I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
Some might even say it was the culmination of a process that began in 1979
Well i was removing the nadir of 97-05 but whilst boundaries have varied theres some interesting comparisons of May in 2017 to Major 92 for example
Not going to any street parties or any other such things, I will enjoy some peace and quiet away from work for once.
yes the same- Yesterday i went on a 12 mile walk through the more secluded and deserted bits of Sherwood Forest - bliss ! Hardly saw a soul.
i am not a royalist or a republican - more of a "whatever" - the one thing I dont like though is having my spare time organised by others so love doing my own thing
Hope you are keeping well, state.
I'm on principle opposed but in practice I am a whatever. I couldn't give a toss about any of them but then I don't give a toss what Rita Ora or whoever is wearing either.
yes thanks - I even got a chance to use my OS map in anger when one of the few people i saw in the forest asked where the Major Oak was (main tourist site in Sherwood Forest as the Robin Hood story says its where he gathered his outlaws) - so I tutted a bit (like a builder being asked for a quote) and said you are two miles away and showed him how to get there in a deliberately mappish sort of way (pass the firetower , go left at the church with a spire) - as i said bliss!
Love to hear someone had a great day. I have had a brilliant 2 days , in the garden , fair bit of work and a few refreshments afterwards in the sun, also very pleasant.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
Not necessarily men as in adults; that includes children, who have a male-skewed sex ratio at birth but die off at a higher rate through life. And presumably the effects of selection for a male child in certain areas (not an expert on that though).
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
This match is quickly running away from England here, as the NZ lead crosses 200 with six wickets remaining.
150 these two have put on, they look completely at ease, and we’re still a dozen overs from the new ball - which might now be tomorrow, as we’ve been bowling so damn slowly.
This match is quickly running away from England here, as the NZ lead crosses 200 with six wickets remaining.
150 these two have put on, they look completely at ease, and we’re still a dozen overs from the new ball - which might now be tomorrow, as we’ve been bowling so damn slowly.
I've not been following this.
Interesting pitch?
Slightly easier pitch after lunch, and two determined batsmen.
England seem to think it's partially an issue with the ball, too.
We've been saying that a lot about England recently.
Well, we've been saying their performances are a load of balls, anyway.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
Not necessarily men as in adults; that includes children, who have a male-skewed sex ratio at birth but die off at a higher rate through life. And presumably the effects of selection for a male child in certain areas (not an expert on that though).
Male children still usually have testicles though. Albeit small ones.
Judging by the vid, Liz T could have been Hermione in Harry Potter. Borisov Absentia Permanens !Nice to see that the NS is trying to scare us. Do we have any PB LT admirers in the military?
How many votes will change because of something La Truss said at a Lib Dem conference at the age approximately 18 and a half?
A lovely afternoon in the garden. Now I need some rain because the patio plants have drunk the water butt.
You should come to the Lake district. Been here 5 days now, rained every one of them and today was a better effort than most with several hours worth. Beginiing to think the clue was maybe in the name...
Sun beating down on God's country David, you should have gone to Ayrshire.
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Johnson doesn't have any appeal now and no other leader does either.
The Red Wall is gone and you are out unless you have a new leader who is somehow more charismatic than Johnson, which doesn't exist.
So your choices are new leader to shore up the South or a new leader to try and hold the North and then you lose the South.
I don't think you quite realise what a delicate position you are in. 2019's coalition is basically impossible to hold together without Corbyn at the helm of Labour.
So what is your solution, please I would love to hear it.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
Not necessarily men as in adults; that includes children, who have a male-skewed sex ratio at birth but die off at a higher rate through life. And presumably the effects of selection for a male child in certain areas (not an expert on that though).
Male children still usually have testicles though. Albeit small ones.
Oh yes, but that differential death rate even in infancy has ot be remembered.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
Liz Truss is very like Theresa May in that there's something 'different' about her - that in less politically correct times might be considered something missing. 'On the spectrum' is another unkind way to express it. There's a bit of an awkwardness there, when she poses it's always a bit 'off' somehow. Though she isn't by any means an unattractive woman. I don't have much to go on as to how intelligent or unintelligent she is, and I am not saying that she's not a good politician, or that there's not a place for her (or for May), but not as PM imo. May was painful. Truss would be equally painful. You need an emotional intelligence - an ability to read a room, that they don't have.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
I'm not sure you're right on this.
The views of the "right" (if we mean not just those supportive of the Government but those opposed to the alternative) seem to this observer to dominate. Most of the newspapers are broadly anti-left. Where is the left-wing alternative to GB News or Talk TV? Look at Sky News in Australia - strongly anti-Labor and pro-Coalition and their response to the election of a Labor Government has been illuminating.
Free speech means allowing as many different voices as possible to be heard not just the same voices. As a good liberal authoritarian, I'd love all media outlets to be forced to provide balanced coverage - don't worry, I do appreciate the irony of that.
The BBC is full of wokeness, so it depends how you measure things.
I'm not even sure what "wokeness" is to be honest with you. Every time I see the term "woke" I assume it's someone on the "right" complaining the news isn't reported the way they would like it to be. Perhaps I should call the Daily Mail "woke" in response if we're throwing the word around.
"Woke" is just a new name for "politically correct".
Woke was actually used by some of the liberal (mainly young) left somewhat pompously to describe themselves. My left wing daughter taught me the word when it was used as a badge of honour. The right decided to sneer at the word as they (probably correctly) saw it as a sign certain sections of the left were so up themselves by using the term to describe themselves.
I can picture Justin Trudeau proudly describing himself thusly (in blackface of course)
While talking of the she-covery from covid.
Undoubtedly so. A colossus of our times.
"We prefer to say peoplekind" as if humankind wasn't a term.
To which the only reply really should havd been 'you use what you like pal'
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
Not necessarily men as in adults; that includes children, who have a male-skewed sex ratio at birth but die off at a higher rate through life. And presumably the effects of selection for a male child in certain areas (not an expert on that though).
Male children still usually have testicles though. Albeit small ones.
Oh yes, but that differential death rate even in infancy has ot be remembered.
I think you may have misread the statistic I quoted. It was the ratio of males to females currently alive, not the ratio at birth. Interestingly, there were apparently more females than males until 1957, when the situation reversed. My guess would be a combination of fewer men dying in wars and selection for male children in certain countries.
Liz Truss is very like Theresa May in that there's something 'different' about her - that in less politically correct times might be considered something missing. 'On the spectrum' is another unkind way to express it. There's a bit of an awkwardness there, when she poses it's always a bit 'off' somehow. Though she isn't by any means an unattractive woman. I don't have much to go on as to how intelligent or unintelligent she is, and I am not saying that she's not a good politician, or that there's not a place for her (or for May), but not as PM imo. May was painful. Truss would be equally painful. You need an emotional intelligence - an ability to read a room, that they don't have.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
So, right now the average human has two balls... but given falling birth rates and an increasingly elderly population, we'll have a very brief period of the average person having one ball, before moving to a world where the average is zero in 12-14 years time.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
That though is the problem, isn't it? If all you want is news which re-enforces your worldview you end up in an echo chamber as we see in political debate in America and Australia and to an extent here.
Democracy flourishes when a plurality of voices are heard and argument is had across the political divide. If all we hear is what we want to hear we will stagnate politically and I'd argue culturally.
I should watch GB News - I should because it offers a different perspective. I shouldn't be afraid of that - no one should be afraid of hearing arguments which challenge or make you re-evaluate.
I keep meaning to watch it myself, but my tvs were expensive and I will find it very difficult not to chuck anytghing at Dewbury, Wootton, Farage et al.
Despite the boo's I still think the Conservatives should carry on with Boris until the next election.
Partly because there's no clear successor within the Cabinet (and the idea it could be someone from outside the cabinet is fanciful IMO) but mainly because he was elected in 2019 with a near landslide and the highest popular share of the vote for the Conservatives since 1970 - After giving him such a strong endorsement it should be for the British people to remove him at the next election.
Generally I'm not a fan of parties removing elected Prime Ministers, mind. I always felt Maggie should have been allowed to fight the 1992 election and removing her actually caused for more problems for the Conservatives than if they'd just let her go to the election and been defeated.
Same with the way Labour effectively ousted Blair for Brown something from which even now they've still not recovered from.
Theresa May is the exception, ousting her was the correct decision as the electorate basically stripped her of her authority in the 2017 election.
The Guardian can start a news channel if they want, there is plenty of room on freeview. However the fact the BBC and especially C4 news are seen as giving a centre to centre left worldview already is why there was a gap in the market for GB news and it is doing reasonably well and already has overtaken Sky news in the ratings
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
So, right now the average human has two balls... but given falling birth rates and an increasingly elderly population, we'll have a very brief period of the average person having one ball, before moving to a world where the average is zero in 12-14 years time.
Not sure it works like that. Cue discussion on mean, median, mode.
This match is quickly running away from England here, as the NZ lead crosses 200 with six wickets remaining.
150 these two have put on, they look completely at ease, and we’re still a dozen overs from the new ball - which might now be tomorrow, as we’ve been bowling so damn slowly.
This match is quickly running away from England here, as the NZ lead crosses 200 with six wickets remaining.
150 these two have put on, they look completely at ease, and we’re still a dozen overs from the new ball - which might now be tomorrow, as we’ve been bowling so damn slowly.
I've not been following this.
Interesting pitch?
Slightly easier pitch after lunch, and two determined batsmen.
England seem to think it's partially an issue with the ball, too.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
"The sex ratio at birth is 107 boys per 100 girls" which is much more than I would have expected. I thought it was more like 102/103.
Yes, that surprised me too. What I found shocking, though, is that the scale of gender selection in China and India is sufficient to skew the statistics so far away from the natural value in those countries.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
So, right now the average human has two balls... but given falling birth rates and an increasingly elderly population, we'll have a very brief period of the average person having one ball, before moving to a world where the average is zero in 12-14 years time.
Not sure it works like that. Cue discussion on mean, median, mode.
If by average he means median, and if a sufficiently low number of males have less than 2 testicles, then he is correct.
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Yes but if @wooliedyed is correct (I have no idea if he is) it means it didn't matter who the PM was. You could have shuffled them around and the last one would have delivered the Redwall. As I say I don't know if this is correct, but if you want to challenge it you have challenge @wooliedyed data not his logic.
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
Some might even say it was the culmination of a process that began in 1979
I would have thought the nadir in many of these seats was the miner's strike.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
I'm not sure you're right on this.
The views of the "right" (if we mean not just those supportive of the Government but those opposed to the alternative) seem to this observer to dominate. Most of the newspapers are broadly anti-left. Where is the left-wing alternative to GB News or Talk TV? Look at Sky News in Australia - strongly anti-Labor and pro-Coalition and their response to the election of a Labor Government has been illuminating.
Free speech means allowing as many different voices as possible to be heard not just the same voices. As a good liberal authoritarian, I'd love all media outlets to be forced to provide balanced coverage - don't worry, I do appreciate the irony of that.
The BBC is full of wokeness, so it depends how you measure things.
I'm not even sure what "wokeness" is to be honest with you. Every time I see the term "woke" I assume it's someone on the "right" complaining the news isn't reported the way they would like it to be. Perhaps I should call the Daily Mail "woke" in response if we're throwing the word around.
"Woke" is just a new name for "politically correct".
Woke was actually used by some of the liberal (mainly young) left somewhat pompously to describe themselves. My left wing daughter taught me the word when it was used as a badge of honour. The right decided to sneer at the word as they (probably correctly) saw it as a sign certain sections of the left were so up themselves by using the term to describe themselves.
I can picture Justin Trudeau proudly describing himself thusly (in blackface of course)
While talking of the she-covery from covid.
Undoubtedly so. A colossus of our times.
"We prefer to say peoplekind" as if humankind wasn't a term.
To which the only reply really should havd been 'you use what you like pal'
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
Think that's right but he did rocket-boost it. I mean, if Hunt or Gove had won the Leadership the Cons would still have won but the majority wouldn't have been anything like 80.
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
It was very clearly part of a process. Boris Johnson may have accelerated it or enhanced it but it was going on anyway and removing him will not undo the progress made into 2019 (national swing and picture aside). There is no 'only Boris can win in the red wall'
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
So, right now the average human has two balls... but given falling birth rates and an increasingly elderly population, we'll have a very brief period of the average person having one ball, before moving to a world where the average is zero in 12-14 years time.
Not sure it works like that. Cue discussion on mean, median, mode.
Japan has 95 men for every 100 women. Italy is just 93. Russia is a just staggering 86.
Simply, as birth rates fall and societies age, everywhere starts to look more like Italy and Japan. (Although probably not like Russia.)
Now we can argue about whether crossover is 2035, 2045 or 2065, but the world is following the same trends as Italy and Japan.
"Uefa wishes to sincerely apologise to all spectators who had to experience or witness frightening and distressing events in the build-up to the Uefa Champions League final... on a night, which should have been a celebration of European club football," a statement said. "No football fan should be put in that situation, and it must not happen again."
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
Think that's right but he did rocket-boost it. I mean, if Hunt or Gove had won the Leadership the Cons would still have won but the majority wouldn't have been anything like 80.
I think thats very fair. Theyd have won Bishop Auckland but not Blyth Valkey. Darlington and Don Valley but not Leigh etc etc
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
That though is the problem, isn't it? If all you want is news which re-enforces your worldview you end up in an echo chamber as we see in political debate in America and Australia and to an extent here.
Democracy flourishes when a plurality of voices are heard and argument is had across the political divide. If all we hear is what we want to hear we will stagnate politically and I'd argue culturally.
I should watch GB News - I should because it offers a different perspective. I shouldn't be afraid of that - no one should be afraid of hearing arguments which challenge or make you re-evaluate.
I keep meaning to watch it myself, but my tvs were expensive and I will find it very difficult not to chuck anything at Dewbury, Wootton, Farage et al.
Yes, I really wouldn't. Ghastly crew. I take no pleasure in saying that - I'd like a high quality right of centre tv station to get my teeth into - but there's no point pretending.
The Guardian can start a news channel if they want, there is plenty of room on freeview. However the fact the BBC and especially C4 news are seen as giving a centre to centre left worldview already is why there was a gap in the market for GB news and it is doing reasonably well and already has overtaken Sky news in the ratings
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
Tl;dr “I’ve read a guardian hit piece on GB news and decided that it is not a good thing”
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Yes but if @wooliedyed is correct (I have no idea if he is) it means it didn't matter who the PM was. You could have shuffled them around and the last one would have delivered the Redwall. As I say I don't know if this is correct, but if you want to challenge it you have challenge @wooliedyed data not his logic.
Any 5 random red wall seats, especially in the NE snd Yorks/Humber will show the pattern. There are exceptions of course - Tynemouth, South Shields went differently for example but its there to track. Data rather than misty eyed Boris bollocks for me!
Liz Truss is very like Theresa May in that there's something 'different' about her - that in less politically correct times might be considered something missing. 'On the spectrum' is another unkind way to express it. There's a bit of an awkwardness there, when she poses it's always a bit 'off' somehow. Though she isn't by any means an unattractive woman. I don't have much to go on as to how intelligent or unintelligent she is, and I am not saying that she's not a good politician, or that there's not a place for her (or for May), but not as PM imo. May was painful. Truss would be equally painful. You need an emotional intelligence - an ability to read a room, that they don't have.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
"The sex ratio at birth is 107 boys per 100 girls" which is much more than I would have expected. I thought it was more like 102/103.
Yes, that surprised me too. What I found shocking, though, is that the scale of gender selection in China and India is sufficient to skew the statistics so far away from the natural value in those countries.
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Yes but if @wooliedyed is correct (I have no idea if he is) it means it didn't matter who the PM was. You could have shuffled them around and the last one would have delivered the Redwall. As I say I don't know if this is correct, but if you want to challenge it you have challenge @wooliedyed data not his logic.
Any 5 random red wall seats, especially in the NE snd Yorks/Humber will show the pattern. There are exceptions of course - Tynemouth, South Shields went differently for example but its there to track. Data rather than misty eyed Boris bollocks for me!
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Well yes - that's the whole point.
The enlightenment wasn’t all that enlightened - it generally detracted democracy, and was pretty well fine with slavery, for example.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
So, right now the average human has two balls... but given falling birth rates and an increasingly elderly population, we'll have a very brief period of the average person having one ball, before moving to a world where the average is zero in 12-14 years time.
More males are born than females to compensate for the fact that they're more likely to die early from illnesses, accidents or combat/war. IIRC once you get to the age of 40 females tend to outnumber males.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
I'm not sure you're right on this.
The views of the "right" (if we mean not just those supportive of the Government but those opposed to the alternative) seem to this observer to dominate. Most of the newspapers are broadly anti-left. Where is the left-wing alternative to GB News or Talk TV? Look at Sky News in Australia - strongly anti-Labor and pro-Coalition and their response to the election of a Labor Government has been illuminating.
Free speech means allowing as many different voices as possible to be heard not just the same voices. As a good liberal authoritarian, I'd love all media outlets to be forced to provide balanced coverage - don't worry, I do appreciate the irony of that.
The BBC is full of wokeness, so it depends how you measure things.
I'm not even sure what "wokeness" is to be honest with you. Every time I see the term "woke" I assume it's someone on the "right" complaining the news isn't reported the way they would like it to be. Perhaps I should call the Daily Mail "woke" in response if we're throwing the word around.
"Woke" is just a new name for "politically correct".
Sigh
No, it really isn’t
You’re too smart for this intellectually lazy, myopic bullshit
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
I'm not sure you're right on this.
The views of the "right" (if we mean not just those supportive of the Government but those opposed to the alternative) seem to this observer to dominate. Most of the newspapers are broadly anti-left. Where is the left-wing alternative to GB News or Talk TV? Look at Sky News in Australia - strongly anti-Labor and pro-Coalition and their response to the election of a Labor Government has been illuminating.
Free speech means allowing as many different voices as possible to be heard not just the same voices. As a good liberal authoritarian, I'd love all media outlets to be forced to provide balanced coverage - don't worry, I do appreciate the irony of that.
It is also the Right that are suppressing the right to protest.
The right to free speech does not extend to consequence free speech.
I'd say the Right make a lot of noise about Free Speech but they aren't great defenders of it. You can split this (imo) into legal v social. Legal is what the law forbids you from saying. Social is what society discourages you from saying. The issue in this country is the latter since very little lands you in jail and what can are only things escaping your lips that are pretty much agreed by most to be both vile and dangerous.
On the non-legal side a person is more likely to feel their Free Speech is under threat if they have opinions and attitudes which are throwbacks to a bygone age. I can empathize with this - it must be frustrating - but at the same time I view it as progress that certain things which used to be the norm and openly expressed must now be avoided like the plague unless you're prepared to get some shit for it.
And I'm sorry but I think all the stuff about the Left wanting to roll back The Enlightenment is just UnHerd Drivelpipe - pseudo-deep wordplay with little or no connection to the mundane bread-and-butter actual world.
There are dozens of examples of individuals getting investigated by the police for 'hate crimes' for expressing quite mainstream opinions - the classic example being women not having a penis. That falls under legal, surely? And I don't think the views of JK Rowling etc are throwback to a bygone age.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
I think that in terms of freedom of speech in the UK the old ideas about Left and Right are pretty much irrelevant. There have been strongly anti-free speech Governments on both sides of the political spectrum (indeed it is the norm) and none of the main parties can honestly lay claim to being pro-free speech in the way that many of us would like to see them. The most recent incarnations of suppression of free speech which have been labelled (for want of a better term) woke are simply the latest in a very long line of ideologies and movements that have proclaimed that free speech should have limits based on their own particular political and social outlook.
This is a fight that I believe will never end - it will always be a tug of war between free speech advocates and those who, for a million different reasons, think certain aspects of this freedom should be removed. What is important is to remember the misattributed words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall describing the philosophy of Voltaire.
Freedom of speech is no freedom if you only apply it to those you agree with.
Judging by the vid, Liz T could have been Hermione in Harry Potter. Borisov Absentia Permanens !Nice to see that the NS is trying to scare us. Do we have any PB LT admirers in the military?
How many votes will change because of something La Truss said at a Lib Dem conference at the age approximately 18 and a half?
A lovely afternoon in the garden. Now I need some rain because the patio plants have drunk the water butt.
You should come to the Lake district. Been here 5 days now, rained every one of them and today was a better effort than most with several hours worth. Beginiing to think the clue was maybe in the name...
The only PB patio in the Lake District is @Cyclefree I suspect.
I'm not getting some early strawberries, mind. A whole 3 the day before yesterday, and I can see some more now. Currently warthing a neighbour pressure-washing his roof from above the apex on a firmly lashed in ladder - not my style.
Where it always seems to be shining and various exotic flowers are in bloom. It is lush here, I can't argue with that. But early afternoon today on 3rd June it was 12 degrees. My wife keeps pointing at the airport chaos but jeez, that's not warm.
Out for walkies in the last of the bluebells at 10 am this morning, we needed our Gore-Tex jackets just to cut the mild but snell wind coming in with the haar off the sea. Mrs C was wearing her woolly hat!
Come to Tbilisi. 31C and superb hot soup dumplings. And the wine! And the wome
"Uefa wishes to sincerely apologise to all spectators who had to experience or witness frightening and distressing events in the build-up to the Uefa Champions League final... on a night, which should have been a celebration of European club football," a statement said. "No football fan should be put in that situation, and it must not happen again."
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
"The sex ratio at birth is 107 boys per 100 girls" which is much more than I would have expected. I thought it was more like 102/103.
Yes, that surprised me too. What I found shocking, though, is that the scale of gender selection in China and India is sufficient to skew the statistics so far away from the natural value in those countries.
It's intriguing to me that most of Africa is 1.02/03.
You know, everyone talks about China and India skewing the birth figures, and they are numbers two and three on the list for the highest proportion of boys vs girls at birth.
But they are not the worst culprit. No, the worst culprit - at birth - is a European country, a member of EFTA no less, where males outnumber females 1.26 to 1 at birth.
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
That though is the problem, isn't it? If all you want is news which re-enforces your worldview you end up in an echo chamber as we see in political debate in America and Australia and to an extent here.
Democracy flourishes when a plurality of voices are heard and argument is had across the political divide. If all we hear is what we want to hear we will stagnate politically and I'd argue culturally.
I should watch GB News - I should because it offers a different perspective. I shouldn't be afraid of that - no one should be afraid of hearing arguments which challenge or make you re-evaluate.
I watched GB News when it started up. I wasn't blown away and haven't watched it again. But goodness me it was refreshing to watch a news channel which didn't appear to dislike me. I am quite open to hearing perspectives which are not my own, but being metaphorically bashed over the head constantly by BBC worldview does get tiring.
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Yes but if @wooliedyed is correct (I have no idea if he is) it means it didn't matter who the PM was. You could have shuffled them around and the last one would have delivered the Redwall. As I say I don't know if this is correct, but if you want to challenge it you have challenge @wooliedyed data not his logic.
Any 5 random red wall seats, especially in the NE snd Yorks/Humber will show the pattern. There are exceptions of course - Tynemouth, South Shields went differently for example but its there to track. Data rather than misty eyed Boris bollocks for me!
Yeah. You're absolutely spot on right about this.
I've probably pb peaked! I think it will lead to some interesting holds against the grain whilst the blue wall struggles and if a recovery towards 40% occurs under a new leader then i see a handful against the head. Will be looking closely at Donny, Normanton, Sunderland etc if Lab and Tory come in towards 40 nearer polling day.
Judging by the vid, Liz T could have been Hermione in Harry Potter. Borisov Absentia Permanens !Nice to see that the NS is trying to scare us. Do we have any PB LT admirers in the military?
How many votes will change because of something La Truss said at a Lib Dem conference at the age approximately 18 and a half?
A lovely afternoon in the garden. Now I need some rain because the patio plants have drunk the water butt.
You should come to the Lake district. Been here 5 days now, rained every one of them and today was a better effort than most with several hours worth. Beginiing to think the clue was maybe in the name...
The only PB patio in the Lake District is @Cyclefree I suspect.
I'm not getting some early strawberries, mind. A whole 3 the day before yesterday, and I can see some more now. Currently warthing a neighbour pressure-washing his roof from above the apex on a firmly lashed in ladder - not my style.
Where it always seems to be shining and various exotic flowers are in bloom. It is lush here, I can't argue with that. But early afternoon today on 3rd June it was 12 degrees. My wife keeps pointing at the airport chaos but jeez, that's not warm.
Out for walkies in the last of the bluebells at 10 am this morning, we needed our Gore-Tex jackets just to cut the mild but snell wind coming in with the haar off the sea. Mrs C was wearing her woolly hat!
Come to Tbilisi. 31C and superb hot soup dumplings. And the wine! And the wome
No, not the women
I’m sure if you go up a price bracket, you’ll find them more to your liking.
"Uefa wishes to sincerely apologise to all spectators who had to experience or witness frightening and distressing events in the build-up to the Uefa Champions League final... on a night, which should have been a celebration of European club football," a statement said. "No football fan should be put in that situation, and it must not happen again."
Apparently - according to the French Press tonight - Macron is now “indignant” about what happened at the Stade de France
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Yes but if @wooliedyed is correct (I have no idea if he is) it means it didn't matter who the PM was. You could have shuffled them around and the last one would have delivered the Redwall. As I say I don't know if this is correct, but if you want to challenge it you have challenge @wooliedyed data not his logic.
Any 5 random red wall seats, especially in the NE snd Yorks/Humber will show the pattern. There are exceptions of course - Tynemouth, South Shields went differently for example but its there to track. Data rather than misty eyed Boris bollocks for me!
Yeah. You're absolutely spot on right about this.
I've probably pb peaked! I think it will lead to some interesting holds against the grain whilst the blue wall struggles and if a recovery towards 40% occurs under a new leader then i see a handful against the head. Will be looking closely at Donny, Normanton, Sunderland etc if Lab and Tory come in towards 40 nearer polling day.
Mm. The Council elections in Wakefield MBC were spectacularly woeful for the Conservatives. Normanton is a long, long way off on those figures. What's been interesting for a while is how some of the Red Wall is moving to the Tories at Council levels too. Suggesting it's bedded in, positive Tory support. Whilst other bits aren't at all. Indeed went quite quickly backwards. West Yorkshire is one of these. Suggesting it isn't.
"Buzz off, killjoys – sneaking into illicit films is a teenage pleasure Plans to introduce Home Office-backed ID checks in cinemas are a wearying bit of state-sponsored joylessness. Let kids get their kicks Tim Robey"
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
I'm not sure you're right on this.
The views of the "right" (if we mean not just those supportive of the Government but those opposed to the alternative) seem to this observer to dominate. Most of the newspapers are broadly anti-left. Where is the left-wing alternative to GB News or Talk TV? Look at Sky News in Australia - strongly anti-Labor and pro-Coalition and their response to the election of a Labor Government has been illuminating.
Free speech means allowing as many different voices as possible to be heard not just the same voices. As a good liberal authoritarian, I'd love all media outlets to be forced to provide balanced coverage - don't worry, I do appreciate the irony of that.
It is also the Right that are suppressing the right to protest.
The right to free speech does not extend to consequence free speech.
I'd say the Right make a lot of noise about Free Speech but they aren't great defenders of it. You can split this (imo) into legal v social. Legal is what the law forbids you from saying. Social is what society discourages you from saying. The issue in this country is the latter since very little lands you in jail and what can are only things escaping your lips that are pretty much agreed by most to be both vile and dangerous.
On the non-legal side a person is more likely to feel their Free Speech is under threat if they have opinions and attitudes which are throwbacks to a bygone age. I can empathize with this - it must be frustrating - but at the same time I view it as progress that certain things which used to be the norm and openly expressed must now be avoided like the plague unless you're prepared to get some shit for it.
And I'm sorry but I think all the stuff about the Left wanting to roll back The Enlightenment is just UnHerd Drivelpipe - pseudo-deep wordplay with little or no connection to the mundane bread-and-butter actual world.
There are dozens of examples of individuals getting investigated by the police for 'hate crimes' for expressing quite mainstream opinions - the classic example being women not having a penis. That falls under legal, surely? And I don't think the views of JK Rowling etc are throwback to a bygone age.
Oh indeed. The police have wasted time on trivia. The trans issue throws up some craziness. There's a new orthodoxy in certain sectors which can be oppressive. Not denying any of this for a minute. But I vastly prefer where we are to where we used to be - the old orthodoxy which froze out all lacking a certain background and mindset - and I really cannot be having this nonsense that the Enlightenment inc Free Speech is threatened by the Left and cherished by the Right.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
"The sex ratio at birth is 107 boys per 100 girls" which is much more than I would have expected. I thought it was more like 102/103.
Yes, that surprised me too. What I found shocking, though, is that the scale of gender selection in China and India is sufficient to skew the statistics so far away from the natural value in those countries.
It's intriguing to me that most of Africa is 1.02/03.
You know, everyone talks about China and India skewing the birth figures, and they are numbers two and three on the list for the highest proportion of boys vs girls at birth.
But they are not the worst culprit. No, the worst culprit - at birth - is a European country, a member of EFTA no less, where males outnumber females 1.26 to 1 at birth.
Central estimate of 30 female foetuses aborted annually on the basis of being female, unless the sex-selection is happening as part of IVF. Kinda chilling.
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Yes but if @wooliedyed is correct (I have no idea if he is) it means it didn't matter who the PM was. You could have shuffled them around and the last one would have delivered the Redwall. As I say I don't know if this is correct, but if you want to challenge it you have challenge @wooliedyed data not his logic.
Why would the redwall have voted for a Remainer like Hunt? The redwall are economically centrist even centre left historically, socially conservative and pro Brexit.
They didn't vote for Remainer Cameron or Remainer May, even against Corbyn in 2017, they only voted for Leaver Boris in 2019
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
"The sex ratio at birth is 107 boys per 100 girls" which is much more than I would have expected. I thought it was more like 102/103.
Yes, that surprised me too. What I found shocking, though, is that the scale of gender selection in China and India is sufficient to skew the statistics so far away from the natural value in those countries.
It's intriguing to me that most of Africa is 1.02/03.
So what is the evolutionary inference to be made? I'd have thought that nature would want a surplus of women as they are the rate limiting step in reproduction. But perhaps we need more men to counterbalance their tendency to get themselves killed hunter-gathering?
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
On the one hand female life expectancy is longer, but on the other sex selective abortion is quite common in some societies, so male births outnumber female, substantially in some countries. Add in deaths in childbirth in undeveloped parts of the world and the number of females might not be exceed that of males.
This estimate puts the number of males at 65 million more than females in the world:
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Yes but if @wooliedyed is correct (I have no idea if he is) it means it didn't matter who the PM was. You could have shuffled them around and the last one would have delivered the Redwall. As I say I don't know if this is correct, but if you want to challenge it you have challenge @wooliedyed data not his logic.
Why would the redwall have voted for a Remainer like Hunt? The redwall are economically centrist even centre left historically, socially conservative and pro Brexit.
They didn't vote for Remainer Cameron or Remainer May, even against Corbyn in 2017, they only voted for Leaver Boris in 2019
As someone who lives in, and grew up in, the Red Wall, I see very little evidence whatsoever for your first statement. Strip out immigration, and not much at all for your second. Some evidence for your third. But not overwhelmingly so. The biggest leave votes were down the east coast. Some of them Red Wall. Not all.
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
That though is the problem, isn't it? If all you want is news which re-enforces your worldview you end up in an echo chamber as we see in political debate in America and Australia and to an extent here.
Democracy flourishes when a plurality of voices are heard and argument is had across the political divide. If all we hear is what we want to hear we will stagnate politically and I'd argue culturally.
I should watch GB News - I should because it offers a different perspective. I shouldn't be afraid of that - no one should be afraid of hearing arguments which challenge or make you re-evaluate.
I watched GB News when it started up. I wasn't blown away and haven't watched it again. But goodness me it was refreshing to watch a news channel which didn't appear to dislike me. I am quite open to hearing perspectives which are not my own, but being metaphorically bashed over the head constantly by BBC worldview does get tiring.
The biggest problem with GB news is the repetitive nature of its rants. Night after night of a pub bore, with no real indepth discussion or evaluation of evidence, just the same old prejudices. It is simply boring.
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
"The sex ratio at birth is 107 boys per 100 girls" which is much more than I would have expected. I thought it was more like 102/103.
Yes, that surprised me too. What I found shocking, though, is that the scale of gender selection in China and India is sufficient to skew the statistics so far away from the natural value in those countries.
It's intriguing to me that most of Africa is 1.02/03.
So what is the evolutionary inference to be made? I'd have thought that nature would want a surplus of women as they are the rate limiting step in reproduction. But perhaps we need more men to counterbalance their tendency to get themselves killed hunter-gathering?
There needs to be an excess of men so that women get to exercise evolutionary pressure by choosing mates?
"Buzz off, killjoys – sneaking into illicit films is a teenage pleasure Plans to introduce Home Office-backed ID checks in cinemas are a wearying bit of state-sponsored joylessness. Let kids get their kicks Tim Robey"
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Yes but if @wooliedyed is correct (I have no idea if he is) it means it didn't matter who the PM was. You could have shuffled them around and the last one would have delivered the Redwall. As I say I don't know if this is correct, but if you want to challenge it you have challenge @wooliedyed data not his logic.
Why would the redwall have voted for a Remainer like Hunt? The redwall are economically centrist even centre left historically, socially conservative and pro Brexit.
They didn't vote for Remainer Cameron or Remainer May, even against Corbyn in 2017, they only voted for Leaver Boris in 2019
As someone who lives in, and grew up in, the Red Wall, I see very little evidence whatsoever for your first statement. Strip out immigration, and not much at all for your second. Some evidence for your third. But not overwhelmingly so. The biggest leave votes were down the east coast. Some of them Red Wall. Not all.
The biggest Leave votes were in the West and East Midlands, then the North East, then Yorkshire and Humber and only after that the East of England
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
That though is the problem, isn't it? If all you want is news which re-enforces your worldview you end up in an echo chamber as we see in political debate in America and Australia and to an extent here.
Democracy flourishes when a plurality of voices are heard and argument is had across the political divide. If all we hear is what we want to hear we will stagnate politically and I'd argue culturally.
I should watch GB News - I should because it offers a different perspective. I shouldn't be afraid of that - no one should be afraid of hearing arguments which challenge or make you re-evaluate.
I watched GB News when it started up. I wasn't blown away and haven't watched it again. But goodness me it was refreshing to watch a news channel which didn't appear to dislike me. I am quite open to hearing perspectives which are not my own, but being metaphorically bashed over the head constantly by BBC worldview does get tiring.
The biggest problem with GB news is the repetitive nature of its rants. Night after night of a pub bore, with no real indepth discussion or evaluation of evidence, just the same old prejudices. It is simply boring.
So, exactly like Newsnight on the BBC or C4 News, then
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Yes but if @wooliedyed is correct (I have no idea if he is) it means it didn't matter who the PM was. You could have shuffled them around and the last one would have delivered the Redwall. As I say I don't know if this is correct, but if you want to challenge it you have challenge @wooliedyed data not his logic.
Any 5 random red wall seats, especially in the NE snd Yorks/Humber will show the pattern. There are exceptions of course - Tynemouth, South Shields went differently for example but its there to track. Data rather than misty eyed Boris bollocks for me!
Yeah. You're absolutely spot on right about this.
I've probably pb peaked! I think it will lead to some interesting holds against the grain whilst the blue wall struggles and if a recovery towards 40% occurs under a new leader then i see a handful against the head. Will be looking closely at Donny, Normanton, Sunderland etc if Lab and Tory come in towards 40 nearer polling day.
Mm. The Council elections in Wakefield MBC were spectacularly woeful for the Conservatives. Normanton is a long, long way off on those figures. What's been interesting for a while is how some of the Red Wall is moving to the Tories at Council levels too. Suggesting it's bedded in, positive Tory support. Whilst other bits aren't at all. Indeed went quite quickly backwards. West Yorkshire is one of these. Suggesting it isn't.
Oh id want to see a shift and Lab under 40, tories at worst level pegging first then id start digging into the councils etc. They wont gain anything frim 33% of course. Yes, some of the movement is bedded in for sure
"Buzz off, killjoys – sneaking into illicit films is a teenage pleasure Plans to introduce Home Office-backed ID checks in cinemas are a wearying bit of state-sponsored joylessness. Let kids get their kicks Tim Robey"
They still exist for the small demographic of teenagers trying to, err, court, potential mates while still living with their parents.
For adults with 75” screens at home, a pause button on the movie, and no room full of idiots on their phones and talking to each other, they’re sticking with the living room.
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Yes but if @wooliedyed is correct (I have no idea if he is) it means it didn't matter who the PM was. You could have shuffled them around and the last one would have delivered the Redwall. As I say I don't know if this is correct, but if you want to challenge it you have challenge @wooliedyed data not his logic.
Why would the redwall have voted for a Remainer like Hunt? The redwall are economically centrist even centre left historically, socially conservative and pro Brexit.
They didn't vote for Remainer Cameron or Remainer May, even against Corbyn in 2017, they only voted for Leaver Boris in 2019
Simply and demonstrably untrue. The movement in the red wall was much more pronounced in 2017 - Sunderland, Bishop A, Don Valley etc all double digit gains under May. 2019 much smaller gains in votes and Lab fall away leading to gains in seats Data doesnt lie.
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
That though is the problem, isn't it? If all you want is news which re-enforces your worldview you end up in an echo chamber as we see in political debate in America and Australia and to an extent here.
Democracy flourishes when a plurality of voices are heard and argument is had across the political divide. If all we hear is what we want to hear we will stagnate politically and I'd argue culturally.
I should watch GB News - I should because it offers a different perspective. I shouldn't be afraid of that - no one should be afraid of hearing arguments which challenge or make you re-evaluate.
I watched GB News when it started up. I wasn't blown away and haven't watched it again. But goodness me it was refreshing to watch a news channel which didn't appear to dislike me. I am quite open to hearing perspectives which are not my own, but being metaphorically bashed over the head constantly by BBC worldview does get tiring.
Some may have found the booing of Johnson caused, or caused a risk of, 'serious annoyance': whether intentional or reckless, potentially a crime under s.78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 https://twitter.com/ffgqc/status/1532734586219790336
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
That though is the problem, isn't it? If all you want is news which re-enforces your worldview you end up in an echo chamber as we see in political debate in America and Australia and to an extent here.
Democracy flourishes when a plurality of voices are heard and argument is had across the political divide. If all we hear is what we want to hear we will stagnate politically and I'd argue culturally.
I should watch GB News - I should because it offers a different perspective. I shouldn't be afraid of that - no one should be afraid of hearing arguments which challenge or make you re-evaluate.
I watched GB News when it started up. I wasn't blown away and haven't watched it again. But goodness me it was refreshing to watch a news channel which didn't appear to dislike me. I am quite open to hearing perspectives which are not my own, but being metaphorically bashed over the head constantly by BBC worldview does get tiring.
Some may have found the booing of Johnson caused, or caused a risk of, 'serious annoyance': whether intentional or reckless, potentially a crime under s.78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 https://twitter.com/ffgqc/status/1532734586219790336
I was thinking of voting LibDem in the forthcoming T and H election, as I want Boris out. Reading this thread reminded my why I swore not to do that again.
Care to elaborate?
EU. The core leadership of the party would throw anything away, even liberalism and democracy, for it. The members used to be a bit more equivocal, and the voters at least in the SW were downright hostile.
I have knocked on literally thousands of doors for the LibDems. I was always bemused when other canvassers would report that Europe never came up, whereas I would receive it loud and clear at 120 decibels. I guess you hear what you want to hear.
I recall the LibDems staging a strop when their demand to get an in/out referendum was turned down. Of course when they (we) did get offered one a few years later they voted against it, duly lost it and used every trick in the Trump book to frustrate its implementation (with the honourable exception of the late great Paddy Ashdown).
Democracy when it suits doesn't work for me so I left the party after 28 years. Since then they seems to have been captured by the worst excesses of student extremism and pretty much reject the Enlightenment never mind about classical liberalism.
I actually think Jeremy Corbyn has a stronger grip on reality than the likes of Layla Moran.
A Lib Dem that gets it! Bravo
OK an ex Lib Dem, but still
Yes, the attempts to thwart the 2016 vote were Trumpite, minus the flares and buffalo horns. It was still a shameful bid to subvert democracy
I could actually vote for a really liberal, really democratic Lib Dem party. Socially relaxed, fiscally prudent, friendly to all our neighbours (including the EU), sound on defence and the union, strong on the Enlightenment, not full of Woke lefty idiots or lying greedy Tories. Sadly, I can’t see that in the LDs right now
"strong on the Enlightenment" - lol.
Yeah, you know: Free Speech. No de facto blasphemy laws. That kinda shit
There were, and are, several 'Enlightenments', just as there were several 'Reformations'.
Yeah but the Enlightenment that matters is one many of us are attached to. Unfortunately, much of the modern left seems content to throw it in the bin. Free speech, democracy, rule of law etc.
Bullshit!
Democracy? The Enlightenment is generally reckoned to have occurred through the 17th and 18th centuries. What was the state of democracy in the UK by 1800? What percentage of the adult population do you think had a vote?
Free Speech? In 1795, the Parliament enacted the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act to suppress the burgeoning Radical movement calling for Parliamentary reform.
Democracy and Free Speech were only won because left-wing activists fought for them.
Rule of Law? Ask Johnson about that one.
Just because the Enlightenment promoted certain ideas doesn't mean the institutions around them magically caught up. The gap between the new thinking and the old way of doing things was what the violent upheavals of the 19th Century was about. And yes, the old left did fight passionately for these things, before the new left started embracing immigration amnesties and blasphemy bans. Or valuing speech based on the identity of who said it rather than its content.
I won't even indulge the whataboutism of the last line.
I don't think the right have a great track record on free speech, democracy or the rule of law.
Indeed, which is why it’s surprising that it’s flipped, with the free speech defenders now mostly on the right and the more censorious attitudes coming from the left. What caused the switch?
Many things, including the death of communism leading to a lack of ideological direction, especially taken in tandem with atheism (remember a lot of left wing thought used to be quite religious: Methodism overlapped with British socialism, for instance)
Identity politics - Woke - rushed to fill the gaping void. Very successfully. As it is a form of secular religion. So it ticked all the boxes
However in a religion the holy thing trumps all else so all the Enlightenment values got dumped in favour of extreme social justice for the intersectionally oppressed
The joke in all of this is that intersectionality is about considering all the different parts of identity. So if you consider race, religion, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, socioeconomic class, you start to get into pretty small segments. If you start adding in other things that affect life experience and treatment, you can add physical attractiveness, height, weight, family size, birth order, rural vs urban, age, medical conditions, neurodivergence and so on. Ultimately, you splice the population down to the individual level, at which point we return to the Enlightenment and liberalism after all.
Its not exactly the same but sort of along the same lines when there was an experiment in Australia to find the "average" Australian - by looking for somebody who was average height , average income , average weight , etc - when they got down to about 7 categories of which they got an average for each category there was nobody in Australia who was actually average!
The average human has one testicle.
I would have thought the median and the mode was zero, while the mean will be around 0.95.
More data needed, given that there are more men than women in the world:
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
So, right now the average human has two balls... but given falling birth rates and an increasingly elderly population, we'll have a very brief period of the average person having one ball, before moving to a world where the average is zero in 12-14 years time.
Not sure it works like that. Cue discussion on mean, median, mode.
Japan has 95 men for every 100 women. Italy is just 93. Russia is a just staggering 86.
Simply, as birth rates fall and societies age, everywhere starts to look more like Italy and Japan. (Although probably not like Russia.)
Now we can argue about whether crossover is 2035, 2045 or 2065, but the world is following the same trends as Italy and Japan.
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
That though is the problem, isn't it? If all you want is news which re-enforces your worldview you end up in an echo chamber as we see in political debate in America and Australia and to an extent here.
Democracy flourishes when a plurality of voices are heard and argument is had across the political divide. If all we hear is what we want to hear we will stagnate politically and I'd argue culturally.
I should watch GB News - I should because it offers a different perspective. I shouldn't be afraid of that - no one should be afraid of hearing arguments which challenge or make you re-evaluate.
I watched GB News when it started up. I wasn't blown away and haven't watched it again. But goodness me it was refreshing to watch a news channel which didn't appear to dislike me. I am quite open to hearing perspectives which are not my own, but being metaphorically bashed over the head constantly by BBC worldview does get tiring.
The biggest problem with GB news is the repetitive nature of its rants. Night after night of a pub bore, with no real indepth discussion or evaluation of evidence, just the same old prejudices. It is simply boring.
So, exactly like Newsnight on the BBC or C4 News, then
As the pber who (probably) posts most links to GB News stories here, no.
Just been doung some constituency surfing and it occurs to me that the laughable 'red wall' threat from Boz supporters is a crock of crap. The red wall realignment is not some magical 2019 phenomena, that was just the year the waters overtopped. Its been a pattern since 2005/2010. Tories have been on the increase in these seats in a very recognisable pattern - increase from 2005 onwards, 2015 saw a levelling or slight dip but a large UKIP vote and falling labour share, increases into 2017 continuing with overtopping and gains 2019. Johnson did NOT deliver the red wall, he was a step in an ongoing process. The trend does not suggest removing him is a reset
There is no doubt however that it was only under Johnson, not May or Cameron that the redwall fell.
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Yes but if @wooliedyed is correct (I have no idea if he is) it means it didn't matter who the PM was. You could have shuffled them around and the last one would have delivered the Redwall. As I say I don't know if this is correct, but if you want to challenge it you have challenge @wooliedyed data not his logic.
Why would the redwall have voted for a Remainer like Hunt? The redwall are economically centrist even centre left historically, socially conservative and pro Brexit.
They didn't vote for Remainer Cameron or Remainer May, even against Corbyn in 2017, they only voted for Leaver Boris in 2019
Simply and demonstrably untrue. The movement in the red wall was much more pronounced in 2017 - Sunderland, Bishop A, Don Valley etc all double digit gains under May. 2019 much smaller gains in votes and Lab fall away leading to gains in seats Data doesnt lie.
That was because of Brexit not May.
It took Remainer May being replaced by Leaver Boris for the Conservatives to actually win them
I've been enjoying this series. There appears to be two series running concurrently: one showing a collection of hits, and another with a very similar collection of hits interspersed with some talking heads. Both are engaging. I quite like the perspectives of people who I wasn't really interested in first time around (e.g. Apache Indian), most of whom come across quite well. Even Wet Wet Wet were interesting. But good grief pop music had gone off the boil by the time 1999 came around.
it is quite gob-stopping to learn that Wuhan was also working on Gain of Function research on Monkeypox. It’s like someone jumping the shark while riding a shark
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
That though is the problem, isn't it? If all you want is news which re-enforces your worldview you end up in an echo chamber as we see in political debate in America and Australia and to an extent here.
Democracy flourishes when a plurality of voices are heard and argument is had across the political divide. If all we hear is what we want to hear we will stagnate politically and I'd argue culturally.
I should watch GB News - I should because it offers a different perspective. I shouldn't be afraid of that - no one should be afraid of hearing arguments which challenge or make you re-evaluate.
I watched GB News when it started up. I wasn't blown away and haven't watched it again. But goodness me it was refreshing to watch a news channel which didn't appear to dislike me. I am quite open to hearing perspectives which are not my own, but being metaphorically bashed over the head constantly by BBC worldview does get tiring.
The biggest problem with GB news is the repetitive nature of its rants. Night after night of a pub bore, with no real indepth discussion or evaluation of evidence, just the same old prejudices. It is simply boring.
So, exactly like Newsnight on the BBC or C4 News, then
Oh come on Leon. That's like equating the Guardian to the Express. Or - let's demo my famous balance - the Times to the Mirror. You can surely untangle quality from political slant.
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
That though is the problem, isn't it? If all you want is news which re-enforces your worldview you end up in an echo chamber as we see in political debate in America and Australia and to an extent here.
Democracy flourishes when a plurality of voices are heard and argument is had across the political divide. If all we hear is what we want to hear we will stagnate politically and I'd argue culturally.
I should watch GB News - I should because it offers a different perspective. I shouldn't be afraid of that - no one should be afraid of hearing arguments which challenge or make you re-evaluate.
I watched GB News when it started up. I wasn't blown away and haven't watched it again. But goodness me it was refreshing to watch a news channel which didn't appear to dislike me. I am quite open to hearing perspectives which are not my own, but being metaphorically bashed over the head constantly by BBC worldview does get tiring.
The biggest problem with GB news is the repetitive nature of its rants. Night after night of a pub bore, with no real indepth discussion or evaluation of evidence, just the same old prejudices. It is simply boring.
I find it a useful antidote to the group-think of the other news channels.
Are the BBC and C4 "centre to centre left" or is it because they try to have a plurality of opinion whereas GB News (which I confess I've not watched) seems, from what I read, to be much less diverse and almost wholly either pro-Government or culturally "anti-left"? I've seen some on here moan about Sky News UK which apparently isn't Sky News Australia.
There's a paradox at work - the requirement for "free speech" on the one hand versus the advantages in a democratic culture of allowing a plurality of opinion.
Would you rather only hear the opinions you support or the views with which you agree or are you willing to be challenged and listen to contrary opinions? I'm in the latter camp.
We live in a largely free market economy in TV now as much as elsewhere, as I said if the Guardian wants to start a Woke left TV channel it can do. I sometimes listen to the main BBC news at 10pm or the ITV news at the same time, otherwise I now get most of my news and discussion from GB news which matches my worldview more
That though is the problem, isn't it? If all you want is news which re-enforces your worldview you end up in an echo chamber as we see in political debate in America and Australia and to an extent here.
Democracy flourishes when a plurality of voices are heard and argument is had across the political divide. If all we hear is what we want to hear we will stagnate politically and I'd argue culturally.
I should watch GB News - I should because it offers a different perspective. I shouldn't be afraid of that - no one should be afraid of hearing arguments which challenge or make you re-evaluate.
I watched GB News when it started up. I wasn't blown away and haven't watched it again. But goodness me it was refreshing to watch a news channel which didn't appear to dislike me. I am quite open to hearing perspectives which are not my own, but being metaphorically bashed over the head constantly by BBC worldview does get tiring.
The biggest problem with GB news is the repetitive nature of its rants. Night after night of a pub bore, with no real indepth discussion or evaluation of evidence, just the same old prejudices. It is simply boring.
So, exactly like Newsnight on the BBC or C4 News, then
Oh come on Leon. That's like equating the Guardian to the Express. Or - let's demo my famous balance - the Times to the Mirror. You can surely untangle quality from political slant.
No, it’s not. You’re just so used to TV news being biased heavily in favour of YOUR wearying and intellectually mediocre liberal bullshit, you don’t notice it.
It’s like not noticing that you are in a comfortable warm bath at just the right temperature. Why should you worry? It’s lovely. Maybe a few more bubbles would be nice, and a glass of decent English fizz
Comments
Gender Ratio in the World in 2021 is 101.68 males per 100 females
https://statisticstimes.com/demographics/world-sex-ratio.php
I've been saying this for months, perhaps they should read my posts.
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/government-cost-of-living-policies-fall-flat-damaged-prime-minister-polls
Had Hunt been Tory leader in 2019 he would not have had the appeal Boris did in the redwall and would almost certainly not have gained as many seats there as Boris did
Well, we've been saying their performances are a load of balls, anyway.
The Red Wall is gone and you are out unless you have a new leader who is somehow more charismatic than Johnson, which doesn't exist.
So your choices are new leader to shore up the South or a new leader to try and hold the North and then you lose the South.
I don't think you quite realise what a delicate position you are in. 2019's coalition is basically impossible to hold together without Corbyn at the helm of Labour.
So what is your solution, please I would love to hear it.
Thankfully, we have Mordaunt.
Wouldn't have expected that.
So, right now the average human has two balls... but given falling birth rates and an increasingly elderly population, we'll have a very brief period of the average person having one ball, before moving to a world where the average is zero in 12-14 years time.
Partly because there's no clear successor within the Cabinet (and the idea it could be someone from outside the cabinet is fanciful IMO) but mainly because he was elected in 2019 with a near landslide and the highest popular share of the vote for the Conservatives since 1970 - After giving him such a strong endorsement it should be for the British people to remove him at the next election.
Generally I'm not a fan of parties removing elected Prime Ministers, mind. I always felt Maggie should have been allowed to fight the 1992 election and removing her actually caused for more problems for the Conservatives than if they'd just let her go to the election and been defeated.
Same with the way Labour effectively ousted Blair for Brown something from which even now they've still not recovered from.
Theresa May is the exception, ousting her was the correct decision as the electorate basically stripped her of her authority in the 2017 election.
Cue discussion on mean, median, mode.
If you have watery eyes and a runny nose, is that covid or monkeypox? I don't have Hay fever btw.
Simply, as birth rates fall and societies age, everywhere starts to look more like Italy and Japan. (Although probably not like Russia.)
Now we can argue about whether crossover is 2035, 2045 or 2065, but the world is following the same trends as Italy and Japan.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2022/06/03/real-madrid-demand-answers-uefa-champions-league-final-chaos/
"Uefa wishes to sincerely apologise to all spectators who had to experience or witness frightening and distressing events in the build-up to the Uefa Champions League final... on a night, which should have been a celebration of European club football," a statement said. "No football fan should be put in that situation, and it must not happen again."
Data rather than misty eyed Boris bollocks for me!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
China - 1.11
India - 1.11
The developed world 1.05/1.06
Malawi/Kenya - 1.02 (!)
Kazakhstan - 0.94 (!!)
Nauru - 0.84 (!!!)
It's intriguing to me that most of Africa is 1.02/03.
I’d like to think we’ve progressed just a little.
No, it really isn’t
You’re too smart for this intellectually lazy, myopic bullshit
And I don't think the views of JK Rowling etc are throwback to a bygone age.
This is a fight that I believe will never end - it will always be a tug of war between free speech advocates and those who, for a million different reasons, think certain aspects of this freedom should be removed. What is important is to remember the misattributed words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall describing the philosophy of Voltaire.
Freedom of speech is no freedom if you only apply it to those you agree with.
No, not the women
But they are not the worst culprit. No, the worst culprit - at birth - is a European country, a member of EFTA no less, where males outnumber females 1.26 to 1 at birth.
I am quite open to hearing perspectives which are not my own, but being metaphorically bashed over the head constantly by BBC worldview does get tiring.
I think it will lead to some interesting holds against the grain whilst the blue wall struggles and if a recovery towards 40% occurs under a new leader then i see a handful against the head. Will be looking closely at Donny, Normanton, Sunderland etc if Lab and Tory come in towards 40 nearer polling day.
Three of the guys from the stag weekend I was on last weekend have come down with those symptoms and tested positive. I await my fate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/us/politics/trump-pence-safety-jan-6.html
Almost a week later. He is indignant!
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-cant-ignore-the-booing-they-should-be-his-crowd-mq80k08m8
Ca suffit. I am off to Tbilisi’s biggest Carrefour to buy some olive oil and hopefully some decent tonic. Ah, the exotic excitement!
I recommend gin with the tonic, rather than olive oil.
The Council elections in Wakefield MBC were spectacularly woeful for the Conservatives. Normanton is a long, long way off on those figures.
What's been interesting for a while is how some of the Red Wall is moving to the Tories at Council levels too. Suggesting it's bedded in, positive Tory support.
Whilst other bits aren't at all. Indeed went quite quickly backwards. West Yorkshire is one of these. Suggesting it isn't.
It means you've been watching too many of those straight-to-TV movies on the Hallmark channel.
"Buzz off, killjoys – sneaking into illicit films is a teenage pleasure
Plans to introduce Home Office-backed ID checks in cinemas are a wearying bit of state-sponsored joylessness. Let kids get their kicks
Tim Robey"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/buzz-killjoys-sneaking-illicit-films-teenage-pleasure/
They didn't vote for Remainer Cameron or Remainer May, even against Corbyn in 2017, they only voted for Leaver Boris in 2019
This estimate puts the number of males at 65 million more than females in the world:
https://m.statisticstimes.com/demographics/world-sex-ratio.php#:~:text=Gender ratio in the World&text=The population of females in,101.68 males per 100 females.
Yes, some of the movement is bedded in for sure
Queen’s thanksgiving service: Boos and jeers for Boris Johnson outside St Paul’s
https://twitter.com/NadineDorries/status/1532778456072732672
Best privatise The Times. https://twitter.com/nadinedorries/status/1532778456072732672
For adults with 75” screens at home, a pause button on the movie, and no room full of idiots on their phones and talking to each other, they’re sticking with the living room.
The movement in the red wall was much more pronounced in 2017 - Sunderland, Bishop A, Don Valley etc all double digit gains under May. 2019 much smaller gains in votes and Lab fall away leading to gains in seats
Data doesnt lie.
https://twitter.com/ffgqc/status/1532734586219790336
It took Remainer May being replaced by Leaver Boris for the Conservatives to actually win them
NIH, Wuhan were working on monkeypox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E6cD-VWhQY
Flying saucer hat lifts off as royals and guests don jaunty headwear
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/jun/03/flying-saucer-hat-royals-kate-meghan-carrie-johnson-jubilee?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
But good grief pop music had gone off the boil by the time 1999 came around.
WHAT NEXT??
Do I go for Borgen, or The Last Kingdom??
(I’m saving Stranger Things)
And if I go Borgen, do I need to bother with seasons 2 and 3 which are ancient yet which I somehow missed?
TAK
It’s like not noticing that you are in a comfortable warm bath at just the right temperature. Why should you worry? It’s lovely. Maybe a few more bubbles would be nice, and a glass of decent English fizz