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262
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Exactly what I thought when I saw the username. Methinks the fascist doth protest too much.

    For anyone unaware - that is the guy who's spamming every comment section with a comment explaining how he considers all 2.3 million Gazans (including the 40% of whom are children under 14) to be equally responsible for Hamas's 7 October attacks, and therefore deserving of what they get.

  • Yes. Literally the only truly evil senior British politician I have come across in my lifetime.

    There are plenty of politicians in my lifetime who I have disagreed with quite severely on certain things - Thatcher, Blair, Corbyn, May, for example. But in each of their cases I honestly believe they were pursuing a course that they believed would improve the lot of the British people and bring about a better, fairer and more prosperous society - I might have disagreed with them (in some cases a lot!) about how to get there, but I never doubted their hearts were ultimately in the right place. Boris Johnson was the first who left me thinking he had no redeeming qualities - selfish and egotistical, heart very much in the wrong place. Boris was only in it for Boris.

    But Suella is something else. Suella isn't in it for the public good, but Suella isn't in it for Suella either. Suella is in it to hurt people. That's her overwhelming motivating goal in life and politics. She gets off on undisguised cruelty. She is genuinely evil.

  • So weird to hear it put like that. I watched the X-Files when it aired (at least when my parents let me) and The Voyage Home (which was released in 1986, not just set then) seemed like a classic old movie to me at the time.

  • Just imagine trying to use a terrorist mob as a yardstick to excuse the misdeeds of the advanced 21st century military of a modern democracy.

  • I mean, they're obviously not going to, so I guess Zuckerberg better go dust off what I can only assume is his comically large chequebook...

  • How would travelling to Leeds help with a study of what accents are spoken in the south-east of England?

    How would you react if a piece of research on the variety of accents spoken in Yorkshire included fieldwork from Wimbledon and Hemel Hempstead?

  • Apols, the last number I'd seen was 44% from a CIA Factbook dated 2018, but I see the latest now says 40% (but still under-14 not under-18). That's still a shocking number of children in a very densely populated enclave that has been bombed to shit over the last few weeks and is about to be stormed by a modern 21st century ground army.

  • These acts of terrorism were perpetrated by the entire Gazan community, they voted for Hamas

    There are 2.3 million people in Gaza. Nearly half of them are children under 14, who were not even alive when a minority of Palestinian voters voted for Hamas in 2006.

    You are advocating collective punishment of innocent children - a war crime.

    You are fascist scum and you can fuck right off.

  • He didn't steal it. He took it to give to Spock's son, who Kirk took to be raised by Spock's family on the desert world of Vulcan for safekeeping ... High ground!

  • The thing is, this is such a massive political own goal for the Tories and they don't even know it.

    Water quality sounds like a bit of a niche political issue. But you know all those rural southern 'Blue Wall' constituencies where the Tories have been bleeding votes to the Lib Dems over the last few years? Water quality and sewage discharge into rivers comes up as a top local issue for voters in so many of these places. This is why the Lib Dems are campaigning so furiously on water quality in their rural target seats. It's also why every time there's a national news story about water quality (like this one), there's always a quote from a Lib Dem spokesperson in the article rather than a Labour quote (even though in general, the national press massively prefer to look to Labour for an opposition quote).

    The Lib Dems have identified this as a salient issue that the Tories nationally simply haven't woken up to. It's such a damning statement about Rishi's Tories - not just clueless about what's happening in the country at large, but clueless about even the parts of the country that have Tory MPs - so clueless that they're making national decisions that are actively harming their own election prospects but are clearly unaware of the impact this is having.

  • The fact that most people don't know the name of James Somerset is a sad indictment of how history is taught in this country. Somerset had been brought to Britain from Massachusetts against his will as a slave by a Scottish slaver called Charles Stewart. After he got here, Somerset ran away and then, when Stewart tried to re-enslave him, he sought to assert his freedom with the support of abolitionists.

    The Somerset vs Stewart case of 1772 - in which the court found that there was not and never had been a common law institution of slavery in England and Wales, and therefore that a black man setting foot here would instantly become a free man - was a monumental moment in our country's history and set the scene for Britain eventually taking a global lead in combating the scourge of slavery in the 19th century. There were supposedly around 15,000 black people living in Britain at the time, many of them living in some form of de facto slavery, and the court's ruling was a cause for great celebration among the black community, and remains a proud moment in British history centuries later.

    Children should learn James Somerset's name in school.

  • It's widely referred to as that.

    Also, Friends didn't invent 'The one with...', they named their episodes like that as a joke because it is common for fans of a show to refer to their favourite episodes along such lines regardless of what the episodes are actually titled.

    So use of 'The one with the whales' very likely predates Friends.

  • Some of us are able to comprehend complexity and hold multiple thoughts in our heads at the same time. It's possible (and the only way to be logically consistent) to understand that:

    • in Iran, Muslim fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent other Muslims;
    • in Israel, Jewish fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent Muslims, and Muslim fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent Jews;
    • in Palestine, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent Muslims.

    This isn't a weekend football game where you have to pick one side, wear their colours and then support them until the final whistle. This is real life, it's complicated. Don't turn mass suffering into a sport.

  • It looks like they're not actually removing the course, they're just not intending to update it further in future. So if you've started it you might as well keep going?

    Definitely worth writing to your (Westminster and Senedd) representatives about this though to try to put pressure on Duolingo to reconsider.