British politics has this problem though where for some reason the noisiest minority gets to drive the whole agenda. We also really don't have much of local powerbases where they can fail hard, the closest thing are local councils, but councils don't always listen to elected councillors anyway so they typically fail or succeed in spite of who has been elected to try and tell them what to do.

Take for example the EU referendum - in the European elections, despite a favourable demographic turnout for the far right, far right parties only won about 30% of the vote. The other 70% was won by parties whose stated aim is to remain in the EU. Yet for some reason, we're having a referendum on EU membership despite there being clear overwhelming support for staying in (recent polls put it overwhelmingly in favour of the EU). Quite why we're wasting hundreds of millions on a referendum like this just because a vocal far right minority screams the loudest I've no fucking idea - they had their referendum, it was called the European elections, and despite disproportionate positive media coverage, turnout favouring their electoral base, and so on and so forth, they still lost hard.

Probably the real problem here is that the press love sensation, so they'd rather praise the far right for causing a stir, than question them for lying their way to power with populism. As such we have this problem whereby there's no one with any real voice that can expose their wrongdoing and lies on a grander scale.

No, not even remotely close. Before the EU, the world was massively different and the EU was in ruins from a massive war.

It's like saying "Before the fall of the British empire, Britain did better with India". Right, but we're not before the British empire, just like we're not before the EU. NAFTA isn't even remotely as comprehensive a free trade agreement as what the EU has - you still have massive customs barriers as anyone that has tried to move goods between the US and Canada vs. between European states can tell you.

Of course, the EU doesn't preclude us also having partnerships with these countries as well - it's not mutually exclusive, why limit ourselves to one just because people like Farage hate foreign people that aren't largely of British cultural descent?

Um, no. Milliband was too far left for the electorate and they lost hard as a result. Why do you think that going even further left will help exactly?

The centrist candidate last time was David Milliband, the centrist candidate this time is Liz Kendall. Neither were/will be elected, even though they're the only options that would have/will make Labour tolerable to the electorate.

People voted towards the right, they would probably have tolerated something slightly more the left (i.e. actual centre), but Milliband was too far to the left to be tolerable to most people. Your solution is to swing to a leader even further away from what people wanted, really?

Gordon Brown had the same problem, he was just a little too far left to be tolerable. No one wants Brownites like Milliband, Balls, and Burnham. They want people who are willing to balance state handouts with fiscal responsibility, Corbyn is the exact opposite of that - he believes that we have infinite money that we can just use to give more and more handouts to everyone.

Good luck with that, that was exactly what lost both Brown and Milliband the election, except now you want to double down with it and do it even more, as if you believe that if you throw enough fail at something it'll become success. No, just no.

"And this is moot anyway. British democracy allows you to select your local MP - and that's all. The PM and the government are appointed by the Queen based on the allegiances of the elected MPs."

Yes, but even that's broken. Some MPs are elected with as little as 25% of local support, the vast majority under 50%, and I believe even a majority under 30%.

So even our elected representatives aren't really our elected representatives. They're just people who represent a local minority in a vast amount of cases.

This is FWIW what AV would've fixed - it would've ensured MPs had to at least somewhat represent even if not a first choice over half of the electorate. It was rejected though as people don't want local representatives, they want proportional representation as shown by most polls, but this wasn't allowed as an option so we're stuck with what we have which is broken in both ways - it's neither nationally representative, nor is it hardly ever locally representative.

I don't think any government can realistically split from the EU and get re-elected, it's an inherent death wish, and I suspect that's why Cameron said ahead of time this would be his last parliament either way - if he loses the EU vote and we pull out he wont be able to stick around regardless.

The problem is that even if Farage is right (which, frankly, he isn't, in the same way that Alex Salmond had the same fantasies and wasn't right either) and we can somehow make up the loss of EU trade, we wont do it overnight, those trade agreements we have with the EU will take years to renegotiate and we'll be stuck in limbo in the meantime facing high tarrifs. So even if it is only temporary, and even if we did do better in the long run, an EU exit inherently means at least a couple of years of recession and declining economic growth. Any PM in charge when that happens is automatically fucked whatever the outcome.

Then like you say, if he wins, and we stay in the EU, then the bitter old folks on his back benches will defect to UKIP, quite parliament altogether, or just be difficult anyway, so he'll lose his majority.

A coalition in the UK isn't that unheard of though, we just had one :)

I actually completely agree with you on that aspect of your post (though UKIP not getting more seats is one of the upsides of the current electoral system because less far right is a good thing, no matter good they are at pretending they're not.). It is unfair all the same, and our electoral sytem is completely broken. It is neither representative on a local level (AV was rejected) nor representative on a national level (PR hasn't been allowed).

My comment about you not understanding British politics was more in reference to your jab at the Tory being propped up by some rural mafia - don't believe it, the amount of constituencies where Tory candidates have a 50%+ majority in rural areas is still only a fraction of their seats. Their support base is primarily the other 50s, whether urban or rural.

The fact that Cameron and co. as well as his city mates go and shoot pheasants in the countryside on weekends doesn't mean there's some great rural backing for these guys. It's just where they go when they're bored of fucking people over in the city during weekdays. Even on issues like Fox hunting there are more than enough of us who live rurally that hate Fox hunting not just because it's pointless, selfish, and requires you to be a real actual psycopath, but because we get fed up when some rich Tory toff decides he's going to blockade a country lane illegally with 100 dogs so we can't go and get our shopping and have to turn back because they think they own the fucking place.

Trust me, if rural folks had some special hold over the Tories, I wouldn't be commuting to work on a 45 year old train running on Victorian era tracks from a station that I drove to on terribly maintained roads full of potholes.

Yeah, I know I didn't really have a firm grasp on what did and didn't count as addiction at that age - even by the age of 18 I was still grappling with the concept of whether spending 8 hours a day in online video games was addiction or not. Given that I could still walk away at any moment and do something else for days on end, and at times, did, I'm still not overly sure to this day if it was.

Ask a 12 - 13 year old whether they're addicted and they'll have no fucking idea.

It's going to happen anyway, UK politics are in turmoil. Labour is on the verge of committing suicide, and when it does it'll fracture leaving the Tories the only electable party.

Except, they wont be electable because the longer a party is in power, the more fucking batshit it becomes, and as such people are going to split away from it and it wont hold a parliamentary majority. It may remain the biggest party but wont be able to form a government, hell, it's barely there now - wait until the EU referendum is over and hard right Tories defect to UKIP whatever the result, their majority doesn't have much life in it. We've already seen a massive split of the vote the last two elections - an unheard of coalition, followed by a fracturing of parties.

As soon as we get a non-Tory coalition, it'll happen because it'll have to. If no party can guarantee that all it has to do is wait 5 years for it's turn as has been the case for decades with the back and forth between red and blue then it'll be in their interest to make sure they can maintain at least some reasonable amount of power without getting fucked by FPTP.

Few people in the UK understand British politics either, including the post you quoted.

No it's not even that. When I was a kid growing up in the UK before the internet we still encountered porn at that age - either left by builders in the building sites we used to dick around in, brought into school by that one kid whose dad creepily collected page 3 pictures from The Sun, or call girl leaflets with pornographic imagery on them that used to be left in phone boxes (remember them?).

The fact is, kids will encounter porn, you could ban the whole internet and they still would, just like I did and everyone I knew at school did. Porn is everywhere, kids will see it. It's not neglect, because it's an impossible task preventing it. My parents weren't even remotely neglectful, they let me go out and play all by myself like every other kid of my age before this nanny state view where all kids can't leave their front garden without an adult nowadays up until the age of 16 or whatever the fuck.

All that needs to be done is to make sure kids understand what it is and how to interpret it, nothing more.

Most people do when you listen to them directly rather than focussing only on hearsay and mainstream press mis-quoting.

I can think of any number of people who have been criticised for being tools here and by the media, but who make a lot more sense when you listen to their actual words, rather than choice misquotes by their detractors.

It makes a good joke, but it's not really that unintuitive, you're basically saying Start Shutdown.

This is in the exact same way that in Linux "shutdown now" doesn't actually shutdown now, it just begins the shutdown now. Computers don't cleanly turn off instantly, shutdown is a process that you start.

I only have shitty 4mb ADSL in the UK and I have absolutely no problems streaming their content. How bad is your connection exactly?

I agree their lack of Android support was shitty, but given that I could play it on my X1, my 360s, my PS4, my PS3 my Smart TVs, and I think even my WiiU as well as my computers (I also have two internet connections with different IPs) I always wondered how long it'd be before they phoned me to tell me I'd been banned from sharing my account. There was never really much of a shortage of devices that could play this stuff, Android was really the exception not the rule.

To be fair, flying a drone in a populated area is also a very bad idea - you don't know if it's going to fail and fall on someone, have it's Li-Ion battery ignite and start a fire on a building or just general crash into someone or a helicopter because you're not paying attention.

I'd wager that pidgeon shot landing on someone and killing them from a discharged shotgun is less likely to kill someone than a drone incident is.

As such I think the situation is more nuanced, one could argue it's safer to bring down a dangerous drone.

Of course, ideally, no one would be an idiot and neither eventuality would need to occur, but unfortunately people are people and so sometimes we're stuck with the least bad option.

Apparently we've not been successfully leveraged.

That's unfortunate.