"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
Taking a wild stab, reducing our (already comparatively very low) carbon emissions at a speed that doesn't impoverish the citizenry and wreck the economy. Weren't you complaining about the cost of living the other day? Join the dots.
We literally do not have a choice. The rich can pay for it.
Of course we have a choice. Watch fewer stupid Netflix documentaries.
In the words of Beckett "What about hanging ourselves?" "It'd give us an erection." So yes. We always have a choice.
I can't think of any reasons why Kemi Badenoch shouldn't be the next leader.
No to net zero. A show stopper in my book.
Waiting to hear what Penny’s position is on this.
What you're hearing in that OP line is why Tory members shouldn't be trusted with choosing a leader (and why Labour members are probably in the same boat).
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
Some people mumbling prayers in temples don't believe God exists either. I know. I'm one of them.
If I may ask - Why do you do it?
Because I'm not praying to God. They don't exist. I'll leave it to you to ask where the prayers are directed?
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were also burnt as heretics. Today however unlike many nations of your religion of heritage most Christian nations don't make atheism illegal.
Christ's message however remains as relevant as ever.
His openly gay relationship with John the Disciple certainly speaks to us across the ages
I an a WASP by the way, except the P bit. "Ishmael" is a Moby Dick gag.
No it doesn't just your rude disrespectful attitude, WASP or not
Something something, let thee who casts the first stone etc.
Twitter The Telegraph@Telegraph 🔴 Sajid Javid and Jeremy Hunt have put tax cuts at the heart of the battle for Downing Street, as both MPs declared their candidacies in The Telegraph with pledges to slash corporation tax
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were also burnt as heretics. Today however unlike many nations of your religion of heritage most Christian nations don't make atheism illegal.
Christ's message however remains as relevant as ever.
His openly gay relationship with John the Disciple certainly speaks to us across the ages
I an a WASP by the way, except the P bit. "Ishmael" is a Moby Dick gag.
No it doesn't just your rude disrespectful attitude, WASP or not
I have a great deal of respect for the pioneer gay historical figure Joshua Ben Joseph
Once again, we are seeing prospective Conservative leadership candidates try to win support with completely ridiculous "tax cuts". Does anyone in the Conservative Party realise how serious the economic and public finance situation is?
Unfunded tax cuts (should we now call that the "Sri Lanka" option?) are a one-way ticket to disaster. That's not to say ALL tax cuts are bad - that would be absurd - but it's reasonable to ask where, for example, the £26 billion the Government would lose if it unilaterally gave up fuel duty would be recouped?
Given the pledges of additional spending on defence, Police, the NHS and education, are any of the candidates going to stand up and say how they would fund these tax cuts? Pensions perhaps - a nice 20% cut in State pensions would help and I imagine someone as politically erudite as a Sunak, Hunt or Badenoch could explain to the pensioners how that will work and not lose a single vote.
Back in the real world, how are these tax cuts to be funded? Where will any public spending cuts be made? Care for vulnerable adults and children perhaps? Libraries maybe? Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
Which merely shows the insane savagery of religion and why it deserves to be heavily constrained.
I'm sure that'll please the shire Tories. He's gone in round two.
If I understand you correctly, Tory heartlands mighty fed up with all this preferential treatment for the red wall, the sane approach for next leader is to go quiet on this stuff?
If so I think you spot on. I suspect anger and resentment at this impartiality is fuelling the Lib Dem success in Blue Wall.
Conclusion: Team Boris was daft as a brush, but not to learn the lessons, dafter.
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
Which merely shows the insane savagery of religion and why it deserves to be heavily constrained.
In your view, not mine.
For me the Christian message remains as strong as ever, Jesus himself never threatened stake burnings for non believers
This is insane. Cutting corporation tax by 10% will cost billions, and the optics of a "tax cut for corporations" in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis are terrible.
I'm increasingly thinking this is going to come down to Sunak vs the frothing rightwinger du jour (Braverman, Badenoch, Patel).
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
I'm sure that'll please the shire Tories. He's gone in round two.
If I understand you correctly, Tory heartlands mighty fed up with all this preferential treatment for the red wall, the sane approach for next leader is to go quiet on this stuff?
If so I think you spot on. I suspect anger and resentment at this impartiality is fuelling the Lib Dem success in Blue Wall.
Conclusion: Team Boris was daft as a brush, but not to learn the lessons, dafter.
Yes, apologies, sarcasm doesn't propagate well on the internet. That's exactly what I'm saying. Cutting business rates is not a stupid idea in and of itself as it's a tax that often falls on small businesses. Cutting business rates in the midlands to try to win some votes at the expense of a core vote that's already buggering off to the Yellow Team is exceptionally unwise. Doing that, while cutting taxes that will mainly benefit larger businesses is suicidally stupid. If you're going to cut taxes, target it wisely so that money circulates through the entire economy, not so that you can get some votes out of Redcar and please your pals in the city.
This is insane. Cutting corporation tax by 10% will cost billions, and the optics of a "tax cut for corporations" in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis are terrible.
I'm increasingly thinking this is going to come down to Sunak vs the frothing rightwinger du jour (Braverman, Badenoch, Patel).
The current rate is 19%, which was scheduled to raise to 25% next year. The theory is that the 15% rate attracts multinational companies - Ireland waves hello - and that the planned rise will push companies, especially companies that trade heavily with EU, offshore.
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
Sunak said a while ago that they're losing money on VAT because of the economy cooling down. People buy less stuff, less VAT gets collected, and there's only so much inflation mitigates against that. Plus, government expenditure also rises in line with inflation, through increased wage bills and rising costs.
Once again, we are seeing prospective Conservative leadership candidates try to win support with completely ridiculous "tax cuts". Does anyone in the Conservative Party realise how serious the economic and public finance situation is?
Unfunded tax cuts (should we now call that the "Sri Lanka" option?) are a one-way ticket to disaster. That's not to say ALL tax cuts are bad - that would be absurd - but it's reasonable to ask where, for example, the £26 billion the Government would lose if it unilaterally gave up fuel duty would be recouped?
Given the pledges of additional spending on defence, Police, the NHS and education, are any of the candidates going to stand up and say how they would fund these tax cuts? Pensions perhaps - a nice 20% cut in State pensions would help and I imagine someone as politically erudite as a Sunak, Hunt or Badenoch could explain to the pensioners how that will work and not lose a single vote.
Back in the real world, how are these tax cuts to be funded? Where will any public spending cuts be made? Care for vulnerable adults and children perhaps? Libraries maybe? Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
We should hold a public vote as to where Parliament should be moved to as I suspect the final place would be somewhere no politician would want to live in..
Once again, we are seeing prospective Conservative leadership candidates try to win support with completely ridiculous "tax cuts". Does anyone in the Conservative Party realise how serious the economic and public finance situation is?
Unfunded tax cuts (should we now call that the "Sri Lanka" option?) are a one-way ticket to disaster. That's not to say ALL tax cuts are bad - that would be absurd - but it's reasonable to ask where, for example, the £26 billion the Government would lose if it unilaterally gave up fuel duty would be recouped?
The government is already committed to giving up fuel duty at the shrine of the futile net zero.
This is insane. Cutting corporation tax by 10% will cost billions, and the optics of a "tax cut for corporations" in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis are terrible.
I'm increasingly thinking this is going to come down to Sunak vs the frothing rightwinger du jour (Braverman, Badenoch, Patel).
The current rate is 19%, which was scheduled to raise to 25% next year. The theory is that the 15% rate attracts multinational companies - Ireland waves hello.
Firstly it won’t, and secondly we’ve only just negotiated a deal for the world to increase corporate tax rates as it’s just lost tax revenue…
This is insane. Cutting corporation tax by 10% will cost billions, and the optics of a "tax cut for corporations" in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis are terrible.
I'm increasingly thinking this is going to come down to Sunak vs the frothing rightwinger du jour (Braverman, Badenoch, Patel).
The current rate is 19%, which was scheduled to raise to 25% next year. The theory is that the 15% rate attracts multinational companies - Ireland waves hello.
I suspect on tax cutting the response from the tory membership will be: is that it? Why aren't we slashing income tax to 15% and giving aged pensioners with large houses a special Brexit Bonus of £10,000?
This is insane. Cutting corporation tax by 10% will cost billions, and the optics of a "tax cut for corporations" in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis are terrible.
I'm increasingly thinking this is going to come down to Sunak vs the frothing rightwinger du jour (Braverman, Badenoch, Patel).
The current rate is 19%, which was scheduled to raise to 25% next year. The theory is that the 15% rate attracts multinational companies - Ireland waves hello.
Ireland is in the EU, which helps. The UK has a lot going for it, but if I were looking at the UK as an investment opportunity, with the potential for an EU trade war and serious labour shortages I'd be seriously tempted to hold off. Not sure even a 4% corporation tax cut helps. And that doesn't address the optics (and moral) problem of cutting taxes for a large chunk of very rich companies when people are having to decide between food and fuel.
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
Sunak said a while ago that they're losing money on VAT because of the economy cooling down. People buy less stuff, less VAT gets collected, and there's only so much inflation mitigates against that. Plus, government expenditure also rises in line with inflation, through increased wage bills and rising costs.
So you are making a good argument for tax cuts then, to pep a cooling economy?
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
Sunak said a while ago that they're losing money on VAT because of the economy cooling down. People buy less stuff, less VAT gets collected, and there's only so much inflation mitigates against that. Plus, government expenditure also rises in line with inflation, through increased wage bills and rising costs.
All of which pales into relative insignificance, compared to what a couple of years of 10% inflation does to the national debt. The Treasury Blob thinks 10% inflation and £2 petrol are brilliant, especially if they can keep the public sector pay rises down.
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
This is insane. Cutting corporation tax by 10% will cost billions, and the optics of a "tax cut for corporations" in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis are terrible.
I'm increasingly thinking this is going to come down to Sunak vs the frothing rightwinger du jour (Braverman, Badenoch, Patel).
The current rate is 19%, which was scheduled to raise to 25% next year. The theory is that the 15% rate attracts multinational companies - Ireland waves hello - and that the planned rise will push companies, especially companies that trade heavily with EU, offshore.
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
Sunak said a while ago that they're losing money on VAT because of the economy cooling down. People buy less stuff, less VAT gets collected, and there's only so much inflation mitigates against that. Plus, government expenditure also rises in line with inflation, through increased wage bills and rising costs.
So you are making a good argument for tax cuts then, to pep a cooling economy?
The Tories think there are two times when you should cut taxes:
When the economy is growing, as the government needs to spend less;
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
Sunak said a while ago that they're losing money on VAT because of the economy cooling down. People buy less stuff, less VAT gets collected, and there's only so much inflation mitigates against that. Plus, government expenditure also rises in line with inflation, through increased wage bills and rising costs.
So you are making a good argument for tax cuts then, to pep a cooling economy?
Nope, we are just going to see less tax revenue, cutting taxes further would just exacerbate that issue.
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
Which merely shows the insane savagery of religion and why it deserves to be heavily constrained.
In your view, not mine.
For me the Christian message remains as strong as ever, Jesus himself never threatened stake burnings for non believers
Well, if Christ never threatened such actions, why did his followers do it in his name?
Why bother with cutting CT - that doesn't put anything extra into people's pockets.
OK, fair enough to scrap the increase coming - but if you want to pledge tax cuts then surely you want to put it straight into people's pockets.
By the way is anyone saying what cuts in spending they will make to fund the tax cuts?
No. There aren't any easy cuts to make. Folk are moaning about health already. There is a serious issue regarding staffing schools in September. No one can recruit for social care. Can't get a passport or driving licence. Nor anyone to answer phones. Let alone the paperwork for Brexit. Nowt left to privatise. Even if that were popular any more. And outlining any of this is a sure fire way to not win this contest.
Looks like “levelling up” is being roundly ditched. As I warned when @Tissue_Price made his move against Boris.
The Tory party is returning to pandering to the interests of the wealthy retired south-east Tory members/voters.
Fuck the north.
Fuck levelling up.
Core vote policy - try and stop Liberals from taking heartland seats.
Not a totally insane approach.
Southern Tories aren't generally reactionary on green issues and not fanatically opposed to levelling up. Predominantly retired, I don't think they'll be terribly interested in lower corporation tax either. They like low taxes and restrictions on "unsuitable" housing development.
I guess what we're seeing, entirely predictably, is candidates throwing out policies that will appeal to the immediate electorate: that is, Conservative MPs and party members.
Which is a wizzo strategy to lead the country for another year or two. It's also a wizzo strategy for crashing to a historic defeat at GE 2024 and ushering in eight years of Labour, possibly with the bonus prize of PR meaning you'll never get a majority again.
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
Sunak said a while ago that they're losing money on VAT because of the economy cooling down. People buy less stuff, less VAT gets collected, and there's only so much inflation mitigates against that. Plus, government expenditure also rises in line with inflation, through increased wage bills and rising costs.
So you are making a good argument for tax cuts then, to pep a cooling economy?
As much as the Tory party's obsession with tax cuts grinds my gears, cuts in personal taxes can be a useful method in a time of national crisis to keep the economy going. What it doesn't do is pay itself back. You are applying stimulus to help people through difficult times. That is what it needs to be seen as. It isn't going to make things better in and of itself, nor is it going to magically stimulate enough economic growth to up the exchequer's total take.
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
Which merely shows the insane savagery of religion and why it deserves to be heavily constrained.
In your view, not mine.
For me the Christian message remains as strong as ever, Jesus himself never threatened stake burnings for non believers
Mind, his "dad" seemed to take great delight in killing the first born in Egypt and drowning every living thing that wasn't on Noah's Ark.
I wouldn't want to spill his pint in the local Spoons!
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
Which merely shows the insane savagery of religion and why it deserves to be heavily constrained.
In your view, not mine.
For me the Christian message remains as strong as ever, Jesus himself never threatened stake burnings for non believers
Mind, his "dad" seemed to take great delight in killing the first born in Egypt and drowning every living thing that wasn't on Noah's Ark.
I wouldn't want to spill his pint in the local Spoons!
In the first case to free the Jews from Egypt.
Though if you follow the Old Testament alone you are Jewish not Christian
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
Sunak said a while ago that they're losing money on VAT because of the economy cooling down. People buy less stuff, less VAT gets collected, and there's only so much inflation mitigates against that. Plus, government expenditure also rises in line with inflation, through increased wage bills and rising costs.
So you are making a good argument for tax cuts then, to pep a cooling economy?
As much as the Tory party's obsession with tax cuts grinds my gears, cuts in personal taxes can be a useful method in a time of national crisis to keep the economy going. What it doesn't do is pay itself back. You are applying stimulus to help people through difficult times. That is what it needs to be seen as. It isn't going to make things better in and of itself, nor is it going to magically stimulate enough economic growth to up the exchequer's total take.
It's called Keynesianism. It's been around for some time.
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
Which merely shows the insane savagery of religion and why it deserves to be heavily constrained.
In your view, not mine.
For me the Christian message remains as strong as ever, Jesus himself never threatened stake burnings for non believers
Mind, his "dad" seemed to take great delight in killing the first born in Egypt and drowning every living thing that wasn't on Noah's Ark.
I wouldn't want to spill his pint in the local Spoons!
I saw a sign up on the local evangelical church with John 14:6 on it ("No one comes to my father except through me") and for the life of me I couldn't hear it in any other voice than Ray Winston and see any other image than a bearded bouncer outside an East London nightclub.
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
Sunak said a while ago that they're losing money on VAT because of the economy cooling down. People buy less stuff, less VAT gets collected, and there's only so much inflation mitigates against that. Plus, government expenditure also rises in line with inflation, through increased wage bills and rising costs.
So you are making a good argument for tax cuts then, to pep a cooling economy?
As much as the Tory party's obsession with tax cuts grinds my gears, cuts in personal taxes can be a useful method in a time of national crisis to keep the economy going. What it doesn't do is pay itself back. You are applying stimulus to help people through difficult times. That is what it needs to be seen as. It isn't going to make things better in and of itself, nor is it going to magically stimulate enough economic growth to up the exchequer's total take.
So as we go into the early part of the recession, I may have more money in pocket and sales on in the shops, so the boots I have been looking at may be easier to buy? Good times for compulsive shoppers 🤗
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
Sunak said a while ago that they're losing money on VAT because of the economy cooling down. People buy less stuff, less VAT gets collected, and there's only so much inflation mitigates against that. Plus, government expenditure also rises in line with inflation, through increased wage bills and rising costs.
So you are making a good argument for tax cuts then, to pep a cooling economy?
As much as the Tory party's obsession with tax cuts grinds my gears, cuts in personal taxes can be a useful method in a time of national crisis to keep the economy going. What it doesn't do is pay itself back. You are applying stimulus to help people through difficult times. That is what it needs to be seen as. It isn't going to make things better in and of itself, nor is it going to magically stimulate enough economic growth to up the exchequer's total take.
It's called Keynesianism. It's been around for some time.
Oh come now, has my red cred not been well enough established yet? Counter-cyclic economics is very much my jam.
Mr Javid reels off the cost of each measure and says he would fund the package from a mixture of the £32 billion fiscal headroom forecast to be available by 2024-25, and an efficiency savings programme that would see 1 per cent cut from all Whitehall spending, including on the NHS.
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
Which merely shows the insane savagery of religion and why it deserves to be heavily constrained.
In your view, not mine.
For me the Christian message remains as strong as ever, Jesus himself never threatened stake burnings for non believers
Mind, his "dad" seemed to take great delight in killing the first born in Egypt and drowning every living thing that wasn't on Noah's Ark.
I wouldn't want to spill his pint in the local Spoons!
I saw a sign up on the local evangelical church with John 14:6 on it ("No one comes to my father except through me") and for the life of me I couldn't hear it in any other voice than Ray Winston and see any other image than a bearded bouncer outside an East London nightclub.
That's a little Calvinist. "Your name's not dahnn, you're not getting in."
Mr Javid reels off the cost of each measure and says he would fund the package from a mixture of the £32 billion fiscal headroom forecast to be available by 2024-25, and an efficiency savings programme that would see 1 per cent cut from all Whitehall spending, including on the NHS.
"Highland Park shooting suspect’s mother was convicted of abandoning him in hot car when he was two Highland Park Police responded to at least nine domestic disputes between Robert Crimo’s parents from 2010 to 2014"
I guess what we're seeing, entirely predictably, is candidates throwing out policies that will appeal to the immediate electorate: that is, Conservative MPs and party members.
Which is a wizzo strategy to lead the country for another year or two. It's also a wizzo strategy for crashing to a historic defeat at GE 2024 and ushering in eight years of Labour, possibly with the bonus prize of PR meaning you'll never get a majority again.
Mr Javid reels off the cost of each measure and says he would fund the package from a mixture of the £32 billion fiscal headroom forecast to be available by 2024-25, and an efficiency savings programme that would see 1 per cent cut from all Whitehall spending, including on the NHS.
As we now start having to ask - 1% in money terms, or 1% in real terms?
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
Which merely shows the insane savagery of religion and why it deserves to be heavily constrained.
In your view, not mine.
For me the Christian message remains as strong as ever, Jesus himself never threatened stake burnings for non believers
Mind, his "dad" seemed to take great delight in killing the first born in Egypt and drowning every living thing that wasn't on Noah's Ark.
I wouldn't want to spill his pint in the local Spoons!
In the first case to free the Jews from Egypt.
Though if you follow the Old Testament alone you are Jewish not Christian
And if you are Christian all that Old Testament killing is still part of your Bible. Perpetrated by your God.
Mr Javid reels off the cost of each measure and says he would fund the package from a mixture of the £32 billion fiscal headroom forecast to be available by 2024-25, and an efficiency savings programme that would see 1 per cent cut from all Whitehall spending, including on the NHS.
"Efficiency savings". CALLED IT!
That’s an 11% cut once 2022’s inflation is taken into account. By the time you get to 2024 that will be a 20-30% cut…
And our real situation is way worse than the public position which is why Rishi isn’t talking about tax cuts because they aren’t possible.
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
Which merely shows the insane savagery of religion and why it deserves to be heavily constrained.
In your view, not mine.
For me the Christian message remains as strong as ever, Jesus himself never threatened stake burnings for non believers
Mind, his "dad" seemed to take great delight in killing the first born in Egypt and drowning every living thing that wasn't on Noah's Ark.
I wouldn't want to spill his pint in the local Spoons!
I saw a sign up on the local evangelical church with John 14:6 on it ("No one comes to my father except through me") and for the life of me I couldn't hear it in any other voice than Ray Winston and see any other image than a bearded bouncer outside an East London nightclub.
That's a little Calvinist. "Your name's not dahnn, you're not getting in."
Right city for it. Though I'm amazed the Evangelicals ever get any converts here with the Church of Scotland, The Free Church of Scotland, The United Free Church of Scotland, The Free Church of Scotland (Continuing) and The Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Yes. Preferably with the Tory leadership contenders still inside.
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
One thing the government does have is a huge windfall from inflation?
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
Sunak said a while ago that they're losing money on VAT because of the economy cooling down. People buy less stuff, less VAT gets collected, and there's only so much inflation mitigates against that. Plus, government expenditure also rises in line with inflation, through increased wage bills and rising costs.
So you are making a good argument for tax cuts then, to pep a cooling economy?
As much as the Tory party's obsession with tax cuts grinds my gears, cuts in personal taxes can be a useful method in a time of national crisis to keep the economy going. What it doesn't do is pay itself back. You are applying stimulus to help people through difficult times. That is what it needs to be seen as. It isn't going to make things better in and of itself, nor is it going to magically stimulate enough economic growth to up the exchequer's total take.
It's called Keynesianism. It's been around for some time.
Oh come now, has my red cred not been well enough established yet? Counter-cyclic economics is very much my jam.
Mine too. I don't think it's particularly "red" though. It's just the common sense solution after all other cakeist batshittery has been exhausted.
Reading between the lines of this puff piece for Truss by Simon Clarke (published 9.30pm tonight) surely it signals that Truss will declare in the morning?
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
So what, you are able to say that now in the UK.
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
Which merely shows the insane savagery of religion and why it deserves to be heavily constrained.
In your view, not mine.
For me the Christian message remains as strong as ever, Jesus himself never threatened stake burnings for non believers
Mind, his "dad" seemed to take great delight in killing the first born in Egypt and drowning every living thing that wasn't on Noah's Ark.
I wouldn't want to spill his pint in the local Spoons!
In the first case to free the Jews from Egypt.
Though if you follow the Old Testament alone you are Jewish not Christian
And if you are Christian all that Old Testament killing is still part of your Bible. Perpetrated by your God.
"What do you make of the argument that if, say, someone could never, ever be attracted to a person of a significantly different skin colour, we might affirm their personal choice and yet still suggest that they harboured a societal prejudice? And that a similar prejudice is on display for someone (whatever their sexual orientation) that would not ever consider having sex with a trans person?
Is (a) the idea this is prejudiced wrong? (b) correct, but not applicable to the case of trans people because of the physical difference in genitalia? (c) something else going on?"
My answer is that to confuse a sexual preference with societal prejudice is to make a fundamental category mistake.
A sexual preference is innate & strongly correlated with a person's body. If you're gay you want to have sex with people of the same sex. If you're straight you want sex with the opposite sex. It is the sex of the partner which is key. Body and sex are intimately connected.
So a gay man is not prejudiced against women because he does not want to have sex with them. There is no prejudice or bigotry. The basic sexual attraction simply does not exist. Ditto with a lesbian not wanting to have sex with a man. It is not societal preferences which determine this but your own sexuality.
Now TRAs have got themselves into a pickle because while they may well feel themselves to be a different sex, their actual body has not changed. (The overwhelming majority of transpeople do not have surgery so retain the body they were born with.) Whatever they may feel however genuinely, the factual reality is that a lesbian is not going to be sexually attracted to a male body. Similarly a gay man is not going to be attracted a trans man retaining their female body. That is not prejudice or bigotry. It is a consequence of their sexuality.
TRAs are not willing to accept this because it undermines their claim that, say, a TW is just like any other woman. She isn't & in a very fundamental way. Sex is the rock on which the belief TRAs have crashes and founders. Rather than accept this, they describe a normal sexual preference as bigotry & preference belittle & demean lesbians by claiming that men are lesbians. It is aggressive, upsetting & infused with a rape mentality - a coercive approach which assumes that they are entitled to sex with women & any woman refusing this has no business doing so.
If a white person is only attracted to other white people, is that prejudice?
I agree that what genitals you are attracted to is not a prejudice, but does that generalise to other features?
Sex is one of those things that proves we're all capitalists, and proves the ruthlessness of capitalism at the same time.
In sex, there's no redistribution. There's no "look at those poor people over there, they aren't getting any, we should take some partners off the people who are getting loads and give them to the poor deprived people." We lionise the billionares of the sex world. The most beautiful. The most active. The most - dare I say it - privileged.
I'm not saying I disagree with any of that, by the way. Just making the point that even the staunchest communist, who would be willing to redistribute income, food, housing, practically everything else to make people equal - would find the idea of sexual "equality" absurd.
No open atheists were also burnt at the stake as heretics.
Though of course unlike many nations of your religion of heritage atheism is not illegal in virtually any Christian countries today. However Christ's message holds true as much now as then
Without commenting on the substance of what you're saying, redistribution and capitalism go together quite nicely. Capitalism does not imply a lack of redistribution, and, I firmly believe, cannot possibly survive without redistribution.
Which is why our attitudes to sex are all the more remarkable. The sexual marketplace is hyper-capitalism, rapacious capitalism, ayn-rand-style-tyranny-of-the-market-capitalism.
The idea of redistribution in the sexual marketplace is repugnant to us. The notion of coercion, abhorrent. We are happy to have 40% of our incomes taken off us, but 40% of our sexual partners given to those unluckier in love than we are would be ridiculous.
The sexual marketplace accepts absolutely zero compulsion, whether that's being forced to sleep with an ugly person, or a person whose bits you aren't attracted to.
As I say, it says something fascinating about human nature.
At the end of the day there are about equal numbers of good looking, average looking and ugly looking men and women. If more followed traditional religious principles and stuck to one partner who matched them in looks and personality for life there would be less of an issue.
Only a small minority of us are very good looking or will be very rich so better to settle for what you have
Did God ever marry the mother of His Only Begotten Son?
He produced Jesus via the Holy Spirit through Mary and Joseph committed to Mary for life to bring him up
Christianity - One adulterers lie that got out of hand.
You of course would never be so insulting about Muhammad or the Koran or you would have a Fatwa on you!
Given the amount of paedo Prophet stuff that gets boaked up on the internet (including on occasions on here) I sense your fatwa fears are somewhat over egged.
Anyone who can be publicly identified as having insulted the Prophet is likely to have a Fatwa on them and a mob round by their house.
Just we Christians no longer burn at the stake those who disrespect our religion as we did 500 years ago
No you didn't, it was more those who subscribed wholeheartedly to the religion but had virtually invisible sectarian disagreements over details. And Christianity is as contemptibly vile now as it was then, just, thankfully, relatively toothless.
No open atheists were
Wrong! I am openly atheist. I make no secret of the fact that God does not exist and all those people in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc are mumbling their prayers to an empty sky.
There is no heaven. There are no angels. There is no devil. No one tempts you to sin. No eternal life awaits the virtuous.
If anyone other than Rishi wins it's looking like there is going to have to be a massive rise in interest rates.
Not sure about that, tbh. Although personally, I think 5/6% would be a sensible rate to have, now. Even if if they have to put it down again, next year.
In reality, central bankers - and the bond market, is (still) looking through the current inflation and predicting a global recession. BoE logic is still firmly on the side of keeping rates low.
I don’t think a change of Tory leader/spending/tax policy changes that calculation much.
Reading between the lines of this puff piece for Truss by Simon Clarke (published 9.30pm tonight) surely it signals that Truss will declare in the morning?
I wonder if Truss is going to end up being the "please clap" candidate this time round?
The Treasury (not faultless of course) believes that the historic corporation tax cuts were simply banked by businesses, who continued to avoid capital investment.
So Rishi announced he would put them up and put in some heavy incentives to invest instead.
Hunt will be aware of this (he’s not stupid) but he needs aggressive tax-cutting policies to woo a skeptical electorate. It’s incredibly irresponsible, but this is why I suggested a May interregnum and an opportunity for everyone to cool down.
What we are seeing is a bonfire of the scraps of fiscal sobriety that even Boris maintained.
As I bid goodnight, may I just say how much I'm enjoying the (impending) Tory Civil War? Let's hope it lasts at least a couple of years.
If they were in Opposition, I might share your hopes.
But they're not.
For the good of country it needs to be sorted in a fortnight.
To hell with the members in other words.
Not happening, there is no way the right of the party will give tax rising Rishi a coronation and will try and ensure they get one of their own in the final 2 who might then win the membership vote.
Only way a members vote might be avoided if is the final 2 were Sunak and Hunt or Tugendhat but even then I suspect the latter 2 would still take it to the membership
Dan Hannan sets out his stall. His endorsement probably carries a fair bit of weight within the party members, as the single most prominent MEP, and now in the Lords.
Once again, we are seeing prospective Conservative leadership candidates try to win support with completely ridiculous "tax cuts". Does anyone in the Conservative Party realise how serious the economic and public finance situation is?
Unfunded tax cuts (should we now call that the "Sri Lanka" option?) are a one-way ticket to disaster. That's not to say ALL tax cuts are bad - that would be absurd - but it's reasonable to ask where, for example, the £26 billion the Government would lose if it unilaterally gave up fuel duty would be recouped?
Given the pledges of additional spending on defence, Police, the NHS and education, are any of the candidates going to stand up and say how they would fund these tax cuts? Pensions perhaps - a nice 20% cut in State pensions would help and I imagine someone as politically erudite as a Sunak, Hunt or Badenoch could explain to the pensioners how that will work and not lose a single vote.
Back in the real world, how are these tax cuts to be funded? Where will any public spending cuts be made? Care for vulnerable adults and children perhaps? Libraries maybe? Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Inevitable when you have a system that puts the choice of the next PM in the hands a tiny group of unrepresentative members who are largely retired, comfortably-off and out of touch with modern life.
The Treasury (not faultless of course) believes that the historic corporation tax cuts were simply banked by businesses, who continued to avoid capital investment.
So Rishi announced he would put them up and put in some heavy incentives to invest instead.
Hunt will be aware of this (he’s not stupid) but he needs aggressive tax-cutting policies to woo a skeptical electorate. It’s incredibly irresponsible, but this is why I suggested a May interregnum and an opportunity for everyone to cool down.
What we are seeing is a bonfire of the scraps of fiscal sobriety that even Boris maintained.
Are red wall MPs really going to get behind cuts to corporation tax? They are surely a substantial part of the MP electorate.
The redwall is probably mostly lost back to Labour anyway post Boris and now Brexit is done.
Best Tories can hope for is a 1992 or 2015 style scraped majority
Yep.
It's far too early to be making predictions when we don't even know who the leaders will be for the next election. Anything could happen between now and January 2025.
Comments
500 years ago we would be burning you at the stake!
"It'd give us an erection."
So yes. We always have a choice.
I'll leave it to you to ask where the prayers are directed?
The Tory party is returning to pandering to the interests of the wealthy retired south-east Tory members/voters.
Fuck the north.
Fuck levelling up.
The Telegraph@Telegraph
🔴 Sajid Javid and Jeremy Hunt have put tax cuts at the heart of the battle for Downing Street, as both MPs declared their candidacies in The Telegraph with pledges to slash corporation tax
The Telegraph@Telegraph·6m
🔓 This front page story is currently free to read 👇
https://telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/
Once again, we are seeing prospective Conservative leadership candidates try to win support with completely ridiculous "tax cuts". Does anyone in the Conservative Party realise how serious the economic and public finance situation is?
Unfunded tax cuts (should we now call that the "Sri Lanka" option?) are a one-way ticket to disaster. That's not to say ALL tax cuts are bad - that would be absurd - but it's reasonable to ask where, for example, the £26 billion the Government would lose if it unilaterally gave up fuel duty would be recouped?
Given the pledges of additional spending on defence, Police, the NHS and education, are any of the candidates going to stand up and say how they would fund these tax cuts? Pensions perhaps - a nice 20% cut in State pensions would help and I imagine someone as politically erudite as a Sunak, Hunt or Badenoch could explain to the pensioners how that will work and not lose a single vote.
Back in the real world, how are these tax cuts to be funded? Where will any public spending cuts be made? Care for vulnerable adults and children perhaps? Libraries maybe? Perhaps we should forego the renovation of the Palace of Westminster and let it fall into the Thames?
Incidentally, how long before the laughably false "Tax cuts pay for themselves" line from one of the candidates?
If so I think you spot on. I suspect anger and resentment at this impartiality is fuelling the Lib Dem success in Blue Wall.
Conclusion: Team Boris was daft as a brush, but not to learn the lessons, dafter.
It was a slogan. He never actually delivered anything on it, nor intended to.
About the only concrete thing that might have been of benefit - HS2 - is being systematically cut back to appease southern ecoloons.
Not a totally insane approach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument
For me the Christian message remains as strong as ever, Jesus himself never threatened stake burnings for non believers
I'm increasingly thinking this is going to come down to Sunak vs the frothing rightwinger du jour (Braverman, Badenoch, Patel).
Correct me where wrong, if it cost £10 to fill up your car and tax of that is 50%, now you pay £20 to fill up your car, the government isn’t are getting £10?
So, a lot of what they have done to help with cost of living is, to some extent, paying for itself.
Was always inevitable. Just look where your average Tory MP represents. And where the membership resides.
Pity really.
Someone less feckless...
OK, fair enough to scrap the increase coming - but if you want to pledge tax cuts then surely you want to put it straight into people's pockets.
By the way is anyone saying what cuts in spending they will make to fund the tax cuts?
https://metro.co.uk/2022/03/23/what-is-fuel-duty-and-how-much-is-it-in-the-uk-16327625/#:~:text=According to the government website, the current rates,or used for heating) – 10.70p per litre
And not to be replaced buy everyone paying through taxation.
When the economy is growing, as the government needs to spend less;
When it isn't growing, to stimulate growth.
The destination is unfortunately Sri Lanka.
But they're not.
For the good of country it needs to be sorted in a fortnight.
I doubt members care about corporation tax, so this is squarely aimed at the MPs who actually have a vote on Wednesday next week and of course donors.
There aren't any easy cuts to make. Folk are moaning about health already.
There is a serious issue regarding staffing schools in September.
No one can recruit for social care.
Can't get a passport or driving licence. Nor anyone to answer phones.
Let alone the paperwork for Brexit.
Nowt left to privatise. Even if that were popular any more.
And outlining any of this is a sure fire way to not win this contest.
Some people are standing for it.
Which is a wizzo strategy to lead the country for another year or two. It's also a wizzo strategy for crashing to a historic defeat at GE 2024 and ushering in eight years of Labour, possibly with the bonus prize of PR meaning you'll never get a majority again.
The last leadership contest was defined by Johnson's promise to Brexit, deal or no deal, by the end of October 2019.
What's the defining issue this time?
Tax cuts? Everyone is in favour of tax cuts. Seems hard to differentiate one candidate from another on that policy.
Perhaps one candidate will simply appear to demonstrate more charisma than the others, and appear more credible as a result.
I wouldn't want to spill his pint in the local Spoons!
Though if you follow the Old Testament alone you are Jewish not Christian
It's been around for some time.
It is one of the more solid rules of our unwritten constitution.
Best Tories can hope for is a 1992 or 2015 style scraped majority
Mr Javid reels off the cost of each measure and says he would fund the package from a mixture of the £32 billion fiscal headroom forecast to be available by 2024-25, and an efficiency savings programme that would see 1 per cent cut from all Whitehall spending, including on the NHS.
It's probably as trivial as that.
"Your name's not dahnn, you're not getting in."
First cabinet endorsement
"Highland Park shooting suspect’s mother was convicted of abandoning him in hot car when he was two
Highland Park Police responded to at least nine domestic disputes between Robert Crimo’s parents from 2010 to 2014"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/robert-crimo-mother-hot-car-b2119031.html
Are you teeing me up for “Rishi has to stand, or no one will see him” so I get another ban!
And our real situation is way worse than the public position which is why Rishi isn’t talking about tax cuts because they aren’t possible.
It's just the common sense solution after all other cakeist batshittery has been exhausted.
Reading between the lines of this puff piece for Truss by Simon Clarke (published 9.30pm tonight) surely it signals that Truss will declare in the morning?
In reality, central bankers - and the bond market, is (still) looking through the current inflation and predicting a global recession. BoE logic is still firmly on the side of keeping rates low.
I don’t think a change of Tory leader/spending/tax policy changes that calculation much.
So Rishi announced he would put them up and put in some heavy incentives to invest instead.
Hunt will be aware of this (he’s not stupid) but he needs aggressive tax-cutting policies to woo a skeptical electorate. It’s incredibly irresponsible, but this is why I suggested a May interregnum and an opportunity for everyone to cool down.
What we are seeing is a bonfire of the scraps of fiscal sobriety that even Boris maintained.
Only way a members vote might be avoided if is the final 2 were Sunak and Hunt or Tugendhat but even then I suspect the latter 2 would still take it to the membership
Nice tracker of MP's declared so far
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/07/09/tories-must-rediscover-values-stand-hope-redemption/
It's fantasy.