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Finished Talos Principle 2, and it was a bit meh. That's probably unfair, because my hopes were high based on expecations from the first game and its DLC, but it was disapponting in comparison. Technically and thematically, it's more ambitious than the original, but it doesn't deliver the way the first game did.

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if they go with a right wing headbanger then it will be someone more centre leading them into the next election.

On past performance, if they go with a headbanger the next one will be worse. For one thing, I'd be surprised if the party membership is about to increase and get younger; fewer, older and madder is much more likely.

"Guns don't kill people, toddlers kill people" wouldn't be the maddest NRA slogan ever

I would wait until finishing the original trilogy. The stories in the book/film Tales From Earthsea aren't exactly spoilers, but they're a response to (and attempt to make up for) the pronounced internalised misogyny of the earlier books, and make more sense read after them. I loved the trilogy as a child and still do, but even as a kid I found the "Weak as women's magic, wicked as women's magic" stuff odd.

I regret reading the late fourth novel in the series and wish I could forget I had. A good book needs more than regret for past mistakes. "Tales from Earthsea" is a lot better than Tehanu.

If this was @me I'd expect people's politics to be informed by their lived experiences, not their ethnicity.

That's what @t-v was saying.

Um. Do you mean "When did it emerge?", :"Over what period was it a powerful political movement?" or something else? Marxism is still a thing, by at least some definitions of thing. If this is your primary motivation for looking into European history, @eejit 's suggestion is still a good one, but what exactly are you after?

No idea.

Without more information, it's pretty thin. In the mutually back-scratching oligarchy, a fair number of directorship positions are non-jobs. People with a genuine business reputation giving some of their lustre to someone else's hustle, a business currying favour with the politician spouse of the notional director, and so on. Every so often some scandal (Robert Maxwell, Theramon) lifts the curtain on this, as it turns out most of the directors just turned up a few times a year to rubber stamp the actions of a crook for some money.

Return of the "We lost because we weren't extreme enough" argument.

The massive shift to contactless payments during the pandemic tipped back some as lockdown eased, but there's still a lot less people with cash in their pockets than before 2020. One group this impacts is those begging in the street.

not much scope, if any, for winding back neoliberal dystopia :(

I think we can reasonably be grateful that, for the second time in just a few days, a country has pulled back from the brink of insanity. We can criticise them for not curing cancer next week.

Well, my principal objection was to "rather than making more laws", which really hasn't been true for decades. The lack of respect for the actual law has taken a bit longer to develop, although the seeds were there in the 80s.

Imo it is a fantastic indicator of how unconservative Johnson's government was.

Unconservative in the old sense, but full of rabid Thatcherites (the only people left in the party who were still willing to work with Johnson). Before Thatcher, the Conservative party had been largely suspicious of ideology; she was an ideologue, and the fight between her ideological followers and the old pragmatists has been one of the principal themes of the last four and a half decades. Which @greentricky described succinctly.

Upholding rule of law, rather than making more laws

If this was ever true, it hasn't been for a long time. It's a bit like censorship, where left and right parties claim the other is more censorial because they call theirs "common sense" or "common decency" and the other's censorship.

The Thatcher government distrusted the legal system so much that laws telling judges what sentences they could apply to specific crimes became a major activity; more recent Tory governments have simply decided that the legal system is their enemy. Privatisation also meant that primary legislation was required to set standards and governance rules for things that had previously simply been governed.

The ones you mention, no, they wouldn't. Listening to Tory MPs opining in the early hours of Friday morning, though, there were some real nutjobs who considered themselves centre-right - don't think many other people would see them that way.

That's where you went with it, not the OP:

Starmer is a lucky bystander during a collapse in the Tory vote and nothing he did had any tangible effect on Labour's vote share.

Distance travelled is not a definitive measure of effort required to achieve it, as anybody cycling through Croydon can testify. "Your pedalling is having no tangible effect." "If I wasn't pedalling, I'd be going backwards!".

If every Reform voter had voted Tory the result would have been Con 303, Lab 268.

This seems to be based on the very simplistic (and rather unlikely) assumption that all movement of votes was just from the Tories to Reform. That really doesn't seem to be the case. Labour took at least some votes from the Tories, Reform didn't just take votes from the Tories (some were from Labour) and so on and so on.

Not Reform?

After the relief that the UK opinion polls were fairly accurate, back to seeing Biden be defiantly in denial about his situation. Is there some law of physics requiring the total amount of lunacy in the world to be constant?

I think the Tories can and will debase themselves more, fall further.

That's a pretty safe bet, I think. Priti Patel's speech early this morning fired the first shots in the battle to become even more deranged.

Ian Hislop on the radio.

Presenter: Politics may get more boring for a while. Is Private Eye going to be short of content?

Hislop: There has never been a time when we were short of content.

Gone! Truss is out.

YES!! While the result was being announced, he was gurning, turning and hopping from foot to foot like a muppet on amphetamines.

He did say a little of that in between "All the many cabinet posts I've held and Ukraine is going to miss me".

He gets to spend more time with his alter egos, now.

Closely followed by Grant Shapps

His valedictory speech is bloody unbearable and I can't tutn it off because the batteries for my remote are still recharging.