In other news:
- Pope's Catholicism denial is dishonest, says ex-bishopmate
- Bear's woods defecation denial is dishonest, says ex-cubmate
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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Meanwhile it is stated that the renowned English private eye, Sherlock Holmes is entirely devoid of fecal matter.
I'm sure most people here would have a lower threshold than me to condemn someone for their childhood behaviour, but this seems well beyond my threshold, too. You've got:
- multiple sources
- describing very similar patterns of behaviour
- going back many years
- a man who can't bring himself to deny the claims fully - except then, a day later, changes his wording
- a man who while he generally doesn't make overtly racist comments espouses policies which are nevertheless congruent with a racist outlook.
There just isn't any way it's not both true and forming a part of his current beliefs. Anyone you can find 20 people with matching accounts of seriously nasty bullying behaviour for was almost certainly a bully. Such a person who is then not able to identify what was described as such as someone who is still a bully.
Yes, exactly. If it turned out that, e.g., Ed Davey was a bit of a dick when he was 14, we'd all say: 'Yeah, obviously. He was 14.' But it's your second and fifth points that make this especially salient: Farage's childhood nasty racist comments fit perfectly with the adulthood nasty racist policies. He hasn't changed, he just expresses it differently!
Hes walking a tight rope with his denials as he cant completely deny being a racist* as that undermines the fundamental plank to many of Reforms policies, but he cant be linked to being openly racist as that puts off the quiet racists who are quite happy with his policies as long as he doesn't get caught using slurs as that risks them being ostracized by society.
*The truth or providing actual evidence of claims has never been anything that has bothered either Farage or Reform, see their bullshit council savings numbers just this week.
Yes I did wonder if that "I never 'directly' abused anyone" was supposed to deliberately allow the dyed-in-the-wool racists to believe one thing and the more moderate supporters to believe another. I didn't hear enough interviews though to know whether he was properly challenged on it.
When is he ever properly challenged by the media? Same problem with Boris before his fall
I heard some interview excerpts where the interview called him out for trying to weasel out, but I don't know if they were in the minority or if the overall interviews were like that or lenient. So yeah, it happens but not enough (generally)
I saw this bald pasty fat brit in his late 50's scroll on his phone in the bar the other day, I don't know what the app was but it looked like Twitter or some other single column doom scroller, and I was sitting so I could just peruse his feed, and I did for anthropological reasons.
What I saw sank my spirits completely and I think that we are fucked. If his feed is what "normal" people see on their feeds, they are being so systematically programmed to be outraged at immigrants and to praise right wing extremism that I felt like I was caught in a 1984 mid-indoctrination session.
I knew it was like this, but it was a different thing seeing someone get brain washed in real time.
Encouraging thing to remember here is that hardly anyone uses Twitter, so the bloke you saw at the pub was probably an outlier.
The discouraging thing is that a lot of elite tastemakers and trendsetters do use Twitter, so they're the ones getting their brains cooked. Even Farage is an example of this: he didn't use to talk about mass deportations!
The problem is, that unfortunately you're wrong. I think it's like top 4 in terms of global traffic, above LinkedIn and TikTok. I wish you were right, and it did die off, but the stats don't back that up.
According to Ofcom, Twitter is sixth for social media and dropping.
Good to see it dropping, but 22m visitors is huge. Until it's below 5m, its a big problem.
80% bots
This may be true, but I believe it's still only a small proportion of the population (both can be true!) and a still smaller proportion that spend any length of time on there.
22m is roughly a third of the population. More if you discount kids. Brexit was won on 17m. It is a significant part of the population even if you don't want it to be.
Fair point on usage time, hopefully that will play an increasing part of it's diminishing impact, but I don't think we're there yet.
@frankPodmore @tomiant all the journalists are still on there which is why they're so obsessed with immigration too.
And as far as I know, Labour / UKGov still only have accounts on X/Facebook/Threads. So again, all their (already useless) PR department feedback is going to be far right bots.
I agree completely: the government still being on there is a huge problem. They need to abandon it ASAP.
At least he wasn't being anti-semitic in a hurtful way. I'm not sure how that's possible, but Farage has assured us of such!
And notice that Farage, rather than the person he hurt, is apparently the one who gets to decide what's hurtful.
He's trying to characterise it as "banter".
Farage being a racist is as surprising as Trump being an adjudicated rapist
Why does this not surprise me