Finland seems to have this right, you can have a private school but you're not allowed to charge fees and have to adhere to public standards. Essentially nullifies all but faith schools and ensures that the wealthy have to raise the tide for all boats, or at least a greater proportion of them.

Being PM is like being the lead singer of a band. It takes a staggering amount of ego to pull it off. If you can wield that ego without pissing off all your bandmates you've got a shot at doing something great.

The annoying thing is that one of the only decent things Starmer's Labour has achieved is bringing back stability and boredom to British politics.

Should Starmer resign over Mandelson? Yes. It was a choice so bad it was visible from space. The only good thing about it was that it told those with an ounce of principle that Starmer's Labour was a dead horse not worth the flogging.

I struggle to outrun my demons. Thankfully my demons are as lazy as me, so we agree to just hobble along tripping each other up wherever possible

I don't know if the hard reality of running the country will just destroy it. It needs some time as a strong party in a more representative system to bring in some more realistic and workable options

Hand waving about bio alternatives. These things are possible but not now, and there are many people in the green movement so anti industry and students radical in the former Corbynist movement its attracting that I don't see how it can ever effectively run the country.

I hope so. I carried on that thread and got quite theoretical. But what I'm really driving at is the party is clearly shaped by the kind of people who for example would ban oil production with no thought to the consequences for solar or medical uses. And if challenged there would be >

In the world of politics and politics movement this constantly manifests as a fractured left where every movement despises the other because if it accepted the other it would mean a weakening of commitment to the central ideology. It's a catch 22 we must break out of.

This comes back to that central ideology. The left can't reach consensus because any solution that leaves out or underserves anyone, undermines the central ideology. And so the more committed to the ideology you are, the harder consensus becomes.

Despite being a social species it's easier to unite a bunch of people festering in their own rancid and harmful ideas as long as they're all individually allowed to believe and say whatever batshit it is, than it is to reach a consensus of compromise.

The left always criticises the right for creating bogeymen, whether it's immigrants or feminists or the new world order. But they create them precisely to create cohesion. And ultimately it works. Somehow it connects evangelicals with the mannosphere or brexiters chemtrailers.

I think because the left is ideologically centred in social cohesion, it seems to have some reaction to disagreement. It's like an autoimmune disease, where the body attacks itself. The anti-isrealist cannot stand with the cargo bike evangelist because they work in banking.

And this is the fascinating difference for me between the right and the left. The right has all these weird factions and somehow they make a cohesion that moves things forwards. The left, however cannot create that cohesion.

It's led to poverty, corruption, war, division, unlivable economies and unlivable environments. They see it. But it manifests in anger about Isreal, or radicak evangelicism on cargo bikes, while being totally anti the cargo ship that made the motor possible.

Remember occupy, remember Corbynism. That's the disenchanted left. A group of voters who see the failings of global technocratic corporatist democratic system of government.

I thought the uk just needs to have sustainability as it's foremost principle. But as a ruling party it's never going to work. Especially now it has become the home of the disenchanted left.

I voted Green, having read the manifesto and fully accepted it might as well have been a scrapbook of guardian clippings. Loads of stuff that's nice in theory but actively harmful in practice.

It should be Back Deur Action, but Breversal is the most natural portmanteau

I have a father and mother in law in Iran. I have a sister in law. A niece. She's 14. She likes silly pink headbands and purses and dresses, just like kids her age all over the world. There are 93 million people like her in Iran. People who do all the normal mundane life things as the rest of us.

in persian culture, telling someone "we're going to kill you all" is considered deeply offensive

America spending billions to dismantle the Iranian state and its infrastructure from the air while simultaneously dismantling its own state apparatus and capability from the White House is just mind bending to witness

Just as well you're not hosting any global sporting events in the near future...oh.

that stone thing's quite funny too.

However, I do worry about the temptation to outsource the thinking. Because it can provide a simulacrum of thinking where others have produced prior thought, and reconsitute that thought around your problems. It looks like thinking. But it's easy to then start to think it can solve your problems.

As an advertising copywriter of 18 years I find it very useful, wielded well, it's like having a powerful thesaurus, a keen-eyed editor, and a ball-breaking editor at your disposal. It can also be useful in churning through possibilities and presenting possibilities my meat brain won't get to.

Being less philosophical, I call AI writing sausage meat. It's reconstituted language. Just like sausages, it can be tasty. But often it's cheap watery rubbish with spices to disguise the trotter and anus lurking within.

Writing is codified thought. AI writing is a simulacrum of human writing, therefore a simulacrum of codified human thought. In some places it is usable and acceptable. But in cases where I want to know what another human thinks, it is not.

Surprised no-one is mentioning Trafalgar comes from Taraf al-gharb - an arabic place name from the Moorish occupation of Spain under the Umayyad dynasty – the first hereditary dynasty in the history of islam and the only dynasty to rule over the entire Islamic world of their time.