instances where wind has had to stop producing due to excess (yes that’s a design problem)
- Comment on No particular reason 1 month ago:
Well Douglas Adams thought it was the mice and the dolphins, but crows are very plausible
- Comment on Carenheit 1 month ago:
I know the Indians have their 2 digit 3 digit thing, who else does interesting groupings ?