221–230 of 290 posts
Johnson has lived a long life. Buses are common. He's painted buses for a long time, and he used a bus in his Brexit campaign.
Johnson says a lot of things; that's been his job for decades.
This conspiracy is the same as the now that says Facebook was recording everything you say and putting it in ads.
I'm skeptical. (a)When I search "Boris Johnson model," I still get the Jennifer Arcuri results and (b) even if working perfectly, this kind of SEO spamming would be pretty marginal. People are exposed to the "model" story via so many avenues: TV, radio, news sites, FB feed, other search terms... It just doesn't seem worth it. At best it takes like 10% of the heat off him for a day. Null hypothesis is that Boris just…
But using the word "model" to mean "a model of good behaviour" which is what it meant in that context is totally normal English. And Boris has been associated with buses for ages, in his time as London mayor a revamp of the buses became known as literally "Boris Buses". The idea he might have an eccentric hobby involving buses is entirely plausible. I don't think Boris says random baffling shit. I think the null hypo…
Second paragraph goes off the rails.
I made a throwaway suggestion he was doing this a few months back on reddit when he brought "bus" into the conversation [0] I wish I had started keeping track of things he says to see how his comments impact search results. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/c59q98/boris...
Just a reminder that Boris Johnson is not an elected leader.
You're simply "reminding" people of how a parliamentary democracy works. Plus it is inaccurate, he was elected, against Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, and other candidates in the Conservative Party Leadership race. Voted on by MPs who the public themselves feel were qualified to represent them in a representative democracy. I have no love for Boris Johnson (nor the Conservative Party itself). But this kind of "not a demo…
He's also trying to talk up whether he's really subject to the law or not, specifically in regard to the Benn Act against no-deal.
While fascinating, if this is a deliberate strategy, I wonder what its intended effect is supposed to be. Are people curious enough to google for stories about Johnson's alleged affair with the American woman going to be satisfied with the "model of restraint" quote? Are they going to forget what they have just been searching for, get immediately distracted and go read what this model of restraint business is all abo…
No, but it makes the alleged affair look a lot less important. If a news story is not even on the first page of google results, is it even that big of a deal ?
If you remove the vague extra word "model", the alleged affair is still on the first page pof results for "Boris johnson".
Also, if you want news, perhaps you could...read a news site, not just stop at whatever Google suggests as 10 headlines related to a three word query
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then I'd argue that we are the greater fools for letting this happen without any consequences. Letting what exactly happen? Him using a phrase that might or might not have been intended to make a previous story fall in search results? As if the original story about the model could not still be in the front pages of newspapers and websites, and so on? That's not even half an accusation... The public voted for someth…
"The public voted for something specific and 3 years down the road it has not happened or been scheduled properly. That should be the bigger democratic scandal" The public did not vote for something specific - they voted for something very vague and ill defined, the little information they were provided was incorrect (e.g. "an extra £350m a week for the NHS"), nobody had anything even approaching a plan, the whole th…
Well, you never have full information, even if you're the PM and passing a new law.
As for the "an extra £350m a week for the NHS", I'm pretty sure all the sides had their misinformation at the ready, there was so much scaremongering and hyperbole from the remain side as if the world was going to end if exit was voted.
The "dire consequences" of an exit were repeated constantly by established media, politicians, celebrities, EU figureheads, and the public still voted in favor of exit, period...
Given the available information, the public voted what it did. It didn't see the outcome of that vote yet though, and everybody has been stalling it.
This is actually fascinating (even if it may not be the behavior we expect from our elected leaders). He did the same thing in June where he gave a completely baffling interview [1] about how his hobby was painting models of buses out of used fruit crates. But people suspected [2] then that it might be a similar strategy, to monopolize the results for "boris johnson bus" searches. I wonder why nobody else is willing…
It's insane that people are obsesses with calling "conspiracy!" on Johnson for making an easily verifiable true statement about himself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they voted for something very vague and ill defined Utter tosh. The consequences of a Leave vote were hammered out by Remain-supporting politicians for weeks and weeks before the referendum. The government spent 9 million GBP to publish a leaflet in support of Remain which went to every household in the UK, before the referendum. Claiming that no one knew what a Leave vote meant, is gaslighting in the extreme.
So what you are telling us is that the leave side knew what they were voting for because they saw through the lies from the leave side which said that everything the remain side was saying was "project fear". Do you honestly think you can claim that is democracy working as intended?
1) One side of a political decision is considered "lies".
2) The people vote, but don't get what they voted for.
3) Only one side's arguments count as "min-information".
4) The people who voted a certain way are sneered at.
5) The situation is presented as remaining is a There Is No Alternative situation.
Apparently the modern elites, and the 10%-20% richer substrates at the population are allergic to democracy and those "deplorable" 80% of their fellow citizens, and don't want anything to disrupt business as usual. And if things go well for the 10%-20%, obviously the rest have absolutely no basis to complain, they are just ignorant/vote against their interests (because the 10-20% know better than them)/etc...
When a "democracy" gets in that stage, and the higher ups loose all touch, you get people like Trump and Johnson. But that's only because you deserve them...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is in this case, Boris has been caught red-handed doing very similar sorts of "cunning disguised as idiocy" ploys before. For example, feigning forgetting speeches. It seems plausible that it was intentional. Both sides of the political aisle are certainly highly susceptible to conspiracy theories about the opposition, but this case seems pretty interesting. It may be a wolf-crying situation, too: since Bor…
> The thing is in this case, Boris has been caught red-handed doing very similar sorts of "cunning disguised as idiocy" ploys before. For example, feigning forgetting speeches. Seems hard to blame him for this. Compare https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnaccustomedAsIA... .
My respect level for Boris actually went up a few notches after reading about this :)
Indeed. The "lovable bumbling fool" image he puts across is a very conscious choice on his part. Despite what you think about his politics (and I'm personally not a fan) you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think.