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"Harvey previously stood as a similar character, Lord Buckethead, but was forced to create a new character due to a dispute with the filmmaker Todd Durham, who

"Harvey previously stood as a similar character, Lord Buckethead, but was forced to create a new character due to a dispute with the filmmaker Todd Durham, who owns the Buckethead character" [1]. (The videos on this website are worth the watch. Hilarious, of course. But also...Binface conjugates Latin to Sky News, and not just as a bit. I don't know how I feel about the British comedy candidate outclassing half of the American elected leadership–and a good fraction of its industrial leadership–on IQ.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Binface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Binface

BLKNSLVR 4mo ago
Excerpt from linked page: > I came to Earth in 2017 and stood against Prime Minister Theresa May (as ‘Lord Buckethead’). Then in 2018, after an unfortunate battle on the planet Copyright, I rewspawned in my true form as Count Binface.
unfitted2545 4mo ago
I think it's so interesting he was a scriptwriter for "The Thick of It", a satirical comedy about British politics
- flopsamjetsam 4mo ago
  That is excellent, and explains much!
- dofm 4mo ago
  FWIW I don’t at all think it’s wrong for people to pick up on whether this would make him a good representative of Clacton were he to win (which isn’t going to happen and he surely thinks it is not). Part of Clacton is relatively well off; part of the wider constituency (Jaywick) is genuinely deprived on a national scale, and they really do need an MP that bothers to understand them and that they can relate to. Farage is absolutely manipulating and exploiting them for his own benefit; he uses their concerns to give himself a way to play on the national stage but he is a pretty terrible MP (though he’s not the only politician to forget they have a local constituency). But if Binface could win, I don’t think it’s at all wrong to question whether the man under the bin is going to be good for them. His job, I think, is to expose Farage’s lies and insecurities.
  - glaucon 4mo ago
    |which isn’t going to happen I do wonder if Farage will decide to drop out before the vote. Farage, more than most people, seems to strongly dislike ridicule and to lose a good deal of his vote to a comedy candidate would significantly damage his long term political prospects. If the polls look really bad for him it might be better to cut and run. If that happened it would be difficult for the Count as I assume he would win the seat, but having to be a reasonably behaved MP is an onerous task and one that he might prefer not to take on.
    - glaucon 4mo ago
      I've just looked up the regulations. If he plans to withdraw he only has until 4pm Monday 20th July. After that he's on the ballot regardless.
dofm 4mo ago
> I don't know how I feel about the British comedy candidate outclassing half of the American elected leadership–and a good fraction of its industrial leadership–on IQ.) Your entire political system has flirted with anti-intellectualism for over a century; it used to pretend to be uneducated simpletons to appeal to the electorate (witness, e.g. the folksy “ahhm just a simple mayynn” gurning schtick of Senator John Kennedy, who literally fakes his accent and demeanour despite having a sharp legal mind and Oxford degree, and who could likely conjugate latin; he is following a path trodden by Bill Clinton) and now it has refined the concept such that politicians can actually be simpletons for real: Tommy Tuberville isn’t faking being thick and neither is Markwayne Mullin. I don’t know about conjugating latin specifically (I used to be able to do this but the memory has faded) but the standard of literacy in the UK was excellent. We do now have a fairly similar literacy skills profile in the young as the USA and Canada, but unlike in the USA, older adults outperform them, partly because more of us were exposed to the (now essentially eliminated) selective education (grammar school) system that favoured advanced literacy. We are thus as I understand it unique in having (ETA: or having had) declining literacy; it is declining to the US/Canada level rather than below it but it is rather sad. Binface went to good schools and has an Oxford classics degree, I think. Much of our political class did. More recently they will have done the PPE degree (which is more or less training to be a politician). He is in that sense as “establishment” as Farage, but more importantly he is a product of that fading system. So it is this you are observing; writers, politicians, actors often come from that declining tradition. Side note: even many politicians from a non-traditional background have gone through this path at some level; the famously working-class deputy prime minister John Prescott studied at Ruskin College, which was a college associated with the trade union movement based in and sort of orbiting Oxford University that specialised in providing PPE-type education to aspiring politicians from working class backgrounds (originally founded, incidentally, by two Americans)
- madaxe_again 4mo ago
  Isn’t it the democratic ideal though? Of the people, for the people. If a representative democracy is to truly be representative then the elected representatives should be… representative? Tuberville and Mullin I wouldn’t say were thick so much as they’re pretty average.
zeumo 4mo ago
Why would Todd Durham have issues with a Lord Buckethead doing his thing in another country and continent, but apparently not with a guitar player named Buckethead in the United States?
- lmm 4mo ago
  Presumably because he thinks (rightly or wrongly) that the one is damaging his reputation while the other is not.
- dofm 4mo ago
  Lord Buckethead (the at-that-point temporary novelty candidate) was much closer to (and inspired by) Durham’s character, to be fair. Ultimately it is all for the good; clearly a -face name is much more quintessentially British.
- Barbing 4mo ago
  Ouch, Durham’s Buckethead didn’t even make it above the collapsed See Also on Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckethead_(disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckethead_(disambiguation) Also in the US, Apple’s search assumes we want the guitarist.
- gpderetta 4mo ago
  that's all right, Lord Buckethead has now officially endorsed Count Binface for the by-election: https://xcancel.com/DavidHughesTwit/status/2075926465846140991 https://xcancel.com/DavidHughesTwit/status/20759264658461409...
gadders 4mo ago
>>But also...Binface conjugates Latin to Sky News He studied Classics at Oxford. He'd be in trouble if he couldn't.
pjc50 4mo ago
Note that the ability to conjugate Latin does not correlate with good character, despite what the English public school system would have you think. Most famous example of that is of course Enoch Powell. It is however true that you're only allowed to say true, intelligent things in British politics if you're a joke candidate. Jester's privilege. Binface has driven the rightwing press mad because he's the last threat to their darling candidate, so they're now trying to smear him as if he were a serious candidate. Which he is not. The end result is very funny.
- nephihaha 4mo ago
  Enoch Powell was gifted linguistically, despite his notoriety elsewhere (and his Brummie accent?). I heard he was fluent in Urdu of all things, and was even seen speaking to Pakistanis in it when he was out campaigning. He could speak Welsh too. I was reading some academic paper on Greek literature once, I forget which, only to notice that it was written by one J. Enoch Powell.

BLKNSLVR 4mo ago

Excerpt from linked page: > I came to Earth in 2017 and stood against Prime Minister Theresa May (as ‘Lord Buckethead’). Then in 2018, after an unfortunate battle on the planet Copyright, I rewspawned in my true form as Count Binface.

unfitted2545 4mo ago

I think it's so interesting he was a scriptwriter for "The Thick of It", a satirical comedy about British politics

flopsamjetsam 4mo ago
That is excellent, and explains much!
dofm 4mo ago
FWIW I don’t at all think it’s wrong for people to pick up on whether this would make him a good representative of Clacton were he to win (which isn’t going to happen and he surely thinks it is not). Part of Clacton is relatively well off; part of the wider constituency (Jaywick) is genuinely deprived on a national scale, and they really do need an MP that bothers to understand them and that they can relate to. Farage is absolutely manipulating and exploiting them for his own benefit; he uses their concerns to give himself a way to play on the national stage but he is a pretty terrible MP (though he’s not the only politician to forget they have a local constituency). But if Binface could win, I don’t think it’s at all wrong to question whether the man under the bin is going to be good for them. His job, I think, is to expose Farage’s lies and insecurities.
- glaucon 4mo ago
  |which isn’t going to happen I do wonder if Farage will decide to drop out before the vote. Farage, more than most people, seems to strongly dislike ridicule and to lose a good deal of his vote to a comedy candidate would significantly damage his long term political prospects. If the polls look really bad for him it might be better to cut and run. If that happened it would be difficult for the Count as I assume he would win the seat, but having to be a reasonably behaved MP is an onerous task and one that he might prefer not to take on.
  - glaucon 4mo ago
    I've just looked up the regulations. If he plans to withdraw he only has until 4pm Monday 20th July. After that he's on the ballot regardless.

dofm 4mo ago

> I don't know how I feel about the British comedy candidate outclassing half of the American elected leadership–and a good fraction of its industrial leadership–on IQ.) Your entire political system has flirted with anti-intellectualism for over a century; it used to pretend to be uneducated simpletons to appeal to the electorate (witness, e.g. the folksy “ahhm just a simple mayynn” gurning schtick of Senator John Kennedy, who literally fakes his accent and demeanour despite having a sharp legal mind and Oxford degree, and who could likely conjugate latin; he is following a path trodden by Bill Clinton) and now it has refined the concept such that politicians can actually be simpletons for real: Tommy Tuberville isn’t faking being thick and neither is Markwayne Mullin. I don’t know about conjugating latin specifically (I used to be able to do this but the memory has faded) but the standard of literacy in the UK was excellent. We do now have a fairly similar literacy skills profile in the young as the USA and Canada, but unlike in the USA, older adults outperform them, partly because more of us were exposed to the (now essentially eliminated) selective education (grammar school) system that favoured advanced literacy. We are thus as I understand it unique in having (ETA: or having had) declining literacy; it is declining to the US/Canada level rather than below it but it is rather sad. Binface went to good schools and has an Oxford classics degree, I think. Much of our political class did. More recently they will have done the PPE degree (which is more or less training to be a politician). He is in that sense as “establishment” as Farage, but more importantly he is a product of that fading system. So it is this you are observing; writers, politicians, actors often come from that declining tradition. Side note: even many politicians from a non-traditional background have gone through this path at some level; the famously working-class deputy prime minister John Prescott studied at Ruskin College, which was a college associated with the trade union movement based in and sort of orbiting Oxford University that specialised in providing PPE-type education to aspiring politicians from working class backgrounds (originally founded, incidentally, by two Americans)

madaxe_again 4mo ago
Isn’t it the democratic ideal though? Of the people, for the people. If a representative democracy is to truly be representative then the elected representatives should be… representative? Tuberville and Mullin I wouldn’t say were thick so much as they’re pretty average.

zeumo 4mo ago

Why would Todd Durham have issues with a Lord Buckethead doing his thing in another country and continent, but apparently not with a guitar player named Buckethead in the United States?

lmm 4mo ago
Presumably because he thinks (rightly or wrongly) that the one is damaging his reputation while the other is not.
dofm 4mo ago
Lord Buckethead (the at-that-point temporary novelty candidate) was much closer to (and inspired by) Durham’s character, to be fair. Ultimately it is all for the good; clearly a -face name is much more quintessentially British.
Barbing 4mo ago
Ouch, Durham’s Buckethead didn’t even make it above the collapsed See Also on Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckethead_(disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckethead_(disambiguation) Also in the US, Apple’s search assumes we want the guitarist.
gpderetta 4mo ago
that's all right, Lord Buckethead has now officially endorsed Count Binface for the by-election: https://xcancel.com/DavidHughesTwit/status/2075926465846140991 https://xcancel.com/DavidHughesTwit/status/20759264658461409...

gadders 4mo ago

>>But also...Binface conjugates Latin to Sky News He studied Classics at Oxford. He'd be in trouble if he couldn't.

pjc50 4mo ago

Note that the ability to conjugate Latin does not correlate with good character, despite what the English public school system would have you think. Most famous example of that is of course Enoch Powell. It is however true that you're only allowed to say true, intelligent things in British politics if you're a joke candidate. Jester's privilege. Binface has driven the rightwing press mad because he's the last threat to their darling candidate, so they're now trying to smear him as if he were a serious candidate. Which he is not. The end result is very funny.

nephihaha 4mo ago
Enoch Powell was gifted linguistically, despite his notoriety elsewhere (and his Brummie accent?). I heard he was fluent in Urdu of all things, and was even seen speaking to Pakistanis in it when he was out campaigning. He could speak Welsh too. I was reading some academic paper on Greek literature once, I forget which, only to notice that it was written by one J. Enoch Powell.