They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
Kind of, there clearly are some bonkers people on the fringe of woke and those should be reined in. So the challenge to woke does that bit. But, yes social attitudes are driven by the younger generations and their inclusive approach is going to win, whether the establishment like it or not.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
Right idea - wrong person being asked to drop out....
And it's too late now for this round anyway Suella will be out at 3pm.
Apparently Frost says he would decline any offer to word in Mordaunt's cabinet. Another good reason to support Mordaunt.
Frosty's arrogance is astonishing. He mucked the Brexit negotiations and dog whistled Boris's xenophobic client base on Boris's behalf. Why does he think anyone should pay him any attention?
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
Not endemic. Still pandemic. Very much so.
Its a constant presence now, that's endemic, isn't it?
The time that Covid19 was exponentially spreading to naive communities as a pandemic has long since been and gone. Now its simply waxing and waning ever-present in society just as other endemic viruses do.
No. Worldwide outbreaks of new variants, all still spreading. It's not history as a pandemic.
And most importantly the hospitals are still under pressure, as are public services, all part ofd the same pandemic that started. We're nowhere near a steady state.
New variants will spread for the rest of time too. That's entirely normal with endemic viruses, they evolve into new variants, that's why we get a new flu vaccine every year instead of just reusing last year's one again.
This is our steady state.
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem. ~ Douglas Adams
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
Right idea - wrong person being asked to drop out....
And it's too late now for this round anyway Suella will be out at 3pm.
It shows Truss’ weakness that Frost is begging others to drop out and support her.
All the momentum is with Kemi.
Can anyone who knows more about Tory politics than me rank the remaining six Left to Right? (Or should that be soft-right to hard-right?)
As far as I can see (L-R) it is Tugendhat, Mordaunt, Sunak, Truss, Badenoch, Braverman. Mordaunt is the one I find hardest to position in the spectrum, which perhaps explains her success.
Mordaunt will win this and then there will be terrible buyer's remorse.
Yeah that is my assumption. Sunak is their best candidate (as is clear from the polling vs Labour) but is suffering from being a known quality. Tories are projecting ideal qualities onto blank slates like Mordaunt and Badenoch, but it is highly likely that they turn out to be far weaker than Sunak. I mean, Mordaunt may turn out to be brilliant but on a balance of probabilities I would say she won't.
It all depends on whom she brings in around her. Leadership is not about having all the answers; it is about providing the framework for others to do so. I have a good feeling about Penny Mordaunt on this.
A slightly less demented Ronnie Reagan then? Well, if I thought the modern Tory party had sufficient numbers of bright sparks to form a cabinet I’d agree.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
Not endemic. Still pandemic. Very much so.
Its a constant presence now, that's endemic, isn't it?
The time that Covid19 was exponentially spreading to naive communities as a pandemic has long since been and gone. Now its simply waxing and waning ever-present in society just as other endemic viruses do.
No. Worldwide outbreaks of new variants, all still spreading. It's not history as a pandemic.
And most importantly the hospitals are still under pressure, as are public services, all part ofd the same pandemic that started. We're nowhere near a steady state.
New variants will spread for the rest of time too. That's entirely normal with endemic viruses, they evolve into new variants, that's why we get a new flu vaccine every year instead of just reusing last year's one again.
This is our steady state.
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem. ~ Douglas Adams
Look up the definitions of pandemic and endemic.
Yes, pandemic is when it is spreading (often exponentially) into new areas. Covid19 isn't doing this anymore.
Endemic is when a virus is perpetually in the same area. Covid19 is this.
If you can't cope with the virus being here, its not going to be gone next year or the year after. Its here to stay.
One of the organisations I belong to supplies us with a super-abundance of woke tweets and emails every day, and there are a super-abundance of committees & administrators busy examining equality & diversity & inclusion.
We have a 100 per cent white committee of the most highly privileged in the institution reading Eddo-Lodge.
However, nothing has actually changed, e.g., if you are a woman doing a pretty menial job at the bottom, you are still pretty much ignored despite all the tweets to the contrary.
Wokery has become the Glass Bead Game.
It's a long slow grind with frequent small steps backwards and stubborn areas of resistance... but change has, is, and will keep happening.
You need to look aback over periods of 20, 50, 100, 300 years to see the changes.
What I find interesting is the number of people who accept and even support all the changes up to, say 5-10 years ago, but who say 'no more'. The same would have been seen at ay time in the past 100 or so years - e.g.
'votes for women that's sensible but let's not have any nonsense about equal pay' or
'homosexuality should not be illegal, ok, but gay marriage - no way' or
'banning discrimination against disabled people, ok, but forcing businesses to provide access* will be an unfair burden on those businesses'
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
No you aren't, mate. Diminishing returns. Societal change is you can go to prison for b*ggering another bloke - then you can't - then you can marry him. Changes in the law. There has never been a law against a person with a dick asking people to call him her, and nobody actually gives or has ever given a fuck. It's as interesting and important as someone telling you they are vegan. Hence the militants pushing it to the edge cases, at the expense of every single birth/biological woman ever born, in order to provoke a reaction.
So we need to marginalise and ostracise these militants. Freedom and Liberty can't be imposed over the rights of others. The row over the extremist end of the trans rights movement can't be used to simply scrap trans rights, nor to scrap women's safe places and their own rights.
The problem is finding a balance. My dismissal of the "anti-woke" debate is that it isn't really interested in feminism, it just wants to use it to bash the trannies with.
By seeing it as a question of "bashing the trannies" aren't you falling into the same trap as those who "think they are literally the only thing holding back the forces of evil"?
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Exactly. Pronoun badges were handed out at my clients Pride event last week and they had massive rainbow/trans flags on all the tables.
I didn't go.
I always refuse to give pronouns. But I always try to respect the wishes of individuals who make specific requests.
And as for Pride flags....
There is absolutely nothing in the rainbow flag that excluded anyone. With the various new 'progressive' versions are so forced that they have to be updated regularly because a new group wants their space on it.
The traditional 6 colour rainbow flag is a symbol that represents all who wish to be part of it and in no way excludes anyone.
But you aren't allowed to say that in a Pride context anymore as you are labelled as a -phobe .
1) I understand people who have changed orientation using pronouns. But cis people? Give over and stop being so hand-wringing. It says more about you than your preferred pronoun...
2) When I was at uni it was LGB. Well, I say that but B wasn't liked. Then LGBT. Then LGBTQ. Then LGBTQI. Then a plus added. I honestly don't understand some of the new definitions - pansexual? You are sexually attracted to all genders? Yeah me to, but I'm Bi. So what's your point? etc
But the Pride movement salami-slicing itself isn't a reason to give up on the positive modernisation of societal attitudes it represents. If a small number have disappeared up their own arse, just ignore them.
Whilst I was in A&E with a friend's son a while back, I met a man who had broken some ribs and twisted his sternum whilst trying to move a fish tank. He said perhaps he should have emptied it first...
St Andrews really is just too easy for the modern pros now. 3 woods off the tee to drive a par 4 by even those who aren't in the worlds best.
Golf really needs to do what F1 does, and periodically restrict the equipment to make the courses a fair test.
When the modern driver is good for almost 400 yards, they either need to build bigger courses or make the drivers go only 300 yards.
The problem with that is this. Golf equipment company's customers want to be able to hit it as far as possible. That's how they make their money.
Well the only other option is to redesign the courses. Maybe the fairways need to be narrowed considerably, surrounded by heavy rough and with greenside bunkers on par-4s
Can any golf fans explain Rory Mcilroy's odds at every single major being so short even though he's not won one since 2014 ?
Fools and their money......
The amount of time BBC radio spends talking about Rory is completely out of proportion to his record. Ever major it's "can Rory win it?" The answer 30 odd times in a row has been "no". Better golfers get far less said about them.
Who are these better golfers?
People like Scheffller, Thomas, Koepka; I think Rory's ranking flatters him, his performance in majors has been quite poor given his talent.
Rory 4 major wins, 41 professional wins, world no 1 for 106 weeks Thomas 2 major wins, 23 professional wins, world no 1 for 5 weeks Koepka 4 major wins, 20 professional wins, world no 1 for 47 weeks Scheffler 1 major win, 8 professional wins, world no 1 for 16 weeks
They are perhaps his peers, but if you have to pick the best golfer since Tiger, it is Rory.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Exactly. Pronoun badges were handed out at my clients Pride event last week and they had massive rainbow/trans flags on all the tables.
I didn't go.
I always refuse to give pronouns. But I always try to respect the wishes of individuals who make specific requests.
And as for Pride flags....
There is absolutely nothing in the rainbow flag that excluded anyone. With the various new 'progressive' versions are so forced that they have to be updated regularly because a new group wants their space on it.
The traditional 6 colour rainbow flag is a symbol that represents all who wish to be part of it and in no way excludes anyone.
But you aren't allowed to say that in a Pride context anymore as you are labelled as a -phobe .
1) I understand people who have changed orientation using pronouns. But cis people? Give over and stop being so hand-wringing. It says more about you than your preferred pronoun...
2) When I was at uni it was LGB. Well, I say that but B wasn't liked. Then LGBT. Then LGBTQ. Then LGBTQI. Then a plus added. I honestly don't understand some of the new definitions - pansexual? You are sexually attracted to all genders? Yeah me to, but I'm Bi. So what's your point? etc
But the Pride movement salami-slicing itself isn't a reason to give up on the positive modernisation of societal attitudes it represents. If a small number have disappeared up their own arse, just ignore them.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
I have no fears about everyone in our society being included and given a fair shot.
Again, all you have are insinuations, innuendos, and tropes.
If you say so. If only everyone in society was actually included and given a fair shot. Would make life so much simpler.
Whilst I was in A&E with a friend's son a while back, I met a man who had broken some ribs and twisted his sternum whilst trying to move a fish tank. He said perhaps he should have emptied it first...
Ouch.
Oooft. This is why manual handling training is legitimately useful.
A Penny Mordaunt led Conservative party would be a gift for Labour. There are many women who will vote Tory for the first time in their lives, some holding their noses, in order to save women's rights from gender identity ideology but they will not vote for Mordaunt.
Don't worry Carlotta, according to @Anabobazina you only care about these things if you are, quote, 'an ageing, right wing Trumpist on PB.com' so Penny will be fine.
The Tory Party care a lot. Voters however do not.
We have a case study of this. The AU elections which the Coalition believed could be won by culture war issues instead were responded with “why the fuck does that matter I can’t eat”.
And Oz Labor weren’t even very good.
If you go down this road you’re going to lose.
Hello Horse. So my original point had been to Ananob who had been saying that Tory members don't care about trans issues when the polling suggests they do. I'd agree with you they care more about it than ordinary voters but - and pure anecdote - there are a fair few parents out there, and not all right-wing Trumpists, who do not like what their kids are being taught in school. And that's before you even try and discuss such issues where a large minority (at least) of the parents are of the Muslim faith.
I think there is a danger of extrapolating Australia to the rest of the world. Australia is the most urbanised society of the world - 85% of its population lives in (I think) the top 5 cities. We know from the US, UK etc that the cities and now the suburbs are becoming more progressive (no doubt there is an element of social conformity involved). However, the UK and US have plenty more people who live in smaller towns / rural; areas who don't have the same views. Ignore these at your peril.
Australia isn't culturally woker than the UK. Funny it even need be said.
Actually, in a number of cases, it probably is. And the fact the country was so locked down during Covid without a mass revolt probably shows the old stereotypes of unwoke Aussies is probably out of date.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
No you aren't, mate. Diminishing returns. Societal change is you can go to prison for b*ggering another bloke - then you can't - then you can marry him. Changes in the law. There has never been a law against a person with a dick asking people to call him her, and nobody actually gives or has ever given a fuck. It's as interesting and important as someone telling you they are vegan. Hence the militants pushing it to the edge cases, at the expense of every single birth/biological woman ever born, in order to provoke a reaction.
So we need to marginalise and ostracise these militants. Freedom and Liberty can't be imposed over the rights of others. The row over the extremist end of the trans rights movement can't be used to simply scrap trans rights, nor to scrap women's safe places and their own rights.
The problem is finding a balance. My dismissal of the "anti-woke" debate is that it isn't really interested in feminism, it just wants to use it to bash the trannies with.
Woke and anti-woke both have the same problem at the extreme. They are about hatred and division. For extreme anti-wokers it is about finding things that they can get wound up about. They are generally wannabe Daily Express leader writers; they have an ability to be negative about all things modern. Extreme woke proponents equally want to find things to get wound up about; generally things that signal their wonderful virtue. They are engaged in a kind of arms race of politically correct virtue.
All of this stuff is just a further development of the extreme left v extreme right battle. People who bang on about both are generally just negatively minded saddos. The centre ground is a happier and more positive place to be.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
No you aren't, mate. Diminishing returns. Societal change is you can go to prison for b*ggering another bloke - then you can't - then you can marry him. Changes in the law. There has never been a law against a person with a dick asking people to call him her, and nobody actually gives or has ever given a fuck. It's as interesting and important as someone telling you they are vegan. Hence the militants pushing it to the edge cases, at the expense of every single birth/biological woman ever born, in order to provoke a reaction.
So we need to marginalise and ostracise these militants. Freedom and Liberty can't be imposed over the rights of others. The row over the extremist end of the trans rights movement can't be used to simply scrap trans rights, nor to scrap women's safe places and their own rights.
The problem is finding a balance. My dismissal of the "anti-woke" debate is that it isn't really interested in feminism, it just wants to use it to bash the trannies with.
I don't think objecting to women being raped, makes you a feminist.
One of the organisations I belong to supplies us with a super-abundance of woke tweets and emails every day, and there are a super-abundance of committees & administrators busy examining equality & diversity & inclusion.
We have a 100 per cent white committee of the most highly privileged in the institution reading Eddo-Lodge.
However, nothing has actually changed, e.g., if you are a woman doing a pretty menial job at the bottom, you are still pretty much ignored despite all the tweets to the contrary.
Wokery has become the Glass Bead Game.
It's a long slow grind with frequent small steps backwards and stubborn areas of resistance... but change has, is, and will keep happening.
You need to look aback over periods of 20, 50, 100, 300 years to see the changes.
What I find interesting is the number of people who accept and even support all the changes up to, say 5-10 years ago, but who say 'no more'. The same would have been seen at ay time in the past 100 or so years - e.g.
'votes for women that's sensible but let's not have any nonsense about equal pay' or
'homosexuality should not be illegal, ok, but gay marriage - no way' or
'banning discrimination against disabled people, ok, but forcing businesses to provide access* will be an unfair burden on those businesses'
etc. etc.
(*We still don't have this last one yet btw)
One of the most valid criticisms of woke politics is that it is a very useful way to distract away from more pressing inequalities, namely that of wealth.
It shouldn't be surprising that many of the most wealthiest are very happy to continue to discuss inequalities around trans issues and so on.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
What we are dealing with these days is at best a refusal to engage in rational argument and at worst a demand that anything you feel should be respected and protected and that you don't even want to hear about things outside of your echo chamber.
This is very different to rock and roll or the suffrage movement.
The concepts of no platforming, 'safe spaces', online bubbles have made debate impossible meaning that views are not only going unchallenged but met with an absolute refusal to engage with anything with which you disagree.
Those are very unwelcome additions to our society alongside the denial of evidence and facts.
We can set aside the nutters at either end of the spectrum who refuse to engage in rational argument. As we can the nutters on any issue you care to choose - they always exist.
On a couple of the points you mention - safe spaces is an interesting one. 25 years ago at Sheffield University there was a massive row on this subject, specifically over the Union's "Women's Safety Bus". A group of students objected to the union spending money on transporting drunk female students home. "Where's my free ride home" etc. That there had been a spate of attacks on female students didn't seem to bother them - the bus was aptly named.
As for online bubbles making debate impossible, that is a function of online. The nutters at either end of the spectrum we set aside? They're all online, they're mad as hell and the SHOUT AND SHOUT like they are the majority view. Short of abolishing social media, best we can do is ignore them and get on with our lives.
That's not what "safe spaces" mean, in woke terms. It's emotional rather than physical safety - it means a place where people can be assured of not hearing anything that might upset them.
I think you have just deftly demonstrated the difference between "woke" and reality. Women's refuges are not a hypothetical thing that exists only to protect their right to be feminists. Its to stop their violent menfolk beating and raping the shit out of them. Again.
Actually what? When the left talks about "safe spaces", they do not mean - or at least do not primarily mean - women's refuges. You must know this.
Having been a 25-year card carrying member of the left, I think I may know something about what the left actually think as opposed to what others claim they think.
But anyway, witness the petulant row over trans rights. The hard militant end of the trans rights movement think I should be able to classify myself as a woman today and enter female changing rooms and women's refuges tomorrow.
The safe spaces that people are anti-woke to protect are quite literally physical. Toilets. Changing Rooms. Prisons. Sports Teams. Not Kumbiya internet bubbles where the bad man can't call you a fag.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Exactly. Pronoun badges were handed out at my clients Pride event last week and they had massive rainbow/trans flags on all the tables.
I didn't go.
I always refuse to give pronouns. But I always try to respect the wishes of individuals who make specific requests.
And as for Pride flags....
There is absolutely nothing in the rainbow flag that excluded anyone. With the various new 'progressive' versions are so forced that they have to be updated regularly because a new group wants their space on it.
The traditional 6 colour rainbow flag is a symbol that represents all who wish to be part of it and in no way excludes anyone.
But you aren't allowed to say that in a Pride context anymore as you are labelled as a -phobe .
1) I understand people who have changed orientation using pronouns. But cis people? Give over and stop being so hand-wringing. It says more about you than your preferred pronoun...
2) When I was at uni it was LGB. Well, I say that but B wasn't liked. Then LGBT. Then LGBTQ. Then LGBTQI. Then a plus added. I honestly don't understand some of the new definitions - pansexual? You are sexually attracted to all genders? Yeah me to, but I'm Bi. So what's your point? etc
But the Pride movement salami-slicing itself isn't a reason to give up on the positive modernisation of societal attitudes it represents. If a small number have disappeared up their own arse, just ignore them.
Where have I said anything about giving up on modernisation or change? Nowhere.
I have described exactly where I believe the D&I realm should be moving to be inclusive.
And I think you need to educate yourself on issues surrounding sexuality. There is very much a difference between Bi and Pan.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
How many people are affected partly depends on what Government and society does about it. How the NHS handles the numbers depends on what Government and society does about it. As is the case for viruses that are endemic, like HIV or flu. So it seems like a valid topic for a political discussion forum.
I think the public care much more about COVID than they do about Ben & Jerry’s or some of the other topics Tory leadership candidates have focused on.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
St Andrews really is just too easy for the modern pros now. 3 woods off the tee to drive a par 4 by even those who aren't in the worlds best.
Golf really needs to do what F1 does, and periodically restrict the equipment to make the courses a fair test.
When the modern driver is good for almost 400 yards, they either need to build bigger courses or make the drivers go only 300 yards.
The problem with that is this. Golf equipment company's customers want to be able to hit it as far as possible. That's how they make their money.
Well the only other option is to redesign the courses. Maybe the fairways need to be narrowed considerably, surrounded by heavy rough and with greenside bunkers on par-4s
One thing the R&A / PGA could have done but have decided not to is take a leaf from the way athletics addressed the problem with the javelin going too far, they could have put in place regulation on the golf ball (for pros) that can be used.
There are already different rules for amateurs vs pros e.g. range finder use.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
That's no reason not to take reasonable steps to improve things. Do you refuse all vaccinations because they're a futile attempt to keep you alive a bit longer?
Improving ventilation and filtration is such a no-brainer. It inconveniences no-one and it will benefit us in reduced spread of every airborne virus.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
St Andrews really is just too easy for the modern pros now. 3 woods off the tee to drive a par 4 by even those who aren't in the worlds best.
Golf really needs to do what F1 does, and periodically restrict the equipment to make the courses a fair test.
When the modern driver is good for almost 400 yards, they either need to build bigger courses or make the drivers go only 300 yards.
The problem with that is this. Golf equipment company's customers want to be able to hit it as far as possible. That's how they make their money.
Well the only other option is to redesign the courses. Maybe the fairways need to be narrowed considerably, surrounded by heavy rough and with greenside bunkers on par-4s
This would be utter vandalism! Just enjoy a fantastic course that will see the cream rise to the top. Imagine its a par 70 if you must.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Funny thing is that I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is in Singapore.
He said things have calmed down (after forced vaccinations). He said that cases were rising but everyone was more relaxed because as we were two and a half years on "of course" the government had added extra hospital capacity.
A Penny Mordaunt led Conservative party would be a gift for Labour. There are many women who will vote Tory for the first time in their lives, some holding their noses, in order to save women's rights from gender identity ideology but they will not vote for Mordaunt.
Don't worry Carlotta, according to @Anabobazina you only care about these things if you are, quote, 'an ageing, right wing Trumpist on PB.com' so Penny will be fine.
The Tory Party care a lot. Voters however do not.
We have a case study of this. The AU elections which the Coalition believed could be won by culture war issues instead were responded with “why the fuck does that matter I can’t eat”.
And Oz Labor weren’t even very good.
If you go down this road you’re going to lose.
Hello Horse. So my original point had been to Ananob who had been saying that Tory members don't care about trans issues when the polling suggests they do. I'd agree with you they care more about it than ordinary voters but - and pure anecdote - there are a fair few parents out there, and not all right-wing Trumpists, who do not like what their kids are being taught in school. And that's before you even try and discuss such issues where a large minority (at least) of the parents are of the Muslim faith.
I think there is a danger of extrapolating Australia to the rest of the world. Australia is the most urbanised society of the world - 85% of its population lives in (I think) the top 5 cities. We know from the US, UK etc that the cities and now the suburbs are becoming more progressive (no doubt there is an element of social conformity involved). However, the UK and US have plenty more people who live in smaller towns / rural; areas who don't have the same views. Ignore these at your peril.
Australia isn't culturally woker than the UK. Funny it even need be said.
Actually, in a number of cases, it probably is. And the fact the country was so locked down during Covid without a mass revolt probably shows the old stereotypes of unwoke Aussies is probably out of date.
Lockdown isn't a woke or unwoke issue, especially in the context of countries like Australia and New Zealand.
Australia has long zealously protected its borders from importing new viruses, fauna and flora into its rather unique ecosystem.
"Keep out dirty foreign diseases, keeping out foreigners if need be" is not an especially "woke" concept for Australians to have.
The key to this drone war appears to be rapid prototyping of many different, cheap systems and evolution thereof.
That’s a very good piece. The repurposing of civilian drone equipment for military use is helping the Ukranians considerably, as the enemy doesn’t have a plan to deal with them.
They can’t waste a $100k anti-aircraft missile on a $10k drone, and half the time they can’t even see it on radar. The repurposed grenades with the 3D-printed tail fins are brilliantly inspired. All low-level stuff, but together adds up.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
No you aren't, mate. Diminishing returns. Societal change is you can go to prison for b*ggering another bloke - then you can't - then you can marry him. Changes in the law. There has never been a law against a person with a dick asking people to call him her, and nobody actually gives or has ever given a fuck. It's as interesting and important as someone telling you they are vegan. Hence the militants pushing it to the edge cases, at the expense of every single birth/biological woman ever born, in order to provoke a reaction.
So we need to marginalise and ostracise these militants. Freedom and Liberty can't be imposed over the rights of others. The row over the extremist end of the trans rights movement can't be used to simply scrap trans rights, nor to scrap women's safe places and their own rights.
The problem is finding a balance. My dismissal of the "anti-woke" debate is that it isn't really interested in feminism, it just wants to use it to bash the trannies with.
By seeing it as a question of "bashing the trannies" aren't you falling into the same trap as those who "think they are literally the only thing holding back the forces of evil"?
No. Because both groups exist. We have Tory leadership candidates who want to pull back on pro-migration wokeness by supporting a policy which would have had them deported to Rwanda had it existed when they came here.
This isn't about being fed up with companies virtue signalling (which I have repeated posted that I agree that they are), its being fed up with what they are signalling about.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
Right idea - wrong person being asked to drop out....
And it's too late now for this round anyway Suella will be out at 3pm.
It shows Truss’ weakness that Frost is begging others to drop out and support her.
All the momentum is with Kemi.
Can anyone who knows more about Tory politics than me rank the remaining six Left to Right? (Or should that be soft-right to hard-right?)
As far as I can see (L-R) it is Tugendhat, Mordaunt, Sunak, Truss, Badenoch, Braverman. Mordaunt is the one I find hardest to position in the spectrum, which perhaps explains her success.
Mordaunt will win this and then there will be terrible buyer's remorse.
Yeah that is my assumption. Sunak is their best candidate (as is clear from the polling vs Labour) but is suffering from being a known quality. Tories are projecting ideal qualities onto blank slates like Mordaunt and Badenoch, but it is highly likely that they turn out to be far weaker than Sunak. I mean, Mordaunt may turn out to be brilliant but on a balance of probabilities I would say she won't.
It all depends on whom she brings in around her. Leadership is not about having all the answers; it is about providing the framework for others to do so. I have a good feeling about Penny Mordaunt on this.
A slightly less demented Ronnie Reagan then? Well, if I thought the modern Tory party had sufficient numbers of bright sparks to form a cabinet I’d agree.
There are quite a lot of bright sparks on the backbenches and in junior ministerial posts. There are also a lot of very experienced sages in the HoLs. It would not be difficult to do a much better job than The Clown did.
This is why Labour should not have got involved with votes of confidence or whatever. Just sit back and let the next cabinet take pops at each other and expose each others weaknesses.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Exactly. Pronoun badges were handed out at my clients Pride event last week and they had massive rainbow/trans flags on all the tables.
I didn't go.
I always refuse to give pronouns. But I always try to respect the wishes of individuals who make specific requests.
And as for Pride flags....
There is absolutely nothing in the rainbow flag that excluded anyone. With the various new 'progressive' versions are so forced that they have to be updated regularly because a new group wants their space on it.
The traditional 6 colour rainbow flag is a symbol that represents all who wish to be part of it and in no way excludes anyone.
But you aren't allowed to say that in a Pride context anymore as you are labelled as a -phobe .
1) I understand people who have changed orientation using pronouns. But cis people? Give over and stop being so hand-wringing. It says more about you than your preferred pronoun...
2) When I was at uni it was LGB. Well, I say that but B wasn't liked. Then LGBT. Then LGBTQ. Then LGBTQI. Then a plus added. I honestly don't understand some of the new definitions - pansexual? You are sexually attracted to all genders? Yeah me to, but I'm Bi. So what's your point? etc
But the Pride movement salami-slicing itself isn't a reason to give up on the positive modernisation of societal attitudes it represents. If a small number have disappeared up their own arse, just ignore them.
For some no doubt fuddy duddy old white bloke reason I farkin' hate the term "cis". It is so arch it makes me vomit.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
No you aren't, mate. Diminishing returns. Societal change is you can go to prison for b*ggering another bloke - then you can't - then you can marry him. Changes in the law. There has never been a law against a person with a dick asking people to call him her, and nobody actually gives or has ever given a fuck. It's as interesting and important as someone telling you they are vegan. Hence the militants pushing it to the edge cases, at the expense of every single birth/biological woman ever born, in order to provoke a reaction.
So we need to marginalise and ostracise these militants. Freedom and Liberty can't be imposed over the rights of others. The row over the extremist end of the trans rights movement can't be used to simply scrap trans rights, nor to scrap women's safe places and their own rights.
The problem is finding a balance. My dismissal of the "anti-woke" debate is that it isn't really interested in feminism, it just wants to use it to bash the trannies with.
I don't think objecting to women being raped, makes you a feminist.
Its not that far back that it was legal for a man to rape his wife. The push to give women rights as individuals is absolutely a feminist cause.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
That's no reason not to take reasonable steps to improve things. Do you refuse all vaccinations because they're a futile attempt to keep you alive a bit longer?
Improving ventilation and filtration is such a no-brainer. It inconveniences no-one and it will benefit us in reduced spread of every airborne virus.
Of course I get my vaccines but that's it, I put my faith in the vaccines to do their job they're there to do.
I won't wear a mask, and if I get the virus again, I won't be isolating. I'd avoid going to visit anyone immunocompromised, just as I would with the common cold or a cough, but I wouldn't avoid going out and about generally and I wouldn't wear a mask while doing so. It spreading is part of how we live now.
Ventilation and filtration I have no objections to if they're economic, but if they're not economic then they wouldn't be a priority for me. If they're economic maybe put it into building standards for new buildings, but not necessarily any point in revamping every old building in the country.
It is pathetic. They really need to move on. People who do this stuff are as bad as the Corbynistas in the labour party. Maybe they want to be pure and be in permanent opposition after the next election
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Exactly. Pronoun badges were handed out at my clients Pride event last week and they had massive rainbow/trans flags on all the tables.
I didn't go.
I always refuse to give pronouns. But I always try to respect the wishes of individuals who make specific requests.
And as for Pride flags....
There is absolutely nothing in the rainbow flag that excluded anyone. With the various new 'progressive' versions are so forced that they have to be updated regularly because a new group wants their space on it.
The traditional 6 colour rainbow flag is a symbol that represents all who wish to be part of it and in no way excludes anyone.
But you aren't allowed to say that in a Pride context anymore as you are labelled as a -phobe .
1) I understand people who have changed orientation using pronouns. But cis people? Give over and stop being so hand-wringing. It says more about you than your preferred pronoun...
2) When I was at uni it was LGB. Well, I say that but B wasn't liked. Then LGBT. Then LGBTQ. Then LGBTQI. Then a plus added. I honestly don't understand some of the new definitions - pansexual? You are sexually attracted to all genders? Yeah me to, but I'm Bi. So what's your point? etc
But the Pride movement salami-slicing itself isn't a reason to give up on the positive modernisation of societal attitudes it represents. If a small number have disappeared up their own arse, just ignore them.
Where have I said anything about giving up on modernisation or change? Nowhere.
I have described exactly where I believe the D&I realm should be moving to be inclusive.
And I think you need to educate yourself on issues surrounding sexuality. There is very much a difference between Bi and Pan.
I absolutely do need to educate myself on it, because I don't understand it. But am I trying to silence pansexuals or say they shouldn't be? The whole point is to let people freely define themselves.
It is pathetic. They really need to move on. People who do this stuff are as bad as the Corbynistas in the labour party. Maybe they want to be pure and be in permanent opposition after the next election
The last election showed the number of votes in tory remainerism is precisely zero.
One of the organisations I belong to supplies us with a super-abundance of woke tweets and emails every day, and there are a super-abundance of committees & administrators busy examining equality & diversity & inclusion.
We have a 100 per cent white committee of the most highly privileged in the institution reading Eddo-Lodge.
However, nothing has actually changed, e.g., if you are a woman doing a pretty menial job at the bottom, you are still pretty much ignored despite all the tweets to the contrary.
Wokery has become the Glass Bead Game.
It's a long slow grind with frequent small steps backwards and stubborn areas of resistance... but change has, is, and will keep happening.
You need to look aback over periods of 20, 50, 100, 300 years to see the changes.
What I find interesting is the number of people who accept and even support all the changes up to, say 5-10 years ago, but who say 'no more'. The same would have been seen at ay time in the past 100 or so years - e.g.
'votes for women that's sensible but let's not have any nonsense about equal pay' or
'homosexuality should not be illegal, ok, but gay marriage - no way' or
'banning discrimination against disabled people, ok, but forcing businesses to provide access* will be an unfair burden on those businesses'
etc. etc.
(*We still don't have this last one yet btw)
It takes time for change to happen. 30 years ago the discrimination legislation was not far off the same, but practice was not. Senior management committees, College Officers, heads of service etc were disproportionately white males. That is very much no longer the case in my Trust at least.
Are things perfect? Not at all, but we are certainly in a much more diverse and equal place in what must be amongst the most diverse employers in the country. I think there are still social class issues to address, as diversity has too often been skin deep in the past.
@benrileysmith NEW: Lord Frost understood to be privately urging Suella + Kemi to drop out and back Liz Truss.
A friend of Lord Frost: “While Suella, Kemi and Liz are all extremely good candidates on the right of the party, he thinks Liz Truss’s evident determination to put Britain onto a new reforming free-market economic path gives her the edge. He thinks it’s time for all three to unite behind her and make sure the members get a candidate who can deliver real economic reform and change.”
Liz Truss is spectacularly, magnificently, unimpressive. She may be a lightweight fantasist with very little experience, but Truss is so bad Mordaunt is definitely the better choice. I think that she'll end up winning on that basis given that Sunak is far too socialist for today's Conservative party.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
A Penny Mordaunt led Conservative party would be a gift for Labour. There are many women who will vote Tory for the first time in their lives, some holding their noses, in order to save women's rights from gender identity ideology but they will not vote for Mordaunt.
Don't worry Carlotta, according to @Anabobazina you only care about these things if you are, quote, 'an ageing, right wing Trumpist on PB.com' so Penny will be fine.
The Tory Party care a lot. Voters however do not.
We have a case study of this. The AU elections which the Coalition believed could be won by culture war issues instead were responded with “why the fuck does that matter I can’t eat”.
And Oz Labor weren’t even very good.
If you go down this road you’re going to lose.
Hello Horse. So my original point had been to Ananob who had been saying that Tory members don't care about trans issues when the polling suggests they do. I'd agree with you they care more about it than ordinary voters but - and pure anecdote - there are a fair few parents out there, and not all right-wing Trumpists, who do not like what their kids are being taught in school. And that's before you even try and discuss such issues where a large minority (at least) of the parents are of the Muslim faith.
I think there is a danger of extrapolating Australia to the rest of the world. Australia is the most urbanised society of the world - 85% of its population lives in (I think) the top 5 cities. We know from the US, UK etc that the cities and now the suburbs are becoming more progressive (no doubt there is an element of social conformity involved). However, the UK and US have plenty more people who live in smaller towns / rural; areas who don't have the same views. Ignore these at your peril.
Australia isn't culturally woker than the UK. Funny it even need be said.
Actually, in a number of cases, it probably is. And the fact the country was so locked down during Covid without a mass revolt probably shows the old stereotypes of unwoke Aussies is probably out of date.
If woke means urban or Covid risk aversion, you might have a point. But then it seems too general a word to be what I meant by it, covering pratically everything (maybe tax is woke). I think it surely means attitudes toward traditional / patriarchal institutions and behaviours in Western countries, and these enemies of the woke are stronger in Australia relative to the UK. Patronising sexism and provocative conservatism on migration and sexuality are much stronger. That's all!
In defence of Penny, what is actually so bad with homeopathy?
Isn’t Prince Charles in favour as well so PM as PM aligns Conservatives with Monarchy again would be a bonus.
I like Penny, but homeopathy is pseudoscience, and is nonsense. That said, a large number of people in the Conservative Party (including Penny) tell their activists that they believe in Brexit, which is about as real as homeopathy.
A Penny Mordaunt led Conservative party would be a gift for Labour. There are many women who will vote Tory for the first time in their lives, some holding their noses, in order to save women's rights from gender identity ideology but they will not vote for Mordaunt.
Don't worry Carlotta, according to @Anabobazina you only care about these things if you are, quote, 'an ageing, right wing Trumpist on PB.com' so Penny will be fine.
The Tory Party care a lot. Voters however do not.
We have a case study of this. The AU elections which the Coalition believed could be won by culture war issues instead were responded with “why the fuck does that matter I can’t eat”.
And Oz Labor weren’t even very good.
If you go down this road you’re going to lose.
Hello Horse. So my original point had been to Ananob who had been saying that Tory members don't care about trans issues when the polling suggests they do. I'd agree with you they care more about it than ordinary voters but - and pure anecdote - there are a fair few parents out there, and not all right-wing Trumpists, who do not like what their kids are being taught in school. And that's before you even try and discuss such issues where a large minority (at least) of the parents are of the Muslim faith.
I think there is a danger of extrapolating Australia to the rest of the world. Australia is the most urbanised society of the world - 85% of its population lives in (I think) the top 5 cities. We know from the US, UK etc that the cities and now the suburbs are becoming more progressive (no doubt there is an element of social conformity involved). However, the UK and US have plenty more people who live in smaller towns / rural; areas who don't have the same views. Ignore these at your peril.
Australia isn't culturally woker than the UK. Funny it even need be said.
Actually, in a number of cases, it probably is. And the fact the country was so locked down during Covid without a mass revolt probably shows the old stereotypes of unwoke Aussies is probably out of date.
Lockdown isn't a woke or unwoke issue, especially in the context of countries like Australia and New Zealand.
Australia has long zealously protected its borders from importing new viruses, fauna and flora into its rather unique ecosystem.
"Keep out dirty foreign diseases, keeping out foreigners if need be" is not an especially "woke" concept for Australians to have.
I wasn't thinking of the external borders issue. That is normal as you say.
It is more that Australians were willing to let people be sent to quarantine camps if they had Covid. It's like something from 100 years ago and rather Chinese-style in its approach.
That may not be woke per se but it does suggest a pattern of conformity to what been told to do which would have been unlikely in the UK.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
A third and larger group = people who have encountered what you describe as "woke" and are totally fine with it. Eg at my kids' school - one family objected to PSHE lessons discussing race and gender and they got quoted in the Sunday Times, the Mail and the Sun. All the other families were totally fine with it meanwhile. I wonder what would happen if I called up the Sun and told them my daughter had had these lessons and found them interesting and useful? Do you think they would run that story? No, because they have an agenda and have abandoned any pretence at balanced reporting on this issue.
Part of the problem is anti-woke obsessives running round trying to find the next thing to be offended by and try to blow it out of all proportion.
IIRC about a year ago Leon, Mr Ed and Casino were telling us that footballers taking the knee and someone pushing a statue into Bristol harbour was truly the end of civilisation as we know it. They frothed on about it for days but 12 months on nobody gives a toss.
A few years ago eldest granddaughter was a supply teacher teaching PHSE around around the country. At only one school was there a complaint of any sort about what she was teaching; she remarked to me afterwards that the parents in question were not prepared to consider any view other than their own!
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Exactly. Pronoun badges were handed out at my clients Pride event last week and they had massive rainbow/trans flags on all the tables.
I didn't go.
I always refuse to give pronouns. But I always try to respect the wishes of individuals who make specific requests.
And as for Pride flags....
There is absolutely nothing in the rainbow flag that excluded anyone. With the various new 'progressive' versions are so forced that they have to be updated regularly because a new group wants their space on it.
The traditional 6 colour rainbow flag is a symbol that represents all who wish to be part of it and in no way excludes anyone.
But you aren't allowed to say that in a Pride context anymore as you are labelled as a -phobe .
1) I understand people who have changed orientation using pronouns. But cis people? Give over and stop being so hand-wringing. It says more about you than your preferred pronoun...
2) When I was at uni it was LGB. Well, I say that but B wasn't liked. Then LGBT. Then LGBTQ. Then LGBTQI. Then a plus added. I honestly don't understand some of the new definitions - pansexual? You are sexually attracted to all genders? Yeah me to, but I'm Bi. So what's your point? etc
But the Pride movement salami-slicing itself isn't a reason to give up on the positive modernisation of societal attitudes it represents. If a small number have disappeared up their own arse, just ignore them.
For some no doubt fuddy duddy old white bloke reason I farkin' hate the term "cis". It is so arch it makes me vomit.
St Andrews really is just too easy for the modern pros now. 3 woods off the tee to drive a par 4 by even those who aren't in the worlds best.
Golf really needs to do what F1 does, and periodically restrict the equipment to make the courses a fair test.
When the modern driver is good for almost 400 yards, they either need to build bigger courses or make the drivers go only 300 yards.
The problem with that is this. Golf equipment company's customers want to be able to hit it as far as possible. That's how they make their money.
Well the only other option is to redesign the courses. Maybe the fairways need to be narrowed considerably, surrounded by heavy rough and with greenside bunkers on par-4s
One thing the R&A / PGA could have done but have decided not to is take a leaf from the way athletics addressed the problem with the javelin going too far, they could have put in place regulation on the golf ball (for pros) that can be used.
There are already different rules for amateurs vs pros e.g. range finder use.
Yes, a standard ball design for professional and open tournaments, is probably the easiest answer. Strikes the best balance between equipment providers/sponsors, regular members of the courses, and the pros themselves.
Liz Truss is spectacularly, magnificently, unimpressive. She may be a lightweight fantasist with very little experience, but Truss is so bad Mordaunt is definitely the better choice. I think that she'll end up winning on that basis given that Sunak is far too socialist for today's Conservative party.
I hope she will win because on balance she is significantly better than Sunak.
They were all up for the Culture War v lefty Labour, tying Starmer’s cervix in knots, and Penny will cancel it. She will take them on like Cameron did and drag them into the 2020s, they fear it. You can smell the fear of the right now 🤗
In defence of Penny, what is actually so bad with homeopathy?
Isn’t Prince Charles in favour as well so PM as PM aligns Conservatives with Monarchy again would be a bonus.
It's a waste of time and money and no better than a placebo. It may stop the user from getting real treatment. Worse it indicates that the believer is not prepared to listen to the science.
Rishi campaign prickly and defensive today but I suspect the numbers will hold firm today.
Probably a fairly steady as she goes result today? Suella out. Then it gets interesting next week.
Only things I can think to watch are a) how much Rishi adds (if he’s not up to 100 then it’s all going pear shaped IMHO) b) whether Liz shores up any support or is staying fairly static (if she’s still hovering on 50-55 she’s vulnerable).
It is pathetic. They really need to move on. People who do this stuff are as bad as the Corbynistas in the labour party. Maybe they want to be pure and be in permanent opposition after the next election
The last election showed the number of votes in tory remainerism is precisely zero.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
No you aren't, mate. Diminishing returns. Societal change is you can go to prison for b*ggering another bloke - then you can't - then you can marry him. Changes in the law. There has never been a law against a person with a dick asking people to call him her, and nobody actually gives or has ever given a fuck. It's as interesting and important as someone telling you they are vegan. Hence the militants pushing it to the edge cases, at the expense of every single birth/biological woman ever born, in order to provoke a reaction.
So we need to marginalise and ostracise these militants. Freedom and Liberty can't be imposed over the rights of others. The row over the extremist end of the trans rights movement can't be used to simply scrap trans rights, nor to scrap women's safe places and their own rights.
The problem is finding a balance. My dismissal of the "anti-woke" debate is that it isn't really interested in feminism, it just wants to use it to bash the trannies with.
By seeing it as a question of "bashing the trannies" aren't you falling into the same trap as those who "think they are literally the only thing holding back the forces of evil"?
No. Because both groups exist. We have Tory leadership candidates who want to pull back on pro-migration wokeness by supporting a policy which would have had them deported to Rwanda had it existed when they came here.
So no immigrant or person with an immigrant background can be in favour of controlling borders in any circumstances?
Liz Truss is spectacularly, magnificently, unimpressive. She may be a lightweight fantasist with very little experience, but Truss is so bad Mordaunt is definitely the better choice. I think that she'll end up winning on that basis given that Sunak is far too socialist for today's Conservative party.
Just topped up my Badenoch bet. Might be wrong but, at 18/1, I reckon it's value given Truss' performance.
Even assuming no cock-up and sufficient dilution to remove the 'active' ingredient completely, there's the costs to providers (I only really care if publicly funded, but even if private insurers are funding it then it puts everyone else's pemiums up). There's also the point that being distracted by homeopathy may prevent or delay people geting actual effective treatments.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Exactly. Pronoun badges were handed out at my clients Pride event last week and they had massive rainbow/trans flags on all the tables.
I didn't go.
I always refuse to give pronouns. But I always try to respect the wishes of individuals who make specific requests.
And as for Pride flags....
There is absolutely nothing in the rainbow flag that excluded anyone. With the various new 'progressive' versions are so forced that they have to be updated regularly because a new group wants their space on it.
The traditional 6 colour rainbow flag is a symbol that represents all who wish to be part of it and in no way excludes anyone.
But you aren't allowed to say that in a Pride context anymore as you are labelled as a -phobe .
1) I understand people who have changed orientation using pronouns. But cis people? Give over and stop being so hand-wringing. It says more about you than your preferred pronoun...
2) When I was at uni it was LGB. Well, I say that but B wasn't liked. Then LGBT. Then LGBTQ. Then LGBTQI. Then a plus added. I honestly don't understand some of the new definitions - pansexual? You are sexually attracted to all genders? Yeah me to, but I'm Bi. So what's your point? etc
But the Pride movement salami-slicing itself isn't a reason to give up on the positive modernisation of societal attitudes it represents. If a small number have disappeared up their own arse, just ignore them.
Where have I said anything about giving up on modernisation or change? Nowhere.
I have described exactly where I believe the D&I realm should be moving to be inclusive.
And I think you need to educate yourself on issues surrounding sexuality. There is very much a difference between Bi and Pan.
I absolutely do need to educate myself on it, because I don't understand it. But am I trying to silence pansexuals or say they shouldn't be? The whole point is to let people freely define themselves.
Again I haven't said anything about restricting how people define themselves.
But I do question how far the state should go in protecting those definitions given for some people they can change on an hour by hour or day by day basis.
(Redfield & Wilton Strategies publishes polls of 37 constituencies won by the Conservatives in 2019 that had been held by Labour in 2010, 2015 and 2017; as well as Burnley, Redcar and Vale of Clwyd.)
UK GE 2019 result in these seats: Con 46.7% Lab 38.0% Ref 6.5% LD 4.5% Grn 1.4% PC 1.2% oth 1.7%
Not looking good. I can't see much on the table to get these Labour turned Tory turned Labour to go Tory again.
Even more so when you look at those LD 10% + Grn 4% = 14%. Surely, come the squeeze, a big chunk of them are going to vote Lab?
A Penny Mordaunt led Conservative party would be a gift for Labour. There are many women who will vote Tory for the first time in their lives, some holding their noses, in order to save women's rights from gender identity ideology but they will not vote for Mordaunt.
Don't worry Carlotta, according to @Anabobazina you only care about these things if you are, quote, 'an ageing, right wing Trumpist on PB.com' so Penny will be fine.
The Tory Party care a lot. Voters however do not.
We have a case study of this. The AU elections which the Coalition believed could be won by culture war issues instead were responded with “why the fuck does that matter I can’t eat”.
And Oz Labor weren’t even very good.
If you go down this road you’re going to lose.
Hello Horse. So my original point had been to Ananob who had been saying that Tory members don't care about trans issues when the polling suggests they do. I'd agree with you they care more about it than ordinary voters but - and pure anecdote - there are a fair few parents out there, and not all right-wing Trumpists, who do not like what their kids are being taught in school. And that's before you even try and discuss such issues where a large minority (at least) of the parents are of the Muslim faith.
I think there is a danger of extrapolating Australia to the rest of the world. Australia is the most urbanised society of the world - 85% of its population lives in (I think) the top 5 cities. We know from the US, UK etc that the cities and now the suburbs are becoming more progressive (no doubt there is an element of social conformity involved). However, the UK and US have plenty more people who live in smaller towns / rural; areas who don't have the same views. Ignore these at your peril.
Australia isn't culturally woker than the UK. Funny it even need be said.
Actually, in a number of cases, it probably is. And the fact the country was so locked down during Covid without a mass revolt probably shows the old stereotypes of unwoke Aussies is probably out of date.
Lockdown isn't a woke or unwoke issue, especially in the context of countries like Australia and New Zealand.
Australia has long zealously protected its borders from importing new viruses, fauna and flora into its rather unique ecosystem.
"Keep out dirty foreign diseases, keeping out foreigners if need be" is not an especially "woke" concept for Australians to have.
I wasn't thinking of the external borders issue. That is normal as you say.
It is more that Australians were willing to let people be sent to quarantine camps if they had Covid. It's like something from 100 years ago and rather Chinese-style in its approach.
That may not be woke per se but it does suggest a pattern of conformity to what been told to do which would have been unlikely in the UK.
But that's due to the border issue.
They are passionate about their country, nationalists in a way that most people here won't understand or would find unpleasant if shown here. I think that's part of why I'm such an English nationalist, is because I grew up as an English child there and it was so normal and pleasant there. 👍
For them, if you say that an alien virus can be contained and kept out of the country, sending the few who have it to isolation if need be, then that is much more natural to them than it is here. Here it could never have worked because we are so interconnected to the world, but there is different, they have an option to keep their ecosystem unique and they're used to it. Having the infected quarantine wouldn't be the "woke" thing to do there, it would be the "patriotic" thing to do.
To take a British or American attitude of "woke" or "unwoke" and apply it there is a point of view failure.
Liz Truss is spectacularly, magnificently, unimpressive. She may be a lightweight fantasist with very little experience, but Truss is so bad Mordaunt is definitely the better choice. I think that she'll end up winning on that basis given that Sunak is far too socialist for today's Conservative party.
Correct
The right need to prevail upon Truss to give up and let Badenoch champion the right.
Can any golf fans explain Rory Mcilroy's odds at every single major being so short even though he's not won one since 2014 ?
Fools and their money......
The amount of time BBC radio spends talking about Rory is completely out of proportion to his record. Ever major it's "can Rory win it?" The answer 30 odd times in a row has been "no". Better golfers get far less said about them.
Who are these better golfers?
People like Scheffller, Thomas, Koepka; I think Rory's ranking flatters him, his performance in majors has been quite poor given his talent.
Rory 4 major wins, 41 professional wins, world no 1 for 106 weeks Thomas 2 major wins, 23 professional wins, world no 1 for 5 weeks Koepka 4 major wins, 20 professional wins, world no 1 for 47 weeks Scheffler 1 major win, 8 professional wins, world no 1 for 16 weeks
They are perhaps his peers, but if you have to pick the best golfer since Tiger, it is Rory.
Best since is not the same as best now, and Rory simply hasn't performed as well in majors as his rankings and talent would lead us to expect. There was a point in time when the hype wasn't hype, I can remember huge amounts of talk about "the next Tiger" and "can he catch Tiger?" It hasn't happened.
I'd love Rory to win more, it's the excessive attention Rory receives that annoys me. I doubt it helps him either.
It is pathetic. They really need to move on. People who do this stuff are as bad as the Corbynistas in the labour party. Maybe they want to be pure and be in permanent opposition after the next election
The last election showed the number of votes in tory remainerism is precisely zero.
WTF are you on about? There is no "remainerism" anymore duncehead. Brexit is over. Even I, who think Brexit was the most stupid foreign policy ever, do not think rejoin is worthwhile. Move on.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
Not endemic. Still pandemic. Very much so.
Its a constant presence now, that's endemic, isn't it?
The time that Covid19 was exponentially spreading to naive communities as a pandemic has long since been and gone. Now its simply waxing and waning ever-present in society just as other endemic viruses do.
No. Worldwide outbreaks of new variants, all still spreading. It's not history as a pandemic.
And most importantly the hospitals are still under pressure, as are public services, all part ofd the same pandemic that started. We're nowhere near a steady state.
New variants will spread for the rest of time too. That's entirely normal with endemic viruses, they evolve into new variants, that's why we get a new flu vaccine every year instead of just reusing last year's one again.
This is our steady state.
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem. ~ Douglas Adams
Look up the definitions of pandemic and endemic.
Yes, pandemic is when it is spreading (often exponentially) into new areas. Covid19 isn't doing this anymore.
Endemic is when a virus is perpetually in the same area. Covid19 is this.
If you can't cope with the virus being here, its not going to be gone next year or the year after. Its here to stay.
Waves of infection from new variants are as ubiquitous as at any time during the pandemic. It is still pandemic - though fortunately associated with much lower mortality. A new variant of flu this widespread, to take another instance, would also be pandemic. That's unlikely, though, since it's much less infectious.
In defence of Penny, what is actually so bad with homeopathy?
Isn’t Prince Charles in favour as well so PM as PM aligns Conservatives with Monarchy again would be a bonus.
What is wrong with it is it is fraudulent, quack medicine. It has no place in modern health care beyond a simple placebo.
But that is the point. Placebos are incredibly valuable and used to be easy because people couldn't read, or couldn't read Latin (aqua purissima) or doctors just lied. What with medical ethics plus the internet that is no longer possible, so the only way of getting placebos to where they are needed is homeopathy.
the other point is, people are better off going to a NHS homeopath who can probably make some suggestions about conventional treatments for their cancer, vs a pure balls out nutter.
Both substantial arguments. I think the truth should be valued for its own sake too much to admit them, but they are there.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Exactly. Pronoun badges were handed out at my clients Pride event last week and they had massive rainbow/trans flags on all the tables.
I didn't go.
I always refuse to give pronouns. But I always try to respect the wishes of individuals who make specific requests.
And as for Pride flags....
There is absolutely nothing in the rainbow flag that excluded anyone. With the various new 'progressive' versions are so forced that they have to be updated regularly because a new group wants their space on it.
The traditional 6 colour rainbow flag is a symbol that represents all who wish to be part of it and in no way excludes anyone.
But you aren't allowed to say that in a Pride context anymore as you are labelled as a -phobe .
1) I understand people who have changed orientation using pronouns. But cis people? Give over and stop being so hand-wringing. It says more about you than your preferred pronoun...
2) When I was at uni it was LGB. Well, I say that but B wasn't liked. Then LGBT. Then LGBTQ. Then LGBTQI. Then a plus added. I honestly don't understand some of the new definitions - pansexual? You are sexually attracted to all genders? Yeah me to, but I'm Bi. So what's your point? etc
But the Pride movement salami-slicing itself isn't a reason to give up on the positive modernisation of societal attitudes it represents. If a small number have disappeared up their own arse, just ignore them.
For some no doubt fuddy duddy old white bloke reason I farkin' hate the term "cis". It is so arch it makes me vomit.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
I remember at university one of my female tutors telling me applied for a mortgage in the late 60s she would be rejected unless a male blood relative agreed to be on the mortgage despite her earning more money than her brothers.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I mean, “If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with,“ is pretty on the nose.
Paraphrased: “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make”.
(Also, refusing to wear a mask when you know you’re infectious & going out anyway? Do you genuinely not care about the fact that this inevitably infects many, many people, half of whom will end up stuck at home with something that is roughly flu equvalent? I never really had you pegged as someone to whom adding to the sum total of human misery would come so easily, but maybe I misjudged you?)
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
It seems to me that the real challenge is being missed. Most PBers are in fact fairly old fashioned liberals in the sense of believing in freedom as widely as possible, with the major proviso being that, so to speak, your freedom to punch ends where my nose begins. I have no freedom to do harm or interfere with the freedom of others.
Some old fashioned liberals (I am one) fear that what is occurring is a power play. Artificial extensions are rapidly being built to the concept of what constitutes 'harm'. This explains the bogus 'snowflake' phenomenon, whereby certain expressions of free speech come under threat, not because it will hurt my nose but because I can't cope with the trauma of having to be in the same room/country/planet as that thought.
This is also the danger of 'protected characteristics'. This is mostly about who gets to order whom around.
And yet the laws taking away rights of free speech and protest are coming from the most fervent anti-woke right.
Both the right and the left instantiate large anti liberal groups. Old fashioned liberals get hit by traffic coming from all directions.
Rishi campaign prickly and defensive today but I suspect the numbers will hold firm today.
Probably a fairly steady as she goes result today? Suella out. Then it gets interesting next week.
Only things I can think to watch are a) how much Rishi adds (if he’s not up to 100 then it’s all going pear shaped IMHO) b) whether Liz shores up any support or is staying fairly static (if she’s still hovering on 50-55 she’s vulnerable).
43 votes to share both from centralist MPs given the candidates who lost yesterday.
If Sunak doesn't pick up 30% or more of those he has a problem - he really does need 100+ today..
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I mean, “If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with,“ is pretty on the nose.
Paraphrased: “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make”.
(Also, refusing to wear a mask when you know you’re infectious & going out anyway? Do you genuinely not care about the fact that this inevitably infects many, many people, half of whom will end up stuck at home with something that is roughly flu equvalent? I never really had you pegged as someone to whom adding to the sum total of human misery would come so easily, but maybe I misjudged you?)
No, not "some of you may die". SomeAll of you maywill die.
Death is not a "sacrifice" it is a part of the circle of life.
Technology has worked wonders in increasing people's life expectancies, but there is no divine reason that stays the same forever. If Covid knocks a month or two off average life expectancies, then that's just nature taking its course.
Do I don't give a fuck about Covid, or the fact it infects people, anymore than I care about the cold or a cough? No, I don't. We've wasted far too much time and effort on Covid. If I have a cough or a cold I would go out and cover my mouth if I cough, and cover my nose when I sneeze. I would do the same for Covid.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
It seems to me that the real challenge is being missed. Most PBers are in fact fairly old fashioned liberals in the sense of believing in freedom as widely as possible, with the major proviso being that, so to speak, your freedom to punch ends where my nose begins. I have no freedom to do harm or interfere with the freedom of others.
Some old fashioned liberals (I am one) fear that what is occurring is a power play. Artificial extensions are rapidly being built to the concept of what constitutes 'harm'. This explains the bogus 'snowflake' phenomenon, whereby certain expressions of free speech come under threat, not because it will hurt my nose but because I can't cope with the trauma of having to be in the same room/country/planet as that thought.
This is also the danger of 'protected characteristics'. This is mostly about who gets to order whom around.
And yet the laws taking away rights of free speech and protest are coming from the most fervent anti-woke right.
Both the right and the left instantiate large anti liberal groups. Old fashioned liberals get hit by traffic coming from all directions.
Sure, but in practice, in the West and the UK over recent times, the legislative restrictions on free speech have come from the right, most recently here from Priti Patel.
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The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Endemic is when a virus is perpetually in the same area. Covid19 is this.
If you can't cope with the virus being here, its not going to be gone next year or the year after. Its here to stay.
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1547331386536755200
The key to this drone war appears to be rapid prototyping of many different, cheap systems and evolution thereof.
You need to look aback over periods of 20, 50, 100, 300 years to see the changes.
What I find interesting is the number of people who accept and even support all the changes up to, say 5-10 years ago, but who say 'no more'. The same would have been seen at ay time in the past 100 or so years - e.g.
'votes for women that's sensible but let's not have any nonsense about equal pay' or
'homosexuality should not be illegal, ok, but gay marriage - no way' or
'banning discrimination against disabled people, ok, but forcing businesses to provide access* will be an unfair burden on those businesses'
etc. etc.
(*We still don't have this last one yet btw)
2) When I was at uni it was LGB. Well, I say that but B wasn't liked. Then LGBT. Then LGBTQ. Then LGBTQI. Then a plus added. I honestly don't understand some of the new definitions - pansexual? You are sexually attracted to all genders? Yeah me to, but I'm Bi. So what's your point? etc
But the Pride movement salami-slicing itself isn't a reason to give up on the positive modernisation of societal attitudes it represents. If a small number have disappeared up their own arse, just ignore them.
Whilst I was in A&E with a friend's son a while back, I met a man who had broken some ribs and twisted his sternum whilst trying to move a fish tank. He said perhaps he should have emptied it first...
Ouch.
Thomas 2 major wins, 23 professional wins, world no 1 for 5 weeks
Koepka 4 major wins, 20 professional wins, world no 1 for 47 weeks
Scheffler 1 major win, 8 professional wins, world no 1 for 16 weeks
They are perhaps his peers, but if you have to pick the best golfer since Tiger, it is Rory.
They are however delivering lollies to staff for the heatwave. A small gesture but appreciated 😎
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
All of this stuff is just a further development of the extreme left v extreme right battle. People who bang on about both are generally just negatively minded saddos. The centre ground is a happier and more positive place to be.
The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions.
In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it.
Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail.
Nothing lasts forever.
It shouldn't be surprising that many of the most wealthiest are very happy to continue to discuss inequalities around trans issues and so on.
But anyway, witness the petulant row over trans rights. The hard militant end of the trans rights movement think I should be able to classify myself as a woman today and enter female changing rooms and women's refuges tomorrow.
The safe spaces that people are anti-woke to protect are quite literally physical. Toilets. Changing Rooms. Prisons. Sports Teams. Not Kumbiya internet bubbles where the bad man can't call you a fag.
I have described exactly where I believe the D&I realm should be moving to be inclusive.
And I think you need to educate yourself on issues surrounding sexuality. There is very much a difference between Bi and Pan.
I think the public care much more about COVID than they do about Ben & Jerry’s or some of the other topics Tory leadership candidates have focused on.
There are already different rules for amateurs vs pros e.g. range finder use.
Improving ventilation and filtration is such a no-brainer. It inconveniences no-one and it will benefit us in reduced spread of every airborne virus.
He said things have calmed down (after forced vaccinations). He said that cases were rising but everyone was more relaxed because as we were two and a half years on "of course" the government had added extra hospital capacity.
Have we?
https://order-order.com/2022/07/14/rudds-remainer-house-of-horrors-party/
Australia has long zealously protected its borders from importing new viruses, fauna and flora into its rather unique ecosystem.
"Keep out dirty foreign diseases, keeping out foreigners if need be" is not an especially "woke" concept for Australians to have.
They can’t waste a $100k anti-aircraft missile on a $10k drone, and half the time they can’t even see it on radar. The repurposed grenades with the 3D-printed tail fins are brilliantly inspired. All low-level stuff, but together adds up.
This isn't about being fed up with companies virtue signalling (which I have repeated posted that I agree that they are), its being fed up with what they are signalling about.
Isn’t Prince Charles in favour as well so PM as PM aligns Conservatives with Monarchy again would be a bonus.
I won't wear a mask, and if I get the virus again, I won't be isolating. I'd avoid going to visit anyone immunocompromised, just as I would with the common cold or a cough, but I wouldn't avoid going out and about generally and I wouldn't wear a mask while doing so. It spreading is part of how we live now.
Ventilation and filtration I have no objections to if they're economic, but if they're not economic then they wouldn't be a priority for me. If they're economic maybe put it into building standards for new buildings, but not necessarily any point in revamping every old building in the country.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
Are things perfect? Not at all, but we are certainly in a much more diverse and equal place in what must be amongst the most diverse employers in the country. I think there are still social class issues to address, as diversity has too often been skin deep in the past.
Tugendhat
Mordaunt
Sunak
Truss
Badenoch
Braverman
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
It is more that Australians were willing to let people be sent to quarantine camps if they had Covid. It's like something from 100 years ago and rather Chinese-style in its approach.
That may not be woke per se but it does suggest a pattern of conformity to what been told to do which would have been unlikely in the UK.
Worse it indicates that the believer is not prepared to listen to the science.
It’s ridiculous. The country has left and isn’t going back anytime soon .
Probably a fairly steady as she goes result today? Suella out. Then it gets interesting next week.
Only things I can think to watch are a) how much Rishi adds (if he’s not up to 100 then it’s all going pear shaped IMHO) b) whether Liz shores up any support or is staying fairly static (if she’s still hovering on 50-55 she’s vulnerable).
(basic info is in the URL)
Even assuming no cock-up and sufficient dilution to remove the 'active' ingredient completely, there's the costs to providers (I only really care if publicly funded, but even if private insurers are funding it then it puts everyone else's pemiums up). There's also the point that being distracted by homeopathy may prevent or delay people geting actual effective treatments.
https://youtu.be/n_wkO4hk07o
"YoRRKshire tea!"
But I do question how far the state should go in protecting those definitions given for some people they can change on an hour by hour or day by day basis.
They are passionate about their country, nationalists in a way that most people here won't understand or would find unpleasant if shown here. I think that's part of why I'm such an English nationalist, is because I grew up as an English child there and it was so normal and pleasant there. 👍
For them, if you say that an alien virus can be contained and kept out of the country, sending the few who have it to isolation if need be, then that is much more natural to them than it is here. Here it could never have worked because we are so interconnected to the world, but there is different, they have an option to keep their ecosystem unique and they're used to it. Having the infected quarantine wouldn't be the "woke" thing to do there, it would be the "patriotic" thing to do.
To take a British or American attitude of "woke" or "unwoke" and apply it there is a point of view failure.
The right need to prevail upon Truss to give up and let Badenoch champion the right.
I'd love Rory to win more, it's the excessive attention Rory receives that annoys me. I doubt it helps him either.
A new variant of flu this widespread, to take another instance, would also be pandemic. That's unlikely, though, since it's much less infectious.
They need an hour and a half to count fewer than 360 votes apparently.
the other point is, people are better off going to a NHS homeopath who can probably make some suggestions about conventional treatments for their cancer, vs a pure balls out nutter.
Both substantial arguments. I think the truth should be valued for its own sake too much to admit them, but they are there.
Paraphrased: “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make”.
(Also, refusing to wear a mask when you know you’re infectious & going out anyway? Do you genuinely not care about the fact that this inevitably infects many, many people, half of whom will end up stuck at home with something that is roughly flu equvalent? I never really had you pegged as someone to whom adding to the sum total of human misery would come so easily, but maybe I misjudged you?)
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Today's vote is a bit of a phony war, but I can see Tug-End potentially leapfrogging Badenough with transfers from those eliminated.
If Sunak doesn't pick up 30% or more of those he has a problem - he really does need 100+ today..
Which meant no mortgage or credit of course.
Death is not a "sacrifice" it is a part of the circle of life.
Technology has worked wonders in increasing people's life expectancies, but there is no divine reason that stays the same forever. If Covid knocks a month or two off average life expectancies, then that's just nature taking its course.
Do I don't give a fuck about Covid, or the fact it infects people, anymore than I care about the cold or a cough? No, I don't. We've wasted far too much time and effort on Covid. If I have a cough or a cold I would go out and cover my mouth if I cough, and cover my nose when I sneeze. I would do the same for Covid.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.