Farage is getting righteously hammered for being in the pocket of various shady billionaires. He knows he’s very popular in his electorate and that his constituents don’t care. So he will be re-elected, but with (in effect) voter approval of his funding sources which will kill the story. The other parties won’t run against him because (a) they will lose and (b) not running against him gives them a (somewhat pathetic) basis for denying that voters gave their approval.
It’s a dastardly clever move by Farage, basically.
Hmmm! I’m not sure it works like that. Especially if Binface et al. do well. I have seen reporters asking locals for their opinions, and while some are vehemently supporting NF, some say they dislike him intensely.
The people who would normally vote for the other parties will either not bother to vote or vote for anyone who isn’t NF.
If I lived in Clacton, I would certainly be voting for the BIN.
And even if Farange wins, if the vote ends up being, say, 65 Farange, 35 Binface, that’s really not what you can call a mandate.
The thing is, there’s no harm in a research vessel being named Boaty McBoatface. It’s silly, of course, but we probably can use a little more silliness in our lives. The problem isn’t with Boaty McBoatface, nor, for that matter, with the good Count here. The problem is when people do actual harmful things to troll, and then go “Ha ha, you got triggered just because my side killed a bunch of people, you fragile snowflakes, that’s so funny”.
Farage isn’t concerned about substantive and intellectually convincing evidence. He and his supporters just need a figleaf that they can use to brush off criticism. 65/35 would easily be sufficient for that.
I think there’s some of the same thought process at work. “Nothing matters. Everything is stuck in a rut. Let’s do something different, throw a wrench into the works, blow things up, who cares.” It starts with dissatisfaction with the way things are, so anything different must be better. Boaty McBoatface is different. Donald Trump is different.
Ironically, that’s the same thought process that inspired people like Count Binface in the first place.
If he runs, and he gets elected, he takes the seat. There’s no law, nor should there be, that says “but only if the candidate isn’t a joke”. The only question is whether he continues to wear the costume, and I guess that’s his choice.
I guess there’s also the matter of his name, but plenty of politicians go by a name other than what they were given at birth, and appear on ballots that way. For an American example, no ballot has ever read “Raphael Cruz”.
I wasn’t aware of the MPSIMS thread (I start reading the Dope with the Pit and work up). In any case, I felt there was a significant "Stupid MF"element in slapping more than a dozen stories onto a 50 year old building without first making serious improvements to the existing structure. A video from inside the area of the collapse suggests improvements may have been underway, but at the very least were insufficient.
It really depends. The age of the building does not necessarily matter and adding floors to buildings is not uncommon.
In these sorts of projects, some engineer signed off, and they can be criminally charged if they were negligent in that design. But if the original construction does not match the final blueprints used to plan the new construction or if the building was not originally constructed as specified, that could be a serious problem that was not foreseeable when planning the extension.
The eventual investigation and conclusions will be interesting to see. It could easily be construction error or design error, either of the original structure or the new construction. Or poor maintenance over the last 50 years. Or all of the above, with everybody screwing up 50 years ago and today and along the way and just getting lucky with safety margins until now.
