Technically the act passed in 2023 under the Sunak government.

That said; I can’t seem to find a vote breakdown and I would not be at all surprised if labour also backed it.

I’m hoping enough public dissatisfaction leads to labour repealing it but I won’t hold my breath.

It’s supposed to be the sound French people make when they laugh, despite none of the french people I know sounding anything like that.

I think it’s part of this weird cultural stereotyping the internet does where someone posts a funny meme with an inaccurate stereotype in it, then a legion of mouth breathers re-post the same meme whenever the nationality in question comes up, then due to repetition people who have never met that nationality thinks its real.

People stopped doing the fake “Ching Chong” false Chinese accent bit ages ago (thank god) but I guess France and the French are still valid targets.

I got one via YouTube, I think I was so shocked to see that wars have pr campagins and advertising spend now that I forgot the actual details.

Theme gist was that Iran developing nuclear weapons was a threat to world stability and isreal was stepping up to do what had to be done etc. etc.

No mention of Islam but given it’s a PR campaign I would be surprised if they connected race or religion to their motivation for bombing.

Do you get joy from simple things like eating a nice meal or taking a hot shower on a cold day?

Can you anticipate joy, if you are planning to meet up with friends or watch a movie or read a book; does thinking about the activity lift your mood even a little?

When you think back to happy memories do you feel happy, do you remember what the sensation of happiness felt like?

Not a professional and none of this is diagnostic one way or another, but it’s probably worth checking if you have exhausted or outgrown a hobby which just means you need to find more things you enjoy even if it’s just to add variety to your week. Or if your ability to feel joy itself is failing, in which case you probably need to a professional

Coin flip between it just being yet another case of musk lashing out because his ego hurts and him trying to distance himself from the trump admin when the closeness has caused catastrophic damage to his companies brands (too little too late, but still)

Agreed

How do you reverse a chemical castration if it’s later revealed the person was wrongfully convicted?

You stop the regimen of drugs and the primary effect ceases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_castration

I’m not arguing for the policy, I think violating someones bodily authority is inherently evil and should not be on the table even as a result of a criminal conviction.

But I think our objections should follow the science, we should object to the harm caused to the (falsely)convicted while on the drugs rather than the permencance of the sentence.

The difference is that chemical castration is typically a course of drugs that alter the body’s hormone production while it’s being taken to reduce sexual desire/function, when the subject stops taking the drugs the body returns to its natural hormone balance.

Physical mutilation is a one off, permenant, irreversible operation.

The problem is that the term chemical castration is wildly misleading in its attempt to describe the process.

Just to add to your (excellent) comment; in the UK you can be prescribed medical marijuana but it has to be done by a consultant level doctor and a multi disciplinary trial. The most important disqualifying factor is any history of psychosis, if they see that on your medical records they will not write you a prescription.

So I would a assume there is some published medical literature they are following which states cannabis exacerbates the symptoms of psychosis.

That’s fair, as far as I know it’s a screenshot form the redient doctors conference.

I went digging for more information after your (very fair) comment, I didn’t find it in the agenda https://www.bma.org.uk/media/g2ofmswk/resident-doctors-conference-2025-motions-for-voting.pdf

But I have found an explanation for that and a somewhat dubious confirmation via this thread on Reddit, https://old.reddit.com/r/doctorsUK/comments/1k97tti/british_medical_association_conference_calls/mpc84s8/ wherin a doctor states that it was an emergency motion and they voted in favour. (Side node; a lot of people in that thread are unhappy about the BMA acting beyond the role of a trade union)

On the one hand it’s a random Reddit thread, on the other hand, a lot of people who are likely to have first had knowledge aren’t actively disputing the presence of success of the motion and there are anecdotal confirmations of both.

I will admit I probably jumped the gun here, I was just happy to finally see some trans positive sentiment from a UK institution.

I got nitro for similar reasons but would up cancelling when discord sent ads to a friend of mine with my screen name on it, “why not join your friend _____ with nitro” or something.

Absolutely not, don’t use my name to shill to people I respect.

Israel’s war crimes do not excuse Hamas’ terrorist attacks, nor do Hamas’ terror attacks excuse Israel’s war crimes.

Intentionally escalating the conflict and suppressing rival organisations then turning around and saying “we are the only counterbalance to Israel, you must deal with us” is also kinda gross.

That said, it’s weird that they want the UK involved given the history of the conflict and the relatively paltry (and apparently declining?) level of arms exports.

I think the EU also designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation and Germany is a big arms exporter so I would have expected them to focus on getting that designation repealed.

Correct, this is kinda what I meant in that energy providers are private entities, but can’t really compete over price so the value of having a market based system is diminished

Yeah, this is what I meant by informed consumer, In thory if the consumers are okay with palm oil chocolate so long as it’s cheaper then that’s what the market will provide. If they don’t like it then it won’t sell.

But if they don’t know the difference they will go for the cheaper one then conclude they don’t like chocolate as much as they used to and buy less so both the customer and the brands providing real chocolate lose out.

The more insidious version of this are additives which actually taste better but with less obvious long term health detriments, e.g. packing everything with sugar and salt.

Nutrition labelling helps ofc, but even then who has the time to check the stats of every product they buy?

So my understanding is that they are the second strongest, but still at around 20% the other German parties formed a coalition that froze Afd out of power. So they are still a threat in future elections, but they have limited impact on policy for now.

Is that correct or have I got the wrong idea?

To play devil’s advocate;

The theory is that privately run enterprise is more efficient and is able to provide goods and services at lower price, the mechanism for this that most people don’t mention is that if there are many companies in competition the inefficient ones are out-competed and go bust.

The issue with privatisation is that this efficiency requires A: several businesses competing to provide the service, B: an elastic demand curve and C: informed consumers.

Ideally providing excellent service at a good price increases market share and poor service at high prices results in decreased market share.

The problem with privatisation is that most of the privatised services were nationalised originally because they are not a good fit for one of the above reasons.

E.g. medicine is difficult because if you break a leg you aren’t shopping around for hospitals you go to the nearest one, you can’t really just put it off and medicine is incredibly complex so being and informed consumer is difficult and the country needs sufficient coverage so hospitals going bust is unacceptable.

The UK has chronic issues with energy prices (I seem to remember seeing the highest in Europe?), but we don’t see energy companies undercutting one another, so it’s hard to argue that they are actually in competition.

The issue is that most privatised services wind up running as a defacto monopoly the same as the nationalised one, just as you mentioned now with a profit motive too which incentivises hollowing out the service via cost cutting.

Even if you don’t buy into this logic, you still have to do it in quite a few places because the security auditors have a line in their checklist about being able to extract any internal information from error pages

Best of luck with the job search, linkedin is awful, but at-least the need for it passes.