Mark Splane

@CrazyChicknLady @LostBritainSOS Thank you. Mad Max 2. I was sure that child reminded of something, but I couldn't quite place it. I feel so, so sorry for that kid.

@LostBritainSOS Mad Max cometh.

So here we have 2 children, one is a racist, violent, far right thug, the other, well I’ll let you decide.

@James7Holland @michaelgove I'm generally not a big fan of Michael Gove but, credit where credit's due, that was eloquent.

Superb from @michaelgove. The silence in the room is telling. When eloquently delivered facts hit an audience, with many perhaps quietly grasping for the first time that the pro-EU lobby in Britain have been peddling nonsense for a decade.

You inspired me to read up on the history of the 2A. You are indeed correct. I hadn't realized how much its roots lie in English common law and Bill of Rights. Yet another thing you have the English to thank for! (Or blame for, depending on which side of the gun debate you're on) But, as I'm sure you know, the militias themselves long preceded American Independence. The 2A didn't really change anything: it simply enshrined the status quo in the Constitution.

@SplaneMark @GaryWilton1980 @Wrexham_Red @GoodwinMJ Incorrect. The Constitution in 1789 authorized Congress to establish a military. The 2A was written two years later in 1791 by those fearful of this standing military.

Here are 4 things that happened to the UK in the last 24 hours: 1. The Labour government confirmed it will remove the right to a jury trial. Cases will be tried by a judge alone. 2. The Labour gvt confirmed it will impose Digital ID despite it never being included in Labour's manifesto and nearly 3 million Brits signing a petition against it. 3. The Labour gvt confirmed we will "align" with the European Union, directly going against the 2016 democratic vote for Brexit & forcing the British people to pay billions for laws they'll never be able to influence. 4. The Labour gvt confirmed that while Islamist sympathisers & antisemites are free to march on the streets of our capital city, & while it welcomes former allies of al-Qaeda into Downing Street, it has banned conservative activists from joining a peaceful protest against mass immigration in London. Put all these things together and you get a sense - just a sense - of how hideously authoritarian and illiberal this Labour government really is.

The 2nd Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." At the time the USA had no standing army. The 2nd Amendment was intended to *protect* the state, not to protect people *from* the state.

@Wrexham_Red @GoodwinMJ The 2nd amendment was created in order for civilians to own guns to defend themselves against a tyrannical government. Personally, I fully support that, and wish we had that right here in the uk.

No it doesn't. "Judaism teaches that lying to or deceiving anyone—including gentiles (non-Jews)—is generally forbidden" [Source: Grok] I suspect you are thinking of the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya. This does permit lying to non-Muslims, but only under very specific circumstances. All the Abrahamic faiths stress the importance of truthfulness to all.

@MeidasTouch @dcpoll How do I know that didn't happen like Mike Lawler is saying. Remember their religion says it's okay to lie to goyim.

Rep. Mike Lawler details how Sen. Rand Paul’s son confronted him in a drunken antisemitic and homophobic tirade at a DC bar last night: "Rand Paul’s son was belligerent and drunk, sitting at the bar. At one point, he jumped into a conversation I was having with a friend and a reporter who was there, and went on an anti-Semitic tirade for about ten minutes about a whole host of things, including blaming, quote unquote, ‘my people’ if Thomas Massie loses his primary. And when I asked him who ‘my people’ are, he said, ‘Jews,’ and proceeded to go on a tirade about how he hates Jews, hates gays, and doesn’t care if they die."

Many of those replying below seem to be missing the point. It is not *that* Davey is arguing for PR. There are valid arguments in its favour and it has always been LD policy. It is *why*. He is suggesting that we should abandon FPP, always the heart of the British parliamentary system (long before universal suffrage and true democracy), *specifically* to prevent British voters from electing a government of which he would disapprove. And yet this man leads a party that has the word "democrat" in its name...

Ed Davey saying the quiet part out loud. He wants PR to happen just to stop Reform. He sees Reform as a threat to democracy after *checks notes* millions of people voted for Reform to win the local elections. A liberal’s motto is if you can’t beat them, change the system.

I assume you're alluding to the Dunblane school massacre in 1996 (30 years ago). The subsequent changes to gun control laws were indeed (in my opinion) very much an overreaction. However it was the first and (to date) last time such a thing has *ever* happened in the UK. By contrast: "The United States leads globally in school shootings, with 288 incidents reported from 2009 to 2018, far surpassing other countries. In recent years, the U.S. has averaged over 87 school shootings annually, while other nations experience these events much less frequently." [Source: Firefox Search Assist] I have read numerous posts by Americans on the same lines as your "you guys shouldn’t have given up your guns". We didn't "give up" our guns: the vast majority of British people never had (or would have wanted) guns in the first place. The UK has never had a gun culture.

@GoodwinMJ I guess you guys shouldn’t have given up your guns 35 years ago huh?

@Outoftweet123 @GuidoFawkes I'm *pretty* sure she meant leasehold. But it's one hell of a Freudian slip!

@GuidoFawkes People havent made enough of the fact Angela Rayner wants to abolish freehold property ownership!

Starmer is on the brink. How did we get here? Wasn't he supposed to be the adult in the room? Here's how Guido blew up 'The Quiet Era' of politics... 🧵

Your first accusation is simply absurd. The rationale behind the Greens' drug policy is harm reduction, that it would reduce the misery (and criminality) due to illegal drugs. You may well disagree, but the idea that decriminalizing a drug can bring a net benefit is not inherently absurd. It is, after all, the basis on which the USA repealed the 18th Amendment in 1933. Of what possible relevance can it be that Polanski chooses not to use a drug that is already legal? It's not even an ad hominem. FFS, there is an abundant surfeit of good reasons to be critical of Polanski. So there's really no point in making up bad ones.

Zack Polanski is teetotal while wanting others to suffer the misery of legalised drugs He says he’s “against hate” while enabling Islamist sectarianism & antisemitism He wants to raise your taxes while admitting he “may” have dodged tax for 3 yrs Zack Polanski is a hypocrite.

@philmcraig @OldRoberts953 Here on X, you can still encounter some Remainiacs who have never accepted that Leave *did* win. They believe to this day that the referendum must have been "fixed" in some way, usually some variation on foreign (particularly Russian) interference.

One of the long tail effects of the 2016 referendum was the trauma it inflicted on people who were used to getting their own way. The idea that the unwashed and undereducated could ignore the likes of Dunt, Hutton, Maitlis, Campbell or Guru-Murthy, and then actually beat them, sent many into a psychic tailspin so profound that they stopped being reliable reporters on pretty much anything for years to come. People like them - the 'expert class' if you like - had been ignored by the misled knuckle-draggers and so a series of bad things would now inevitably happen until they could all be returned to positions of power and influence and then there would be calm and quiet once again. And so clever people came to believe dumb things - such as those tendentious 'doppelganger' economic audits on Brexit, even as the actual, measurable, real-world GDP figures were pretty decent (by the EU's normal sclerotic standards anyway). Jolyon and his risible ‘There is an England of my Mind’ crusade to stop the independent UK vaccine task force - even in the face of evidence that its EU equivalent would be a bust - is another perfect example of this. His mind wasn't really on Covid it was on the humiliation of 2016 and how unjust, unfair and cosmically out of balance everything in public life now felt to him. But most importantly of all, this mindset explains the astonishing lack of media scrutiny of Starmer and his party in the 2024 election campaign, and the joyous but so so credulous 'it's nice the quiet' response to his victory amongst the expert class.

‘This is how serious government behaves … Know-nothings have been replaced by people with expertise. Ignorance has been replaced by specialism. Incomprehension has been replaced by deep domain knowledge.’ Ian Dunt, July 2024

@doveyymargeauxx @RupertLowe10 Nigel Farage is living rent free inside Rupert Lowe's head. If Restore does grow to the point where it becomes a serious rival to Reform, it will split the vote. This is not a matter of opinion but simply a statement of fact.

@RupertLowe10 Rupert has mentioned Reform and Nigel 100s of times and all in a very hostile and negative way. Reform concentrates on their own campaign and party. 🤷🏻‍♀️ And no senior figures in Reform has ever pushed the idea of splitting the vote. This came from supporters.

In Great Yarmouth, everything Reform campaigned on was negative - largely on the fact that voters should not 'split the vote'. We ignored it all. We put forward our positive local vision, with policies that matter to local people, and we crushed them in every single seat. There is a lesson here. For far too long, British politics has been about who you shouldn't vote for. About who can keep who out. When actually, if enough people vote for who they genuinely believe in? Stunning results are possible, as we saw last week. So make no mistake - we made history. It was a victory that was about far more than ten election wins out of ten. We set an example. We proved it can be done, we proved we can win. Now the challenge is to take it national, and that has to be done through our flourishing branch network. Within a few weeks, almost every parliamentary constituency will be covered which is quite remarkable. I want to thank everybody involved - our internal team, the membership and the local branch organisation. A team effort. The hard work starts today for the elections next year, and of course the general election. A very good start though.

Others said very much the same to me in the months (and years!) after the referendum: "I voted remain but, as a nation, we voted leave. So why aren't we leaving? Isn't that how democracy works?" Yes, it is: an essential prerequisite for a functioning democracy is that, after a vote is taken, those on the losing side accept (as you did) that they have lost. The undermining of this fundamental principle of democracy (2016 - present) is ultimately far more important than EU membership itself.

@EdwardJDavey Two peas in a pod, Brexit means Brexit. I was a remainer but accepted the democratic decision of a refendum which I wasn't in favour of. Political leaders should know better than to go against the will of the people.

This simply doesn’t cut it. Saying Britain should be at the heart of Europe means nothing if Labour keeps ruling out the very steps that would get us there. If Starmer thinks vague words on Europe will keep him in Number 10, he is badly mistaken.

I think there may be a flaw in your reasoning. If a shop is functioning as a front for some illicit activity, then it doesn't really matter what the shop sells: it's only a front! Ban vape shops and soon you'll have a high street full of shoe shops. (You'd also be handing the entire vape market on a plate to criminals)

A good percentage of this can be stopped overnight by banning vapes - totally, and Deliveroo and Uber Eats apps

I'm not asking for a tutorial in statistics. I just acknowledged that you were correct in saying I used the term "base rate fallacy" inappropriately. What I am looking for is an answer to my question. I'm not saying you are necessarily wrong. Merely that, if I am to accept your conclusion, you should provide further justification.

@SplaneMark @ChiefPM15 @anishmoonka I'm still pretty sure you don't understand the meaning of "base rate fallacy." That doesn't apply because I'm not comparing populations of different sizes based on absolute numeric variance. You should go read up on it and get back to me. Until then, ciao.

Three people just died of hantavirus on a Dutch cruise ship. The strain kills nearly 40% of the people it infects. And yet no virologist on earth is panicking about a pandemic, because the reason it stays small is one of the strangest rules in disease science. The rule is simple. The deadlier a virus is, the harder it is to spread. If a virus kills you in days, you can't ride a bus, board a plane, or even leave the hospital. You're in a bed or a body bag. Either way, the virus killed its only ride. Hantavirus has been around for at least 70 years, but fewer than 1,000 Americans have ever caught it. The CDC says it kills 38% of those who do. The cruise ship strain, called Andes, kills closer to 40%. If hantavirus spread like COVID, it would kill billions. But it can't. Most hantaviruses spread only one way. You breathe in tiny dust particles from rat or mouse pee, droppings, or spit. No mice in your house, no virus. The cruise ship is the rare exception, because the Andes strain can spread between people, but it usually needs close contact like spouses sharing a bed. A Johns Hopkins virologist called Andes spread "unbelievably rare." Compare it to the viruses that scared the world. Ebola kills 60 to 90% of people, but only through bodily fluids and only late in the illness, so each patient passes it to fewer than 2 others. SARS killed 10% before being wiped out in 8 months. MERS killed 35% but never spread far beyond the Middle East. None of them became pandemics, because the spread was always too slow. Then COVID showed up. It killed about 1 in every 100 people who caught it. That is almost nothing compared to hantavirus. But COVID was mild enough that you could work for a week without knowing. You would ride the bus, hug your kid, eat lunch with a coworker, and infect four other people. It killed 7 million. Flu works the same way. Mild fever, sore throat, but you still drag yourself to school or the office. The virus walks right into the next host. Hantavirus is the opposite. Within 4 to 10 days, your lungs fill with fluid. There's no medicine that fights it and no vaccine to prevent it. The only treatment is a machine that breathes for you, and even that just cuts the death rate from 50% to 20%. Every outbreak, from 3,200 UN soldiers in the Korean War, to the 1993 Four Corners cases, to Gene Hackman's wife Betsy Arakawa last year, traces back to mice. The viruses that worry scientists are the boring ones. The ones that give you a sniffle for a week and let you walk around the city while you're contagious. Hantavirus, brutal as it is, never had the spread to do real damage.

My apologies for the delay in responding. (No, you didn't frighten me off with that barrage of posts!) Having now read your longer thread, I have no real issues with it. The contextual information contained therein is largely what I wrote in response to your shorter thread. But I had no way of knowing the former existed! From reading the shorter thread in isolation, it appeared that you had not taken base rates into account. This would be *a* base rate fallacy, but you are indeed correct it's not *the* base rate fallacy. My bad. But I genuinely do not understand your argument that "if other causes of death were substituted for covid, other causes of death would have been down". Covid, and the way governments and people responded to it, affected both the number and nature of deaths during the pandemic in multiple ways. Yet you claim mathematical proof. How so?

@SplaneMark @ChiefPM15 @anishmoonka You should probably read this thread before you critique the analysis any further. I walked through the full logic. x.com/Truth_in_Numbe…

@ikeijeh Thank you. The one point on which I would differ is that I think Labour's despisal of the working class began earlier. The Brexit vote was merely when they stopped trying to hide it.

It simply beggars belief that anyone can look at the scale & especially locations of Labour's losses last week & conclude that the solution is to arrogantly reanimate the gross democratic betrayal that sparked Labour's schism with the working class in the first place. Astounding.

@anon_opin Your terms are acceptable.

Civil servant here. If Farage wins the next GE, he'll call us all back to the office 5 days a week. The CS will then be on the verge of collapse, as thousands of people will either retire immediately or quit, due to the removal of WFH. Cheap optics will meet reality.

@trevorcando @PaulEmbery I am genuinely curious to know which of these bullet points you consider to be in any way fascistic, and for what possible reasons.

@PaulEmbery Not much of a risk when you look at their Education Policy; clearly more to do with their fascist views that education. But then Inexpect most Reform voters don’t even check the parties policies.

The line that Labour is taking about Reform - that it is a party intent on spreading hate and division in our society - is decidedly risky. Millions of Red Wall voters - many of them once loyal to Labour - have just voted for that party. They will hear Labour's message and think: "They are calling me a racist bigot. Just like they did when I voted for Brexit."

@Truth_in_Number @ChiefPM15 @anishmoonka Boy - you type fast! I'll get back to you.