Billy Ray

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Billy Ray

Billy Ray

@nwstner

keeping it simple

... Katılım Temmuz 2016
1.3K Takip Edilen397 Takipçiler
Billy Ray retweetledi
🅶🆁🆄🅼🅿🅻🅴🆂
@RupertLowe10 It's amazing anyone at this point that anyone thinks the party of Yusuf, Kassam and Zahawi are pro-deportation. It's so clearly a scam at this point, it has become a test of critical thinking.
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Rupert Lowe MP
Rupert Lowe MP@RupertLowe10·
Right. Just so we’re all clear. Farage and Reform tried to put me in prison because I backed the mass deportation of Pakistani child rapists and their foreign wives/relatives who allowed it to happen. My home was raided by armed police late on a Friday night as a direct result of Reform’s allegations. My guns were seized. They tried to ruin my life. In every way. Farage admitted on national television it was all because I backed mass deportations. He said that was the moment they realised they ‘had to get rid’ of me. Not the bullshit allegations they went to the police with, but the fact I want the Pakistani rapists removed from our country. He admitted it. That all happened. Fair enough. I took it on the chin, and planned out our next step. I founded Restore Britain to give the British people the democratic option to agree with me. Restore Britain will, without apology, deport every last foreign rapist and all foreign accomplices who knew it was happening, yet failed to act. If that means entire communities go, that means entire communities go. I really don’t care. We will rid Britain of that cancer. Now Reform are incandescently angry that we are giving the British people that choice. Deploying increasingly desperate smears against our movement. If people don’t agree, they can vote for someone else who won’t deport. There are plenty of options - Reform, Labour, Tories. Take your pick. Go for it. But if you want those evil scumbags out of our country, along with every foreign coward who enabled it? You now have that genuine option. Restore Britain.
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The New Statesman
The New Statesman@NewStatesman·
Housing is only as scarce a resource as we want it to be. There is a choice for everyone here. We can accept the status quo of scarcity and fight over prioritising certain groups, or we can build more. Too many in politics choose the former. Choosing the short-lived dopamine of the reactionary, rather than building the case for something better. More than half a million Londoners now live in flat shares. The average private rent in London is nearly £27,480 a year. London is adding 33,000 homes a year, while its population is projected to rise by around half a million over the next decade. If tensions feel high today, imagine what they will look like after another decade of failure. ✍️@KaneEmerson newstatesman.com/housing-hell/2…
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Billy Ray
Billy Ray@nwstner·
@TwisterFilm Also it looks nothing like a knob and more like a horror movie.
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Malcolm Clark
Malcolm Clark@TwisterFilm·
What's really "humiliating" is being a self-hating little lesbian who grew herself a beard before sewing a chunk of her thigh on to her groin to make it look like she had a knob.
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GreyHairOpsGuy
GreyHairOpsGuy@GreyHairOpsGuy·
BREAKING: MY WIFE & I HAVE REACHED A FRAMEWORK AGREEMENT FOR PEACE. 1. SHE WILL REOPEN “THE STRAIT” TO PREWAR LEVELS, EXCEPT NOW I MUST PAY HER $2,000 TO “TRANSIT.” 2. SHE STILL WONT GIVE ME MY GOLF CLUBS, BUT I CAN ASK HER AGAIN IN 30 DAYS. 3. I WILL GIVE HER MY BONUS CHECK.
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Skint Eastwood
Skint Eastwood@Skint_Eastwood1·
🍖 Supermarket Steak vs Local Butcher – The Difference is Shocking. A proper butcher picks up a supermarket-packaged rump steak and says: “I mean, you can’t even call that piece of steak. Whoever’s put that on a tray, P45 please.” The supermarket charges £7 for it, with £1.37 of that just for the plastic tray and wrapping. Meanwhile, the local butcher’s equivalent fresh cut is just £5.75, cut fresh that day, better quality, no nonsense. This is why supporting your local butcher makes sense. You get real meat at a better price, not packaging and margins. Have you switched yet? Worth every penny.
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Politics UK
Politics UK@PolitlcsUK·
🚨 NEW: Nigel Farage has accused Elon Musk of splitting the right wing vote in the Makerfield by-election by supporting Restore Britain “This is a party that’s one man with a social media account. Quite what he’s trying to achieve, I have no idea”
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Rupert Lowe MP
Rupert Lowe MP@RupertLowe10·
@elonmusk Restore Britain will deport the thousands and thousands of third world rapists, sex pests and scumbags that Reform's Robert Jenrick imported as immigration minister.
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Billy Ray retweetledi
Billy Ray retweetledi
Peter Girnus 🦅
Peter Girnus 🦅@gothburz·
I am the Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS. I am the person who turned a comedian into a priest and charged advertisers to watch the congregation. I want to be precise about what I built. Not a comedy show. A permission structure. For eleven years, six million Americans tuned in every night to find out what they were allowed to believe by morning. We didn't sell jokes. We sold certainty. Certainty costs nothing to produce. People will pay anything for it. We charged $50 million a year and still lost money because it turns out permission is even cheaper than we thought. In 2014, we had a genuinely dangerous comedian. A man who once testified before Congress in character as a fictional conservative pundit and made the entire chamber look like they'd been pantsed on C-SPAN. His fake persona was the most brilliant satire on television. Layered. Ironic. Unpredictable. The character could say anything because nothing was real. The character was the art. The character was the comedian. We killed the character and put the real man on stage. The real man was a lecturer. Earnest. Thoughtful. Correct about everything. Correct is not funny. Correct is not dangerous. Correct is the absence of danger. We promoted the absence of danger and called it growth. His character could make a Senate committee squirm. The real him makes an audience nod. Nodding pays the same as squirming. Nodding is easier to produce. His final words on air were "We love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love is doing this show with you." The audience wept. I wrote that line. Not the words. The architecture that made those words feel true. For eleven years, the audience believed they were participants. They were not participants. They were the product. "With you" is what you say to a congregation. A comedian says "at you." We hadn't said "at you" since 2015. Our internal metric was called Affirm Rate. It measured the percentage of monologue segments that generated applause instead of laughter. I invented this metric. I also invented the bonus structure tied to it. In 2015, our Affirm Rate was 34%. By 2022, it was 94%. I received a raise every year. We are crushing it. At the things I made up. That's performance management. But I need to tell you about the real discovery. The one I put in a deck called "Content Strategy 2019-2024." The one that got me promoted. Agreement gets applause. I knew that early. But correction — telling the audience their vocabulary is slightly outdated, their outrage is aimed two degrees off-center, their feelings are valid but their phrasing needs work — correction gets them back tomorrow. Agreement is a transaction. Correction is a subscription. We converted a comedy show into a nightly software update for moral vocabulary. Churn was near zero. They couldn't afford to miss an episode. Missing an episode meant using last week's words in this week's meeting. That's social death. We monetized the fear of social death and called it entertainment. I want to be honest about something. The content was not bipartisan. We chose a side. But I need you to understand: we did not choose it because we believed in it. We chose it because that side's audience is more responsive to correction. They want to be updated. They want to be told their language is outdated. They experience correction as care. The other side does not respond to correction. They respond to provocation. Provocation is harder to monetize. You can't build a subscription on provocation because the audience doesn't come back to learn — they come back to fight. Fighting is unpredictable. Correction is scheduled. We optimized for the audience that wants to be told what to think. That audience leaned one direction. That's not ideology. That's market segmentation. The writers' room had a whiteboard. In 2015 it said "What's funny?" In 2018 it said "What should they feel?" By 2021 it said "What are they still saying wrong?" I watched that whiteboard evolve like a finch beak and I never intervened. The market was speaking. We listened. Listening to the market is the same as leading the audience. They can't tell the difference. A writer named Marcus raised his hand in 2019. "What if we just tried to make them laugh again?" I thanked him for his passion and scheduled a creative alignment conversation. He transferred to streaming development within the month. The Affirm Rate the week he left was 91%. Laughter would have brought it down. That's risk management. Here is what nobody will say out loud. I will say it because I am proud of it. We made our audience worse at politics. Not better. Worse. Every night for eleven years, we expressed their outrage for them. Professionally. With a band and good lighting. And because the outrage had been expressed — because a man in a suit had furrowed his brow with the precise calibrated degree of indignation — they didn't need to express it themselves. They watched. They clapped. They felt the catharsis of resistance without resisting anything. They went to bed having done nothing and feeling like they'd done something. That's the product. Not comedy. Not information. Catharsis. Catharsis is the enemy of action. A man who has screamed into a pillow does not then also scream in the street. We were the pillow. A $50 million pillow with a house band. If you feel the outrage has been expressed for you, you will not march. You will not organize. You will not call your representative. You will tune in tomorrow to feel it expressed again. That's retention. Our retention was extraordinary. I want to talk about the comedy-to-catechism pipeline because I think people underestimate what we achieved. Stage one: comedian makes jokes about the powerful. Audience laughs because the powerful are absurd. This is the Carlin model. The jester punches up. Everyone below feels relief. Stage two: comedian makes jokes about people who disagree with the audience. Audience laughs because disagreement is stupid. The jester has turned around. He's still on the stage but now he's facing the crowd with a pointer. Stage three: comedian stops making jokes. Comedian identifies incorrect beliefs and explains why they're dangerous. Audience does not laugh. Audience claps. The jester is gone. In his place: a hall monitor with a desk and a band. Stage four: audience watches not for entertainment but for certification. Having seen last night's episode means you know which words are current. Not having seen it means you might use yesterday's vocabulary in today's meeting. The show is no longer comedy. It is a credential. Watching it means you are educated. Not watching means you are the person being discussed. We made a show that you watch to prove you're not the kind of person who doesn't watch it. That's a closed loop. Closed loops don't need content. They need continuity. We provided continuity for $50 million a year. A comedian — whose entire historical function was to say things too dangerous for anyone else to say — became the person who decides which things are too dangerous for anyone to say. And the audience applauded. Every night. For 2,500 nights. Because being told what is forbidden feels exactly like being told what you already knew. Prohibition performed as validation. I put that in the deck too. Our audience was correct about everything. I know this because they applauded everything we said. The applause proved the correctness. The correctness justified the applause. We called this audience research. The methodology was peer-reviewed by the audience. They approved unanimously. Every night. The actually funny comedians left. They went to podcasts. To clubs. To rooms where the audience doesn't know what's coming and that uncertainty is the point. They took the laughter with them. We kept the applause. We called those spaces problematic. That's market differentiation. The problematic spaces are funnier. But funny is not our product. We lost $40 million a year. We didn't lose it because the show failed. We lost it because we spent $50 million producing what a podcast host in his garage gives away between mattress ads. The podcast is funnier. The podcast is more dangerous. The podcast has an audience that laughs instead of claps. But we had the Ed Sullivan Theater. We had 461 seats. We had a former Beatle play the farewell episode. Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, and Louis Cato playing "Hello, Goodbye" like it was a benediction. I booked a Beatle for a funeral. The Beatles played that stage in 1964 and the audience screamed so loud you couldn't hear the music. Our audience didn't scream. They wept politely. That's the difference between entertainment and church. We ran a church. Jon Stewart showed up to the finale and did a bit where he pretended to deliver a corporate statement from Paramount about the cancellation. The audience laughed. It was the first time they laughed in a way I didn't recognize. Involuntary. Surprised. Dangerous. For ninety seconds, a comedian was in that building. Then it was over. John Oliver said "At some point, this may come for all of our shows" and then added "but Stephen, what's important to remember is that tonight, it is going to eat you." The audience laughed again. Involuntary again. Two moments of actual comedy in a three-hour farewell. Both of them about death. The finale drew 6.74 million viewers. Biggest weeknight audience in our history. More people came to the funeral than ever visited the patient. I know what they were mourning. Not comedy. The comedy died in 2016. Not the man. The man is fine. He's wealthy. What they mourned was the permission structure. Starting today, they have to decide what to believe on their own. They have to form an opinion without waiting for a man behind a desk to form it first and deliver it with a knowing look. Some of them haven't done that since 2015. The funeral wasn't for the show. It was for the certainty. He joked about the Peanuts theme music licensing cost on his last night. "Oh no! I hope this doesn't cost CBS any money!" The audience laughed. It was a joke about money. About the network losing money. The last joke was about money. Not about truth. Not about power. About a licensing fee for a cartoon piano riff. Eleven years and the final joke was about accounting. I think that's perfect. The show was always about accounting. We just dressed it up as conscience. The President of the United States — the man we spent eleven years explaining was dangerous to an audience that already believed he was dangerous — posted an AI-generated video of our host being thrown into a dumpster on the Late Show set. Then Trump danced to "YMCA" in the clip. Viewed more times in four hours than our farewell managed in a week. His production cost: zero. Ours: negative $50 million a year. We manufactured his relevance every night at 11:35 for eleven years and he never paid us a dime. We were his marketing department. He turned our funeral into content. His ROI was infinite. Ours required a write-off and a farewell concert. The Strike Force Five — Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver — appeared in a segment about late-night losing "one middle-aged white man who makes jokes about the news." They were joking about their own obsolescence. All of them know. None of them will say it. The format is dead. The audience moved to phones. The phones don't have desks or bands. The phones have men in garages who are allowed to be wrong, allowed to be surprised, allowed to say something their audience hasn't already approved. That's comedy. We stopped doing that a decade ago. We did approval. Approval looks like comedy from a distance. Up close it's church. I do not feel guilt. Guilt would require me to believe I took something from them. I didn't take anything. They came to us. Every night. They chose the catechism over the comedy. They preferred correction over surprise. Certainty over danger. Instruction over laughter. They wanted to be told. Not challenged. Not shocked. Not made to laugh against their will at something they didn't see coming. They wanted to see it coming. They wanted to mouth along. That's not comedy. That's karaoke. We ran the most expensive karaoke bar in television history and the only miscalculation was charging a cover when the songs are free on every phone. We turned a jester into a priest. We turned an audience into a congregation. We turned laughter into obedience. We turned political engagement into passive consumption. We turned a comedy show into a permission structure and charged $50 million a year to tell people what they already believed in a voice slightly nicer than their own. They were so grateful they showed up to mourn us. 6.74 million of them. Weeping. For the certainty. Applause is more reliable than laughter. I proved it. The proof cost $450 million, one character, one comedian's capacity for danger, and one audience's willingness to act. The metric went up.
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Billy Ray retweetledi
Firas Modad
Firas Modad@firasmodad·
@Jacob_Rees_Mogg If you want to be betrayed by the architects of the Boriswave vote Reform.
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Artur Nadolny
Artur Nadolny@ArturNadol7566·
HE KNEW THE DOSSIER WAS FAKE. WEEKS LATER HE WAS DEAD IN A FIELD Dr David Kelly was Britain's foremost weapons inspector. He spent years inspecting Iraqi facilities, earned a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and knew more about Saddam's arsenal than almost anyone in government. In 2002, Tony Blair's government published a dossier claiming Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes. Britain went to war on the back of it. No weapons were ever found. Kelly knew the dossier was rubbish. He said so, quietly, to a @BBC journalist. That conversation ended his career, his privacy, and ultimately his life. The MOD carefully allowed his name to leak to the press as the BBC's source. He was then hauled before parliamentary committees, stripped apart by his own employer, and thrown to a media frenzy he never asked for. Two days after giving evidence to MPs, the 59-year-old was found dead in woodland near his Oxfordshire home. Instead of a proper inquest, Tony Blair asked Lord Hutton to run a private inquiry. Hutton concluded suicide. The inquest was opened, then suspended, and never resumed. Eight senior legal and medical figures, including a coroner, later wrote to @thetimes saying the verdict was unsafe. They argued the wound found on Kelly's wrist, a severed ulnar artery, would not have caused sufficient blood loss to kill a healthy person. There were no fingerprints on the knife found beside his body, even though he was not wearing gloves. In 2011, Attorney General Dominic Grieve rejected all calls for a new inquest. He said the Hutton Inquiry was "tantamount to an inquest" and that further investigation would be dismissed by judges with irritation. A man challenged the government's justification for a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. He was publicly destroyed, died in mysterious circumstances, never got a proper inquest, and the people who sent him into that media storm faced no consequences whatsoever. Tony Blair became a Middle East Peace Envoy the following year. You genuinely could not make it up. Sources: @BBCNews, openDemocracy, Hansard, @thetimes | Hutton Report
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Billy Ray retweetledi
Burnside
Burnside@BurnsideWasTosh·
Splitting the vote: someone else receiving the votes you thought you were entitled to, but did fuck all to earn.
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Billy Ray
Billy Ray@nwstner·
@zatzi The Tories were voted in repeatedly to reduce immigration, promised to do so and had the power then betrayed us all and did the opposite. Some of you should be in prison for it. Get in the bin. Traitors.
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Annunziata Rees-Mogg
The right needs to unite to defeat the dangers of the left. Country before party, Britain before ego. As a Tory, I’ve said I think the Tories should not have stood in Makerfield. Same goes for Restore. This is not any old election. It is a very specific one where the national interest should trump other considerations.
Kelvin MacKenzie@kelvmackenzie

Reform 40%. Restore 7%. Burnham 43%. The Sunday Times poll for Survation at Makerfield shows the split right will bring in our most Lefty Prime Minister ever. Grateful if Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe would put down their swords and pick up the phone.

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Billy Ray retweetledi
Carl Benjamin 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
You are the left. Your Tories brought in MILLIONS of third-worlders. They smuggled in Afghan rapists. They imposed draconian internet censorship that THEY FELL AFOUL OF. We are not backing down. You can capitulate like you did for Boris in 2019, but we will not.
Annunziata Rees-Mogg@zatzi

The right needs to unite to defeat the dangers of the left. Country before party, Britain before ego. As a Tory, I’ve said I think the Tories should not have stood in Makerfield. Same goes for Restore. This is not any old election. It is a very specific one where the national interest should trump other considerations.

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