But now there is a vacancy for the Labour deputy leadership, and Labour members might try to elect somebody who is even more left-wing, so the government might be pushed to the left.

Edit: I’m not saying that a more left-wing deputy leader of Labour is necessarily a bad thing. I’m just saying I don’t necessarily believe that Starmer was happy to remove Rayner. “Better the devil you know” and all that - Rayner was a known quantity to Starmer, and she didn’t criticise his leadership too much. Now there is a risk of someone critical of the government becoming the deputy leader of Labour, which could give Starmer more problems.

If it was a Tory they probably would have refused to resign and they would have kept their job.

Very true that people should pay their taxes, I agree with that. So maybe Rayner should have been allowed to pay the correct tax, and any penalties for late payment, and then she could have kept her job.

If you’re right then I think Rayner should have been able to keep her job, as long as she paid the tax and any penalties for late payment. Rayner losing her job means that Labour have done the bidding of the right-wing press.

I think it would be good if the UK had proportional representation - it’s a shame it’s unlikely to happen any time soon. Labour only got 34% of the vote last year, but this gave them 63% of the seats, and that might be one reason why the public is so unhappy at the moment.

Yeah maybe there’s stuff I’m not aware of. I’ve seen some people on Lemmy point out that Bill Gates lobbied for the University of Oxford to not open source their Covid vaccine. I suppose that seems shitty on the face of it.

I got downvoted on Lemmy the other day because I said that I prefer Bill Gates to Musk.

Maybe there are things about Gates I don’t know. Maybe he is actually quite an evil person; I don’t know. But he does at least spend billions of dollars helping vulnerable people, right? And Bill’s stances on global politics are far more sensible than those of Musk.

Tankies are going to be upset, because according to them, Democrats are just as bad as Republicans.

In both cases you have a person doing something that many people would consider bad. Then this person gets mad when others find out about their behaviour. If you don’t want people to find out you did something, maybe just don’t do it in the first place.

I think it’s pretty comparable. The guys in the OP are getting mad at Derek but they’re the ones who said bad things in the first place. Their actions caused this. All Derek did was let people know the truth, and maybe it’s good when people know the truth.

If you find out that someone cheated on their wife, do you have to keep it private to protect the cheater’s “privacy”?

Maybe it’s better if that person’s wife knows the truth.

Good guy Derek

Maybe Lemmy is a 2020s version of phpBB (the forum software, which is open source like Lemmy is). Lemmy and phpBB can both be hosted by anyone, but of course the interesting thing about Lemmy is that Lemmy servers can share their content with each other.

I read the same story on CNN this morning.

Apparently the Democrats have a favourability rating of 29% (“a record low in CNN’s polling dating back to 1992 and a drop of 20 points since January 2021”) while the Republicans have a favourability rating of 36%.

This reminds me of something I read from a British left-wing journalist the other day (source). She suggested that perhaps the left should focus less on identity politics, and more on wealth and class:

By making a virtue of marginalisation, breaking ourselves down into ever smaller and mutually hostile groupings, we make it impossible to build a mass movement capable of taking on extreme concentrations of wealth and power

I don’t think it’s just Putin which is why I mentioned the megalomania of other Russian elites. But Putin surely made the final decision to invade.

I didn’t say Russian only lies. I said Russia “has lied about pretty much everything for a long time”. That is not the same thing.

assuming the opposite of whatever Russia says

I’m not just assuming the opposite of Russia’s statements. I’m drawing a best guess conclusion based on two premises:

• Russia has a history of lying about its true intentions and actions
• Russian oligarchs and elites would absolutely be interested in mineral wealth, given their history of megalomania

I think it’s likely that mineral wealth would have been part of the Kremlin’s motivation to invade. Along with general megalomania and irredentism.

Maybe the primary cause was Putin’s megalomania, or indeed megalomania among quite a few Russian elites.

Occam’s razor would dictate that Russia is probably lying if they say they’re not interested in Ukrainian minerals, given that the Kremlin has lied about pretty much everything for a long time.

Putin is even saying he wants to sell minerals from Russian-occupied Ukraine to the US. Clearly he wants to profit from minerals in Ukraine.

Removed by mod

It’s hilarious that you accuse the US and Ukraine of wanting to get rich from mineral rights, but you won’t accuse Russia of the same thing. In reality there will be rich people in each of those countries wanting to profit from minerals.