In happier news. My 100% record of having mildly disappointing food (on my one previous Sri Lankan trip) has been easily shattered. It’s all good so far. Black Pork Curry lunch here was absolutely excellent
Colombo is a strange city. Poor, scruffy, yet in places intensely civilised. And stunned by the sun and heat into an amiable complacency
Are there still lots of stray dogs lining the streets? Was when I was there. Plagued with them - a bit off-putting.
Not one that I’ve seen. Not cats. In fact a decided absence by “3rd World” standards (are we still allowed to say 3rd World? What’s the replacement?)
The Global South. Not to be confused with the pop group of that name.
The Global South is surely far more insulting than “3rd World” (which is an antique Cold War term, I readily confess)
For a start there are plenty of once-developing countries in the “Global South” which would really resent that characterization;. Chileans are quite haughty about being compared to Argentina, let alone Sudan. Indonesia is equally proud, likewise Costa Rica, the Maldives, Mauritius, what even is “the Global South”?
You asked what the term now is and I told you - The Global South. But please note it doesn't mean below the equator. It's pretty much a straight replacement for 3rd World. It's a development measure not a geographic one. Insulting? No, the whole point is that 3rd World was, but this isn't. Everyone is happy and onboard with it.
Erondu says she's embarrassed if she inadvertently uses the term during a workshop in one of the countries in Africa where she works on health care issues. Why? "Because people in Nigeria don't refer to themselves as the 'global south.' It's something someone named them."
I could go on and on. Third world is a no no, describing in terms of income is problematic and global south many don't like either.
In my work, I avoid all those terms completely. I refer, when I have to, to low-resource settings or environments. This does not seem to insult because, say, within Pakistan the relatively affluent institutions, such as Agha Khan University or LUMS, don't see themselves at being low-resource, while laboratories in Quetta or Gilgit do and want to know what they can do within those very real-life constraints.
PS And low-resource does not always mean 'poor' - it can be some other resource we take for granted in the West, such as water. In Quetta, for instance, a question I've had is how much water do you need to wash your hands properly?
Yes "low resource" is quite accurate. It also usefully deals with low income areas within high income countries such as Jaywick, and high resource areas of low or middle income countries such as Sandton in South Africa.
It also makes a distinction between the low-resource things, and the quality of the people.
LOL how the mighty have fallen. He can’t even put his camera the right way round.
Now, Cameo was a funny pandemic-era way to get an out-of-work actor or comedian to say happy birthday to your friend, but surely this sort of stunt raises all sorts of questions about advertising regulations?
It's amusing as I've said before I think we pay our politicians too much and it'd be better if their pay was more closely linked to citizens pay in general. I believe in the 90s an MP typically got two times average income and now it's three times and I don't think that's healthy.
Others have said they think MPs are underpaid compared to the private sector.
While a tiny, tiny minority of the private sector may be worth more than MPs that's far from the case for all MPs as the likes of Bercow etc whoring themselves post politics helps demonstrate. As does the desperation in many MPs to do anything to stay loyal to the Party and keep their seat, because if they lose their seat they lose their job and there £84k+ salary they'd never achieve in the real world.
Above average intelligence, middle class background at least, graduate from good uni, driven and ambitious, energetic, robust and thick skinned, gift of the gab, alert to opportunities to get ahead.
The above being the typical profile of an MP, there's little doubt in my mind that most of them would have been able to earn more if they'd choosen a career in the private sector.
I am actually quite surprised the average is that high after 5 years.
I do wonder whether the base stats are on all degrees, including Masters (and MBAs) and PhDs etc. That would boost the numbers up a bit. Depending on data too, if it's survey based (how else?) then likely to be a differential response with lower earners less responsive? Don't account for that and you get high numbers.
Five years after first graduating I was doing a PhD on a £15k stipend, so I'm happy to believe those numbers are high
So 22 years after PhD I'm just touching 50K, but thats a middle ranking academic salary. Just shows that I do it for love and not for the cash...
Sounds familiar. I got my Ph.D. in 1973 and when I retired in 2001 as a progressed PL I had just reached 40K.
Glad I didn't go the PhD route, then.
I've said this before, but I know a fair few people who have PhDs. The vast majority of them either regret doing it, or think it has had no, or even negative, effect on their salary over those with ordinary degrees.
PhDs are important if you want to be an academic, helpful if you want to teach in a top private school or grammar, of little benefit otherwise unless in a specific area in demand in the commercial field
That's a rather British attitude.
Indeed. A close relative did a PhD. When he applied for management positions, just after he left academia, he would find himself being interviewed for jobs in research which paid peanuts.
If you want to go into business management an MBA would be far more useful than a PhD
The famous Master of Bugger-All.
See those three letters after somebody's name, and you know that you'll be facing an avalanche of bullshit, buzzwords and inanity.
My relative, at one interview, pointed to an article in the trade press about a problem the company was having ramping up production of a particular chemical. He gave his understanding of the problem, and some possible reasons for the issue. And some possible solutions, along with cost/complexity issues.
He noted that the interviewer seemed horrified by the idea of someone knowing about chemistry in management.
Must say I’m struggling to parse Leon’s dichotomy. Western superiority complex vs racism. Hmm.
Glad I'm not the only one having problems following exactly what is being argued about.
Haven't been following the pile-on on poor Kinabulu, but there is most certainly a distinction between being an ethnocentrist ('my way of life or religion is best') and being a racist ('my race is superior'). For instance, Frederick Douglass the ex-slave AIUI preferred the Christian American life (apart from the racism!) to the pagan life in Africa, but he was no racist.
In happier news. My 100% record of having mildly disappointing food (on my one previous Sri Lankan trip) has been easily shattered. It’s all good so far. Black Pork Curry lunch here was absolutely excellent
Colombo is a strange city. Poor, scruffy, yet in places intensely civilised. And stunned by the sun and heat into an amiable complacency
Are there still lots of stray dogs lining the streets? Was when I was there. Plagued with them - a bit off-putting.
Not one that I’ve seen. Not cats. In fact a decided absence by “3rd World” standards (are we still allowed to say 3rd World? What’s the replacement?)
The Global South. Not to be confused with the pop group of that name.
The Global South is surely far more insulting than “3rd World” (which is an antique Cold War term, I readily confess)
For a start there are plenty of once-developing countries in the “Global South” which would really resent that characterization;. Chileans are quite haughty about being compared to Argentina, let alone Sudan. Indonesia is equally proud, likewise Costa Rica, the Maldives, Mauritius, what even is “the Global South”?
You asked what the term now is and I told you - The Global South. But please note it doesn't mean below the equator. It's pretty much a straight replacement for 3rd World. It's a development measure not a geographic one. Insulting? No, the whole point is that 3rd World was, but this isn't. Everyone is happy and onboard with it.
Third World originates in the division between the Communist block and the capitalist democracies, hence Third World. S such it is obsolete for the fall of the Soviet Union.
Quite. I don’t think @kinabalu grasps the basic etymology of “3rd World”
Of course I grasp. Obsolete, as I said, and the term now is Global South. Although Francis Urquhart informs us there has been a further evolution. If so, fine. Language lives, it doesn't atrophy. One of its many charms. Surf it, don't fight it. Surprised I have to tell a pro writer this.
But this is exactly the same issue as with all the synonyms for non-white. It's the concept behind the description that people don't like, not the latest iteration.
Well sometimes you need a general description for something, don't you? Avoid sloppy generalizations, yes, but sometimes a term is needed.
TBH, the people on here who get hung up about this stuff are not the ones agonizing over the "correct" term to use. Hardly anybody does that. I certainly don't. No, the ones for whom this is a matter of great concern are those forever keen to eye-roll about how "difficult" and "illogical" it all is.
It's just virtue signalling, where the virtue being signalled is "Ooo I'm a free-thinking, intellectually muscular type, me."
You need to use a specific term for the countries you want to refer to, otherwise it's just an example of lazy thinking and othering.
So for vaccines you can specifically refer to countries that don't have domestic vaccine production capacity, or the cash to pay for vaccines manufactured elsewhere. Because this will be a different group of countries, not involving India for example, than if you want to talk about countries where a large proportion of the country still lacks basic sanitation or electricity (which does include a lot of rural India still).
Your approach is a hangover from Colonialism. It betrays a Colonialist mindset. It divides the world between those countries that are strong enough to colonize others and those that would be better off if they were still colonised. You need to free yourself from that paradigm of thinking.
My approach? C'mon. I tend to say something like "poorer countries" when I'm referring to what used to be called the 3rd World and is now (I believe) often referred to as the Global South. Indeed you'll struggle to find much use of any of these so-called woke terms in my posts at all. MY approach - honestly!
You probably have a point about the mindset of some of those for whom these "defined as opposite to the norm" terms slip easily off the tongue. Ingrained superiority syndrome maybe? Yes, maybe. But my point is different. I mean, are the people who are forever eye-rolling about this stuff - the "oh god what do we call it/them now?" merchants - doing it as a pushback against ingrained superiority syndrome? I rather doubt it.
Must say I’m struggling to parse Leon’s dichotomy. Western superiority complex vs racism. Hmm.
Glad I'm not the only one having problems following exactly what is being argued about.
Haven't been following the pile-on on poor Kinabulu, but there is most certainly a distinction between being an ethnocentrist ('my way of life or religion is best') and being a racist ('my race is superior'). For instance, Frederick Douglass the ex-slave AIUI preferred the Christian American life (apart from the racism!) to the pagan life in Africa, but he was no racist.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
In happier news. My 100% record of having mildly disappointing food (on my one previous Sri Lankan trip) has been easily shattered. It’s all good so far. Black Pork Curry lunch here was absolutely excellent
Colombo is a strange city. Poor, scruffy, yet in places intensely civilised. And stunned by the sun and heat into an amiable complacency
Are there still lots of stray dogs lining the streets? Was when I was there. Plagued with them - a bit off-putting.
Not one that I’ve seen. Not cats. In fact a decided absence by “3rd World” standards (are we still allowed to say 3rd World? What’s the replacement?)
The Global South. Not to be confused with the pop group of that name.
The Global South is surely far more insulting than “3rd World” (which is an antique Cold War term, I readily confess)
For a start there are plenty of once-developing countries in the “Global South” which would really resent that characterization;. Chileans are quite haughty about being compared to Argentina, let alone Sudan. Indonesia is equally proud, likewise Costa Rica, the Maldives, Mauritius, what even is “the Global South”?
You asked what the term now is and I told you - The Global South. But please note it doesn't mean below the equator. It's pretty much a straight replacement for 3rd World. It's a development measure not a geographic one. Insulting? No, the whole point is that 3rd World was, but this isn't. Everyone is happy and onboard with it.
"Everyone is happy and onboard with it."
Not true....its far from settled issue.
‘Global South’, a term frequently used on websites and in papers related to academic and ‘predatory’ publishing, may represent a form of unscholarly discrimination. Arguments are put forward as to why the current use of this term is geographically meaningless, since it implies countries in the southern hemisphere, whereas many of the entities in publishing that are referred to as being part of the Global South are in fact either on the equator or in the northern hemisphere. Therefore, academics, in writing about academic publishing, should cease using this broad, culturally insensitive, and geographically inaccurate term.
Erondu says she's embarrassed if she inadvertently uses the term during a workshop in one of the countries in Africa where she works on health care issues. Why? "Because people in Nigeria don't refer to themselves as the 'global south.' It's something someone named them."
I could go on and on. Third world is a no no, describing in terms of income is problematic and global south many don't like either.
I see. So what's a better term then? What gets your stamp of approval? Or let's put it this way. What term do YOU use when needing one for referring to the relatively impoverished parts of the world?
Eg, complete this sentence - The pandemic will soon be over in the rich nations of the West but will rage on for a long time in ????????? unless vaccines are rolled out there as a matter of priority.
I still use third world. This isn't me being deliberately old-fashioned or deliberately refusing to use the woke term. It would never occur to me that third world was unwoke. Actually, I might use developing world. Which itself is a polite euphemism which replaced the earlier and more pejorative 'undeveloped world' despite it being glaringly apparently that many parts of the undeveloped world were not developing. I suppose - if it occurred to me, because it's not a phrase that ever really does occur to me - you could use 'global south' to include countries like Chile whereas third world brings to mind more countries like Benin.
And I tend to say "poorer countries". Whatever, I don't find it a big deal. All that happened here was @Leon asked what was the modern term for 3rd World and I replied to him - being the helpful sort - with what I believe is the answer, Global South.
From this we get to him - Leon - telling me I'm hung up about "woke" and that I act like some sort of language policema ... person, and now we have @MaxPB crashing in and saying I'm worse than a racist!
Utterly bizarrio. And on a day that Meat Loaf died too. Chilean Red and Bag of Nuts time cannot come too soon for me today, I tell you.
It's the same reason that SA Omicron data was dismissed. You and liberal racists have othered them with some new term that makes them different to us because they're poor, not white or both. The "global south" is stupid term.
How has he othered them? They are different from us - we are rich, they are poor; we have privileged access to powerful global institutions, they don't; our citizens can easily travel to their countries, their citizens can't easily travel to our countries; they consume our media and culture; we don't consume their media and culture; ... the list of differences goes on. Whatever term or phrase you deem politically correct to differentiate between these groups of countries, they are different. It is the existence of these differences that is problematic, surely, not the acknowledgement of them?
And yet in matters of infectious diseases and other science South Africa is pretty reliable, they've only had, what 30 years, of dealing with HIV/AIDS? Lumping SA in with the "global south" or having a generalisation that doesn't recognise that not all poorer/non-white countries are the same is racist. Would we say that India, the producer of billions of vaccine doses per year and a nation that has true scientific expertise in infectious disease research is part of this "global south" because they're poor and not white?
Labels like this are racist, I'm glad we finally got rid of that stupid idea of BAME in the UK, hopefully the wider world can do it too.
I'm not talking about the Omicron/SA issue and whether they were listened to enough because that's a separate question and not one I have a strong opinion on. I have no problem with the idea that a country could be in the global South or whatever term you want to use, and be full of non white people, but still produce excellent science that we should absolutely listen to. I'd be surprised if any serious person took an opposing view. I assume you violently disapprove of the term Emerging Market too?
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
To be fair, all we really actually knew at the time was that it spread fast. The rest was mostly informed speculation.
Re: Ignoring data from SA. Didn't we also ignore what we were seeing in Italy at the very beginning?
There is definitely a 'not invented here' syndrome but I'm not sure whether it is racist.
People will be doing studies on why Covid 'behaved' the way it did for decades; trying to disentangle the effects of variant, demographics, regulations, social effects and other factors.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
In happier news. My 100% record of having mildly disappointing food (on my one previous Sri Lankan trip) has been easily shattered. It’s all good so far. Black Pork Curry lunch here was absolutely excellent
Colombo is a strange city. Poor, scruffy, yet in places intensely civilised. And stunned by the sun and heat into an amiable complacency
Are there still lots of stray dogs lining the streets? Was when I was there. Plagued with them - a bit off-putting.
Not one that I’ve seen. Not cats. In fact a decided absence by “3rd World” standards (are we still allowed to say 3rd World? What’s the replacement?)
The Global South. Not to be confused with the pop group of that name.
The Global South is surely far more insulting than “3rd World” (which is an antique Cold War term, I readily confess)
For a start there are plenty of once-developing countries in the “Global South” which would really resent that characterization;. Chileans are quite haughty about being compared to Argentina, let alone Sudan. Indonesia is equally proud, likewise Costa Rica, the Maldives, Mauritius, what even is “the Global South”?
You asked what the term now is and I told you - The Global South. But please note it doesn't mean below the equator. It's pretty much a straight replacement for 3rd World. It's a development measure not a geographic one. Insulting? No, the whole point is that 3rd World was, but this isn't. Everyone is happy and onboard with it.
Third World originates in the division between the Communist block and the capitalist democracies, hence Third World. S such it is obsolete for the fall of the Soviet Union.
Quite. I don’t think @kinabalu grasps the basic etymology of “3rd World”
Of course I grasp. Obsolete, as I said, and the term now is Global South. Although Francis Urquhart informs us there has been a further evolution. If so, fine. Language lives, it doesn't atrophy. One of its many charms. Surf it, don't fight it. Surprised I have to tell a pro writer this.
But this is exactly the same issue as with all the synonyms for non-white. It's the concept behind the description that people don't like, not the latest iteration.
Well sometimes you need a general description for something, don't you? Avoid sloppy generalizations, yes, but sometimes a term is needed.
TBH, the people on here who get hung up about this stuff are not the ones agonizing over the "correct" term to use. Hardly anybody does that. I certainly don't. No, the ones for whom this is a matter of great concern are those forever keen to eye-roll about how "difficult" and "illogical" it all is.
It's just virtue signalling, where the virtue being signalled is "Ooo I'm a free-thinking, intellectually muscular type, me."
You need to use a specific term for the countries you want to refer to, otherwise it's just an example of lazy thinking and othering.
So for vaccines you can specifically refer to countries that don't have domestic vaccine production capacity, or the cash to pay for vaccines manufactured elsewhere. Because this will be a different group of countries, not involving India for example, than if you want to talk about countries where a large proportion of the country still lacks basic sanitation or electricity (which does include a lot of rural India still).
Your approach is a hangover from Colonialism. It betrays a Colonialist mindset. It divides the world between those countries that are strong enough to colonize others and those that would be better off if they were still colonised. You need to free yourself from that paradigm of thinking.
My approach? C'mon. I tend to say something like "poorer countries" when I'm referring to what used to be called the 3rd World and is now (I believe) often referred to as the Global South. Indeed you'll struggle to find much use of any of these so-called woke terms in my posts at all. MY approach - honestly!
You probably have a point about the mindset of some of those for whom these "defined as opposite to the norm" terms slip easily off the tongue. Ingrained superiority syndrome maybe? Yes, maybe. But my point is different. I mean, are the people who are forever eye-rolling about this stuff - the "oh god what do we call it/them now?" merchants - doing it as a pushback against ingrained superiority syndrome? I rather doubt it.
Tell the woke halfwits to take a hike an dpeddle their crap elsewhere, you call them exactly wht you want to and take mince from no man or woman
Must say I’m struggling to parse Leon’s dichotomy. Western superiority complex vs racism. Hmm.
Glad I'm not the only one having problems following exactly what is being argued about.
Haven't been following the pile-on on poor Kinabulu, but there is most certainly a distinction between being an ethnocentrist ('my way of life or religion is best') and being a racist ('my race is superior'). For instance, Frederick Douglass the ex-slave AIUI preferred the Christian American life (apart from the racism!) to the pagan life in Africa, but he was no racist.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
covers the matter pretty well, I think.
Quite. The distinction comes to mind from my reading about a historical discussion of a controversy in the mid-C19.
We had the announcement of the battery factory funding. I missed this,
Wayve, a London-based startup creating autonomous driving technology based on computer vision and machine learning, has raised a $200m Series B funding round to help get self-driving cars onto the road faster.
Waymo has had $5.5bn and still can't solve the problems. Remember the issue isn't that driving is a 95% issue (and people can live with the 5%) it's a 99.9995% issue and until you've uncovered all the issues a self-driving car won't be allowed on the road.
If i had $200m to invest, it would be going into the battery factory rather than yet another SD car startup.
Unless someone builds a new town specifically around them, self-driving cars are coming a few years after personal flying cars powered by nuclear fusion.
Indeed, if the government was serious about levelling up it would announce a £30bn fund for electrification of our vehicle manufacturing industry, subsidies available to companies who will manufacture batteries, mine lithium, make the EVs, roll out charging stations and a few extras.
They seem to think that a few hundred million here and there will make a difference, it won't. Forget the cries from the left about "giving away billions to Elon Musk", just get on with it.
Agreed. Though I'd note Musk would have built his first European plant here, in all likelihood, had we not Brexited. Which probably makes you suggestion more, not less sensible.
South Korea (a similar sized country) is going to be one of the big global players in the battery market, and without a massive amount of government assistance. But we're five years behind.
What's really worrying for me is that the UK may end up becoming a net exporter of unrefined lithium, we'll miss out on the whole value chain other than exporting the cheapest bit of it. I don't understand why alarm bells aren't ringing at BEIS all day everyday about this. It's a £500bn per year market that we will have a vanishingly small role in unless we get moving now. A huge chunk of viable export industry just disappears because the Treasury decided to count coppers.
That's the Treasury for you - it seems the general rule at the moment is because of the money spent on Covid the answer is No...
Everything has to be justified which again means the default answer is (you've guessed it) No
What's mad is that for the first time we may actually have a leg up on a lot of countries with a huge stock of lithium in the UK that can be viably mined, instead of taking advantage of this very, very enviable position of being able to have a fully vertically integrated EV manufacturing industry in the UK with scads of money, we're "unlocking private investment" with a few hundred million here and there.
It's got to be the worst bit of economic vandalism I've seen in a while, the UK could potentially be an EV superpower with a hugely outsized presence in the market but the treasury seems determined to blow it.
I suspect a lot of it has to do with no one of the right sort writing a suitable business proposal that outlines our advantages in a way that senior Treasury people understand.
It will be like transport where the proposals are based on faster train times because the idea that a regular service between 2 places up north on say the ECML (similar to what happens by default down in London where trains are commuter services running at identical speeds) may increase demand is hard to model so just utterly ignored.
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
It all boils down to that word 'know'. You could argue that the only things 'known' about omicron at that stage was that it was more transmissible than delta and could result in breakthrough infections for both the vaccinated and those recovered from prior strains. Both of those are undoubtedly 'bad' characteristics. The other evidence was indicative not definitive at that point. So, at one level Whitty was not lying, just being cautious - and perhaps misleading - in the use of the word 'know'.
Which is what I think Selebian's point was.
If "could result in breakthrough infections" was true, then so was "could be milder".
If kinabalu is a 'liberal racist', as alleged, does that make Tommy Robinson an 'illiberal racist' and me a secret Tory? Utter piffle.
In other news from the right, I've learnt today that food banks are A Good Thing in a rich country such as ours, and the more food banks the merrier.
On the latter point, apparently I am giving to my local food bank so the ones who say it is a Good Thing don't have to pay so much tax. But the wine calls.
In happier news. My 100% record of having mildly disappointing food (on my one previous Sri Lankan trip) has been easily shattered. It’s all good so far. Black Pork Curry lunch here was absolutely excellent
Colombo is a strange city. Poor, scruffy, yet in places intensely civilised. And stunned by the sun and heat into an amiable complacency
Are there still lots of stray dogs lining the streets? Was when I was there. Plagued with them - a bit off-putting.
Not one that I’ve seen. Not cats. In fact a decided absence by “3rd World” standards (are we still allowed to say 3rd World? What’s the replacement?)
The Global South. Not to be confused with the pop group of that name.
The Global South is surely far more insulting than “3rd World” (which is an antique Cold War term, I readily confess)
For a start there are plenty of once-developing countries in the “Global South” which would really resent that characterization;. Chileans are quite haughty about being compared to Argentina, let alone Sudan. Indonesia is equally proud, likewise Costa Rica, the Maldives, Mauritius, what even is “the Global South”?
You asked what the term now is and I told you - The Global South. But please note it doesn't mean below the equator. It's pretty much a straight replacement for 3rd World. It's a development measure not a geographic one. Insulting? No, the whole point is that 3rd World was, but this isn't. Everyone is happy and onboard with it.
Third World originates in the division between the Communist block and the capitalist democracies, hence Third World. S such it is obsolete for the fall of the Soviet Union.
Quite. I don’t think @kinabalu grasps the basic etymology of “3rd World”
Of course I grasp. Obsolete, as I said, and the term now is Global South. Although Francis Urquhart informs us there has been a further evolution. If so, fine. Language lives, it doesn't atrophy. One of its many charms. Surf it, don't fight it. Surprised I have to tell a pro writer this.
But this is exactly the same issue as with all the synonyms for non-white. It's the concept behind the description that people don't like, not the latest iteration.
Well sometimes you need a general description for something, don't you? Avoid sloppy generalizations, yes, but sometimes a term is needed.
TBH, the people on here who get hung up about this stuff are not the ones agonizing over the "correct" term to use. Hardly anybody does that. I certainly don't. No, the ones for whom this is a matter of great concern are those forever keen to eye-roll about how "difficult" and "illogical" it all is.
It's just virtue signalling, where the virtue being signalled is "Ooo I'm a free-thinking, intellectually muscular type, me."
You need to use a specific term for the countries you want to refer to, otherwise it's just an example of lazy thinking and othering.
So for vaccines you can specifically refer to countries that don't have domestic vaccine production capacity, or the cash to pay for vaccines manufactured elsewhere. Because this will be a different group of countries, not involving India for example, than if you want to talk about countries where a large proportion of the country still lacks basic sanitation or electricity (which does include a lot of rural India still).
Your approach is a hangover from Colonialism. It betrays a Colonialist mindset. It divides the world between those countries that are strong enough to colonize others and those that would be better off if they were still colonised. You need to free yourself from that paradigm of thinking.
My approach? C'mon. I tend to say something like "poorer countries" when I'm referring to what used to be called the 3rd World and is now (I believe) often referred to as the Global South. Indeed you'll struggle to find much use of any of these so-called woke terms in my posts at all. MY approach - honestly!
You probably have a point about the mindset of some of those for whom these "defined as opposite to the norm" terms slip easily off the tongue. Ingrained superiority syndrome maybe? Yes, maybe. But my point is different. I mean, are the people who are forever eye-rolling about this stuff - the "oh god what do we call it/them now?" merchants - doing it as a pushback against ingrained superiority syndrome? I rather doubt it.
Tell the woke halfwits to take a hike an dpeddle their crap elsewhere, you call them exactly wht you want to and take mince from no man or woman
You can't expect good behaviour from the GB South. Without the calm, civilising hand of the north, they would be staving each others heads in for calories in a matter of weeks.
LOL how the mighty have fallen. He can’t even put his camera the right way round.
Now, Cameo was a funny pandemic-era way to get an out-of-work actor or comedian to say happy birthday to your friend, but surely this sort of stunt raises all sorts of questions about advertising regulations?
It's amusing as I've said before I think we pay our politicians too much and it'd be better if their pay was more closely linked to citizens pay in general. I believe in the 90s an MP typically got two times average income and now it's three times and I don't think that's healthy.
Others have said they think MPs are underpaid compared to the private sector.
While a tiny, tiny minority of the private sector may be worth more than MPs that's far from the case for all MPs as the likes of Bercow etc whoring themselves post politics helps demonstrate. As does the desperation in many MPs to do anything to stay loyal to the Party and keep their seat, because if they lose their seat they lose their job and there £84k+ salary they'd never achieve in the real world.
Above average intelligence, middle class background at least, graduate from good uni, driven and ambitious, energetic, robust and thick skinned, gift of the gab, alert to opportunities to get ahead.
The above being the typical profile of an MP, there's little doubt in my mind that most of them would have been able to earn more if they'd choosen a career in the private sector.
I am actually quite surprised the average is that high after 5 years.
I do wonder whether the base stats are on all degrees, including Masters (and MBAs) and PhDs etc. That would boost the numbers up a bit. Depending on data too, if it's survey based (how else?) then likely to be a differential response with lower earners less responsive? Don't account for that and you get high numbers.
Five years after first graduating I was doing a PhD on a £15k stipend, so I'm happy to believe those numbers are high
So 22 years after PhD I'm just touching 50K, but thats a middle ranking academic salary. Just shows that I do it for love and not for the cash...
Sounds familiar. I got my Ph.D. in 1973 and when I retired in 2001 as a progressed PL I had just reached 40K.
Glad I didn't go the PhD route, then.
I've said this before, but I know a fair few people who have PhDs. The vast majority of them either regret doing it, or think it has had no, or even negative, effect on their salary over those with ordinary degrees.
PhDs are important if you want to be an academic, helpful if you want to teach in a top private school or grammar, of little benefit otherwise unless in a specific area in demand in the commercial field
That's a rather British attitude.
Indeed. A close relative did a PhD. When he applied for management positions, just after he left academia, he would find himself being interviewed for jobs in research which paid peanuts.
If you want to go into business management an MBA would be far more useful than a PhD
He was under the delusion that having a PhD in Chemistry, would have some kind of usefulness in running companies that made chemicals.
Only if it was related to the specific chemicals they produce
Having the MBAs take over from the engineers to run Boeing worked out so well, didn't it!
Does the McDonnell Douglas - Boeing merger go down as one of the worst corporate mergers of all time? Totally destroyed the profitability and reputation of the company, by forgetting that what they actually did was top level engineering.
Currently reading Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing. That is the central hypothesis of the book.
The disgraceful events before Philip's funeral were leaving do parties and the point about them is that Boris was not there
This is true, but I'm not sure how much it will help him in the court of public opinion. The sequence of leaks has worked out quite well for Boris's opponents -- first the Christmas one, tied to a clear point in time when everybody can remember what they personally had to give up because of the restrictions; then the drinks in the garden, which is pretty low-wattage as parties go but has photographic evidence clearly putting Boris on the scene. By the time we get to raucous partying while the Queen is in mourning I suspect the "Boris = parties" link has been firmly made in the public mind and he is tainted by association whether or not he knew about them.
(His most immediate hurdle is his own MPs, on the other hand, and they may be more disposed to consider the specifics rather than the overall mood music. Or not.)
If kinabalu is a 'liberal racist', as alleged, does that make Tommy Robinson an 'illiberal racist' and me a secret Tory? Utter piffle.
In other news from the right, I've learnt today that food banks are A Good Thing in a rich country such as ours, and the more food banks the merrier.
On the latter point, apparently I am giving to my local food bank so the ones who say it is a Good Thing don't have to pay so much tax. But the wine calls.
How much tax would you need to pay to ensure that food banks were not necessary? That someone has not had bad luck, or made poor life choices, that has led them to have not enough money for essentials such as food?
This is why charities are vital IMV. The state is a big broadsword, making big swipes but missing many important things. charities are a dirk or scalpel, getting to the bits the state can not.
The state can never catch everyone, which means there will always be a role for charities to act as a fallback. Systems that try to do it all with the state cause mass hardship.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h On the South Africa debate. People can try and re-write history as much as they like. Chris Whitty said "there are several things we don't know, but all the things that we do know, are bad". That statement simply wasn't accurate.
That's Dec 15. Depending how high a bar you have for 'know' it's defensible. We knew it had some vaccine escape and was more easily transmitted. There was some evidence on lower severity (probably, by then?) but I'm not sure I'd have said we 'knew' that at that point.
SA Doctors were saying about the significant lower severity 3 weeks before his statement.
Quite possibly (by which I mean I don't remember the timings, but assuming you do and I believe you). But 'know' in science has a quite specific meaning. Even knowing it was less severe in South Africa wouldn't mean it knowing (hoping, suspecting, expecting even, perhaps, but not knowing) was less severe here for a few reasons: - Different age profiles - Different profiles of past infection to different variants - Different comorbidities (partly due to differences in age) - Different profile of vaccines used (I don't know this to be the case, but good chance we have a different mix?)
Even at this point, do we know that Omicron is intrinsically milder than Delta? As opposed to effectively milder due to increased past exposure and increased vaccination giving us more protection? I haven't seen convincing studies on that - you'd need comparisons among unvaccinated and unexposed populations. If we still don't know the intrinsic severity then we didn't know it was going to be milder in a population with different past exposure, vaccination and comorbidity characterstics.
Whitty’s statement was still factually incorrect. And crucially and desperately incorrect and stated to the world as fact - at a time when UK hospitality was desperate for a good Xmas season
It was irresponsible, which is kinda ironic for a man who comes across as the epitome of decorously judged English reserve and judiciousness
It was not incorrect, for the reasons I have stated. We had some evidence it was milder. But what we knew was that it had some vaccine escape and spread faster.
I think, while this is correct, you can argue about the tone. There was a lot of evidence coming from SA that was treated with incredible skepticism by our, and other, governments/scientists. Frankly I can see why some thought it was racist or otherwise prejudiced. That's perhaps not was anyone intended, but its certainly the perception.
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I don’t believe it was “racism” per se
For a start most of the doctors and profs reporting the mildness of Omicron were white
It was more a kind of lingering, snobbish western-eurocentrism. We might have reacted with equal skepticism to data coming out of Bulgaria, or the Phillipines, or the Falklands, or Macau, or Iceland, or even the Trumpier states of the USA
The sense was “we need a big important sensible country to back up these numbers - Western Europe, bits of Eastern Europe, developed east Asia, eg Japan or korea, MOST of the USA, the wider Anglosphere”
I admit this is a slender difference, but it is a difference. Either way it hindered our understanding of Omicron. And I am still sure Whitty told untruths at that presser. We did not KNOW anything. We had some bad intimations (justified) and some good (justified)
The fact that the most prominent person saying it was a white (female) South African doctor may have made matters worse in that respect. A sort of double racism in both directions, if that's possible.
Must say I’m struggling to parse Leon’s dichotomy. Western superiority complex vs racism. Hmm.
Glad I'm not the only one having problems following exactly what is being argued about.
Haven't been following the pile-on on poor Kinabulu, but there is most certainly a distinction between being an ethnocentrist ('my way of life or religion is best') and being a racist ('my race is superior'). For instance, Frederick Douglass the ex-slave AIUI preferred the Christian American life (apart from the racism!) to the pagan life in Africa, but he was no racist.
It's totally ridiculous. People no doubt can't be arsed to go back and audit the conversation - and I can't blame them one iota - but if they did they'd realize there is much objection being expressed, and mud being slung, by the reactionary reductives community (and one or two others tbf) to a stream of posts that I guess somebody must have written but that person is not I.
Not for the first time it's Fruity Leon's fault. He set a trap - asking me what the modern term for 3rd World is - and I walked right into it by answering. Live and learn.
LOL how the mighty have fallen. He can’t even put his camera the right way round.
Now, Cameo was a funny pandemic-era way to get an out-of-work actor or comedian to say happy birthday to your friend, but surely this sort of stunt raises all sorts of questions about advertising regulations?
It's amusing as I've said before I think we pay our politicians too much and it'd be better if their pay was more closely linked to citizens pay in general. I believe in the 90s an MP typically got two times average income and now it's three times and I don't think that's healthy.
Others have said they think MPs are underpaid compared to the private sector.
While a tiny, tiny minority of the private sector may be worth more than MPs that's far from the case for all MPs as the likes of Bercow etc whoring themselves post politics helps demonstrate. As does the desperation in many MPs to do anything to stay loyal to the Party and keep their seat, because if they lose their seat they lose their job and there £84k+ salary they'd never achieve in the real world.
Above average intelligence, middle class background at least, graduate from good uni, driven and ambitious, energetic, robust and thick skinned, gift of the gab, alert to opportunities to get ahead.
The above being the typical profile of an MP, there's little doubt in my mind that most of them would have been able to earn more if they'd choosen a career in the private sector.
I am actually quite surprised the average is that high after 5 years.
I do wonder whether the base stats are on all degrees, including Masters (and MBAs) and PhDs etc. That would boost the numbers up a bit. Depending on data too, if it's survey based (how else?) then likely to be a differential response with lower earners less responsive? Don't account for that and you get high numbers.
Five years after first graduating I was doing a PhD on a £15k stipend, so I'm happy to believe those numbers are high
So 22 years after PhD I'm just touching 50K, but thats a middle ranking academic salary. Just shows that I do it for love and not for the cash...
Sounds familiar. I got my Ph.D. in 1973 and when I retired in 2001 as a progressed PL I had just reached 40K.
Glad I didn't go the PhD route, then.
I've said this before, but I know a fair few people who have PhDs. The vast majority of them either regret doing it, or think it has had no, or even negative, effect on their salary over those with ordinary degrees.
PhDs are important if you want to be an academic, helpful if you want to teach in a top private school or grammar, of little benefit otherwise unless in a specific area in demand in the commercial field
That's a rather British attitude.
Indeed. A close relative did a PhD. When he applied for management positions, just after he left academia, he would find himself being interviewed for jobs in research which paid peanuts.
If you want to go into business management an MBA would be far more useful than a PhD
He was under the delusion that having a PhD in Chemistry, would have some kind of usefulness in running companies that made chemicals.
Only if it was related to the specific chemicals they produce
Having the MBAs take over from the engineers to run Boeing worked out so well, didn't it!
Does the McDonnell Douglas - Boeing merger go down as one of the worst corporate mergers of all time? Totally destroyed the profitability and reputation of the company, by forgetting that what they actually did was top level engineering.
Currently reading Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing. That is the central hypothesis of the book.
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
It all boils down to that word 'know'. You could argue that the only things 'known' about omicron at that stage was that it was more transmissible than delta and could result in breakthrough infections for both the vaccinated and those recovered from prior strains. Both of those are undoubtedly 'bad' characteristics. The other evidence was indicative not definitive at that point. So, at one level Whitty was not lying, just being cautious - and perhaps misleading - in the use of the word 'know'.
Which is what I think Selebian's point was.
If "could result in breakthrough infections" was true, then so was "could be milder".
Not equivalent. Could be milder is a speculation based on overall results and a lagging indicator to boot.. Can cause breakthroughs only requires one actual observed instance, which was already in the books at that point, and is a leading indicator.
If kinabalu is a 'liberal racist', as alleged, does that make Tommy Robinson an 'illiberal racist' and me a secret Tory? Utter piffle.
In other news from the right, I've learnt today that food banks are A Good Thing in a rich country such as ours, and the more food banks the merrier.
On the latter point, apparently I am giving to my local food bank so the ones who say it is a Good Thing don't have to pay so much tax. But the wine calls.
How much tax would you need to pay to ensure that food banks were not necessary? That someone has not had bad luck, or made poor life choices, that has led them to have not enough money for essentials such as food?
This is why charities are vital IMV. The state is a big broadsword, making big swipes but missing many important things. charities are a dirk or scalpel, getting to the bits the state can not.
The state can never catch everyone, which means there will always be a role for charities to act as a fallback. Systems that try to do it all with the state cause mass hardship.
Yes, but wouldn't you expect the number of food banks to decrease, rather than increase, as a society becomes more prosperous?
The rise in food banks is due to a rise in inequality, not a rise in benevolent charitable giving. For a more extreme example, see the USA where extreme wealth exists cheek by jowl with millions struggling to get by and dependent on charity - a significant cause of the awful fractures in that country at the moment.
If kinabalu is a 'liberal racist', as alleged, does that make Tommy Robinson an 'illiberal racist' and me a secret Tory? Utter piffle.
In other news from the right, I've learnt today that food banks are A Good Thing in a rich country such as ours, and the more food banks the merrier.
On the latter point, apparently I am giving to my local food bank so the ones who say it is a Good Thing don't have to pay so much tax. But the wine calls.
How much tax would you need to pay to ensure that food banks were not necessary? That someone has not had bad luck, or made poor life choices, that has led them to have not enough money for essentials such as food?
This is why charities are vital IMV. The state is a big broadsword, making big swipes but missing many important things. charities are a dirk or scalpel, getting to the bits the state can not.
The state can never catch everyone, which means there will always be a role for charities to act as a fallback. Systems that try to do it all with the state cause mass hardship.
Was there not an elector in Hartlepool who gave as his reason for voting Tory that, under Labour there'd only been one food bank in the town. Under the Tories there were three.
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
To be fair, all we really actually knew at the time was that it spread fast. The rest was mostly informed speculation.
Re: Ignoring data from SA. Didn't we also ignore what we were seeing in Italy at the very beginning?
There is definitely a 'not invented here' syndrome but I'm not sure whether it is racist.
People will be doing studies on why Covid 'behaved' the way it did for decades; trying to disentangle the effects of variant, demographics, regulations, social effects and other factors.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
Oh my god.
Again.
AGAIN!
The South Africans were NOT comparing Omicron (SA) with Omicron (select far flung foreign nation here).
If kinabalu is a 'liberal racist', as alleged, does that make Tommy Robinson an 'illiberal racist' and me a secret Tory? Utter piffle.
In other news from the right, I've learnt today that food banks are A Good Thing in a rich country such as ours, and the more food banks the merrier.
On the latter point, apparently I am giving to my local food bank so the ones who say it is a Good Thing don't have to pay so much tax. But the wine calls.
How much tax would you need to pay to ensure that food banks were not necessary? That someone has not had bad luck, or made poor life choices, that has led them to have not enough money for essentials such as food?
This is why charities are vital IMV. The state is a big broadsword, making big swipes but missing many important things. charities are a dirk or scalpel, getting to the bits the state can not.
The state can never catch everyone, which means there will always be a role for charities to act as a fallback. Systems that try to do it all with the state cause mass hardship.
Yes, but wouldn't you expect the number of food banks to decrease, rather than increase, as a society becomes more prosperous?
The rise in food banks is due to a rise in inequality, not a rise in benevolent charitable giving. For a more extreme example, see the USA where extreme wealth exists cheek by jowl with millions struggling to get by and dependent on charity - a significant cause of the awful fractures in that country at the moment.
If you are poor, what is better than free food? Even if you double your income, would you stop going to get the free food?
So Boris does better in the redwall than every other Tory alternative except Sunak then. However even Sunak still loses most of the redwall to Starmer.
Suggests Sunak would make it closer but still not win the next general election even if Boris was removed
Must say I’m struggling to parse Leon’s dichotomy. Western superiority complex vs racism. Hmm.
Glad I'm not the only one having problems following exactly what is being argued about.
Haven't been following the pile-on on poor Kinabulu, but there is most certainly a distinction between being an ethnocentrist ('my way of life or religion is best') and being a racist ('my race is superior'). For instance, Frederick Douglass the ex-slave AIUI preferred the Christian American life (apart from the racism!) to the pagan life in Africa, but he was no racist.
Not for the first time it's Fruity Leon's fault. He set a trap - asking me what the modern term for 3rd World is - and I walked right into it by answering. Live and learn.
I don't know why Leon (Sean T) is allowed to keep causing all this trouble on this site. He's a really unpleasant character who thinks he's funny, constantly winding people up deliberately - usually on the back of alcohol or some other substance(s) - and thinks most of us have the time of day for his proclivities.
He should face a ban for considerably longer than 24 hours. For the sake of the rest of this forum.
If you asked people in Bury South a list of 20 things most bothering them right now, a by-election wouldn't even feature.
It's such a free hit as well. Every defection people will say there should be a by-election, but law and history certainly don't make it the norm, any more than when we change PMs between elections and people pretend it essential we go to the polls.
So Boris does better in the redwall than every other Tory alternative except Sunak then. However even Sunak still loses most of the redwall to Starmer.
Suggests Sunak would make it closer but still not win the next general election even if Boris was removed
It is surprising with your well known polling observations that actually the poll summary indicates both could win GE24
So Boris does better in the redwall than every other Tory alternative except Sunak then. However even Sunak still loses most of the redwall to Starmer.
Suggests Sunak would make it closer but still not win the next general election even if Boris was removed
So you're completely buggered whichever way you choose. What a happy moment this must be for you! You can finally lay down the crosstabs and have a little think about what you'd actually like from a leader. Other than, you know, that rich seam of unobtanium, a victory. If you're going down, may as well go down in a blaze of glory. Fighting the good fight for what you truly believe in. Which is.......?
If kinabalu is a 'liberal racist', as alleged, does that make Tommy Robinson an 'illiberal racist' and me a secret Tory? Utter piffle.
In other news from the right, I've learnt today that food banks are A Good Thing in a rich country such as ours, and the more food banks the merrier.
On the latter point, apparently I am giving to my local food bank so the ones who say it is a Good Thing don't have to pay so much tax. But the wine calls.
How much tax would you need to pay to ensure that food banks were not necessary? That someone has not had bad luck, or made poor life choices, that has led them to have not enough money for essentials such as food?
This is why charities are vital IMV. The state is a big broadsword, making big swipes but missing many important things. charities are a dirk or scalpel, getting to the bits the state can not.
The state can never catch everyone, which means there will always be a role for charities to act as a fallback. Systems that try to do it all with the state cause mass hardship.
Yes, but wouldn't you expect the number of food banks to decrease, rather than increase, as a society becomes more prosperous?
(Snip)
This is one of the places where the controversy comes in. If you provide something to someone for free, many will take you up on the offer. If food banks become available in more areas, or the criteria for accessing it is relaxed, demand will go up.
By the way, I wouldn't want to push this argument all the way but the fact remains that under our electoral system we elect a Member of Parliament. We don't elect a party.
Hence no requirement for a by-election. The Member of Parliament was elected and is still the same person representing his people.
So Boris does better in the redwall than every other Tory alternative except Sunak then. However even Sunak still loses most of the redwall to Starmer.
Suggests Sunak would make it closer but still not win the next general election even if Boris was removed
You never really know how someone will do until they are in position. Plenty of people might look good on paper but do terribly, perhaps just because of the nature of the situation, and others might surprise on the upside.
Polling is all we have to judge of course, there's really no way of telling who might be a good PM (since even being a good minister would not guarantee that) and if he is starting out with more positive views toward him than other Tories, it may well be easier for him to recover lost ground than others.
We'll see (or rather, not, as I don't think he'll get the gig).
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
To be fair, all we really actually knew at the time was that it spread fast. The rest was mostly informed speculation.
Re: Ignoring data from SA. Didn't we also ignore what we were seeing in Italy at the very beginning?
There is definitely a 'not invented here' syndrome but I'm not sure whether it is racist.
People will be doing studies on why Covid 'behaved' the way it did for decades; trying to disentangle the effects of variant, demographics, regulations, social effects and other factors.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
Oh my god.
Again.
AGAIN!
The South Africans were NOT comparing Omicron (SA) with Omicron (select far flung foreign nation here).
They were comparing SA (Omicron) with SA (Delta).
And they said - repeatedly - that it was milder.
And they were ignored.
Oh my god.
Again
AGAIN!
The assumption that the difference between the variants was not affected by other measures is silly.
So Boris does better in the redwall than every other Tory alternative except Sunak then. However even Sunak still loses most of the redwall to Starmer.
Suggests Sunak would make it closer but still not win the next general election even if Boris was removed
I keep telling you, were Sunak to become leader, his and the Conservatives polling would go strataspheric for the honeymoon. He then needs to hope that his successor as CofE and the Labour Party are blamed for the economy.
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
To be fair, all we really actually knew at the time was that it spread fast. The rest was mostly informed speculation.
Re: Ignoring data from SA. Didn't we also ignore what we were seeing in Italy at the very beginning?
There is definitely a 'not invented here' syndrome but I'm not sure whether it is racist.
People will be doing studies on why Covid 'behaved' the way it did for decades; trying to disentangle the effects of variant, demographics, regulations, social effects and other factors.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
Oh my god.
Again.
AGAIN!
The South Africans were NOT comparing Omicron (SA) with Omicron (select far flung foreign nation here).
They were comparing SA (Omicron) with SA (Delta).
And they said - repeatedly - that it was milder.
And they were ignored.
Any chance of making this a sticky @MikeSmithson - it’s a waste of pixels posting it ad infinitum
If kinabalu is a 'liberal racist', as alleged, does that make Tommy Robinson an 'illiberal racist' and me a secret Tory? Utter piffle.
In other news from the right, I've learnt today that food banks are A Good Thing in a rich country such as ours, and the more food banks the merrier.
On the latter point, apparently I am giving to my local food bank so the ones who say it is a Good Thing don't have to pay so much tax. But the wine calls.
How much tax would you need to pay to ensure that food banks were not necessary? That someone has not had bad luck, or made poor life choices, that has led them to have not enough money for essentials such as food?
This is why charities are vital IMV. The state is a big broadsword, making big swipes but missing many important things. charities are a dirk or scalpel, getting to the bits the state can not.
The state can never catch everyone, which means there will always be a role for charities to act as a fallback. Systems that try to do it all with the state cause mass hardship.
I can't remember where but there are European Countries (I think one is Denmark) where the Government supports Food Banks because there are always gaps that create problems so it's best to have them as a fallback if everything else has gone wrong.
If the Tories want a female leader who might actually have some appeal in the Red Wall they should go for Mordaunt. Truss would get found out quicker than May was.
Must say I’m struggling to parse Leon’s dichotomy. Western superiority complex vs racism. Hmm.
Glad I'm not the only one having problems following exactly what is being argued about.
Haven't been following the pile-on on poor Kinabulu, but there is most certainly a distinction between being an ethnocentrist ('my way of life or religion is best') and being a racist ('my race is superior'). For instance, Frederick Douglass the ex-slave AIUI preferred the Christian American life (apart from the racism!) to the pagan life in Africa, but he was no racist.
Not for the first time it's Fruity Leon's fault. He set a trap - asking me what the modern term for 3rd World is - and I walked right into it by answering. Live and learn.
I don't know why Leon (Sean T) is allowed to keep causing all this trouble on this site. He's a really unpleasant character who thinks he's funny, constantly winding people up deliberately - usually on the back of alcohol or some other substance(s) - and thinks most of us have the time of day for his proclivities.
He should face a ban for considerably longer than 24 hours. For the sake of the rest of this forum.
I've duelled with Leon's many incarnations for a decade or more, and have come to feel OK with him as a literate, sometimes witty provocateur. In the early days I took him seriously, and felt as you do now, but I think it does add something to the site to have someone offering half-serious wild opinions in coherent form (unlike, say, MalcolmG, who I might be closer to politically as he's merely SNP but who just rips off a few lines of usually meaningless abuse). (Example today: "Tell the woke halfwits to take a hike an dpeddle their crap elsewhere, you call them exactly wht you want to and take mince from no man or woman" - eh?)
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
To be fair, all we really actually knew at the time was that it spread fast. The rest was mostly informed speculation.
Re: Ignoring data from SA. Didn't we also ignore what we were seeing in Italy at the very beginning?
There is definitely a 'not invented here' syndrome but I'm not sure whether it is racist.
People will be doing studies on why Covid 'behaved' the way it did for decades; trying to disentangle the effects of variant, demographics, regulations, social effects and other factors.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
Oh my god.
Again.
AGAIN!
The South Africans were NOT comparing Omicron (SA) with Omicron (select far flung foreign nation here).
They were comparing SA (Omicron) with SA (Delta).
And they said - repeatedly - that it was milder.
And they were ignored.
Any chance of making this a sticky @MikeSmithson - it’s a waste of pixels posting it ad infinitum
Why not just stop posting it, as it is bollocks? They were paid very close attention.
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
To be fair, all we really actually knew at the time was that it spread fast. The rest was mostly informed speculation.
Re: Ignoring data from SA. Didn't we also ignore what we were seeing in Italy at the very beginning?
There is definitely a 'not invented here' syndrome but I'm not sure whether it is racist.
People will be doing studies on why Covid 'behaved' the way it did for decades; trying to disentangle the effects of variant, demographics, regulations, social effects and other factors.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
Oh my god.
Again.
AGAIN!
The South Africans were NOT comparing Omicron (SA) with Omicron (select far flung foreign nation here).
They were comparing SA (Omicron) with SA (Delta).
And they said - repeatedly - that it was milder.
And they were ignored.
But they weren't ignored. Nearly everyone looked at the SA data and hoped upon hope it would be true globally.
If you go back and look at threads here, or even the mainstream media, you'll see plenty of references to the SA data. But leaders, scientists and public health professionals were quite rightly were cautious. We have all been confounded by COVID more than once. While I think everyone was hoping the SA experience would be replicated in Europe and America, some were too fearful to that it might not to just assume it would.
Edit: FWIW, Whitty's words at the time grated with me. My first instinct was 'but there is positive indicative evidence'. But, parsing his meaning to the word 'know', I knew where he was coming from.
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
To be fair, all we really actually knew at the time was that it spread fast. The rest was mostly informed speculation.
Re: Ignoring data from SA. Didn't we also ignore what we were seeing in Italy at the very beginning?
There is definitely a 'not invented here' syndrome but I'm not sure whether it is racist.
People will be doing studies on why Covid 'behaved' the way it did for decades; trying to disentangle the effects of variant, demographics, regulations, social effects and other factors.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
Oh my god.
Again.
AGAIN!
The South Africans were NOT comparing Omicron (SA) with Omicron (select far flung foreign nation here).
They were comparing SA (Omicron) with SA (Delta).
And they said - repeatedly - that it was milder.
And they were ignored.
Any chance of making this a sticky @MikeSmithson - it’s a waste of pixels posting it ad infinitum
As a warning against simplistic thinking in complex situations?
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
To be fair, all we really actually knew at the time was that it spread fast. The rest was mostly informed speculation.
Re: Ignoring data from SA. Didn't we also ignore what we were seeing in Italy at the very beginning?
There is definitely a 'not invented here' syndrome but I'm not sure whether it is racist.
People will be doing studies on why Covid 'behaved' the way it did for decades; trying to disentangle the effects of variant, demographics, regulations, social effects and other factors.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
Oh my god.
Again.
AGAIN!
The South Africans were NOT comparing Omicron (SA) with Omicron (select far flung foreign nation here).
They were comparing SA (Omicron) with SA (Delta).
And they said - repeatedly - that it was milder.
And they were ignored.
Oh my god.
Again
AGAIN!
The assumption that the difference between the variants was not affected by other measures is silly.
To be fair, Anabobazina did the random capitalisation of words first, and under traditional internet rules, thereby wins the argument.
Must say I’m struggling to parse Leon’s dichotomy. Western superiority complex vs racism. Hmm.
Glad I'm not the only one having problems following exactly what is being argued about.
Haven't been following the pile-on on poor Kinabulu, but there is most certainly a distinction between being an ethnocentrist ('my way of life or religion is best') and being a racist ('my race is superior'). For instance, Frederick Douglass the ex-slave AIUI preferred the Christian American life (apart from the racism!) to the pagan life in Africa, but he was no racist.
Not for the first time it's Fruity Leon's fault. He set a trap - asking me what the modern term for 3rd World is - and I walked right into it by answering. Live and learn.
I don't know why Leon (Sean T) is allowed to keep causing all this trouble on this site. He's a really unpleasant character who thinks he's funny, constantly winding people up deliberately - usually on the back of alcohol or some other substance(s) - and thinks most of us have the time of day for his proclivities.
He should face a ban for considerably longer than 24 hours. For the sake of the rest of this forum.
Now, I'm liberal, but to a degree I want ev'rybody to be free
But I'd draw the line at posters who call for other posters to be banned.
If kinabalu is a 'liberal racist', as alleged, does that make Tommy Robinson an 'illiberal racist' and me a secret Tory? Utter piffle.
In other news from the right, I've learnt today that food banks are A Good Thing in a rich country such as ours, and the more food banks the merrier.
On the latter point, apparently I am giving to my local food bank so the ones who say it is a Good Thing don't have to pay so much tax. But the wine calls.
How much tax would you need to pay to ensure that food banks were not necessary? That someone has not had bad luck, or made poor life choices, that has led them to have not enough money for essentials such as food?
This is why charities are vital IMV. The state is a big broadsword, making big swipes but missing many important things. charities are a dirk or scalpel, getting to the bits the state can not.
The state can never catch everyone, which means there will always be a role for charities to act as a fallback. Systems that try to do it all with the state cause mass hardship.
Yes, but wouldn't you expect the number of food banks to decrease, rather than increase, as a society becomes more prosperous?
The rise in food banks is due to a rise in inequality, not a rise in benevolent charitable giving. For a more extreme example, see the USA where extreme wealth exists cheek by jowl with millions struggling to get by and dependent on charity - a significant cause of the awful fractures in that country at the moment.
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
To be fair, all we really actually knew at the time was that it spread fast. The rest was mostly informed speculation.
Re: Ignoring data from SA. Didn't we also ignore what we were seeing in Italy at the very beginning?
There is definitely a 'not invented here' syndrome but I'm not sure whether it is racist.
People will be doing studies on why Covid 'behaved' the way it did for decades; trying to disentangle the effects of variant, demographics, regulations, social effects and other factors.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
Oh my god.
Again.
AGAIN!
The South Africans were NOT comparing Omicron (SA) with Omicron (select far flung foreign nation here).
They were comparing SA (Omicron) with SA (Delta).
And they said - repeatedly - that it was milder.
And they were ignored.
Oh my god.
Again
AGAIN!
The assumption that the difference between the variants was not affected by other measures is silly.
Two variants.
Same demographic group.
Different outcomes.
The South Africans were right.
Our scientists were wrong.
The South Africans said they were wrong, at the time.
We had the announcement of the battery factory funding. I missed this,
Wayve, a London-based startup creating autonomous driving technology based on computer vision and machine learning, has raised a $200m Series B funding round to help get self-driving cars onto the road faster.
Waymo has had $5.5bn and still can't solve the problems. Remember the issue isn't that driving is a 95% issue (and people can live with the 5%) it's a 99.9995% issue and until you've uncovered all the issues a self-driving car won't be allowed on the road.
If i had $200m to invest, it would be going into the battery factory rather than yet another SD car startup.
Unless someone builds a new town specifically around them, self-driving cars are coming a few years after personal flying cars powered by nuclear fusion.
Indeed, if the government was serious about levelling up it would announce a £30bn fund for electrification of our vehicle manufacturing industry, subsidies available to companies who will manufacture batteries, mine lithium, make the EVs, roll out charging stations and a few extras.
They seem to think that a few hundred million here and there will make a difference, it won't. Forget the cries from the left about "giving away billions to Elon Musk", just get on with it.
Agreed. Though I'd note Musk would have built his first European plant here, in all likelihood, had we not Brexited. Which probably makes you suggestion more, not less sensible.
South Korea (a similar sized country) is going to be one of the big global players in the battery market, and without a massive amount of government assistance. But we're five years behind.
What's really worrying for me is that the UK may end up becoming a net exporter of unrefined lithium, we'll miss out on the whole value chain other than exporting the cheapest bit of it. I don't understand why alarm bells aren't ringing at BEIS all day everyday about this. It's a £500bn per year market that we will have a vanishingly small role in unless we get moving now. A huge chunk of viable export industry just disappears because the Treasury decided to count coppers.
Agreed. This is a hugely important part of manufacturing over the next couple of decades.
It's blindingly obvious that if Con elect Truss as leader it'll be total wipeout - back to approx 175 seats.
She is simply not remotely credible as a PM.
But that doesn't mean she won't win - it's exactly the same as Labour members loving Corbyn, many Con members will love Truss.
The only hope is that these polls get enough cut through to get the message across.
I guess there's also a backstop in that if she were to win in next few months she could still be removed before a GE after a wipeout at the 2023 Locals.
By the way, I wouldn't want to push this argument all the way but the fact remains that under our electoral system we elect a Member of Parliament. We don't elect a party.
Hence no requirement for a by-election. The Member of Parliament was elected and is still the same person representing his people.
No requirement, you're right. But the argument that "we elect a member not a party" is utterly disconnected from what motivates people at the ballot box. Surely some people vote for the man or woman, but most are putting a cross next to the party. In the basis of ideology, manifesto, leader. Legal fact is political fiction in this case. We need system that reflects this better.
Must say I’m struggling to parse Leon’s dichotomy. Western superiority complex vs racism. Hmm.
Glad I'm not the only one having problems following exactly what is being argued about.
Haven't been following the pile-on on poor Kinabulu, but there is most certainly a distinction between being an ethnocentrist ('my way of life or religion is best') and being a racist ('my race is superior'). For instance, Frederick Douglass the ex-slave AIUI preferred the Christian American life (apart from the racism!) to the pagan life in Africa, but he was no racist.
Not for the first time it's Fruity Leon's fault. He set a trap - asking me what the modern term for 3rd World is - and I walked right into it by answering. Live and learn.
I don't know why Leon (Sean T) is allowed to keep causing all this trouble on this site. He's a really unpleasant character who thinks he's funny, constantly winding people up deliberately - usually on the back of alcohol or some other substance(s) - and thinks most of us have the time of day for his proclivities.
He should face a ban for considerably longer than 24 hours. For the sake of the rest of this forum.
Now, I'm liberal, but to a degree I want ev'rybody to be free
But I'd draw the line at posters who call for other posters to be banned.
Can we ban all the posters calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned for calling for people to be banned......
Actually - what we need are more people who get the question "Is the glass half empty or half full?" right.
In happier news. My 100% record of having mildly disappointing food (on my one previous Sri Lankan trip) has been easily shattered. It’s all good so far. Black Pork Curry lunch here was absolutely excellent
Colombo is a strange city. Poor, scruffy, yet in places intensely civilised. And stunned by the sun and heat into an amiable complacency
Are there still lots of stray dogs lining the streets? Was when I was there. Plagued with them - a bit off-putting.
Not one that I’ve seen. Not cats. In fact a decided absence by “3rd World” standards (are we still allowed to say 3rd World? What’s the replacement?)
The Global South. Not to be confused with the pop group of that name.
The Global South is surely far more insulting than “3rd World” (which is an antique Cold War term, I readily confess)
For a start there are plenty of once-developing countries in the “Global South” which would really resent that characterization;. Chileans are quite haughty about being compared to Argentina, let alone Sudan. Indonesia is equally proud, likewise Costa Rica, the Maldives, Mauritius, what even is “the Global South”?
You asked what the term now is and I told you - The Global South. But please note it doesn't mean below the equator. It's pretty much a straight replacement for 3rd World. It's a development measure not a geographic one. Insulting? No, the whole point is that 3rd World was, but this isn't. Everyone is happy and onboard with it.
"Everyone is happy and onboard with it."
Not true....its far from settled issue.
‘Global South’, a term frequently used on websites and in papers related to academic and ‘predatory’ publishing, may represent a form of unscholarly discrimination. Arguments are put forward as to why the current use of this term is geographically meaningless, since it implies countries in the southern hemisphere, whereas many of the entities in publishing that are referred to as being part of the Global South are in fact either on the equator or in the northern hemisphere. Therefore, academics, in writing about academic publishing, should cease using this broad, culturally insensitive, and geographically inaccurate term.
Erondu says she's embarrassed if she inadvertently uses the term during a workshop in one of the countries in Africa where she works on health care issues. Why? "Because people in Nigeria don't refer to themselves as the 'global south.' It's something someone named them."
I could go on and on. Third world is a no no, describing in terms of income is problematic and global south many don't like either.
I see. So what's a better term then? What gets your stamp of approval? Or let's put it this way. What term do YOU use when needing one for referring to the relatively impoverished parts of the world?
Eg, complete this sentence - The pandemic will soon be over in the rich nations of the West but will rage on for a long time in ????????? unless vaccines are rolled out there as a matter of priority.
I still use third world. This isn't me being deliberately old-fashioned or deliberately refusing to use the woke term. It would never occur to me that third world was unwoke. Actually, I might use developing world. Which itself is a polite euphemism which replaced the earlier and more pejorative 'undeveloped world' despite it being glaringly apparently that many parts of the undeveloped world were not developing. I suppose - if it occurred to me, because it's not a phrase that ever really does occur to me - you could use 'global south' to include countries like Chile whereas third world brings to mind more countries like Benin.
And I tend to say "poorer countries". Whatever, I don't find it a big deal. All that happened here was @Leon asked what was the modern term for 3rd World and I replied to him - being the helpful sort - with what I believe is the answer, Global South.
From this we get to him - Leon - telling me I'm hung up about "woke" and that I act like some sort of language policema ... person, and now we have @MaxPB crashing in and saying I'm worse than a racist!
Utterly bizarrio. And on a day that Meat Loaf died too. Chilean Red and Bag of Nuts time cannot come too soon for me today, I tell you.
It's the same reason that SA Omicron data was dismissed. You and liberal racists have othered them with some new term that makes them different to us because they're poor, not white or both. The "global south" is stupid term.
Ah, so that's me AND "liberal racists". Seems I'm off the hook. Phew.
And I should be off the hook too. This hook anyway. Because the one & only time I've used the wicked othering term Global South is today in response to someone specifically asking about it.
Amazing to think that some PBers are still unwilling to admit that the South Africans were dismissed in December. They absolutely were dismissed. Better to admit it and move on rather than swear white is black.
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
To be fair, all we really actually knew at the time was that it spread fast. The rest was mostly informed speculation.
Re: Ignoring data from SA. Didn't we also ignore what we were seeing in Italy at the very beginning?
There is definitely a 'not invented here' syndrome but I'm not sure whether it is racist.
People will be doing studies on why Covid 'behaved' the way it did for decades; trying to disentangle the effects of variant, demographics, regulations, social effects and other factors.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
Oh my god.
Again.
AGAIN!
The South Africans were NOT comparing Omicron (SA) with Omicron (select far flung foreign nation here).
They were comparing SA (Omicron) with SA (Delta).
And they said - repeatedly - that it was milder.
And they were ignored.
Oh my god.
Again
AGAIN!
The assumption that the difference between the variants was not affected by other measures is silly.
Two variants.
Same demographic group.
Different outcomes.
The South Africans were right.
Our scientists were wrong.
The South Africans said they were wrong, at the time.
And they were ignored.
They were not ignored. Far from. But it's idiotic to assume that the combination of other non-variant effects - when effects are lagging - would follow through to the UK.
In happier news. My 100% record of having mildly disappointing food (on my one previous Sri Lankan trip) has been easily shattered. It’s all good so far. Black Pork Curry lunch here was absolutely excellent
Colombo is a strange city. Poor, scruffy, yet in places intensely civilised. And stunned by the sun and heat into an amiable complacency
Are there still lots of stray dogs lining the streets? Was when I was there. Plagued with them - a bit off-putting.
Not one that I’ve seen. Not cats. In fact a decided absence by “3rd World” standards (are we still allowed to say 3rd World? What’s the replacement?)
The Global South. Not to be confused with the pop group of that name.
The Global South is surely far more insulting than “3rd World” (which is an antique Cold War term, I readily confess)
For a start there are plenty of once-developing countries in the “Global South” which would really resent that characterization;. Chileans are quite haughty about being compared to Argentina, let alone Sudan. Indonesia is equally proud, likewise Costa Rica, the Maldives, Mauritius, what even is “the Global South”?
You asked what the term now is and I told you - The Global South. But please note it doesn't mean below the equator. It's pretty much a straight replacement for 3rd World. It's a development measure not a geographic one. Insulting? No, the whole point is that 3rd World was, but this isn't. Everyone is happy and onboard with it.
"Everyone is happy and onboard with it."
Not true....its far from settled issue.
‘Global South’, a term frequently used on websites and in papers related to academic and ‘predatory’ publishing, may represent a form of unscholarly discrimination. Arguments are put forward as to why the current use of this term is geographically meaningless, since it implies countries in the southern hemisphere, whereas many of the entities in publishing that are referred to as being part of the Global South are in fact either on the equator or in the northern hemisphere. Therefore, academics, in writing about academic publishing, should cease using this broad, culturally insensitive, and geographically inaccurate term.
Erondu says she's embarrassed if she inadvertently uses the term during a workshop in one of the countries in Africa where she works on health care issues. Why? "Because people in Nigeria don't refer to themselves as the 'global south.' It's something someone named them."
I could go on and on. Third world is a no no, describing in terms of income is problematic and global south many don't like either.
I see. So what's a better term then? What gets your stamp of approval? Or let's put it this way. What term do YOU use when needing one for referring to the relatively impoverished parts of the world?
Eg, complete this sentence - The pandemic will soon be over in the rich nations of the West but will rage on for a long time in ????????? unless vaccines are rolled out there as a matter of priority.
I still use third world. This isn't me being deliberately old-fashioned or deliberately refusing to use the woke term. It would never occur to me that third world was unwoke. Actually, I might use developing world. Which itself is a polite euphemism which replaced the earlier and more pejorative 'undeveloped world' despite it being glaringly apparently that many parts of the undeveloped world were not developing. I suppose - if it occurred to me, because it's not a phrase that ever really does occur to me - you could use 'global south' to include countries like Chile whereas third world brings to mind more countries like Benin.
And I tend to say "poorer countries". Whatever, I don't find it a big deal. All that happened here was @Leon asked what was the modern term for 3rd World and I replied to him - being the helpful sort - with what I believe is the answer, Global South.
From this we get to him - Leon - telling me I'm hung up about "woke" and that I act like some sort of language policema ... person, and now we have @MaxPB crashing in and saying I'm worse than a racist!
Utterly bizarrio. And on a day that Meat Loaf died too. Chilean Red and Bag of Nuts time cannot come too soon for me today, I tell you.
It's the same reason that SA Omicron data was dismissed. You and liberal racists have othered them with some new term that makes them different to us because they're poor, not white or both. The "global south" is stupid term.
Ah, so that's me AND "liberal racists". Seems I'm off the hook. Phew.
And I should be off the hook too. This hook anyway. Because the one & only time I've used the wicked othering term Global South is today in response to someone specifically asking about it.
I found it strange that we got so rapidly from "global south" to "disease" and "spear chuckers". And from what I've read, that was nothing to do with you.
The same poll concludes Boris/Rishi can still win GE 24
Yes, but I was really surprised to see that Rishi polls little better than Boris. That suggests that the problem is the Party rather than the leader. That's not what I would have expected.
Am I misreading something? If I am not, your team's problems may run deeper than I thought.
Non-technical people, in the world of default cloud backup, and social media? Ha Ha.. There are 137 billion copies of those photos out there, for sure.
It's almost as funny as the people who think that Bitcoin guarantees anonymity.
Then again, some people have been claiming that No 10 is a no personal phone zone. So does this mean *official* phones?
Amongst the plethora of elections due this year (Slovenia, French presidential, US mid-terms, Portugal, Barbados, Conservative Party leadership), another which may be of more than passing interest on here is Sweden which votes on 11th September (subject to us not having been incinerated in the Russo-Ukraine war presumably).
The latest poll with changes on the last election in 2018:
Social Democrats: 31.1% (+2.8) Moderate Party: 20.9% (+1.1) Sweden Democrats: 19.2% (+1.7) Left Party: 9.6% (+1.6) Centre Party: 7.0% (-1.6) Christian Democrats: 4.4% (-1.9) Greens: 3.0% (-1.4) Liberals: 2.9% (-2.6)
The smaller parties struggling as the big three all put on some support but a small swing only of 0.8% from the Moderates to the Social Democrats.
Last time, the Social Democrats won 100 seats, the Moderates 70 and the Sweden Democrats 62 in the 349-seat Riksdag.
The current Government is a minority but has support from the Centre, Left and Greens but is down nearly 3 points from last time. The possibility of a deal with the Left Party can't be ruled out.
On the other side, could the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Sweden Democrats form a Government. That option is viable and would be a majority if they could get Centre support but neither the Centre nor Liberals have been willing to support a centre-right Government reliant on Sweden Democrat support.
Must say I’m struggling to parse Leon’s dichotomy. Western superiority complex vs racism. Hmm.
Glad I'm not the only one having problems following exactly what is being argued about.
Haven't been following the pile-on on poor Kinabulu, but there is most certainly a distinction between being an ethnocentrist ('my way of life or religion is best') and being a racist ('my race is superior'). For instance, Frederick Douglass the ex-slave AIUI preferred the Christian American life (apart from the racism!) to the pagan life in Africa, but he was no racist.
Not for the first time it's Fruity Leon's fault. He set a trap - asking me what the modern term for 3rd World is - and I walked right into it by answering. Live and learn.
I don't know why Leon (Sean T) is allowed to keep causing all this trouble on this site. He's a really unpleasant character who thinks he's funny, constantly winding people up deliberately - usually on the back of alcohol or some other substance(s) - and thinks most of us have the time of day for his proclivities.
He should face a ban for considerably longer than 24 hours. For the sake of the rest of this forum.
Now, I'm liberal, but to a degree I want ev'rybody to be free
But I'd draw the line at posters who call for other posters to be banned.
It is out of order for anyone to call for another poster to be banned
The responsibility of managing this forum is with the moderators and not because someone does not agree with another poster
By the way, I wouldn't want to push this argument all the way but the fact remains that under our electoral system we elect a Member of Parliament. We don't elect a party.
Hence no requirement for a by-election. The Member of Parliament was elected and is still the same person representing his people.
No requirement, you're right. But the argument that "we elect a member not a party" is utterly disconnected from what motivates people at the ballot box. Surely some people vote for the man or woman, but most are putting a cross next to the party. In the basis of ideology, manifesto, leader. Legal fact is political fiction in this case. We need system that reflects this better.
For many, you're right but I do happen to know people including a close friend who votes for a Labour MP even though my friend is a diehard tory. Why? Because he says the MP in question "is a brilliant constituency Member of Parliament who serves our community, as well as being moderate which helps".
I've said before she's crap. Hopefully the Tory membership are stupid enough to elect her as BJ's replacement.
She's another unserious politician, albeit without afaik the moral vacancy of BJ. Her attempts to do serious statesman (statesperson?) are about as convincing as BJ's, and on the once bitten principle..
Amazing to think that some PBers are still unwilling to admit that the South Africans were dismissed in December. They absolutely were dismissed. Better to admit it and move on rather than swear white is black.
If it stops you wittering on about it ad nauseam and ad infinitum, fine.
On the last point I said before and I still think that there was a huge element of the South Africans being treated as "primitive spear chuckers" by our scientific establishment. They couldn't fathom that a nation like SA could be get the data right so chose to not believe them, essentially because it's an African nation. I found the whole thing extremely unedifying and it showed how institutionally racist the British establishment still is, which was quite disheartening.
I think that's a bit unfair. I think the skepticism was mostly driven by the fear that the data was too good to be true and that if they called it wrong — "yes, SA data is directly applicable to the UK" — a hell of a lot of people might die. I don't think anyone queried the South African testing and sequencing, it was the data about hospitalisation and development of disease that people were skeptical about. It was believed that our different demographics and different pre-existing immunity from vaccinations and prior infections might lead to different outcomes. It didn't, thank God, but how many people would want to take that risk? I would have certainly been very cautious if I had to make such a decision.
No. Whitty stood up in front of the UK public and said “all we know about omicron is bad”.
That was an outright untruth.
To be fair, all we really actually knew at the time was that it spread fast. The rest was mostly informed speculation.
Re: Ignoring data from SA. Didn't we also ignore what we were seeing in Italy at the very beginning?
There is definitely a 'not invented here' syndrome but I'm not sure whether it is racist.
People will be doing studies on why Covid 'behaved' the way it did for decades; trying to disentangle the effects of variant, demographics, regulations, social effects and other factors.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
Oh my god.
Again.
AGAIN!
The South Africans were NOT comparing Omicron (SA) with Omicron (select far flung foreign nation here).
They were comparing SA (Omicron) with SA (Delta).
And they said - repeatedly - that it was milder.
And they were ignored.
Oh my god.
Again
AGAIN!
The assumption that the difference between the variants was not affected by other measures is silly.
Two variants.
Same demographic group.
Different outcomes.
The South Africans were right.
Our scientists were wrong.
The South Africans said they were wrong, at the time.
And they were ignored.
If those were the only considerations in pathogenicity, then explain to me why only the South Han people get nanopharyngeal carcinoma when infected with EB virus.
The South Africans were right. The South Africans were not ignored. Scientists everywhere hoped that what was true for the South African population would be true for all other populations.
By the way, I wouldn't want to push this argument all the way but the fact remains that under our electoral system we elect a Member of Parliament. We don't elect a party.
Hence no requirement for a by-election. The Member of Parliament was elected and is still the same person representing his people.
No requirement, you're right. But the argument that "we elect a member not a party" is utterly disconnected from what motivates people at the ballot box. Surely some people vote for the man or woman, but most are putting a cross next to the party. In the basis of ideology, manifesto, leader. Legal fact is political fiction in this case. We need system that reflects this better.
For many, you're right but I do happen to know people including a close friend who votes for a Labour MP even though my friend is a diehard tory. Why? Because he says the MP in question "is a brilliant constituency Member of Parliament who serves our community, as well as being moderate which helps".
Interesting isn't it?
Yes, it's certain that some people are motivated to vote for the person. And on here, I suspect a higher proportion than is normal would say so. Lots of you seem to have met your MP. But that's not really normal for the laity.
Amazing to think that some PBers are still unwilling to admit that the South Africans were dismissed in December. They absolutely were dismissed. Better to admit it and move on rather than swear white is black.
I bow to your authoritarian desire that your belief is king.
An interesting idea that BAe came up with in the 80s, and which has been implemented in Syria by amateurs, recently was this - such a weapon on a tripod, triggered by a camera recognising a military vehicle in it's line of sight.
In Syria, IIRC they home-brewed with some off-the-internet software running on a cheap laptop. A very smart mine, really.
I've duelled with Leon's many incarnations for a decade or more, and have come to feel OK with him as a literate, sometimes witty provocateur. In the early days I took him seriously, and felt as you do now, but I think it does add something to the site to have someone offering half-serious wild opinions in coherent form (unlike, say, MalcolmG, who I might be closer to politically as he's merely SNP but who just rips off a few lines of usually meaningless abuse). (Example today: "Tell the woke halfwits to take a hike and peddle their crap elsewhere, you call them exactly what you want to and take mince from no man or woman" - eh?)
To be fair, in the early days, @SeanT was genuinely witty - dry, perceptively cutting and sharp to all but he was consistently so irrespective of where you sat. His barbs were never cruel but always elegant.
At the time of the GFC, he morphed into this tedious right-winger who would come on here and whinge on about how the "lefties" were destroying the world and how all the young were now conservative and going to save us all.
With the coming of the EU Referendum, he completely lost it and became this dribbling pastiche of a once erudite commentator and wit. It's probably long overdue he was put out of our misery.
By the way, I wouldn't want to push this argument all the way but the fact remains that under our electoral system we elect a Member of Parliament. We don't elect a party.
Hence no requirement for a by-election. The Member of Parliament was elected and is still the same person representing his people.
No requirement, you're right. But the argument that "we elect a member not a party" is utterly disconnected from what motivates people at the ballot box. Surely some people vote for the man or woman, but most are putting a cross next to the party. In the basis of ideology, manifesto, leader. Legal fact is political fiction in this case. We need system that reflects this better.
For many, you're right but I do happen to know people including a close friend who votes for a Labour MP even though my friend is a diehard tory. Why? Because he says the MP in question "is a brilliant constituency Member of Parliament who serves our community, as well as being moderate which helps".
Interesting isn't it?
Yes, it's certain that some people are motivated to vote for the person. And on here, I suspect a higher proportion than is normal would say so. Lots of you seem to have met your MP. But that's not really normal for the laity.
Personal vote is probably pretty small in most cases and won't make a difference, and of course it is correct that in practice a lot of people decide their vote on the basis of the rosette. But whether that is what they are doing in or not, fact is that is not what they are actually doing.
Since I'm in favour of a more proportional system anyway I'm more up for considering all manner of potential improvements, but until there is support for changes, and changes enacted, politicians making the 'should resign' argument is just tiresome, since they know better.
The same poll concludes Boris/Rishi can still win GE 24
Yes, but I was really surprised to see that Rishi polls little better than Boris. That suggests that the problem is the Party rather than the leader. That's not what I would have expected.
Am I misreading something? If I am not, your team's problems may run deeper than I thought.
I do not think anyone can be sure the outcome of GE24 with either Boris or Rishi as this poll states, but at this moment in time the conservative party looks unelectable and the future is far from certain as is their recovery
Comments
He noted that the interviewer seemed horrified by the idea of someone knowing about chemistry in management.
Vodka slide
Tequila roundabout
?
You probably have a point about the mindset of some of those for whom these "defined as opposite to the norm" terms slip easily off the tongue. Ingrained superiority syndrome maybe? Yes, maybe. But my point is different. I mean, are the people who are forever eye-rolling about this stuff - the "oh god what do we call it/them now?" merchants - doing it as a pushback against ingrained superiority syndrome? I rather doubt it.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged:
and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
covers the matter pretty well, I think.
I assume you violently disapprove of the term Emerging Market too?
In other news from the right, I've learnt today that food banks are A Good Thing in a rich country such as ours, and the more food banks the merrier.
Countries that are, on the face of it, similar have suffered dramatically different Covid epidemics, with waves of different peaks and timings. The idea that we could just look at SA and assume it would behave the same way here was silly. In fact, worse than silly. It was stupid.
It will be like transport where the proposals are based on faster train times because the idea that a regular service between 2 places up north on say the ECML (similar to what happens by default down in London where trains are commuter services running at identical speeds) may increase demand is hard to model so just utterly ignored.
(His most immediate hurdle is his own MPs, on the other hand, and they may be more disposed to consider the specifics rather than the overall mood music. Or not.)
*Boris Johnson as Conservative Leader*
LAB: 48%
CON: 36%
LDM: 6%
GRN: 3%
REF: 3%
via @RedfieldWilton, 19-20 Jan
*Rishi Sunak as Conservative Leader*
LAB: 46%
CON: 38%
LDM: 5%
GRN: 5%
REF: 3%
via @RedfieldWilton, 19-20 Jan
*Liz Truss as Conservative Leader*
LAB: 51%
CON: 29%
LDM: 7%
GRN: 6%
REF: 4%
via @RedfieldWilton, 19-20 Jan
This is why charities are vital IMV. The state is a big broadsword, making big swipes but missing many important things. charities are a dirk or scalpel, getting to the bits the state can not.
The state can never catch everyone, which means there will always be a role for charities to act as a fallback. Systems that try to do it all with the state cause mass hardship.
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1484556398444924928?t=0G4uG-lUs_rdYSa4Ltqxig&s=19
Not for the first time it's Fruity Leon's fault. He set a trap - asking me what the modern term for 3rd World is - and I walked right into it by answering. Live and learn.
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1484541372040454145?t=pGhvN5dSX7tzKdieXQFtJQ&s=19
The rise in food banks is due to a rise in inequality, not a rise in benevolent charitable giving. For a more extreme example, see the USA where extreme wealth exists cheek by jowl with millions struggling to get by and dependent on charity - a significant cause of the awful fractures in that country at the moment.
It's a leading question containing a prompt.
If you asked people in Bury South a list of 20 things most bothering them right now, a by-election wouldn't even feature.
Again.
AGAIN!
The South Africans were NOT comparing Omicron (SA) with Omicron (select far flung foreign nation here).
They were comparing SA (Omicron) with SA (Delta).
And they said - repeatedly - that it was milder.
And they were ignored.
Even if you double your income, would you stop going to get the free food?
Suggests Sunak would make it closer but still not win the next general election even if Boris was removed
He should face a ban for considerably longer than 24 hours. For the sake of the rest of this forum.
If you're going down, may as well go down in a blaze of glory. Fighting the good fight for what you truly believe in. Which is.......?
Hence no requirement for a by-election. The Member of Parliament was elected and is still the same person representing his people.
Are you telling me that these matters are more casually handled in Downing Street than they would be in a domestic residence in North Wales?
Please don't pull the plonker. It's not nice.
Polling is all we have to judge of course, there's really no way of telling who might be a good PM (since even being a good minister would not guarantee that) and if he is starting out with more positive views toward him than other Tories, it may well be easier for him to recover lost ground than others.
We'll see (or rather, not, as I don't think he'll get the gig).
Again
AGAIN!
The assumption that the difference between the variants was not affected by other measures is silly.
A wealthy US family, based in New England, have made a formal offer to buy Championship club Derby County.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/60085954
If you go back and look at threads here, or even the mainstream media, you'll see plenty of references to the SA data. But leaders, scientists and public health professionals were quite rightly were cautious. We have all been confounded by COVID more than once. While I think everyone was hoping the SA experience would be replicated in Europe and America, some were too fearful to that it might not to just assume it would.
Edit: FWIW, Whitty's words at the time grated with me. My first instinct was 'but there is positive indicative evidence'. But, parsing his meaning to the word 'know', I knew where he was coming from.
Cool, go for it.
I said this is the danger for Boris on exactly what he knew and when about these two parties and querying if this is the silver bullet
And yes my wife and I went on holiday in the 1980s , and our teenage children had a party in our house which we were not told about until years after
I want ev'rybody to be free
But I'd draw the line at posters who call for other posters to be banned.
Same demographic group.
Different outcomes.
The South Africans were right.
Our scientists were wrong.
The South Africans said they were wrong, at the time.
And they were ignored.
This is a hugely important part of manufacturing over the next couple of decades.
She is simply not remotely credible as a PM.
But that doesn't mean she won't win - it's exactly the same as Labour members loving Corbyn, many Con members will love Truss.
The only hope is that these polls get enough cut through to get the message across.
I guess there's also a backstop in that if she were to win in next few months she could still be removed before a GE after a wipeout at the 2023 Locals.
But the argument that "we elect a member not a party" is utterly disconnected from what motivates people at the ballot box. Surely some people vote for the man or woman, but most are putting a cross next to the party. In the basis of ideology, manifesto, leader. Legal fact is political fiction in this case. We need system that reflects this better.
https://www.saab.com/newsroom/stories/2018/june/5-facts-about-saabs-nlaw-anti-tank-system
Actually - what we need are more people who get the question "Is the glass half empty or half full?" right.
And I should be off the hook too. This hook anyway. Because the one & only time I've used the wicked othering term Global South is today in response to someone specifically asking about it.
Am I misreading something? If I am not, your team's problems may run deeper than I thought.
It's almost as funny as the people who think that Bitcoin guarantees anonymity.
Then again, some people have been claiming that No 10 is a no personal phone zone. So does this mean *official* phones?
Amongst the plethora of elections due this year (Slovenia, French presidential, US mid-terms, Portugal, Barbados, Conservative Party leadership), another which may be of more than passing interest on here is Sweden which votes on 11th September (subject to us not having been incinerated in the Russo-Ukraine war presumably).
The latest poll with changes on the last election in 2018:
Social Democrats: 31.1% (+2.8)
Moderate Party: 20.9% (+1.1)
Sweden Democrats: 19.2% (+1.7)
Left Party: 9.6% (+1.6)
Centre Party: 7.0% (-1.6)
Christian Democrats: 4.4% (-1.9)
Greens: 3.0% (-1.4)
Liberals: 2.9% (-2.6)
The smaller parties struggling as the big three all put on some support but a small swing only of 0.8% from the Moderates to the Social Democrats.
Last time, the Social Democrats won 100 seats, the Moderates 70 and the Sweden Democrats 62 in the 349-seat Riksdag.
The current Government is a minority but has support from the Centre, Left and Greens but is down nearly 3 points from last time. The possibility of a deal with the Left Party can't be ruled out.
On the other side, could the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Sweden Democrats form a Government. That option is viable and would be a majority if they could get Centre support but neither the Centre nor Liberals have been willing to support a centre-right Government reliant on Sweden Democrat support.
The responsibility of managing this forum is with the moderators and not because someone does not agree with another poster
Interesting isn't it?
We have all moved on.
The South Africans were right. The South Africans were not ignored. Scientists everywhere hoped that what was true for the South African population would be true for all other populations.
Even when you're wrong.
In Syria, IIRC they home-brewed with some off-the-internet software running on a cheap laptop. A very smart mine, really.
Remaining restrictions are on isolating if infected, Covid passes required for international travel and masks inside a few places.
They did have an 8pm closing time for pubs/restaurants, and so on, so this is a large change in one go.
At the time of the GFC, he morphed into this tedious right-winger who would come on here and whinge on about how the "lefties" were destroying the world and how all the young were now conservative and going to save us all.
With the coming of the EU Referendum, he completely lost it and became this dribbling pastiche of a once erudite commentator and wit. It's probably long overdue he was put out of our misery.
Boris, I didn't know I was at a party, party, is a different matter.
Since I'm in favour of a more proportional system anyway I'm more up for considering all manner of potential improvements, but until there is support for changes, and changes enacted, politicians making the 'should resign' argument is just tiresome, since they know better.