Best Of

Response to comments, part 7: next steps (trans)

My original intention was to write a series thus

Series

• Part 0: your friend Susan
  
• Part 1: the war of ideas (tracking the rise and fall of specific terminology over time: see Robert Reilly for warfare examples)
  
• Part 2: a sequel to the History of Gambling article, placing trans in the context of similar concepts (gambling, male homosexuality, drugs) and how these are resolved over time,
  
• Part 3: archetypes, being a discussion of how archetypes (the wealthy sybarite, the overproviding doctor, the jumped-up pantry boy, etc) recur over the centuries.
  

I thought Part 1 was all sorted out in my head but this twitter - https://x.com/EsquireKin92774 - makes me think the Twitter consensus mangles American and British history into a telepod accident, so the research for that now exceeds a year, so don't expect these any time soon. I'll replace Part 1 (temporarily, honest) with my answers to @kinabalu and @RochdalePioneers' questions above.

If the Iranian allegations are right, and America is planning a broad ground offensive on Iran, allying with the Kurds, then fucking hell. God help us all. It has OBVIOUS TOTAL CATASTROPHE tattooed on its forehead

They might just be able to prevail, for a while, but as the Iranian mullahs fall - if they fall - they will take out every single oil refinery they can hit, within 1500 miles, and every tanker and every port and every airport, and the whole of Dubai and God help us

It will quite shortly lead to fairly apocalyptic scenes, worldwide

There will be fuel rationing you would think. The supply of diesel for tractors, trains and HGVs would need to be prioritised.

I did see an Instagram video where a farmer in the US had been told by his oil delivery guy that he was limited to 100 gallons for the next 30 days.

I've been saying for a while we're headed for a de facto lockdown

I'd settle for the permanent shutting of all nightclubs: after all, opinion polls show majority support for that.

Rule of six. NOW.

Let's do a reverse, the elderly can be locked at home and young people can live peacefully.

Lots of us are effectively locked up at home. Or locked up in a Home.

If the Iranian allegations are right, and America is planning a broad ground offensive on Iran, allying with the Kurds, then fucking hell. God help us all. It has OBVIOUS TOTAL CATASTROPHE tattooed on its forehead

They might just be able to prevail, for a while, but as the Iranian mullahs fall - if they fall - they will take out every single oil refinery they can hit, within 1500 miles, and every tanker and every port and every airport, and the whole of Dubai and God help us

It will quite shortly lead to fairly apocalyptic scenes, worldwide

There will be fuel rationing you would think. The supply of diesel for tractors, trains and HGVs would need to be prioritised.

I did see an Instagram video where a farmer in the US had been told by his oil delivery guy that he was limited to 100 gallons for the next 30 days.

I've been saying for a while we're headed for a de facto lockdown

I'd settle for the permanent shutting of all nightclubs: after all, opinion polls show majority support for that.

As I've said, the elderly were happy to destroy the futures and lives of young people for good. Should have let nature take its course.

If the Iranian allegations are right, and America is planning a broad ground offensive on Iran, allying with the Kurds, then fucking hell. God help us all. It has OBVIOUS TOTAL CATASTROPHE tattooed on its forehead

They might just be able to prevail, for a while, but as the Iranian mullahs fall - if they fall - they will take out every single oil refinery they can hit, within 1500 miles, and every tanker and every port and every airport, and the whole of Dubai and God help us

It will quite shortly lead to fairly apocalyptic scenes, worldwide

It is not our choice, but so long as the Mullahs fall, I'd take that.

Better than surrendering to them and letting them survive, with control of the Strait.

What? You'd take total global catastrophe over allowing the Mullahs to gloat about some short term tactical win over the Great Satan?

You're a fucking idiot. If Iran destroys all the oil infra in the ME - which it looks very capable of doing - then the planetary economy will spiral into meltdown. We could see revolutions and famines, and economic Depressioin - not just recession - in the West

And all this will happen with no guarantee of "victory" in Iran, and even if there is a "victory" it could easily turn into Afghanistan, and America has to retreat 20 years later, by which time China will be utterly dominant and the dollar will be dethroned, with all that means for the USA and the West

I would love to see the Iranian regime eliminated. Sadly, it does not look do-able without using

1. nukes

or

2. nukes

Ground invasion won't do it. Nukes will be Armageddon

Goodwin doubling down on his race baiting dishonesty.

In more than 2,000 schools in England today a majority of children no longer speak English as their main language. My critics might not think that tells us something important about what is happening to our country. But I do. And I will not change my view
https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/2037792677266162089

He has become the country's leading stand up philosophers.

https://youtu.be/tl4VD8uvgec?si=-zeqAGOvHiABpLhw

Incidentally I wonder whether he has checked to remove private international schools from that list?

https://www.bell-foundation.org.uk/app/uploads/2017/05/EALachievementStrand-1.pdf appears to be the primary source of this.

The study states that they included "maintained, mainstream schools"

Included, or only included?

From page 25

"We used the School Level Database (SLD) from the ASC January 2013 to examine the
variation in the proportion of EAL students at the school level. We selected all maintained,
mainstream schools in England. Additionally we eliminated 32 very small maintained schools
(10 or fewer students on roll). The resulting population contained 20,033 schools."

Ok, thanks. So they don't know the difference between maintained schools and academies. That's a rocky start in terms of their credibility.

From a quick googling around, there were a couple of thousand academies in 2013.

Edit : the report is from 2015 and doesn't seem to have an axe to grind over immigration. More about identifying areas where support is required.

Further Edit: they say - "Almost a quarter of all schools (22.1%) have less than 1% EAL, and over half (54%) have less than 5% of student with EAL. However at the other extreme 1,681 schools (8.4%) have a majority of students with EAL. This does not support headlines such as that in the Daily Telegraph (31/01/14) that "English is no longer the first language for the majority of pupils at one in nine schools"

Right, so it's not the survey, it's Goodwin misusing it by presenting out of date material. I withdraw my slur on their credibility.

I think it entirely possible that if a study found 1681 schools were found to have a majority on non-english speakers in 2013, that in 2026 the number is higher.

Given that we have had lots of immigration in the last 13 year, probably inevitable. If you import lots of furriners, then you'll get lots of people talkiin' the furrin.

So we just need to make sure we put enough resources into getting them up to speed in English. Which, according to the report has a direct, definite and completely unsurprising effect on educational attainment.

Edit: Goodwin is still Badfail, of course.

The report is interesting, and worth reading.

And, yes, it is entirely possible -probable even- that the number of schools where English is not the first language has risen since 2013. However, what is likely to have changed significantly is who the parents are. Back in 2013, a lot of those parents (and kids) will have been from the EU Eastern European 8. Because that was where the majority of immigration was from.

13 years later, we've left the EU, and net immigration from Eastern Europe is -IIRC- currently negative.

Instead we've had the Boriswave, bringing mostly people from outside Europe. And I suspect that those immigrants have settled in different parts of the country.

So there might well be an interesting 'switch' in where the majority non-English students are.

(As an aside: I went to a majority non-English speaking school in Bedford. All my friends from there who spoke Urdu/Gujerati/etc at home when kids, speak English at home now. So their kids won't be from English as a second language kids.)

My kids' primary school has gone from negligible EASL to c.50% EASL in the 11 years I have been a parent there.
I should stress that they are largely the sort of EASL kids who ate very much tryimg to learn English and to integrate - HK and Indian are the top two nationalities. I live in a comfortable middle class area and realistically *difficult* immigrants are priced out.

However I do know quite a bit about a school with a less favourable experience in a deprived area of South Yorkshire: 60% of the kids there are Roma from Slovakia, typically:
- from families where no women and under 10% of men are economically active
- living upwards of 12 people to an unfurnished two bedroom house
- from families where education is in no way value
- from two villages in Slovakia which are functionally at war with each other.
They are here living in these conditions because, incredibly, life in Slovakian Roma villages is much, much worse. Seriously. Google them. And because they face much less discrimination here than in Slovakia. But they have no sense of permanence or investment in the UK, and are constantly sparring with the authorities over crime and benefit fraud.

In these conditions education is challenging.

Of the 40% who are not Roma, the next most prominent ethnic group are Somali.

So, the experience of education at majority EASL schools is variable.

These people need to be expelled. They should never have been allowed in, we will bankrupt the country supporting them for the next ten generations

It's hard to escape that conclusion.

I listened to a Daily T podcast with Zia Yusuf, and the Telegraph team, today. Yusuf is a very impressive speaker, lucid, clever, forthright. Vastly better than almost anyone on the Tory and Labour front benches. He's a genuine talent, and Farage was wise to make peace with him

He was candid about this problem. There are people now in the country that we cannot afford to keep here, as they will cost hundreds of billions to maintain in their state of unemployment and welfare dependency, Unless technology saves us, we will have to choose between national bankruptcy or a much more hard nosed approach to citizenship and residency. There is no alternative

He was very good. Also, the balls on the guy to go to town on Boris whilst being interviewed by his sister!

Does his sister like him?

If the Iranian allegations are right, and America is planning a broad ground offensive on Iran, allying with the Kurds, then fucking hell. God help us all. It has OBVIOUS TOTAL CATASTROPHE tattooed on its forehead

They might just be able to prevail, for a while, but as the Iranian mullahs fall - if they fall - they will take out every single oil refinery they can hit, within 1500 miles, and every tanker and every port and every airport, and the whole of Dubai and God help us

It will quite shortly lead to fairly apocalyptic scenes, worldwide

There will be fuel rationing you would think. The supply of diesel for tractors, trains and HGVs would need to be prioritised.

I did see an Instagram video where a farmer in the US had been told by his oil delivery guy that he was limited to 100 gallons for the next 30 days.

The experience of Covid may have given some governments a false sense of confidence about how manageable this will be. You can't fix real shortages with financial engineering and paying people to stay at home.

If the Iranian allegations are right, and America is planning a broad ground offensive on Iran, allying with the Kurds, then fucking hell. God help us all. It has OBVIOUS TOTAL CATASTROPHE tattooed on its forehead

They might just be able to prevail, for a while, but as the Iranian mullahs fall - if they fall - they will take out every single oil refinery they can hit, within 1500 miles, and every tanker and every port and every airport, and the whole of Dubai and God help us

It will quite shortly lead to fairly apocalyptic scenes, worldwide

There will be fuel rationing you would think. The supply of diesel for tractors, trains and HGVs would need to be prioritised.

I did see an Instagram video where a farmer in the US had been told by his oil delivery guy that he was limited to 100 gallons for the next 30 days.

I've been saying for a while we're headed for a de facto lockdown

I'd settle for the permanent shutting of all nightclubs: after all, opinion polls show majority support for that.