Good for them, I’d personally rather forget about the US for at least a day.* So get in there and throw the rascals out!
Meanwhile, William Hogarth shows us what elections were like a few hundred years ago. Nothing has changed!
*I know my mother would rather ignore today — her house is next to an Indian reservation that sells fireworks, and the noise & chaos starts in June. She’s in the hospital now, I hope her room is soundproofed, and that she gets out soon, after the nightly explosions die down.
In rural southwest Georgia, my grandfather was convinced that a distant cousin won elections as sheriff with dead peoples votes. With mail in ballots, It actually can happen today. There are a lot of elderly people where I live. When we mail in our ballots before election day, there’s a good chance that one or two people will die before the votes are counted. I don’t think there’s any way they can disqualify those votes during the count.
If they were alive when they voted, why would you not count their vote?
chigau @ #2 — My point wasn’t whether the mail in ballots should or should not be counted, just that they. I’m fine with that. In the case of the sheriff elections in Georgia in the 40s and 50s, those were people that were long dead and had not actually voted.
That’s Ian Hislop in the video. William Hogarth is the guy who made the 18th century paintings he’s describing.
Whether mailed ballots count when the voter died before Election Day varies state by state. That is, 10 states specifically allow those ballots to be counted, 16 states prohibit counting those ballots, and the remaining 24 states have no specific laws on the topic.
https://ballotpedia.org/What_happens_if_someone_votes_by_mail-in_ballot_or_absentee_ballot_and_subsequently_passes_away_before_Election_Day%3F_(2020)
In regard to the current iteration of tories…
.
Before most of you were born, Britain had a prime minister named Thatcher.
A lot of satire was created during her tenure.
The late Rik Mayall played the corrupt and utterly vile conservative member of parliament Alan B’Stard in a lowbrow TV comedy.
Nobody expected the comedy to be prophetic.
Today, dumping leftover stores of WWI poison gas on a school playground (which happens in one episode) would just be another run-of-the-mill scandal, hardly worth a front page headline.
@6:
The other day the Graun did a small quiz asking whether various events happened in real life or in the show The Thick of It.
Xohjoh2n @ 7
Thanks.
@6 Before most of us were born? I have a strong suspicion that most of PZ’s audience are of an age where they have an unmediated appreciation of Alan Moore’s satire and strong memories of the original Spitting Image (we not only remember Thatcher, we remember the backlash to her [I suspect].)
Happy Earth Aphelion, everyone!
(It’s tomorrow at about 5AM UTC, I think that’s midnight tonight in US central daylight saving time.)
Oy mazeltov (or oi Molotov). We’ll get rid of the Tories.. and get another lot of Tories. Me, I voted Labour, without hope, just to get rid of the Fng Conservative Tories. Our electoral system doesn’t do subtleties. I’d have voted (less reluctantly) Green if there was a first choice/ second choice system.
jacksprocket, mate! You’re just nervous.
At least give them a chance.
[A channel I like]
@10. lumipuna : “Happy Earth Aphelion, everyone!”‘
Thanks for that! Cool bit of orbital astronomical triia there.
.***
As predicted the election is an anti-Tory landslide. Keir Starmer is now Britain’s new PM being sworn in by its hereditary monarch as I type this. Aussie ABC live coveage here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-05/uk-general-election-live-updates-rishi-sunak-keir-starmer/104055784
British BBC news coverage here : https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn09xn9je7lt
Plus :
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2v0e074jejo
As well as Owen Jones asking here – Is Liz Truss Going To LOSE Her Seat – I Went To Her Constituency To Find Out 211minutes long.
Turns out the answer is : Yes! Yes, she has.As wellas Jacob Rees-Mogg, too.
21 minutes long that is NOT 211.. Sigh.
[StevoR, why not just preview? Even on a phone, it’s very doable. Then fix, iterate]
For my GCE A-Level Eng Lit course the set book was a George Eliot novel called Felix Holt. It contains an extended account of what an election was like in the early part of the 19th century. It hadn’t changed much since Hogarth’s time and probably still hasn’t
The most satisfying result was Liz Truss lost her seat.
@17. John Morales : Becoz I suck at previewing almost as much as i suck at typing. Also clumsy fingers esp when tired* & that tendancy to see what I think I’ve written rather than what’s on the actual .. thing..
Then there’s the whole thinking of something else even better that I should’ve said about a nanosecond after I’ve clicked the “Post comment”” button. Sigh.
.* A state that takes up a disturbingly high % ãge of my life these days esp in the tired but somehow also cannot sleep state.
StevoR, fair enough. Still generalby readable, anyway.