The claim that the criminal justice system is generally biased against white people is baseless. It is black Britons, not white ones, who are most likely to be victims of discriminatory policing: in 2021 to 2022 they were 2.4 times more likely to be arrested than white people and 3.5 times more likely to be victims of police violence.
Why, then, is the myth of “two-tier” policing spreading? Many Britons feel let down by the police—less than half think their local force is doing a good or excellent job, down from 63% a decade ago. Far-right influencers are happy to exploit that feeling. Selective presentation of evidence, vitriolic argument and the shareability of memes buoy their claims on social media and messaging apps. Mainstream politicians and media outlets who echo the far right’s language lend their claims legitimacy. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, a populist right-wing party, has spoken of two-tier policing, as has Suella Braverman, a Conservative former home secretary. Ill-informed interventions by the likes of Mr Musk only amplify the idea.
But when experts viewed clips from 2024 and compared them to clips from 2017, they noted that Trump’s speech included more short sentences, a confused order of words, repetition and extended digressions. The causes could vary, some worse than others, including mood changes, trying to win over a certain group of people, natural aging or it could be the start of a cognitive condition such as Alzheimer’s disease, the experts said.
In an analysis for STAT, fellow University of Texas social psychologist James Pennebaker reviewed transcripts of interviews with Trump from 2015 until 2024. He found a major rise in “all-or-nothing thinking” which is signified by the use of words such as “completely,” “never” and “always.”
That trend could indicate depression, Pennebaker said, which also connects to his use of fewer positive words than earlier, and also his many references to negative emotions following his departure from the White House.
A rise in all-or-nothing thinking is connected to cognitive decline. Pennebaker told STAT that Biden’s all-or-nothing thinking has also increased.
Pennebaker noted that a linguistic metric of analytic thinking reveals that Trump’s levels of complexity are remarkably low – most presidential candidates range between 60 and 70 in the metric, while Trump ranges from 10 to 24, something Pennebaker called “staggering.”
Not sure if people are following the betting markets but I can see Kamala is now the narrow favourite. On Betfair, the mid-odds pricing equates to a 51% probability for Kamala vs 46% for Trump. That compares to Trump's win probability peaking just above 70% in the immediate aftermath of the debate.
The Harris campaign seem to be enjoying themselves!
What I find so dumb about naming children Khaleesi is that:
a) It's not the name of a character anyway. Apparently a lot of casual fans thought Dany's actual name was Khaleesi because several other characters often addressed her by her title. So there's a good chance that either these parents are casual fans who nonetheless then misnamed their child after a character, or they are serious fans who named their child in a way that will lead other people to infer her parents were casual fans. (Nothing wrong with being a casual fan, but I'd find it a bit dumb to name my child after an IP that I was only loosely into...)
b) The child is six years old. The final episode aired only five years ago. That means they named their child before Dany's story had even concluded. George RR Martin had been dropping hints throughout the book series that Dany might or might not end up as a genocidal mad queen like her father (the TV show had laid the groundwork for this less effectively, which is in part why the abruptness of her turn was so unpopular) and I find it bizarre that a parent would name a kid after a character who might still end up as a murderous tyrant
I think about the amount of thought and research that many of my friends have conducted when naming their children (including looking up famous real and fictional people with that name, doing word associations, etc). Then these guys come along and just say 'fuck it, let's just call her after that blonde girl off TV, Khaleesi I think?'
He didn't 'appear' to justify the rioting.
He literally said 'of course it’s politically justified!' There's no ambiguity here.
Repeated and urgent counsel that far-right extremists were exploiting gaps in the law to foment violence on social media had been ignored while top-rank politicians over a number of administrations sought to gain advantage by waging culture wars, Khan said, in a damning intervention.
“The writing was clearly on the wall for some time,” Khan told the Guardian. “All my reports have shown, in a nutshell that, firstly, these extremist and cohesion threats are worsening; secondly, that our country is woefully unprepared. We’ve got a gap in our legislation which is allowing these extremists to operate with impunity.
I think the online bombardment is about laying the groundwork. If every day you're getting a torrent of fake news in your feed demonising immigrants and refugees to an exceptional degree and telling you that mainstream politicians and media are hiding these truths from you, it gradually warps your worldview until you're pliable to join in when your mate from work starts ranting about Muslims and then another guy down the pub who just got out of prison says he's going to a 'protest' about some incident involving an immigrant (fake news, but you don't know that) that popped up on all your Twitter feeds and he says the media aren't covering.
I've seen exactly the same happen with people I know in relation to Israel and Palestine - people who have always felt a reasonable and human sympathy for the Palestinians' awful plight then joining community WhatsApp groups, following certain Twitter accounts, and so on until six months later they're suddenly weirdly aware of which public figures or their partners are Jewish and you notice them using the word 'Zionist' in everyday speech (without, I suspect, actually knowing what one is) - all without them realising they're getting slowly radicalised.
Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/ZcfbY