Went for a stroll a bit further up to the mountain before dinner, hoping to see the Abbey of St Martin of Canigou but it was a bit too far (and high up!) for me to reach in the time I had. I’m sorely tempted to stay another night and check it out tomorrow..
I did see what I can only assume is a Ukrainian tractor - they really are going to some lengths and heights to catch those Russian tanks!
Blanche, I went up Mount Canigou a few decades ago. Then it was possible to drive up near the top and then you either walked or went up to the summit in an open top Land Rover. We walked and I experienced schedenfreude seeing the look of terror on the faces of those who chose the Land Rover as it went round hairpin bends at break-neck speed, inches from the edge.
Boris Johnson has been apparently airbrushed from Conservative party leaflets for next month's local elections in the wake of the "partygate" row.
The Prime Minister is not mentioned in the Welsh or Scottish Conservative manifestos or some campaign literature produced by local party associations.
Mr Johnson has also not been seen knocking on doors with Conservative candidates for the campaign, which was not given an official launch but was referred to in passing at the party's spring conference in Blackpool last month.
The decision to play down the role of Mr Johnson in campaign leaflets will draw comparisons to the way some Labour politicians omitted Jeremy Corbyn from leaflets when he was the party's leader.
Remind me again: Tory MPs are keeping him in place even though he broke the law because he is so popular with the public and no other politician can campaign like him?
Boris Johnson has been apparently airbrushed from Conservative party leaflets for next month's local elections in the wake of the "partygate" row.
The Prime Minister is not mentioned in the Welsh or Scottish Conservative manifestos or some campaign literature produced by local party associations.
Mr Johnson has also not been seen knocking on doors with Conservative candidates for the campaign, which was not given an official launch but was referred to in passing at the party's spring conference in Blackpool last month.
The decision to play down the role of Mr Johnson in campaign leaflets will draw comparisons to the way some Labour politicians omitted Jeremy Corbyn from leaflets when he was the party's leader.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
Just looking out from our balcony on the Gwynt y Môr wind farm the turbines are barely turning tonight
Gwynt y Môr (Welsh: meaning sea wind) is a 576-megawatt (MW) offshore wind farm located off the coast of Wales and is the fifth largest operating offshore windfarm in the world. The farm has 160 wind turbines of 150 metres (490 ft) tip height above mean sea level.
The wind is still blowing somewhere though. Currently providing about 20% of UK electricity.
It may be but it is as calm as a millpond tonight with the whole field (5th largest in the world) sails barely turning
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
59% of Conservative voters and 57% of Leave voters support the Rwanda immigration plan however. So in terms of Boris shoring up his core vote it works
Yes and no.
10% of Conservative voters strongly oppose it. That's about 3% of voters overall. Now, if they oppose it enough to change their vote (and my impression is that this has cut through among those who've heard it in a really visceral way... those who dislike it really think it's evil), that's more votes than the Conservatives can afford to lose. After all, 43% is a triumphant landslide and 33% is a one-way ticket to Oppositionsville.
Politically, it might work, in the short term at least. But it's not Brexit redux. The thing about Brexit was that Leave won because they had heart arguments, and very very few people had passionate feels about Remain. (Ironically, by going bull-in-a-china-shop about it, the government may have created people who do.) For the assylum changes, the heart arguments are mostly on the anti-government side.
Besides, until yesterday, Priti Patel was about the least popular member of the government. Half the population hated what she said, and the other half despised her inablilty to convert her horrible words into action. If this mad plan dies on its bum, and there are many ways it can do that, that same toxic combination will spread to the rest of the government.
HYUFD's point is that the policy isn't designed to win a majority in the country. It's designed to get most Conservative Party members and voters telling Conservative MPs that they should support Boris Johnson. Quite possibly that will work - after all, Conservatives voters prefer Le Pen to Macron (insofar as they have a view).
If successful, that gets BJ another 2 years in Downing Street. The General Election? That's for another day.
I don't support Le Pen one little bit Nick
I wouldn't have expected it, BigG. But there was a poll linked from PB a couple of days ago on who British voters would like to see win in France. Labour voters were so,mething like 53-8 for Macron. Conservatives were IIRC 37-22 for Le Pen. Obviously lots of don't knows, but still, it does suggest that the party is different from what it was, doesn't it?
There is no doubt it has lost its way and needs to replace Boris ASAP though I admit that may not change its fortunes
What's Farage's position on all this? I have lost track. Is he basically in agreement with Stop The War that the whole thing is the West's fault and NATO should not have expanded eastwards?
Anecdotal - My most Boris fan relative responded with confusion rather than happiness at the Rwanda plan. First question was about atrocities, naturally, but next point was that people should just be shipped back to France, as it is all their fault for letting people onto the boats in the first place.
Obviously if it is effective I imagine people will like it, but Rwanda is so far away I think he was uncertain how to think about it.
The counter-argument is put forward by Brett Devereaux (who actually, does not disagree with you about the exploitative nature of the Roman Empire). I find convincing the argument for quite a sharp decline in Western European living standards after 450.
Britain may have enjoyed a brief sweet spot, where it was no longer paying taxes to Rome, but things did fall apart after the mid Fifth century. By the mid Sixth century, Britain must have been like the world of Mad Max.
I thought there was considerable evidence the Romano-British rural estates were being abandoned by the beginning of the fourth rather than the fifth century. The economic, social and cultural decline of Roman Britain pre-dated the military and political collapse.
There was a retreat into the towns and cities while the country was increasingly abandoned to bandits and others and this obviously accelerated with the collapse of the security apparatus after 410.
The Romano-British successors lacked, it seems, the will rather than the means to organise the defence of Britain once Honorius had withdrawn the final troops and used paid mercenaries to try to hold the line which didn't end well as we know. To what extent Vortigern, if he existed, held any kind of real political power is uncertain.
I can only imagine the psychological shock for the Romano-British to find themselves without Imperial protection for the first time in nearly five centuries, to see Hadrian's Wall abandoned to the Picts and Scots who could presumably roam at will far to the south forcing the populace into fortified and isolated towns.
Devereaux' view is that decline set in about the middle of the Fourth century, and the cities were more or less gone, in Britain, by 420.
At that point, I don't think anyone in Rome thought that the retreat from Britain was permanent, and I expect there were probably people in Britain who expected imperial control to be reasserted. The Notitia Dignitatum, of 423, still lists Britain as a part of the empire.
Britain is a most unusual case because of the totality of collapse. Throughout most of Western Europe, one can point to institutions or noble families that long outlived the fall of the Western Empire, but in Britain, everything vanished, pretty much. My guess is that Southern Germany and Austria was similar to Britain at the time, judging by the Life of St. Severinus
I think there is plenty of evidence that that isn't true. And at least enough to dispute that. The material culture changes dramatically (just as it did in the decades preceding and after 43AD!), but DNA evidence suggests that the people are still mostly the same.
The fact that in the countryside, it is spectacular how many Anglo Saxon sites are built next to the old Villa sites (and ever more so as modern tech helps us find more of both) and how many Anglo Saxon churches are built from villa walls, on Roman sites...
I don't buy the "rapid, wholesale collapse, and population replacement" story, even among elites.
There's a small church in a river valley NW of Oxford - there are bits of a Roman mosaic visible in the floor.
It must be one of the oldest buildings in Britain (the world?) in some form of continuous use
Port Eliot House, the seat of the Earl of St Germans, in Cornwall, has remnants of a Dark Age abbey in the basement (weird slit windows) and possibly Roman and - tantalisingly - pre-Roman traces
Probably it doesn't go back that far but the idea alone is brilliant
The posho family that own it is also superbly mad
I'm not sure if the kirk walls are Roman as such, just that the base is evidently reused Roman. But even so there is at least physical continuity, as at York Minster where the cellar is basically the old Roman HQ of the legionary fortress.
Boris Johnson has been apparently airbrushed from Conservative party leaflets for next month's local elections in the wake of the "partygate" row.
The Prime Minister is not mentioned in the Welsh or Scottish Conservative manifestos or some campaign literature produced by local party associations.
Mr Johnson has also not been seen knocking on doors with Conservative candidates for the campaign, which was not given an official launch but was referred to in passing at the party's spring conference in Blackpool last month.
The decision to play down the role of Mr Johnson in campaign leaflets will draw comparisons to the way some Labour politicians omitted Jeremy Corbyn from leaflets when he was the party's leader.
Remind me again: Tory MPs are keeping him in place even though he broke the law because he is so popular with the public and no other politician can campaign like him?
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
Me. Sex, hunting, naturally fermented fruit juice, mushrooms and cave paintings, and all done by 40. Sounds perfect.
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
There can't have been many slaves in Roman Britain. Maybe a bunch of household slaves but their nutrition was probably better than many (scraps of the big banquets). The big Roman slave plantations were in Italy. We don't really have the climate for it.
59% of Conservative voters and 57% of Leave voters support the Rwanda immigration plan however. So in terms of Boris shoring up his core vote it works
Yes and no.
10% of Conservative voters strongly oppose it. That's about 3% of voters overall. Now, if they oppose it enough to change their vote (and my impression is that this has cut through among those who've heard it in a really visceral way... those who dislike it really think it's evil), that's more votes than the Conservatives can afford to lose. After all, 43% is a triumphant landslide and 33% is a one-way ticket to Oppositionsville.
Politically, it might work, in the short term at least. But it's not Brexit redux. The thing about Brexit was that Leave won because they had heart arguments, and very very few people had passionate feels about Remain. (Ironically, by going bull-in-a-china-shop about it, the government may have created people who do.) For the assylum changes, the heart arguments are mostly on the anti-government side.
Besides, until yesterday, Priti Patel was about the least popular member of the government. Half the population hated what she said, and the other half despised her inablilty to convert her horrible words into action. If this mad plan dies on its bum, and there are many ways it can do that, that same toxic combination will spread to the rest of the government.
HYUFD's point is that the policy isn't designed to win a majority in the country. It's designed to get most Conservative Party members and voters telling Conservative MPs that they should support Boris Johnson. Quite possibly that will work - after all, Conservatives voters prefer Le Pen to Macron (insofar as they have a view).
If successful, that gets BJ another 2 years in Downing Street. The General Election? That's for another day.
Alternatively, and I urge you to consider this possibility, this is actually a serious attempt to solve the Channel migrants problem. The point is not to actually send 50,000 people to Rwanda, it is to stop people crossing - and drowning - at Calais and elsewhere, so the pressure ends. The point is not to use the nukes, it is to deter others using them. And Australia shows that this method worse
And this problem needs solving. Right now 2022 looks set to be a record year for crossings, bigger than 2021, which was bigger than 2020 (despite Covid). And we are now talking serious numbers: tens of thousands, which might become hundreds of thousands, in time
This is unsustainable. So what do we do?
The EU in the south has happily allowed Libya to put people in concentration camps whence they can be slaved, I do not exaggerate.
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
Is the mainstream view of Gobekli Tepi still that it was built by hunter-gatherers, who had an abundance of leisure time relative to to early agriculturalists that followed them?
Went for a stroll a bit further up to the mountain before dinner, hoping to see the Abbey of St Martin of Canigou but it was a bit too far (and high up!) for me to reach in the time I had. I’m sorely tempted to stay another night and check it out tomorrow..
I did see what I can only assume is a Ukrainian tractor - they really are going to some lengths and heights to catch those Russian tanks!
Blanche, I went up Mount Canigou a few decades ago. Then it was possible to drive up near the top and then you either walked or went up to the summit in an open top Land Rover. We walked and I experienced schedenfreude seeing the look of terror on the faces of those who chose the Land Rover as it went round hairpin bends at break-neck speed, inches from the edge.
I’ve had a few cars speeding past today; not inches from the edge, but inches from me - which has been literally hair raising!
Anecdotal - My most Boris fan relative responded with confusion rather than happiness at the Rwanda plan. First question was about atrocities, naturally, but next point was that people should just be shipped back to France, as it is all their fault for letting people onto the boats in the first place.
Obviously if it is effective I imagine people will like it, but Rwanda is so far away I think he was uncertain how to think about it.
I do wonder how the phoots of the apparently luxury accommodation [sic] will impact public opinion in that quarter.
What's Farage's position on all this? I have lost track. Is he basically in agreement with Stop The War that the whole thing is the West's fault and NATO should not have expanded eastwards?
Yes. He would have been a Hitler sympathizer in the 1930s. What a disgrace to everything Britain stands for.
The Russians seem to be trying to corroborate every racist meme that the Ukrainians might have had about them. Katsapy/moskali/Mongols. No wonder they are being referred to as orcs. The Ukrainians have thought of them as Asiatic hordes and... well, Chingis had nothing on Uncle Vova. Смерть кацапам.
According to at least one person on here, they are all Slavs, so are the same.
It is noteworthy how many of the faces of dead and captured Russians are very 'eastern' in appearance. It's almost as though Russia is depleting its regions of its young men rather than its western cities.
(I'm aware this might be seen as racist, but the pictures do give that impression - as does the info on where the men are coming from ...)
A lot of Russians look Eastern. Even Putin. The theory is that there is a lot of Tatar in them... DNA evidence shows otherwise, however.
Russia is throwing her minorities into the the meat grinder, see kamilkazani on twitter who is himself Tatar.
My old Russian teacher is Russian-Tartar, I haven't dared get in touch.
The number of dead soldiers is indeed reported much higher in Buryatia and Dagestan and very low in St Petersburg and Moscow. Make of that what you will, but a general conscription that covers European Russia could lead to a severe backlash.
It would presumably take them months to train all these conscripts though. The Ukrainians I assume have a big head start. I haven't see numbers on the reserve army they are training but men under 65 are not allowed to leave and quite a few women appear to be signing up. It must be in the hundreds of thousands.
59% of Conservative voters and 57% of Leave voters support the Rwanda immigration plan however. So in terms of Boris shoring up his core vote it works
Yes and no.
10% of Conservative voters strongly oppose it. That's about 3% of voters overall. Now, if they oppose it enough to change their vote (and my impression is that this has cut through among those who've heard it in a really visceral way... those who dislike it really think it's evil), that's more votes than the Conservatives can afford to lose. After all, 43% is a triumphant landslide and 33% is a one-way ticket to Oppositionsville.
Politically, it might work, in the short term at least. But it's not Brexit redux. The thing about Brexit was that Leave won because they had heart arguments, and very very few people had passionate feels about Remain. (Ironically, by going bull-in-a-china-shop about it, the government may have created people who do.) For the assylum changes, the heart arguments are mostly on the anti-government side.
Besides, until yesterday, Priti Patel was about the least popular member of the government. Half the population hated what she said, and the other half despised her inablilty to convert her horrible words into action. If this mad plan dies on its bum, and there are many ways it can do that, that same toxic combination will spread to the rest of the government.
HYUFD's point is that the policy isn't designed to win a majority in the country. It's designed to get most Conservative Party members and voters telling Conservative MPs that they should support Boris Johnson. Quite possibly that will work - after all, Conservatives voters prefer Le Pen to Macron (insofar as they have a view).
If successful, that gets BJ another 2 years in Downing Street. The General Election? That's for another day.
I don't support Le Pen one little bit Nick
I wouldn't have expected it, BigG. But there was a poll linked from PB a couple of days ago on who British voters would like to see win in France. Labour voters were so,mething like 53-8 for Macron. Conservatives were IIRC 37-22 for Le Pen. Obviously lots of don't knows, but still, it does suggest that the party is different from what it was, doesn't it?
I think what it means is that many Con voters don't like Macron very much. Not too surprising really. He comes across as hostile to Brexit and contemptuous of UK. I don't think it means they've gone proto-Fascist - don't suppose they have given much thought to Le Pen or the implications of her winning.
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
We might be surprised, it is a bit of an implicit opinion when people lament the negatives of agricultural/urban civilization. I remember reading Humankind by Rutger Bremen, and he seemed to spend a lot of time rebutting, with some success, negative ('realistic') views of humanity by challenging some of the studies or opinions that suggest a pessimistic view as being without evidence, but then several times lapses into rose coloured views of hunter gatherer lifestyles without any evidence of his own.
What's Farage's position on all this? I have lost track. Is he basically in agreement with Stop The War that the whole thing is the West's fault and NATO should not have expanded eastwards?
Yes. He would have been a Hitler sympathizer in the 1930s. What a disgrace to everything Britain stands for.
Hilarious that the Hard Left and the Hard Right are in agreement over Russia.
59% of Conservative voters and 57% of Leave voters support the Rwanda immigration plan however. So in terms of Boris shoring up his core vote it works
Yes and no.
10% of Conservative voters strongly oppose it. That's about 3% of voters overall. Now, if they oppose it enough to change their vote (and my impression is that this has cut through among those who've heard it in a really visceral way... those who dislike it really think it's evil), that's more votes than the Conservatives can afford to lose. After all, 43% is a triumphant landslide and 33% is a one-way ticket to Oppositionsville.
Politically, it might work, in the short term at least. But it's not Brexit redux. The thing about Brexit was that Leave won because they had heart arguments, and very very few people had passionate feels about Remain. (Ironically, by going bull-in-a-china-shop about it, the government may have created people who do.) For the assylum changes, the heart arguments are mostly on the anti-government side.
Besides, until yesterday, Priti Patel was about the least popular member of the government. Half the population hated what she said, and the other half despised her inablilty to convert her horrible words into action. If this mad plan dies on its bum, and there are many ways it can do that, that same toxic combination will spread to the rest of the government.
HYUFD's point is that the policy isn't designed to win a majority in the country. It's designed to get most Conservative Party members and voters telling Conservative MPs that they should support Boris Johnson. Quite possibly that will work - after all, Conservatives voters prefer Le Pen to Macron (insofar as they have a view).
If successful, that gets BJ another 2 years in Downing Street. The General Election? That's for another day.
Alternatively, and I urge you to consider this possibility, this is actually a serious attempt to solve the Channel migrants problem. The point is not to actually send 50,000 people to Rwanda, it is to stop people crossing - and drowning - at Calais and elsewhere, so the pressure ends. The point is not to use the nukes, it is to deter others using them. And Australia shows that this method worse
And this problem needs solving. Right now 2022 looks set to be a record year for crossings, bigger than 2021, which was bigger than 2020 (despite Covid). And we are now talking serious numbers: tens of thousands, which might become hundreds of thousands, in time
This is unsustainable. So what do we do?
The EU in the south has happily allowed Libya to put people in concentration camps whence they can be slaved, I do not exaggerate.
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
Me. Sex, hunting, naturally fermented fruit juice, mushrooms and cave paintings, and all done by 40. Sounds perfect.
So long as it was hunter gathering in a place and time it was pretty easy it sounds great - those that are left now it is mostly in tougher areas I'd imagine.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
Unfortunately most of the dissing of Rwanda has been on the basis of ignorance - genocides and so on.
Is\n't that a graph of cumulative figures during each year? Pretty misleading.
What's misleading ? (puzzled)
It's a cumulative month-by-month graph, as it shows in the page linked in the text mentioning both monthly an annual increased figures, which works up to the total of 30k-40k I mentioned as the total for last year and implied for this year - increasing each year as you read the line labelled for the year. Perfectly clear, surely?
This is how it is explained:
More than 3,000 people arrived in small boats in March, compared with 831 in March 2021. More than 4,500 have made the crossing so far this year.
Last year, 28,526 people are known to have crossed in small boats - up from 8,404 in 2020.
This year's figure is set to be much higher, according to Border Force union officials.
TBF I read the piece in detail, as I put a question mark over "there is no problem".
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
Me. Sex, hunting, naturally fermented fruit juice, mushrooms and cave paintings, and all done by 40. Sounds perfect.
So long as it was hunter gathering in a place and time it was pretty easy it sounds great - those that are left now it is mostly in tougher areas I'd imagine.
Yes but that's because they have been marginalized by colonialist agricultural bastards
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
Unfortunately most of the dissing of Rwanda has been on the basis of ignorance - genocides and so on.
Is\n't that a graph of cumulative figures during each year? Pretty misleading.
What's misleading ? (puzzled)
It's a cumulative month-by-month graph, as it says in the page linked, which works up to the total of 30k-40k I mentioned as the total for last year and implied for this year - increasing each year as you read the line labelled for the year. Perfectly clear, surely?
This is how it is explained:
More than 3,000 people arrived in small boats in March, compared with 831 in March 2021. More than 4,500 have made the crossing so far this year.
Last year, 28,526 people are known to have crossed in small boats - up from 8,404 in 2020.
This year's figure is set to be much higher, according to Border Force union officials.
TBF I read the piece in detail, as I put a question mark over "there is no problem".
Okay, if the attached text explains that, then fine. But it is still an odd graph p[articularly for something journalistic.
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
Me. Sex, hunting, naturally fermented fruit juice, mushrooms and cave paintings, and all done by 40. Sounds perfect.
So long as it was hunter gathering in a place and time it was pretty easy it sounds great - those that are left now it is mostly in tougher areas I'd imagine.
Yes but that's because they have been marginalized by colonialist agricultural bastards
Indeed, but that's why I'd only want to do it back when they had freer run of the place.
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
Is the mainstream view of Gobekli Tepi still that it was built by hunter-gatherers, who had an abundance of leisure time relative to to early agriculturalists that followed them?
My recent visit there this month - I hope to do a Knappers' Gazette piece shortly - has transformed this
They are now discovering MULTIPLE Gobekli Tepes, 20, 40, 60, wherever they look, they find them. I asked rthe chief archaeologist from Istanbul Uni how many pillars he expected to find at Karahan Tepe, he said, plainly, "thousands". They ARE finding many homes now, with evidence of fires and cooking and skull cults, but still no agriculture
It is an entire buried civilisation, 13,000 years old, with a coherent artistic culture, and a sophisticated shrine-temple-cathedral ritual sustem across 10,000 square km of Anatolia. Or more? Who the fuck knows?
My own intimation, looking down at the penis-temple of Karahan Tepe, was: How the F could anyone build this complex town without writing? How? How did they exchange info?
I reckon they had writing. Which immediately puts the birth of writing back about 5,000 years
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
Me. Sex, hunting, naturally fermented fruit juice, mushrooms and cave paintings, and all done by 40. Sounds perfect.
So long as it was hunter gathering in a place and time it was pretty easy it sounds great - those that are left now it is mostly in tougher areas I'd imagine.
Boris Johnson has been apparently airbrushed from Conservative party leaflets for next month's local elections in the wake of the "partygate" row.
The Prime Minister is not mentioned in the Welsh or Scottish Conservative manifestos or some campaign literature produced by local party associations.
Mr Johnson has also not been seen knocking on doors with Conservative candidates for the campaign, which was not given an official launch but was referred to in passing at the party's spring conference in Blackpool last month.
The decision to play down the role of Mr Johnson in campaign leaflets will draw comparisons to the way some Labour politicians omitted Jeremy Corbyn from leaflets when he was the party's leader.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
The Castleton ridge walk is perhaps my favourite walk in the entire UK. Having said that, I haven't done it for over ten years.
I love that area. The Limestone Way descending down through the gully into Castleton is sublime for a number of reasons,
Cave Dale? Fun to descend on a bicycle if you are in to that kind of thing...
My favourite bits of the Peak are the Wye valley (not the Monsal Trail, but various bits of hillside and the part through the gorge in Chee Dale) and the upper Derwent, beyond the reservoirs, for the anti-social factor. Watching a vulture, yes, a vulture scanning the hillsides there during a rare day out in the pandemic was quite something.
Tideswell is definitely high up the list you want a pub or two and a picturesque village, although I quite like the setting of Stoney Middleton and the walks to Eyam (no doubt much more popular and relevant these days).
Bakewell and Buxton are mostly AVOID, particularly during holidays.
What's Farage's position on all this? I have lost track. Is he basically in agreement with Stop The War that the whole thing is the West's fault and NATO should not have expanded eastwards?
Yes. He would have been a Hitler sympathizer in the 1930s. What a disgrace to everything Britain stands for.
Quite a few of them in the 1930s. Not many who’d still admit to it by 1940. We’re past 1940 with Putin now…
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
Me. Sex, hunting, naturally fermented fruit juice, mushrooms and cave paintings, and all done by 40. Sounds perfect.
So long as it was hunter gathering in a place and time it was pretty easy it sounds great - those that are left now it is mostly in tougher areas I'd imagine.
Yes but that's because they have been marginalized by colonialist agricultural bastards
Don’t the hunter-gatherers tend to become wandering drunks when that happens?
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
Unfortunately most of the dissing of Rwanda has been on the basis of ignorance - genocides and so on.
Is\n't that a graph of cumulative figures during each year? Pretty misleading.
What's misleading ? (puzzled)
It's a cumulative month-by-month graph, as it shows in the page linked in the text mentioning both monthly an annual increased figures, which works up to the total of 30k-40k I mentioned as the total for last year and implied for this year - increasing each year as you read the line labelled for the year. Perfectly clear, surely?
This is how it is explained:
More than 3,000 people arrived in small boats in March, compared with 831 in March 2021. More than 4,500 have made the crossing so far this year.
Last year, 28,526 people are known to have crossed in small boats - up from 8,404 in 2020.
This year's figure is set to be much higher, according to Border Force union officials.
TBF I read the piece in detail, as I put a question mark over "there is no problem".
You're talking to a fucking moron who would rather deny the problem exists than actually address how we might deal with it, so as to preserve their self-perceived virtue
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
We might be surprised, it is a bit of an implicit opinion when people lament the negatives of agricultural/urban civilization. I remember reading Humankind by Rutger Bremen, and he seemed to spend a lot of time rebutting, with some success, negative ('realistic') views of humanity by challenging some of the studies or opinions that suggest a pessimistic view as being without evidence, but then several times lapses into rose coloured views of hunter gatherer lifestyles without any evidence of his own.
Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be extremely violent, in large part due to the philosophy that the hardest, toughest, bastard is to be the leader, without regard to any kind of hereditary principle.
Settled societies are less violent, on the whole, but paradoxically, are easier to organise for war. The growth of agriculture led to the growth of the small (relative to overall size of population) professional army, which over the course of several thousand years, has been a very effective tool to deliver violence.
59% of Conservative voters and 57% of Leave voters support the Rwanda immigration plan however. So in terms of Boris shoring up his core vote it works
Yes and no.
10% of Conservative voters strongly oppose it. That's about 3% of voters overall. Now, if they oppose it enough to change their vote (and my impression is that this has cut through among those who've heard it in a really visceral way... those who dislike it really think it's evil), that's more votes than the Conservatives can afford to lose. After all, 43% is a triumphant landslide and 33% is a one-way ticket to Oppositionsville.
Politically, it might work, in the short term at least. But it's not Brexit redux. The thing about Brexit was that Leave won because they had heart arguments, and very very few people had passionate feels about Remain. (Ironically, by going bull-in-a-china-shop about it, the government may have created people who do.) For the assylum changes, the heart arguments are mostly on the anti-government side.
Besides, until yesterday, Priti Patel was about the least popular member of the government. Half the population hated what she said, and the other half despised her inablilty to convert her horrible words into action. If this mad plan dies on its bum, and there are many ways it can do that, that same toxic combination will spread to the rest of the government.
HYUFD's point is that the policy isn't designed to win a majority in the country. It's designed to get most Conservative Party members and voters telling Conservative MPs that they should support Boris Johnson. Quite possibly that will work - after all, Conservatives voters prefer Le Pen to Macron (insofar as they have a view).
If successful, that gets BJ another 2 years in Downing Street. The General Election? That's for another day.
Alternatively, and I urge you to consider this possibility, this is actually a serious attempt to solve the Channel migrants problem. The point is not to actually send 50,000 people to Rwanda, it is to stop people crossing - and drowning - at Calais and elsewhere, so the pressure ends. The point is not to use the nukes, it is to deter others using them. And Australia shows that this method worse
And this problem needs solving. Right now 2022 looks set to be a record year for crossings, bigger than 2021, which was bigger than 2020 (despite Covid). And we are now talking serious numbers: tens of thousands, which might become hundreds of thousands, in time
This is unsustainable. So what do we do?
The EU in the south has happily allowed Libya to put people in concentration camps whence they can be slaved, I do not exaggerate.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
Unfortunately most of the dissing of Rwanda has been on the basis of ignorance - genocides and so on.
Is\n't that a graph of cumulative figures during each year? Pretty misleading.
What's misleading ? (puzzled)
It's a cumulative month-by-month graph, as it shows in the page linked in the text mentioning both monthly an annual increased figures, which works up to the total of 30k-40k I mentioned as the total for last year and implied for this year - increasing each year as you read the line labelled for the year. Perfectly clear, surely?
This is how it is explained:
More than 3,000 people arrived in small boats in March, compared with 831 in March 2021. More than 4,500 have made the crossing so far this year.
Last year, 28,526 people are known to have crossed in small boats - up from 8,404 in 2020.
This year's figure is set to be much higher, according to Border Force union officials.
TBF I read the piece in detail, as I put a question mark over "there is no problem".
You're talking to a fucking moron who would rather deny the problem exists than actually address how we might deal with it, so as to preserve their self-perceived virtue
Don't forget that none of the migrants want to go to Scotland so easy for Caledonians to exercise their virtue.
What's Farage's position on all this? I have lost track. Is he basically in agreement with Stop The War that the whole thing is the West's fault and NATO should not have expanded eastwards?
Yes. He would have been a Hitler sympathizer in the 1930s. What a disgrace to everything Britain stands for.
Hilarious that the Hard Left and the Hard Right are in agreement over Russia.
Why are you surprised - twas often thus.
My grandfather worked in the Glasgow shipyards in WWII. Before Germany invaded Russia, the extreme left line was that there should be go slows and strikes because this was a war not in the interest of Russia (see COMINTERN).
My grandfather, a regular Union man, opposed the wildcat strikes and carried on working. This was the line supported by the regular Labour party etc. It was this kind of stuff, incidentally, that made Attlee & Co. so aggressive in their dealing with the pro-Stalin left.
A couple of the hard core types turned up at his local pub, with a handful of followers. With weapons. They let them in and then closed the doors behind them.
My grandfather had been rather active in WWI and the pub was full of his friends. He dealt with the ring leaders in quite a brutal fashion. After that there were no more attacks.
Boris Johnson has been apparently airbrushed from Conservative party leaflets for next month's local elections in the wake of the "partygate" row.
The Prime Minister is not mentioned in the Welsh or Scottish Conservative manifestos or some campaign literature produced by local party associations.
Mr Johnson has also not been seen knocking on doors with Conservative candidates for the campaign, which was not given an official launch but was referred to in passing at the party's spring conference in Blackpool last month.
The decision to play down the role of Mr Johnson in campaign leaflets will draw comparisons to the way some Labour politicians omitted Jeremy Corbyn from leaflets when he was the party's leader.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
Unfortunately most of the dissing of Rwanda has been on the basis of ignorance - genocides and so on.
Is\n't that a graph of cumulative figures during each year? Pretty misleading.
What's misleading ? (puzzled)
It's a cumulative month-by-month graph, as it shows in the page linked in the text mentioning both monthly an annual increased figures, which works up to the total of 30k-40k I mentioned as the total for last year and implied for this year - increasing each year as you read the line labelled for the year. Perfectly clear, surely?
This is how it is explained:
More than 3,000 people arrived in small boats in March, compared with 831 in March 2021. More than 4,500 have made the crossing so far this year.
Last year, 28,526 people are known to have crossed in small boats - up from 8,404 in 2020.
This year's figure is set to be much higher, according to Border Force union officials.
TBF I read the piece in detail, as I put a question mark over "there is no problem".
You're talking to a fucking moron who would rather deny the problem exists than actually address how we might deal with it, so as to preserve their self-perceived virtue
Don't forget that none of the migrants want to go to Scotland so easy for Caledonians to exercise their virtue.
Yes it is easy to lecture England on the evils of its slightly-stricter immigration policy, when you live in a Scottish town like Glasgow, Dundee, Inverness or Edinburgh, where the climate is so awful your main problem is EMigration to literally anywhere else.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
Unfortunately most of the dissing of Rwanda has been on the basis of ignorance - genocides and so on.
Is\n't that a graph of cumulative figures during each year? Pretty misleading.
What's misleading ? (puzzled)
It's a cumulative month-by-month graph, as it says in the page linked, which works up to the total of 30k-40k I mentioned as the total for last year and implied for this year - increasing each year as you read the line labelled for the year. Perfectly clear, surely?
This is how it is explained:
More than 3,000 people arrived in small boats in March, compared with 831 in March 2021. More than 4,500 have made the crossing so far this year.
Last year, 28,526 people are known to have crossed in small boats - up from 8,404 in 2020.
This year's figure is set to be much higher, according to Border Force union officials.
TBF I read the piece in detail, as I put a question mark over "there is no problem".
Okay, if the attached text explains that, then fine. But it is still an odd graph p[articularly for something journalistic.
Thanks.
I don't know where my thinking is going on this - though I certainly think Rwanda is a strange choice on demographic grounds. The small, third most densely populated country in Africa, is not the obvious place to send people.
Perhaps the logic is that it will be an increased risk of not hitting an economic jackpot, and so deter economic migrants (?)
And the same issue will be arising elsewhere, since the New Yorker has recently carried a further story about how EU/Italy have changed their arrangements following its earlier article exposing the practices - so that will perhaps be lighting up again in the Med.
AIUI the reason Denmark can do what they have put in law is because of an opt-out.
I don't buy the "open the borders completely" argument, and I think one answer will be adjusting real pull-factors, whatever they are. And I think that PP has something on 'politically motivated lawyers' gumming up the system - even most Lib Dems don't believe that they don't exist afaics.
I am not sure where I stand on the "migrants" vs "asylum seekers" category distinction.
And Mons. Macron may continue doing his performing seal thing.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
Unfortunately most of the dissing of Rwanda has been on the basis of ignorance - genocides and so on.
Is\n't that a graph of cumulative figures during each year? Pretty misleading.
What's misleading ? (puzzled)
It's a cumulative month-by-month graph, as it says in the page linked, which works up to the total of 30k-40k I mentioned as the total for last year and implied for this year - increasing each year as you read the line labelled for the year. Perfectly clear, surely?
This is how it is explained:
More than 3,000 people arrived in small boats in March, compared with 831 in March 2021. More than 4,500 have made the crossing so far this year.
Last year, 28,526 people are known to have crossed in small boats - up from 8,404 in 2020.
This year's figure is set to be much higher, according to Border Force union officials.
TBF I read the piece in detail, as I put a question mark over "there is no problem".
Okay, if the attached text explains that, then fine. But it is still an odd graph p[articularly for something journalistic.
Thanks.
I don't know where my thinking is going on this - though I certainly think Rwanda is a strange choice on demographic grounds. The small, third most densely populated country in Africa, is not the obvious place to send people.
Perhaps the logic is that it will be an increased risk of not hitting an economic jackpot, and so deter economic migrants (?)
Seems more likely it is just a case of any port in a storm - how many places returned the phone call enquiring if they wanted to be part of this?
What's Farage's position on all this? I have lost track. Is he basically in agreement with Stop The War that the whole thing is the West's fault and NATO should not have expanded eastwards?
Yes. He would have been a Hitler sympathizer in the 1930s. What a disgrace to everything Britain stands for.
Hilarious that the Hard Left and the Hard Right are in agreement over Russia.
Why are you surprised - twas often thus.
My grandfather worked in the Glasgow shipyards in WWII. Before Germany invaded Russia, the extreme left line was that there should be go slows and strikes because this was a war not in the interest of Russia (see COMINTERN).
My grandfather, a regular Union man, opposed the wildcat strikes and carried on working. This was the line supported by the regular Labour party etc. It was this kind of stuff, incidentally, that made Attlee & Co. so aggressive in their dealing with the pro-Stalin left.
A couple of the hard core types turned up at his local pub, with a handful of followers. With weapons. They let them in and then closed the doors behind them.
My grandfather had been rather active in WWI and the pub was full of his friends. He dealt with the ring leaders in quite a brutal fashion. After that there were no more attacks.
Very sad that it had to come to that, but good for your Grandfather.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
The Castleton ridge walk is perhaps my favourite walk in the entire UK. Having said that, I haven't done it for over ten years.
I love that area. The Limestone Way descending down through the gully into Castleton is sublime for a number of reasons,
Cave Dale? Fun to descend on a bicycle if you are in to that kind of thing...
My favourite bits of the Peak are the Wye valley (not the Monsal Trail, but various bits of hillside and the part through the gorge in Chee Dale) and the upper Derwent, beyond the reservoirs, for the anti-social factor. Watching a vulture, yes, a vulture scanning the hillsides there during a rare day out in the pandemic was quite something.
Tideswell is definitely high up the list you want a pub or two and a picturesque village, although I quite like the setting of Stoney Middleton and the walks to Eyam (no doubt much more popular and relevant these days).
Bakewell and Buxton are mostly AVOID, particularly during holidays.
One of my favourite places in the world is the area around Wormhill Springs. There's a loop in the river, and a place where stepping stones take you under an undercut in the cliff. It's never busy, and the path is sometimes annoyingly inaccessible due to flood damage.
59% of Conservative voters and 57% of Leave voters support the Rwanda immigration plan however. So in terms of Boris shoring up his core vote it works
Yes and no.
10% of Conservative voters strongly oppose it. That's about 3% of voters overall. Now, if they oppose it enough to change their vote (and my impression is that this has cut through among those who've heard it in a really visceral way... those who dislike it really think it's evil), that's more votes than the Conservatives can afford to lose. After all, 43% is a triumphant landslide and 33% is a one-way ticket to Oppositionsville.
Politically, it might work, in the short term at least. But it's not Brexit redux. The thing about Brexit was that Leave won because they had heart arguments, and very very few people had passionate feels about Remain. (Ironically, by going bull-in-a-china-shop about it, the government may have created people who do.) For the assylum changes, the heart arguments are mostly on the anti-government side.
Besides, until yesterday, Priti Patel was about the least popular member of the government. Half the population hated what she said, and the other half despised her inablilty to convert her horrible words into action. If this mad plan dies on its bum, and there are many ways it can do that, that same toxic combination will spread to the rest of the government.
HYUFD's point is that the policy isn't designed to win a majority in the country. It's designed to get most Conservative Party members and voters telling Conservative MPs that they should support Boris Johnson. Quite possibly that will work - after all, Conservatives voters prefer Le Pen to Macron (insofar as they have a view).
If successful, that gets BJ another 2 years in Downing Street. The General Election? That's for another day.
I don't support Le Pen one little bit Nick
I wouldn't have expected it, BigG. But there was a poll linked from PB a couple of days ago on who British voters would like to see win in France. Labour voters were so,mething like 53-8 for Macron. Conservatives were IIRC 37-22 for Le Pen. Obviously lots of don't knows, but still, it does suggest that the party is different from what it was, doesn't it?
I think what it means is that many Con voters don't like Macron very much. Not too surprising really. He comes across as hostile to Brexit and contemptuous of UK. I don't think it means they've gone proto-Fascist - don't suppose they have given much thought to Le Pen or the implications of her winning.
France 24 debate programme earlier this evening was talking about MM's support being weak amongst far-lefters, whichever one that was.
Agnes Poirier sounded quite pro-UK, which was interesting.
There was also debate about whether "genocide" was an appropriate word for the Russians in Ukraine. Strong proponents both sides.
59% of Conservative voters and 57% of Leave voters support the Rwanda immigration plan however. So in terms of Boris shoring up his core vote it works
Yes and no.
10% of Conservative voters strongly oppose it. That's about 3% of voters overall. Now, if they oppose it enough to change their vote (and my impression is that this has cut through among those who've heard it in a really visceral way... those who dislike it really think it's evil), that's more votes than the Conservatives can afford to lose. After all, 43% is a triumphant landslide and 33% is a one-way ticket to Oppositionsville.
Politically, it might work, in the short term at least. But it's not Brexit redux. The thing about Brexit was that Leave won because they had heart arguments, and very very few people had passionate feels about Remain. (Ironically, by going bull-in-a-china-shop about it, the government may have created people who do.) For the assylum changes, the heart arguments are mostly on the anti-government side.
Besides, until yesterday, Priti Patel was about the least popular member of the government. Half the population hated what she said, and the other half despised her inablilty to convert her horrible words into action. If this mad plan dies on its bum, and there are many ways it can do that, that same toxic combination will spread to the rest of the government.
HYUFD's point is that the policy isn't designed to win a majority in the country. It's designed to get most Conservative Party members and voters telling Conservative MPs that they should support Boris Johnson. Quite possibly that will work - after all, Conservatives voters prefer Le Pen to Macron (insofar as they have a view).
If successful, that gets BJ another 2 years in Downing Street. The General Election? That's for another day.
Alternatively, and I urge you to consider this possibility, this is actually a serious attempt to solve the Channel migrants problem. The point is not to actually send 50,000 people to Rwanda, it is to stop people crossing - and drowning - at Calais and elsewhere, so the pressure ends. The point is not to use the nukes, it is to deter others using them. And Australia shows that this method worse
And this problem needs solving. Right now 2022 looks set to be a record year for crossings, bigger than 2021, which was bigger than 2020 (despite Covid). And we are now talking serious numbers: tens of thousands, which might become hundreds of thousands, in time
This is unsustainable. So what do we do?
The EU in the south has happily allowed Libya to put people in concentration camps whence they can be slaved, I do not exaggerate.
Putin's Russia is disturbing and utterly bonkers at same time...
The student on the right in that photo looks a bit old for school? and in uniform, perhaps they have resisted there solders are so stupid they are sending them back to school?
What's the relevance of the PM in a local election campaign?
On the assumption you've never actually fought an election, I'll re-iterate what I said last evening.
IF your party leader is popular, you put him or her all over her literature because you want your candidate to be associated with a popular figure. If the voters like your leader, maybe they'll come out and vote for you by association.
If, however, your party leader is unpopular and your party is struggling, you have two levels of disassociation. One is to keep the party identity but not reference your leader or the national picture at all. If you control the local council you reference your successes - if you are in Opposition, you reference the administration's failures but you disconnect your local campaign from the national campaign.
If your party is really unpopular, don't mention it at all. Okay, it's on your description on the ballot paper but instead reference on what your candidate has done or will do and completely disconnect the candidate from the party - emphasise it's a local election and he/she is the local candidate for your area.
That's basic electioneering - yes, on the doorstep you might get the odd voter who wants to whinge about your party in Government - the response is to emphasise it's a local election, the council doesn't set energy prices or can do much about inflation.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
Unfortunately most of the dissing of Rwanda has been on the basis of ignorance - genocides and so on.
Is\n't that a graph of cumulative figures during each year? Pretty misleading.
What's misleading ? (puzzled)
It's a cumulative month-by-month graph, as it says in the page linked, which works up to the total of 30k-40k I mentioned as the total for last year and implied for this year - increasing each year as you read the line labelled for the year. Perfectly clear, surely?
This is how it is explained:
More than 3,000 people arrived in small boats in March, compared with 831 in March 2021. More than 4,500 have made the crossing so far this year.
Last year, 28,526 people are known to have crossed in small boats - up from 8,404 in 2020.
This year's figure is set to be much higher, according to Border Force union officials.
TBF I read the piece in detail, as I put a question mark over "there is no problem".
Okay, if the attached text explains that, then fine. But it is still an odd graph p[articularly for something journalistic.
Thanks.
I don't know where my thinking is going on this - though I certainly think Rwanda is a strange choice on demographic grounds. The small, third most densely populated country in Africa, is not the obvious place to send people.
Perhaps the logic is that it will be an increased risk of not hitting an economic jackpot, and so deter economic migrants (?)
Seems more likely it is just a case of any port in a storm - how many places returned the phone call enquiring if they wanted to be part of this?
Landlocked is key, prevents the fuckers from having another go at Blighty via Suez
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
Is the mainstream view of Gobekli Tepi still that it was built by hunter-gatherers, who had an abundance of leisure time relative to to early agriculturalists that followed them?
My recent visit there this month - I hope to do a Knappers' Gazette piece shortly - has transformed this
They are now discovering MULTIPLE Gobekli Tepes, 20, 40, 60, wherever they look, they find them. I asked rthe chief archaeologist from Istanbul Uni how many pillars he expected to find at Karahan Tepe, he said, plainly, "thousands". They ARE finding many homes now, with evidence of fires and cooking and skull cults, but still no agriculture
It is an entire buried civilisation, 13,000 years old, with a coherent artistic culture, and a sophisticated shrine-temple-cathedral ritual sustem across 10,000 square km of Anatolia. Or more? Who the fuck knows?
My own intimation, looking down at the penis-temple of Karahan Tepe, was: How the F could anyone build this complex town without writing? How? How did they exchange info?
I reckon they had writing. Which immediately puts the birth of writing back about 5,000 years
Quite something
One of the ongoing fascinating mysteries of Gobekli Tepe and its neighbouring sites is that, in spite of there being hundreds of thousands of fragments of animals covering and filling the stones, none of it is of domesticated species. It is all wild animals caught by hunting.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
The alternative suggestion is not made because it doesnt mesh with fluffly democracy even though fluffy democracy leads to more death and misery
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
Unfortunately most of the dissing of Rwanda has been on the basis of ignorance - genocides and so on.
Is\n't that a graph of cumulative figures during each year? Pretty misleading.
What's misleading ? (puzzled)
It's a cumulative month-by-month graph, as it shows in the page linked in the text mentioning both monthly an annual increased figures, which works up to the total of 30k-40k I mentioned as the total for last year and implied for this year - increasing each year as you read the line labelled for the year. Perfectly clear, surely?
This is how it is explained:
More than 3,000 people arrived in small boats in March, compared with 831 in March 2021. More than 4,500 have made the crossing so far this year.
Last year, 28,526 people are known to have crossed in small boats - up from 8,404 in 2020.
This year's figure is set to be much higher, according to Border Force union officials.
TBF I read the piece in detail, as I put a question mark over "there is no problem".
You're talking to a fucking moron who would rather deny the problem exists than actually address how we might deal with it, so as to preserve their self-perceived virtue
Don't forget that none of the migrants want to go to Scotland so easy for Caledonians to exercise their virtue.
Yes it is easy to lecture England on the evils of its slightly-stricter immigration policy, when you live in a Scottish town like Glasgow, Dundee, Inverness or Edinburgh, where the climate is so awful your main problem is EMigration to literally anywhere else.
29% of our babies are born to mothers born outside the UK. This figure is not compatible with the view that the UK is in general unwelcoming to migrants. (No idea what the Scottish figure is. Does anyone know?)
And our population has been rocketing by western standards, and set to continue up, very unlike most western countries. As the birth rate is below replacement levels it suggests the same thing.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
The alternative suggestion is not made because it doesnt mesh with fluffly democracy even though fluffy democracy leads to more death and misery
LDs are certainly fluffy, even 22 years later, though he seems to have stopped in 2019. A Labour of Sisyphus.
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
We might be surprised, it is a bit of an implicit opinion when people lament the negatives of agricultural/urban civilization. I remember reading Humankind by Rutger Bremen, and he seemed to spend a lot of time rebutting, with some success, negative ('realistic') views of humanity by challenging some of the studies or opinions that suggest a pessimistic view as being without evidence, but then several times lapses into rose coloured views of hunter gatherer lifestyles without any evidence of his own.
Try "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
The alternative suggestion is not made because it doesnt mesh with fluffly democracy even though fluffy democracy leads to more death and misery
LDs are certainly fluffy, even 22 years later, though he seems to have stopped in 2019. A Labour of Sisyphus.
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
Is the mainstream view of Gobekli Tepi still that it was built by hunter-gatherers, who had an abundance of leisure time relative to to early agriculturalists that followed them?
My recent visit there this month - I hope to do a Knappers' Gazette piece shortly - has transformed this
They are now discovering MULTIPLE Gobekli Tepes, 20, 40, 60, wherever they look, they find them. I asked rthe chief archaeologist from Istanbul Uni how many pillars he expected to find at Karahan Tepe, he said, plainly, "thousands". They ARE finding many homes now, with evidence of fires and cooking and skull cults, but still no agriculture
It is an entire buried civilisation, 13,000 years old, with a coherent artistic culture, and a sophisticated shrine-temple-cathedral ritual sustem across 10,000 square km of Anatolia. Or more? Who the fuck knows?
My own intimation, looking down at the penis-temple of Karahan Tepe, was: How the F could anyone build this complex town without writing? How? How did they exchange info?
I reckon they had writing. Which immediately puts the birth of writing back about 5,000 years
Quite something
One of the ongoing fascinating mysteries of Gobekli Tepe and its neighbouring sites is that, in spite of there being hundreds of thousands of fragments of animals covering and filling the stones, none of it is of domesticated species. It is all wild animals caught by hunting.
I found an arrowhead at Karahan Tepe last week. Primitive yet exquisite. 13,000 years old
It is a cruder version of the arrowhead I found at Gobekli Tepe 15 years ago
There are surely millions of these scattered around these sites, so I don't feel like Lord Elgin in Athens.
I am hesitant to make any conclusions about this truly truly remarkable region. I remember when I took tea with then chief-archaeologist Klaus Schmidt at the Gobekli site, and he was convinced Gobekli was a one-off, a "temple in Eden" as he put it
And yet it turns out he was wrong. There are many Gobeklis. And there ARE homes. And, even weirder, every single one seems to have been purposefully buried around 8,000BC - that is the only reason the local archaeologists have been able to dig up the penis temple of Karahan Tepe so quickly, they are simply extracting backfill. Like stripping away already-peeling wallpaper. It is stupidly easy
All of it is mind boggling. It is without question the greatest archaeological discovery, and mystery, in human history
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
It's scary how many Tory MPs seem to think the fascist state of Rwanda is democratic.
There are very few boats coming across the Channel, there is no 'problem' at all. This is purely being whipped up by the right wing media.
That's not the press coverage though, nor is it the trend: eg BBC:
Unfortunately most of the dissing of Rwanda has been on the basis of ignorance - genocides and so on.
Is\n't that a graph of cumulative figures during each year? Pretty misleading.
What's misleading ? (puzzled)
It's a cumulative month-by-month graph, as it shows in the page linked in the text mentioning both monthly an annual increased figures, which works up to the total of 30k-40k I mentioned as the total for last year and implied for this year - increasing each year as you read the line labelled for the year. Perfectly clear, surely?
This is how it is explained:
More than 3,000 people arrived in small boats in March, compared with 831 in March 2021. More than 4,500 have made the crossing so far this year.
Last year, 28,526 people are known to have crossed in small boats - up from 8,404 in 2020.
This year's figure is set to be much higher, according to Border Force union officials.
TBF I read the piece in detail, as I put a question mark over "there is no problem".
You're talking to a fucking moron who would rather deny the problem exists than actually address how we might deal with it, so as to preserve their self-perceived virtue
Don't forget that none of the migrants want to go to Scotland so easy for Caledonians to exercise their virtue.
Yes it is easy to lecture England on the evils of its slightly-stricter immigration policy, when you live in a Scottish town like Glasgow, Dundee, Inverness or Edinburgh, where the climate is so awful your main problem is EMigration to literally anywhere else.
To be fair, depopulation is a serious issue in Scotland, and the population projections are pretty dismal. A huge number of dependents with relatively few wage-earners and very few higher tax payers. Of course, independence will sort it all out, as thousands of wealthy Europeans flock to the newly liberated northlands to dance a reel with their new tartan-clad Euro-brethren.
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
We might be surprised, it is a bit of an implicit opinion when people lament the negatives of agricultural/urban civilization. I remember reading Humankind by Rutger Bremen, and he seemed to spend a lot of time rebutting, with some success, negative ('realistic') views of humanity by challenging some of the studies or opinions that suggest a pessimistic view as being without evidence, but then several times lapses into rose coloured views of hunter gatherer lifestyles without any evidence of his own.
Try "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Wife and I have just come back from our first night away without kids since my 7-year old was born. A night away in the Peak District, for no particular reason. Lovely. Actually, arguably it was for our tenth wedding anniversary, three years late, having been postponed by first the need to disimpact my youngest daughter's colon and then by covid. Anyway, a super little break. The hotel was just setting up for a wedding as we were preparing to leave, and we briefly met the groom. Delightful that even among the tumult of the early 2020s here are young people with reason to look to the future with excitement. A morning in Bakewell mooching amiably about before returning home, joining apparently the entire population of the East Midlands in a delirious quest to spend money on unnecessary things.
Arrived back at the grandparents where the kids were staying; 7-year-old enthusiastically greets her mother thus: "Are you pregnant?". Sadly the list of reasons that the answer to that question is "no" is long and lamentable but can largely be summed up by being 47 and knackered.
May I ask where you stayed?
I find Bakewell a bit 'meh'. If you go to the Peak District, you want countryside, not a town. I feel the same way about Buxton and Matlock (although both of those are just outside). Then again, I spent far too long in all those places in my youth, so am probably a little jaded.
We were staying in the Edale Valley. I share your view on Bakewell, and the other towns which surround the Peak District, a bit. But my knee is awaiting an op and my wife's back was sore and frankly for the sheer joy of being at large unencumbered by children we could have been anywhere and it would have been wonderful.
Re: Peak Dist. stayed on two occasions at youth hostel at Hartington, with private room, excellent cafeteria (which doubled as pub) and miles of pleasant hiking, including fishing spots where Izaak Walton used to try his luck.
I've been nearly everywhere in the Peaks, although usually in the day.
There's been a lot of Rwanda-dissing happening today on debates I have seen.
I still haven't seen any comments that have not been predictable, or serious alternative suggestions - except essentially "open the borders" or "throw money at the Home Office".
The alternative suggestion is not made because it doesnt mesh with fluffly democracy even though fluffy democracy leads to more death and misery
LDs are certainly fluffy, even 22 years later, though he seems to have stopped in 2019. A Labour of Sisyphus.
(Blogging Soft Toy Elephant, purchased at the Millenium Dome,)
Well the lib dems have always been fluffy and pathetic its why they dont get elected much
A compassionate government however wouldn't bother with rwanda initiatives it would take the view find a refugee boat and sink it and let them drown. Yes you would be taking a few hundred lives but word would spread and boats would stop and a lot less life would be lost over the following ten years than the lives we took
Went for a stroll a bit further up to the mountain before dinner, hoping to see the Abbey of St Martin of Canigou but it was a bit too far (and high up!) for me to reach in the time I had. I’m sorely tempted to stay another night and check it out tomorrow..
I did see what I can only assume is a Ukrainian tractor - they really are going to some lengths and heights to catch those Russian tanks!
Blanche, I went up Mount Canigou a few decades ago. Then it was possible to drive up near the top and then you either walked or went up to the summit in an open top Land Rover. We walked and I experienced schedenfreude seeing the look of terror on the faces of those who chose the Land Rover as it went round hairpin bends at break-neck speed, inches from the edge.
I’ve had a few cars speeding past today; not inches from the edge, but inches from me - which has been literally hair raising!
Do you remember which side you climbed it from?
Sorry, no. We drove along the French coast on the Med and then went inland - that is all I can remember.
What's Farage's position on all this? I have lost track. Is he basically in agreement with Stop The War that the whole thing is the West's fault and NATO should not have expanded eastwards?
Yes. He would have been a Hitler sympathizer in the 1930s. What a disgrace to everything Britain stands for.
Hilarious that the Hard Left and the Hard Right are in agreement over Russia.
Why are you surprised - twas often thus.
My grandfather worked in the Glasgow shipyards in WWII. Before Germany invaded Russia, the extreme left line was that there should be go slows and strikes because this was a war not in the interest of Russia (see COMINTERN).
My grandfather, a regular Union man, opposed the wildcat strikes and carried on working. This was the line supported by the regular Labour party etc. It was this kind of stuff, incidentally, that made Attlee & Co. so aggressive in their dealing with the pro-Stalin left.
A couple of the hard core types turned up at his local pub, with a handful of followers. With weapons. They let them in and then closed the doors behind them.
My grandfather had been rather active in WWI and the pub was full of his friends. He dealt with the ring leaders in quite a brutal fashion. After that there were no more attacks.
Very sad that it had to come to that, but good for your Grandfather.
His comment in his letters was something on the lines of he felt better about breaking the arms of men who deserved it from their actions than he felt about all the German lives he'd taken in the Great War. Sort of an expiation of his sins, it seems.
In WWI he'd led a lot of trench raids - nip over the other side and find out which unit was opposing yours. The way to find out was to grab a sentry, and take his shoulder tabs and paybook. The easy way to take those was to take the sentries life first. Quietly.
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
We might be surprised, it is a bit of an implicit opinion when people lament the negatives of agricultural/urban civilization. I remember reading Humankind by Rutger Bremen, and he seemed to spend a lot of time rebutting, with some success, negative ('realistic') views of humanity by challenging some of the studies or opinions that suggest a pessimistic view as being without evidence, but then several times lapses into rose coloured views of hunter gatherer lifestyles without any evidence of his own.
Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be extremely violent, in large part due to the philosophy that the hardest, toughest, bastard is to be the leader, without regard to any kind of hereditary principle.
Settled societies are less violent, on the whole, but paradoxically, are easier to organise for war. The growth of agriculture led to the growth of the small (relative to overall size of population) professional army, which over the course of several thousand years, has been a very effective tool to deliver violence.
The wheat growing, cattle and sheep farming ancient greeks were violent AF, and not just in war (Oedipus killed some old twat in a fit of road rage as one does).
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
We might be surprised, it is a bit of an implicit opinion when people lament the negatives of agricultural/urban civilization. I remember reading Humankind by Rutger Bremen, and he seemed to spend a lot of time rebutting, with some success, negative ('realistic') views of humanity by challenging some of the studies or opinions that suggest a pessimistic view as being without evidence, but then several times lapses into rose coloured views of hunter gatherer lifestyles without any evidence of his own.
Try "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
By the way, PB, and this is genuinely privileged info - if you want the most amazing historico-archaeological holiday OF A LIFETIME then just fly to Sanliurfa (in far eastern Turkey), via Istanbul, and hire a car, and do it for yourself.
Yes it is an awkward connection but you will have an experience you will recall for the rest of your days. It is definitely better than another jaunt to Ibiza, or even Venice. You will feel like the person turning up at Tutankhamun's tomb about 2 days after it was discovered
Why? Because the Turks haven't even opened half these sites yet, and yet at the same time they don't stop people coming (a car full of rich Istanbul kids turned up at Karahan Tepe when we were there, no one even thought about stopping them)
Karahan Tepe and the other Tas Tepeler (stone hills) - https://arkeonews.net/turkeys-tas-tepeler-marks-the-beginning-of-civilization/ - will probably change everything we believe about human prehistory. Yet you can just drive up, chat with the (bored) guards, and then go see the penis temple. No one will stop you. It feels like you are the first person seeing the cave paintings of Lascaux
Go. Do it. Do it this year, This summer. Amaze yourself, and create a memory you can enshrine, and which you will tell to your stupefied grand-kids
And after that you can nip off to a Turkish resort on the Med and have a lovely time on the beach. AND it's really cheap
What's Farage's position on all this? I have lost track. Is he basically in agreement with Stop The War that the whole thing is the West's fault and NATO should not have expanded eastwards?
Yes. He would have been a Hitler sympathizer in the 1930s. What a disgrace to everything Britain stands for.
Hilarious that the Hard Left and the Hard Right are in agreement over Russia.
Why are you surprised - twas often thus.
My grandfather worked in the Glasgow shipyards in WWII. Before Germany invaded Russia, the extreme left line was that there should be go slows and strikes because this was a war not in the interest of Russia (see COMINTERN).
My grandfather, a regular Union man, opposed the wildcat strikes and carried on working. This was the line supported by the regular Labour party etc. It was this kind of stuff, incidentally, that made Attlee & Co. so aggressive in their dealing with the pro-Stalin left.
A couple of the hard core types turned up at his local pub, with a handful of followers. With weapons. They let them in and then closed the doors behind them.
My grandfather had been rather active in WWI and the pub was full of his friends. He dealt with the ring leaders in quite a brutal fashion. After that there were no more attacks.
Very sad that it had to come to that, but good for your Grandfather.
His comment in his letters was something on the lines of he felt better about breaking the arms of men who deserved it from their actions than he felt about all the German lives he'd taken in the Great War. Sort of an expiation of his sins, it seems.
In WWI he'd led a lot of trench raids - nip over the other side and find out which unit was opposing yours. The way to find out was to grab a sentry, and take his shoulder tabs and paybook. The easy way to take those was to take the sentries life first. Quietly.
Bloody love the story of the Gurkhas in WW2 who found 3 sleeping Italian sentries and decapitated the outermost 2 and swapped the heads round, and left the one in the middle sleeping. Top trolling.
What's Farage's position on all this? I have lost track. Is he basically in agreement with Stop The War that the whole thing is the West's fault and NATO should not have expanded eastwards?
Yes. He would have been a Hitler sympathizer in the 1930s. What a disgrace to everything Britain stands for.
Hilarious that the Hard Left and the Hard Right are in agreement over Russia.
Why are you surprised - twas often thus.
My grandfather worked in the Glasgow shipyards in WWII. Before Germany invaded Russia, the extreme left line was that there should be go slows and strikes because this was a war not in the interest of Russia (see COMINTERN).
My grandfather, a regular Union man, opposed the wildcat strikes and carried on working. This was the line supported by the regular Labour party etc. It was this kind of stuff, incidentally, that made Attlee & Co. so aggressive in their dealing with the pro-Stalin left.
A couple of the hard core types turned up at his local pub, with a handful of followers. With weapons. They let them in and then closed the doors behind them.
My grandfather had been rather active in WWI and the pub was full of his friends. He dealt with the ring leaders in quite a brutal fashion. After that there were no more attacks.
Very sad that it had to come to that, but good for your Grandfather.
His comment in his letters was something on the lines of he felt better about breaking the arms of men who deserved it from their actions than he felt about all the German lives he'd taken in the Great War. Sort of an expiation of his sins, it seems.
In WWI he'd led a lot of trench raids - nip over the other side and find out which unit was opposing yours. The way to find out was to grab a sentry, and take his shoulder tabs and paybook. The easy way to take those was to take the sentries life first. Quietly.
Bloody love the story of the Gurkhas in WW2 who found 3 sleeping Italian sentries and decapitated the outermost 2 and swapped the heads round, and left the one in the middle sleeping. Top trolling.
By the way, PB, and this is genuinely privileged info - if you want the most amazing historico-archaeological holiday OF A LIFETIME then just fly to Sanliurfa (in far eastern Turkey), via Istanbul, and hire a car, and do it for yourself.
Yes it is an awkward connection but you will have an experience you will recall for the rest of your days. It is definitely better than another jaunt to Ibiza, or even Venice. You will feel like the person turning up at Tutankhamun's tomb about 2 days after it was discovered
Why? Because the Turks haven't even opened half these sites yet, and yet at the same time they don't stop people coming (a car full of rich Istanbul kids turned up at Karahan Tepe when we were there, no one even thought about stopping them)
Karahan Tepe and the other Tas Tepeler (stone hills) - https://arkeonews.net/turkeys-tas-tepeler-marks-the-beginning-of-civilization/ - will probably change everything we believe about human prehistory. Yet you can just drive up, chat with the (bored) guards, and then go see the penis temple. No one will stop you. It feels like you are the first person seeing the cave paintings of Lascaux
Go. Do it. Do it this year, This summer. Amaze yourself, and create a memory you can enshrine, and which you will tell to your stupefied grand-kids
And after that you can nip off to a Turkish resort on the Med and have a lovely time on the beach. AND it's really cheap
Does a holiday get better than that?
I approve this message. Also, Harran (ancient Carrhae) is just down the road, Nemrut Dag a couple of hours drive, Gaziantep has some fab mosaics from Zeugma, etc etc etc
Caesar's conquest of Gaul supposedly resulted in a million killed, and a million enslaved, which must have been quite a high proportion of the population at the time. So I guess the Roman empire must go down as one of the most evil in history.
Worse people to be ruled by, but the process of becoming ruled not a pleasant one.
Being ruled by Rome was bad. Like all empires, Rome was an extractive system leading to poverty for the subjected peoples.
"An unpublished survey of 1,867 skeletons from sixty-one sites in Britain likewise documents an increase in body height after the end of Roman rule. These findings reinforce the general impression conveyed by a more eclectic long-term survey of stature in different parts of Europe that identifies troughs during the Roman period and the High Middle Ages and peaks in the post Roman period and in the wake of the Black Death."
What we can learn from evidence like this is that in times of high inequality, which is what happens when extractive regimes hold hegemonic power, the average citizen suffers. Empires is an extremely bad system of government for normal people, and the continued sense of nostalgia and romance around them is a function of the narrative focus on the elites, who, of course, benefit hugely from such a system of government.
Hmmm
That's interesting (and I suspect slavery is the key here, reducing the median height) but remember that human height diminished greatly when we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Because domesticated animals gave us zoonotic plagues and diseases (!!) and the general life was probably tougher - Adam forced to hew and toil with the sweat of his brow
But who would seriously want to stop human evolution at the hunter-gathering stage?
We might be surprised, it is a bit of an implicit opinion when people lament the negatives of agricultural/urban civilization. I remember reading Humankind by Rutger Bremen, and he seemed to spend a lot of time rebutting, with some success, negative ('realistic') views of humanity by challenging some of the studies or opinions that suggest a pessimistic view as being without evidence, but then several times lapses into rose coloured views of hunter gatherer lifestyles without any evidence of his own.
Try "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
That book made the grave mistake of being simultaneously enormously Woke AND confidently articulate on a subject where I just happen to be more expert than almost anyone, having debated and written about this shit for years, and having visited all the sites (unlike the authors)
There is the odd interesting and provocative insight, but most of it is wish-casting piffle. It is oddly, metaphorically reminiscent of the penis pillars at Karahan Tepe, mostly surrounded by eccentric and useless backfill, put there for some sociopolitical reason which will remain obscure to our descendants, but hey, look, there's a cock made of sandstone, yay
Many on the left want high levels of migration because it will dilute the current electorate, who are all too nasty and nationalist.
That's a bit of a myth - as HYUFD has pointed out, many immigrants are socially conservative and by no means keen on the left.
Personally I think the effort to get into the developed world (it's not just us) is an inevitable consequence of easy travel and global inequality. You only have one life to live, and you happen to be born in, say, Libya. You can just about get by, if you're not bumped off by one of the rival militias. Do you just shrug and put up with it, or try to get to a country where you can be 10 times better off, and safer as well?
Since we have shortages of young workers, we might as well establish an orderly system where applicants have a reasonable shot at getting in, instead of flailing around with Rwanda and other bonkers schemes. But that's not a particularly left-wing thought, just common sense.
Putin's Russia is disturbing and utterly bonkers at same time...
Do they have the Hitler Putin Youth in Russia? If not, can't be long until they set it up.
They are mainlining Nazism, now
Why is there a 50 year old bloke sitting on the right in a school classroom in a military uniform?
Political Officer.
Incidentally the PO in Red October is called Putin.
So, what, they sit there checking teachers are not saying unapproved things? How long before the GOP turn to this idea in their war on education?
A Russian friend who did his military service in USSR time said the most remarkable thing about the Political Officers was that, there should have been some who were OK people. There were lots of them and by the laws of averages..
But no, each and every one he'd met was an utter thunderknut. The kind of people you hate from the first sentence they speak.
Many on the left want high levels of migration because it will dilute the current electorate, who are all too nasty and nationalist.
That's a bit of a myth - as HYUFD has pointed out, many immigrants are socially conservative and by no means keen on the left.
Personally I think the effort to get into the developed world (it's not just us) is an inevitable consequence of easy travel and global inequality. You only have one life to live, and you happen to be born in, say, Libya. You can just about get by, if you're not bumped off by one of the rival militias. Do you just shrug and put up with it, or try to get to a country where you can be 10 times better off, and safer as well?
Since we have shortages of young workers, we might as well establish an orderly system where applicants have a reasonable shot at getting in, instead of flailing around with Rwanda and other bonkers schemes. But that's not a particularly left-wing thought, just common sense.
What you neglect though Nick is realising its a ponzi scheme. As countries get educated and living standards raise their birth rates fall. Eventually there will be no where to poach migrants from. You also neglect that taking the brightest and best from developing countries completely fucks them over.....but then I guess you dont care about that
By the way, PB, and this is genuinely privileged info - if you want the most amazing historico-archaeological holiday OF A LIFETIME then just fly to Sanliurfa (in far eastern Turkey), via Istanbul, and hire a car, and do it for yourself.
Yes it is an awkward connection but you will have an experience you will recall for the rest of your days. It is definitely better than another jaunt to Ibiza, or even Venice. You will feel like the person turning up at Tutankhamun's tomb about 2 days after it was discovered
Why? Because the Turks haven't even opened half these sites yet, and yet at the same time they don't stop people coming (a car full of rich Istanbul kids turned up at Karahan Tepe when we were there, no one even thought about stopping them)
Karahan Tepe and the other Tas Tepeler (stone hills) - https://arkeonews.net/turkeys-tas-tepeler-marks-the-beginning-of-civilization/ - will probably change everything we believe about human prehistory. Yet you can just drive up, chat with the (bored) guards, and then go see the penis temple. No one will stop you. It feels like you are the first person seeing the cave paintings of Lascaux
Go. Do it. Do it this year, This summer. Amaze yourself, and create a memory you can enshrine, and which you will tell to your stupefied grand-kids
And after that you can nip off to a Turkish resort on the Med and have a lovely time on the beach. AND it's really cheap
Does a holiday get better than that?
I approve this message. Also, Harran (ancient Carrhae) is just down the road, Nemrut Dag a couple of hours drive, Gaziantep has some fab mosaics from Zeugma, etc etc etc
Harran is great, Sogmatar is INTENSE
And the Tas Tepeler, oh my lord
You can fly to Sanliurfa for about £250 return. It is bonkers
Imagine if someone was unearthing the Sphinx or Stonehenge RIGHT NOW and you could just rock up, and there it is. In the dirt. And you will likely be alone, as you wander around it. And also, what you are looking at is WAAAAAAY more important than either Stonehenge or the Sphinx?
Also, great liver kebabs in Sanliurfa (which is a wonderful town, with a world class museum, full of these mindboggling Neolithic finds)
By the way, PB, and this is genuinely privileged info - if you want the most amazing historico-archaeological holiday OF A LIFETIME then just fly to Sanliurfa (in far eastern Turkey), via Istanbul, and hire a car, and do it for yourself.
Yes it is an awkward connection but you will have an experience you will recall for the rest of your days. It is definitely better than another jaunt to Ibiza, or even Venice. You will feel like the person turning up at Tutankhamun's tomb about 2 days after it was discovered
Why? Because the Turks haven't even opened half these sites yet, and yet at the same time they don't stop people coming (a car full of rich Istanbul kids turned up at Karahan Tepe when we were there, no one even thought about stopping them)
Karahan Tepe and the other Tas Tepeler (stone hills) - https://arkeonews.net/turkeys-tas-tepeler-marks-the-beginning-of-civilization/ - will probably change everything we believe about human prehistory. Yet you can just drive up, chat with the (bored) guards, and then go see the penis temple. No one will stop you. It feels like you are the first person seeing the cave paintings of Lascaux
Go. Do it. Do it this year, This summer. Amaze yourself, and create a memory you can enshrine, and which you will tell to your stupefied grand-kids
And after that you can nip off to a Turkish resort on the Med and have a lovely time on the beach. AND it's really cheap
Does a holiday get better than that?
I approve this message. Also, Harran (ancient Carrhae) is just down the road, Nemrut Dag a couple of hours drive, Gaziantep has some fab mosaics from Zeugma, etc etc etc
Harran is great, Sogmatar is INTENSE
And the Tas Tepeler, oh my lord
You can fly to Sanliurfa for about £250 return. It is bonkers
Imagine if someone was unearthing the Sphinx or Stonehenge RIGHT NOW and you could just rock up, and there it is. In the dirt. And you will likely be alone, as you wander around it. And also, what you are looking at is WAAAAAAY more important than either Stonehenge or the Sphinx?
Also, great liver kebabs in Sanliurfa (which is a wonderful town, with a world class museum, full of these mindboggling Neolithic finds)
And for those with more modern tastes it was the County of Edessa 1098-1144 under the crusaders
And King Abgar exchanged a lot of letters with Jesus of Nazareth
Putin's Russia is disturbing and utterly bonkers at same time...
Do they have the Hitler Putin Youth in Russia? If not, can't be long until they set it up.
They are mainlining Nazism, now
Why is there a 50 year old bloke sitting on the right in a school classroom in a military uniform?
Political Officer.
Incidentally the PO in Red October is called Putin.
So, what, they sit there checking teachers are not saying unapproved things? How long before the GOP turn to this idea in their war on education?
I have no idea, it's purely a guess that schools have POs (but if not wtf is he there for?)
He is probably in that class room at that time as part of the publicity photo shoot. but it does look a bit silly, and always good to mock the Russian armed forces.
Comments
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-53734793#:~:text=More than 3,000 people arrived,up from 8,404 in 2020.
Unfortunately most of the dissing of Rwanda has been on the basis of ignorance - genocides and so on.
The concept that 30k-40k crossing the channel via criminal people trafficking gangs 'not being a problem at all' is an unusual thought.
Core vote strategy does not win elections
Obviously if it is effective I imagine people will like it, but Rwanda is so far away I think he was uncertain how to think about it.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquaries-journal/article/abs/roman-mosaic-in-the-church-of-st-oswald-widford/B2DE1F47B5AC599076873AE9A7798F91
And this problem needs solving. Right now 2022 looks set to be a record year for crossings, bigger than 2021, which was bigger than 2020 (despite Covid). And we are now talking serious numbers: tens of thousands, which might become hundreds of thousands, in time
This is unsustainable. So what do we do?
The EU in the south has happily allowed Libya to put people in concentration camps whence they can be slaved, I do not exaggerate.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-libyan-prisons-that-keep-migrants-out-of-europe
I don't want us to do that. Yet somehow our plan to fly them safely to a safe place in Rwanda is some kind of Belsen??
Enough
It may not work. That I concede, But at least it is an attempt to solve a terrible problem
The alternative signalled by all the wankers on here seems to be: Let them all come, just as long as I feel good about myself
Do you remember which side you climbed it from?
It's a cumulative month-by-month graph, as it shows in the page linked in the text mentioning both monthly an annual increased figures, which works up to the total of 30k-40k I mentioned as the total for last year and implied for this year - increasing each year as you read the line labelled for the year. Perfectly clear, surely?
This is how it is explained:
More than 3,000 people arrived in small boats in March, compared with 831 in March 2021. More than 4,500 have made the crossing so far this year.
Last year, 28,526 people are known to have crossed in small boats - up from 8,404 in 2020.
This year's figure is set to be much higher, according to Border Force union officials.
TBF I read the piece in detail, as I put a question mark over "there is no problem".
They are now discovering MULTIPLE Gobekli Tepes, 20, 40, 60, wherever they look, they find them. I asked rthe chief archaeologist from Istanbul Uni how many pillars he expected to find at Karahan Tepe, he said, plainly, "thousands". They ARE finding many homes now, with evidence of fires and cooking and skull cults, but still no agriculture
It is an entire buried civilisation, 13,000 years old, with a coherent artistic culture, and a sophisticated shrine-temple-cathedral ritual sustem across 10,000 square km of Anatolia. Or more? Who the fuck knows?
My own intimation, looking down at the penis-temple of Karahan Tepe, was: How the F could anyone build this complex town without writing? How? How did they exchange info?
I reckon they had writing. Which immediately puts the birth of writing back about 5,000 years
Quite something
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g186338-d2371957-Reviews-Wild_Food_Cafe-London_England.html
My favourite bits of the Peak are the Wye valley (not the Monsal Trail, but various bits of hillside and the part through the gorge in Chee Dale) and the upper Derwent, beyond the reservoirs, for the anti-social factor. Watching a vulture, yes, a vulture scanning the hillsides there during a rare day out in the pandemic was quite something.
Tideswell is definitely high up the list you want a pub or two and a picturesque village, although I quite like the setting of Stoney Middleton and the walks to Eyam (no doubt much more popular and relevant these days).
Bakewell and Buxton are mostly AVOID, particularly during holidays.
Who, me?
Settled societies are less violent, on the whole, but paradoxically, are easier to organise for war. The growth of agriculture led to the growth of the small (relative to overall size of population) professional army, which over the course of several thousand years, has been a very effective tool to deliver violence.
HitlerPutin Youth in Russia? If not, can't be long until they set it up.My grandfather worked in the Glasgow shipyards in WWII. Before Germany invaded Russia, the extreme left line was that there should be go slows and strikes because this was a war not in the interest of Russia (see COMINTERN).
My grandfather, a regular Union man, opposed the wildcat strikes and carried on working. This was the line supported by the regular Labour party etc. It was this kind of stuff, incidentally, that made Attlee & Co. so aggressive in their dealing with the pro-Stalin left.
A couple of the hard core types turned up at his local pub, with a handful of followers. With weapons. They let them in and then closed the doors behind them.
My grandfather had been rather active in WWI and the pub was full of his friends. He dealt with the ring leaders in quite a brutal fashion. After that there were no more attacks.
I don't know where my thinking is going on this - though I certainly think Rwanda is a strange choice on demographic grounds. The small, third most densely populated country in Africa, is not the obvious place to send people.
Perhaps the logic is that it will be an increased risk of not hitting an economic jackpot, and so deter economic migrants (?)
And the same issue will be arising elsewhere, since the New Yorker has recently carried a further story about how EU/Italy have changed their arrangements following its earlier article exposing the practices - so that will perhaps be lighting up again in the Med.
AIUI the reason Denmark can do what they have put in law is because of an opt-out.
I don't buy the "open the borders completely" argument, and I think one answer will be adjusting real pull-factors, whatever they are. And I think that PP has something on 'politically motivated lawyers' gumming up the system - even most Lib Dems don't believe that they don't exist afaics.
I am not sure where I stand on the "migrants" vs "asylum seekers" category distinction.
And Mons. Macron may continue doing his performing seal thing.
https://peakdistrictkids.co.uk/chee-dale-stepping-stones/
Like many 'favourite' things, it has a connection with my past that is somewhat bittersweet.
Agnes Poirier sounded quite pro-UK, which was interesting.
There was also debate about whether "genocide" was an appropriate word for the Russians in Ukraine. Strong proponents both sides.
BTW there's no need to swear.
He is convinced that Ukraine is riddled with Nazi, whilst busy creating a massive Nazi reenactment across the entire Russian Federation.
IF your party leader is popular, you put him or her all over her literature because you want your candidate to be associated with a popular figure. If the voters like your leader, maybe they'll come out and vote for you by association.
If, however, your party leader is unpopular and your party is struggling, you have two levels of disassociation. One is to keep the party identity but not reference your leader or the national picture at all. If you control the local council you reference your successes - if you are in Opposition, you reference the administration's failures but you disconnect your local campaign from the national campaign.
If your party is really unpopular, don't mention it at all. Okay, it's on your description on the ballot paper but instead reference on what your candidate has done or will do and completely disconnect the candidate from the party - emphasise it's a local election and he/she is the local candidate for your area.
That's basic electioneering - yes, on the doorstep you might get the odd voter who wants to whinge about your party in Government - the response is to emphasise it's a local election, the council doesn't set energy prices or can do much about inflation.
And our population has been rocketing by western standards, and set to continue up, very unlike most western countries. As the birth rate is below replacement levels it suggests the same thing.
Incidentally the PO in Red October is called Putin.
http://millenniumelephant.blogspot.com/
(Blogging Soft Toy Elephant, purchased at the Millenium Dome,)
http://millenniumelephant.blogspot.com/2006/02/day-1880-story-so-far.html
It is a cruder version of the arrowhead I found at Gobekli Tepe 15 years ago
There are surely millions of these scattered around these sites, so I don't feel like Lord Elgin in Athens.
I am hesitant to make any conclusions about this truly truly remarkable region. I remember when I took tea with then chief-archaeologist Klaus Schmidt at the Gobekli site, and he was convinced Gobekli was a one-off, a "temple in Eden" as he put it
And yet it turns out he was wrong. There are many Gobeklis. And there ARE homes. And, even weirder, every single one seems to have been purposefully buried around 8,000BC - that is the only reason the local archaeologists have been able to dig up the penis temple of Karahan Tepe so quickly, they are simply extracting backfill. Like stripping away already-peeling wallpaper. It is stupidly easy
All of it is mind boggling. It is without question the greatest archaeological discovery, and mystery, in human history
In WWI he'd led a lot of trench raids - nip over the other side and find out which unit was opposing yours. The way to find out was to grab a sentry, and take his shoulder tabs and paybook. The easy way to take those was to take the sentries life first. Quietly.
It was dissolved a few years back when it got a bit out of control and embarrassing.
EDIT: https://web.archive.org/web/20111030051019/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8852735/Unreported-World-Vlads-Army-Putins-brave-new-world.html
Yes it is an awkward connection but you will have an experience you will recall for the rest of your days. It is definitely better than another jaunt to Ibiza, or even Venice. You will feel like the person turning up at Tutankhamun's tomb about 2 days after it was discovered
Why? Because the Turks haven't even opened half these sites yet, and yet at the same time they don't stop people coming (a car full of rich Istanbul kids turned up at Karahan Tepe when we were there, no one even thought about stopping them)
Karahan Tepe and the other Tas Tepeler (stone hills) - https://arkeonews.net/turkeys-tas-tepeler-marks-the-beginning-of-civilization/ - will probably change everything we believe about human prehistory. Yet you can just drive up, chat with the (bored) guards, and then go see the penis temple. No one will stop you. It feels like you are the first person seeing the cave paintings of Lascaux
Go. Do it. Do it this year, This summer. Amaze yourself, and create a memory you can enshrine, and which you will tell to your stupefied grand-kids
And after that you can nip off to a Turkish resort on the Med and have a lovely time on the beach. AND it's really cheap
Does a holiday get better than that?
There is the odd interesting and provocative insight, but most of it is wish-casting piffle. It is oddly, metaphorically reminiscent of the penis pillars at Karahan Tepe, mostly surrounded by eccentric and useless backfill, put there for some sociopolitical reason which will remain obscure to our descendants, but hey, look, there's a cock made of sandstone, yay
Copying the Chinese model from Uyghur.
Personally I think the effort to get into the developed world (it's not just us) is an inevitable consequence of easy travel and global inequality. You only have one life to live, and you happen to be born in, say, Libya. You can just about get by, if you're not bumped off by one of the rival militias. Do you just shrug and put up with it, or try to get to a country where you can be 10 times better off, and safer as well?
Since we have shortages of young workers, we might as well establish an orderly system where applicants have a reasonable shot at getting in, instead of flailing around with Rwanda and other bonkers schemes. But that's not a particularly left-wing thought, just common sense.
But no, each and every one he'd met was an utter thunderknut. The kind of people you hate from the first sentence they speak.
And the Tas Tepeler, oh my lord
You can fly to Sanliurfa for about £250 return. It is bonkers
Imagine if someone was unearthing the Sphinx or Stonehenge RIGHT NOW and you could just rock up, and there it is. In the dirt. And you will likely be alone, as you wander around it. And also, what you are looking at is WAAAAAAY more important than either Stonehenge or the Sphinx?
Also, great liver kebabs in Sanliurfa (which is a wonderful town, with a world class museum, full of these mindboggling Neolithic finds)
Any more questions on a country about which you haven't a clue, just let me know.
Marc Caputo
@MarcACaputo
Trump is planning to endorse JD Vance in Ohio’s Senate race, according to those who have spoken to him in recent days.
https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1514653428579975172
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/politics/ohio-jd-vance-trump-endorsement.html
And King Abgar exchanged a lot of letters with Jesus of Nazareth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abgar_Legend
and I think they have their own version of the Turin Shroud. And the world's most famous fishponds. It really is fun for all the family.