Kemi Badenoch is the leader of the Conservative party, and Leader of the Opposition. Why she’s talking about sandwiches no one knows, though brain rot is a definite possibility.

It’s oddly relatable. Let the man enjoy his one sandwich!

Still less than Kemi hates moist sandwiches.

Yep, part of the difficulty is that people have a very inaccurate picture of what the ‘green belt’ looks like. When the green belts were drawn (70 years ago!), they inevitably included some already developed land which now can’t be redeveloped. As a result, it currently includes not only low-quality ‘green’ spaces but in some cases car parks, disused petrol stations, dumping grounds next to railway sidings - it’s ridiculous.

I don’t think it was terrorism, either, as the rest of my comment - indeed, the rest of that sentence - makes clear!

It’s not unreasonable for people to object to their communities being turned into giant dormitories.

Counterpoint: yes it is. All communities are full of houses that are empty for a lot of the time while people go to work elsewhere. My road in inner-city London is exactly like this. The ‘dormitories’ meme is just another NIMBY talking point, I’m afraid, which makes no sense at all. What are we going to do, forbid people to work outside of ‘their communities’ (whatever that means)?

I’m not saying they never happen (the South Korea thing the other day apparently involved a false flag) but nowhere near as often as some people online like to suggest!

A lot of the ‘green’ belt is golf courses. Also, a lot of it isn’t really all that green, certainly not if ‘green’ means something other than the colour (like ‘biodiverse’, for example). It’s very often low-quality, inaccessible, economically unproductive land that would be much better off with people living on it.

I just worry that some people will look at house prices in 4 years, see that they’re obviously not cheap, and then give up entirely/vote in a party that will do nothing. Tackling the issue of decades of low building rates is a significant challange, and housing estates don’t spring up overnight.

Indeed, the political rewards might not come as we’d like, but they have to build anyway, as it’s just the right thing to do!

Apologies, I thought this was a reference to conspiracies:

Fly a plane into another tower? Found “evidence” that Luigi is a pedophile? distract us with a war with china?

It seemed to suggest various ‘false flag’ type ideas, which are a hallmark of conspiracy theorising.

Convert the castles into affordable homes, perhaps?

The things that don’t seem to get built (despite promises)

But this is flatly untrue. There are laws requiring local authorities to take this into account and they can compel developers to contribute either financially or in-kind. What causes the problems with doctor’s surgeries is not new developments, but austerity, which is why it’s a problem everywhere.

But even aside from austerity, nimbyism significantly contributes to the problems you’ve identified, at the local level both directly and indirectly. E.g., here’s an example of NIMBYs trying to prevent a school building a garden (a direct example). But, it also happens indirectly:

• NIMBYs oppose housing, infrastructure and business development
• Prices rise
• No one can afford housing in the area
• People leave for jobs/houses elsewhere
• Businesses can attract neither investment nor customers, because no one lives there any more, so they shut down, so there are even fewer jobs and more people leave
• The economic case for maintaining existing schools, hospitals and other infrastructure in the area collapses, so they close
• NIMBYS complain that their infrastructure has been shut down and that their high street is terrible

This is the reason that, e.g., many rural schools have shut down. There was a particularly good example within the last year or so of a councillor celebrating preventing a housing development and then, mere weeks later, the very same councillor complaining that the DfE had ordered the local school to be shut down because there weren’t enough children in the village!

EDIT: A further indirect consequence of NIMBYs causing the kinds of problems they claim to oppose is that you simply cannot have economic growth without development. When so much development is blocked and delayed, it leads to less growth, which means government revenue falls, which means less money for development… etc.

The ship flying out of the rift reminds me of the XCV-330 Enteprise from the 22nd Century, first seen as part of the Enterprise lineage of ships in a painting in TMP. The ring structure might be a coleopteric warp drive which the XCV-330 used, also used by Vulcan starships.

I think a similar ring design was also an early concept for the Enterprise, before they settled on the familiar saucer + nacelles look.

There’s no need to indulge in conspiratorial thinking, here. Whatever you think of Mangione’s motives, it seems overwhelmingly likely that he did it and, if so, he will almost certainly be in jail for the rest of his life. There’s no need for them to do anything else to him. It seems as though he acted alone, so a broader anti-terrorist crackdown is possible but unlikely, and even less likely to be effective.

As for the CEOs, I imagine a lot more money is going to be spent on security and they’ll probably demand the businesses they work for pay for that, which actually seems fair, as far as it goes.

While I don’t have any sympathy for the Republicans, they didn’t seem to even consider more gun control even after Trump was actually hit by a would-be assassin’s bullet, so I doubt they will now. They might pass a law against 3D gun printing, but it’s not even slightly enforceable; I believe owning such a weapon is already illegal but, as Mangione has demonstrated, there’s not much to stop someone making or using one.

“I think my experience of 18 years of being an independent parish councillor and a district councillor has demonstrated that the system has utterly failed and government is absolutely incompetent for trying to deliver infrastructure services to local people.”

A typically coherent NIMBY comment, here. ‘The government is terrible at delivering infrastructure. That’s why I’m opposed to the government delivering infrastructure.’

Also notable that 14 of those 18 years were under a Conservative government dedicated to cutting government services and infrastructure.

Historically, ‘libertarian’ was a leftwing ideology. It’s only a fairly recent and, even then, a fairly American development that it was co-opted by Ayn Rand types. Then there are people like Noam Chomsky, who calls himself a ‘libertarian socialist’. Presumably some such people would have expressed a favourable view of both libertarianism and socialism given this survey.

People feel like there are a lot of these, because they’re conspicuous, but there really just isn’t enough building going on.

Part of the issue with the low-quality housing is that it’s often in the middle of nowhere, with no connections - because nimbyism has made it impossible to build housing where it’s needed or to build the infrastructure that would improve the quality. So there’s a vicious cycle of: good housing is blocked > low-quality housing is built > people point to low-quality housing as a reason to block more developments > good housing is blocked…