>>102377

What annoys me is it would be so easy and cost absolutely nothing for lefties to detoxify themselves of the anti-British perceptions, and the tiresome identity politics own-goals they are mired in, and just say "yeah we don't agree with that either" whenever something like this happens. It would harm nobody, and only benefit them to say it.

But instead they do all the backflips and acrobatics they can to talk about why it didn't really happen, and if it did it didn't happen how it's being reported, and if it did it doesn't actually mean what you think it means, and if it does, it doesn't. When instead they could just say "yeah we think that's bullshit too" and look like normal people.

Because it's quite obvious this kind of story gets pushed precisely to exploit that weakness.

>>102382
The real optimum strategy would be to not engage at all and to produce their own similarly incendiary stories, setting up similar traps and dilemmas for the right. If you're responding, you're losing.
Keir Starmer may crop up to condemn the school and show he's not like those other lefties, but anyone who hears the story is going to be nudged towards Reform regardless of what Starmer says. He's just not the most credible response to "the problem." He does everything he can to wrap himself in the flag and yet the association just doesn't stick.

>>102380
>Without being a smartarse, I'd like to know how one would distinguish between Britishness and Englishness in England, other than as a class sort of thing where we love union jack kitsch but think it's a bit weird to fly St. George's cross in your garden, or as a racial thing where Britishness is a little more ethnically flexible.

I think these things are just inherently difficult as it gets into subjective feelings and no true Scotsmans. To me it feels like English is more a heritage from the Middle Ages whereas British is empire onwards (e.g. coronation chicken, punks, defeating France at Waterloo thanks to the invention of wellingtons), there's probably a class element too with working class consciousness being most at home in the North West in England.

>>102383
I reckon that falls into another trap though of viewing everything through the culture warrior prism instead of actually fixing the problem. In this case the symptom is the kid getting excluded for the crime of being British on a Friday but the cause is obviously deeper institutional issues with how the school approaches multiculturalism and how it appraises what is and isn't a valid identity which I can't imagine are unique to one school.

To loop this back to incel lesson; there's no way we're not going to get a shitstorm from it and it will be for the same reason that a teacher thought it acceptable to tell a 12 year old girl that she can't dress as a Spice Girl because she gets to celebrate being British everyday even after she'd wanted to do it hard enough that she wrote an essay.

>>102380

Historically, "British" and "English" were more-or-less synonymous; the distinction only became widely acknowledged as politically charged after the establishment of the Irish Free State and the subsequent rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism.

England football fans only really started waving the St George's Cross in the 90s, because the Union Jack had become toxic due to associations with the far right. I think we're in the middle of a swing in the opposite direction, as groups like the EDL have adopted the idea of "English nationalism"; the Union Jack used to be associated with skinheads and football hooligans and the St George's Cross was twee, but now a lot of people see it the other way around.

I think that Brexit has undoubtedly increased the salience of Britishness - like it or not, the Scottish and Welsh are now much more tied to the fate of Britain than when we were in the EU. Blue passports are a slightly silly symbol of a very meaningful recalibration of our place in the world. Obviously that's most strongly evident in Northern Ireland, where the complexities of national identity are most acute. The great genius of the Good Friday Agreement was creating a kind of liminal space in which people could freely choose to be British, Irish, both or neither; Brexit blew that up in ways that were unanticipated by both Brexiteers and remainers, and that are likely to have repercussions for generations to come.

>Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has suspended four MPs from Labour over repeated breaches of party discipline.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y7zqdwzqyo

>Neil Duncan-Jordan, Brian Leishman, Chris Hinchliff and Rachael Maskell have had the party whip removed, meaning the MPs will sit as independents in the House of Commons.

>Three other Labour MPs - Rosena Allin Khan, Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Mohammed Yasin - have been stripped of their trade envoy roles.

>It comes after all four of the suspended MPs and the former trade envoys voted against the government's welfare reform bill earlier this month.

>The rebellion undermined Sir Keir's authority, which was weakened after a series of policy reversals, such as restoring the winter fuel allowance to millions of pensioners.

>In a debate in the Commons, Maskell called the bill an "omnishambles" and described the benefits changes as "Dickensian cuts belong to a different era and a different party".
>Maskell told the BBC she had been elected to Parliament to speak up for her constituents.
>"I don't see myself as a rebel," Maskell said. "But I'm not afraid to speak up about whatever is in my constituents' interests."

Wouldn't it have made more sense to kick them out of the party before you U-turned on the policy they were protesting against?

I hope Starmer is raped to death by elephants, minutes after receiving a diagnosis for eye cancer.

t. Labour member.

>>102386

I'm starting to think Kier is our guy after all. He's devoted his career to this, rising to the top just so he can sabotage Blairite Labour from the inside. He's laying the foundations for a second coming.

Ok but really. I doubt the JC party will get much further than Reform, they can't (well, they could, but you know they wouldn't) rely on the kind of cheap and easy populist easy votes Reform are all about. But just imagine if both Labour and the Conservatives are pulled to their respective left/right by a third party threatening to split the vote.

We can return to a politics that actually has a left and a right, and not just this fucking endless worst-of-both-worlds centrist quagmire.

>>102387
That's a bit of a tall order, in what situation might that happen?

>>102388
The problem is that both Labour and the Tories are controlled by people who would rather see the party destroyed than see it fall into the hands of somebody else. It's a textbook case of the iron law of institutions.
In the case of the Labour right it's matched with an outright pathological loathing of the left. The sort of thing that needs a sociologist or psychiatrist rather than a political analysis.

Given the general state of things, I think whatever comes next is going to make us nostalgic for neoliberalism. We'll keep all the worst bits and bring in some new bad things too, for good measure. Whether it's delivered by a new Lab/Ref party system, by the old Lab/Con one, or by some kind of long-lasting Reform regime against an incompetent opposition eastern-Europe style, I can't say.

>>102388

FPTP is a cruel mistress.

>>102388
>>102391
I don't get how someone would vote for Reform or the Sultana party. People are just thick for sure but they're such obviously bad ideas I don't get how it works, I had assumed that the NHS, Trussism and climate change were settled issues in the UK.

It really does seem like either living standards will be growing at a good speed in 2029 or we'll just implode as a country.

>>102391
Who is the Dominic Cummings or Morgan McSweeney of Reform UK? Do they even have one? If I was Keir Starmer, I’d just hire him or her.

>>102393

>>102392
It’s a protest vote. Under first-past-the-post, you’re basically guaranteed one or other of the two main parties, so on polling day you can vote for literally whoever you want and it won’t matter in most cases. I feel very strongly that what we are seeing here is a total loss of faith in the political establishment; we’ve realised the Conservatives are shit but now Labour are having the exact same problems and nothing is being fixed. So it’s time to vote for a nutter, to send a message that you do not endorse the status quo.

The fact that everyone feels this way means there is a genuine danger of nutters gaining power, just like how so many people voted for Brexit that it actually happened. But the main parties can’t turn into nutters and pick up the protest votes for themselves, because it’s not about the policies any more - people are just voting against the current system.

>>102392
Put yourself in the mindset of someone who only picks up bits and pieces of the news from our already dire press, i.e. most sane people. Your living standards are disappointing, the PM is a cunt, the Tories have basically no media presence, and Jimmy Savile crops up to say that the PM is a cunt with surprising regularity.

The NHS will stick about, but hand all your data to Palantir. Climate change is a settled issue so far as it's real, but we're not seriously interested in doing anything about it. Trussism would be a change, but quite easy if you'll make public spending cuts to pay for the tax cuts - cull the disabled and find a way to split the unemployed depending on who they vote for, starve the half who don't vote for you.

I flip between the idea that the institutions of this country will crush any attempt at change and any Reform administration would show the same kind of continuity with Starmer as Starmer has with Sunak, or that they're so crooked or broken that it's a foregone conclusion we're going to wind up like Hungary.

I don't know how I feel about the Elections Bill. Aside from the headline of lowering the voting age (a bad idea) it seems a bit absurd to have voter ID but then make a bank card a valid identity document just because it has your name on it.

I'm also pretty sure that auto-enrolment on the electoral register is how you get started with compulsory voting.

>>102396
>i.e. most sane people

I'd suggest we need another lockdown then but I'm pretty sure that the core of Reform is lockdown protesters.

So I notice the thread de-railed into identity politics again before anyone took a bite out of this post.

>>102374

I thought economicslad might have something to say about the ideas, considering his usual spiel that Britain has a productivity problem. What if we don't have a productivity problem, and our workers are actually very productive and efficient; but that their productivity is in effect diluted because it has to do all the work holding up a bloated management caste who spend all day sat around forwarding emails and holding meetings about fuck all?

>>102409
>bloated management caste who spend all day sat around forwarding emails and holding meetings about fuck all?
Where do you think the charity shop I work for would be if Stuart hadn't sent an email last week, asking one of the employees to come in early and do a "Wow" window display? That's right, it would have raped to death by ghosts. The shop itself would have been raped to death by ghosts if it wasn't for that idea.

>>102409
>What if we don't have a productivity problem

We do and we know this because we can compare like-for-like industries and use common sense. Our farms output lags compared to peers because they have low-levels of mechanisation and historically lack investment in new machinery which limits productivity etc. There's also nonsense involved for sure but a lot of that is for things we want like animal welfare and not dumping less shit in our rivers which ARE BOYS up against the coal face might miss or otherwise not care about. Similarly we KNOW that the North of England is less productive because we have the data and that data explains the impact of things like poor infrastructure and Northerners being a species of sentient bushes inhabiting skinsuits.

There's always challenges with data conforming to reality but you also need data to make big decisions and understand the world. To be a Ode to Joy singing Europhile about this, subsidiarity is normally understood downwards as delegating to the lowest possible floor but that also means that certain decisions like steering the ship or cross-cutting issues need to be made further up and that requires mass data. As for care workers wiping arses, it's the wrong metric and you would instead measure things like home visits which make a better proxy of arses wiped (given some turds need more wipes than others) and that information is actually useful if handled with the right managerial expertise.

I didn't bother to respond to otherlad (I'm not sure what lad I am anymore) because it's a tedious argument, yes the New Public Management has been bad for the NHS but I don't believe economists or analysts deserve a kicking when we know they can also deliver essential functions. Same with HR which is often treated as a scapegoat. The problem the British workforce might have is people who are all breadth and no depth (wider knowledge but lacking technical depth) but the inverse is also a problem and management (and leadership) are extremely underrated skillsets where by definition a manager will never have the micro view of subordinates.

>>102413

This is exactly the answer I would expect from a manager who adds no value, and knows they don't.

https://robinmcalpine.org/scotland-has-no-controlling-intellect/
On the subject of managing things, I thought this was interesting. It's about Scotland, but I can't imagine England is much different.

In other news, Jeremy Corbyn has now confirmed that he’s setting up a new party with Zarah Sultana. If nobody here has posted about it yet, I am not confident for their abilities to capture headlines.

>>102446

I couldn't be arsed writing a joke about Your Party. My opinion of Corbyn and Sultana is so low that I genuinely can't be bothered to satirise them.

It's a shame Corbyn's just a random nice-if-dithering bloke and not the mental Stalinist he's made out to be. He'd be polling second place if he'd picked a party name and announced he'd lock Keir Starmer up for war crimes.

>They are the real reason many of us love visiting National Trust houses. Fresh scones topped with cream and jam are often the highlight of any visit to a historic house, once their fine architecture, old rooms and beautifully tended gardens have been taken in.

>But the traditional, homemade favourites are now set to be replaced with bought-in alternatives at some properties amid job cuts. The National Trust is cutting 550 jobs as a higher minimum wage and the impact of Rachel Reeves’s national insurance raid on employers has caused costs to balloon.

>It said costs had grown more quickly than visitor numbers to its historic houses, castles, parks and gardens and that it had no choice but to cut back. Chefs and catering staff at the least profitable cafes are set to lose their jobs, and food will instead be bought in.

https://www.I need to find an archive link for this.co.uk/news/2025/07/28/homemade-scones-off-menu-some-national-trust-houses/

>National Trust scones (with clotted cream and jam, of course) are so popular they have inspired a bestselling book and have a dedicated web page. One woman even visited every National Trust café to taste their scones and rate them out of five. Yet this Great British food institution is under threat. Job losses at the National Trust mean that some venues will stop baking their own scones, The Times has learnt. Instead they will be shipped in from a central source, raising fears they will lose the home-baked freshness that makes them so popular.

>The problem stems from the National Trust’s decision this month to shed 550 jobs in an effort to cut its wage bill. The conservation charity, which employs nearly 8,500 people, said recent rises in the minimum wage and Labour’s decision to increase employer national insurance contributions had cost it more than £10 million. It explained that these rising costs had outstripped an increase in income from visitors to its 500 historic houses, castles, parks and gardens and that it had to cut back.

>Concerns had already been raised about the quality of scones at some National Trust properties. In 2023, after Sarah Merker finished her ten-year odyssey of the charity’s 244 cafés, she completed an analysis of her reviews, finding that the least popular properties had the worst scones. Merker discovered that the venues with more than 50,000 visitors a year had an average scone rating of 4.4 out of 5 while properties with fewer visitors scored an average of only 3.7. This week Merker did not respond when asked to comment on the latest development.

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/food-drink/article/national-trust-job-cuts-threaten-homemade-scones-clxk0jrkq

RACHEL REEVES IS AFTER YOUR NATIONAL TRUST SCONES.

>>102489

Morrisons do the best scones (skɒns). Think I'm off to Morrisons after I've had breakfast.

>>102489
I know I'm probably going to get flamed for this but I've found that the best scones are often found at cafes nearby to historic landmarks rather than attached to them. I'd guess because it's life-or-death for some of them to get good reviews online.

For example while I know Kew Gardens aren't NT he Kew Greenhouse Cafe on the way to the station is miles better than anything that you'll find inside the place and it has a cat.

So Queer's going to have to recognise Palestine now. Because we know it's not like Israel will actually change anything.

>The population of England and Wales has grown by more than 700,000 in the year to June 2024 - the second-largest increase in over 75 years.

>The change was largely fuelled by international migration, with natural change - the difference between births and deaths - accounting for only a small proportion. According to the Office for National Statistics, there were an estimated 61.8 million people in England and Wales in mid-2024, up from 61.1 million the year before.

>It is the second-largest numerical jump since at least 1949, when comparable data began. And it is behind only the rise of 821,210 that took place in the preceding 12 months from mid-2022 to mid-2023. Net international migration - the difference between people moving to the country and leaving - accounted for 690,147 of the estimated population increase of 706,881 people, or 98% of the total.

https://news.sky.com/story/second-largest-population-increase-in-england-and-wales-in-over-75-years-mainly-fuelled-by-migration-13403904

Are Nige really is going to become PM, isn't he?

>>102528
I've been thinking a lot about the "Australian style points based immigration system" lately. It's actually pretty funny. The press and the public got very upset about immigration numbers so Blair promised a points system in 2005, Brown made it Australian style in 2010, Savile demanded it in 2015, Brexit made it possible in 2016 and Johnson made it happen after 2019, and the result is: more immigration than under free movement with Europe.

Which is an outcome anyone even remotely familiar with Australia could've predicted. Their population has grown by 10 million since 1990 (of 26 million total), and most of that immigration is non-European. It's hilariously bonkers that imitating them was ever an anti-migration proposal, like if anti-privatisation campaigners argued for an "America style" healthcare system.

Can't wank, can't support Palestine, can't even transition until you're about forty and have had the approval of a council of wizards. Apparently you can be a female archbishop though, well, I can't (not for another ten years), but some can.

Giving 16 year olds the vote and then making it difficult for them to access porn seems like it could end up being a massive own goal.

>>102531
School leavers are hardly going to vote Reform, are they? It barely matters what they do beyond that.

>>102532
Young men are becoming increasingly right-wing.

>>102532
>School leavers are hardly going to vote Reform, are they?

>>102533

When the bars for men and women are so close together, and show identical trend across the groups, compared with the gulf between the generations, I find it can only be called misrepresentation to say "young men" and not just "gen z/millennials" are becoming increasingly right wing.

To frame it as a gender thing strikes me as that kind of technically true according to the statistics (but only because you are focussing on one thing and therefore missing the context that totally changes the perspective) kind of lying our media just loves to do. Like the one they are currently doing about vaping where they say a third of teens who vape are likely to smoke, and saying that's "the same rate" as the 70s- But it takes the wind out of that assertion when you point out the comparison is that in the 70s a third of ALL teens, not just a third of teens who vape, were likely to smoke.

So take your graph and fuck off back to the Telegraph you journalist.

>>102533
I feel like this is less a result of young people radicalising and more a result of the conventional political system falling apart.
No baby boomers voted far-right because your options across Europe were: Communist Party, Social Democratic Party, Union of Christian Democrats, and "Whoa!" - Liberal League 57!.

Generation X get a little bit in as the early phases of disillusionment cause a slight the rise in support for the Nazi Democrats, the Alliance for Fascism, the Ruud Hartholt Death List, etc, while most voters are still supporting the old system. Depending on your country, the trend really takes off around the 2000s, particularly after the recession, which killed a good chunk of Social Democratic parties. Millennials continue the basic trend, and Gen Z pick up where they left off. Older voters will have a little lag, and boomers may not go in for it at all, but what's really happening is that the entire electorate is more open to voting for the far right than before, rather than younger people being substantially more radical than slightly older people.

Britain here is a good example: Jim'll Fix It's vote share gets higher the older you go, but young people have "moved right" because ~10% of them would vote Reform now, which didn't exist as an option in 2019. No older people could possibly have voted for Reform when they were young because Reform did not exist. (And if you lump together Reform, UKIP, etc, you'd probably see a similar curve.)

>Jeremy Corbyn has ruled out an alliance between his new political party and the Greens. The independent MP claimed the Green party was locked in an “eternal, riven debate” over what they stood for and suggested the party was not Left-wing enough to formally join forces with. However, the former leader of the Labour Party said he would be willing to work with the Greens on specific issues.

> Mr Corbyn told the commentator Owen Jones in an interview posted on YouTube that “we’re not forming an alliance” with the Greens. He said: “Would we work with them? Yes, on issues. Generally we would agree on environmental issues, we would agree on social justice issues. They are not a socialist organisation and they seem to me into an eternal, riven debate between trying to appeal to a sort of semi-conservative voting suburban electorate as opposed to a committed, environmentally conscious electorate. So yes, we work with them in Parliament and yes, we would co-operate, but we’re not forming an alliance with them. They don’t want to form an alliance with us. But we do recognise each other’s positions and I think we will come to some good positions and good agreements in the future.”

https://www.I need to find an archive link for this.co.uk/news/2025/07/31/greens-not-left-wing-enough-for-corbyn-alliance/

Glad to see he's calling out the Greens for being Tories on bikes.

>>102568
I thought the current Green leaders were alright until boobman challenged them. I'd have expected them to do the Starmer thing of lying to their members and promising that they can have their moderate, agreeable leader as the face of radical policies, but they're not doing it that way - they're running basically the campaign Starmer would've won if he wasn't a pathological liar, arguing that the Greens have to win over moderate voters, that having policies or campaigning at all would scare the horses, and that Starmer's been right to throw LGBT people under the bus. In short, outing themselves as bike Tories in disposition even if you could quibble about policy detail. There've even been idiotic moments like someone mostly notable for an environmental protest delivering rehearsed lines about the Greens being a party of power, not protest...
It'll be fun whatever happens: Either they're losing control of that party, or they'll keep the party only for Corbyn's gang to eat their lunch...

https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/delusions-on-left-and-labour-right.html
>In the summer of 2019 I was writing a regular monthly article for the online New Statesman. Within hours of publishing my latest piece, where I suggested Corbyn would do less harm as Prime Minister than Boris Johnson, they withdrew it. I was told I could continue writing for them only if I stuck to economics and did not mention to anyone what they had just done. I didn’t accept the latter condition, and have never been invited to write for them again.
Does this strike you as something that happens in a normal country?
Look, I'm as bored of arguing the merits of Corbyn as anyone - but I feel like I'm going crazy. Over time I've come to believe more-and-more that he'd have done a terrible job as PM, but that the measures taken to make sure that didn't happen would constitute a scandal in any sane country.
It's one thing to be dropped by The Sun for being a lefty, that's obvious and in line with what The Sun does as a right wing tabloid. It's quite another for an ostensibly center left paper to act in such a way.

>>102581
Bernie Sanders got a lot of grief in America from people who should have supported him, and while this is admittedly a right-wing example rather than a left-wing one, I really don't think France should have banned Marine Le Pen from running in their elections. These things happen.

>>102583
They didn't just ban her from running for shits and giggles. They (rather sensibly IMO) have a law that says that if you're convicted of certain offences of dishonesty, you can't be in Parliament or run for President. It's not particularly unusual to have rules about who is or isn't allowed to be in government. It's common to have rules that say you can't be in office if you're a crook, or if you're bankrupt, and so on.

>>102584
>It's common to have rules that say you can't be in office if you're a crook

mirth

>>102583

> I really don't think France should have banned Marine Le Pen from running in their elections

The problem with extremists is that they often come to power through what most people would call entirely democratic elections.

If you are serious about maintaining democracy in your country, then you can't just let the people elect leaders who will do away with it or at least turn it into something that nobody would recognise anymore as a free democracy. As we've seen in the last 25 years or so with examples from all kinds of countries, from Russia to Turkey, Hungary, and now as some would argue even in the U.S., democracy isn't always self sustaining and self perpetuating. It tends to be vulnerable to takeovers by those who seek to undo and exploit it for their own gain.

>>102589
For the past several decades, we have all learned what Franklin meant when he described the result of the Constitutional Convention as "a republic, if you can keep it".

>>102590

The strength of a liberal democracy is also at the same time its weakness. While it's a very good thing that we're guaranteed freedom of speech, expression and opinion as well as free and fair elections and some other similar rights, this plurality also implicity gives you, and anybody the right to express opinions that are against the system itself. So the system often runs the risk of being unstable from within.

Maybe not unlike free markets, which also don't tend to function well, at least not for long, without certain guardrails.

Are things really as bad as this crypto ad is trying to make out and more importantly is the rest of the world the same if not worse?

>>102594
>While it's a very good thing that we're guaranteed freedom of speech, expression and opinion as well as free and fair elections and some other similar rights

Can we keep the discussion about the UK?

>>102596
Obviously the crypto ad isn't a realistic depiction of the UK.

I'd been thinking not long ago about how some people here like to wallow in how shite it is. They think every highstreet is full of phone snatchers and empty shop fronts, that contacting an NHS professional requires a telegraph and a spiritual medium, and that every meal is from the darkest recesses of the Footy Scran Twitter account. And I'm not saying it's not kind of shite, but there is an element of self-fulfilling prophecy to going around and making out like you're living in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

So what exactly is the cynical, right-wing, bastard's cabal that is Coinbase saying? You can't afford the weekly shop, or your rent, but you can afford to invest in crypto? That seems unlikely. Plus look at how it wants you to view other Britons. They're pathetic, docile, literally covered in shit and they're all too thick to realise it, some might even be happy about it. Not you though. You're different. At least Leni Riefenstahl had some class, because this anti-social nonsense makes the Ludovico technique look subtle.

And what are you supposed to do if you strike it lucky? "We're off to Dubai", sings the only man with hair I've ever seen in a convertable. Yeah, well, good. If we shipped off every prick who longs for Dubai we'd become a society so advanced that within a year we could clone Thatcher endlessly just so we could immediately launch her, screaming, into the Sun, as we'd have no further unmet needs or wants.

I'm not saying we're living a golden age and people are just too dour to see it. I'm not saying that by a longshot. However, Coinbase and their zero-regulation, Trump World Order are just trying to heard us into company towns where only their shitty financial system rules. Where Amazon is pround to partner with Coinbase on their newly developed vending machines, that sell you everything from condoms to bran flakes. But they'll cut you off if you buy too much of either, because fucking without getting someone pregnant is bad for productivity, and it's bad for your team's workflow if you have to shit too often.

Umm, anyway. I'd too tired after all that to even go off about Aardman doing their last run of ads. Fuck Coinbase.

>>102596
It's a parody, although the start of the video probably is applicable to some people. Maybe all of it is true somewhere, but none of it will be true for everyone.

I am confident that the rest of the developed world is similar, and poorer countries are definitely worse.

>>102596 That's clearly not meant to be taken seriously, which is what most people say. That is, you don't take it at face value.

There is a point to it; the country has declined somewhat over recent decades, and that includes the financial system, but not much; their point is that it needs reforming. It is coming from a place of concern and all the (mildly) dystopian imagery is meant to catch your attention like most ads.

And that they have the answers, allegedly.

Some dickheads on the other place's politics board though thought it was meant to insult us, and even suggested that it took up their view of interracial co-existance being a bad thing, because they're desperate to find validation in anything for their vile beliefs.

Anyway the ad was pretty funny.