ThePyroPython

The slow collapse will start to quicken within the next 5 years.

Funnily enough there's a term for this in the UK; it's called Doing a Ratner's.

Trump and the far-right regularly just sling politically charged insults around so Mamdini calling Trump a Fascist is, to them, just part of Zorahn's political performance using aggressive politically charged language to stirr up his voter base; because that's what Trump and the far-right do. Lie, stirring words to whip the crowd up in a frenzy around some imaginary and inaccurate ideal of the past. Then they get in power and when they try to implement policies they just end up breaking things and letting the true fascistic, elitist, and racist political theorists write their policies for them (Project 2025).

Whereas Zorahn is actually politically educated and is likely using the word Fascist to describe Trump because that's what Trump is acting like and is using logic and reason to appeal to his voter base by calling a flapping quacking duck a fucking duck: honest and direct words about the state of affairs and what should be done to fix it.

To Trump, Zohran just looks like the other side of the same shitcoin. But if Zohran actually implements his proposed policies, he'll be demonstrating that he's actually got value.

(The metaphor got away from me at the end there)

Lib-right: We'll just make them work to cover their upkeep.

There's a good dozen of great suggestions in the comments here for tips to sort out various things like cooking, etc. (I have saved a few for myself later).

So instead I'll offer some meta advice for making these things feel effortless:

1. Find the paths of least resistance and chain them together.

Look at the additional activities you want to add on to your day before/after work and figure out what is the most effortless way to trigger starting one activity when the previous one ends.

For example, back in April I wanted to start going to the gym regularly so I did three things: put together a gym bag with enough sets of gym clothes for the week's exercise, keep that gym bag in my car, and joined a gym as close to my place of work as possible.

By doing this I was able to build "going to the gym" into my commute home from work. I have managed to keep up the habit of three gym sessions a week since then (with the occasional miss due to illness or other life events getting in the way).

2. Make the good habits obvious and the bad ones obscure.

I struggled all my life with something so basic; remembering to brush my teeth both in the morning and at night. So what I did last year was use the IKEA peg board thing and found some holders for my toothbrush and toothpaste. That pegboard is right next to my bedroom door so I have to walk past my toothbrush whenever I leave the room as a visual trigger to go brush my teeth.

Think about how you can position physical reminders in your space to do the activities you want to do.

Or use your phone's calendar/to do list app of your choice to book in reminders to nudge you into getting started.

3. Just five minutes to get started and if necessary do the bare minimum badly.

Whenever I'm feeling tired but there's a task that needs doing I ask myself "will this take five minutes or less?". If the answer is yes, then I just do it there and then.

If it's something that will take more than five minutes to complete to 100% then I say to myself "ok I'm tired but I'm just going to do five minutes of it and see how I'm feeling then". This works out great for the gym example. Today on the way home from work I was knackered but I told myself to just do the five minutes as the bare minimum. Once I'd done a few minutes of exercise I felt like I was achieving and then pushed past the five minutes for a good 30 minutes before deciding that was enough for today.

And yes, there have been days when I literally just did the five minutes and stopped. But that didn't matter, because I still completed what I set as the bare minimum. Those minimums still get me closer to my goals and therefore they're still a win. So long as I'm getting just one more of these little wins over losing (i.e. not going to the gym) then the progress keeps stacking and the good habit continues to form.

"half-chewed thoughts" ooooh another delightful turn of phrase I'm adding to my ~~armoury~~ collection.

You haven't been to enough regions of England mate. I'm only slightly joking when I say it can get bad. Not "it's a difficult to understand dialect" but "how the hell did you even make it through the state school system?" bad. Genuinely some of the first generation immigrants speak better English than some of the locals.

Source: grew up in one of these regions.

I can't comment for the whole Anglosphere and I certainly won't comment on NI, Wales, and Scotland, but for England:

Pick any point on the map and move in any direction. As you move, if the average wage increases, English proficiency increases and vice versa.

I'd say at the lowest level equivalent is France and the highest level equivalent is Denmark.

And so what's your threshold for calling a spade a spade? Is a trowel a spade? Is a spoon a spade? Is a flat bit of wood a spade?

Do you understand the concept of neuance or shades of grey or do you doggedly stick to black and white?

Must be blissfull to see the world with strict category boundaries and be willingly ignorant of anything on a spectrum that doesn't fit into your nice and neat categories.

Not my thing, but you do you boo.

I have yet to see UK election officials being caught on CCTV stuffing ballet boxes.

I have yet to see the Police arresting people for being gay in public.

I have yet to see the BBC be handed notes live on air and completely change the narrative around an ongoing war.

So yeah, the original comment saying "the UK is more authoritarian than Russia" is insane hyperbole.

Ironically, your comment about the UK being halfway to as authoritarian as somewhere like Russia is more interesting as we can get into the details as how they are currently similar and how much further the UK would have to slide to be there, and presumably how to stop it.

See this here u/Jhex, this is a comparison that makes sense because it is a criticism of the "surveillance state" by comparing numbers of CCTV cameras between a parliamentary democracy with free and fair elections and an authoritarian state which does not and highlights that whilst one has much more political freedoms they both have a large surveillance state apparatus and you'd expect one of them to have a smaller one.

No, I think we can acknowledge the problems surrounding digital ID, the surveillance state, prosecuting whistleblower journalists who leak classified information, and many other problematic policies and institutions WITHOUT resorting to a rediculous comparison and insane hyperbole.