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Why Burnham shouldn’t be the favourite to succeed Starmer – politicalbetting.com

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  • Farooq said:

    kinabalu said:

    Farooq said:

    darkage said:

    darkage said:

    https://www.prfe.education/

    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.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-supported-trump-likely-lack-college-education-rcna1306

    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.
    Although in the USA there's a lot of split voting.

    Which is why there are GOP governors in Maryland, Mass and Vermont currently with Dem governors in Kansas, Kentucky and Louisiana.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758

    IanB2 said:

    malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:

    Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    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. :disappointed:
    Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?

    Don’t know if this helps

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFnS18LM8Ws
    Dodgy for neighbours if he also migrates to using the flat roof though.
    I don’t like cats.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXezLv_5RaY
    They do make some mess in your garden , they seem to prefer using everyone else's rather than their own.
    Being a non-cat owner surrounded by houses with cats is a terrible fate.

    Another good reason for getting a dog
    That would whippet in the bud.
    That was a truly terrierble effort.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,575
    MrEd said:

    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…

    I think we've discussed it before, and it's an entirely defensible view.
    I'd treat the Pfizer and Moderna opinions on regular future boosters for entire populations (rather than vulnerable individuals) with a similar degree of scepticism.

    The amount of money made by Pfizer during the pandemic is quite extraordinary in both industry and historic terms. That's not to say the vaccines weren't worth it, but anything they say should be viewed with that in mind.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758

    IanB2 said:

    malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:

    Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    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. :disappointed:
    Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?

    Don’t know if this helps

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFnS18LM8Ws
    Dodgy for neighbours if he also migrates to using the flat roof though.
    I don’t like cats.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXezLv_5RaY
    They do make some mess in your garden , they seem to prefer using everyone else's rather than their own.
    Being a non-cat owner surrounded by houses with cats is a terrible fate.

    Another good reason for getting a dog
    That would whippet in the bud.

    And before Dr Y gets there first, yes we are lurching from one solution to another. 🙂
    That edit was a feeble attempt to try and retriever situation that had already gone.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851
    Farooq said:

    kinabalu said:

    Farooq said:

    darkage said:

    darkage said:

    https://www.prfe.education/

    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.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-supported-trump-likely-lack-college-education-rcna1306

    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.
    Yep. Say Starmer takes Labour so far from my ideal that (eg) the Greens become a closer fit. Don't think he will but let's assume he drops every last vestige of "leftism" in a scramble to win. Would I then vote Green in a FPTP GE? Probably not because my vote is also - and perhaps primarily - an anti Con vote. So it's always going to Lab or LD depending on electoral calculus.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415

    *🐎 Green flag at Newcastle

    And Malc wins. 🥳
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,069

    malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:

    Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    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. :disappointed:
    Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?

    Don’t know if this helps

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFnS18LM8Ws
    Dodgy for neighbours if he also migrates to using the flat roof though.
    I don’t like cats.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXezLv_5RaY
    They do make some mess in your garden , they seem to prefer using everyone else's rather than their own.
    Best way to avoid cat shit in your garden is to get a cat. Fact.
    A small hound like mine very enthusiastically clears the garden of foxes and enemy cats, though fairly tolerant of his own cat.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758
    edited January 2022

    *🐎 Green flag at Newcastle

    And Malc wins. 🥳
    Really? I didn't even know he was running!
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,263
    Farooq said:



    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.

    Is that true, though? I think Putin edges into the evil category, but I've little doubt that he was popular when he got in, as "the sensible fellow who'll restore national pride", and Hitler more or less defined evil politicians and came close enough to winning a free election. It would be nice to think that electorates shrink from evil, but I'm not sure they do, if they're frustrated enough. They see politicians through the prism of angry, cynical media, and for many they all look much the same - I've canvassed people who thought Corbyn and Johnson were very similar people, which is just insane.

    What makes democracy superior in dealing with nasty politicians isn't that they are never elected but that you can get rid of the bastards. The autocrats are there until they accumulate too many enemies to kill.
  • kinabalu said:

    Farooq said:

    darkage said:

    darkage said:

    https://www.prfe.education/

    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.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-supported-trump-likely-lack-college-education-rcna1306

    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.
    Equality of opportunity absolutely can be intellectually separated from equality of outcome.

    If your issue is that you object to outcomes being determined by birth circumstances then that is saying there isn't equality of opportunity.

    If we have true equality of opportunity then birth circumstances would cease to be relevant even if outcomes aren't the same.

    That is a profound difference. I have specific examples of things I believe need reforming to further equality of opportunity.

    That you are airily dismissing the importance of equality of opportunity is not furthering your objective of separating birth circumstances from results. That is not a weakness of the right.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146
    Cookie said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    darkage said:

    darkage said:

    https://www.prfe.education/

    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.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-supported-trump-likely-lack-college-education-rcna1306

    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.
    As a Swede, I sometimes raise my eyebrows at you lot getting so animated about relatively minuscule differences between England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It’s odd how very few posters around here raise their eyes to peruse Europe, let alone the world.

    Global Britain is a hollow slogan because almost nobody in the archipelago thinks globally.
  • malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    It must surely be a woman, this time

    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.

    ‘You’re a big man but you’re in bad shape..’
    Was a good film
    Roy Budd's music for it is superb.
    I didn't know this about the soundtrack..

    "The theme (otherwise known as "Carter Takes a Train"), the best-known piece from the film, was played by Budd and the other members of his jazz trio, Jeff Clyne (double bass) and Chris Karan (percussion), and was recorded on a budget of £450. The musicians recorded the soundtrack live, direct to picture, playing along with the film. To save time and money Budd did not use overdubs, simultaneously playing a real harpsichord, a Wurlitzer electric piano and a grand piano. Budd described the experience as "uncomfortable, but it sounded pleasant"."
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,184

    kinabalu said:

    Farooq said:

    darkage said:

    darkage said:

    https://www.prfe.education/

    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.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-supported-trump-likely-lack-college-education-rcna1306

    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.
    You are the mirror image of me! I have generally voted for whoever was best placed to beat Labour, but since I have been of voting age have never not lived in a Labour seat, at any level.
    I say this with some reluctance, as for two GEs the Labour candidate was the excellent NPMP and his Conservative opponent was, er, not exactly to my taste. It was more a case of trying to bring Brownenomics to an end than anything against Nick. I'm sure others can sympathise with the local candidate/national party dilemma
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775
    tlg86 said:

    Charles said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    It must surely be a woman, this time

    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:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_towns_in_England_without_a_railway_station#Built-up_area_subdivisions
    Peterhead has >20,000 people and the nearest train station is ten HOURS walk away. Must be a record for the mainland in the 20,000+ category.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415
    ydoethur said:

    IanB2 said:

    malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:

    Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    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. :disappointed:
    Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?

    Don’t know if this helps

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFnS18LM8Ws
    Dodgy for neighbours if he also migrates to using the flat roof though.
    I don’t like cats.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXezLv_5RaY
    They do make some mess in your garden , they seem to prefer using everyone else's rather than their own.
    Being a non-cat owner surrounded by houses with cats is a terrible fate.

    Another good reason for getting a dog
    That would whippet in the bud.

    And before Dr Y gets there first, yes we are lurching from one solution to another. 🙂
    That edit was a feeble attempt to try and retriever situation that had already gone.
    I’m making an Otterhound of it?
  • Charles said:

    Charles said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    It must surely be a woman, this time

    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
    South London used to be Surrey. South East London used to be Kent. The old boundary is approximately the Southwark/Lewisham border.
  • stodgestodge Posts: 12,745
    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775

    Farooq said:



    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.

    Is that true, though? I think Putin edges into the evil category, but I've little doubt that he was popular when he got in, as "the sensible fellow who'll restore national pride", and Hitler more or less defined evil politicians and came close enough to winning a free election. It would be nice to think that electorates shrink from evil, but I'm not sure they do, if they're frustrated enough. They see politicians through the prism of angry, cynical media, and for many they all look much the same - I've canvassed people who thought Corbyn and Johnson were very similar people, which is just insane.

    What makes democracy superior in dealing with nasty politicians isn't that they are never elected but that you can get rid of the bastards. The autocrats are there until they accumulate too many enemies to kill.
    I thought of Putin, and I do think he's evil, but Russia is emphatically not a democracy. I don't think it has ever been.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199
    On Astra Zeneca it the decision to give the Oxford vaccine to a company with little experience in vaccines may well come to be seen as one of the worst mistakes of the pandemic, from a global point of view. AIUI it AZ weren't their first choice, and they were unfortunately pressured into giving it to AZ by the British government.
  • Oh god. Maajid thinks he's Obi Wan Kenobi.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    Novax's legal team is just digging a bigger hole for him. Someone tell them to stop.

    My Twitter feed is just full of photos and videos of Djokers at events after his purported positive Covid test.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,674

    malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    It must surely be a woman, this time

    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.

    ‘You’re a big man but you’re in bad shape..’
    Was a good film
    Roy Budd's music for it is superb.
    Hard to believe how they dumped all the waste from the colliery straight into the beach/sea.
  • Farooq said:

    Farooq said:



    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.

    Is that true, though? I think Putin edges into the evil category, but I've little doubt that he was popular when he got in, as "the sensible fellow who'll restore national pride", and Hitler more or less defined evil politicians and came close enough to winning a free election. It would be nice to think that electorates shrink from evil, but I'm not sure they do, if they're frustrated enough. They see politicians through the prism of angry, cynical media, and for many they all look much the same - I've canvassed people who thought Corbyn and Johnson were very similar people, which is just insane.

    What makes democracy superior in dealing with nasty politicians isn't that they are never elected but that you can get rid of the bastards. The autocrats are there until they accumulate too many enemies to kill.
    I thought of Putin, and I do think he's evil, but Russia is emphatically not a democracy. I don't think it has ever been.
    https://freedomhouse.org/country/russia/freedom-world/2021

    "Power in Russia’s authoritarian political system is concentrated in the hands of President Vladimir Putin. With loyalist security forces, a subservient judiciary, a controlled media environment, and a legislature consisting of a ruling party and pliable opposition factions, the Kremlin is able to manipulate elections and suppress genuine dissent. Rampant corruption facilitates shifting links among bureaucrats and organized crime groups."
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,718
    edited January 2022
    Cookie said:

    kinabalu said:

    Farooq said:

    darkage said:

    darkage said:

    https://www.prfe.education/

    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.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-supported-trump-likely-lack-college-education-rcna1306

    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.
    You are the mirror image of me! I have generally voted for whoever was best placed to beat Labour, but since I have been of voting age have never not lived in a Labour seat, at any level.
    I say this with some reluctance, as for two GEs the Labour candidate was the excellent NPMP and his Conservative opponent was, er, not exactly to my taste. It was more a case of trying to bring Brownenomics to an end than anything against Nick. I'm sure others can sympathise with the local candidate/national party dilemma
    To expand a little, on several occasions I voted Liberal, being an activist. We always hoped we'd have the best chance of beating the Tory, but it was, TBH, a pretty forlorn hope.
    Bob Spink's Conservative, as opposed to Tory as presently understood, predecessor in Castle Point, Bernard Braine, was someone who could be respected and indeed liked, although not agreed with! When we moved to Braintree, the Labour MP, Alan Hurst was a very pleasant chap indeed; much better as a man that his successor Brooks Newmark.
    Then we were transferred to the Witham constituency! To be fair, I have had some unexpected, and considerable, help from Ms Patel.
  • @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415
    Farooq said:

    stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
    It isn't Trump's prioritisation of America that leads me to put him in the "evil" category. You'd catch far too many people in the net doing that. It's the fact that he's a user, a bigot, a selfish, self-aggrandising fool who breaks little people on the wheel of his narcissism, a corrupt, democracy-threatening arsehole, a self-pitying, whining crybaby, a fat lump of flesh with a cruel streak as wide as the Hudson and a penchant for petty revenge. He has nothing good in his soul.
    I would actually have liked one of your posts for once - but you held back too much 🙂
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,674

    *🐎 Green flag at Newcastle

    And Malc wins. 🥳
    I thought that one would be well odds on , 15/8 is a great price for it
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    kamski said:

    On Astra Zeneca it the decision to give the Oxford vaccine to a company with little experience in vaccines may well come to be seen as one of the worst mistakes of the pandemic, from a global point of view. AIUI it AZ weren't their first choice, and they were unfortunately pressured into giving it to AZ by the British government.

    That is a factor (although the U.K. has other pharma companies) although trying to say that this was a bigger factor than European leaders such as Macron and Merkel trashing the vaccine in public plus the US authorities’ actions is wrong.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    edited January 2022

    Farooq said:

    kinabalu said:

    Farooq said:

    darkage said:

    darkage said:

    https://www.prfe.education/

    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.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-supported-trump-likely-lack-college-education-rcna1306

    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.
    Although in the USA there's a lot of split voting.

    Which is why there are GOP governors in Maryland, Mass and Vermont currently with Dem governors in Kansas, Kentucky and Louisiana.
    Kansas was a fairly unique situatuon basically an internal GOP civil war against Kobach and Kentucky state level Democrats are very much not national level Democrats.

    Dod't know about Louisiana but i wouldn't be suprised if they were like Kentucky.
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    Farooq said:

    stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
    It isn't Trump's prioritisation of America that leads me to put him in the "evil" category. You'd catch far too many people in the net doing that. It's the fact that he's a user, a bigot, a selfish, self-aggrandising fool who breaks little people on the wheel of his narcissism, a corrupt, democracy-threatening arsehole, a self-pitying, whining crybaby, a fat lump of flesh with a cruel streak as wide as the Hudson and a penchant for petty revenge. He has nothing good in his soul.
    “Let he who is without sin…”
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    On Astra Zeneca it the decision to give the Oxford vaccine to a company with little experience in vaccines may well come to be seen as one of the worst mistakes of the pandemic, from a global point of view. AIUI it AZ weren't their first choice, and they were unfortunately pressured into giving it to AZ by the British government.

    That is a factor (although the U.K. has other pharma companies) although trying to say that this was a bigger factor than European leaders such as Macron and Merkel trashing the vaccine in public plus the US authorities’ actions is wrong.
    Quasi-ineffective, anyone?
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,837
    edited January 2022

    @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Good job he's not seeking asylum from a war or political persecution then.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941

    @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Tennis Australia were sent a letter by the government saying that prior infection was not a valid excuse.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2022/01/05/novak-djokovic-refused-entry-australia-visa-cancelled-deported/

    Two letters emerged in which Tennis Australia was told those who had not been vaccinated and had caught the disease in the past six months would not be permitted quarantine-free travel to the country.
  • Alistair said:

    Novax's legal team is just digging a bigger hole for him. Someone tell them to stop.

    My Twitter feed is just full of photos and videos of Djokers at events after his purported positive Covid test.

    Is isolation a requirement in Serbia? Or wherever he was.

    I don't know if it is or isn't, but I've been saying for a while now that a positive test shouldn't require isolation in this country and I fully expect it won't later this year.

    If it doesn't there, then his being at events wouldn't be relevant to anything.
  • stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
    Trump would have won but for his belief that you beat covid with bluster.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Farage firmly aligning himself with Pauline Hanson not Scott Morrison there as he gets closer to the anti vaxxer movement
  • Cookie said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    darkage said:

    darkage said:

    https://www.prfe.education/

    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.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-supported-trump-likely-lack-college-education-rcna1306

    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.
    As a Swede, I sometimes raise my eyebrows at you lot getting so animated about relatively minuscule differences between England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It’s odd how very few posters around here raise their eyes to peruse Europe, let alone the world.

    Global Britain is a hollow slogan because almost nobody in the archipelago thinks globally.
    This from the man who before Christmas was making misleading statements about 'Scandinavia' based purely on his experiences of Sweden.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,069

    @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Indeed. Imagine a rich celebrity sportsman being treated like any other immigration offender...

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jan/07/novak-djokovic-refugees-hope-tennis-stars-hotel-detention-will-cast-light-on-their-torture
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,837
    RobD said:

    @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Tennis Australia were sent a letter by the government saying that prior infection was not a valid excuse.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2022/01/05/novak-djokovic-refused-entry-australia-visa-cancelled-deported/

    Two letters emerged in which Tennis Australia was told those who had not been vaccinated and had caught the disease in the past six months would not be permitted quarantine-free travel to the country.
    Seems like it's Tennis Australia rather than the Federal or State government at fault. They appear prima facie to have put their tournament above the law.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146
    kamski said:

    On Astra Zeneca it the decision to give the Oxford vaccine to a company with little experience in vaccines may well come to be seen as one of the worst mistakes of the pandemic, from a global point of view. AIUI it AZ weren't their first choice, and they were unfortunately pressured into giving it to AZ by the British government.

    Speaking truth to power.

    Incoming…
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,674
    I cannot believe how bad Galloise was there, obviously something wrong. Bang goes my day as that was the main one
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,168

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    It must surely be a woman, this time

    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.
    North of Watford, it's all the same.
    Watford? What nonsense.

    Hendon

    Hatfield and the North.
    Great band.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 9,166

    Charles said:

    Charles said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    It must surely be a woman, this time

    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
    South London used to be Surrey. South East London used to be Kent. The old boundary is approximately the Southwark/Lewisham border.
    And West London used to be Middlesex, North London Herts etc.

    The old Surrey/Kent border goes through my local park, Hilly Fields.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199
    RobD said:

    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    On Astra Zeneca it the decision to give the Oxford vaccine to a company with little experience in vaccines may well come to be seen as one of the worst mistakes of the pandemic, from a global point of view. AIUI it AZ weren't their first choice, and they were unfortunately pressured into giving it to AZ by the British government.

    That is a factor (although the U.K. has other pharma companies) although trying to say that this was a bigger factor than European leaders such as Macron and Merkel trashing the vaccine in public plus the US authorities’ actions is wrong.
    Quasi-ineffective, anyone?
    People here massively overestimate Macron's influence outside of France (and Britain it seems). Hardly anyone in Germany has even heard of Macron's "quasi-ineffective" remarks.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    dixiedean said:

    RobD said:

    @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Tennis Australia were sent a letter by the government saying that prior infection was not a valid excuse.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2022/01/05/novak-djokovic-refused-entry-australia-visa-cancelled-deported/

    Two letters emerged in which Tennis Australia was told those who had not been vaccinated and had caught the disease in the past six months would not be permitted quarantine-free travel to the country.
    Seems like it's Tennis Australia rather than the Federal or State government at fault. They appear prima facie to have put their tournament above the law.
    That's what it looks like. Giving incorrect advice and soliciting visas on the basis of that incorrect advice. Hard to see how he appeals this.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149

    ydoethur said:

    IanB2 said:

    malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:

    Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    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. :disappointed:
    Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?

    Don’t know if this helps

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFnS18LM8Ws
    Dodgy for neighbours if he also migrates to using the flat roof though.
    I don’t like cats.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXezLv_5RaY
    They do make some mess in your garden , they seem to prefer using everyone else's rather than their own.
    Being a non-cat owner surrounded by houses with cats is a terrible fate.

    Another good reason for getting a dog
    That would whippet in the bud.

    And before Dr Y gets there first, yes we are lurching from one solution to another. 🙂
    That edit was a feeble attempt to try and retriever situation that had already gone.
    I’m making an Otterhound of it?
    ONe does need to setter a good example to the local mogs.
  • What's Nige grift here? His Brexit supporter base are older and overwhelming keen on being jabbed whenever required.

    The vocal antivaxxer movement in the UK is thankfully very small.
  • @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Morning Nigel.
    When it's asylum seekers, they're put up in 4 or 5-star luxury hotels.
    When it's Djokovic, the same type of hotel is 'prison conditions'.
    He's a tosser.
    I guess you are referring to Farage? Or Novax? Tosser is too mild a word for either of them.

    I hope we keep Djokovic out of UK for Wimbledon too. He is a disgrace. It is his right to be an anti-science idiot, but it is also the right of countries to say he can stay in Serbia until we are all satisfied such entry requirements are no longer needed.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    kamski said:

    RobD said:

    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    On Astra Zeneca it the decision to give the Oxford vaccine to a company with little experience in vaccines may well come to be seen as one of the worst mistakes of the pandemic, from a global point of view. AIUI it AZ weren't their first choice, and they were unfortunately pressured into giving it to AZ by the British government.

    That is a factor (although the U.K. has other pharma companies) although trying to say that this was a bigger factor than European leaders such as Macron and Merkel trashing the vaccine in public plus the US authorities’ actions is wrong.
    Quasi-ineffective, anyone?
    People here massively overestimate Macron's influence outside of France (and Britain it seems). Hardly anyone in Germany has even heard of Macron's "quasi-ineffective" remarks.
    No, they heard the remarks of that German newspaper from which Macron's remarks were based.
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
    I think you hit the nail on the head here. When Trump’s name is mentioned, the Red Mist appears for many. But he is essentially an America First President. Where I would disagree is that his policy was a failure because there were no tangible results - I actually think it was the lack of international crises (certainly when it came to Russia, North Korea and China) that shows its success. Interestingly, with Russia, they invaded the Crimea when BO was President, did nothing for four years and are now rattling again when Biden is President. Unless you believe the horse shit that Trump was a Russian spy, there is a logical explanation for that.

    However, if we are going to talk about evil / amoral Presidents, the most egregious example certainly post WW2 from a personal actions point of view was JFK - almost certainly a rapist, leveraged off Mafia connections in the 1960 election, treated women generally like shit including Jackie Kennedy etc. Have I missed anything?
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited January 2022
    Amazing convenient timing that old novax got covid and then still out and about when he had it.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146

    Cookie said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    darkage said:

    darkage said:

    https://www.prfe.education/

    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.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-supported-trump-likely-lack-college-education-rcna1306

    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.
    As a Swede, I sometimes raise my eyebrows at you lot getting so animated about relatively minuscule differences between England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It’s odd how very few posters around here raise their eyes to peruse Europe, let alone the world.

    Global Britain is a hollow slogan because almost nobody in the archipelago thinks globally.
    This from the man who before Christmas was making misleading statements about 'Scandinavia' based purely on his experiences of Sweden.
    Very cryptic.

    Care to enlighten us on my immense crime?
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,837

    Alistair said:

    Novax's legal team is just digging a bigger hole for him. Someone tell them to stop.

    My Twitter feed is just full of photos and videos of Djokers at events after his purported positive Covid test.

    Is isolation a requirement in Serbia? Or wherever he was.

    I don't know if it is or isn't, but I've been saying for a while now that a positive test shouldn't require isolation in this country and I fully expect it won't later this year.

    If it doesn't there, then his being at events wouldn't be relevant to anything.
    Yes but. Djokovic is a notorious scofflaw. So whether it was the law or not would be of little relevance. Frankly, his attitude and prior behaviour suggests that he would be unlikely to follow the COVID rules were he permitted into Australia. Which, in itself, would be grounds for visa refusal.
    If he weren't for who he is, the matter wouldn't be even being discussed.
  • MrEd said:

    Farooq said:

    stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
    It isn't Trump's prioritisation of America that leads me to put him in the "evil" category. You'd catch far too many people in the net doing that. It's the fact that he's a user, a bigot, a selfish, self-aggrandising fool who breaks little people on the wheel of his narcissism, a corrupt, democracy-threatening arsehole, a self-pitying, whining crybaby, a fat lump of flesh with a cruel streak as wide as the Hudson and a penchant for petty revenge. He has nothing good in his soul.
    “Let he who is without sin…”
    Aww, let's go to stoning...
  • dixiedean said:

    Alistair said:

    Novax's legal team is just digging a bigger hole for him. Someone tell them to stop.

    My Twitter feed is just full of photos and videos of Djokers at events after his purported positive Covid test.

    Is isolation a requirement in Serbia? Or wherever he was.

    I don't know if it is or isn't, but I've been saying for a while now that a positive test shouldn't require isolation in this country and I fully expect it won't later this year.

    If it doesn't there, then his being at events wouldn't be relevant to anything.
    Yes but. Djokovic is a notorious scofflaw. So whether it was the law or not would be of little relevance. Frankly, his attitude and prior behaviour suggests that he would be unlikely to follow the COVID rules were he permitted into Australia. Which, in itself, would be grounds for visa refusal.
    If he weren't for who he is, the matter wouldn't be even being discussed.
    Probably just went to those magic pyramids to cure him.....
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    What's Nige grift here? His Brexit supporter base are older and overwhelming keen on being jabbed whenever required.

    The vocal antivaxxer movement in the UK is thankfully very small.

    Now Brexit is done, RefUK is shifting to antivaxxers and small state low tax voters as Farage and Tice spot a gap in the market, while still keeping a hardline on immigration
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    LFT still positive on day 8.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    edited January 2022
    kamski said:

    On Astra Zeneca it the decision to give the Oxford vaccine to a company with little experience in vaccines may well come to be seen as one of the worst mistakes of the pandemic, from a global point of view. AIUI it AZ weren't their first choice, and they were unfortunately pressured into giving it to AZ by the British government.

    It's because Merck wouldn't agree to the "at cost" clause that AZ agreed to and wouldn't agree to the distributed third party manufacturing network and preferred to keep the whole manufacturing pipeline in the US. The risk that Trump would block exports was very real, the pressure from the UK government was well founded, given that Trump went on to restrict exports of feed in materials.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415
    Carnyx said:

    ydoethur said:

    IanB2 said:

    malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:

    Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    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. :disappointed:
    Get rid of the cats, use the litter tray yourself?

    Don’t know if this helps

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFnS18LM8Ws
    Dodgy for neighbours if he also migrates to using the flat roof though.
    I don’t like cats.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXezLv_5RaY
    They do make some mess in your garden , they seem to prefer using everyone else's rather than their own.
    Being a non-cat owner surrounded by houses with cats is a terrible fate.

    Another good reason for getting a dog
    That would whippet in the bud.

    And before Dr Y gets there first, yes we are lurching from one solution to another. 🙂
    That edit was a feeble attempt to try and retriever situation that had already gone.
    I’m making an Otterhound of it?
    ONe does need to setter a good example to the local mogs.
    Well it is Mudi out there today
  • I think Australia are more likely to let England score 358 runs tomorrow than to let Novax in on Monday.
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775
    MrEd said:

    stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
    I think you hit the nail on the head here. When Trump’s name is mentioned, the Red Mist appears for many. But he is essentially an America First President. Where I would disagree is that his policy was a failure because there were no tangible results - I actually think it was the lack of international crises (certainly when it came to Russia, North Korea and China) that shows its success. Interestingly, with Russia, they invaded the Crimea when BO was President, did nothing for four years and are now rattling again when Biden is President. Unless you believe the horse shit that Trump was a Russian spy, there is a logical explanation for that.

    However, if we are going to talk about evil / amoral Presidents, the most egregious example certainly post WW2 from a personal actions point of view was JFK - almost certainly a rapist, leveraged off Mafia connections in the 1960 election, treated women generally like shit including Jackie Kennedy etc. Have I missed anything?
    You can say those things without fear of libel. There are allegations of all of the above applying to another recent (and living) ex-president. Those allegations are pretty robust, and there are many more allegations besides. If Kennedy was guilty of a mere subset of President X's crimes, that logically makes President X worse, no matter how bad Kennedy was.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,837

    LFT still positive on day 8.

    Gosh. But are you feeling OK?
  • @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Interesting that he has such links to a high profile person in Serbia. I wonder how that came about.
  • Charles said:

    Charles said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    It must surely be a woman, this time

    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
    South London used to be Surrey. South East London used to be Kent. The old boundary is approximately the Southwark/Lewisham border.
    The other way of doing it is Anglican dioceses;

    London is "proper London" north of the Thames
    Southwark is "proper South London" and some bits of East Surrey
    Bromley and Bexley are in Rochester, but they don't really think of themselves as London, do they?
    Chelmsford diocese reaches further into North East London than one might think; the boundary is between Tower Hamlets (London) and Newham (Chelmsford)

    I'm not sure if this is a good thing, reflecting traditional loyalties, or a mess.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    edited January 2022
    dixiedean said:

    Alistair said:

    Novax's legal team is just digging a bigger hole for him. Someone tell them to stop.

    My Twitter feed is just full of photos and videos of Djokers at events after his purported positive Covid test.

    Is isolation a requirement in Serbia? Or wherever he was.

    I don't know if it is or isn't, but I've been saying for a while now that a positive test shouldn't require isolation in this country and I fully expect it won't later this year.

    If it doesn't there, then his being at events wouldn't be relevant to anything.
    Yes but. Djokovic is a notorious scofflaw. So whether it was the law or not would be of little relevance. Frankly, his attitude and prior behaviour suggests that he would be unlikely to follow the COVID rules were he permitted into Australia. Which, in itself, would be grounds for visa refusal.
    If he weren't for who he is, the matter wouldn't be even being discussed.
    That denial would be arbitrary. Unless you think everyone entering will have their twitter history searched to check what their attitudes are regarding covid regs.
  • LFT still positive on day 8.

    You know you have to use a new test each time ;-)
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    kamski said:

    RobD said:

    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    On Astra Zeneca it the decision to give the Oxford vaccine to a company with little experience in vaccines may well come to be seen as one of the worst mistakes of the pandemic, from a global point of view. AIUI it AZ weren't their first choice, and they were unfortunately pressured into giving it to AZ by the British government.

    That is a factor (although the U.K. has other pharma companies) although trying to say that this was a bigger factor than European leaders such as Macron and Merkel trashing the vaccine in public plus the US authorities’ actions is wrong.
    Quasi-ineffective, anyone?
    People here massively overestimate Macron's influence outside of France (and Britain it seems). Hardly anyone in Germany has even heard of Macron's "quasi-ineffective" remarks.
    Considering the amount of coverage it got, hardly likely. Especially when you then look at the reports in Europe of resistance to the AZ vaccine post-those remarks. And of course others took his lead.

    Macron let his disdain for the U.K., Brexit etc override any concerns for how his remarks could be interpreted. Disgraceful behaviour that probably led to the loss of many lives.

    PS I don’t think you should be telling Macron he’s got no influence outside of France. He will get mightily upset.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    dixiedean said:

    LFT still positive on day 8.

    Gosh. But are you feeling OK?
    Been fine since day 3!
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415
    malcolmg said:

    I cannot believe how bad Galloise was there, obviously something wrong. Bang goes my day as that was the main one

    Have they been feeding her too many snails 😕
  • OT: Burnham shouldn't be the favourite to succeed Starmer for no other reason than that while being a perfectly OK chap, he is a complete and utter lightweight.
  • stodgestodge Posts: 12,745
    Farooq said:


    It isn't Trump's prioritisation of America that leads me to put him in the "evil" category. You'd catch far too many people in the net doing that. It's the fact that he's a user, a bigot, a selfish, self-aggrandising fool who breaks little people on the wheel of his narcissism, a corrupt, democracy-threatening arsehole, a self-pitying, whining crybaby, a fat lump of flesh with a cruel streak as wide as the Hudson and a penchant for petty revenge. He has nothing good in his soul.

    I did say he was an appalling individual and everything you've said about him is fair comment but evil?

    It's been fascinating to see how some of his followers reacted when Trump started supporting vaccination.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Interesting that he has such links to a high profile person in Serbia. I wonder how that came about.
    The far right love Eastern Europe
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775
    MrEd said:

    Farooq said:

    stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
    It isn't Trump's prioritisation of America that leads me to put him in the "evil" category. You'd catch far too many people in the net doing that. It's the fact that he's a user, a bigot, a selfish, self-aggrandising fool who breaks little people on the wheel of his narcissism, a corrupt, democracy-threatening arsehole, a self-pitying, whining crybaby, a fat lump of flesh with a cruel streak as wide as the Hudson and a penchant for petty revenge. He has nothing good in his soul.
    “Let he who is without sin…”
    ...cast the first stone. I've thrown no stones, I've used words.

    Or are you implying that I'm somehow just as bad? You're probably wrong, but happily I've never stood for election and have no intention of doing so. I know that every time I go to cast a ballot there are multiple people on the ticket who are better than me. I do not think Trump is better than me, though. So even if I am AS BAD as Trump, I'm better by virtue of recognising my own unsuitability for public office.
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    Farooq said:

    MrEd said:

    stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
    I think you hit the nail on the head here. When Trump’s name is mentioned, the Red Mist appears for many. But he is essentially an America First President. Where I would disagree is that his policy was a failure because there were no tangible results - I actually think it was the lack of international crises (certainly when it came to Russia, North Korea and China) that shows its success. Interestingly, with Russia, they invaded the Crimea when BO was President, did nothing for four years and are now rattling again when Biden is President. Unless you believe the horse shit that Trump was a Russian spy, there is a logical explanation for that.

    However, if we are going to talk about evil / amoral Presidents, the most egregious example certainly post WW2 from a personal actions point of view was JFK - almost certainly a rapist, leveraged off Mafia connections in the 1960 election, treated women generally like shit including Jackie Kennedy etc. Have I missed anything?
    You can say those things without fear of libel. There are allegations of all of the above applying to another recent (and living) ex-president. Those allegations are pretty robust, and there are many more allegations besides. If Kennedy was guilty of a mere subset of President X's crimes, that logically makes President X worse, no matter how bad Kennedy was.
    It’s been well documented about Kennedy and several of his victims have stated it publicly. And that is without getting into the Marilyn Monroe stuff.

    As far as I know, Trumpy wasn’t accused of raping his staff in the WH abut you tell me. Yes, accused of sex crimes by others for sure - as indeed has Joe Biden (but funnily enough, these were ignored…)
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,837
    RobD said:

    dixiedean said:

    Alistair said:

    Novax's legal team is just digging a bigger hole for him. Someone tell them to stop.

    My Twitter feed is just full of photos and videos of Djokers at events after his purported positive Covid test.

    Is isolation a requirement in Serbia? Or wherever he was.

    I don't know if it is or isn't, but I've been saying for a while now that a positive test shouldn't require isolation in this country and I fully expect it won't later this year.

    If it doesn't there, then his being at events wouldn't be relevant to anything.
    Yes but. Djokovic is a notorious scofflaw. So whether it was the law or not would be of little relevance. Frankly, his attitude and prior behaviour suggests that he would be unlikely to follow the COVID rules were he permitted into Australia. Which, in itself, would be grounds for visa refusal.
    If he weren't for who he is, the matter wouldn't be even being discussed.
    That denial would be arbitrary. Unless you think everyone entering will have their twitter history searched to check what their attitudes are regarding covid regs.
    Not really. The default position in Australia has been no entry since the start of the pandemic.
    You need to show exceptional evidence why you should be admitted.
    They've taken back control of their borders and laws one might say.
  • malcolmg said:

    I cannot believe how bad Galloise was there, obviously something wrong. Bang goes my day as that was the main one

    A lucky escape here after to-ing and fro-ing about an antepost bet for the Mares Hurdle. Was 14/1. Now 25/1. Unless something emerges, it might simply have been the heavy going.
  • malcolmg said:

    I cannot believe how bad Galloise was there, obviously something wrong. Bang goes my day as that was the main one

    Have they been feeding her too many snails 😕
    Or too many acrid, untipped cigarettes?
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    dixiedean said:

    RobD said:

    dixiedean said:

    Alistair said:

    Novax's legal team is just digging a bigger hole for him. Someone tell them to stop.

    My Twitter feed is just full of photos and videos of Djokers at events after his purported positive Covid test.

    Is isolation a requirement in Serbia? Or wherever he was.

    I don't know if it is or isn't, but I've been saying for a while now that a positive test shouldn't require isolation in this country and I fully expect it won't later this year.

    If it doesn't there, then his being at events wouldn't be relevant to anything.
    Yes but. Djokovic is a notorious scofflaw. So whether it was the law or not would be of little relevance. Frankly, his attitude and prior behaviour suggests that he would be unlikely to follow the COVID rules were he permitted into Australia. Which, in itself, would be grounds for visa refusal.
    If he weren't for who he is, the matter wouldn't be even being discussed.
    That denial would be arbitrary. Unless you think everyone entering will have their twitter history searched to check what their attitudes are regarding covid regs.
    Not really. The default position in Australia has been no entry since the start of the pandemic.
    You need to show exceptional evidence why you should be admitted.
    They've taken back control of their borders and laws one might say.
    You said it would be grounds for visa refusal. I don't think it would be, because that would be unfairly arbitrary.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    OT: Burnham shouldn't be the favourite to succeed Starmer for no other reason than that while being a perfectly OK chap, he is a complete and utter lightweight.

    Yet less so than some others on either main party frontbench
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517

    @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Interesting that he has such links to a high profile person in Serbia. I wonder how that came about.
    I was slightly angry when they decided to let Novax in; now I'm finding it all very amusing. From supporters trying to make out he is more persecuted than Christ, to the rather odd array of people who have come out to bat (racket?) for him, it has all gone rather odd.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758
    edited January 2022
    MrEd said:

    Farooq said:

    MrEd said:

    stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
    I think you hit the nail on the head here. When Trump’s name is mentioned, the Red Mist appears for many. But he is essentially an America First President. Where I would disagree is that his policy was a failure because there were no tangible results - I actually think it was the lack of international crises (certainly when it came to Russia, North Korea and China) that shows its success. Interestingly, with Russia, they invaded the Crimea when BO was President, did nothing for four years and are now rattling again when Biden is President. Unless you believe the horse shit that Trump was a Russian spy, there is a logical explanation for that.

    However, if we are going to talk about evil / amoral Presidents, the most egregious example certainly post WW2 from a personal actions point of view was JFK - almost certainly a rapist, leveraged off Mafia connections in the 1960 election, treated women generally like shit including Jackie Kennedy etc. Have I missed anything?
    You can say those things without fear of libel. There are allegations of all of the above applying to another recent (and living) ex-president. Those allegations are pretty robust, and there are many more allegations besides. If Kennedy was guilty of a mere subset of President X's crimes, that logically makes President X worse, no matter how bad Kennedy was.
    It’s been well documented about Kennedy and several of his victims have stated it publicly. And that is without getting into the Marilyn Monroe stuff.

    As far as I know, Trumpy wasn’t accused of raping his staff in the WH abut you tell me. Yes, accused of sex crimes by others for sure - as indeed has Joe Biden (but funnily enough, these were ignored…)
    What makes you think he was referring to Trump?

    Trump is creepy as hell but (unlike you) I've never heard he's been accused of actual sexual assault. There is another President I cannot say that of.
  • malcolmg said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    It must surely be a woman, this time

    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.

    ‘You’re a big man but you’re in bad shape..’
    Michael Caine also bumped off Glynn Edwards, who played the barman of the Winchester Club in Minder.
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    Farooq said:

    MrEd said:

    Farooq said:

    stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
    It isn't Trump's prioritisation of America that leads me to put him in the "evil" category. You'd catch far too many people in the net doing that. It's the fact that he's a user, a bigot, a selfish, self-aggrandising fool who breaks little people on the wheel of his narcissism, a corrupt, democracy-threatening arsehole, a self-pitying, whining crybaby, a fat lump of flesh with a cruel streak as wide as the Hudson and a penchant for petty revenge. He has nothing good in his soul.
    “Let he who is without sin…”
    ...cast the first stone. I've thrown no stones, I've used words.

    Or are you implying that I'm somehow just as bad? You're probably wrong, but happily I've never stood for election and have no intention of doing so. I know that every time I go to cast a ballot there are multiple people on the ticket who are better than me. I do not think Trump is better than me, though. So even if I am AS BAD as Trump, I'm better by virtue of recognising my own unsuitability for public office.
    TBH, I don’t really care. My concern is whether someone governs well, and well means a wide spectrum of affairs. Labelling people as “evil” should be reserved for those who are truly evil such as Hitler and Stalin. Otherwise it becomes cheap.
  • malcolmg said:

    I cannot believe how bad Galloise was there, obviously something wrong. Bang goes my day as that was the main one

    Have they been feeding her too many snails 😕
    Or too many acrid, untipped cigarettes?
    It makes me feel old that commentators cannot pronounce Gauloise. At least she's not called Gitanes.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    RobD said:

    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    On Astra Zeneca it the decision to give the Oxford vaccine to a company with little experience in vaccines may well come to be seen as one of the worst mistakes of the pandemic, from a global point of view. AIUI it AZ weren't their first choice, and they were unfortunately pressured into giving it to AZ by the British government.

    That is a factor (although the U.K. has other pharma companies) although trying to say that this was a bigger factor than European leaders such as Macron and Merkel trashing the vaccine in public plus the US authorities’ actions is wrong.
    Quasi-ineffective, anyone?
    People here massively overestimate Macron's influence outside of France (and Britain it seems). Hardly anyone in Germany has even heard of Macron's "quasi-ineffective" remarks.
    Considering the amount of coverage it got, hardly likely. Especially when you then look at the reports in Europe of resistance to the AZ vaccine post-those remarks. And of course others took his lead.

    Macron let his disdain for the U.K., Brexit etc override any concerns for how his remarks could be interpreted. Disgraceful behaviour that probably led to the loss of many lives.

    PS I don’t think you should be telling Macron he’s got no influence outside of France. He will get mightily upset.
    I'll just tell him his attempts at influence outside France are quasi-ineffective ...
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,837
    RobD said:

    dixiedean said:

    RobD said:

    dixiedean said:

    Alistair said:

    Novax's legal team is just digging a bigger hole for him. Someone tell them to stop.

    My Twitter feed is just full of photos and videos of Djokers at events after his purported positive Covid test.

    Is isolation a requirement in Serbia? Or wherever he was.

    I don't know if it is or isn't, but I've been saying for a while now that a positive test shouldn't require isolation in this country and I fully expect it won't later this year.

    If it doesn't there, then his being at events wouldn't be relevant to anything.
    Yes but. Djokovic is a notorious scofflaw. So whether it was the law or not would be of little relevance. Frankly, his attitude and prior behaviour suggests that he would be unlikely to follow the COVID rules were he permitted into Australia. Which, in itself, would be grounds for visa refusal.
    If he weren't for who he is, the matter wouldn't be even being discussed.
    That denial would be arbitrary. Unless you think everyone entering will have their twitter history searched to check what their attitudes are regarding covid regs.
    Not really. The default position in Australia has been no entry since the start of the pandemic.
    You need to show exceptional evidence why you should be admitted.
    They've taken back control of their borders and laws one might say.
    You said it would be grounds for visa refusal. I don't think it would be, because that would be unfairly arbitrary.
    And I'm saying the default position is refusal.
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775
    stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    It isn't Trump's prioritisation of America that leads me to put him in the "evil" category. You'd catch far too many people in the net doing that. It's the fact that he's a user, a bigot, a selfish, self-aggrandising fool who breaks little people on the wheel of his narcissism, a corrupt, democracy-threatening arsehole, a self-pitying, whining crybaby, a fat lump of flesh with a cruel streak as wide as the Hudson and a penchant for petty revenge. He has nothing good in his soul.

    I did say he was an appalling individual and everything you've said about him is fair comment but evil?

    It's been fascinating to see how some of his followers reacted when Trump started supporting vaccination.
    Yes. Evil. People who treat others (especially badly) as a means to an end partake in the form of Evil. That's not enough to make them evil, since they might also have something redeeming about them. Trump has basically nothing. In other words, it's all bad. Ok, he's occasionally funny and sometimes whilst also meaning to, and without it being at some weaker person's expense. And that's it.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,758

    @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Interesting that he has such links to a high profile person in Serbia. I wonder how that came about.
    I was slightly angry when they decided to let Novax in; now I'm finding it all very amusing. From supporters trying to make out he is more persecuted than Christ, to the rather odd array of people who have come out to bat (racket?) for him, it has all gone rather odd.
    Do you remember those Greek athletes who missed a drug test because 'they were out riding a moped and had an accident?' The male one compared himself to Jesus too...
  • I think I can guess what Money’s important buckets are and with what they should be filled.


  • TresTres Posts: 2,163
    How many lives did Trump cost when he was more concerned about attacking Gretchen Whitmer rather than mimicking her shut-down policies?
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    dixiedean said:

    RobD said:

    dixiedean said:

    RobD said:

    dixiedean said:

    Alistair said:

    Novax's legal team is just digging a bigger hole for him. Someone tell them to stop.

    My Twitter feed is just full of photos and videos of Djokers at events after his purported positive Covid test.

    Is isolation a requirement in Serbia? Or wherever he was.

    I don't know if it is or isn't, but I've been saying for a while now that a positive test shouldn't require isolation in this country and I fully expect it won't later this year.

    If it doesn't there, then his being at events wouldn't be relevant to anything.
    Yes but. Djokovic is a notorious scofflaw. So whether it was the law or not would be of little relevance. Frankly, his attitude and prior behaviour suggests that he would be unlikely to follow the COVID rules were he permitted into Australia. Which, in itself, would be grounds for visa refusal.
    If he weren't for who he is, the matter wouldn't be even being discussed.
    That denial would be arbitrary. Unless you think everyone entering will have their twitter history searched to check what their attitudes are regarding covid regs.
    Not really. The default position in Australia has been no entry since the start of the pandemic.
    You need to show exceptional evidence why you should be admitted.
    They've taken back control of their borders and laws one might say.
    You said it would be grounds for visa refusal. I don't think it would be, because that would be unfairly arbitrary.
    And I'm saying the default position is refusal.
    OK, that's different from what you said originally about his prior behavior being grounds for refusal.
  • malcolmg said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    Cookie said:

    Leon said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    It must surely be a woman, this time

    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.

    ‘You’re a big man but you’re in bad shape..’
    Michael Caine also bumped off Glynn Edwards, who played the barman of the Winchester Club in Minder.
    Dave owned the Winchester; he was not just the barman. It was a running gag that Arthur had bought a minority stake but never got round to paying for it.
  • HYUFD said:

    @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Interesting that he has such links to a high profile person in Serbia. I wonder how that came about.
    The far right love Eastern Europe
    Certain parts of it. We know that Farage greatly admires Putin and Farage is reportedly RT's favourite British politician. I guess Bozo must be fairly high on their list of Useful Idiots too.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,837
    edited January 2022

    @henrymance
    seems like someone is no longer so keen on Australia’s tough border policy

    https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1479789720540491776

    Interesting that he has such links to a high profile person in Serbia. I wonder how that came about.
    I was slightly angry when they decided to let Novax in; now I'm finding it all very amusing. From supporters trying to make out he is more persecuted than Christ, to the rather odd array of people who have come out to bat (racket?) for him, it has all gone rather odd.
    It's been a fascinating story all round.
    It is strange that the right of a sovereign nation to refuse or accept who the heck it likes has proved so emotionally potent amongst some.
    Even more ironic. Many of them want an "Australian immigration system".
  • MJWMJW Posts: 1,282
    A few points that would back up the conclusion to this thread. Firstly, Burnham has lost two leadership elections already - one where he was a frontrunner. The other where he failed to make an impact despite obvious flaws in the three leading candidates. Proof he's not great at the mechanics of these contests if nothing else. Secondly, in the absence of an utterly outstanding male candidate, one shouldn't underestimate the pull of wanting Labour to have its first woman leader. More than 51% of the PLP are now women, and while it's the membership that decides and one doesn't want to be patronising by saying will vote because of their sex - i will surely inform who some influential MPs decide to support if they think it's much of a muchness. E.g. If Nandy vaguely impresses too over the next few years he loses his USP of being a Labour politician who 'gets' the north (silly as that notion is) and she would break Labour's duck on that front. Lastly, a lot of Burnham's appeal is that he does a totally different job to Starmer but I don't think there are many of the 'controversial' (among some Lab members) things Starmer has done that he'd do differently. He would have had to suspend and ostracise Corbyn because although his supporters won't admit it, his behaviour has stained Labour and would continue to if a leader drew a line. He'd have almost certainly talked up patriotism etc as local pride has been a key plank of his running in Manchester. He's not hugely liberal on crime in the way some Labour activists are in the same way as Starmer isn't, and is a pragmatist on public services. If Starmer fails, it's not overly clear why members would think selecting another chap from the middle of the party would be a good idea rather than a rethink either way. Even if he was an electorally successful northern mayor. In a leadership election he would be asked about these things and inevitably would annoy some of those who like him now because he's quite good at having arguments with a Tory government.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415

    I think I can guess what Money’s important buckets are and with what they should be filled.


    How can she get her hand to come in from that angle 🤔
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775
    MrEd said:

    Farooq said:

    MrEd said:

    Farooq said:

    stodge said:

    Farooq said:


    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.

    I disagree.

    I don't consider Trump to be "evil" - an appalling individual in many respects but his worldview is that of the American Nationalist. There's a hint of Lindbergh ("America First") and also of Nixon (only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could go to North Korea).

    He represented a reversal of decades of "global" presidents going back to FDR. From FDR to Obama, all Presidents were global leaders whose primary purpose was the furthering of American values (call them "Western" if you want) and confronting the other non-American ideologies whether Communism or Islamic fundamentalism or Juche or whatever.

    Trump saw (rightly you can argue) America had taken on this burden and was carrying a whole lot of other countries (the one thing Trump did get right was shaming European countries on defence spending and their contribution to NATO). Oddly enough, he chose the financial argument in terms of influence just as Thatcher did in the early 80s within the EEC,.

    The other side of this was whether the approach of successive Presidents had been in any way effective either in promoting American (and by definition western) security or whether America was just pouring money down a big hole with little to show. Trump took a very different approach - he reached out personally to Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-Un and others offering the hand of economic friendship in exchange for a toning down of the confrontational rhetoric.

    Voters like politicians who put their country first - it's obvious but it's worth saying. There aren't many votes in overt internationalism. Trump's failure was, I would argue, he didn't have a single tangible success to show for four years of this direction. You can argue some of what he was trying to do would take decades to come to fruition but in truth, and perhaps he was frustrated by the establishment in the State Department and elsewhere, he achieved almost nothing.
    It isn't Trump's prioritisation of America that leads me to put him in the "evil" category. You'd catch far too many people in the net doing that. It's the fact that he's a user, a bigot, a selfish, self-aggrandising fool who breaks little people on the wheel of his narcissism, a corrupt, democracy-threatening arsehole, a self-pitying, whining crybaby, a fat lump of flesh with a cruel streak as wide as the Hudson and a penchant for petty revenge. He has nothing good in his soul.
    “Let he who is without sin…”
    ...cast the first stone. I've thrown no stones, I've used words.

    Or are you implying that I'm somehow just as bad? You're probably wrong, but happily I've never stood for election and have no intention of doing so. I know that every time I go to cast a ballot there are multiple people on the ticket who are better than me. I do not think Trump is better than me, though. So even if I am AS BAD as Trump, I'm better by virtue of recognising my own unsuitability for public office.
    TBH, I don’t really care. My concern is whether someone governs well, and well means a wide spectrum of affairs. Labelling people as “evil” should be reserved for those who are truly evil such as Hitler and Stalin. Otherwise it becomes cheap.
    I mean, if you'd read the whole lead up to that you'd see that I have said as much. I do not throw the word about liberally.
    It's sort of interesting that some people want to cancel the word "evil" as if humans these days are incapable of being evil any more. That can't be true. We haven't evolved past that.
This discussion has been closed.