Politically, this is magnificent. The Lib Dems have target seats throughout Surrey where they’re typically the main challenger, they’ve been campaigning hard locally on water quality through most of this parliament (hasn’t always got national attention but they worked out a while ago it’s a very resonant issue in their target seats) and then just in time for the election Thames Water start warning people the water isn’t drinkable…

Reminder that the Equality and Human Rights Commission is not ‘the media’. It’s a non-governmental public body created by a Labour government in 2006 to promote and enforce equality legislation introduced by said Labour government.

I mean, is it? Under his leadership the Labour Party broke the law in relation to racism within the party - that was the finding of the independent Equalities and Human Rights Commission investigation. It found that on Corbyn’s watch, the culture of the Labour Party ‘at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it’. He was the leader, he is accountable. That was his doing.

He then chose to put out a statement rejecting this and dismissing the evidence of racism suffered by Labour members as exaggerated - as a result of which he was suspended. That statement was his doing too.

And now he has chosen to stand against the Labour candidate in an election - this choice was also his doing.

So which part of this is ‘their doing’?

lily-livered

Hoist the mainsail and shiver me timbers, are they joining the Pirate Party?

I don’t think Starmer is stupid but I think Labour’s large polling lead has - paradoxically - encouraged him to be very politically timid, to the detriment of his party and the country.

Broadly speaking the Labour leadership seems to be acting as if, if literally nothing changes between now and election day, then Labour will win a landslide. That means no genuine big new policy announcements, because any policy change is seen as a roll of the dice that could change the polling status quo. Rejoining the single market whilst staying outside the EU could be a popular policy - polling shows that even Labour Leave voters support it by a 53% to 31% margin - and would give an incoming Labour government an actual policy option to help turn around the economy, but Starmer’s caution means forgoing this in favour of saying literally nothing novel. The Labour leadership think any change is a risk, and why take a risk when you’re already sitting on a polling lead.

In general I’m favourable towards Starmer, and certainly in comparison to what came immediately before him. But on several issues - Europe, electoral reform, Gaza/Israel - he’s adopting bad cautious positions to protect the enormous polling lead over the Tories he’s stumbled into. These are going to end up doing him more harm than good in the long run.

I was replying to you (you were saying Starmer is staying quiet because he needs Brexit voters in the North).

I’m saying that if that’s the case, he’s thinking of the Brexit voters of 2016, not what these people think about things in 2024.

The world has moved on from the divisions of 2016. The idea that Brexit was a bad idea is now pretty common outside the political bubble. Even among Leave voters, few think Brexit has been a success.

The economic reality of what Britain outside the EU looks like and the global geopolitical realignment that has happened since that day in 2016 - Russia’s warmongering in our European neighbourhood and the very real prospect of a future Republican president (if not Trump this November, then someone else 4 or 8 years later) abandoning NATO - obviously should lead (and is leading) to people who voted for Brexit rethinking Britain’s relationship with the EU.

And anyway - rejoining the Single Market wouldn’t be undoing Brexit, it would just be doing literally what the Brexiters promised their voters they would do in the first place.

Starmer is being dramatically too cautious about the most impactful thing he could do to improve things in Britain.

The EU is a capitalist entity, why would any leftist support it?

*gestures generally at modern Britain*

Yawn. He’s a pro-Brexit, anti-net-zero, conspiracy-theory-peddling demagogue. He literally endorsed and then tried to get selected as a candidate for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in 2019.

Why are people who claim to be on the left even giving Galloway the time of day?

They’ve yet to try the ‘pick the candidate with the most sensible policies’ method.

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.

https://archive.ph/yYV7y

Rishi: we have a plan for tackling the cost of living crisis.

The plan:

No, they’re not even proposing to replace the House of Lords here. All they’re proposing is to remove the remaining 92 unelected hereditary peers (out of around 800+ total unelected peers) who survived Blair’s 1999 cull of most hereditary peers.

No, it’s member of Parliament who’s not a frontbencher - i.e. who’s not a government minister or an official spokesperson for their party in Parliament.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves and Ed Davey don’t hold government office, since they’re opposition politicians, but they’re not backbenchers.

You do have to feel for these red wall Brexit voters.

Apparently they require constant visual assurance that they are in fact still in Britain, and can’t just maintain this information in their heads like the rest of us.