Utopia? Have you see Earth today?

Starmer just purges members that make too much trouble like Corbyn, and his majority is so big that he can’t really be opposed.

There already is a major party that’s actually left wing, the Greens. Its not clear where this new party actually differs from the greens in terms of policy.

Reform are splitting both. They’re pretty smart in their messaging supporting a few leftist policies that are popular with the working class, while backing the 1% for everything that really matters.

Really? I thought most of Europe had the long easter weekend (good friday, easter monday) and Christmas day and boxing day (st stephens) as holidays?

Don’t worry, it won’t be long before they stop deporting them and instead force them to work on farms as slave labor. Maybe with somr promise that work will make them free or something.

Don’t those things literally have a bus variant though?

What does it matter in the end? Russia doesn’t say these bombers and only these bombers are for bombing Ukraine and if they get destroyed we’ll stop bombing Ukraine even though we have other bombers available. They’ll use whatever capacity they have, so any reduction in that capacity is a win.

On a scale of 1-10, how hard did you find Lady Butterfly to beat for the first time?

Its the overwhelming success of divide and conquer politics.

Back in the 00s British newspapers (overwhelmingly right wing and owned by very wealthy people) were constantly running stories about people on low income benefits supposedly living better lives than hard working normal people.

They were so successful that it was practically common knowledge that the country was full of families who chose to remain unemployed but lived in a cosy house paid for by the state, and spent all their time watching cable TV, paid for by the state, drinking beer and smoking fags, paid for by the state, and maybe also doing a bit of crime.

This supposedly huge group of “scroungers” were the hate target for regular, honest, hard working people, whose taxes were being wasted supporting them.

So high was the public interest in stories about benefits cheats or scroungers that TV shows were made about them like Benefits Street or Shameless. It was seen as one of the great failings of the labour government, an example of irresponsible government spending which exacerbated the effects of the 2008 financial crash.

So when the Conservative government arrived, they made a big deal of reducing benefits and benefit claimants and introducing a kind of bureaucracy designed to make it as difficult to claim as possible. This system resulted in cases like a blind man in a wheelchair having his disability payments stopped and being told by letter that he was ruled fit for work following a phone assessment by someone with no medical training. It has resulted in millions of children now living below the poverty line and often going hungry.

But these stringent measures were broadly popular because most people had been reading and talking about all the terrible problems of benefits scroungers for over a decade.

And the same thing happened with immigration and with the EU. Every week another story misrepresenting some EU regulation like bendy bananas, or a crime committed by an immigrant where his nationality is bold and underlined in the article which makes some comment about uncontrolled immigration. Articles covering crimes committed by white British people don’t mention nationality and get less space further back in the paper.

There was never much prominence given in most newspapers to issues like tax avoidance, or wealth inequality, so most people didn’t talk about it. Their hate was well focused elsewhere. Meanwhile the rich keep getting richer, everyone else keeps getting poorer, and most people spend their energy complaining about something else.

Isn’t the reason it pops because of steam building up pressure inside the kernel? Then you would only need to heat them somewhere above 100C, and evoo doesnt smoke until 200C+

Not true, I use EVOO and it doesnt smoke. Oil goes in with a couple of kernels on the heat, when they pop remove and add the rest of the kernels. Remove when popping stops.

Maybe its a case of lower heat, more time?

Yeah the typical American stuff is like 10% sugar, packed with additives like emulsifiers and preservatives, and anything that makes the production processes cheaper and faster, made from bleached flour and has most of the fibre stripped out.

If your bread is made from flour, water, salt and yeast its processed food not UPF.