@MoonRabbit Moonrabbit my nags for today , did not see anything great so have done a yankee and a single on Mullins horse. All short priced but will see how it goes. Gauloise 12:40 Sandown, have this as a single as well Flemenstide 12:55 Wincanton, will do single if price decent Walk In The Storm 12:13 Newcastle Crystal Glory 14:33 Newcastle
Interesting you said that there Malc, I took about 2 hours longer than usual as well. I’m not so ‘cocky and vicious’ about today either. 🤔
*Betting Post *Horse Racing 🐎 Paging as usual @Malc@Stodge, who are not afraid at times to post tips, and anyone who wants to share love of the sport today like Mr Decrepiter, Mt Kinabalu etc
I appreciate not every gambler loves sharing and sharing publicly. I suspect though some reading PB may be betting on horse racing regular particularly the Saturday coverage, I will be placing bets today and means a degree of “due diligence” on my choices - I’m a open and honest girl I don’t mind sharing what led to my decision 🙂
last couple of weeks proved difficult when weather makes it slippy - even in hurdles they can leap last fence in lead and get the landing wrong, so just 2/4 not 3/4 last time but including a 28-1 long shot. I might well have better strike rate recently with my Long Shots than naps! 🤭
MoonRabbits tips this week. (NO NAPS)
Wincanton 13:30 - Mi Laddo Excellent form and has won over 2m, I think not as many questions of trip and handicap as rivals.
Sandown 13:50 - Paddy’s Poem (LONG SHOT) 11 yr old, heavily handicapped, hasn’t raced yet this year with better days over much longer trip. But surely too good to be this far out in the betting amongst this crowd? Say hello to this weeks long shot.
Wincanton 14:40 - Earth Business Form, going, and fairly handicapped.
Sandown 15:00 - Rolling Dylan this old horse pulled wagons on the Oregon trail in youth, but has shown it’s veteran 3m staying power in two recent second placing.
Away from the irrelevancies of feline defecation and what constitutes "proper London" to the serious subject of this afternoon's equine activities.
Three jump cards at Sandown, Wincanton and Newcastle.
The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. It's not the worst punting card I've ever seen. A couple of "dead 8" handicaps so let's hope for no late withdrawals. In the 1.15 the money has been for FARINET but there's some interesting each way options - I quite like GOA LIL at 6s while in the last I like VOLKOVKA at 15/2.
Wincanton stages an average card and searching for an option I've landed on MIDNIGHT CALLISTO in the 1.30 - available at 13/2.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
I don't understand what you mean by "proper London". Could you explain?
I am mostly just taking the piss and pushing back against the traditional distain with which South London is viewed. But I do think that South of the river some more of what makes London a great place to live has been retained. Such as proper boozers. Housing that is almost affordable. Friendly neighbours. Cheap, unpretentious eateries with a dazzling variety of food. Some parts of North London feel pretty sanitised for the global market these days, not quite as bad as central Paris but getting there.
Don't know how anybody can argue that Southwark isn't "proper London". Southwark literally exists as evidence that a lot of "proper" London is a mirage.
This is basically the Manhattan vs Brooklyn argument London edition.
As a contented Sarf Londoner I am nevertheless very happy spending time in North, East and West London too.
Around here though there is a big divide between my (and OLB’s) SE London and the alternative universe the other side of Blackheath as recently illustrated in the Bexley & Sidcup by-election.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
Yes, 90% of kids in reported difficulty in communicating with teachers in the classroom with masks on (it's in that study). That's a proven detriment.
Forgive my laziness, does the report go into any depth as to what "difficulty" means? It sounds like it could cover a range of severities from total breakdown of communication through to having to repeat something every now and then.
It says that in a lot of cases it leads to the removal of masks by both the teachers and the kids to be able to properly communicate so probably a few levels above merely irritating.
Ah ha, interesting. I imagine that also affects the efficacy data!
I have to say, @alex_ 's point about language classes hit home to me. That must be significantly harder compared to maskless classes.
Not too sure about that. If every line of speech in every language is reduced to "fwa fwa fwa fwa fwa" behind a stupid effing gag necessary item of respiratory PPE, then the children can hardly fail to get their answers right, can they?
You exaggerate. In situations where's it's harder to distinguish sounds, the brain can do a lot to correct for it. If a child answers a question about the Seven Years' War naming "Napoweon" as a key participant, you can hear enough to know they've got it wrong. But if you're trying to teach a child how to pronounce "monsieur" well, the muffled sound is much more of a problem, isn't it?
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
I don't understand what you mean by "proper London". Could you explain?
I am mostly just taking the piss and pushing back against the traditional distain with which South London is viewed. But I do think that South of the river some more of what makes London a great place to live has been retained. Such as proper boozers. Housing that is almost affordable. Friendly neighbours. Cheap, unpretentious eateries with a dazzling variety of food. Some parts of North London feel pretty sanitised for the global market these days, not quite as bad as central Paris but getting there.
Don't know how anybody can argue that Southwark isn't "proper London". Southwark literally exists as evidence that a lot of "proper" London is a mirage.
This is basically the Manhattan vs Brooklyn argument London edition.
As a contented Sarf Londoner I am nevertheless very happy spending time in North, East and West London too.
Around here though there is a big divide between my (and OLB’s) SE London and the alternative universe the other side of Blackheath as recently illustrated in the Bexley & Sidcup by-election.
Essentially the Manhattan v Brooklyn argument applied to London would be that only Zone 1 is proper London
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
Yes, 90% of kids in reported difficulty in communicating with teachers in the classroom with masks on (it's in that study). That's a proven detriment.
Forgive my laziness, does the report go into any depth as to what "difficulty" means? It sounds like it could cover a range of severities from total breakdown of communication through to having to repeat something every now and then.
It says that in a lot of cases it leads to the removal of masks by both the teachers and the kids to be able to properly communicate so probably a few levels above merely irritating.
Ah ha, interesting. I imagine that also affects the efficacy data!
I have to say, @alex_ 's point about language classes hit home to me. That must be significantly harder compared to maskless classes.
Not too sure about that. If every line of speech in every language is reduced to "fwa fwa fwa fwa fwa" behind a stupid effing gag necessary item of respiratory PPE, then the children can hardly fail to get their answers right, can they?
You exaggerate. In situations where's it's harder to distinguish sounds, the brain can do a lot to correct for it. If a child answers a question about the Seven Years' War naming "Napoweon" as a key participant, you can hear enough to know they've got it wrong. But if you're trying to teach a child how to pronounce "monsieur" well, the muffled sound is much more of a problem, isn't it?
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
It does however highlight the fact that too many policy makers have become obsessed with the pandemic while failing to think about the wider issues, and at the same time showing neither imagination nor understanding of the said issues.
When this was first brought back by the DfE last week, some random wonk from Demos came on saying, 'well, the benefits aren't clear cut but if they cut transmission even by an infinitesimal amount that will be worth it.'
No thought had been given to the damage it does in other ways. The disruption to communication. The discomfort. The lack of decent masks. The fact I now have to waste large amounts of time telling children to pull their masks up rather than teach them.
Here we see again the same problem. A series of inconclusive studies, using a flawed methodology, being used to justify face coverings in schools. The real reason that they are being introduced is to hide the total, utter, abject failure of the DfE and other branches of the government to actually get to grips with what's needed. Better ventilation and heating. An effort to reduce class sizes by hiring extra teachers at an earlier stage, rather than in a panic at the last minute and completely failing. Filters. Vaccinations at an earlier stage - while I had some sympathy with it being marginal at the time, it was still the wrong call. That has left masks as pretty much the only thing they can do, and because they've now admitted that they are probably no use, even that isn't going to help as we already have huge numbers ignoring them.
When you have only a hammer, because you were too fucking stupid to buy a toolkit when you had the opportunity, every problem looks like a nail.
But such people shouldn't be making policy decisions. Or even commenting on them. The damage they do through ignorance and incompetence is too great.
You’re lashing out at the person who did what looks like a decent analysis with limited data and reached a sensible conclusion
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
Yes, 90% of kids in reported difficulty in communicating with teachers in the classroom with masks on (it's in that study). That's a proven detriment.
Forgive my laziness, does the report go into any depth as to what "difficulty" means? It sounds like it could cover a range of severities from total breakdown of communication through to having to repeat something every now and then.
It says that in a lot of cases it leads to the removal of masks by both the teachers and the kids to be able to properly communicate so probably a few levels above merely irritating.
Ah ha, interesting. I imagine that also affects the efficacy data!
I have to say, @alex_ 's point about language classes hit home to me. That must be significantly harder compared to maskless classes.
Not too sure about that. If every line of speech in every language is reduced to "fwa fwa fwa fwa fwa" behind a stupid effing gag necessary item of respiratory PPE, then the children can hardly fail to get their answers right, can they?
You exaggerate. In situations where's it's harder to distinguish sounds, the brain can do a lot to correct for it. If a child answers a question about the Seven Years' War naming "Napoweon" as a key participant, you can hear enough to know they've got it wrong. But if you're trying to teach a child how to pronounce "monsieur" well, the muffled sound is much more of a problem, isn't it?
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Interestingly though Romney won college graduates in 2012 but lost non graduates to Obama, the reverse of Trump v Hillary and Biden.
Cameron won graduates here too in 2015, the last Tory leader to do so.
If Pecresse rather than Zemmour or Le Pen was Macron's runoff opponent equally I would expect a lot of graduates to vote for her
A good tip from Q. Rather than short Burnham I'm backing others but I agree he's too short for all the reasons mentioned and one more - he's a bloke. I'm a Labour member and I'll almost certainly (again) be voting for a woman as our next leader. It's long overdue.
The number of Labour supporters on here proudly saying they will vote for a woman next time makes me believe it almost certainly… won’t happen
I don’t believe PB is representative of the Labour Party…
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
You forget I grew up in the swamp between the City and Westminster and now have my private office in Northbank…
South London is what it is: a vibrant overspill of Kent. Fun to go to for a visit from time to time, but never the beating heart of London itself
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Horror; you would go Sarf of the River after dark!
I don't have to go sarf of the river, I live there! Greatest place on earth.
The hostility of Essex cricket fans towards Kent is quite noticeable. It does feel to be a different place though. And it's noticeable that there's no public transport between the two counties. Can't take a bike, either over the Dartford Crossing, although one can be taken on the Tilbury Ferry. (or used to be able to do, when I was concerned about such things.)
Being born and raised in Kent, as is my wife but living in Essex I disagree. I would say demographically Kent and Essex are closer to each other than other Home Counties like Buckinghamshire, Surrey or Oxfordshire or Berkshire
Away from the irrelevancies of feline defecation and what constitutes "proper London" to the serious subject of this afternoon's equine activities.
Three jump cards at Sandown, Wincanton and Newcastle.
The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. It's not the worst punting card I've ever seen. A couple of "dead 8" handicaps so let's hope for no late withdrawals. In the 1.15 the money has been for FARINET but there's some interesting each way options - I quite like GOA LIL at 6s while in the last I like VOLKOVKA at 15/2.
Wincanton stages an average card and searching for an option I've landed on MIDNIGHT CALLISTO in the 1.30 - available at 13/2.
“ Away from the irrelevancies of feline defecation and what constitutes "proper London" to the serious subject of this afternoon's equine activities. “
😆
Yet again PB serving the nation. 11 tips.
“ The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. “. Or at least heavy in places. That’s what they are saying, that’s the basis I worked on looking at Horse History. So I actually switched away from hurdles to some chases today to find a horse. “Not the worse punting card” card you ever seen? Nothing stood out for me, giving it the big confident yawn like CHB’s avatar.
Anyway, you got me all day on this laptop. You lucky peeblets (to coin a phrase) I’ll try and keep abreast of these tips out there. Weathers rubbish here. My brother is driving me back to London tomorrow. Holiday over ☹️ I have vacated the barn and surrendered the keys. (odd barn building, nothing anywhere near it. It’s my dads escape haven of peace and quiet when he says “down old barn doing it up for Air bnb love”) My girlfriend drove back to London Monday, I stayed on more partying 🥳 I texted are you back safe yet and it came back in capitals FLAT STILL SMELLING OF YOUR VOMIT HAD TO OPEN EVERY WINDOW. Libdems winning Shropshire seems so long ago now. 🤑
It’s all a bit after the party this week? I went on walks with a sketch book. I searched out some of my old paintings in the lofts was interesting in with time passage and I didn’t remember them, I was like wow it’s better than I thought but also very different to what I do now. 🤔 I’m taking some back I need to improve portraiture now there’s a 14 yr old girl painting portraits better than I’ll ever be. Not that I’m competitive, but she is making subject look so jolly, would it be realistic if she made whistlers mum look so cheerful?
Like I said, not that I’m Competitive, Whatever you are on today, best of luck PBers.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
A question for @ydoethur. Reading the above, it appears to have been written by the sort of people who go to university, stay as long as they can because that’s all they want to, or are able to, do, produce poor research theses, and are then kicked out to attempt to make their way in the world. Is that who the DfE recruit?
On another theme, I don’t see the point of masks in class when the students are maskless and not socially distancing outwith class. Do you feel safer when they are wearing masks?
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
It's a private company pitching its "services" to local councils. So far it has found one sucker client, Cambridgeshire council.
Yes but echoes here of Black Lives Matter, Stonewall, and Stop Funding Hate: everyone rolls their eyes and shrugs it off as a harmless eccentricity, and then it quickly becomes the mainstream.
There is actually a very significant distinction: this is a for profit entity, taking money from investors with the explicit purpose of making money.
None of the other bodies you mention are explicitly "in it for the money".
Whether that is good or bad is another matter altogether, but it is a very interesting difference.
I would say that, in the case of the first two groups, this is essentially an administrative difference rather than one of any real significance. Stonewall have recently generated a large amount of revenue through public sector contracts which funds lucrative employment. People associated with BLM have become rich, even if the purposes of the organisation (which has nonetheless benefited from enormous corporate donations) are vague.
Stonewall has total assets of a couple of million pounds. If it's operating as a secret "get rich scheme" it's hiding it well.
Lots of useless no marks pulling in good salaries where otherwise they would be on jobseekers allowance.
Leaving aside the trans issue, Stonewall is an interesting case of a campaigning group basically winning, and trying to find a new role. They were formed in 1989 to campaign for LGBT rights and against Section 28. In the thirty years since, the country's attitude towards LGBT rights has changed massively. Section 28 abolished, age of consent laws more equalised, civil partnerships, gay marriage, gay and lesbian characters common and often unremarked in the media and on TV.
That doesn't mean that gay people in the UK don't face problems and prejudice, but the levels of that prejudice are far lower than they were three decades ago. Arguments over whether a baker should be able to refuse to make a cake for a gay couple is important to individuals, but it's not as if people are still being arrested for being gay or being forcibly sterilised.
So Stonewall have essentially won the big battles, and the battles remaining are much smaller.
Yet the Stephen Port case is just one example that shows that a campaigning group for gay rights is still required. I just think that Stonewall are finding it hard to remain a 'campaigning' charity in a world where the campaigns are smaller.
I'd agree with that. I asked some gay (male) friends what battles were still to be fought, and their response was interesting, I thought. They accepted they now had equality before the law, and nothing much needed doing. But they said they would truly feel equal when they could walk anywhere in public holding hands, without being stared at or, on occasion, abused. When they are out together, they avoid public displays of affection in most places.
I reckon that's not a bad test for real equality, although of course it's cultural, and change is gradual. I'm not sure if campaigning by Stonewall, or anybody else, can accelerate the pace of cultural change.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
True, but the soul of London has migrated south over time. If you want proper London you have to look south of the river these days.
I don't understand what you mean by "proper London". Could you explain?
I am mostly just taking the piss and pushing back against the traditional distain with which South London is viewed. But I do think that South of the river some more of what makes London a great place to live has been retained. Such as proper boozers. Housing that is almost affordable. Friendly neighbours. Cheap, unpretentious eateries with a dazzling variety of food. Some parts of North London feel pretty sanitised for the global market these days, not quite as bad as central Paris but getting there.
Don't know how anybody can argue that Southwark isn't "proper London". Southwark literally exists as evidence that a lot of "proper" London is a mirage.
This is basically the Manhattan vs Brooklyn argument London edition.
As a contented Sarf Londoner I am nevertheless very happy spending time in North, East and West London too.
Around here though there is a big divide between my (and OLB’s) SE London and the alternative universe the other side of Blackheath as recently illustrated in the Bexley & Sidcup by-election.
Essentially the Manhattan v Brooklyn argument applied to London would be that only Zone 1 is proper London
Yes almost, but Manhattan is bigger than zone 1 and some areas are equivalent to inner zone 2 areas of West and North London.
It's a private company pitching its "services" to local councils. So far it has found one sucker client, Cambridgeshire council.
Yes but echoes here of Black Lives Matter, Stonewall, and Stop Funding Hate: everyone rolls their eyes and shrugs it off as a harmless eccentricity, and then it quickly becomes the mainstream.
There is actually a very significant distinction: this is a for profit entity, taking money from investors with the explicit purpose of making money.
None of the other bodies you mention are explicitly "in it for the money".
Whether that is good or bad is another matter altogether, but it is a very interesting difference.
I would say that, in the case of the first two groups, this is essentially an administrative difference rather than one of any real significance. Stonewall have recently generated a large amount of revenue through public sector contracts which funds lucrative employment. People associated with BLM have become rich, even if the purposes of the organisation (which has nonetheless benefited from enormous corporate donations) are vague.
Stonewall has total assets of a couple of million pounds. If it's operating as a secret "get rich scheme" it's hiding it well.
Lots of useless no marks pulling in good salaries where otherwise they would be on jobseekers allowance.
Leaving aside the trans issue, Stonewall is an interesting case of a campaigning group basically winning, and trying to find a new role. They were formed in 1989 to campaign for LGBT rights and against Section 28. In the thirty years since, the country's attitude towards LGBT rights has changed massively. Section 28 abolished, age of consent laws more equalised, civil partnerships, gay marriage, gay and lesbian characters common and often unremarked in the media and on TV.
That doesn't mean that gay people in the UK don't face problems and prejudice, but the levels of that prejudice are far lower than they were three decades ago. Arguments over whether a baker should be able to refuse to make a cake for a gay couple is important to individuals, but it's not as if people are still being arrested for being gay or being forcibly sterilised.
So Stonewall have essentially won the big battles, and the battles remaining are much smaller.
Yet the Stephen Port case is just one example that shows that a campaigning group for gay rights is still required. I just think that Stonewall are finding it hard to remain a 'campaigning' charity in a world where the campaigns are smaller.
I'd agree with that. I asked some gay (male) friends what battles were still to be fought, and their response was interesting, I thought. They accepted they now had equality before the law, and nothing much needed doing. But they said they would truly feel equal when they could walk anywhere in public holding hands, without being stared at or, on occasion, abused. When they are out together, they avoid public displays of affection in most places.
I reckon that's not a bad test for real equality, although of course it's cultural, and change is gradual. I'm not sure if campaigning by Stonewall, or anybody else, can accelerate the pace of cultural change.
I wonder whether the way that Stonewall campaign has the reverse effect?
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
I agree with that.
Just not with @pigeon’s view that it was “reasonable to assume” (not “reasonable to claim” as he later asserted) that masks were useless
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
I whisper this quietly: I actually quite like Gosport. I lived nearby ten years ago, and we got married on HMS Warrior across the water in Portsmouth, so I got to know the area very well. Gosport felt like an area that was really in flux, and I wondered if it might end up more prosperous than Portsmouth. It's a fascinating place full of history, dereliction and promise.
When I worked at the ONS, some used to refer to it as Gospit, which I think is probably a bit harsh.
Second largest built-up area without a railway station:
Away from the irrelevancies of feline defecation and what constitutes "proper London" to the serious subject of this afternoon's equine activities.
Three jump cards at Sandown, Wincanton and Newcastle.
The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. It's not the worst punting card I've ever seen. A couple of "dead 8" handicaps so let's hope for no late withdrawals. In the 1.15 the money has been for FARINET but there's some interesting each way options - I quite like GOA LIL at 6s while in the last I like VOLKOVKA at 15/2.
Wincanton stages an average card and searching for an option I've landed on MIDNIGHT CALLISTO in the 1.30 - available at 13/2.
“ The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. “. Or at least heavy in places. That’s what they are saying, that’s the basis I worked on looking at Horse History. So I actually switched away from hurdles to some chases today to find a horse. “Not the worse punting card” card you ever seen? Nothing stood out for me, giving it the big confident yawn like CHB’s avatar.
The rain so far has been fairly light here in London. At Sandown, the hurdles course is the summer flat course so it gets watered in the summer and is always softer than the chase course which is only used in the winter.
The trouble is the Pond area (a clue there) can get very deep and that impacts both courses.
If the rain gets heavier, it'll be a serious slog for the veterans at 3pm though I think they've reduced the distance of the race from 3 miles 5 furlongs to 3 miles.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
My daughter started wearing gloves everywhere, inside and out, and refused to take them off. Fortunately she’s over that now, but it was very worrying at the time
It's a private company pitching its "services" to local councils. So far it has found one sucker client, Cambridgeshire council.
Yes but echoes here of Black Lives Matter, Stonewall, and Stop Funding Hate: everyone rolls their eyes and shrugs it off as a harmless eccentricity, and then it quickly becomes the mainstream.
There is actually a very significant distinction: this is a for profit entity, taking money from investors with the explicit purpose of making money.
None of the other bodies you mention are explicitly "in it for the money".
Whether that is good or bad is another matter altogether, but it is a very interesting difference.
I would say that, in the case of the first two groups, this is essentially an administrative difference rather than one of any real significance. Stonewall have recently generated a large amount of revenue through public sector contracts which funds lucrative employment. People associated with BLM have become rich, even if the purposes of the organisation (which has nonetheless benefited from enormous corporate donations) are vague.
Stonewall has total assets of a couple of million pounds. If it's operating as a secret "get rich scheme" it's hiding it well.
Lots of useless no marks pulling in good salaries where otherwise they would be on jobseekers allowance.
Leaving aside the trans issue, Stonewall is an interesting case of a campaigning group basically winning, and trying to find a new role. They were formed in 1989 to campaign for LGBT rights and against Section 28. In the thirty years since, the country's attitude towards LGBT rights has changed massively. Section 28 abolished, age of consent laws more equalised, civil partnerships, gay marriage, gay and lesbian characters common and often unremarked in the media and on TV.
That doesn't mean that gay people in the UK don't face problems and prejudice, but the levels of that prejudice are far lower than they were three decades ago. Arguments over whether a baker should be able to refuse to make a cake for a gay couple is important to individuals, but it's not as if people are still being arrested for being gay or being forcibly sterilised.
So Stonewall have essentially won the big battles, and the battles remaining are much smaller.
Yet the Stephen Port case is just one example that shows that a campaigning group for gay rights is still required. I just think that Stonewall are finding it hard to remain a 'campaigning' charity in a world where the campaigns are smaller.
I'd agree with that. I asked some gay (male) friends what battles were still to be fought, and their response was interesting, I thought. They accepted they now had equality before the law, and nothing much needed doing. But they said they would truly feel equal when they could walk anywhere in public holding hands, without being stared at or, on occasion, abused. When they are out together, they avoid public displays of affection in most places.
I reckon that's not a bad test for real equality, although of course it's cultural, and change is gradual. I'm not sure if campaigning by Stonewall, or anybody else, can accelerate the pace of cultural change.
I wonder whether the way that Stonewall campaign has the reverse effect?
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
I whisper this quietly: I actually quite like Gosport. I lived nearby ten years ago, and we got married on HMS Warrior across the water in Portsmouth, so I got to know the area very well. Gosport felt like an area that was really in flux, and I wondered if it might end up more prosperous than Portsmouth. It's a fascinating place full of history, dereliction and promise.
When I worked at the ONS, some used to refer to it as Gospit, which I think is probably a bit harsh.
Second largest built-up area without a railway station:
It's a private company pitching its "services" to local councils. So far it has found one sucker client, Cambridgeshire council.
Yes but echoes here of Black Lives Matter, Stonewall, and Stop Funding Hate: everyone rolls their eyes and shrugs it off as a harmless eccentricity, and then it quickly becomes the mainstream.
There is actually a very significant distinction: this is a for profit entity, taking money from investors with the explicit purpose of making money.
None of the other bodies you mention are explicitly "in it for the money".
Whether that is good or bad is another matter altogether, but it is a very interesting difference.
I would say that, in the case of the first two groups, this is essentially an administrative difference rather than one of any real significance. Stonewall have recently generated a large amount of revenue through public sector contracts which funds lucrative employment. People associated with BLM have become rich, even if the purposes of the organisation (which has nonetheless benefited from enormous corporate donations) are vague.
Stonewall has total assets of a couple of million pounds. If it's operating as a secret "get rich scheme" it's hiding it well.
Lots of useless no marks pulling in good salaries where otherwise they would be on jobseekers allowance.
Leaving aside the trans issue, Stonewall is an interesting case of a campaigning group basically winning, and trying to find a new role. They were formed in 1989 to campaign for LGBT rights and against Section 28. In the thirty years since, the country's attitude towards LGBT rights has changed massively. Section 28 abolished, age of consent laws more equalised, civil partnerships, gay marriage, gay and lesbian characters common and often unremarked in the media and on TV.
That doesn't mean that gay people in the UK don't face problems and prejudice, but the levels of that prejudice are far lower than they were three decades ago. Arguments over whether a baker should be able to refuse to make a cake for a gay couple is important to individuals, but it's not as if people are still being arrested for being gay or being forcibly sterilised.
So Stonewall have essentially won the big battles, and the battles remaining are much smaller.
Yet the Stephen Port case is just one example that shows that a campaigning group for gay rights is still required. I just think that Stonewall are finding it hard to remain a 'campaigning' charity in a world where the campaigns are smaller.
I'd agree with that. I asked some gay (male) friends what battles were still to be fought, and their response was interesting, I thought. They accepted they now had equality before the law, and nothing much needed doing. But they said they would truly feel equal when they could walk anywhere in public holding hands, without being stared at or, on occasion, abused. When they are out together, they avoid public displays of affection in most places.
I reckon that's not a bad test for real equality, although of course it's cultural, and change is gradual. I'm not sure if campaigning by Stonewall, or anybody else, can accelerate the pace of cultural change.
I wonder whether the way that Stonewall campaign has the reverse effect?
Not sure whether you're being serious, but rather unlikely. I very much doubt that the sort of folk who abuse gay people have even heard of Stonewall.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
It does however highlight the fact that too many policy makers have become obsessed with the pandemic while failing to think about the wider issues, and at the same time showing neither imagination nor understanding of the said issues.
When this was first brought back by the DfE last week, some random wonk from Demos came on saying, 'well, the benefits aren't clear cut but if they cut transmission even by an infinitesimal amount that will be worth it.'
No thought had been given to the damage it does in other ways. The disruption to communication. The discomfort. The lack of decent masks. The fact I now have to waste large amounts of time telling children to pull their masks up rather than teach them.
Here we see again the same problem. A series of inconclusive studies, using a flawed methodology, being used to justify face coverings in schools. The real reason that they are being introduced is to hide the total, utter, abject failure of the DfE and other branches of the government to actually get to grips with what's needed. Better ventilation and heating. An effort to reduce class sizes by hiring extra teachers at an earlier stage, rather than in a panic at the last minute and completely failing. Filters. Vaccinations at an earlier stage - while I had some sympathy with it being marginal at the time, it was still the wrong call. That has left masks as pretty much the only thing they can do, and because they've now admitted that they are probably no use, even that isn't going to help as we already have huge numbers ignoring them.
When you have only a hammer, because you were too fucking stupid to buy a toolkit when you had the opportunity, every problem looks like a nail.
But such people shouldn't be making policy decisions. Or even commenting on them. The damage they do through ignorance and incompetence is too great.
You’re lashing out at the person who did what looks like a decent analysis with limited data and reached a sensible conclusion
But the negatives aside of Covid are not being considered. That’s the issue.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
Oh man!
Mind bleach!
(Why am I suddenly thinking about Wayne Rooney?)
I don't know. I was thinking of things like munitions depots and hospitals. Obviously.
(NARRATOR: He wasn't just thinking of things like munitions depots and hospitals. He is still a bit traumatised by a map of 18th century Gosport he found at the library when doing some extra geeky research for a school local history project.)
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
I whisper this quietly: I actually quite like Gosport. I lived nearby ten years ago, and we got married on HMS Warrior across the water in Portsmouth, so I got to know the area very well. Gosport felt like an area that was really in flux, and I wondered if it might end up more prosperous than Portsmouth. It's a fascinating place full of history, dereliction and promise.
When I worked at the ONS, some used to refer to it as Gospit, which I think is probably a bit harsh.
Second largest built-up area without a railway station:
And transport is the big challenge for the whole area. It's all distant enough (and the trains are slow enough) that it doesn't really look to London in the way that Winchester of Guildford do. And Gosport, being a ferry trip or long drive away from Portsmouth, is more insular than its neighbours. Fun though the ferry is, it's a shame the under-harbour tram got canned.
Prof. Christina Pagel @chrischirp · 51m I disagree strongly with jcvi on their hesitation to offer covid vaccine to children, but I do agree that the evidence for a 4th Vax dose for adults is not there. @UKHSA vaccine effectiveness studies have been outstanding in their speed and thoroughness.
What it doesn't make clear is how many of those domestic sales came from other ports losing out. And that is turnover. Not profit for the fish market, let alone the fishing boats themselves get. And it's not corrected for inflation.
Away from the irrelevancies of feline defecation and what constitutes "proper London" to the serious subject of this afternoon's equine activities.
Three jump cards at Sandown, Wincanton and Newcastle.
The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. It's not the worst punting card I've ever seen. A couple of "dead 8" handicaps so let's hope for no late withdrawals. In the 1.15 the money has been for FARINET but there's some interesting each way options - I quite like GOA LIL at 6s while in the last I like VOLKOVKA at 15/2.
Wincanton stages an average card and searching for an option I've landed on MIDNIGHT CALLISTO in the 1.30 - available at 13/2.
“ The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. “. Or at least heavy in places. That’s what they are saying, that’s the basis I worked on looking at Horse History. So I actually switched away from hurdles to some chases today to find a horse. “Not the worse punting card” card you ever seen? Nothing stood out for me, giving it the big confident yawn like CHB’s avatar.
The rain so far has been fairly light here in London. At Sandown, the hurdles course is the summer flat course so it gets watered in the summer and is always softer than the chase course which is only used in the winter.
The trouble is the Pond area (a clue there) can get very deep and that impacts both courses.
If the rain gets heavier, it'll be a serious slog for the veterans at 3pm though I think they've reduced the distance of the race from 3 miles 5 furlongs to 3 miles.
Thanks for that anecdote. Stodge’s Tales From The Going Stick.
The veterans series 🙂 gave me images of unreconstructed old cowboys in buffalo bills Wild West show.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
Oh man!
Mind bleach!
(Why am I suddenly thinking about Wayne Rooney?)
I don't know. I was thinking of things like munitions depots and hospitals. Obviously.
(NARRATOR: He wasn't just thinking of things like munitions depots and hospitals. He is still a bit traumatised by a map of 18th century Gosport he found at the library when doing some extra geeky research for a school local history project.)
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
I whisper this quietly: I actually quite like Gosport. I lived nearby ten years ago, and we got married on HMS Warrior across the water in Portsmouth, so I got to know the area very well. Gosport felt like an area that was really in flux, and I wondered if it might end up more prosperous than Portsmouth. It's a fascinating place full of history, dereliction and promise.
When I worked at the ONS, some used to refer to it as Gospit, which I think is probably a bit harsh.
Second largest built-up area without a railway station:
And transport is the big challenge for the whole area. It's all distant enough (and the trains are slow enough) that it doesn't really look to London in the way that Winchester of Guildford do. And Gosport, being a ferry trip or long drive away from Portsmouth, is more insular than its neighbours. Fun though the ferry is, it's a shame the under-harbour tram got canned.
Ooh yes, I want to go back to Priddy's Hard armament depot. Managed to get a tour behind the scenes years ago with a volunteer who turned out to be ex Ordnance Artificer like my dad. Best place in the area, scenically anyway, to sit and have coffee and bread pudding next to the little harbour. And there's Haslar Hospital and the submarines though the Palmerston Fort Brockhurst is no longer normally open, sadly (even before covid). Used to have a Mandarin duck pair in the moat. Bizarre against that background of brick and grass fort.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
It does however highlight the fact that too many policy makers have become obsessed with the pandemic while failing to think about the wider issues, and at the same time showing neither imagination nor understanding of the said issues.
When this was first brought back by the DfE last week, some random wonk from Demos came on saying, 'well, the benefits aren't clear cut but if they cut transmission even by an infinitesimal amount that will be worth it.'
No thought had been given to the damage it does in other ways. The disruption to communication. The discomfort. The lack of decent masks. The fact I now have to waste large amounts of time telling children to pull their masks up rather than teach them.
Here we see again the same problem. A series of inconclusive studies, using a flawed methodology, being used to justify face coverings in schools. The real reason that they are being introduced is to hide the total, utter, abject failure of the DfE and other branches of the government to actually get to grips with what's needed. Better ventilation and heating. An effort to reduce class sizes by hiring extra teachers at an earlier stage, rather than in a panic at the last minute and completely failing. Filters. Vaccinations at an earlier stage - while I had some sympathy with it being marginal at the time, it was still the wrong call. That has left masks as pretty much the only thing they can do, and because they've now admitted that they are probably no use, even that isn't going to help as we already have huge numbers ignoring them.
When you have only a hammer, because you were too fucking stupid to buy a toolkit when you had the opportunity, every problem looks like a nail.
But such people shouldn't be making policy decisions. Or even commenting on them. The damage they do through ignorance and incompetence is too great.
You’re lashing out at the person who did what looks like a decent analysis with limited data and reached a sensible conclusion
But the negatives aside of Covid are not being considered. That’s the issue.
I agree, but that wasn’t the remit of the specific analysis
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
My daughter started wearing gloves everywhere, inside and out, and refused to take them off. Fortunately she’s over that now, but it was very worrying at the time
My friend's wife (fully vaxxed) tested positive for covid yesterday. Her daughters (7 & 10) were in tears. I don't know why, because the parents are as blase as we are - but somewhere along the line the daughters have been terrified into thinking this is a potentially life threatening illness. The continuous culture of fear which masking engenders is no small part of this.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
My daughter started wearing gloves everywhere, inside and out, and refused to take them off. Fortunately she’s over that now, but it was very worrying at the time
My friend's wife (fully vaxxed) tested positive for covid yesterday. Her daughters (7 & 10) were in tears. I don't know why, because the parents are as blase as we are - but somewhere along the line the daughters have been terrified into thinking this is a potentially life threatening illness. The continuous culture of fear which masking engenders is no small part of this.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Also, are you sure it is not fox excrement on your roof? Foxes don't bury their business and do run along rooves.
Something else that is dying out: rooves as the plural of roof. I blame the masked teachers.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
It does however highlight the fact that too many policy makers have become obsessed with the pandemic while failing to think about the wider issues, and at the same time showing neither imagination nor understanding of the said issues.
When this was first brought back by the DfE last week, some random wonk from Demos came on saying, 'well, the benefits aren't clear cut but if they cut transmission even by an infinitesimal amount that will be worth it.'
No thought had been given to the damage it does in other ways. The disruption to communication. The discomfort. The lack of decent masks. The fact I now have to waste large amounts of time telling children to pull their masks up rather than teach them.
Here we see again the same problem. A series of inconclusive studies, using a flawed methodology, being used to justify face coverings in schools. The real reason that they are being introduced is to hide the total, utter, abject failure of the DfE and other branches of the government to actually get to grips with what's needed. Better ventilation and heating. An effort to reduce class sizes by hiring extra teachers at an earlier stage, rather than in a panic at the last minute and completely failing. Filters. Vaccinations at an earlier stage - while I had some sympathy with it being marginal at the time, it was still the wrong call. That has left masks as pretty much the only thing they can do, and because they've now admitted that they are probably no use, even that isn't going to help as we already have huge numbers ignoring them.
When you have only a hammer, because you were too fucking stupid to buy a toolkit when you had the opportunity, every problem looks like a nail.
But such people shouldn't be making policy decisions. Or even commenting on them. The damage they do through ignorance and incompetence is too great.
You’re lashing out at the person who did what looks like a decent analysis with limited data and reached a sensible conclusion
But the negatives aside of Covid are not being considered. That’s the issue.
I agree, but that wasn’t the remit of the specific analysis
Which is entirely the problem. Decisions are being made in isolation.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Also, are you sure it is not fox excrement on your roof? Foxes don't bury their business and do run along rooves.
Something else that is dying out: rooves as the plural of roof. I blame the masked teachers.
Difficult to bury shite in a tarpaulin. I do wonder if fallen leaves give it a WC-like air.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
My daughter started wearing gloves everywhere, inside and out, and refused to take them off. Fortunately she’s over that now, but it was very worrying at the time
My friend's wife (fully vaxxed) tested positive for covid yesterday. Her daughters (7 & 10) were in tears. I don't know why, because the parents are as blase as we are - but somewhere along the line the daughters have been terrified into thinking this is a potentially life threatening illness. The continuous culture of fear which masking engenders is no small part of this.
Children don't always get hold of the right end of the stick, do they. Any Primary teacher will have such anecdotes. Best of luck to her, and to them. Probably turn out to be no more than a dodgy day or two, like me, or a persistent cough, like my wife. Took quite a long time to finally shake off, though! Get up and go didn't come back for a while, on reflection!
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Had thought about that. Would need o e of those trays with doors, so the litter doesn't get wet, and I don't much fancy spinning up there repeatedly to clear it out or change the litter. But as I now seem to face the prospect of shinning up there repeatedly every day or two anyway to clean it all up... Honestly, I don't have any better ideas.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
My daughter started wearing gloves everywhere, inside and out, and refused to take them off. Fortunately she’s over that now, but it was very worrying at the time
My friend's wife (fully vaxxed) tested positive for covid yesterday. Her daughters (7 & 10) were in tears. I don't know why, because the parents are as blase as we are - but somewhere along the line the daughters have been terrified into thinking this is a potentially life threatening illness. The continuous culture of fear which masking engenders is no small part of this.
We’ve tried as hard to instil a blase feeling about Covid into our Children, and left the worrying to the adults. Luckily they seem to have bought it - helped by the fact many of their friends and their parents have had mild versions - but I’m pretty sure there are some at the local school who have the fear.
It’s a bit like Cold War fear of nukes. I remember that, in the background, growing up in the 80s and I think it was even sharper for my parents’ generation. That background hum of unease about the fact Armageddon could be just around the corner at any moment.
Without wanting to come over all Leon, I've just learned that there was an 1894 outbreak of the plague which killed 15 million worldwide. Apologies if we've already discussed this in the last two years - seems remarkable this aspect of history is so obscure.
Without wanting to come over all Leon, I've just learned that there was an 1894 outbreak of the plague which killed 15 million worldwide. Apologies if we've already discussed this in the last two years - seems remarkable this aspect of history is so obscure.
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
My daughter started wearing gloves everywhere, inside and out, and refused to take them off. Fortunately she’s over that now, but it was very worrying at the time
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
Weighed against a proven detriment of having kids and teachers wear masks. That's what makes the decision so dubious. On one side there's a unproven benefit which has been chosen ahead of the proved disadvantages. Even if we ignore the statistical insignificance of the samples and say there's a proven benefit, it's very small and was recorded during the Delta wave, not Omicron.
What proven detriments? Serious question. I'm aware of narrative descriptions about "mental trauma" (which I find dubious), inaccessibility for the deaf (a perfectly sensible point), and other anecdotes. But do we have anything statistical to rely on?
My daughter started wearing gloves everywhere, inside and out, and refused to take them off. Fortunately she’s over that now, but it was very worrying at the time
My friend's wife (fully vaxxed) tested positive for covid yesterday. Her daughters (7 & 10) were in tears. I don't know why, because the parents are as blase as we are - but somewhere along the line the daughters have been terrified into thinking this is a potentially life threatening illness. The continuous culture of fear which masking engenders is no small part of this.
Sorry to hear that.
Thanks. Friends wife is fine - just a bit of a cold. I feel a bit sad that the kids are so sad though. But hopefully seeing their mum not-particularly-ill with covid will stop them worrying in future.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Also, are you sure it is not fox excrement on your roof? Foxes don't bury their business and do run along rooves.
Something else that is dying out: rooves as the plural of roof. I blame the masked teachers.
Difficult to bury shite in a tarpaulin. I do wonder if fallen leaves give it a WC-like air.
No, the tarp is entirely clean and surprisingly tautly laid out. Quite proud of it, in fact. But @DecrepiterJohnL 's suggestion is valid. It MIGHT be foxes. I have no proof it's the cats, and there's a surprisingly large volume of it.
A good tip from Q. Rather than short Burnham I'm backing others but I agree he's too short for all the reasons mentioned and one more - he's a bloke. I'm a Labour member and I'll almost certainly (again) be voting for a woman as our next leader. It's long overdue.
The number of Labour supporters on here proudly saying they will vote for a woman next time makes me believe it almost certainly… won’t happen
I don’t believe PB is representative of the Labour Party…
The thing is, all the strongest current potential candidates are women. Streeting is a potential future leader, but not the next one.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Had thought about that. Would need o e of those trays with doors, so the litter doesn't get wet, and I don't much fancy spinning up there repeatedly to clear it out or change the litter. But as I now seem to face the prospect of shinning up there repeatedly every day or two anyway to clean it all up... Honestly, I don't have any better ideas.
Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?
My Dad grew up in Gosport, and some of his family still lurk there. I lived in Gosport myself in 1993/4, though my parents refused to school me locally and I had to take a bus to Fareham.
It’s so remote I’m always amused that anyone’s even heard of it, let alone can reference “Priddy’s Hard”!
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Had thought about that. Would need o e of those trays with doors, so the litter doesn't get wet, and I don't much fancy spinning up there repeatedly to clear it out or change the litter. But as I now seem to face the prospect of shinning up there repeatedly every day or two anyway to clean it all up... Honestly, I don't have any better ideas.
Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Also, are you sure it is not fox excrement on your roof? Foxes don't bury their business and do run along rooves.
Something else that is dying out: rooves as the plural of roof. I blame the masked teachers.
Difficult to bury shite in a tarpaulin. I do wonder if fallen leaves give it a WC-like air.
No, the tarp is entirely clean and surprisingly tautly laid out. Quite proud of it, in fact. But @DecrepiterJohnL 's suggestion is valid. It MIGHT be foxes. I have no proof it's the cats, and there's a surprisingly large volume of it.
Mischievous neighbours throwing horse shit onto your roof?
A good tip from Q. Rather than short Burnham I'm backing others but I agree he's too short for all the reasons mentioned and one more - he's a bloke. I'm a Labour member and I'll almost certainly (again) be voting for a woman as our next leader. It's long overdue.
The number of Labour supporters on here proudly saying they will vote for a woman next time makes me believe it almost certainly… won’t happen
I don’t believe PB is representative of the Labour Party…
The thing is, all the strongest current potential candidates are women. Streeting is a potential future leader, but not the next one.
The trouble is some of the women candidates divise opinion in the party. Jess Phillips seems to be hated by the Corbynites to an unhealthy degree, and Angela Rayner is unpopular with the Starmer inner circle. Rachel Reeves appears to have fewer enemies though I can’t see the left warming to her. Hard to know where things will fall because I’m not close enough to labour members to know what they think, and of course the circumstances and timing of Starmer’s departure would have a big effect.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Also, are you sure it is not fox excrement on your roof? Foxes don't bury their business and do run along rooves.
Something else that is dying out: rooves as the plural of roof. I blame the masked teachers.
Difficult to bury shite in a tarpaulin. I do wonder if fallen leaves give it a WC-like air.
No, the tarp is entirely clean and surprisingly tautly laid out. Quite proud of it, in fact. But @DecrepiterJohnL 's suggestion is valid. It MIGHT be foxes. I have no proof it's the cats, and there's a surprisingly large volume of it.
Mischievous neighbours throwing horse shit onto your roof?
Cats normally bury their faeces, foxes, being canines, don't. Used to get it on our lawn when we lived in a house which backed onto a wood. Mind you we did get all sorts of wildlife in that garden. If we hadn't moved as part of the retirement plan I might have tried to deal a deal with the BBC. We had badgers and all sorts of birds as well as the foxes.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Had thought about that. Would need o e of those trays with doors, so the litter doesn't get wet, and I don't much fancy spinning up there repeatedly to clear it out or change the litter. But as I now seem to face the prospect of shinning up there repeatedly every day or two anyway to clean it all up... Honestly, I don't have any better ideas.
Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Had thought about that. Would need o e of those trays with doors, so the litter doesn't get wet, and I don't much fancy spinning up there repeatedly to clear it out or change the litter. But as I now seem to face the prospect of shinning up there repeatedly every day or two anyway to clean it all up... Honestly, I don't have any better ideas.
Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
- “I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others.”
That’s exactly the situation I find myself in regarding the Swedish GE in September. I left my old party 3 years ago, and since then just can’t decide who to vote for. Swithering between 4 or 5 parties at the moment. (And I’ll almost certainly be voting differently in the national, regional and local elections, which are all held on the same day.)
If Scotland was a normal country I’d probably be the same there too (my parents and sister have voted for several different parties, with my mum holding the record having supported everyone at some point). But Scotland is not a normal country yet, and until she is I can only vote for independence-supporting candidates/parties.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Also, are you sure it is not fox excrement on your roof? Foxes don't bury their business and do run along rooves.
Something else that is dying out: rooves as the plural of roof. I blame the masked teachers.
Difficult to bury shite in a tarpaulin. I do wonder if fallen leaves give it a WC-like air.
No, the tarp is entirely clean and surprisingly tautly laid out. Quite proud of it, in fact. But @DecrepiterJohnL 's suggestion is valid. It MIGHT be foxes. I have no proof it's the cats, and there's a surprisingly large volume of it.
Mischievous neighbours throwing horse shit onto your roof?
I'm a bit of an expert on this one, cat shit and horse shit are very different
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
Rayner's not from Brum though. Your confusing he with Jess Philips. Rayner's from Stockport.
Apols, my bad, yes I am. Philips is the fake WWC girl, Rayner is the real deal. A single mum at 16
Rayner has a really impressive backstory, having fought through all that to be where she is
She's also - and this shouldn't matter, but it does - easy on the eye.
And she knows it, and uses it
A hint of Thatcher, perhaps
Except Thatcher made it from provincial Lincolnshire to Oxford, a career as a chemist and a tax barrister before becoming an MP.
Rayner did not even do A Levels nor did she have a career of much note before becoming MP. Yes she had a tough backstory but so did many other people
Her father was a prosperous local businessman and pillar of the community - Alderman Roberts, I believe he was known as. So she had a teeny, weeny leg up.
Did he not run the corner shop in Coronation Street as well
Fun fact, Bryan Mosley who played Alf Roberts also played the overweight businessman who Michael Caine chucked off a multi storey car park.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Yes, all good points, and I certainly wouldn't call Boris Johnson or Conservatives generally as evil. Trump gets closer to it. Why the "rut" arises is a good question. It's clearly more "interesting" to read that Trump says something outrageous than that Biden has (say) called for calm. But I think the media generally see themselves primarily as a branch of the entertainment industry, and that's infected politics. It's much less true in some countries - Germany has for obvious reasons an allergy to populist demagogues, and their political coverage is generally sober and reflective. Frfance, not so much...
A good tip from Q. Rather than short Burnham I'm backing others but I agree he's too short for all the reasons mentioned and one more - he's a bloke. I'm a Labour member and I'll almost certainly (again) be voting for a woman as our next leader. It's long overdue.
The number of Labour supporters on here proudly saying they will vote for a woman next time makes me believe it almost certainly… won’t happen
I don’t believe PB is representative of the Labour Party…
The thing is, all the strongest current potential candidates are women. Streeting is a potential future leader, but not the next one.
An interesting question. Who is the most likely male candidate who is currently eligible. That is an MP? Probably Streeting. Or Jarvis. Or a lefty like Burgon. Maybe Lammy. None first order probabilities. In the absence of Burnham, or Starmer becoming PM, it will end up being a woman almost by default.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
- “I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others.”
That’s exactly the situation I find myself in regarding the Swedish GE in September. I left my old party 3 years ago, and since then just can’t decide who to vote for. Swithering between 4 or 5 parties at the moment. (And I’ll almost certainly be voting differently in the national, regional and local elections, which are all held on the same day.)
If Scotland was a normal country I’d probably be the same there too (my parents and sister have voted for several different parties, with my mum holding the record having supported everyone at some point). But Scotland is not a normal country yet, and until she is I can only vote for independence-supporting candidates/parties.
Do you find it easier to be less partisan about politics in your adopted country? That's what I found when I lived in Forrin Parts. I got to vote in local elections and it was really fun to explore with fresh eyes the opportunities. No preconceptions about the characters involved, too.
A good tip from Q. Rather than short Burnham I'm backing others but I agree he's too short for all the reasons mentioned and one more - he's a bloke. I'm a Labour member and I'll almost certainly (again) be voting for a woman as our next leader. It's long overdue.
The number of Labour supporters on here proudly saying they will vote for a woman next time makes me believe it almost certainly… won’t happen
I don’t believe PB is representative of the Labour Party…
The thing is, all the strongest current potential candidates are women. Streeting is a potential future leader, but not the next one.
An interesting question. Who is the most likely male candidate who is currently eligible. That is an MP? Probably Streeting. Or Jarvis. Or a lefty like Burgon. Maybe Lammy. None first order probabilities. In the absence of Burnham, or Starmer becoming PM, it will end up being a woman almost by default.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Also, are you sure it is not fox excrement on your roof? Foxes don't bury their business and do run along rooves.
Something else that is dying out: rooves as the plural of roof. I blame the masked teachers.
Difficult to bury shite in a tarpaulin. I do wonder if fallen leaves give it a WC-like air.
No, the tarp is entirely clean and surprisingly tautly laid out. Quite proud of it, in fact. But @DecrepiterJohnL 's suggestion is valid. It MIGHT be foxes. I have no proof it's the cats, and there's a surprisingly large volume of it.
Mischievous neighbours throwing horse shit onto your roof?
Cats normally bury their faeces, foxes, being canines, don't. Used to get it on our lawn when we lived in a house which backed onto a wood. Mind you we did get all sorts of wildlife in that garden. If we hadn't moved as part of the retirement plan I might have tried to deal a deal with the BBC. We had badgers and all sorts of birds as well as the foxes.
We've had to build defences to keep the deer out. Lovely to see them, but they eat all of the flowers.
Only once seen a fox, and my wife has seen a weasel.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Also, are you sure it is not fox excrement on your roof? Foxes don't bury their business and do run along rooves.
Something else that is dying out: rooves as the plural of roof. I blame the masked teachers.
Difficult to bury shite in a tarpaulin. I do wonder if fallen leaves give it a WC-like air.
No, the tarp is entirely clean and surprisingly tautly laid out. Quite proud of it, in fact. But @DecrepiterJohnL 's suggestion is valid. It MIGHT be foxes. I have no proof it's the cats, and there's a surprisingly large volume of it.
Mischievous neighbours throwing horse shit onto your roof?
Cats normally bury their faeces, foxes, being canines, don't. Used to get it on our lawn when we lived in a house which backed onto a wood. Mind you we did get all sorts of wildlife in that garden. If we hadn't moved as part of the retirement plan I might have tried to deal a deal with the BBC. We had badgers and all sorts of birds as well as the foxes.
We've had to build defences to keep the deer out. Lovely to see them, but they eat all of the flowers.
Only once seen a fox, and my wife has seen a weasel.
Deer, weasel but rarely foxes? That's like seeing parakeets and Eagles but only once having seen a pigeon. You can see foxes most nights around here.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Yes, all good points, and I certainly wouldn't call Boris Johnson or Conservatives generally as evil. Trump gets closer to it. Why the "rut" arises is a good question. It's clearly more "interesting" to read that Trump says something outrageous than that Biden has (say) called for calm. But I think the media generally see themselves primarily as a branch of the entertainment industry, and that's infected politics. It's much less true in some countries - Germany has for obvious reasons an allergy to populist demagogues, and their political coverage is generally sober and reflective. Frfance, not so much...
Actually, I tried to avoid this in my longer post but I do think Trump is properly evil. It doesn't suit my argument to say it, but there we are. I wouldn't use that word for very many people. I'm struggling to think of other living politicians that it applies to. Possible Duterte, but I don't know enough about the Philippines to be sure about that. Obviously I'm excluding undemocratic countries here. Evil rises easier when the consent of the people is not a determinant.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Evil is thankfully in short supply in mainstream politics here but I'd flirt with that descriptor for some of what's going on with the Trump MAGA movement in the US.
As for being "tribal" I vote only one way (Labour or at a push tactically to beat a Con) but I'd reject the label because it implies unthinkingness and I do think about why I'm Labour. It's because they are our party of the Left and my politics is Left. Why am I on the Left? Because of just one thing - that by my reading of the world the single biggest determinant (by miles) of a person's material life outcome is the pure dumb luck (from their perspective) of their birth circumstances. Where they are born and to whom. I actually don't know why this bugs me so much but it does and always has.
Therefore for me one the highest priorities of government should be to do things which significantly reduce that link. Not eradicate it - impossible outside of a dystopia - but significantly reduce it. You have to really act against the grain in order to do this because so many powerful forces push the other way. So it's very difficult. Far easier to pay lip service to "fairer society" and carry on doing not the slightest thing to make serious progress towards it.
The political Right haven't the remotest interest in this. The big tell that they aren't is they don't even engage with it. Note how when the dreaded word 'equality' crops up what they do like Pavlov's dog is roll out the trite faux-profundity of "I believe in equality of opportunity not of outcome" (as if this is a natural juxta and the 2 things can be intellectually separated) possibly followed by some reference to "grammar schools". So that closes off the Right for me. They don't care about what I care about the most.
A good tip from Q. Rather than short Burnham I'm backing others but I agree he's too short for all the reasons mentioned and one more - he's a bloke. I'm a Labour member and I'll almost certainly (again) be voting for a woman as our next leader. It's long overdue.
The number of Labour supporters on here proudly saying they will vote for a woman next time makes me believe it almost certainly… won’t happen
I don’t believe PB is representative of the Labour Party…
The thing is, all the strongest current potential candidates are women. Streeting is a potential future leader, but not the next one.
An interesting question. Who is the most likely male candidate who is currently eligible. That is an MP? Probably Streeting. Or Jarvis. Or a lefty like Burgon. Maybe Lammy. None first order probabilities. In the absence of Burnham, or Starmer becoming PM, it will end up being a woman almost by default.
Burgon's got no chance, zero.
No. I know. But he could be a candidate. The fact I even dredged him up sort of re-inforces my point.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Also, are you sure it is not fox excrement on your roof? Foxes don't bury their business and do run along rooves.
Something else that is dying out: rooves as the plural of roof. I blame the masked teachers.
Difficult to bury shite in a tarpaulin. I do wonder if fallen leaves give it a WC-like air.
No, the tarp is entirely clean and surprisingly tautly laid out. Quite proud of it, in fact. But @DecrepiterJohnL 's suggestion is valid. It MIGHT be foxes. I have no proof it's the cats, and there's a surprisingly large volume of it.
Mischievous neighbours throwing horse shit onto your roof?
Cats normally bury their faeces, foxes, being canines, don't. Used to get it on our lawn when we lived in a house which backed onto a wood. Mind you we did get all sorts of wildlife in that garden. If we hadn't moved as part of the retirement plan I might have tried to deal a deal with the BBC. We had badgers and all sorts of birds as well as the foxes.
We've had to build defences to keep the deer out. Lovely to see them, but they eat all of the flowers.
Only once seen a fox, and my wife has seen a weasel.
There are roe (I think) deer over the woods to the North of us, towards Halstead and the Suffolk border. We also get muntjac deer in our small town. They're a bit of a pain.
The badgers at our former home were a constant source of interest.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Had thought about that. Would need o e of those trays with doors, so the litter doesn't get wet, and I don't much fancy spinning up there repeatedly to clear it out or change the litter. But as I now seem to face the prospect of shinning up there repeatedly every day or two anyway to clean it all up... Honestly, I don't have any better ideas.
Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
Unproven benefit, not completely useless
It does however highlight the fact that too many policy makers have become obsessed with the pandemic while failing to think about the wider issues, and at the same time showing neither imagination nor understanding of the said issues.
When this was first brought back by the DfE last week, some random wonk from Demos came on saying, 'well, the benefits aren't clear cut but if they cut transmission even by an infinitesimal amount that will be worth it.'
No thought had been given to the damage it does in other ways. The disruption to communication. The discomfort. The lack of decent masks. The fact I now have to waste large amounts of time telling children to pull their masks up rather than teach them.
Here we see again the same problem. A series of inconclusive studies, using a flawed methodology, being used to justify face coverings in schools. The real reason that they are being introduced is to hide the total, utter, abject failure of the DfE and other branches of the government to actually get to grips with what's needed. Better ventilation and heating. An effort to reduce class sizes by hiring extra teachers at an earlier stage, rather than in a panic at the last minute and completely failing. Filters. Vaccinations at an earlier stage - while I had some sympathy with it being marginal at the time, it was still the wrong call. That has left masks as pretty much the only thing they can do, and because they've now admitted that they are probably no use, even that isn't going to help as we already have huge numbers ignoring them.
When you have only a hammer, because you were too fucking stupid to buy a toolkit when you had the opportunity, every problem looks like a nail.
But such people shouldn't be making policy decisions. Or even commenting on them. The damage they do through ignorance and incompetence is too great.
You’re lashing out at the person who did what looks like a decent analysis with limited data and reached a sensible conclusion
I'm lashing out at the people who took a study that they knew was indeterminate and was using an evidence base that was effectively useless (which I might add is initself strange given that some fairly obvious alternatives were available) and decided to base a predetermined policy position on it to hide their total failure in other areas but making the lives of several million people much more uncomfortable in the process.
Personally I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If you disagree, feel free to teach my lessons.
It seems like a Cambridgeshire County Council initiative which they are trying to roll out more widely.
That’s what Michael Gove famously described as the educational “blob”, accountable to no-one other than themselves, and impervious to changes of government in driving their agenda forwards.
Which is richly ironic given he was the one who most furthered their agenda…without realising it.
And given school years last for more than two full parliamentary terms, the idea that schooling should be entirely subject the the whim of any random Education Secretary is a risibly hubristic one anyway.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Evil is thankfully in short supply in mainstream politics here but I'd flirt with that descriptor for some of what's going on with the Trump MAGA movement in the US.
As for being "tribal" I vote only one way (Labour or at a push tactically to beat a Con) but I'd reject the label because it implies unthinkingness and I do think about why I'm Labour. It's because they are our party of the Left and my politics is Left. Why am I on the Left? Because of just one thing - that by my reading of the world the single biggest determinant (by miles) of a person's material life outcome is the pure dumb luck (from their perspective) of their birth circumstances. Where they are born and to whom. I actually don't know why this bugs me so much but it does and always has.
Therefore for me one the highest priorities of government should be to do things which significantly reduce that link. Not eradicate it - impossible outside of a dystopia - but significantly reduce it. You have to really act against the grain in order to do this because so many powerful forces push the other way. So it's very difficult. Far easier to pay lip service to "fairer society" and carry on doing not the slightest thing to make serious progress towards it.
The political Right haven't the remotest interest in this. The big tell that they aren't is they don't even engage with it. Note how when the dreaded word 'equality' crops up what they do like Pavlov's dog is roll out the trite faux-profundity of "I believe in equality of opportunity not of outcome" (as if this is a natural juxta and the 2 things can be intellectually separated) possibly followed by some reference to "grammar schools". So that closes off the Right for me. They don't care about what I care about the most.
To avoid being tribal you need to ask yourself at each election which party is best suited to achieving your desired goals. From the above it sounds like you assume it is automatically Labour, in which case the tribal label is correct.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
- “I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others.”
That’s exactly the situation I find myself in regarding the Swedish GE in September. I left my old party 3 years ago, and since then just can’t decide who to vote for. Swithering between 4 or 5 parties at the moment. (And I’ll almost certainly be voting differently in the national, regional and local elections, which are all held on the same day.)
If Scotland was a normal country I’d probably be the same there too (my parents and sister have voted for several different parties, with my mum holding the record having supported everyone at some point). But Scotland is not a normal country yet, and until she is I can only vote for independence-supporting candidates/parties.
Do you find it easier to be less partisan about politics in your adopted country? That's what I found when I lived in Forrin Parts. I got to vote in local elections and it was really fun to explore with fresh eyes the opportunities. No preconceptions about the characters involved, too.
I've never lives in forrin parts, but I do remember the experience of reading the newspapers in Canada and thinking - why are you all getting so heated about this? It's pleasant to be able to be above the fray in that way, and makes you realise how daftly tribal your own country's arguments also are.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
Rayner's not from Brum though. Your confusing he with Jess Philips. Rayner's from Stockport.
Apols, my bad, yes I am. Philips is the fake WWC girl, Rayner is the real deal. A single mum at 16
Rayner has a really impressive backstory, having fought through all that to be where she is
She's also - and this shouldn't matter, but it does - easy on the eye.
And she knows it, and uses it
A hint of Thatcher, perhaps
Except Thatcher made it from provincial Lincolnshire to Oxford, a career as a chemist and a tax barrister before becoming an MP.
Rayner did not even do A Levels nor did she have a career of much note before becoming MP. Yes she had a tough backstory but so did many other people
Her father was a prosperous local businessman and pillar of the community - Alderman Roberts, I believe he was known as. So she had a teeny, weeny leg up.
Did he not run the corner shop in Coronation Street as well
Fun fact, Bryan Mosley who played Alf Roberts also played the overweight businessman who Michael Caine chucked off a multi storey car park.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Also, are you sure it is not fox excrement on your roof? Foxes don't bury their business and do run along rooves.
Something else that is dying out: rooves as the plural of roof. I blame the masked teachers.
Difficult to bury shite in a tarpaulin. I do wonder if fallen leaves give it a WC-like air.
No, the tarp is entirely clean and surprisingly tautly laid out. Quite proud of it, in fact. But @DecrepiterJohnL 's suggestion is valid. It MIGHT be foxes. I have no proof it's the cats, and there's a surprisingly large volume of it.
Mischievous neighbours throwing horse shit onto your roof?
Cats normally bury their faeces, foxes, being canines, don't. Used to get it on our lawn when we lived in a house which backed onto a wood. Mind you we did get all sorts of wildlife in that garden. If we hadn't moved as part of the retirement plan I might have tried to deal a deal with the BBC. We had badgers and all sorts of birds as well as the foxes.
We've had to build defences to keep the deer out. Lovely to see them, but they eat all of the flowers.
Only once seen a fox, and my wife has seen a weasel.
There are roe (I think) deer over the woods to the North of us, towards Halstead and the Suffolk border. We also get muntjac deer in our small town. They're a bit of a pain.
The badgers at our former home were a constant source of interest.
Foxes' den in our garden. The worst thing is the profusion of dog toys they steal from around the neighbourhood.
Away from the irrelevancies of feline defecation and what constitutes "proper London" to the serious subject of this afternoon's equine activities.
Three jump cards at Sandown, Wincanton and Newcastle.
The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. It's not the worst punting card I've ever seen. A couple of "dead 8" handicaps so let's hope for no late withdrawals. In the 1.15 the money has been for FARINET but there's some interesting each way options - I quite like GOA LIL at 6s while in the last I like VOLKOVKA at 15/2.
Wincanton stages an average card and searching for an option I've landed on MIDNIGHT CALLISTO in the 1.30 - available at 13/2.
“ The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. “. Or at least heavy in places. That’s what they are saying, that’s the basis I worked on looking at Horse History. So I actually switched away from hurdles to some chases today to find a horse. “Not the worse punting card” card you ever seen? Nothing stood out for me, giving it the big confident yawn like CHB’s avatar.
The rain so far has been fairly light here in London. At Sandown, the hurdles course is the summer flat course so it gets watered in the summer and is always softer than the chase course which is only used in the winter.
The trouble is the Pond area (a clue there) can get very deep and that impacts both courses.
If the rain gets heavier, it'll be a serious slog for the veterans at 3pm though I think they've reduced the distance of the race from 3 miles 5 furlongs to 3 miles.
Just driven the A3, rain is now heavy lots of ponding
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Yes, all good points, and I certainly wouldn't call Boris Johnson or Conservatives generally as evil. Trump gets closer to it. Why the "rut" arises is a good question. It's clearly more "interesting" to read that Trump says something outrageous than that Biden has (say) called for calm. But I think the media generally see themselves primarily as a branch of the entertainment industry, and that's infected politics. It's much less true in some countries - Germany has for obvious reasons an allergy to populist demagogues, and their political coverage is generally sober and reflective. Frfance, not so much...
Actually, I tried to avoid this in my longer post but I do think Trump is properly evil. It doesn't suit my argument to say it, but there we are. I wouldn't use that word for very many people. I'm struggling to think of other living politicians that it applies to. Possible Duterte, but I don't know enough about the Philippines to be sure about that. Obviously I'm excluding undemocratic countries here. Evil rises easier when the consent of the people is not a determinant.
Politicians tend to be weird in one way or another, hence their attraction to politics, but I would say that despite all the opprobrium thrown their way on average they're probably better people than the electorate, across all parties. Trump though I think is an utterly malign human being. The only member of his circle I have ever met in the flesh, Corey Lewendowski, was really skin crawlingly unpleasant. Boris Johnson is too reflexively dishonest and self-centred to be suitable for public office but I don't think he is at all evil.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Evil is thankfully in short supply in mainstream politics here but I'd flirt with that descriptor for some of what's going on with the Trump MAGA movement in the US.
As for being "tribal" I vote only one way (Labour or at a push tactically to beat a Con) but I'd reject the label because it implies unthinkingness and I do think about why I'm Labour. It's because they are our party of the Left and my politics is Left. Why am I on the Left? Because of just one thing - that by my reading of the world the single biggest determinant (by miles) of a person's material life outcome is the pure dumb luck (from their perspective) of their birth circumstances. Where they are born and to whom. I actually don't know why this bugs me so much but it does and always has.
Therefore for me one the highest priorities of government should be to do things which significantly reduce that link. Not eradicate it - impossible outside of a dystopia - but significantly reduce it. You have to really act against the grain in order to do this because so many powerful forces push the other way. So it's very difficult. Far easier to pay lip service to "fairer society" and carry on doing not the slightest thing to make serious progress towards it.
The political Right haven't the remotest interest in this. The big tell that they aren't is they don't even engage with it. Note how when the dreaded word 'equality' crops up what they do like Pavlov's dog is roll out the trite faux-profundity of "I believe in equality of opportunity not of outcome" (as if this is a natural juxta and the 2 things can be intellectually separated) possibly followed by some reference to "grammar schools". So that closes off the Right for me. They don't care about what I care about the most.
One-partyism is a symptom of tribalism, but it doesn't prove it. It can come from other sources, as you rightly point out. On the flip side, having changed your vote in the past is not evidence that you aren't currently tribal. Tribalism is when you are incapable of rationally seeing the quality of other parties. And for me, that extends to a party like the Republicans in the USA, which I really couldn't ever imagine voting for. Quite apart from their bizarre foray into Trump's shrunken, blinkered, self-absorption, they are properly batty on a number of issues. And yet there is a worth in some of what they say. If I lived in the USA I would be voting Democrat at every single election, bar none. Not because I'm tribally Democrat, but because I see them as the last, imperfect, hope for US democracy. That's a product of the system as much as of the parties. I suspect some of that plays into your permanent support for Labour, since there are other leftist parties available. Just none with any current prospects for power in England.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Evil is thankfully in short supply in mainstream politics here but I'd flirt with that descriptor for some of what's going on with the Trump MAGA movement in the US.
As for being "tribal" I vote only one way (Labour or at a push tactically to beat a Con) but I'd reject the label because it implies unthinkingness and I do think about why I'm Labour. It's because they are our party of the Left and my politics is Left. Why am I on the Left? Because of just one thing - that by my reading of the world the single biggest determinant (by miles) of a person's material life outcome is the pure dumb luck (from their perspective) of their birth circumstances. Where they are born and to whom. I actually don't know why this bugs me so much but it does and always has.
Therefore for me one the highest priorities of government should be to do things which significantly reduce that link. Not eradicate it - impossible outside of a dystopia - but significantly reduce it. You have to really act against the grain in order to do this because so many powerful forces push the other way. So it's very difficult. Far easier to pay lip service to "fairer society" and carry on doing not the slightest thing to make serious progress towards it.
The political Right haven't the remotest interest in this. The big tell that they aren't is they don't even engage with it. Note how when the dreaded word 'equality' crops up what they do like Pavlov's dog is roll out the trite faux-profundity of "I believe in equality of opportunity not of outcome" (as if this is a natural juxta and the 2 things can be intellectually separated) possibly followed by some reference to "grammar schools". So that closes off the Right for me. They don't care about what I care about the most.
To avoid being tribal you need to ask yourself at each election which party is best suited to achieving your desired goals. From the above it sounds like you assume it is automatically Labour, in which case the tribal label is correct.
Also, you were saying last night that you're guided by what the politicians you most respect tell you. Such that if the politicians you most respect started advocating positions which wouldn't actually bring about the outcome you desire, you'd probably still vote for them, assuming they must be right. Of course, I didn't really believe you about that last night. But I'd say that's quite a tribal approach - albeit less tribal than 'the other lot are all evil'.
Off topic, and I usually don’t wade into COVID topics, one of the things that is becoming increasingly obvious is just how much of an effective hit job the US Pharma companies - and Pfizer in particular - did on AstraZeneca when it came to the vaccines. And of course aided by the US Government.
I always take quite a cynical view on these things. If you are Pfizer, which (I think) is guiding to an extra $36bn of vaccine sales in 2021 alone, why would you NOT try and knock AZ out of the game - it’s a much cheaper vaccine and easier to store and, while less efficient, does most of what was asked of it.
And, of course, leveraging their relationships with the US political / regulatory authorities. The FDA has still not approved Astra Zeneca citing that the data used in its large scale trial was faulty, an argument undermined slightly by (a) the AZ vaccine has been used for approaching 18 months and so we have what should be a very effective trial anyway and (b) the FDA allowed the emergency use of the J & J vaccine which has far more health issues.
The end result is a very nice pay-cheque for Pfizer (and Moderna), which will last for years to come. The only problem is that in raising questions about the AZ vaccine (helped by idiots such as Macron and Merkel), how many lives have been lost, particularly in poorer countries who have been out off using AZ because it is seen as a lesser vaccine?
Nothing will be done of course but, if anyone is thinking of writing a book on COVID, it might not be a bad topic to explore…
The document is nearly all conjecture, more of the infamous modelling, and opinion polling garbage, so I've cut it down to size and present the relevant excerpts, as follows:
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not (see Annex A).
.......
Annex A – preliminary DfE analysis on the use of face coverings in secondary schools
This analysis is based on available data from schools reporting. It is preliminary, experimental analysis, which would benefit from robust external peer review to a longer timescale.
Results
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.6% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on 1 October 2021 to 3.0% in the 3rd week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2–3-week period.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
In summary:
*The mask effect supposedly detected was minuscule *The correlation between mask use and school absence (at -0.202, as shown in the methodology section of the document) is very low *The result was, in any case, statistically insignificant, i.e. there's no particular reason to suppose that the correlation hadn't occurred by chance
Moreover, the data were gathered back in October, before the emergence of the much more contagious Omicron variant, which now predominates. In the absence of a properly conducted assessment to the contrary, it therefore seems reasonable to assume that masks in schools are completely useless.
A question for @ydoethur. Reading the above, it appears to have been written by the sort of people who go to university, stay as long as they can because that’s all they want to, or are able to, do, produce poor research theses, and are then kicked out to attempt to make their way in the world. Is that who the DfE recruit?
On another theme, I don’t see the point of masks in class when the students are maskless and not socially distancing outwith class. Do you feel safer when they are wearing masks?
In answer to the first, good question. AIUI the DfE like the rest of the Civil Service recruits centrally, but as the DfE is usually seen as a bit of a dead end department, unlike, say, the Treasury it tends to attract the dross who were still available when interviewed six months after applying on account of being unemployable elsewhere. But I do not know.
In answer to your second question, I actually feel if anything less safe when they are wearing masks because they tend to feel free to come and stand much closer to me. But truthfully, I am not particularly alarmed on a personal level by Covid. I haven't AFAICP had it yet, and I am fully vaccinated. If I get it, I get it. What I find very much more difficult to deal with, as other deaf teachers have been saying, is that masks make it impossible to do my job. To the extent the school have offered to put me on indefinite sick leave until they are removed, although I haven't taken them up on that offer. If they are kept in place more than another couple of weeks...
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Evil is thankfully in short supply in mainstream politics here but I'd flirt with that descriptor for some of what's going on with the Trump MAGA movement in the US.
As for being "tribal" I vote only one way (Labour or at a push tactically to beat a Con) but I'd reject the label because it implies unthinkingness and I do think about why I'm Labour. It's because they are our party of the Left and my politics is Left. Why am I on the Left? Because of just one thing - that by my reading of the world the single biggest determinant (by miles) of a person's material life outcome is the pure dumb luck (from their perspective) of their birth circumstances. Where they are born and to whom. I actually don't know why this bugs me so much but it does and always has.
Therefore for me one the highest priorities of government should be to do things which significantly reduce that link. Not eradicate it - impossible outside of a dystopia - but significantly reduce it. You have to really act against the grain in order to do this because so many powerful forces push the other way. So it's very difficult. Far easier to pay lip service to "fairer society" and carry on doing not the slightest thing to make serious progress towards it.
The political Right haven't the remotest interest in this. The big tell that they aren't is they don't even engage with it. Note how when the dreaded word 'equality' crops up what they do like Pavlov's dog is roll out the trite faux-profundity of "I believe in equality of opportunity not of outcome" (as if this is a natural juxta and the 2 things can be intellectually separated) possibly followed by some reference to "grammar schools". So that closes off the Right for me. They don't care about what I care about the most.
To avoid being tribal you need to ask yourself at each election which party is best suited to achieving your desired goals. From the above it sounds like you assume it is automatically Labour, in which case the tribal label is correct.
I always take the candidate into account, and, tribalism ahoy, the one who has the best chance of beating the Tory. To be fair, I have rarely lived in anywhere that wasn't a safe Tory seat, at whatever level. Bob Spink's defeat in Castle Point in 1997 was a rare moment of joy, electorally speaking.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Evil is thankfully in short supply in mainstream politics here but I'd flirt with that descriptor for some of what's going on with the Trump MAGA movement in the US.
As for being "tribal" I vote only one way (Labour or at a push tactically to beat a Con) but I'd reject the label because it implies unthinkingness and I do think about why I'm Labour. It's because they are our party of the Left and my politics is Left. Why am I on the Left? Because of just one thing - that by my reading of the world the single biggest determinant (by miles) of a person's material life outcome is the pure dumb luck (from their perspective) of their birth circumstances. Where they are born and to whom. I actually don't know why this bugs me so much but it does and always has.
Therefore for me one the highest priorities of government should be to do things which significantly reduce that link. Not eradicate it - impossible outside of a dystopia - but significantly reduce it. You have to really act against the grain in order to do this because so many powerful forces push the other way. So it's very difficult. Far easier to pay lip service to "fairer society" and carry on doing not the slightest thing to make serious progress towards it.
The political Right haven't the remotest interest in this. The big tell that they aren't is they don't even engage with it. Note how when the dreaded word 'equality' crops up what they do like Pavlov's dog is roll out the trite faux-profundity of "I believe in equality of opportunity not of outcome" (as if this is a natural juxta and the 2 things can be intellectually separated) possibly followed by some reference to "grammar schools". So that closes off the Right for me. They don't care about what I care about the most.
To avoid being tribal you need to ask yourself at each election which party is best suited to achieving your desired goals. From the above it sounds like you assume it is automatically Labour, in which case the tribal label is correct.
No, it's not automatic. I keep an eye on Labour's rhetoric and policies cf other parties.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Had thought about that. Would need o e of those trays with doors, so the litter doesn't get wet, and I don't much fancy spinning up there repeatedly to clear it out or change the litter. But as I now seem to face the prospect of shinning up there repeatedly every day or two anyway to clean it all up... Honestly, I don't have any better ideas.
Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
Rayner's not from Brum though. Your confusing he with Jess Philips. Rayner's from Stockport.
Apols, my bad, yes I am. Philips is the fake WWC girl, Rayner is the real deal. A single mum at 16
Rayner has a really impressive backstory, having fought through all that to be where she is
She's also - and this shouldn't matter, but it does - easy on the eye.
And she knows it, and uses it
A hint of Thatcher, perhaps
Except Thatcher made it from provincial Lincolnshire to Oxford, a career as a chemist and a tax barrister before becoming an MP.
Rayner did not even do A Levels nor did she have a career of much note before becoming MP. Yes she had a tough backstory but so did many other people
Her father was a prosperous local businessman and pillar of the community - Alderman Roberts, I believe he was known as. So she had a teeny, weeny leg up.
Did he not run the corner shop in Coronation Street as well
Fun fact, Bryan Mosley who played Alf Roberts also played the overweight businessman who Michael Caine chucked off a multi storey car park.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Had thought about that. Would need o e of those trays with doors, so the litter doesn't get wet, and I don't much fancy spinning up there repeatedly to clear it out or change the litter. But as I now seem to face the prospect of shinning up there repeatedly every day or two anyway to clean it all up... Honestly, I don't have any better ideas.
Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
- “I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others.”
That’s exactly the situation I find myself in regarding the Swedish GE in September. I left my old party 3 years ago, and since then just can’t decide who to vote for. Swithering between 4 or 5 parties at the moment. (And I’ll almost certainly be voting differently in the national, regional and local elections, which are all held on the same day.)
If Scotland was a normal country I’d probably be the same there too (my parents and sister have voted for several different parties, with my mum holding the record having supported everyone at some point). But Scotland is not a normal country yet, and until she is I can only vote for independence-supporting candidates/parties.
Do you find it easier to be less partisan about politics in your adopted country? That's what I found when I lived in Forrin Parts. I got to vote in local elections and it was really fun to explore with fresh eyes the opportunities. No preconceptions about the characters involved, too.
I've never lives in forrin parts, but I do remember the experience of reading the newspapers in Canada and thinking - why are you all getting so heated about this? It's pleasant to be able to be above the fray in that way, and makes you realise how daftly tribal your own country's arguments also are.
The funniest is people HERE getting all mad about the domestic politics of another country. Like it really matters to our lives that Trudeau won that election! Fairly inconsequential in the big picture, unless you actually live there.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Had thought about that. Would need o e of those trays with doors, so the litter doesn't get wet, and I don't much fancy spinning up there repeatedly to clear it out or change the litter. But as I now seem to face the prospect of shinning up there repeatedly every day or two anyway to clean it all up... Honestly, I don't have any better ideas.
Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Evil is thankfully in short supply in mainstream politics here but I'd flirt with that descriptor for some of what's going on with the Trump MAGA movement in the US.
As for being "tribal" I vote only one way (Labour or at a push tactically to beat a Con) but I'd reject the label because it implies unthinkingness and I do think about why I'm Labour. It's because they are our party of the Left and my politics is Left. Why am I on the Left? Because of just one thing - that by my reading of the world the single biggest determinant (by miles) of a person's material life outcome is the pure dumb luck (from their perspective) of their birth circumstances. Where they are born and to whom. I actually don't know why this bugs me so much but it does and always has.
Therefore for me one the highest priorities of government should be to do things which significantly reduce that link. Not eradicate it - impossible outside of a dystopia - but significantly reduce it. You have to really act against the grain in order to do this because so many powerful forces push the other way. So it's very difficult. Far easier to pay lip service to "fairer society" and carry on doing not the slightest thing to make serious progress towards it.
The political Right haven't the remotest interest in this. The big tell that they aren't is they don't even engage with it. Note how when the dreaded word 'equality' crops up what they do like Pavlov's dog is roll out the trite faux-profundity of "I believe in equality of opportunity not of outcome" (as if this is a natural juxta and the 2 things can be intellectually separated) possibly followed by some reference to "grammar schools". So that closes off the Right for me. They don't care about what I care about the most.
To avoid being tribal you need to ask yourself at each election which party is best suited to achieving your desired goals. From the above it sounds like you assume it is automatically Labour, in which case the tribal label is correct.
No, it's not automatic. I keep an eye on Labour's rhetoric and policies cf other parties.
I'm not going to lie, I am tribal about politics. It's not something I am proud about but I don't think it's something that's going to change and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I think it is possible to still analyse politics somewhat objectively as long as you are aware of your own biases and try to correct for them.
I'd make Rayner favourite right now (but not a huge fave). She is there, she shows talent, she has confidence, she is different
Are you advocating a selection policy based solely on identity?
lol, Yeah
After this succession of inept posh or posh-ish Tories, Cameron, May, Boris, absolutely why not a working class girl from Brum? She's got a sense of humour, she has a bit of sass. She needs to learn some debating skills, judging by PMQs; she is too genial, she needs to employ ruthlessness, but in desperation I might vote for her, if it came to it
She’s from very obviously from Greater Manchester, not Birmingham!
Yes, I apologised earlier
But that said, who cares. Birmingham, Glasgow, Sunderland, Swindon, Plymouth, they're all up north and they're all toilets, whence it is frankly amazing people emerge vaguely literate
Hold on. Weren't your formative years spent in that Northern shithole known to map makers as rural Herefordshire?
I'm pretty sure you were drinking a toast to a return to your roots in the Marches just before xmas.
The trouble is, once you move to London, you go native. Anything north of Epping Forest or west of Heathrow is THE NORTH. Portsmouth is also THE NORTH, it being clearly south of Richmond Park.
You're no Londoner.
London extends northwards to furthest reaches of Hampstead Heath, but does not include Hampstead Garden Suburb or Golders Green.
It's bounded in the South by the Thames, except for a small cut out for the Oval.
In the West, the boundary runs close to the Thames, and very definitely ends at Kew.
To the East, one leaves London somewhere between Aldgate East and Whitchapel tubes.
Only South London is proper London. The stuff north of the river is just for tourists and poshos.
Nah… London was founded on the North bank… Southwark just where they used to go to do the stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in town
Could be worse.
Gosport (which, as my hometown, is a place I love) is largely there for the stuff that couldn't or wouldn't be done in Portsmouth.
I whisper this quietly: I actually quite like Gosport. I lived nearby ten years ago, and we got married on HMS Warrior across the water in Portsmouth, so I got to know the area very well. Gosport felt like an area that was really in flux, and I wondered if it might end up more prosperous than Portsmouth. It's a fascinating place full of history, dereliction and promise.
When I worked at the ONS, some used to refer to it as Gospit, which I think is probably a bit harsh.
Second largest built-up area without a railway station:
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Had thought about that. Would need o e of those trays with doors, so the litter doesn't get wet, and I don't much fancy spinning up there repeatedly to clear it out or change the litter. But as I now seem to face the prospect of shinning up there repeatedly every day or two anyway to clean it all up... Honestly, I don't have any better ideas.
Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
- “I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others.”
That’s exactly the situation I find myself in regarding the Swedish GE in September. I left my old party 3 years ago, and since then just can’t decide who to vote for. Swithering between 4 or 5 parties at the moment. (And I’ll almost certainly be voting differently in the national, regional and local elections, which are all held on the same day.)
If Scotland was a normal country I’d probably be the same there too (my parents and sister have voted for several different parties, with my mum holding the record having supported everyone at some point). But Scotland is not a normal country yet, and until she is I can only vote for independence-supporting candidates/parties.
Do you find it easier to be less partisan about politics in your adopted country? That's what I found when I lived in Forrin Parts. I got to vote in local elections and it was really fun to explore with fresh eyes the opportunities. No preconceptions about the characters involved, too.
Yes. But it greatly helps that very few Swedish politicians are arseholes. I like and respect lots of them. And as Nick Palmer ex-MP points out: the media is crucially important. Swedish journalists see themselves as journalists and are proud of that fact. They are not entertainers. That attitude permeates public life.
But if Sweden was governed from Berlin, I would only be able to support candidates campaigning to bring democracy home.
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Evil is thankfully in short supply in mainstream politics here but I'd flirt with that descriptor for some of what's going on with the Trump MAGA movement in the US.
As for being "tribal" I vote only one way (Labour or at a push tactically to beat a Con) but I'd reject the label because it implies unthinkingness and I do think about why I'm Labour. It's because they are our party of the Left and my politics is Left. Why am I on the Left? Because of just one thing - that by my reading of the world the single biggest determinant (by miles) of a person's material life outcome is the pure dumb luck (from their perspective) of their birth circumstances. Where they are born and to whom. I actually don't know why this bugs me so much but it does and always has.
Therefore for me one the highest priorities of government should be to do things which significantly reduce that link. Not eradicate it - impossible outside of a dystopia - but significantly reduce it. You have to really act against the grain in order to do this because so many powerful forces push the other way. So it's very difficult. Far easier to pay lip service to "fairer society" and carry on doing not the slightest thing to make serious progress towards it.
The political Right haven't the remotest interest in this. The big tell that they aren't is they don't even engage with it. Note how when the dreaded word 'equality' crops up what they do like Pavlov's dog is roll out the trite faux-profundity of "I believe in equality of opportunity not of outcome" (as if this is a natural juxta and the 2 things can be intellectually separated) possibly followed by some reference to "grammar schools". So that closes off the Right for me. They don't care about what I care about the most.
To avoid being tribal you need to ask yourself at each election which party is best suited to achieving your desired goals. From the above it sounds like you assume it is automatically Labour, in which case the tribal label is correct.
Also, you were saying last night that you're guided by what the politicians you most respect tell you. Such that if the politicians you most respect started advocating positions which wouldn't actually bring about the outcome you desire, you'd probably still vote for them, assuming they must be right. Of course, I didn't really believe you about that last night. But I'd say that's quite a tribal approach - albeit less tribal than 'the other lot are all evil'.
The test is whether you are happy to criticise your own side when they clearly deserve it, rather than defend them behind the point of crazy like some zealot from the east
Prejudice reporting for education. On the face of it, this seems like insanity and madness. Prejudice is a human emotion. Like jealousy, it is not in itself a bad thing. The significance of it is how it affects your actions. Education can only guide you in trying to manage your emotions.
Trying to remove prejudice, like hate or jealousy is trying to re-engineer the human heart. It is a totalitarian project. It is no suprise that this is at the heart of our education system. 12 years of conservative government have done nothing to stop this type of thinking or action, which seems to be supported by our institutions.
I am not trying to make this about politics, but this is why educated people vote for Trump or Zemmour. It is for a human future, however flawed; against the nightmare of extreme progressivism. Perhaps we have had our revolt, with Brexit; and it has simply failed to change anything.
That's interesting, partly because I don't understand it all. I agree that we all have prejudices, which I'd define as having opinions about other groups that we can't justify and rationally we suspect are actually groundless. I vaguely suspect that many people in Papua New Guinea are quite primitive, but I recognise that's because I know nothing about PNG except that they used to have cannibals. But prejudice seems to me an unmitigated bad thing, though I agree that it's not actually harmful unless we guide our actions by them (if I had to influence PNG policy I'd take the trouble to understand the place properly). Similarly, jealousy is surely usually understood to mean an unreasonable suspicion of a partner. If they run off with someone, it's natural to feel aggrieved, but is that jealousy?
But you're onto something about revolts. There was a notable drop in anti-immgration polling after Brexit, which is presumably because people felt something was being done to get it under control (possibly that will have changed lately). Some revolts that don't seem to change much lead to demands for bigger revolts (cf. French and Russian revolutions), but shrugging and giving up is a normal human response too.
On Trump, the proportion of highly-educated people who support him is quite low (don't know about Zemmour), and that perhaps reflects the tendency of higher education to weight rational analysis more highly than emotional instinct (and perhaps prejudice). I feel suspicious of myself when I react emotionally to some political development, and that maybe reflects my academic background - you'd just feel silly if you wrote a PhD thesis governed by your gut feelings.
You are overthinking this. Prejudice is a consequence of the limitations of human knowledge. People who are supposedly extremely intelligent and worldly are as susceptible as anyone to prejudice, because there is only so much you can know, and as humans we are driven primarily by instinct not reason. You can see this all the time with 'experts' on twitter descending in to nonsensical tirades against the outgroup, be this Brexitteers, Trump voters, anti-vaxxers etc. It is also much in evidence on PB; even though some people admirably wrestle with and fight these instincts (I would include you in this group) they always eventually seep out.
I don't know the stats about Trump either, but my understanding was that traditionally a high proportion of Republican voters are college graduates (although this is declining as recent graduates are more likely to vote democrat). Zemmour is an intellectual phenomenon (see the film of his recent trip to London, for instance) and his downfall is likely to be his inability to connect with the unwashed masses. But my broader point was that people like myself could vote for something superficially abhorrent like Trump, because they see it as the less harmful of two forms of madness.
Thanks for the response. I looked up Trump support among voters with 4 years of college just now, and Biden did have a large advantage in that group - 57-42 among white voters (vs 33-65 among white voters without 4 years of college) and 69-30 among Latino college grads vs 55-41 for non-grads.
I wonder if "we must stop X" negative voting has become more common across the West generally in recent years - Trump, Corbyn, and le Pen all generated considerable coalitions of people determined to stop them, and Zemmour seems likely to do the same if he does reach the second round.
It's pretty unhealthy for democracy if we mostly choose the lesser evil, but that perhaps reflects the fact that problems are especially difficult nowadays (globalisation is a significant driver, as people elect one country's leaders, who then find themselves unable to change the landscape much), as well as the way that the media have found that highlighting a controversial person is a good way to sell papers and get viewers. So people like Trump get disproportionate airtime because they're interestingly awful, while someone like Starmer who merely exudes competence without saying anything very striking struggles to get a hearing at all.
Two things: in the examples of voting against the "greater of two evils" you give, they all had more than one bite at the cherry. That weakens the evidence for the effect you're looking for, that people are voting negatively. I think.
Secondly, the "lesser of two evils" is less a failure of our democracies and more a failure of the way we talk about politicians. This is related to your point about interesting idiots (Trump) hogging airtime but separate: we are stuck in a rut of being focused on the worst aspects of politicians. For example, I can list a lot of flaws that I think disqualify Boris Johnson from ever being in contention for my votes, but is he evil? No. When you stop and think about it we have several parties who are made of good people doing honest work to the best of their abilities. I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others. But I feel often like I'm in the weirdo minority in that respect. Why is everyone else so tribal? It isn't, I assure you, because any of these parties are objectively evil. The ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
- “I can see myself at some point in the future voting for Conservative, Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Green, and possibly several others.”
That’s exactly the situation I find myself in regarding the Swedish GE in September. I left my old party 3 years ago, and since then just can’t decide who to vote for. Swithering between 4 or 5 parties at the moment. (And I’ll almost certainly be voting differently in the national, regional and local elections, which are all held on the same day.)
If Scotland was a normal country I’d probably be the same there too (my parents and sister have voted for several different parties, with my mum holding the record having supported everyone at some point). But Scotland is not a normal country yet, and until she is I can only vote for independence-supporting candidates/parties.
Do you find it easier to be less partisan about politics in your adopted country? That's what I found when I lived in Forrin Parts. I got to vote in local elections and it was really fun to explore with fresh eyes the opportunities. No preconceptions about the characters involved, too.
Yes. But it greatly helps that very few Swedish politicians are arseholes. I like and respect lots of them. And as Nick Palmer ex-MP points out: the media is crucially important. Swedish journalists see themselves as journalists and are proud of that fact. They are not entertainers. That attitude permeates public life.
But if Sweden was governed from Berlin, I would only be able to support candidates campaigning to bring democracy home.
Give it ten years.
Edit - just to be clear, I do intend that semi-ironically, but it did strike me how every argument for staying in the EU could apply to Scotland staying in the UK as well.
Good news: cats have finally deduced they have the option to defecate outside, rather than use the litter tray (often coming in specifically for the purpose, then going back out). Bad news: the place they've identified as the cat toilet is a tarpaulin sitting on our flat roof above a skylight pending a roofer coming to get it fixed. Just got the ladders out to get up there and clean up ten bags of cat shit. In all honesty, 'cats' might be doing two of them a disservice - I have my suspicions which one it was. Honestly, what is it about that that looks or smells like a litter tray? You can't even attempt to bury it.
Can you not move the litter tray outside (or onto the roof)?
Had thought about that. Would need o e of those trays with doors, so the litter doesn't get wet, and I don't much fancy spinning up there repeatedly to clear it out or change the litter. But as I now seem to face the prospect of shinning up there repeatedly every day or two anyway to clean it all up... Honestly, I don't have any better ideas.
Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?
Comments
As a contented Sarf Londoner I am nevertheless very happy spending time in North, East and West London too.
Around here though there is a big divide between my (and OLB’s) SE London and the alternative universe the other side of Blackheath as recently illustrated in the Bexley & Sidcup by-election.
Cameron won graduates here too in 2015, the last Tory leader to do so.
If Pecresse rather than Zemmour or Le Pen was Macron's runoff opponent equally I would expect a lot of graduates to vote for her
I don’t believe PB is representative of the Labour Party…
South London is what it is: a vibrant overspill of Kent. Fun to go to for a visit from time to time, but never the beating heart of London itself
😆
Yet again PB serving the nation. 11 tips.
“ The ground at Sandown will presumably be pretty heavy for the hurdlers but not too bad for the chasers. “. Or at least heavy in places. That’s what they are saying, that’s the basis I worked on looking at Horse History. So I actually switched away from hurdles to some chases today to find a horse. “Not the worse punting card” card you ever seen? Nothing stood out for me, giving it the big confident yawn like CHB’s avatar.
Anyway, you got me all day on this laptop. You lucky peeblets (to coin a phrase) I’ll try and keep abreast of these tips out there.
Weathers rubbish here. My brother is driving me back to London tomorrow. Holiday over ☹️ I have vacated the barn and surrendered the keys. (odd barn building, nothing anywhere near it. It’s my dads escape haven of peace and quiet when he says “down old barn doing it up for Air bnb love”) My girlfriend drove back to London Monday, I stayed on more partying 🥳 I texted are you back safe yet and it came back in capitals FLAT STILL SMELLING OF YOUR VOMIT HAD TO OPEN EVERY WINDOW.
Libdems winning Shropshire seems so long ago now. 🤑
It’s all a bit after the party this week? I went on walks with a sketch book. I searched out some of my old paintings in the lofts was interesting in with time passage and I didn’t remember them, I was like wow it’s better than I thought but also very different to what I do now. 🤔 I’m taking some back I need to improve portraiture now there’s a 14 yr old girl painting portraits better than I’ll ever be. Not that I’m competitive, but she is making subject look so jolly, would it be realistic if she made whistlers mum look so cheerful?
Like I said, not that I’m Competitive, Whatever you are on today, best of luck PBers.
On another theme, I don’t see the point of masks in class when the students are maskless and not socially distancing outwith class. Do you feel safer when they are wearing masks?
Mind bleach!
(Why am I suddenly thinking about Wayne Rooney?)
I reckon that's not a bad test for real equality, although of course it's cultural, and change is gradual. I'm not sure if campaigning by Stonewall, or anybody else, can accelerate the pace of cultural change.
Just not with @pigeon’s view that it was “reasonable to assume” (not “reasonable to claim” as he later asserted) that masks were useless
Second largest built-up area without a railway station:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_towns_in_England_without_a_railway_station#Built-up_area_subdivisions
The trouble is the Pond area (a clue there) can get very deep and that impacts both courses.
If the rain gets heavier, it'll be a serious slog for the veterans at 3pm though I think they've reduced the distance of the race from 3 miles 5 furlongs to 3 miles.
I wonder who might be able to campaign to rectify that problem...?
(NARRATOR: He wasn't just thinking of things like munitions depots and hospitals. He is still a bit traumatised by a map of 18th century Gosport he found at the library when doing some extra geeky research for a school local history project.) And transport is the big challenge for the whole area. It's all distant enough (and the trains are slow enough) that it doesn't really look to London in the way that Winchester of Guildford do. And Gosport, being a ferry trip or long drive away from Portsmouth, is more insular than its neighbours. Fun though the ferry is, it's a shame the under-harbour tram got canned.
Prof. Christina Pagel
@chrischirp
·
51m
I disagree strongly with jcvi on their hesitation to offer covid vaccine to children, but I do agree that the evidence for a 4th Vax dose for adults is not there.
@UKHSA
vaccine effectiveness studies have been outstanding in their speed and thoroughness.
Like Richmond.
The veterans series 🙂 gave me images of unreconstructed old cowboys in buffalo bills Wild West show.
The continuous culture of fear which masking engenders is no small part of this.
Something else that is dying out: rooves as the plural of roof. I blame the masked teachers.
Best of luck to her, and to them. Probably turn out to be no more than a dodgy day or two, like me, or a persistent cough, like my wife.
Took quite a long time to finally shake off, though! Get up and go didn't come back for a while, on reflection!
It’s a bit like Cold War fear of nukes. I remember that, in the background, growing up in the 80s and I think it was even sharper for my parents’ generation. That background hum of unease about the fact Armageddon could be just around the corner at any moment.
But @DecrepiterJohnL 's suggestion is valid. It MIGHT be foxes. I have no proof it's the cats, and there's a surprisingly large volume of it.
Don’t know if this helps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFnS18LM8Ws
My Dad grew up in Gosport, and some of his family still lurk there. I lived in Gosport myself in 1993/4, though my parents refused to school me locally and I had to take a bus to Fareham.
It’s so remote I’m always amused that anyone’s even heard of it, let alone can reference “Priddy’s Hard”!
Mind you we did get all sorts of wildlife in that garden. If we hadn't moved as part of the retirement plan I might have tried to deal a deal with the BBC. We had badgers and all sorts of birds as well as the foxes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXezLv_5RaY
That’s exactly the situation I find myself in regarding the Swedish GE in September. I left my old party 3 years ago, and since then just can’t decide who to vote for. Swithering between 4 or 5 parties at the moment. (And I’ll almost certainly be voting differently in the national, regional and local elections, which are all held on the same day.)
If Scotland was a normal country I’d probably be the same there too (my parents and sister have voted for several different parties, with my mum holding the record having supported everyone at some point). But Scotland is not a normal country yet, and until she is I can only vote for independence-supporting candidates/parties.
‘You’re a big man but you’re in bad shape..’
None first order probabilities. In the absence of Burnham, or Starmer becoming PM, it will end up being a woman almost by default.
Only once seen a fox, and my wife has seen a weasel.
You can see foxes most nights around here.
Obviously I'm excluding undemocratic countries here. Evil rises easier when the consent of the people is not a determinant.
As for being "tribal" I vote only one way (Labour or at a push tactically to beat a Con) but I'd reject the label because it implies unthinkingness and I do think about why I'm Labour. It's because they are our party of the Left and my politics is Left. Why am I on the Left? Because of just one thing - that by my reading of the world the single biggest determinant (by miles) of a person's material life outcome is the pure dumb luck (from their perspective) of their birth circumstances. Where they are born and to whom. I actually don't know why this bugs me so much but it does and always has.
Therefore for me one the highest priorities of government should be to do things which significantly reduce that link. Not eradicate it - impossible outside of a dystopia - but significantly reduce it. You have to really act against the grain in order to do this because so many powerful forces push the other way. So it's very difficult. Far easier to pay lip service to "fairer society" and carry on doing not the slightest thing to make serious progress towards it.
The political Right haven't the remotest interest in this. The big tell that they aren't is they don't even engage with it. Note how when the dreaded word 'equality' crops up what they do like Pavlov's dog is roll out the trite faux-profundity of "I believe in equality of opportunity not of outcome" (as if this is a natural juxta and the 2 things can be intellectually separated) possibly followed by some reference to "grammar schools". So that closes off the Right for me. They don't care about what I care about the most.
The badgers at our former home were a constant source of interest.
Personally I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If you disagree, feel free to teach my lessons.
On the flip side, having changed your vote in the past is not evidence that you aren't currently tribal. Tribalism is when you are incapable of rationally seeing the quality of other parties. And for me, that extends to a party like the Republicans in the USA, which I really couldn't ever imagine voting for. Quite apart from their bizarre foray into Trump's shrunken, blinkered, self-absorption, they are properly batty on a number of issues. And yet there is a worth in some of what they say. If I lived in the USA I would be voting Democrat at every single election, bar none. Not because I'm tribally Democrat, but because I see them as the last, imperfect, hope for US democracy. That's a product of the system as much as of the parties. I suspect some of that plays into your permanent support for Labour, since there are other leftist parties available. Just none with any current prospects for power in England.
Of course, I didn't really believe you about that last night. But I'd say that's quite a tribal approach - albeit less tribal than 'the other lot are all evil'.
I always take quite a cynical view on these things. If you are Pfizer, which (I think) is guiding to an extra $36bn of vaccine sales in 2021 alone, why would you NOT try and knock AZ out of the game - it’s a much cheaper vaccine and easier to store and, while less efficient, does most of what was asked of it.
And, of course, leveraging their relationships with the US political / regulatory authorities. The FDA has still not approved Astra Zeneca citing that the data used in its large scale trial was faulty, an argument undermined slightly by (a) the AZ vaccine has been used for approaching 18 months and so we have what should be a very effective trial anyway and (b) the FDA allowed the emergency use of the J & J vaccine which has far more health issues.
The end result is a very nice pay-cheque for Pfizer (and Moderna), which will last for years to come. The only problem is that in raising questions about the AZ vaccine (helped by idiots such as Macron and Merkel), how many lives have been lost, particularly in poorer countries who have been out off using AZ because it is seen as a lesser vaccine?
Nothing will be done of course but, if anyone is thinking of writing a book on COVID, it might not be a bad topic to explore…
In answer to your second question, I actually feel if anything less safe when they are wearing masks because they tend to feel free to come and stand much closer to me. But truthfully, I am not particularly alarmed on a personal level by Covid. I haven't AFAICP had it yet, and I am fully vaccinated. If I get it, I get it. What I find very much more difficult to deal with, as other deaf teachers have been saying, is that masks make it impossible to do my job. To the extent the school have offered to put me on indefinite sick leave until they are removed, although I haven't taken them up on that offer. If they are kept in place more than another couple of weeks...
In the same way that if you are afraid of dying of brain cancer, the best way to be certain you won't is to have your head chopped off.
Another good reason for getting a dog
But if Sweden was governed from Berlin, I would only be able to support candidates campaigning to bring democracy home.
Edit - just to be clear, I do intend that semi-ironically, but it did strike me how every argument for staying in the EU could apply to Scotland staying in the UK as well.
And before Dr Y gets there first, yes we are lurching from one solution to another. 🙂