@First-light Whats even better is, Labour have already made their grave, they just haven’t moved in yet.

They bled votes to green, meaning to regain their vote they would have to lean left - and polling suggests less than 1% of reform voters would now vote labour so appealing right is futile.

They’ve lost, and continue to lose the support that props up the centre.

That being said, we’re looking at years of hung parliaments and shoddy coalitions that won’t hold water. If FPTP continues, there will be a desert of functional governance coming to the U.K. at the next GE.

To compound this even further, Plaid Cymru swept up, and the SNP fortified I believe too, as well as Sinn Fein in NI. With weaker and weaker governments or none at all in Westminster, the shouting for independence will only become more and more justified.

Well, I’m no Nostradamus but that appears to be the beginning of the UK balkanisation.

…and I didn’t even mention the uplift in Muslim independents voted in this round.

@Stigma This is an interesting question. Its worth saying that human intelligence may have peaked towards the end of the last ice age. Farming does not require as much mental power as hunting scarce game. Even in fairly recent times one wonders if we are not as smart as they were a few hundred years ago. Read Hamlet and then ask yourself are you smart enough to really get it all as a piece of evening entertainment (which is all a play is) not as a work of literature with commentary notes?

Certainly brain sizes have been shrinking since the end of the last ice age. Life is so easy for people in cities these days that compliance and agreeability seem to be highly selected for traits.

Of course that may yet all change when the people get thinned and renewed in due course. Who can really say what sort of minds will work best with AI? AI has yet to develop enough to know how auto generative it can be. Nerds who can code may be pointless in future.

Intelligence is a combination of many genetic traits and life experience. It is very important for selection but at the moment we are living in strange times.

Smart people are machiavellian in smart ways and dumb people in dumb ways. Fooling an increasingly vigilant system that uses past data for reference points may change who gets away with it?

@Bozza This all looks positive. Just got to actually convert it to parliament.

The left still call reform "right wing" or even "far right" because they want to use magic cancelling words and make the bad blasphemers go away. This works great on a green voter who hates "far right fascist pigs" but he/ she /it/ they were never going to vote reform anyway but really the old left/ right dichotomy doesn't apply to reform.

Reform are taking votes from rural conservatives but they are also taking old labour votes in grim northern cities -people labour considered hereditary voters who "had" to vote labour while labour worried about everyone else who was gay or disabled, anxious, female or foreign -in fact anyone who didn't labour much and wanted free shit.

Thigs are shifting one feels. Its about bloody time too!

@adam-l

therefore it relies on deep, ancestral faculties.

To add technical detail as a starting point for a deeper dive. Primate level cognition and metacognition, on the level that humans consider setting us apart from "lower animals ", is based in the Neocortex, which evolved long after the Old Mammalian and Reptilian brains, both of which still make up the bulk of human braincase content. Dark Triad individuals can perform dumb AF at tasks and skills that run on neocortex circuitry, yet some can greatly outperform their "intellectual " peers at crafty self serving and group dynamic manipulation. It makes me think of the terabytes of Naughty Dog shorts showing how creative canines can be at getting something placed out of their reach, often gaming humans and other dogs with rather detailed multi step schemes requiring forethought and planning. The underlying brain circuitry driving such behaviors evolved EONS before we clever monkies built our neocortex atop it.

It can require a LOT of neocortex processing time, for a trusting intellectual type. To detect when a seemingly dumb person is successfully manipulating them by outperforming at using these older brain circuits.

Lol, autocorrect kept trying to change Neocortex to Neocon. NOOOOOOO!