News thread

It's actually happening!  


Oh dear god, this is actually happening.

Dear God.

And yet, the more I think about it, the more I think it's probably for the best.  Trump is populist awful, Cruz seems to be genuinely awful.  Or, as one of my favourite Facebook quotes put it: "Trump eats spiders because he thinks people will find it funny, whereas Ted Cruz actually seems to enjoy the taste of spiders."

Now to pray to the empty void above that Hillary/Bernie wins.

Trump is a weird one. Any attempt to actually understand his policies seems to show him as pretty liberal. Like Balla says, the most awful things he says are pretty clearly popularist gubbins. He personally likes Bernie Sanders!

To me, the interesting race is Bernie/ Hillary. I can't see the actual election going to Trump, so whichever of these two wins will pretty much be president. We're looking at a real force for positive change, or a typically centrist New Labour-esque wet fart.

Can't wait to see who the next president is who ever she maybe (to copy Obama).

BOATY MCBOATFACE ISN'T HAPPENING. (Or it is, but not the whole ship, just one of its subs.)

This is the worst news this year. Forget Trump, forget all those celebrity deaths, this is simply terrible.

CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT IN "DON'T CARE ABOUT DEMOCRACY" SHOCK

That should definitely be Labour's election pledge for the GE. "We'll bring back Boaty McBoatface!" Entire country votes for Labour, Johnson flees the country in disgrace, problem solved.

Mr. Sadiq Khan, I presume? I'm hoping he'll do good work for the city of London. Also, sort of important for Labour to get something out of Thursday.

Of course it's just as easy to put a false positive spin on things as a false negative, but I don't think things are as bad as they've been made to look.

In other news, summer has come to Britain! I celebrated by buying my first bottle of Pimm's of the year.

The Trump thing isn't scary, Republican primaries always favour more right-wing candidates because numerous states only allow Republican party members to vote, whereas the majority of Americans prefer to be "Independent," and not assigned to a party for primaries. Those floating voters will either abstain or vote for Hilary in the actual election.

More importantly, remember the wide sweeping reforms Obama promised but never delivered? He was paralysed by the House of Representatives, which were majority Republican after the first Lower house re-elections. An extreme President in Trump would suffer the same fate, and the cuckoo ideas wouldn't ever come to fruition.

The US political system is purposely made so that no individual or branch of politics has too much power. People will say, well Trump would still be commander in chief, but his rhetoric is generally one of withdrawal from international conflicts rather than intervention, so that's not really scary.

He's an interesting candidate in the sense that his economic policies tap into what the American working class actually want relative to any other Republican, because he promises to protect American industries, while maintianing extreme views on social issues like abortion and immigration. If one puts aside his insane chatter, there's actual logic behind his support if you're a right wing working class American looking for a better deal. The Republican Party hasn't really stood up for them in a long while, but the polarising nature of US politics has caused those people to remain Republican due to social issues. It shouldn't be too surprising, then, that a "populist" Republican is doing really well, Rick Santorum damn near took the previous Republican nomination on a similar mandate, but had the issue of being a Tea Party guy who worked within the establishment.

It's just that, for non-Americans, it is very difficult to overlook the insane chatter Trump comes out.

I don't support Trump at all, I'm a social democrat, but there is a method behind some of the madness.


I think the claims that Labour did really badly in the council elections tends to stem from the SNP triumphing over them in Scotland and that historically the party out of power tend to make large gains which wasn't the case here, but the beeb coverage hasn't exactly been neutral. And the Beeb cancelled Stewart Lee's comedy vehicle, so fuck em .

I really wish I didn't have care about politics; about blatant hypocrisy and the skew of fact by opinion. It's actually keeping me awake at night.

WELL THEN! Y'know where everyone was saying we hope we don't see any more celebs die this year? And the cycle continues . . .

Never followed boxing myself, but even I knew of Muhammad Ali and his legendary exploits

RIP, Mr. Ali. A legend in his own lifetime.

Another victim of this horrible year. An inspiration, a hero and a truly deserving Champ.

The greatest of all time, with no doubt. 2016 continues to suck.

I currently hold our drinking related WWE belt but I decided to remove the name "Champ" from myself in our facebook chat. Felt inappropriate.

MP killed by far-right nutter (allegedly). All the best to Jo Cox's family. She was 41.

What a travesty. I really hope this wasn't fuelled by the EU referendum, but supposedly it was.

I'm going to wait for there to be an official line on exactly what's happened but I will tell you for free that I'm likely to be enraged. Such a senseless and tragic loss to the community and country she served.

You may have heard that something like this is likely to happen.  Hope y'all are out voting today (but not necessarily voting out today).

I will be after work, I can't wait for this horrible referendum to be over, it's just been a thoroughly depressing thing all round.

Hear hear. Wretched thing brought out the worst in the country. Anyway, I'm back in after voting. We had to queue, for the first time ever!

A Brexit is probably the worse of the two choices. If there was a good reason to leave I could get it, but it sounds like, from the probably politically biased news we get here down under, that the leave campaign is motivated by anti-migration and racial sentiments. And for that the economical world would potentially suffer.


*Disclaimer: I could have probably legally voted in this if I'd wanted.

I've never understood the need for referendums, unless it's about changing land borders (like an independence vote) I think it should be settled by single combat or a parliamentary debate. That is what MP's are for. I still voted though, it was my first time and I've never been more underwhelmed- it's just putting a cross in a box. There was no queue when I was there but the lady with all the voting paper said they'd had a lot of people throughout the day - more than usual.