Then the economy was in great shape. This time it's tanking.
Why do you think the economy is tanking? We live in a country with full employment, something that has not happened for 60 years.. From my personal knowledge of the Construction Industry this is going a be another extremely busy year with Councils finally back at work trying to catch up on all the projects they didn't do over the last 2 years.
Inflation is happening because the country and the world is booming, not crashing.
.
Erm, I don't believe that's exactly right.
A squeeze on supply pushes up prices: basic economics of supply and demand. Take energy as an example, the rise in raw prices is nothing to do with a boom.
Likewise, supply problems partly as a result of Brexit mean that the supply squeeze pushes up prices.
Even schoolgirl economics taught me that too many people chasing too few goods = inflation.
You're cream crackers 24/7 aren't you?
.
Why oh why do you feel the need to go Ad Hominem? Pack it in.
There are major supply problems at the moment, including in China. The equilibrium between supply and demand has been broken a lot of it (of course) because of covid.
Take the second hand car market. Prices have rocketed: there simply aren't enough vehicles to go around, partly because of the problem of key components in the supply chains in the new car market.
That's not 'cream crackers' it's what all economic analysts are saying. Just drop the Ad hominen guff. Ta.
The cream crackers reference was for blaming Brexit. Don't troll and I won't call you out for it.
So basically, tow your right-wing worldview, agree with you, and you won't call me a troll. Stop and think about that. It's pathetic.
Obviously Brexit has had, and is having, 'an' effect. Not to list it among other reasons would be to descend into some dystopian depth of Orwellian horror.
I'm not going to stop posting my left of centre beliefs and nor should I be bullied into doing so. It's putting my perspective which currently holds the majority opinion in the United Kingdom.
If you want to credit Brexit as part of the reason why our inflation rate is lower than America's then sure go ahead with your dystopian nonsense, but you're being ridiculous.
No, Brexit is not having any significant effect whatsoever on global inflation.
You're twisting my words completely which, with respect, is disengenous.
I said that obviously Brexit is having some effect on UK supply. Restricting supply here means that prices rise.
But I see what you are doing. You are using epic levels of whataboutery. The UK has inflation. But, wait, so does the US. Therefore it cannot be because of Brexit. A glorious non sequitur.
The fact that both might have rising inflation for separate, but undeniably also related, causal reasons is lost on you. Or you are being deliberately disingenous.
Then the economy was in great shape. This time it's tanking.
Why do you think the economy is tanking? We live in a country with full employment, something that has not happened for 60 years.. From my personal knowledge of the Construction Industry this is going a be another extremely busy year with Councils finally back at work trying to catch up on all the projects they didn't do over the last 2 years.
Inflation is happening because the country and the world is booming, not crashing.
.
Erm, I don't believe that's exactly right.
A squeeze on supply pushes up prices: basic economics of supply and demand. Take energy as an example, the rise in raw prices is nothing to do with a boom.
Likewise, supply problems partly as a result of Brexit mean that the supply squeeze pushes up prices.
Even schoolgirl economics taught me that too many people chasing too few goods = inflation.
You're cream crackers 24/7 aren't you?
.
Why oh why do you feel the need to go Ad Hominem? Pack it in.
There are major supply problems at the moment, including in China. The equilibrium between supply and demand has been broken a lot of it (of course) because of covid.
Take the second hand car market. Prices have rocketed: there simply aren't enough vehicles to go around, partly because of the problem of key components in the supply chains in the new car market.
That's not 'cream crackers' it's what all economic analysts are saying. Just drop the Ad hominen guff. Ta.
The cream crackers reference was for blaming Brexit. Don't troll and I won't call you out for it.
So basically, tow your right-wing worldview, agree with you, and you won't call me a troll. Stop and think about that. It's pathetic.
Obviously Brexit has had, and is having, 'an' effect. Not to list it among other reasons would be to descend into some dystopian depth of Orwellian horror.
I'm not going to stop posting my left of centre beliefs and nor should I be bullied into doing so. It's putting my perspective which currently holds the majority opinion in the United Kingdom.
If you want to credit Brexit as part of the reason why our inflation rate is lower than America's then sure go ahead with your dystopian nonsense, but you're being ridiculous.
No, Brexit is not having any significant effect whatsoever on global inflation.
You are not comparing like with like. USA CPI includes rent. UK does not.
What a twat. Does that mean that German Jews who were murdered in a genocide by their “German brothers” (so even more brotherly than Ukrainians/Russians as being, you know, the same nationality) weren’t actually victims of genocide?
The Hutu and Tutsi lived in the same country...
And the Armenia genocide - I’m assuming Macron doesn’t think that was genocide, right as they were all part of the same empire, not even separate countries/languages etc so clearly brothers?
Point of PB pedantry, Armenian was/is very much a separate language.
As are Ukrainian and Russian so how Macron defines Ukrainians and Russians as brothers and therefore is reluctant to call it genocide is odd to be generous.
AIUI Ukrainian and Russian are not 'very much a separate language'. I believe that when spoken speakers of one can understand the other. However the written language is more different. How and why I don't know.
However, I'm sure someone here does!
Its the same with many languages. German, Dutch and Afrikaans speakers can kind-of understand much of what each other say even without speaking the other language. Languages have evolved over time and some of those have become different languages over time but they're related to each other.
Used to go clubbing with a couple of Afrikaaner girls. Over the music it was impossible to tell whether they were speaking Afrikaaner or English. The cadence, sounds and tones are remarkably similar. Although that may have been the liquid MDMA.
Definitely the MDMA, Afrikaans is very guttural to me.
Friend of mine from the Borders could understand the gist if he relaxed - very useful for an apparent Briton in SA when the locals were talking about him to his face in Afrikaans.
Then the economy was in great shape. This time it's tanking.
From my personal knowledge of the Construction Industry t
I thought you were a nurse?
If you have rampant inflation and a cost of living squeeze the like of which we haven't seen for 30 years or more, don't expect full employment to continue as the norm for ever and a day.
But I don't think anyway that people will go to the ballot box thinking, 'it has cost me £50 to get here and my family haven't got enough to eat each month let alone take a holiday or any of the former things we enjoyed ... but it's okay because I've got my job.'
Back in the day inflation was the litmus paper for everything else. It was what Margaret Thatcher based her entire economic policy around: getting down the PSBR to reduce inflation. We may have moved on from that but only because until now we have taken low inflation as a given.
High inflation is a curse on everyone: the whole population is affected by it.
The fact remains that the economy is still in good shape and people have money to spend
This really is out of tune I'm afraid.
As a single mum I know just how much my living standards are falling with a terrible squeeze. I'm making big cutbacks every month just to keep my head above water. So to ozzymandias, yes I do get agitated.
@moonshine piss off calling me a troll. It's beyond boring now. I'm not a troll. I'm a decent human being but, yes, I am on the left of centre and have alternative attitudes to lifestyle. The fact that you resort to namecalling me a troll says more about your own inability to access a worldview outside of your own. But it is also indicative of a demographic on here that is far from representative of this nation.
No, you are not a troll but for someone who calls out others behaviour you can be very unpleasant.
I have always said you are neither a troll nor a Russian bot, and it is something you did thank me for. Yet last week during a disagreement you were most rude to me about my avatar and made up some nonsense as well. Simply for me pointing out you call anyone who disagrees with you right wing. Even people like Foxy who are anything but.
I can see why people assume you are a troll. I still don't think you are.
Bit of a scoop in Private Eye. We were discussing Owen Jones last night. This is not a good look for him or the Guardian
‘Owen Jones has relentlessly persecuted women online, including his own colleagues. An external investigator brought in by The Guardian has found him guilty of bullying a female columnist. Yet it has tried to keep the report quiet and appears not to have sanctioned Jones at all.’
Which reminds me of Mark Lamarr on Never Mind the Buzzcocks talking of Stuart Adamson who left the Skids and became a Big Country Member, and how we do remember.
He made the joke well before Mr Adamson took his own life.
Having established that Johnson is more of a "conviction" politician than we had thought, I think the punters will indeed be tempted to give the Tories a fairly clear shot across the bows in May. As for the rubbish about "there is a war on", frankly I´d far rather have Ben Wallace looking after the shop (and I suspect he is the only member of the cabinet who can turn things around for the Conservatives anyway).
...
The cold winter has clung on, but spring is finally on its way, and we hope that a comprehensive defeat in Ukraine might turn Russia away from the road to catastrophe. Nevertheless, for as long as the Mafiosi are in charge in the Kremlin, there remains a high risk of their casual contempt for human life leading to an all out nuclear war. As in the Cold War, we must remember that the best way to preserve peace is to ensure our deterents are credible and that the challenge to the global order by Putin in the name of the neofascist rubbish of Dugin, must be comprehensively beaten. This is our final warning.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
One huge mistake I think the Cameron government made when reforming (i.e. increasing) uni fees is that some subjects genuinely cost a lot of money to put on in particular science and medicine, while also being some of the most crucial to our economy (especially going forward). Them saying to unis you charge up to a cap there will be a market has totally failed, every uni just charges basically the max.
What has happened is a lot of management in unis have been enriched by this change.
What I think we actually wanted is the government to subsidise some courses to ensure they continue to teach them e.g. I believe significant number of unis don't offer / stopped Chemistry because it costs about £15k a year to run, while ensuring unis don't also just rip off the kids charging a lot of money for things that are effectively 30 chairs and a talking head.
There is no incentive to think about costs, you just charge the max for every course at every uni and incentive never to run ones that cost a lot of money.
A change I would like to see is make university exams open to all, for a fee related to exam costs only, similar to A Levels and GCSEs.
Then lets see how much cheaper and faster other suppliers can teach the same content. I bet plenty of 3 year degrees can be taught in 6 months full time.
Compare and contrast the University of Buckingham.
in 1850 or so my 3x Gt Grandfather obtained an MD from St Andrews University by simply turning up at the exam room, paying the fee and passing the exam. He was living in London at the time, didn't have to do any study in Scotland.
That is how it should be. If you know enough, you pass.
This is one free market idea that never seems to be pushed by the right. Perhaps because they dont want some oiks who happen to be bright or work hard, but don't have the connections to get into Oxbridge to outperform them in exams.
Depends on the course though. Mine was physics (four years combined masters) and a fair chunk of the assessment (over half for the masters year) was on lab work, not exams. That made sense, really, as the degree was about actually being able to do the stuff, not just know the answers or being able to work out the maths. You could have a theoretical physics degree completely assessed by exams, I guess.
Actually, the >50% final year 'lab' assessment was, for my project, analysis of pre-collected data from a NASA probe, but even that can only really be tested by being given some data and some weeks to develop analysis of it, not really something you can truly assess in an exam. The skills I developed in that project and earlire labs have been more useful for my future career (and also for my lab-partner who is not in academia) than the stuff we were tested on in the exams.
In my system it would be fine for universities to charge external candidates for lab time in such circumstances. So your degree might end up costing several £k for the exams whereas a theoretical physics exam would cost several hundreds.
What happened during covid on similar courses? Did the universities deny the lab time whilst still charging full whack?
Also, there is an issue of lab space in science practical exams. In a normal course the number of candidates is mediated by the space available in the course anyway. But what uni will have extra space for the practical exam once the small portion vacated by dropouts is accounted for?
@mariatad In joint presser, the Swedish and Finnish PM talk about a watershed moment for European security after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Both set for NATO membership. Finnish PM says will move fast - we’re talking weeks, not months.
I think the Baroness Scotland one is probably the hardest one for Labour to dismiss...
Fixed Penalty Notice queen Harriet Harman then piroutted and defended Baroness Scotland, serving as Gordon Brown’s Attorney General at the time, when she received a £5,000 civil penalty notice for hiring an illegal worker. While this would have been bad enough, Scotland was a Home Office minister who helped introduce the very legislation under which she received the fine. Scotland said the penalty was caused by a technical error and compared it to a parking ticket, saying “it’s not a criminal offence”. Brown said “no further action was necessary”…
Its a good job Baroness Scotland was absolutely top notch individual and never went on to cause any more trouble...check record, expense scandal, awarding consultancy contract to a friend, generally being f##king useless at their job that not even having it auto-renewed as per convention because so many people have objected.
I think the Baroness Scotland one is probably the hardest one for Labour to dismiss...
Fixed Penalty Notice queen Harriet Harman then piroutted and defended Baroness Scotland, serving as Gordon Brown’s Attorney General at the time, when she received a £5,000 civil penalty notice for hiring an illegal worker. While this would have been bad enough, Scotland was a Home Office minister who helped introduce the very legislation under which she received the fine. Scotland said the penalty was caused by a technical error and compared it to a parking ticket, saying “it’s not a criminal offence”. Brown said “no further action was necessary”…
In the ordinary course of things, Johnson‘s FPN would ultimately be of little interest - a brief spat in the papers from the usual suspects & then back to business as usual. It is, as many have rightly said, in and of itself not a particularly egregious crime in the ordinary course of events.
But this isn‘t the ordinary course of events is it? This is about conduct during the pandemic & the incredibly toxic perception that Johnson et al brought in rules for us, the plebs, but didn‘t think they should apply to themselves. People were unable to be with family members when they were dying. People didn‘t see their own relatives for months, sometimes years.
I think the moral aspect is what carries the load here - at a time when everyone else was “pulling together“ Johnson & friends couldn‘t be arsed. It‘s going to be a great attack line at the next GE: “He partied whilst your parents died“. How are you going to counter that? It‘s the attack line that just keeps on giving - there are endless Johnson quotes to mine from the entire period.
My guess is that the bulk of the Conservative party is going to wait for the May elections - if Johnson proves toxic at the ballot box then he’ll be out. The war in Ukraine has made this not quite so certain as it might have been - the “we can‘t change horses during a time of war“ line might be enough. But if not, well - Conservative MPs are ultimately self-preserving & will weigh their vote & then decide.
Anyway having had a disagreement with old Mr Thompson I shall head back out.
Have a nice afternoon all.
xx
Why do you do this ?
He has made it clear he does not wish to have that name used and wishes to use the Name Bartholomew Roberts here and has been asked to be referred to as such.
Whether you like him or not, or agree with him or not, it is just plain good manners to respect that.
Then the economy was in great shape. This time it's tanking.
Why do you think the economy is tanking? We live in a country with full employment, something that has not happened for 60 years.. From my personal knowledge of the Construction Industry this is going a be another extremely busy year with Councils finally back at work trying to catch up on all the projects they didn't do over the last 2 years.
Inflation is happening because the country and the world is booming, not crashing.
.
Erm, I don't believe that's exactly right.
A squeeze on supply pushes up prices: basic economics of supply and demand. Take energy as an example, the rise in raw prices is nothing to do with a boom.
Likewise, supply problems partly as a result of Brexit mean that the supply squeeze pushes up prices.
Even schoolgirl economics taught me that too many people chasing too few goods = inflation.
You're cream crackers 24/7 aren't you?
.
Why oh why do you feel the need to go Ad Hominem? Pack it in.
There are major supply problems at the moment, including in China. The equilibrium between supply and demand has been broken a lot of it (of course) because of covid.
Take the second hand car market. Prices have rocketed: there simply aren't enough vehicles to go around, partly because of the problem of key components in the supply chains in the new car market.
That's not 'cream crackers' it's what all economic analysts are saying. Just drop the Ad hominen guff. Ta.
The cream crackers reference was for blaming Brexit. Don't troll and I won't call you out for it.
So basically, tow your right-wing worldview, agree with you, and you won't call me a troll. Stop and think about that. It's pathetic.
Obviously Brexit has had, and is having, 'an' effect. Not to list it among other reasons would be to descend into some dystopian depth of Orwellian horror.
I'm not going to stop posting my left of centre beliefs and nor should I be bullied into doing so. It's putting my perspective which currently holds the majority opinion in the United Kingdom.
If you want to credit Brexit as part of the reason why our inflation rate is lower than America's then sure go ahead with your dystopian nonsense, but you're being ridiculous.
No, Brexit is not having any significant effect whatsoever on global inflation.
You are not comparing like with like. USA CPI includes rent. UK does not.
I'll accept that's a fair point and I've said many times before UK inflation should.
Doesn't change the fact that Brexit is pretty much inconsequential to global inflation.
One huge mistake I think the Cameron government made when reforming (i.e. increasing) uni fees is that some subjects genuinely cost a lot of money to put on in particular science and medicine, while also being some of the most crucial to our economy (especially going forward). Them saying to unis you charge up to a cap there will be a market has totally failed, every uni just charges basically the max.
What has happened is a lot of management in unis have been enriched by this change.
What I think we actually wanted is the government to subsidise some courses to ensure they continue to teach them e.g. I believe significant number of unis don't offer / stopped Chemistry because it costs about £15k a year to run, while ensuring unis don't also just rip off the kids charging a lot of money for things that are effectively 30 chairs and a talking head.
There is no incentive to think about costs, you just charge the max for every course at every uni and incentive never to run ones that cost a lot of money.
A change I would like to see is make university exams open to all, for a fee related to exam costs only, similar to A Levels and GCSEs.
Then lets see how much cheaper and faster other suppliers can teach the same content. I bet plenty of 3 year degrees can be taught in 6 months full time.
Compare and contrast the University of Buckingham.
in 1850 or so my 3x Gt Grandfather obtained an MD from St Andrews University by simply turning up at the exam room, paying the fee and passing the exam. He was living in London at the time, didn't have to do any study in Scotland.
That is how it should be. If you know enough, you pass.
This is one free market idea that never seems to be pushed by the right. Perhaps because they dont want some oiks who happen to be bright or work hard, but don't have the connections to get into Oxbridge to outperform them in exams.
Depends on the course though. Mine was physics (four years combined masters) and a fair chunk of the assessment (over half for the masters year) was on lab work, not exams. That made sense, really, as the degree was about actually being able to do the stuff, not just know the answers or being able to work out the maths. You could have a theoretical physics degree completely assessed by exams, I guess.
Actually, the >50% final year 'lab' assessment was, for my project, analysis of pre-collected data from a NASA probe, but even that can only really be tested by being given some data and some weeks to develop analysis of it, not really something you can truly assess in an exam. The skills I developed in that project and earlire labs have been more useful for my future career (and also for my lab-partner who is not in academia) than the stuff we were tested on in the exams.
In my system it would be fine for universities to charge external candidates for lab time in such circumstances. So your degree might end up costing several £k for the exams whereas a theoretical physics exam would cost several hundreds.
What happened during covid on similar courses? Did the universities deny the lab time whilst still charging full whack?
My degree was almost two decades ago. At my present uni, lab/practical time in our department was maintained, with some shuffling around of courses to avoid e.g. the first lockdown, but late catchup when it was clearer how to do that. Coding labs (e.g. learning statistical software) switched to remote for a time.
No problem, per se, with your suggestion if there is an option for practical parts of courses to be maintained. Just pointing out that passing exams, for some courses, is only a part of the story.
@mariatad In joint presser, the Swedish and Finnish PM talk about a watershed moment for European security after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Both set for NATO membership. Finnish PM says will move fast - we’re talking weeks, not months.
This is their opportunity. I can't imagine Trump being inclined to accelerate their NATO accession through Congress in a few years so it's now or never.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
That will be fine for Team Boris as long as this Partygate is a final aberration by a now reformed character. As long as he lives by the maxim that the rules he sets for others apply to him and his current mates as well.
Yeah, right...
Semi-relatedly, anyone remember the timeline for the Paterson fiasco? From memory, that started with the Conservatives closing ranks until they didn't.
I think the Baroness Scotland one is probably the hardest one for Labour to dismiss...
Fixed Penalty Notice queen Harriet Harman then piroutted and defended Baroness Scotland, serving as Gordon Brown’s Attorney General at the time, when she received a £5,000 civil penalty notice for hiring an illegal worker. While this would have been bad enough, Scotland was a Home Office minister who helped introduce the very legislation under which she received the fine. Scotland said the penalty was caused by a technical error and compared it to a parking ticket, saying “it’s not a criminal offence”. Brown said “no further action was necessary”…
In the ordinary course of things, Johnson‘s FPN would ultimately be of little interest - a brief spat in the papers from the usual suspects & then back to business as usual. It is, as many have rightly said, in and of itself not a particularly egregious crime in the ordinary course of events.
But this isn‘t the ordinary course of events is it? This is about conduct during the pandemic & the incredibly toxic perception that Johnson et al brought in rules for us, the plebs, but didn‘t think they should apply to themselves. People were unable to be with family members when they were dying. People didn‘t see their own relatives for months, sometimes years.
I think the moral aspect is what carries the load here - at a time when everyone else was “pulling together“ Johnson & friends couldn‘t be arsed. It‘s going to be a great attack line at the next GE: “He partied whilst your parents died“. How are you going to counter that? It‘s the attack line that just keeps on giving - there are endless Johnson quotes to mine from the entire period.
My guess is that the bulk of the Conservative party is going to wait for the May elections - if Johnson proves toxic at the ballot box then he’ll be out. The war in Ukraine has made this not quite so certain as it might have been - the “we can‘t change horses during a time of war“ line might be enough. But if not, well - Conservative MPs are ultimately self-preserving & will weigh their vote & then decide.
Some of us positively don't want Mr Johnson in charge at a time of war. Anyone whose response to covid is to shake hands with as much of a hospital-ful as he can is not a good decision maker.
I feel quite sad about this. Time Out formed a small part of my life for a few years when I lived in London thirty years ago. Buying or borrowing the latest edition to see what was on or read stuff I vehemently disagreed with.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
Can we now read it as a fact that the Mail consider the replacement of Chamberlain with Churchill in WWII to be a stupid mistake?
If not, why not? I understand there was a bloody war on at the time, and one somewhat closer to home and with a large number of British troops already in action.
Surely the difference is that Chamberlain was failing in WWII while Zelenskyy and all concerned seem to be saying that Boris is doing a very good job with respect to Ukraine.
Quite a difference there. If Chamberlain was winning WWII and was doing an excellent job with the war, would he have been defeated?
I still think Boris should go because for me as a point of principle lawmakers can't be lawbreakers but that's a really dodgy comparison.
Their core claim is that we shouldn't change PMs in a war. "Don't they know there's a bloody war on?"
And they're using that to reject claims to change PM. Not "He's doing great in the war and that's more important" (and I'd contend that Ben Wallace, for example, wouldn't automatically lead to a worse handling). And continuing the "giving as much military aid as possible" is certainly important, but I wouldn't say it's a hugely difficult act to follow.
If the principle is "Don't change during a war," then that's the principle on which we judge earlier ones.
What a twat. Does that mean that German Jews who were murdered in a genocide by their “German brothers” (so even more brotherly than Ukrainians/Russians as being, you know, the same nationality) weren’t actually victims of genocide?
The Hutu and Tutsi lived in the same country...
And the Armenia genocide - I’m assuming Macron doesn’t think that was genocide, right as they were all part of the same empire, not even separate countries/languages etc so clearly brothers?
Point of PB pedantry, Armenian was/is very much a separate language.
As are Ukrainian and Russian so how Macron defines Ukrainians and Russians as brothers and therefore is reluctant to call it genocide is odd to be generous.
AIUI Ukrainian and Russian are not 'very much a separate language'. I believe that when spoken speakers of one can understand the other. However the written language is more different. How and why I don't know.
However, I'm sure someone here does!
Its the same with many languages. German, Dutch and Afrikaans speakers can kind-of understand much of what each other say even without speaking the other language. Languages have evolved over time and some of those have become different languages over time but they're related to each other.
Used to go clubbing with a couple of Afrikaaner girls. Over the music it was impossible to tell whether they were speaking Afrikaaner or English. The cadence, sounds and tones are remarkably similar. Although that may have been the liquid MDMA.
I went to Rotterdam for a meeting once, and the Dutch understood my companions Afrikaaner very well. The Dutch found a lot of expressions and forms amusingly archaic, as Dutch has evolved too.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
Of the five people who replied to Sean's article, several showed examples of how he was wrong.
I think you are also making two plus two equal about thirty-five. The Great War contained a whole series of awful traumatic events each of which was a separate one worthy of writing-up on its own: the Dardanelles, the shooting of Franz Ferdinand, The Somme, Ypres, the first flying machines, the use of tanks, .. the list goes on and on.
A plague, as you (sorry Sean) described it is something very different. There are not the same single events to write up. It is just one sorry pandemic saga, within which are countless individual tragedies, themselves not worthy of a book or even a poem.
Don't mistake the capacity of war to make ready literature equate to people's consciousness of an event like a plague.
I think there's another point here. People in England, and let's take just England for now, did not 'see' what was going on in the war, or indeed any war. They were not there on the front line and such news as filtered back at the time was either heavily censored by authorities or numbed by the trauma of those who had experienced it. There was huge appetite to find out more: to learn what had happened, including to loved ones, and what it had really been like.
The Spanish flu or covid is entirely different. We've all seen it up close. We don't need anyone to write about it and probably would rather they didn't. Does that mean we don't care or aren't affected by it? Certainly not.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
New: No 10's at war with Sunak - and it's not clear he knows. - Johnson's now full of contempt for Sunak, has two expletive-laden nicknames for him. - Johnson + Dorries delighted in Sunak's troubles at Chequers 10 days ago. - Lynton Crosby wants Sunak out.
I think the Baroness Scotland one is probably the hardest one for Labour to dismiss...
Fixed Penalty Notice queen Harriet Harman then piroutted and defended Baroness Scotland, serving as Gordon Brown’s Attorney General at the time, when she received a £5,000 civil penalty notice for hiring an illegal worker. While this would have been bad enough, Scotland was a Home Office minister who helped introduce the very legislation under which she received the fine. Scotland said the penalty was caused by a technical error and compared it to a parking ticket, saying “it’s not a criminal offence”. Brown said “no further action was necessary”…
In the ordinary course of things, Johnson‘s FPN would ultimately be of little interest - a brief spat in the papers from the usual suspects & then back to business as usual. It is, as many have rightly said, in and of itself not a particularly egregious crime in the ordinary course of events.
But this isn‘t the ordinary course of events is it? This is about conduct during the pandemic & the incredibly toxic perception that Johnson et al brought in rules for us, the plebs, but didn‘t think they should apply to themselves. People were unable to be with family members when they were dying. People didn‘t see their own relatives for months, sometimes years.
I think the moral aspect is what carries the load here - at a time when everyone else was “pulling together“ Johnson & friends couldn‘t be arsed. It‘s going to be a great attack line at the next GE: “He partied whilst your parents died“. How are you going to counter that? It‘s the attack line that just keeps on giving - there are endless Johnson quotes to mine from the entire period.
My guess is that the bulk of the Conservative party is going to wait for the May elections - if Johnson proves toxic at the ballot box then he’ll be out. The war in Ukraine has made this not quite so certain as it might have been - the “we can‘t change horses during a time of war“ line might be enough. But if not, well - Conservative MPs are ultimately self-preserving & will weigh their vote & then decide.
Some of us positively don't want Mr Johnson in charge at a time of war. Anyone whose response to covid is to shake hands with as much of a hospital-ful as he can is not a good decision maker.
How much of covid spread is by handshakes? I thought we now know its mostly aerosol transmission?
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
The compelling argument for me is the fact that (until WW1 usurped it) the scar on the collective psyche of the English Civil War *far outstripped* the scar of the Great Plague.
One huge mistake I think the Cameron government made when reforming (i.e. increasing) uni fees is that some subjects genuinely cost a lot of money to put on in particular science and medicine, while also being some of the most crucial to our economy (especially going forward). Them saying to unis you charge up to a cap there will be a market has totally failed, every uni just charges basically the max.
What has happened is a lot of management in unis have been enriched by this change.
What I think we actually wanted is the government to subsidise some courses to ensure they continue to teach them e.g. I believe significant number of unis don't offer / stopped Chemistry because it costs about £15k a year to run, while ensuring unis don't also just rip off the kids charging a lot of money for things that are effectively 30 chairs and a talking head.
There is no incentive to think about costs, you just charge the max for every course at every uni and incentive never to run ones that cost a lot of money.
A change I would like to see is make university exams open to all, for a fee related to exam costs only, similar to A Levels and GCSEs.
Then lets see how much cheaper and faster other suppliers can teach the same content. I bet plenty of 3 year degrees can be taught in 6 months full time.
Compare and contrast the University of Buckingham.
in 1850 or so my 3x Gt Grandfather obtained an MD from St Andrews University by simply turning up at the exam room, paying the fee and passing the exam. He was living in London at the time, didn't have to do any study in Scotland.
That is how it should be. If you know enough, you pass.
This is one free market idea that never seems to be pushed by the right. Perhaps because they dont want some oiks who happen to be bright or work hard, but don't have the connections to get into Oxbridge to outperform them in exams.
Depends on the course though. Mine was physics (four years combined masters) and a fair chunk of the assessment (over half for the masters year) was on lab work, not exams. That made sense, really, as the degree was about actually being able to do the stuff, not just know the answers or being able to work out the maths. You could have a theoretical physics degree completely assessed by exams, I guess.
Actually, the >50% final year 'lab' assessment was, for my project, analysis of pre-collected data from a NASA probe, but even that can only really be tested by being given some data and some weeks to develop analysis of it, not really something you can truly assess in an exam. The skills I developed in that project and earlire labs have been more useful for my future career (and also for my lab-partner who is not in academia) than the stuff we were tested on in the exams.
In my system it would be fine for universities to charge external candidates for lab time in such circumstances. So your degree might end up costing several £k for the exams whereas a theoretical physics exam would cost several hundreds.
What happened during covid on similar courses? Did the universities deny the lab time whilst still charging full whack?
My degree was almost two decades ago. At my present uni, lab/practical time in our department was maintained, with some shuffling around of courses to avoid e.g. the first lockdown, but late catchup when it was clearer how to do that. Coding labs (e.g. learning statistical software) switched to remote for a time.
No problem, per se, with your suggestion if there is an option for practical parts of courses to be maintained. Just pointing out that passing exams, for some courses, is only a part of the story.
We ran catch-up labs for all our students when possible in summer 2021. They have missed nothing lab based. Not sure everywhere can say the same. Another course I teach on really struggled to provide project based labs. At one point we needed to set experiments up, run them, work up the products, and tidy everything away inside 4 hours. Not good if the reaction takes 10 hours...
I think the Baroness Scotland one is probably the hardest one for Labour to dismiss...
Fixed Penalty Notice queen Harriet Harman then piroutted and defended Baroness Scotland, serving as Gordon Brown’s Attorney General at the time, when she received a £5,000 civil penalty notice for hiring an illegal worker. While this would have been bad enough, Scotland was a Home Office minister who helped introduce the very legislation under which she received the fine. Scotland said the penalty was caused by a technical error and compared it to a parking ticket, saying “it’s not a criminal offence”. Brown said “no further action was necessary”…
In the ordinary course of things, Johnson‘s FPN would ultimately be of little interest - a brief spat in the papers from the usual suspects & then back to business as usual. It is, as many have rightly said, in and of itself not a particularly egregious crime in the ordinary course of events.
But this isn‘t the ordinary course of events is it? This is about conduct during the pandemic & the incredibly toxic perception that Johnson et al brought in rules for us, the plebs, but didn‘t think they should apply to themselves. People were unable to be with family members when they were dying. People didn‘t see their own relatives for months, sometimes years.
I think the moral aspect is what carries the load here - at a time when everyone else was “pulling together“ Johnson & friends couldn‘t be arsed. It‘s going to be a great attack line at the next GE: “He partied whilst your parents died“. How are you going to counter that? It‘s the attack line that just keeps on giving - there are endless Johnson quotes to mine from the entire period.
My guess is that the bulk of the Conservative party is going to wait for the May elections - if Johnson proves toxic at the ballot box then he’ll be out. The war in Ukraine has made this not quite so certain as it might have been - the “we can‘t change horses during a time of war“ line might be enough. But if not, well - Conservative MPs are ultimately self-preserving & will weigh their vote & then decide.
Personally, I don't care all that much about it. Saying "people were unable to be with family members when they were dying" isn't especially relevant as that isn't the rule that Johnson et al broke. It's the like of @foxy and others who had to go to work who made sure they reduced the risk of the virus spreading as much as possible who have a right to be annoyed, in my opinion.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
We didn't ALL forget Tiger's crash. Some of you did. Probably correlates to how much interest in sport you have + how tough you were finding lockdowns at the time.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
That will be fine for Team Boris as long as this Partygate is a final aberration by a now reformed character. As long as he lives by the maxim that the rules he sets for others apply to him and his current mates as well.
Yeah, right...
Semi-relatedly, anyone remember the timeline for the Paterson fiasco? From memory, that started with the Conservatives closing ranks until they didn't.
I'm not making a political point. The fact we tend to forget horrors like Covid is a double-edged sword for Boris and Co, it means they will likely survive Partygate for now, but it also means we won't give them long-term credit for successes like the vaccines, because we will just want to draw a line under the whole ghastly global panto of death and illness, and think about other stuff
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
The compelling argument for me is the fact that (until WW1 usurped it) the scar on the collective psyche of the English Civil War *far outstripped* the scar of the Great Plague.
Might that have something to do with the poor expectation of health generally at the time? I mean now we are shocked if a child dies, back then it was exceptionally common. Death from illness was part of life.
One huge mistake I think the Cameron government made when reforming (i.e. increasing) uni fees is that some subjects genuinely cost a lot of money to put on in particular science and medicine, while also being some of the most crucial to our economy (especially going forward). Them saying to unis you charge up to a cap there will be a market has totally failed, every uni just charges basically the max.
What has happened is a lot of management in unis have been enriched by this change.
What I think we actually wanted is the government to subsidise some courses to ensure they continue to teach them e.g. I believe significant number of unis don't offer / stopped Chemistry because it costs about £15k a year to run, while ensuring unis don't also just rip off the kids charging a lot of money for things that are effectively 30 chairs and a talking head.
There is no incentive to think about costs, you just charge the max for every course at every uni and incentive never to run ones that cost a lot of money.
A change I would like to see is make university exams open to all, for a fee related to exam costs only, similar to A Levels and GCSEs.
Then lets see how much cheaper and faster other suppliers can teach the same content. I bet plenty of 3 year degrees can be taught in 6 months full time.
Compare and contrast the University of Buckingham.
in 1850 or so my 3x Gt Grandfather obtained an MD from St Andrews University by simply turning up at the exam room, paying the fee and passing the exam. He was living in London at the time, didn't have to do any study in Scotland.
That is how it should be. If you know enough, you pass.
This is one free market idea that never seems to be pushed by the right. Perhaps because they dont want some oiks who happen to be bright or work hard, but don't have the connections to get into Oxbridge to outperform them in exams.
Depends on the course though. Mine was physics (four years combined masters) and a fair chunk of the assessment (over half for the masters year) was on lab work, not exams. That made sense, really, as the degree was about actually being able to do the stuff, not just know the answers or being able to work out the maths. You could have a theoretical physics degree completely assessed by exams, I guess.
Actually, the >50% final year 'lab' assessment was, for my project, analysis of pre-collected data from a NASA probe, but even that can only really be tested by being given some data and some weeks to develop analysis of it, not really something you can truly assess in an exam. The skills I developed in that project and earlire labs have been more useful for my future career (and also for my lab-partner who is not in academia) than the stuff we were tested on in the exams.
In my system it would be fine for universities to charge external candidates for lab time in such circumstances. So your degree might end up costing several £k for the exams whereas a theoretical physics exam would cost several hundreds.
What happened during covid on similar courses? Did the universities deny the lab time whilst still charging full whack?
My degree was almost two decades ago. At my present uni, lab/practical time in our department was maintained, with some shuffling around of courses to avoid e.g. the first lockdown, but late catchup when it was clearer how to do that. Coding labs (e.g. learning statistical software) switched to remote for a time.
No problem, per se, with your suggestion if there is an option for practical parts of courses to be maintained. Just pointing out that passing exams, for some courses, is only a part of the story.
We ran catch-up labs for all our students when possible in summer 2021. They have missed nothing lab based. Not sure everywhere can say the same. Another course I teach on really struggled to provide project based labs. At one point we needed to set experiments up, run them, work up the products, and tidy everything away inside 4 hours. Not good if the reaction takes 10 hours...
Impressive, given you're in chemistry, I think? Our stuff could fairly easily be spread around different rooms, so just needed a few more demonstrators/few more sessions to meet the 'Covid-safe' guidelines at the time.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
We didn't ALL forget Tiger's crash. Some of you did. Probably correlates to how much interest in sport you have + how tough you were finding lockdowns at the time.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
Of the five people who replied to Sean's article, several showed examples of how he was wrong.
I think you are also making two plus two equal about thirty-five. The Great War contained a whole series of awful traumatic events each of which was a separate one worthy of writing-up on its own: the Dardanelles, the shooting of Franz Ferdinand, The Somme, Ypres, the first flying machines, the use of tanks, .. the list goes on and on.
A plague, as you (sorry Sean) described it is something very different. There are not the same single events to write up. It is just one sorry pandemic saga, within which are countless individual tragedies, themselves not worthy of a book or even a poem.
Don't mistake the capacity of war to make ready literature equate to people's consciousness of an event like a plague.
I think there's another point here. People in England, and let's take just England for now, did not 'see' what was going on in the war, or indeed any war. They were not there on the front line and such news as filtered back at the time was either heavily censored by authorities or numbed by the trauma of those who had experienced it. There was huge appetite to find out more: to learn what had happened, including to loved ones, and what it had really been like.
The Spanish flu or covid is entirely different. We've all seen it up close. We don't need anyone to write about it and probably would rather they didn't. Does that mean we don't care or aren't affected by it? Certainly not.
I think that is a different point though. Although I think it will be a significant influence in 2024, by 2034 we will not be harkening back to it - and certainly not by 2064. Whereas the impact of a war that killed 150,000 UK citizens would be felt for decades, precisely for the storytelling reasons you cite.
Also the effect of increasing ability student loans, all it has done is increase the amount charged for student accommodation. £150-200 a week for room in towns where a mortgage on a whole house is that is just criminal, and this is often done under the guise of well you get an ensuite now or have better communal facilities e.g. a nice room with big telly, sky, pool table....the cost of that is peanuts compared to the increase they charge.
I tend to agree, however that policy is usually driven by Universities themselves, and local Councils seeking to restrict the local market by deliberately limiting student housing.
And my local people running anti-student campaigns.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
As we were saying yesterday how absurd and misguided it is for some reason restaurant critics think they are geo-political analysis. Pouilly Fuisse from Pouilly Fume maybe but more than that? Nah.
This is a good example. Do we know who this bloke SeanT is.
@mariatad In joint presser, the Swedish and Finnish PM talk about a watershed moment for European security after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Both set for NATO membership. Finnish PM says will move fast - we’re talking weeks, not months.
This is their opportunity. I can't imagine Trump being inclined to accelerate their NATO accession through Congress in a few years so it's now or never.
Yes good news, let's get Finland and Sweden into NATO as soon as possible 👍
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
As we were saying yesterday how absurd and misguided it is for some reason restaurant critics think they are geo-political analysis. Pouilly Fuisse from Pouilly Fume maybe but more than that? Nah.
This is a good example. Do we know who this bloke SeanT is.
Wasn't he the former site twat, long ago?
Meanwhile I am queuing for Eurotunnel. East Kent is a disaster zone awash with lorries and police checkpoints at junctions to try and stop them using country lanes to jump the queue; meanwhile car traffic is routed on a scenic tour of the backroads...
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
The compelling argument for me is the fact that (until WW1 usurped it) the scar on the collective psyche of the English Civil War *far outstripped* the scar of the Great Plague.
Might that have something to do with the poor expectation of health generally at the time? I mean now we are shocked if a child dies, back then it was exceptionally common. Death from illness was part of life.
Possibly, although it is now widely accepted that the notion that people "cared less" about the death of e.g. children because of its historical frequency is a fallacy.
I do think it is about the tangibility of storytelling, and the state's need/desire to persist a martial mythology.
I think the Baroness Scotland one is probably the hardest one for Labour to dismiss...
Fixed Penalty Notice queen Harriet Harman then piroutted and defended Baroness Scotland, serving as Gordon Brown’s Attorney General at the time, when she received a £5,000 civil penalty notice for hiring an illegal worker. While this would have been bad enough, Scotland was a Home Office minister who helped introduce the very legislation under which she received the fine. Scotland said the penalty was caused by a technical error and compared it to a parking ticket, saying “it’s not a criminal offence”. Brown said “no further action was necessary”…
In the ordinary course of things, Johnson‘s FPN would ultimately be of little interest - a brief spat in the papers from the usual suspects & then back to business as usual. It is, as many have rightly said, in and of itself not a particularly egregious crime in the ordinary course of events.
But this isn‘t the ordinary course of events is it? This is about conduct during the pandemic & the incredibly toxic perception that Johnson et al brought in rules for us, the plebs, but didn‘t think they should apply to themselves. People were unable to be with family members when they were dying. People didn‘t see their own relatives for months, sometimes years.
I think the moral aspect is what carries the load here - at a time when everyone else was “pulling together“ Johnson & friends couldn‘t be arsed. It‘s going to be a great attack line at the next GE: “He partied whilst your parents died“. How are you going to counter that? It‘s the attack line that just keeps on giving - there are endless Johnson quotes to mine from the entire period.
My guess is that the bulk of the Conservative party is going to wait for the May elections - if Johnson proves toxic at the ballot box then he’ll be out. The war in Ukraine has made this not quite so certain as it might have been - the “we can‘t change horses during a time of war“ line might be enough. But if not, well - Conservative MPs are ultimately self-preserving & will weigh their vote & then decide.
Some of us positively don't want Mr Johnson in charge at a time of war. Anyone whose response to covid is to shake hands with as much of a hospital-ful as he can is not a good decision maker.
How much of covid spread is by handshakes? I thought we now know its mostly aerosol transmission?
Snot is passed by hands as much as by aerosol. I can't see any likely practical reason for covid not to be transmitted, especially on a very short timescale. And 'mostly' does allow for that - most of the time we don't shake hands with someome who has shaken hands with 100+ people in the last few minutes.
Also, which is a rather different point, it was very much doctrine at the time that it was passed by handshakes etc. Hence Mr J and his Happy Birthday song while handwashing.
New: No 10's at war with Sunak - and it's not clear he knows. - Johnson's now full of contempt for Sunak, has two expletive-laden nicknames for him. - Johnson + Dorries delighted in Sunak's troubles at Chequers 10 days ago. - Lynton Crosby wants Sunak out.
Though it now seems to me Rishi is safe because Boris can't risk the Chancellor announcing he has resigned over partygate.
That Lynton Crosby is involved suggests I was right to observe Sunak's fall was mainly with MPs and activists, whereas polls of the great unwashed showed no decline in the government's standing.
Also the effect of increasing ability student loans, all it has done is increase the amount charged for student accommodation. £150-200 a week for room in towns where a mortgage on a whole house is that is just criminal, and this is often done under the guise of well you get an ensuite now or have better communal facilities e.g. a nice room with big telly, sky, pool table....the cost of that is peanuts compared to the increase they charge.
I tend to agree, however that policy is usually driven by Universities themselves, and local Councils seeking to restrict the local market by deliberately limiting student housing.
And my local people running anti-student campaigns.
Which is intertwined with my other major gripe. 50% kids going to uni full time (the vast majority living away from home). If we had a system where more went to uni part-time and / or also still lived at home / house share with other working young people, we wouldn't have such a large demand for all this accommodation.
Yes there is many positives for a young person to go away to university and having to fend for themselves, but there are loads who are going to the other end of the country to go to a middling / poorly ranked uni, because they quite liked a campus on an open day or their mate went there, when there is similar ranked uni in their local area. But now there is a whole huge business model built around this happening, rather than in many countries, you go locally unless you are attending a premier university (or some very specific course).
Then the economy was in great shape. This time it's tanking.
From my personal knowledge of the Construction Industry t
I thought you were a nurse?
If you have rampant inflation and a cost of living squeeze the like of which we haven't seen for 30 years or more, don't expect full employment to continue as the norm for ever and a day.
But I don't think anyway that people will go to the ballot box thinking, 'it has cost me £50 to get here and my family haven't got enough to eat each month let alone take a holiday or any of the former things we enjoyed ... but it's okay because I've got my job.'
Back in the day inflation was the litmus paper for everything else. It was what Margaret Thatcher based her entire economic policy around: getting down the PSBR to reduce inflation. We may have moved on from that but only because until now we have taken low inflation as a given.
High inflation is a curse on everyone: the whole population is affected by it.
The fact remains that the economy is still in good shape and people have money to spend
This really is out of tune I'm afraid.
As a single mum I know just how much my living standards are falling with a terrible squeeze. I'm making big cutbacks every month just to keep my head above water. So to ozzymandias, yes I do get agitated.
@moonshine piss off calling me a troll. It's beyond boring now. I'm not a troll. I'm a decent human being but, yes, I am on the left of centre and have alternative attitudes to lifestyle. The fact that you resort to namecalling me a troll says more about your own inability to access a worldview outside of your own. But it is also indicative of a demographic on here that is far from representative of this nation.
Did you watch Aintree last week, absolutely packed to the rafters with average people paying £7 per pint
Also the effect of increasing ability student loans, all it has done is increase the amount charged for student accommodation. £150-200 a week for room in towns where a mortgage on a whole house is that is just criminal, and this is often done under the guise of well you get an ensuite now or have better communal facilities e.g. a nice room with big telly, sky, pool table....the cost of that is peanuts compared to the increase they charge.
I tend to agree, however that policy is usually driven by Universities themselves, and local Councils seeking to restrict the local market by deliberately limiting student housing.
And my local people running anti-student campaigns.
Which is intertwined with my other major gripe. 50% kids going to uni full time (the vast majority living away from home). If we had a system where more went to uni part-time and / or also still lived at home / house share with other working young people, we wouldn't have such a large demand for all this accommodation.
iirc there is a greater drop-out rate among students living at home, so it might be swings and roundabouts there. I imagine it is because they still hang out with their non-student mates, whereas in halls, everyone has to prepare or revise at the same time.
Also the effect of increasing ability student loans, all it has done is increase the amount charged for student accommodation. £150-200 a week for room in towns where a mortgage on a whole house is that is just criminal, and this is often done under the guise of well you get an ensuite now or have better communal facilities e.g. a nice room with big telly, sky, pool table....the cost of that is peanuts compared to the increase they charge.
I tend to agree, however that policy is usually driven by Universities themselves, and local Councils seeking to restrict the local market by deliberately limiting student housing.
And my local people running anti-student campaigns.
Which is intertwined with my other major gripe. 50% kids going to uni full time (the vast majority living away from home). If we had a system where more went to uni part-time and / or also still lived at home / house share with other working young people, we wouldn't have such a large demand for all this accommodation.
iirc there is a greater drop-out rate among students living at home, so it might be swings and roundabouts there. I imagine it is because they still hang out with their non-student mates, whereas in halls, everyone has to prepare or revise at the same time.
Its why I prefer the route in which the degree is part of your job. Having a career in which on-training is required provides much more of an incentive to not drop out.
Leon, I think you have a lot of great qualities and you clearly write well albeit with a degree of hyperbole. You're often amusing, interesting and naughty in equal measures.
But as a bell-weather for this nation? Having your finger on the country's pulse? No no no.
Bell-wether on a point of PB pedantry ... leader of the sheep flock ...
New: No 10's at war with Sunak - and it's not clear he knows. - Johnson's now full of contempt for Sunak, has two expletive-laden nicknames for him. - Johnson + Dorries delighted in Sunak's troubles at Chequers 10 days ago. - Lynton Crosby wants Sunak out.
Boris needs to be careful. Remember the damage the "Princess Nut Nut" nickname did within Number 10....
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
The compelling argument for me is the fact that (until WW1 usurped it) the scar on the collective psyche of the English Civil War *far outstripped* the scar of the Great Plague.
Might that have something to do with the poor expectation of health generally at the time? I mean now we are shocked if a child dies, back then it was exceptionally common. Death from illness was part of life.
Possibly, although it is now widely accepted that the notion that people "cared less" about the death of e.g. children because of its historical frequency is a fallacy.
I do think it is about the tangibility of storytelling, and the state's need/desire to persist a martial mythology.
My grandmother never got over the death of her son in childhood from meningitis in the pre-antibiotic era. She spoke of him mournfully until her own death more than six decades later.
A quick comment on the world economy and inflation.
I had drinks on Monday with a friend of mine (whose business I have invested in), who runs an engineering firm out of HK. They have operations in HK, China, the Philippines and the UK, and are a tier two supplier to the automotive and aerospace sectors, specializing in extruded aluminium.
He is *extremely* nervous. He's concerned that if he produces parts for his customers, then they may end up being unused, because of other problems with supply chains. (If Volvo isn't getting chips because of the lockdown in Shanghai, they won't want his product either.)
This is being exacerbated (particularly as he's in the aluminium space) by rising energy costs. It's costing him more to make product, and he's not sure if what he makes is actually going to be demanded by customers.
He's also absolutely livid with the Chinese government's Zero Covid policy, because it means factories get shut down with zero notice, and then he's scrambling to fill orders from other places. He is seriously considering dramatically downsizing China production in the medium term to focus on other places. (He also thinks, without any special knowledge, that Xi Jinping may not see his position renewed at the next session... which would be extraordinary, if true.)
Finally, he's not feeling particularly warm and fuzzy towards the UK government right now. He exports to Spain, Germany and Sweden, and he feels that - while business in Britain generally good - the government's own administrative burdens and disorganisation are a serious negative to increasing investment here.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
Leon, I think you have a lot of great qualities and you clearly write well albeit with a degree of hyperbole. You're often amusing, interesting and naughty in equal measures.
But as a bell-weather for this nation? Having your finger on the country's pulse? No no no.
Bell-wether on a point of PB pedantry ... leader of the sheep flock ...
Nope.
Bellwether – one word, no hyphen.
You were right and I was wrong about the security of Johnson's position, even in a counterfactual no Ukraine invasion world
Finally, he's not feeling particularly warm and fuzzy towards the UK government right now. He exports to Spain, Germany and Sweden, and he feels that - while business in Britain generally good - the government's own administrative burdens and disorganisation are a serious negative to increasing investment here.
Leon, I think you have a lot of great qualities and you clearly write well albeit with a degree of hyperbole. You're often amusing, interesting and naughty in equal measures.
But as a bell-weather for this nation? Having your finger on the country's pulse? No no no.
Bell-wether on a point of PB pedantry ... leader of the sheep flock ...
Nope.
Bellwether – one word, no hyphen.
Maybe in some usage, but Chambers hyphenates it ...
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
The compelling argument for me is the fact that (until WW1 usurped it) the scar on the collective psyche of the English Civil War *far outstripped* the scar of the Great Plague.
Might that have something to do with the poor expectation of health generally at the time? I mean now we are shocked if a child dies, back then it was exceptionally common. Death from illness was part of life.
It’s more because of the timings of it and the fact there were multiple other outbreaks of plague in the three centuries afterwards, while there were very few wars on the British mainland between 1653 and 1914.
I think anyone who believes plague had minimal impact on the national psyche would benefit from reading Colin Platt’s King Death.
Edit - although on rereading it more carefully I think you were referring to the Great Plague of 1664-66. As has already been noted, that was mostly confined to London where mortality rates were excessive anyway. London’s mortality rates outstripped its birth rate by something crazy like 30% down to the Victorian era, with net immigration from the provinces keeping the population from imploding.
A problem all friendly countries have is that their own stocks of weaponry are low - and they need to keep some back for their own use. Replenishment takes time.
Even the US has problems. They have given 7,000 Javelins to Ukraine. That is 1/3 of their inventory. Yet they only make 1,000 a year - and could, with time, get it up to 6,480 a year.
They have sent 2,000 Stingers to Ukraine. They do not make them for themselves any more, and it is believed that the 2,000 is one quarter of the US's remaining stocks. Lead time is 24 months.
There is only so much material that can be given. That does not really excuse Germany (and to a lesser extent France's) tardiness in providing anything.
Part of the excellent performance by the Ukraine forces against armour is due to incredibly profligate expenditure of weapons; they are firing off hundreds of ATGMs every day.
No other armed forces that weren't a) in an existential struggle for survival and b) were getting them all gratis would expend them at that rate.
But you're correct to observe that's there's a limit and they are probably going to run NATO dry quite soon.
Where do you get the figure that they are firing off hundreds per day? Or do you count RPGs?
If they were firing that number, and knocking out a handful of tanks each day, it would be a problem, but I suspect the effectiveness to be rather better than that.
And similar. It has been a thing since the invention of weapons that usage often greatly outstrips supply and production.
Hit rates are often tiny. Expenditure of anti-tank missiles (for example) has always been vastly higher than supplies - from their introduction in the 60s onwards.
Henry V is believed to have taken a million arrows to Agincourt.
There were people worrying in the 80s that the stocks of vaguely smart weapons would be fired in a week, if the Russians went Full Tonto at the Fulda Gap.
This goes up and down the weapons pyramid - if you want a new fighter jet, lead time is *years*.
Increasing your stock of ammunition and missiles is also, as I've pointed out at least a dozen times now, the most cost effective means of upping defence capability, We spend billions on shiny weapon systems like Typhoon or the F35, and then skimp on the amount their armaments we buy; same thing for the army and navy.
Bit of a scoop in Private Eye. We were discussing Owen Jones last night. This is not a good look for him or the Guardian
‘Owen Jones has relentlessly persecuted women online, including his own colleagues. An external investigator brought in by The Guardian has found him guilty of bullying a female columnist. Yet it has tried to keep the report quiet and appears not to have sanctioned Jones at all.’
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
Bit of a scoop in Private Eye. We were discussing Owen Jones last night. This is not a good look for him or the Guardian
‘Owen Jones has relentlessly persecuted women online, including his own colleagues. An external investigator brought in by The Guardian has found him guilty of bullying a female columnist. Yet it has tried to keep the report quiet and appears not to have sanctioned Jones at all.’
I've read worse than that on PB every day of the week. Including today.
People on PB don't have millions of followers on social media. When you do you have a certain level of responsibly not to be promoting pile-ups on other people (especially using false or misleading claims). Jones has done this on many occasions, and he knows this, and at one point claimed he wasn't ever going to use twitter like that again, only using it in a selective way, but of course he was back to same old same old pretty quickly.
We spend billions on shiny weapon systems like Typhoon or the F35, and then skimp on the amount their armaments we buy; same thing for the army and navy.
The army don't even get as far as buying the shiny weapons systems...
Leon, I think you have a lot of great qualities and you clearly write well albeit with a degree of hyperbole. You're often amusing, interesting and naughty in equal measures.
But as a bell-weather for this nation? Having your finger on the country's pulse? No no no.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
As we were saying yesterday how absurd and misguided it is for some reason restaurant critics think they are geo-political analysis. Pouilly Fuisse from Pouilly Fume maybe but more than that? Nah.
This is a good example. Do we know who this bloke SeanT is.
I recall he was the ahistorical diddy who recently proposed that France went largely unscathed by bombing during WWII.
One might think that he should stick to the aspirational comestibles stuff but then one remembers the great shaved parmesan debacle. Ooh la la!
A problem all friendly countries have is that their own stocks of weaponry are low - and they need to keep some back for their own use. Replenishment takes time.
Even the US has problems. They have given 7,000 Javelins to Ukraine. That is 1/3 of their inventory. Yet they only make 1,000 a year - and could, with time, get it up to 6,480 a year.
They have sent 2,000 Stingers to Ukraine. They do not make them for themselves any more, and it is believed that the 2,000 is one quarter of the US's remaining stocks. Lead time is 24 months.
There is only so much material that can be given. That does not really excuse Germany (and to a lesser extent France's) tardiness in providing anything.
Part of the excellent performance by the Ukraine forces against armour is due to incredibly profligate expenditure of weapons; they are firing off hundreds of ATGMs every day.
No other armed forces that weren't a) in an existential struggle for survival and b) were getting them all gratis would expend them at that rate.
But you're correct to observe that's there's a limit and they are probably going to run NATO dry quite soon.
Where do you get the figure that they are firing off hundreds per day? Or do you count RPGs?
If they were firing that number, and knocking out a handful of tanks each day, it would be a problem, but I suspect the effectiveness to be rather better than that.
And similar. It has been a thing since the invention of weapons that usage often greatly outstrips supply and production.
Hit rates are often tiny. Expenditure of anti-tank missiles (for example) has always been vastly higher than supplies - from their introduction in the 60s onwards.
Henry V is believed to have taken a million arrows to Agincourt.
There were people worrying in the 80s that the stocks of vaguely smart weapons would be fired in a week, if the Russians went Full Tonto at the Fulda Gap.
This goes up and down the weapons pyramid - if you want a new fighter jet, lead time is *years*.
Increasing your stock of ammunition and missiles is also, as I've pointed out at least a dozen times now, the most cost effective means of upping defence capability, We spend billions on shiny weapon systems like Typhoon or the F35, and then skimp on the amount their armaments we buy; same thing for the army and navy.
Always have done. We are not the worst at this - hence selling clapped out rust bucket warships to second world countries, who get to pretend they have navies. Just shops that don’t sail and no ammunition.
Probably only the US has decent weapons reserves.
One of the sensible arguments for continuing the F35 buy beyond 48 is an attrition reserve for a war - plus in case of war they will cram far more than 48 on one of the carriers.
It’s one of the reason I am a fan of the idea of buying a lot of 155 ultra mobile artillery - one of the latest shoot-and-scoot automatic loading systems. Roll up to a firing point, fire a volley, off again on under 100 seconds… 155 shells are cheap enough we might actually buy enough to be useful.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
"Sweden’s inconvenient Covid victory Were millions of people denied freedom for nothing? Johan Anderberg"
Omitting the key points that Sweden's per capita death toll was ten times that of its neighbouring countries, its economic damage was similar or worse to them, the amount of freedom over time was less, its response ripped to shreds in an analysis in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01097-5 ), and Tegnell eventually fired (shortly after claiming to have been right).
Meanwhile those in this country who desperately want to claim that we would just have followed guidance rather than law are exactly the same ones who would not have followed guidance and want to pretend covid never existed or was any threat at all.
The entire "SWEDEN!" narrative has just been people who didn't want to believe there was a problem or that their comfortable routines could or should be disrupted trying to find a handwavy argument that if we'd just done nothing or the equivalent of nothing or if their own lives could just have been unchanged, it would all have been fine and gone away - and externalised that into "This is what Sweden is doing and it's fine." And then denied or ignored or cherrypicked away any evidence to the contrary.
This scandal is simultaneously outrageous and boring. It’s OMG and Yawn
I can see Boris surviving, quite easily, out of voter apathy
Is anyone out there really boiling with anger? I doubt it. It’s like a car crash filmed in such ultra-slow-motion you lose interest
As I say downthread, it's more a "fuck that, I'm not getting off my arse for that clown" come election time, rather than "MAKE WAY, I'M VOTING FOR THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, THE LAST BASTION OF RIGHTOUSNESS, TO SMITE THESE WRONGDOERS".
The Tories will be hoping that, come the 2024 election, partygate will be a dim and boring memory. This might well work. Unfortunately for them, by 2024 there’s a high chance the economy will be in the toilet, so they will get binned for THAT, instead
The Tories can bring up the pandemic without bringing up partygate.
No one will ‘bring up the pandemic’. It is so ghastly and bleak we will erase it from the collective memory ASAFP
What utter, complete, rubbish.
You are becoming the Dennis Healey of pb.com: whatever you say, we can be sure that the diametric opposite is true.
Except, history shows I am right
Read this brilliant piece by the great SeanT, who was once a congregant of this very same PB parish: "Why we remember wars but forget plagues"
He's correct, and the absence of plague literature proves it
I would add The Stand (possibly the great American Novel; certainly better than the tripe from Steinbeck and co) as a plague novel (despite it ostensibly being "horror").
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
It makes total sense. Who wants to remember the ventilators, the gasping noises, the lockdowns, the depression, the temporary morgues, the not-seeing-family-for-two-years, the lonely deaths, the lack of sex, the lack of hugs, the lack of everything, the tedium, the fear, the jabs, the illness, the pain, the Chinese killing all their pets, the whole damn thing is just a terrible terrible horror show and we will thrust it from our minds just as soon as we can
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
The compelling argument for me is the fact that (until WW1 usurped it) the scar on the collective psyche of the English Civil War *far outstripped* the scar of the Great Plague.
That because people took sides - which were also aligned with their religious beliefs - and that continued to affect entire families long after the was and Restoration. Of course for our own recent plague, there's been quite a lot of side taking. I fully expect at least one plague novel from some hack or other on just that basis. Perhaps SeanT could mull over the idea.
Comments
I said that obviously Brexit is having some effect on UK supply. Restricting supply here means that prices rise.
But I see what you are doing. You are using epic levels of whataboutery. The UK has inflation. But, wait, so does the US. Therefore it cannot be because of Brexit. A glorious non sequitur.
The fact that both might have rising inflation for separate, but undeniably also related, causal reasons is lost on you. Or you are being deliberately disingenous.
Have a nice afternoon all.
xx
I have always said you are neither a troll nor a Russian bot, and it is something you did thank me for. Yet last week during a disagreement you were most rude to me about my avatar and made up some nonsense as well. Simply for me pointing out you call anyone who disagrees with you right wing. Even people like Foxy who are anything but.
I can see why people assume you are a troll. I still don't think you are.
He made the joke well before Mr Adamson took his own life.
DO you have a view on the evolution of community relations in the Baltic countries in the future, between the 'Russian' minority, and the mainstream?
Is it going to cause a realignment of loyalties, and more integration over time?
(Which if I have it right from the international media is a somewhat different question that between "Russian speakers" and the rest.)
But that does nothing to undermine your thesis with which I concur.
In joint presser, the Swedish and Finnish PM talk about a watershed moment for European security after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Both set for NATO membership. Finnish PM says will move fast - we’re talking weeks, not months.
https://twitter.com/mariatad/status/1514196473025597450
But this isn‘t the ordinary course of events is it? This is about conduct during the pandemic & the incredibly toxic perception that Johnson et al brought in rules for us, the plebs, but didn‘t think they should apply to themselves. People were unable to be with family members when they were dying. People didn‘t see their own relatives for months, sometimes years.
I think the moral aspect is what carries the load here - at a time when everyone else was “pulling together“ Johnson & friends couldn‘t be arsed. It‘s going to be a great attack line at the next GE: “He partied whilst your parents died“. How are you going to counter that? It‘s the attack line that just keeps on giving - there are endless Johnson quotes to mine from the entire period.
My guess is that the bulk of the Conservative party is going to wait for the May elections - if Johnson proves toxic at the ballot box then he’ll be out. The war in Ukraine has made this not quite so certain as it might have been - the “we can‘t change horses during a time of war“ line might be enough. But if not, well - Conservative MPs are ultimately self-preserving & will weigh their vote & then decide.
He has made it clear he does not wish to have that name used and wishes to use the Name Bartholomew Roberts here and has been asked to be referred to as such.
Whether you like him or not, or agree with him or not, it is just plain good manners to respect that.
Doesn't change the fact that Brexit is pretty much inconsequential to global inflation.
No problem, per se, with your suggestion if there is an option for practical parts of courses to be maintained. Just pointing out that passing exams, for some courses, is only a part of the story.
Yeah, right...
Semi-relatedly, anyone remember the timeline for the Paterson fiasco? From memory, that started with the Conservatives closing ranks until they didn't.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61092799
I feel quite sad about this. Time Out formed a small part of my life for a few years when I lived in London thirty years ago. Buying or borrowing the latest edition to see what was on or read stuff I vehemently disagreed with.
I loved it.
(*) Print edition.
Roaring twenties eh Bart?
Netherlands inflation 11.5% - Because Brexit?
And they're using that to reject claims to change PM. Not "He's doing great in the war and that's more important" (and I'd contend that Ben Wallace, for example, wouldn't automatically lead to a worse handling). And continuing the "giving as much military aid as possible" is certainly important, but I wouldn't say it's a hugely difficult act to follow.
If the principle is "Don't change during a war," then that's the principle on which we judge earlier ones.
I think you are also making two plus two equal about thirty-five. The Great War contained a whole series of awful traumatic events each of which was a separate one worthy of writing-up on its own: the Dardanelles, the shooting of Franz Ferdinand, The Somme, Ypres, the first flying machines, the use of tanks, .. the list goes on and on.
A plague, as you (sorry Sean) described it is something very different. There are not the same single events to write up. It is just one sorry pandemic saga, within which are countless individual tragedies, themselves not worthy of a book or even a poem.
Don't mistake the capacity of war to make ready literature equate to people's consciousness of an event like a plague.
I think there's another point here. People in England, and let's take just England for now, did not 'see' what was going on in the war, or indeed any war. They were not there on the front line and such news as filtered back at the time was either heavily censored by authorities or numbed by the trauma of those who had experienced it. There was huge appetite to find out more: to learn what had happened, including to loved ones, and what it had really been like.
The Spanish flu or covid is entirely different. We've all seen it up close. We don't need anyone to write about it and probably would rather they didn't. Does that mean we don't care or aren't affected by it? Certainly not.
The blurring and erasure has already begun. We were discussing on here t'other day how we'd all forgotten that Tiger Woods was in a car crash in early 2021. It's because it happened during The Pestilence and it is being speedily dumped along with all the other memories of that time
Indeed, I suspect this is an evolved function of the human brain. We cope with horrific traumas and move on, through a process of selective amnesia
Wars get remembered because they are not entirely horrific, they have stories and victories and heroes
"Russian warship, go fuck yourself" is by itself a more pleasing story than anything that has come out of Covid, in the last two disgusting years, even the vaccine
"Covid variant, go fuck yourself" doesn't work, because there is no visible enemy to insult and defy, just this nightmare THING out there in the air
- Johnson's now full of contempt for Sunak, has two expletive-laden nicknames for him.
- Johnson + Dorries delighted in Sunak's troubles at Chequers 10 days ago.
- Lynton Crosby wants Sunak out.
If there's no roaring twenties now I'll blame Sunak for raising taxes instead of allowing the country to grow.
A driverless car stops for the police, then drives away. It was stopped because it was driving at night with no headlights...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/04/cops-take-dim-view-of-autonomous-vehicle-driving-with-no-lights-at-night/
Not sure everywhere can say the same.
Another course I teach on really struggled to provide project based labs. At one point we needed to set experiments up, run them, work up the products, and tidy everything away inside 4 hours. Not good if the reaction takes 10 hours...
https://unherd.com/2022/04/swedens-inconvenient-covid-victory/
"Sweden’s inconvenient Covid victory
Were millions of people denied freedom for nothing?
Johan Anderberg"
Should I read anything into that?
And my local people running anti-student campaigns.
This is a good example. Do we know who this bloke SeanT is.
Meanwhile I am queuing for Eurotunnel. East Kent is a disaster zone awash with lorries and police checkpoints at junctions to try and stop them using country lanes to jump the queue; meanwhile car traffic is routed on a scenic tour of the backroads...
I do think it is about the tangibility of storytelling, and the state's need/desire to persist a martial mythology.
Also, which is a rather different point, it was very much doctrine at the time that it was passed by handshakes etc. Hence Mr J and his Happy Birthday song while handwashing.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2022/04/no-10-is-at-war-with-rishi-sunak-and-its-not-clear-he-knows
Though it now seems to me Rishi is safe because Boris can't risk the Chancellor announcing he has resigned over partygate.
That Lynton Crosby is involved suggests I was right to observe Sunak's fall was mainly with MPs and activists, whereas polls of the great unwashed showed no decline in the government's standing.
Yes there is many positives for a young person to go away to university and having to fend for themselves, but there are loads who are going to the other end of the country to go to a middling / poorly ranked uni, because they quite liked a campus on an open day or their mate went there, when there is similar ranked uni in their local area. But now there is a whole huge business model built around this happening, rather than in many countries, you go locally unless you are attending a premier university (or some very specific course).
Bellwether – one word, no hyphen.
I had drinks on Monday with a friend of mine (whose business I have invested in), who runs an engineering firm out of HK. They have operations in HK, China, the Philippines and the UK, and are a tier two supplier to the automotive and aerospace sectors, specializing in extruded aluminium.
He is *extremely* nervous. He's concerned that if he produces parts for his customers, then they may end up being unused, because of other problems with supply chains. (If Volvo isn't getting chips because of the lockdown in Shanghai, they won't want his product either.)
This is being exacerbated (particularly as he's in the aluminium space) by rising energy costs. It's costing him more to make product, and he's not sure if what he makes is actually going to be demanded by customers.
He's also absolutely livid with the Chinese government's Zero Covid policy, because it means factories get shut down with zero notice, and then he's scrambling to fill orders from other places. He is seriously considering dramatically downsizing China production in the medium term to focus on other places. (He also thinks, without any special knowledge, that Xi Jinping may not see his position renewed at the next session... which would be extraordinary, if true.)
Finally, he's not feeling particularly warm and fuzzy towards the UK government right now. He exports to Spain, Germany and Sweden, and he feels that - while business in Britain generally good - the government's own administrative burdens and disorganisation are a serious negative to increasing investment here.
A very interesting list - UK in the middle but below the 'EU Rate'.
@williamglenn perhaps.
I think anyone who believes plague had minimal impact on the national psyche would benefit from reading Colin Platt’s King Death.
Edit - although on rereading it more carefully I think you were referring to the Great Plague of 1664-66. As has already been noted, that was mostly confined to London where mortality rates were excessive anyway. London’s mortality rates outstripped its birth rate by something crazy like 30% down to the Victorian era, with net immigration from the provinces keeping the population from imploding.
We spend billions on shiny weapon systems like Typhoon or the F35, and then skimp on the amount their armaments we buy; same thing for the army and navy.
I've read worse than that on PB every day of the week. Including today.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-61094059
2. There's plenty of plague literature, some of it quite good: https://lincolnlibraries.org/bookguide/booklists/pandemic-and-plague-literature/
One might think that he should stick to the aspirational comestibles stuff but then one remembers the great shaved parmesan debacle. Ooh la la!
Probably only the US has decent weapons reserves.
One of the sensible arguments for continuing the F35 buy beyond 48 is an attrition reserve for a war - plus in case of war they will cram far more than 48 on one of the carriers.
It’s one of the reason I am a fan of the idea of buying a lot of 155 ultra mobile artillery - one of the latest shoot-and-scoot automatic loading systems. Roll up to a firing point, fire a volley, off again on under 100 seconds… 155 shells are cheap enough we might actually buy enough to be useful.
Meanwhile those in this country who desperately want to claim that we would just have followed guidance rather than law are exactly the same ones who would not have followed guidance and want to pretend covid never existed or was any threat at all.
The entire "SWEDEN!" narrative has just been people who didn't want to believe there was a problem or that their comfortable routines could or should be disrupted trying to find a handwavy argument that if we'd just done nothing or the equivalent of nothing or if their own lives could just have been unchanged, it would all have been fine and gone away - and externalised that into "This is what Sweden is doing and it's fine." And then denied or ignored or cherrypicked away any evidence to the contrary.
Of course for our own recent plague, there's been quite a lot of side taking. I fully expect at least one plague novel from some hack or other on just that basis. Perhaps SeanT could mull over the idea.
Opinion Way
Macron 53
Le Pen 47
Ipsos
Macron 55
Le Pen 45