“Whenever this election is we need someone who appeals to first-time voters in red wall, liberal voters in the south and metropolitan voters in London. If you think Jeremy Hunt is that person then good luck to you.” Some ministers believe that Johnson is the victim of retribution from Theresa May’s allies as they defended the government’s relatively passive approach this week.
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
You're rebutting a point I didn't make. I said east coast. Not east of England. Here are the Top Ten Leave districts.
1 Boston 2 South Holland 3 Castle Point 4 Thurrock 5 Great Yarmouth 6 Fenland 7 Mansfield 8 Bolsover 9 East Lindsey 10 North East Lincolnshire
7 are on the East Coast. None of the top six, and only 3 in total can, by any stretch, be described as "Red Wall". Leave wasn't won in the Red Wall. Incidentally. This maps on to yesterday's Anglo-Saxon/Parliamentarian axis.
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 posted the data for people to consider, im not going to bother arguing in circles about it.
And if I go Borgen, do I need to bother with seasons 2 and 3 which are ancient yet which I somehow missed?
TAK
I haven't watched Borgen, but I enjoyed the Last Kingdom. The origin story for England.
I really like The Last Kingdom, but it’s kind of a treat. So I save it up
Period dramas about the British Dark Ages (one of my favourite historical eras) don’t come around very often, so they are cherished. Often they are ridiculously ahistorical, or infused with unicorns and spells, and yuk. I don’t mind unicorns and spells but if you’re going that way then go the whole hog and have demons and dragons
The Last Kingdom is reasonably true to history, apart from the costumes (too smart and neat) the buildings (insanely well made for AD 700) and the clean healthy people. And lots of other things. But still, it’s fun
But maybe it’s time for a bit of sweary Borgen.
This is the most boring comment I have ever written. It is essentially the PB equivalent of me burping the alphabet
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!
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.
I gave up on music in 1998 because it had gone downhill so much. 1977 to 1997 was the interesting period IMO.
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 posted the data for people to consider, im not going to bother arguing in circles about it.
In Don Valley and Sunderland the Conservative voteshare actually fell in 2015 for example under Cameron despite being up nationally. It saw a big rise in 2017 there after Brexit but it took Boris as leader for the Conservatives to actually gain seats like Bishop Auckland and Don Valley
EU member state officials have been briefed on what to expect from next week’s UK legislation disapplying parts of the NI Protocol
By all accounts the EU is expecting the worst, that London is going “all in”, completely rewriting the Protocol so that it is changed immediately (the bill takes effect), not just that ministers will have the powers to disapply parts of the Protocol at some point in the future
Views among member states said to range from frustration to “outrage”. The UK is just writing a new Protocol it likes, says one source
Response from the EU next week expected to be “low key but firm”
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 like it this way - no nasty sun or horrible heat.
We have home made hot soup dumplings here ... and NZ and Aussie wine. And I am already more than well off on the ladies front.
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.
Yeah. It's a myth Boris was spectacularly and uniquely successful. He put on 1.2 % of the vote and gained an extra 330k votes than the "disastrous" Mrs May. Who put on 2.3 million extra and 5.5 %. The difference was that Corbyn was a busted flush in 2019.
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 posted the data for people to consider, im not going to bother arguing in circles about it.
In Don Valley and Sunderland the Conservative voteshare actually fell in 2015 for example under Cameron despite being up nationally. It saw a big rise in 2017 after Brexit but it took Boris as leader for the Conservatives to actually gain seats like Bishop Auckland and Don Valley
Ive covered 2015 in my previous posts when i described the pattern. Gaining seats is a process not a one off random event. The process of gaining in the red wall is not a 2019 standalone. Boris would not have gained anything had the work not been out in before
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
"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.
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 posted the data for people to consider, im not going to bother arguing in circles about it.
In Don Valley and Sunderland the Conservative voteshare actually fell in 2015 for example under Cameron despite being up nationally. It saw a big rise in 2017 after Brexit but it took Boris as leader for the Conservatives to actually gain seats like Bishop Auckland and Don Valley
Ive covered 2015 in my previous posts when i described the pattern. Gaining seats is a process not a one off random event. The process of gaining in the red wall is not a 2019 standalone. Boris would not have gained anything had the work not been out in before
The extra work before in 2017 was entirely down to Brexit and Boris of course led the Leave campaign in 2016 when Cameron and May backed Remain.
So whichever way you look at it the redwall fell due to Boris and Brexit
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 posted the data for people to consider, im not going to bother arguing in circles about it.
In Don Valley and Sunderland the Conservative voteshare actually fell in 2015 for example under Cameron despite being up nationally. It saw a big rise in 2017 after Brexit but it took Boris as leader for the Conservatives to actually gain seats like Bishop Auckland and Don Valley
Ive covered 2015 in my previous posts when i described the pattern. Gaining seats is a process not a one off random event. The process of gaining in the red wall is not a 2019 standalone. Boris would not have gained anything had the work not been out in before
Yeah. It's like arguing you need to score three to win a football game. Not if your opponent also scores three. Yes if they only get one.
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.
Even China and India?
Mr P is doing his best to equalise the Russian one...
THEY ARE FLENSING THE WHALE AND IT LOOKS REALLY DRAMATIC, THE BLOOD OOZING OFF THE WHALE FAT ONTO THE GREENLANDIC SNOW. THIS IS MAYBE A SYMBOL OF MENSTRUATION? IS THAT THE THEME HERE?
WAIT. NOW THERE’S A MAN IN A JUMPER DRINKING TEA, LOOKING SATISFIED
THEY ARE FLENSING THE WHALE AND IT LOOKS REALLY DRAMATIC, THE BLOOD OOZING OFF THE WHALE FAT ONTO THE GREENLANDIC SNOW. THIS IS MAYBE A SYMBOL OF MENSTRUATION? IS THAT THE THEME HERE?
WAIT. NOW THERE’S A MAN IN A JUMPER DRINKING TEA, LOOKING SATISFIED
Symbolic of male dominance and the need for radical woke reform
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 posted the data for people to consider, im not going to bother arguing in circles about it.
In Don Valley and Sunderland the Conservative voteshare actually fell in 2015 for example under Cameron despite being up nationally. It saw a big rise in 2017 after Brexit but it took Boris as leader for the Conservatives to actually gain seats like Bishop Auckland and Don Valley
Ive covered 2015 in my previous posts when i described the pattern. Gaining seats is a process not a one off random event. The process of gaining in the red wall is not a 2019 standalone. Boris would not have gained anything had the work not been out in before
Yeah. It's like arguing you need to score three to win a football game. Not if your opponent also scores three. Yes if they only get one.
Or perhaps Liverpool didn't lose the title on the last day, they lost it earlier in the season, perhaps on Boxing Day at the King Power. After that they just couldn't catch up.
General Elections as football scores. 1997. Labour 6-0. 2001. Labour 6-0. 2005. Labour 1-0. (Penalty. Blatant dive). 2010. 0-0. 2015. Tories 1-0. 2017. 3-3. Tories sat back after being 3 up after 10 minutes. 2019. Tories 3-0.
Years ago, I read of a study that concluded that the sex ratio at birth changed slightly with prosperity. Wealthy women were slightly more likely to have males, poor women, females.
The evolutionary explanation was that males are riskier bets, more likely to have many children, and more likely to have none, than females. So, poor women were more likely to take the safer sex, than wealthy women. (I don't recall whether a physiological explanation was given for a possible mechanism for the pattern.)
That seems plausible to me, but evolutionary explanations have produced so many "just so" stories that I mention it only as an interesting possibility.
(Incidentally, in the US currently, evolutionary explanations for human behavior are "unfashionable". Which is unfortunate, since it discourages so many promising lines of inquiry.)
"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.
I am in another demographic although homeless and separating with wife soon so could be in the first demographic . To me I like the cinema and indeed went today to see "Men" . I lack the discipline these days to avoid the temptation to fast forward , switch off at first hint of boredom , do other things when watching a film on TV or Netflix so find the cinema keeps that discipline as you are forced to sit there in a way
THEY ARE FLENSING THE WHALE AND IT LOOKS REALLY DRAMATIC, THE BLOOD OOZING OFF THE WHALE FAT ONTO THE GREENLANDIC SNOW. THIS IS MAYBE A SYMBOL OF MENSTRUATION? IS THAT THE THEME HERE?
WAIT. NOW THERE’S A MAN IN A JUMPER DRINKING TEA, LOOKING SATISFIED
Maybe you could do a Leon gogglebox on twitch. You might find yourself an unexpectedly large audience.
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 posted the data for people to consider, im not going to bother arguing in circles about it.
In Don Valley and Sunderland the Conservative voteshare actually fell in 2015 for example under Cameron despite being up nationally. It saw a big rise in 2017 after Brexit but it took Boris as leader for the Conservatives to actually gain seats like Bishop Auckland and Don Valley
Ive covered 2015 in my previous posts when i described the pattern. Gaining seats is a process not a one off random event. The process of gaining in the red wall is not a 2019 standalone. Boris would not have gained anything had the work not been out in before
Yeah. It's like arguing you need to score three to win a football game. Not if your opponent also scores three. Yes if they only get one.
Or perhaps Liverpool didn't lose the title on the last day, they lost it earlier in the season, perhaps on Boxing Day at the King Power. After that they just couldn't catch up.
As I understand it, one of the reasons for male preference in China is that the first-born boys are responsible for their parents in their old age. (In the US, daughters are far more likely to do most of that care.)
"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.
I am in another demographic although homeless and separating with wife soon so could be in the first demographic . To me I like the cinema and indeed went today to see "Men" . I lack the discipline these days to avoid the temptation to fast forward , switch off at first hint of boredom , do other things when watching a film on TV or Netflix so find the cinema keeps that discipline as you are forced to sit there in a way
Some films are just better on a big screen. The new Top Gun for example.
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.
Which BBC programmes are you talking about?
All of them
Well not all of them. News, obviously - though surprisingly often an element of impartiality creeps in. Almost all comedy, of course. Almost all drama. Though very occasionally not. Surprisingly often in the bits of sport the BBC still has. Nature documentaries are usually OK, though inevitably have the five minute section at the end about how dreadful humans are. Some music. That Top of the Pops series on the 80s, for example, managed to include little bits in the script about how dreadful the Tories were and how excited everyone in the 90s was that there would soon be a Labour government. And while I like Radio 6, it does have a certain BBC attitude it expects you to share. Quite a lot of its childrens' programming.
Only Connect manages to be on the BBC without hating its viewers. So not only Connect. And Not Going Out too. That doesn't drip BBC condescension either.
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.
As I understand it, one of the reasons for male preference in China is that the first-born boys are responsible for their parents in their old age. (In the US, daughters are far more likely to do most of that care.)
Yes. You literally become part of your husband's family. In practice, it's the daughter-in-law who does the caring. The son the funding. There's also the question of the surname. They are much more important culturally than here. There are only c 4k in total. (45 000 in UK). And the big five totally dominate. So. By having a son you are literally preserving your surname (clan?) There's a widely observed taboo against marrying someone of the same surname.
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.
Which BBC programmes are you talking about?
All of them
Well not all of them. News, obviously - though surprisingly often an element of impartiality creeps in. Almost all comedy, of course. Almost all drama. Though very occasionally not. Surprisingly often in the bits of sport the BBC still has. Nature documentaries are usually OK, though inevitably have the five minute section at the end about how dreadful humans are. Some music. That Top of the Pops series on the 80s, for example, managed to include little bits in the script about how dreadful the Tories were and how excited everyone in the 90s was that there would soon be a Labour government. And while I like Radio 6, it does have a certain BBC attitude it expects you to share. Quite a lot of its childrens' programming.
Only Connect manages to be on the BBC without hating its viewers. So not only Connect. And Not Going Out too. That doesn't drip BBC condescension either.
The BBC is shit. Get rid
If we can’t do it this time, we do it next time, if it doesn’t self destruct (which it will, because it is so Woke it is asleep and cannot see its own demise hurtling towards it)
Everything Woke in the UK must go. PURGE. We will do it. Time is on our side
OK Back to Borgen.
OOH IT’S SET IN DISKO BAY AND ILULLISAT
THERE IS A GREEN HUT BY THE ICEBERGS AND I HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN TO THAT GREEN HUT
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.
Which BBC programmes are you talking about?
All of them
Well not all of them. News, obviously - though surprisingly often an element of impartiality creeps in. Almost all comedy, of course. Almost all drama. Though very occasionally not. Surprisingly often in the bits of sport the BBC still has. Nature documentaries are usually OK, though inevitably have the five minute section at the end about how dreadful humans are. Some music. That Top of the Pops series on the 80s, for example, managed to include little bits in the script about how dreadful the Tories were and how excited everyone in the 90s was that there would soon be a Labour government. And while I like Radio 6, it does have a certain BBC attitude it expects you to share. Quite a lot of its childrens' programming.
Only Connect manages to be on the BBC without hating its viewers. So not only Connect. And Not Going Out too. That doesn't drip BBC condescension either.
BIB - even the choice of sport the BBC has now indicates this to some extent.
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.
Even China and India?
Mr P is doing his best to equalise the Russian one...
Russia is currently just 86 men for every 100 women. If he kills off a bunch of Russian men, that's going to look even worse.
As I understand it, one of the reasons for male preference in China is that the first-born boys are responsible for their parents in their old age. (In the US, daughters are far more likely to do most of that care.)
Yes. You literally become part of your husband's family. In practice, it's the daughter-in-law who does the caring. The son the funding. There's also the question of the surname. They are much more important culturally than here. There are only c 4k in total. And the big five totally dominate. So. By having a son you are literally preserving your surname (clan?) There's a widely observed taboo against marrying someone of the same surname.
The problem in Pacific Rim Asia with dropping fertility rates does seem to me to boil down to this sort of traditional sexism in collision with an educated female generation, with their own jobs and income. To an extent found elsewhere in the world, but particularly acute there. I don't blame them for staying single.
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.
Even China and India?
Mr P is doing his best to equalise the Russian one...
Russia is currently just 86 men for every 100 women. If he kills off a bunch of Russian men, that's going to look even worse.
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.
As I understand it, one of the reasons for male preference in China is that the first-born boys are responsible for their parents in their old age. (In the US, daughters are far more likely to do most of that care.)
Yes. You literally become part of your husband's family. In practice, it's the daughter-in-law who does the caring. The son the funding. There's also the question of the surname. They are much more important culturally than here. There are only c 4k in total. And the big five totally dominate. So. By having a son you are literally preserving your surname (clan?) There's a widely observed taboo against marrying someone of the same surname.
The problem in Pacific Rim Asia with dropping fertility rates does seem to me to boil down to this sort of traditional sexism in collision with an educated female generation, with their own jobs and income. To an extent found elsewhere in the world, but particularly acute there. I don't blame them for staying single.
Yes. Although in the PRC it's becoming so unbalanced anyway. It's like the nineteen twenties in reverse.
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.
Can't believe you are dissing the year that gave us Witch Doctor by the Cartoons.
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.
I guess the boo constitutes the 'act' that causes the annoyance.
It's still quite a strange word salad:
78Intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance (1)A person commits an offence if— (a)the person— (i)does an act, or (ii)omits to do an act that they are required to do by any enactment or rule of law, (b)the person’s act or omission— (i)creates a risk of, or causes, serious harm to the public or a section of the public, or (ii)obstructs the public or a section of the public in the exercise or enjoyment of a right that may be exercised or enjoyed by the public at large, and (c)the person intends that their act or omission will have a consequence mentioned in paragraph (b) or is reckless as to whether it will have such a consequence. (2)In subsection (1)(b)(i) “serious harm” means— (a)death, personal injury or disease, (b)loss of, or damage to, property, or (c)serious distress, serious annoyance, serious inconvenience or serious loss of amenity.
THEY ARE FLENSING THE WHALE AND IT LOOKS REALLY DRAMATIC, THE BLOOD OOZING OFF THE WHALE FAT ONTO THE GREENLANDIC SNOW. THIS IS MAYBE A SYMBOL OF MENSTRUATION? IS THAT THE THEME HERE?
WAIT. NOW THERE’S A MAN IN A JUMPER DRINKING TEA, LOOKING SATISFIED
Maybe you could do a Leon gogglebox on twitch. You might find yourself an unexpectedly large audience.
That crowd outside St Paul's waited hours for the royals. Unlikely to include many left-wingers. A royalist tradition-loving crowd. The PM got booed, or being generous got a mixed reception. Any Tory who can't see the danger is living in a parallel universe. https://twitter.com/iainmartin1/status/1532820829767184385
I really have been to all these Greenlandic places in Borgen. Quite nostalgic
Disko Bay is sensationally beautiful, yet disturbingly hostile
Meanwhile, a Georgian couple is having a massive row in the cobbled street downstairs and I can’t work out if he is about to rape her, she is about to kill him, or the whole think is a drunken nothing
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.
Which BBC programmes are you talking about?
All of them
Well not all of them. News, obviously - though surprisingly often an element of impartiality creeps in. Almost all comedy, of course. Almost all drama. Though very occasionally not. Surprisingly often in the bits of sport the BBC still has. Nature documentaries are usually OK, though inevitably have the five minute section at the end about how dreadful humans are. Some music. That Top of the Pops series on the 80s, for example, managed to include little bits in the script about how dreadful the Tories were and how excited everyone in the 90s was that there would soon be a Labour government. And while I like Radio 6, it does have a certain BBC attitude it expects you to share. Quite a lot of its childrens' programming.
Only Connect manages to be on the BBC without hating its viewers. So not only Connect. And Not Going Out too. That doesn't drip BBC condescension either.
Despite its irritating qualities it is better than all the rest.
Evening all! Had a bloody brilliant day trip with the family down Loch Ness to Fort William. Amazing that we can get up, go "looks like a nice day" and go looking for Nessie. Scotland - yes!
Anyway on topic, had no idea Truss was a LibDem. Had I know that I may not have rejoined the third time...
Downing Street is now more concerned about the loyalty of many of the Prime Minister’s previous supporters, in Tory safe seats in the south of England.
Many of those on the list for this week’s charm offensive represent constituencies in the south-east and south-west of England
➡️ The Telegraph understands that invitations for the meeting of wavering rebels in No10 have not yet been sent, with officials waiting to see whether the threshold has already been crossed before launching the charm offensive
Evening all! Had a bloody brilliant day trip with the family down Loch Ness to Fort William. Amazing that we can get up, go "looks like a nice day" and go looking for Nessie. Scotland - yes!
Anyway on topic, had no idea Truss was a LibDem. Had I know that I may not have rejoined the third time...
By road or cruiser
Twice we hired a cruiser on the Caley canal for a week and it was fabulous, not least navigating the locks at Fort Augustus
We actually had sonar on the cruiser to identify fish and maybe nessie !
Independent reporting Starmer is asked in his questionnaire from Durham Police about the football shirt he was photographed holding up
Interesting development
There was a zoom event that evening - was advertised. Held it up as auctioning it off for donations perhaps? Not that interesting. If campaigning is allowed - and it was allowed - then was said football shirt related to the campaigning event? If yes then its allowed.
And if I go Borgen, do I need to bother with seasons 2 and 3 which are ancient yet which I somehow missed?
TAK
I love The Last Kingdom, but have read the books before I saw it, so that may colour my judgement.
I recently watched and reread the series. Apart from the usual sort of adaptation changes I liked that one of the main changes, as it seemed to me, was just to make Uhtred slightly less of a dick in the show (whilst still a dick), presumably as it lacks his inner monologue about his own actions.
But really in a choice between Borgen and The Last Kingdom you'd really need to know someone's mood I think.
Evening all! Had a bloody brilliant day trip with the family down Loch Ness to Fort William. Amazing that we can get up, go "looks like a nice day" and go looking for Nessie. Scotland - yes!
Anyway on topic, had no idea Truss was a LibDem. Had I know that I may not have rejoined the third time...
By road or cruiser
Twice we hired a cruiser on the Caley canal for a week and it was fabulous, not least navigating the locks at Fort Augustus
Road. Though cruiser would be great! Drove the whole length of the great glen, and the kids haven't been there since they were tiny. Neptune's Staircase at Banavie is still an amazing thing to look at - how long would it take a cruiser to get all the way down?
Evening all! Had a bloody brilliant day trip with the family down Loch Ness to Fort William. Amazing that we can get up, go "looks like a nice day" and go looking for Nessie. Scotland - yes!
Anyway on topic, had no idea Truss was a LibDem. Had I know that I may not have rejoined the third time...
Do you mean Fort Augustus, or do you mean 'down from Loch Ness?'
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.
Which BBC programmes are you talking about?
All of them
Well not all of them. News, obviously - though surprisingly often an element of impartiality creeps in. Almost all comedy, of course. Almost all drama. Though very occasionally not. Surprisingly often in the bits of sport the BBC still has. Nature documentaries are usually OK, though inevitably have the five minute section at the end about how dreadful humans are. Some music. That Top of the Pops series on the 80s, for example, managed to include little bits in the script about how dreadful the Tories were and how excited everyone in the 90s was that there would soon be a Labour government. And while I like Radio 6, it does have a certain BBC attitude it expects you to share. Quite a lot of its childrens' programming.
Only Connect manages to be on the BBC without hating its viewers. So not only Connect. And Not Going Out too. That doesn't drip BBC condescension either.
Despite its irritating qualities it is better than all the rest.
What are “all the rest”?
Meanwhile on “sweary Borgen” I have just heard my first “fuck” and it’s minute 43 of episode 1, season 4
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.
Which BBC programmes are you talking about?
All of them
Well not all of them. News, obviously - though surprisingly often an element of impartiality creeps in. Almost all comedy, of course. Almost all drama. Though very occasionally not. Surprisingly often in the bits of sport the BBC still has. Nature documentaries are usually OK, though inevitably have the five minute section at the end about how dreadful humans are. Some music. That Top of the Pops series on the 80s, for example, managed to include little bits in the script about how dreadful the Tories were and how excited everyone in the 90s was that there would soon be a Labour government. And while I like Radio 6, it does have a certain BBC attitude it expects you to share. Quite a lot of its childrens' programming.
Only Connect manages to be on the BBC without hating its viewers. So not only Connect. And Not Going Out too. That doesn't drip BBC condescension either.
Despite its irritating qualities it is better than all the rest.
What are “all the rest”?
Meanwhile on “sweary Borgen” I have just heard my first “fuck” and it’s minute 43 of episode 1, season 4
Evening all! Had a bloody brilliant day trip with the family down Loch Ness to Fort William. Amazing that we can get up, go "looks like a nice day" and go looking for Nessie. Scotland - yes!
Anyway on topic, had no idea Truss was a LibDem. Had I know that I may not have rejoined the third time...
Do you mean Fort Augustus, or do you mean 'down from Loch Ness?'
All the way down the Great Glen from Inverness to Fort William. Loch Ness is most of it, was shorter to type. Glad we chose to move to the east though - so many midges!
Evening all! Had a bloody brilliant day trip with the family down Loch Ness to Fort William. Amazing that we can get up, go "looks like a nice day" and go looking for Nessie. Scotland - yes!
Anyway on topic, had no idea Truss was a LibDem. Had I know that I may not have rejoined the third time...
By road or cruiser
Twice we hired a cruiser on the Caley canal for a week and it was fabulous, not least navigating the locks at Fort Augustus
Road. Though cruiser would be great! Drove the whole length of the great glen, and the kids haven't been there since they were tiny. Neptune's Staircase at Banavie is still an amazing thing to look at - how long would it take a cruiser to get all the way down?
Did you see Nessie though?
When I was there with Fox Jr 1 and 2 aged 12 and 5, both Fox jr1 and I saw Nessie, but sadly Fox jr2 turned around and by then there were just ripples on the surface, so missed her. We have been teasing him about it since.
An incident so bad that the OO are investigating itself for sectarianism. We are truly though the looking glass.
Oh dear. Quite so, on inspection.
I thought my reservoir of ‘what the fuck is wrong with these people’ was dry, but no.
Usually PB can rustle up some OO defenders no matter what the event. Will they rouse themselves this time?
They're lying on the floor/sofa in an alcoholic stupor after the celebrations of the last 48 hours? (Or last month, depending on which PBer one follows as to the definition of a Jubilee.)
Comments
They don't exist.
1 Boston
2 South Holland
3 Castle Point
4 Thurrock
5 Great Yarmouth
6 Fenland
7 Mansfield
8 Bolsover
9 East Lindsey
10 North East Lincolnshire
7 are on the East Coast. None of the top six, and only 3 in total can, by any stretch, be described as "Red Wall".
Leave wasn't won in the Red Wall.
Incidentally. This maps on to yesterday's Anglo-Saxon/Parliamentarian axis.
Period dramas about the British Dark Ages (one of my favourite historical eras) don’t come around very often, so they are cherished. Often they are ridiculously ahistorical, or infused with unicorns and spells, and yuk. I don’t mind unicorns and spells but if you’re going that way then go the whole hog and have demons and dragons
The Last Kingdom is reasonably true to history, apart from the costumes (too smart and neat) the buildings (insanely well made for AD 700) and the clean healthy people. And lots of other things. But still, it’s fun
But maybe it’s time for a bit of sweary Borgen.
This is the most boring comment I have ever written. It is essentially the PB equivalent of me burping the alphabet
EU member state officials have been briefed on what to expect from next week’s UK legislation disapplying parts of the NI Protocol
By all accounts the EU is expecting the worst, that London is going “all in”, completely rewriting the Protocol so that it is changed immediately (the bill takes effect), not just that ministers will have the powers to disapply parts of the Protocol at some point in the future
Views among member states said to range from frustration to “outrage”. The UK is just writing a new Protocol it likes, says one source
Response from the EU next week expected to be “low key but firm”
We have home made hot soup dumplings here ... and NZ and Aussie wine. And I am already more than well off on the ladies front.
Who put on 2.3 million extra and 5.5 %. The difference was that Corbyn was a busted flush in 2019.
The section in the Act does not mention noise.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/32/section/78/enacted
Has this wording been tightened up?
and with him, they lose badly...
So whichever way you look at it the redwall fell due to Boris and Brexit
Not if your opponent also scores three.
Yes if they only get one.
I’M GOING TO PAUSE IT EVERY THIRTY SECONDS AND GIVE YOU MY OPINION. IN CAPITALS
WAIT. NOW THERE’S A MAN IN A JUMPER DRINKING TEA, LOOKING SATISFIED
Some interesting reports about US intelligence on Putin and kremlin plotting
1997. Labour 6-0.
2001. Labour 6-0.
2005. Labour 1-0. (Penalty. Blatant dive).
2010. 0-0.
2015. Tories 1-0.
2017. 3-3. Tories sat back after being 3 up after 10 minutes.
2019. Tories 3-0.
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1532791022111150082
https://twitter.com/AnnelieseDodds/status/1530311419283001344
The evolutionary explanation was that males are riskier bets, more likely to have many children, and more likely to have none, than females. So, poor women were more likely to take the safer sex, than wealthy women. (I don't recall whether a physiological explanation was given for a possible mechanism for the pattern.)
That seems plausible to me, but evolutionary explanations have produced so many "just so" stories that I mention it only as an interesting possibility.
(Incidentally, in the US currently, evolutionary explanations for human behavior are "unfashionable". Which is unfortunate, since it discourages so many promising lines of inquiry.)
News, obviously - though surprisingly often an element of impartiality creeps in.
Almost all comedy, of course.
Almost all drama. Though very occasionally not.
Surprisingly often in the bits of sport the BBC still has.
Nature documentaries are usually OK, though inevitably have the five minute section at the end about how dreadful humans are.
Some music. That Top of the Pops series on the 80s, for example, managed to include little bits in the script about how dreadful the Tories were and how excited everyone in the 90s was that there would soon be a Labour government. And while I like Radio 6, it does have a certain BBC attitude it expects you to share.
Quite a lot of its childrens' programming.
Only Connect manages to be on the BBC without hating its viewers. So not only Connect. And Not Going Out too. That doesn't drip BBC condescension either.
There's also the question of the surname. They are much more important culturally than here. There are only c 4k in total. (45 000 in UK). And the big five totally dominate.
So. By having a son you are literally preserving your surname (clan?)
There's a widely observed taboo against marrying someone of the same surname.
If we can’t do it this time, we do it next time, if it doesn’t self destruct (which it will, because it is so Woke it is asleep and cannot see its own demise hurtling towards it)
Everything Woke in the UK must go. PURGE. We will do it. Time is on our side
OK Back to Borgen.
OOH IT’S SET IN DISKO BAY AND ILULLISAT
THERE IS A GREEN HUT BY THE ICEBERGS AND I HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN TO THAT GREEN HUT
An incident so bad that the OO are investigating itself for sectarianism. We are truly though the looking glass.
Gardening is what I'm talking about.
Any similarity to other leisure interests is purely coincidental.
Wrong denominator.
Must have mixed up the units.
Not classy. Even by sectarian standards.
It's like the nineteen twenties in reverse.
The #Russian "Solntsepyok" overheated in the sun: propagandists wanted to shoot a frightening video, but something went wrong. https://t.co/AAEEsDWPgv
78Intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance
(1)A person commits an offence if—
(a)the person—
(i)does an act, or
(ii)omits to do an act that they are required to do by any enactment or rule of law,
(b)the person’s act or omission—
(i)creates a risk of, or causes, serious harm to the public or a section of the public, or
(ii)obstructs the public or a section of the public in the exercise or enjoyment of a right that may be exercised or enjoyed by the public at large, and
(c)the person intends that their act or omission will have a consequence mentioned in paragraph (b) or is reckless as to whether it will have such a consequence.
(2)In subsection (1)(b)(i) “serious harm” means—
(a)death, personal injury or disease,
(b)loss of, or damage to, property, or
(c)serious distress, serious annoyance, serious inconvenience or serious loss of amenity.
❗️Don’t let jubilee bunting and booing bury this story. The HO is completely devoid of humanity. — ‘Asylum seekers who went on hunger strike over plans to send them to Rwanda have been threatened with faster deportation by Home Office if they do not eat.’
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/02/home-office-threatens-hunger-strikers-with-faster-deportation-to-rwanda
Interesting development
Everybody said the legislation was shit when it was drafted. Now we find out...
https://twitter.com/iainmartin1/status/1532820829767184385
Disko Bay is sensationally beautiful, yet disturbingly hostile
Meanwhile, a Georgian couple is having a massive row in the cobbled street downstairs and I can’t work out if he is about to rape her, she is about to kill him, or the whole think is a drunken nothing
Maybe wait for the decision of Durham Police which is due by mid July
Anyway on topic, had no idea Truss was a LibDem. Had I know that I may not have rejoined the third time...
🧵👇
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/06/03/number-10-planning-charm-offensive-win-64-rebels-identified/
Downing Street is now more concerned about the loyalty of many of the Prime Minister’s previous supporters, in Tory safe seats in the south of England.
Many of those on the list for this week’s charm offensive represent constituencies in the south-east and south-west of England
➡️ The Telegraph understands that invitations for the meeting of wavering rebels in No10 have not yet been sent, with officials waiting to see whether the threshold has already been crossed before launching the charm offensive
Twice we hired a cruiser on the Caley canal for a week and it was fabulous, not least navigating the locks at Fort Augustus
We actually had sonar on the cruiser to identify fish and maybe nessie !
We can do this all night...
But really in a choice between Borgen and The Last Kingdom you'd really need to know someone's mood I think.
Meanwhile on “sweary Borgen” I have just heard my first “fuck” and it’s minute 43 of episode 1, season 4
Are @kinabalu and NPXMP a tad over-sensitive?
...
The irritation by some of even commenting on a story the independent considers newsworthy is strange
When I was there with Fox Jr 1 and 2 aged 12 and 5, both Fox jr1 and I saw Nessie, but sadly Fox jr2 turned around and by then there were just ripples on the surface, so missed her. We have been teasing him about it since.
I did not invent the story they consider newsworthy