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Thank you for my favourite giggle of the day.

Look again: they’re still the wrong way round even if so.

You are fantastic. Thank you.

I suspect that men who have sex with men are more prone to STIs because they have a lot more sex with a much wider pool of partners, not because they’re less careful statistically.

Wow, that’s some intense double standards there.

I’ll wager that this meme was not censored by a Brit.

(It has already come in the UK.)

True, but there’s no such thing as a knife licence.

Very much so indeed, but I’m not sure why you mentioned it?

Do y’all brits actually pay for the license?

Licence. (Lisense is a verb in British English.)

Yes. It funds the BBC which is public service broadcasting, usually very high quality and has no advertisements. You aren’t allowed to watch BBC or any live television whatsoever in the UK without a TV licence.

Can you be arrested for not paying it?

Not any more. It’s now a civil rather than criminal offence. The conservatives didn’t like that they even today tend to report facts alongside opinions, so they threatened to remove the licence fee. Instead they made of civil rather than criminal, so non payment is only punishable by a fine, which of course means it’s only illegal for poor people who can’t gamble the fine.

They used to send detector vans round to addresses that don’t have a licence for enforcement. The ads said they could tell if you were watching telly. I suspect they detected aerials, but that was in the days of Cathode Ray Tubes, and maybe you can detect them being on, I don’t know.

How does it work exactly?

They just send a bill to everyone in the post, warning of the consequences of non payment. You can pay by direct debit for less paperwork. Compliance is pretty high. It used to be higher before the conservatives started meddling.

The conservatives would love to get rid of the BBC and the NHS but they know it would be an absolute disaster for them politically because the people love them, flawed as they are, so they just underfund them badly and then complain about how bad they are.

+++

That strategy initially worked with the trains, which the conservatives privatised in the 1980s on the grounds that the reliability was poor and the rolling stock was badly out of date, but after a few decades of privatised rail, the promise of competition driving up quality and driving down prices has proven very hollow indeed, and now nationalisation is popular in every demographic group including conservative voters.

The East Coast Main Line went bust so many times that no commercial operators would touch it and the government was forced to step in. The civil servants were told to look for efficiency savings and make it more commercially viable, but when they did that it became the most reliable and punctual line in the UK with the best customer satisfaction, and cost far less in subsidies than the privatised lines. Who knew that extracting the most money possible for shareholders would drive down quality whilst driving up prices and government costs?

The current labour government is nationalising rail on the cheap by simply not renewing the franchises when they expire. Manchester’s buses have come back under local authority regulatory control. Some things are getting better under labour, but some things are not and the prime minister seems to think that Biden is the best example to follow in many ways.

You invent so much of my side of the conversation. You argue with what you’d prefer I had said because it’s so easy to disagree with and knock down. You’ve invented this whole nonsense viewpoint and life history for me just so you can come across as more sensible. But it’s insane because it has almost nothing to do with what I said and everything to do with your prejudices and your inability to have some self control over your judgementalism and your condemnatory impulses.

You’ve gotta be rightwing.

Bad people who make bad choices deserve all the bad things that come their way and some more flung at them by you just to show them how wrong they are? That’s where you’re coming from here.

Congratulations on ignoring literally everything I said and arguing with some fictitious person who is “body positive” about obesity or who doesn’t think it’s a problem. I mean, I’ve come across straw man arguments before, but this one takes the biscuit.

You think your hate and contempt can fix other people, but you’re very, very, very wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised if you shout at homeless people or at last rant about them for half an hour behind their backs.

Also congrats on completely, utterly and comprehensively falling the self control challenge I set you.

Turns out your self control in some things is at absolute zero.

Still really proud of yourself? I bet you really are, because you’re not very introspective so far today.

Obesity is literally a self control issue.

You sound like you don’t believe in ADHD “just finish what you started, have some impulse control!“, or autism “read the room, don’t be so literal and stop getting distracted by noise and light, just ignore it”.

It night be plausible that most people can just avoid the first cigarette or the first spliff or the first anything, but no one can avoid food, and some people’s biology, their hormonal balance, their brain chemistry, mental health, shit, just their metabolic rate can make them have a very, very different order of magnitude of problems with food.

So it’s easy for you to have self control around food and balance your calorie intake with exercise? Great, good for you, but stop acting all morally superior for not having problems in your life.

Get lost with that judgemental “it’s simple” shit and try to learn a bit of self control yourself over what kind of nasty judgementalism you’re spouting online without thinking about other people.