frankPodmore
@frankPodmore@slrpnk.net
London-based writer. Often climbing.
- Comment on What is that sound effect in the House M.D theme music? 6 days ago:
It sounds like a dial tone to me, with a lot of fuzz. Could be a pager, as doctors used to use them a lot.
- Comment on Kate Osamor has Labour whip restored after investigation into Gaza genocide comments 1 week ago:
Bizarre day where both Kate Osamor and Natalie Elphicke (re)join the PLP.
- Comment on Five ways to catapult the UK towards solar energy success - Positive News 1 week ago:
Yeah, I signed up to one of the group-buying schemes that Sadiq Khan brought in, in theory to make it cheaper to put solar panels on your house. The company that got the contract ended up going bust, so no solar panels for me! At least I got the deposit back.
- Submitted 1 week ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 4 comments
- Comment on Humza Yousaf to resign as Scotland's first minister 2 weeks ago:
Would be funny if he did a Theresa May, just came out and said fuck all then carried on like nothing had happened.
- Comment on Conservative MP Daniel Poulter defects to Labour 3 weeks ago:
He’s standing down at the next general election anyway, so this isn’t about saving his seat.
- Comment on Is there a more politically and ideologically diverse alternative for Lemmy? 4 weeks ago:
That is true, but I did find a lot of people on Twitter and Reddit who I could have productive and interesting disagreements with, even though I naturally mostly followed and subscribed to people and things I did agree with.
- Comment on Is there a more politically and ideologically diverse alternative for Lemmy? 4 weeks ago:
Not really interested in discussing things with fascists, but I’ve rarely seen anyone here who’s to the right of, like, a milquetoast social democrat.
- Comment on Is there a more politically and ideologically diverse alternative for Lemmy? 4 weeks ago:
I don’t think there is one, unfortunately. I agree that lack of ideological diversity is a problem with the Fediverse in general, but it’s a problem that likely won’t go away unless the Fediverse becomes mainstream.
- Comment on Every new school being built in England is in unsafe air pollution area, study says 1 month ago:
The number who think it’s okay to park on the zigzags because they left their hazards on is similarly incredible.
- Comment on Every new school being built in England is in unsafe air pollution area, study says 1 month ago:
As discussed in this article, the government is busily ignoring its own reports and its own advisers, trying to make it harder to implement life-saving policies like ULEZ, LTNs and 20mph zones (by cutting funding, for example), and even trying to make it harder for councils to fine motorists who break the law (more great stuff from ‘the party of law and order’!).
There’s no such thing as road tax, but full duty, which motorists do pay, has not risen. It’s been frozen for, I think, 14 years. Hunt froze it again the Budget just the other day! There may be other taxes I’m not aware of and you’re sort of right that the overall tax burden has increased, but I don’t know how much that applies to motorists specifically.
- Comment on Every new school being built in England is in unsafe air pollution area, study says 1 month ago:
This is the third study in the last week that shows just how wrongheaded the government is to pursue supposedly ‘pro-motorist’ policies.
- Every new school being built in England is in unsafe air pollution area, study sayswww.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 1 month ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 6 comments
- Comment on How do people carry notebooks without bending it 4 months ago:
I eventually just gave up and started buying expensive notebooks. The cheap ones always fell apart before I finished them, so at least this way I get to the end!
- Comment on Does the rest of the English speaking world generally understand what an American means when they say "soccer", or does it help to clarify by adding "football"? 4 months ago:
No, we understand. In fact, if anything it’s easier if you say soccer! If someone with an American accent says ‘football’ I normally assume they mean gridiron, so sayings soccer is actually a little clearer.
Of course, in different parts of the world, ‘football’ might mean rugby (either union or league), Gaelic football or Aussie rules football. So, the potential for confusion is pretty wide!
- Comment on Why would someone openly say that they oppose human rights? 4 months ago:
Yeah, that’s fair enough. Similar to Foucault’s critique, IIRC.
- Comment on Why would someone openly say that they oppose human rights? 4 months ago:
Fair enough. Sounds like you favour the idea of human rights but disagree on some specific conceptions of exactly what those rights are?
- Comment on Why would someone openly say that they oppose human rights? 4 months ago:
There are also specific articles in the universal declaration of human rights that I think are wrong
Do you mind saying which ones?
- Comment on Why would someone openly say that they oppose human rights? 4 months ago:
Normally, to be honest, it’s because they want to hurt someone. Look at the Conservatives in the UK, who are desperate to repeal human rights legislation so that they can send refugees to Rwanda without right of appeal.
Note that those Conservatives still think that they have human rights. None of them thinks they should be detained arbitrarily or deported, even though they now acknowledge that they, their government and their party have broken the law in various ways. No, they want to strip rights from other people.
- Comment on UK inflation falls sharply to 4.6% 5 months ago:
Fair enough, thank you for the correction. It was higher than elsewhere because of the Truss mini-budget and Brexit and still is higher than it otherwise would’ve been without those factors.
- Comment on Do you think that membership into suicide pacts will increase dramatically within the next decade because the world is falling apart at the seams? 5 months ago:
A few people here have pointed this out already, but people have thought the End was pretty Nigh for about as long as we’ve been thinking about things.
Other people are countering this point by saying, ‘Ah, but this time it’s real!’ which doesn’t prove anything. People thought it was real all those previous times (the ecological collapse on Easter Island, or the Bronze Age collapse, or the Roman Civil Wars, or the Black Death, or the French Revolution or the Cold War etc.) and not many of them killed themselves or joined suicide cults, so why would people act differently now?
This isn’t to be pollyannaish about things. All the examples I gave above really did kill huge numbers of people and the Cold War in particular really could’ve caused the collapse of modern civilisation (if a nuclear war had broken out). Climate change, war and resurgent fascism are truly huge problems. I just don’t think the particular example of suicide cults is a very likely development.
- Comment on UK inflation falls sharply to 4.6% 5 months ago:
It’s higher than elsewhere because of the Truss mini-budget and Brexit.
- Comment on UK inflation falls sharply to 4.6% 5 months ago:
It’s higher than elsewhere because of the Truss mini-budget and Brexit.
- Comment on UK inflation falls sharply to 4.6% 5 months ago:
This is an improvement, obviously, but 4.6% is still quite high, it’s not thanks to the Tories that it’s fallen and it’s only retreating from a record high that was largely caused by the Tories.
- Comment on Why do people road rage? 6 months ago:
Lots of good suggestions here, including the difficulty in communicating inherent to being in a car.
I think another important factor is that driving itself is stressful. Surveys of commuters consistently show that people who walk or cycle have the highest satisfaction with their commute, while motorists ranks somewhere from the middle to the bottom (i.e., either ahead of or behind people who use public transport), depending on the study.
When you put people in a stressful situation where it’s difficult to communicate, inevitably some people lose their temper.
- Comment on Totalitarianism. What are the good things about it? 8 months ago:
What you’re describing here (and in the thread below) sounds a bit like technocracy, so you might be interested in reading about the Technocracy Movement.
- Comment on Totalitarianism. What are the good things about it? 8 months ago:
There aren’t any, because if there were, there would be good totalitarianisms.
I partially addressed the ‘fast decisions’ myth above in my comments about efficiency and in more detail here.
- Comment on Totalitarianism. What are the good things about it? 8 months ago:
It’s not true that decisions can’t be made quickly by democratic governments. There are truly thousands of counter examples, but to take a single one, in the COVID-19 pandemic, many democratic governments took rapid decisions. Some of these decisions n turned out badly and some well, which provides a second stumbling block to your thesis: decisions taken quickly can be bad as well as good.
Secondly, it’s not true that totalitarian regimes act quickly. There’s a governmental bottleneck of the ruler and his clique. If they’re not paying attention to a given issue at a given time, decisions can’t be taken at all, making for less efficient governance. And, in practice, such decisions as are taken are often not implemented: you end up with rune-reading and kremlinology by officials trying to work out what an order ‘really’ meant, or whether it really was an order, because there’s no clear method for governing other than ‘Do what the leader said’.
I appreciate, by the way, that you’re making a devil’s advocate argument, here. Just wanted to explain why it’s wrong, as OP seems pretty disposed to believe the devil!
- Comment on Totalitarianism. What are the good things about it? 8 months ago:
I can imagine an alternative, but the reality is that such an alternative has never arisen.
The imagianry ‘good’ version of totalitarianism, I assume, is one where there’s a ‘good’ dictator who is also so intelligent they’re able to run everything very efficiently, where everyone enjoys or at least accepts the dictatorship because everything gets better for everyone. But that’s a very odd utopian daydream. In reality, being a dictator and being good are mutually incompatible.
- Comment on Totalitarianism. What are the good things about it? 8 months ago:
There aren’t any.
Totalitarian regimes are fundamentally not a sensible way of organising society at any level, even if we for some reason decide to ignore the manifold human rights violations committed by totalitarian governments. There is a longheld belief that they are in some ways more ‘efficient’ than democracies (as expressed in the myth that ‘Mussolini made the trains run on time’ – he didn’t) but this isn’t true.
To take two obvious points of comparison, North Korea, the closest to a completely totalitarian regime of any country on Earth, is one of the poorest countries in the world. South Korea, a democracy, is one of the wealthiest.