Where else could he be? The West wouldn’t let him cross, while any ally of Russia would cooperate with Putin. Not that it even has to be an ally after all the assassinations in Europe.
South American countries are on good terms with Putin, being some of the few that let any Russian enter visa-free. Taking him out would be almost as easy in those countries.
South America is a big place with lots of nooks and crannies and different cultures to hide in and blend with.
I’m sure someone as wealthy as Prigo could’ve lived a very modest lifestyle without ever having to work again and staying incognito for the rest of his days in South America. If South America is really too dangerous (it isn’t) then he also has Asia. There are so many options for rich people it’s insane.
tiny dancer playing softly in the background . . .
He just died? Wow. I didn’t know that. You are telling me now for the first time. He led an amazing life. What else can you say. Whether you agreed or not, he was an amazing man who led an amazing life. I am actually sad to hear that. I am sad to hear that.
I can’t get over how insane it is that the sitting party gets to look at their polling numbers and decide if it’s a good time to have an election or not. I get why they are so insistent on keeping the monarchy because the rest of the system is kept together by tape and random bits of string
It's a corrupt convention but it wasn't always the case. An important reform by the 2010-15 coalition government was the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which took this incredibly important decision out of the prime minister's partisan hands and have elections on a predictable 5 year cycle (barring the government falling or a supermajority for early elections).
After Boris Johnson won the 2019 election though, he set about dismantling checks and balances such as this. He also changed the electoral system for mayoral elections to First Past the Post (with no consultation or referendum - which the Tories have always insisted was needed to change the electoral system away from FPTP...) because FPTP tends to favour Tories.
Wait? Is the current political leader allowed to just change how votes are counted for the next election?! Is this why the Wikipedia article for how election in England work is just incomprehensible garbage?
Everything is eventually decided by the majority of votes in the house of commons. Even if you put a law in saying that the pm can’t do this without a 80% vote, that law itself could be repealed with a 50% vote.
Theoretically it would only require a 50% vote to remove elections or something crazy. (Although in practice that might not get past the king who technically has the final say)
There is no formal constitution that has more protection like in some countries.
Can’t they create a law which says that the PM cannot do something without 80% of the votes and that the law itself requires the same amount of votes to be modified or superseded in any way?
It’s been a while since my politics A level, so I may get some of the terms wrong but hopefully the facts right.
As the UK doesn’t have a formal constitution, it relies on convention and that parliament is effectively all powerful (under the crown) in that if parliament (encompassing both houses in this context) votes for something it can do it. (As it represents the will of the people and has the authority of the crown (less relevant in the modern day))
Parliament can’t therefore lock a decision in such a way that a future parliament can’t change because the future parliament is still all powerful.
In practice though this isn’t entirely the case. You can make a law like you said, and while a future parliament can break it, it would (probably) look bad on them. But what does that do to stop politicians?
A further note on the previous chain - we go have two houses of parliament; the house of commons is the main one with the green benches that most will recognise. It has our elected representatives (MPs) in and (normally) where the PM is selected from.
The house of lords (red benches, appointed members for life) is generally considered the check chamber. It used to be able to block laws entirely, but I believe lost that power semi recently and it can now be overruled by the commons after 2/3 rejections.
A similar problem occurs when accessing legislative or parliamentary sovereignty, which holds a specific legal institution to be omnipotent in legal power, and in particular such an institution’s ability to regulate itself.
And tbh, a parliament which cannot regulate itself is a fairly powerless parliament.
All of our constitutional law takes the form of Acts of Parliament that can be amended or repealed with a 50%+1 vote in Parliament - unlike most countries where the constitution sits above the parliament and changing it requires a supermajority and/or a referendum. Boris had a majority so he could change the constitution. It's a totally messed up system.
One reason British liberals as so passionate about internationalism and the European Union is that international treaties and EU law are some of the few mechanisms we have had for constraining executive overreach, since they sit outside and above Parliament's remit. For example, even if Parliament were to repeal the Human Rights Act, Britain remains a party to the European Convention on Human Rights (which is why some Tories now talk about withdrawing from this too). Without international safeguards external to the UK, in theory all that stands between Britain and despotism is a simple majority vote in Parliament.
Somewhat true, but there’s lots of parliamentary systems that were never under British rule. Nobody has followed the US’s weird system. Not even ones where the US had a direct hand in setting up the democratic government, like Iraq.
The weird system of… predictable elections? Because that’s what we’re talking about. You can have predictable elections with a parliamentary system.
And any government is only as good as the people in it, as we can see from Brexit. They threw away their future because of a non-binding vote, which was very close and done only once.
Weird in having a whole bunch of compromises between big and small states, and separating the power of the executive and legislature. Countries looked at both of those and picked the one that’s more chaotic, but less clumsy.
There’s no reason why the current government should be able to pick the date of the election. What’s the reason behind that besides “The Prime Minister wants it that way”?
I dunno, with the American system you have like 2 year long campaigning cycle for president. There’s almost no break and it’s exhausting. In Canada when an election is called the campaign is only about 6 weeks give or take a week.
Also, if the government becomes dysfunctional, it can be dissolved and a new government elected. The US system doesn’t allow for that flexibility.
If your campaign is only 6 weeks, you have to be campaigning all the time too. Do you think people just say “oh there’s an election in 6 weeks? Maybe I’ll run for office!”? They have to have everything ready to go immediately. All politicians are campaigning all the time.
It’s really different though. The politicians are expected to be working at the national capitol during normal sessions. While they are ‘campaigning’ in that they’ll be trying to score sound bites and such for the media, they’re not allowed to spend money on regular campaigning until the election season starts.
How many rallies for president haver been held already with the election still 166 days away? How much money spent? It’s utterly exhausting.
Parliament can always dissolve itself and call an election, and it’s an important mechanism for getting rid of the government.
The problem is that the prime minister also has a majority in parliament, and that means he can make parliament dissolve itself when he likes.
This was actually a problem for Johnson. Initially, he didn’t have enough of a majority and it wasn’t clear he could call an election without Corbyn’s support.
Ahead of today’s court session, a former federal prosecutor told BBC News that Donald Trump’s team was attacking the judge and the trial because “they know they’ve already lost”.
Renato Mariotti says he expected Trump to try to “deflect responsibility” and blame accountants or other employees for the false valuations of properties.
He says Trump is going to have to “walk a tightrope” giving evidence today, but adds he believes the former president’s legal team have internally “told him they’re going to lose this case”.
“They’re attacking the judge, not to try to convince him, but because they already know they’ve lost and are trying to spin, or add some colour, to a very bad result.” from Renato Mariotti, former federal prosecutor
It’s already been a finding of fact that Trump is guilty of fraud. This isn’t even up for debate and hasn’t been for some time. The only thing to decide is the amount of financial liability Trump is going to suffer for the fraud he committed.
So Trump would’ve known for weeks that he’s lost unless his plan is to redefine win as not lose as much as he could’ve.
In this case, it decided that being helpful to the company was more important than its honesty.
It did no such thing. It doesn’t know what those things are. “LLM AI” is not a conscious thinking being and treating it like it is will end badly. Giving an LLM any responsibility to act on your behalf automatically is a crazy stupid idea at this point in time. There needs to be a lot more testing and learning about how to properly train models for more reliable outcomes.
It’s almost impressive how quickly humans seem to accept something as “human” just because it can form coherent sentences.
I don’t know why ppl cannot figure this out. What we are calling “AI” is just a machine putting words together based on what it has “seen” in its training data. It has no intelligence and has no intent. It just groups words together.
It’s like going into a library and asking the librarian to be a doctor. They can tell you what the books in the library say about the subject (and might even make up some things based on what they saw in a few episodes of House), but they cannot actual do the work of a doctor.
Forming coherent sentences puts it above large sections of the population. Eventually they’re going to have to dumb down the speech output, ala Dubya during his presidency. Add to that all the conditioning to trust authoritative sources and this is going to turn into a real problem sooner rather than later. I think one of the first things to come out that will really cause damage is replacing teachers with ai. If all those teachers out there would quit asking to make more money than a 12 year old in a meat packing plant, maybe this wouldn’t happen, but I digress… (Kudos to all the teachers out there, obviously.)
The messages continued as late as Tuesday, when he posted: “Perhaps Utah will become famous this week as the place a sniper took out Biden the Marxist.”
bawllin-sad The world is lesser now that we have lost this great mind
bbc.co.uk
Top