Johnson Oxley's hardly is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Well they can do that and they'll lose again.
I just find it astonishing they sat and watched Corbynism for five years and decided they'd do the same. Baffling.
They need to go back to the centre, perhaps you can get Rory Stewart back
Not only Labour. Their have their own experience post 1997 and 2001 shows how successful such a plan can be.
Johnson Oxley's hardly is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Well they can do that and they'll lose again.
I just find it astonishing they sat and watched Corbynism for five years and decided they'd do the same. Baffling.
They need to go back to the centre, perhaps you can get Rory Stewart back
Depends if the cost of living crisis continues and a Starmer led government cannot get a grip on inflation and strikes are common it would soon become unpopular. Remember we changed government 3 times in the 1970s with similar high inland strikes
On the Spectator piece, whilst it nails just how pointless this government is, I can't help feel a little sorry for the party.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
People don't understand their problems so can't ask for solutions. So they tie the politicians up in knots, demanding solutions they can't have for problems they utterly misunderstand. Tories - and Labour for that matter - have to sing stupid songs because that has become the only way to get elected.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Is there such a politician?
Excellent post, and I agree with everything.
The classic for me is a refusal to see that good services cost money. For all that Teresa Mays attempt to do something about social care was ham fisted, at least it was an attempt. And what happened? Millions reacted in horror at the thought of not being able to pass on some of their inheritance to their kids. No sense of community. No understanding that when a care worker comes in four times a day it costs money. I’m lucky. I don’t need an inheritance, but will likely get decent ones when my folks and my mother in law pass away ((hopefully a long time in the future). But if that money has had to go into care spending so be it. Much of it will have been ‘earned’ by house price inflation, so it’s not even being taxed twice on the same income, as so many bewail. The nation needs a serious discussion about what it wants to be. Perhaps opposition for the Tories might help start this. I’m yet to be impressed that Starmer has a vision other than being a ‘straight kinda guy’, if he’s even that.
I think we're approaching a choice. Either find a way of taxing wealth or downgrade our expectations of what the state should provide for us.
My own view is that wealth needs to be taxed more, and income (especially earned income) taxed less.
I'm 55 now, and I'll likely inherit a lot of money in the next decade, tax free, more or less. That's nice to have, but at this point of my life, not really essential. It would be far better in the hands of my nephews, nieces, and step-children, who should be taxed less on what they earn.
At the same time, we will have to accept that the state does less for us.
Its truly baffling how willing people are to be taxed on their earned income every month (and its in plain site on payslips) but how angry they get at the possibility of being taxed on some potential unearned future inheritance.
"Can't tax me twice!!" - a complete lack of understanding that money is taxed many many times in different ways through its lifecycle.
I've always rejected the idea that it was undemocratic.
Yes
The Brexiteer line that having another vote would be undemocratic is amongst the dumbest, yet most persistent, of their lies.
Good or bad idea it was not good or bad for lack of democracy. One could argue you should enact the first decision before rescinding, you could argue where does it end do you have third or fourth referendums and so on, all valid, but it wasn't undemocratic.
A 2nd vote was absolutely undemocratic. The government swore on oath that it would enact the first vote. “The decision is yours. It will be the final decision. There will be no second vote” - david Cameron, 2014
Johnson Oxley's article is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Does any wing of the Tory party have a policy platform with *practical* ideas to implement across all aspects of public life? Yes we know there are the Singapore-on-Thames enthusiasts who vaguely want a low tax low regulation country but practically don't know how it would work or get there. And the same is true for the other factions - vague impractical ideas.
I said you need a Thatcher and Labour need a Blair because its true - someone who can actually implement a platform that actually works. People object to Blair and Thatcher but at least their governments did something...
I must admit I was expecting a bit more insight and illumination from the Oxley piece. It is pretty vacuous. If that's the best level of analysis the right is capable of then the Tories really are in a rudderless tailspin.
I’ve always found it odd that the Scots words for little (wee) is still in common use, but the Scots word for big (muckle) has died out.
No it hasn't.
Maybe in Sweden.
In fairness to him whilst I'm not in Scotland, I don't ever recall hearing muckle used, whereas using wee is clearly fairly common.
A literature search would settle the issue.
Have a look at a variety of text (newspaper articles, novels, social media etc) written by Scottish writers in 2010-20 and compare with 1910-20 or 1810-20.
Folk regularly use the word wee both written and spoken. I can’t recall ever hearing or seeing muckle since my grandmother died. Perhaps my parents have occasionally spoken it, but I don’t think either of them has ever written it.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Woke? Naah. Even your "they're cutting the tits off teenage girls" panic affects what 0.00000000001% of the population?
Meanwhile the country is sinking and you are cheering on the sinking.
Johnson Oxley's hardly is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Well they can do that and they'll lose again.
I just find it astonishing they sat and watched Corbynism for five years and decided they'd do the same. Baffling.
They need to go back to the centre, perhaps you can get Rory Stewart back
Depends if the cost of living crisis continues and a Starmer led government cannot get a grip on inflation and strikes are common it would soon become unpopular. Remember we changed government 3 times in the 1970s with similar high inland strikes
We did, and a Starmer government won't have it easy.
But a struggling government beats a batso opposition. See 2005 and (controversially, I admit) 2019.
I must admit I was expecting a bit more insight and illumination from the Oxley piece. It is pretty vacuous. If that's the best level of analysis the right is capable of then the Tories really are in a rudderless tailspin.
It has been obvious to me that they ran out of ideas after May left.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Woke? Naah. Even your "they're cutting the tits off teenage girls" panic affects what 0.00000000001% of the population?
Meanwhile the country is sinking and you are cheering on the sinking.
So minorities don’t matter? Spoken like a true man of privilege.
Johnson Oxley's article is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Sounds like you've given up on winning GE 2024. A man of sound judgement, as ever.
If a second Brexit vote was undemocratic then the referendum itself was undemocratic. If this is the level of analysis and comprehension of the right now I think Starmer will be pleased.
Mr. xP, the vote was not on Nigel Farage. The fixation on him was a foolish unforced error by Remainers who thought anyone contemplating voting to Leave could be persuaded not to by invoking the name of a bogeyman.
And how did that work out?
You think you were right. And you lost. The pro-EU types had done precious little to promote the EU even economically (which should have been the easy part) and sod all on identity, so to then mock the identity of such a large slice of the electorate was obvious stupidity.
Very sceptical MPs get knocked here for being stupid, but at least when they voted against May's deal they were voting for what they wanted. How many pro-EU MPs now realise, belatedly, that marching through the lobbies with people diametrically opposed to their own views was not actually a good move?
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Woke? Naah. Even your "they're cutting the tits off teenage girls" panic affects what 0.00000000001% of the population?
Meanwhile the country is sinking and you are cheering on the sinking.
In a world which can sometimes seem grey and menacing, I am always consoled by the thought that ludicrous, clueless twats like you voted for the Brexit I wanted. So, for that, many thanks
Johnson Oxley's article is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
If a long time in opposition is the plan the idea is faultless.
Johnson Oxley's article is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Sounds like you've given up on winning GE 2024. A man of sound judgement, as ever.
HYUFD has been one of the most astute posters here. He has never ever underestimated Starmer. That must tell you something
“Newly released Ministry of Defence files reveal they took the unusual step of informing senior Cabinet figures after an unidentified object was captured on camera in Perthshire.”
It’s not a fucking stone reflected in a lake. It might be secret tech. But that in itself is quite the story given the description that it hovered silently for 10 mins before showing instant acceleration.
That's a stone in a loch, with an RAF or USAF jet (Harrier?) captured in the same reflection
USAF have never had Harrier apart from participation in the UK/FRG/USA Tripartite Evaluation squadron with Kestrel (not exactly Harrier) at RAF West Raynham in 1964 - 65.
Don't do this. You're not good at it. It's like me trying to discuss anchovies or something.
He's not as bad as the Mail, which thought it was a Tornado.
Here’s a long Twitter debate as to the aircraft ID. With actual pilots rather than elderly fantasists like @Dura_Ace
Nah, @Dura_Ace was pointing out that it wasn't a USAF Harrier, not saying it wasn't a Harrier at all.
Aiui, only the USMC fly Harriers?
This guy sounds authoritative
‘For me, the problem with that is that on August 4, 1990, all of the U.S.'s Harrier's should have been on-station on the USS Nassau and Tarawa in the Middle East. The Gulf War had just started 2 days prior.’
So, a RN or RAF Harrier. Sounds like the USMC Harriers weren't in the vicinity.
Fuck the jet. Who cares. The daily Mail has a photo of where the ufo photo was taken. No lochs anywhere
If they are right the mystery deepens. What is the rhomboid object in the sky?
Apologies for both reopening this and for disappearing upwards at supersonic speed after one post last night...
I suspect the MOD saw something they could not immediately explain, so General Paranoia came in and filed it in a cupboard for 50 years.
Without consulting Google Maps the Daily Mail image looks like a picture from the south side of the River Garry, looking east towards Blair Atholl. Ben Vrackie is the triangular hill in the background. So that corresponds with the claimed location.
But where is the Betula pendula? I see only a Larch on the edge of a plantation. Admittedly birch trees don't last terribly long up there but there's something not quite right.
The larch plantation surely isn't close enough to the fence in this case.
Are these locations being guessed at by researchers rather than being specified by the photographer? It is very easy to find both larch and barbed wire fences in this area and you could easily come up with 100 semi-convincing spots.
The other possibility is a double exposure - after all, if you are using black and white film in 1990 you may well have had a manual wind camera - but they tended to look washed out.
I'd still go with a rock in a loch on a very still day. Sorry.
As someone who would dearly love to have intelligent aliens spotted/confirmed (hell, any life off of Earth would be great to have reliably observed), the "evidence" presented tends to go along the lines of "But why would 'they' not publicise this/keep this quiet/say whatever/etc."
Because speculating on motives may be many things, but it sure as hell isn't extraordinary evidence, and we well know that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.
And most of the speculation on motives seems to come from a place where the speculator has never been in one of the organisations involved. Where all you need is one slightly ignorant or slightly paranoid or slightly publicity-averse senior/very senior person, and all of a sudden, it looks like "Yeah; that's not surprising."
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Woke? Naah. Even your "they're cutting the tits off teenage girls" panic affects what 0.00000000001% of the population?
Meanwhile the country is sinking and you are cheering on the sinking.
So minorities don’t matter? Spoken like a true man of privilege.
These aren't minorities. They are the edge cases of the edge cases. Which matter to the people involved but are ignored by the majority of society who are not affected, and certainly not threatened as described.
On a slightly more optimistic note, there are some reasons to be cheerful.
1. We are about to get a new political leader, with new priorities, bringing in new Ministers, both of whom will have a profound determination to improve voters' lives and therefore survive the next general election. Either will be a distinct improvement on the current zombie Government, and both are likely to be a material improvement on the Government of Boris Johnson, which seems to have been characterised by drift and responding to events rather than setting the agenda.
2. The war in Ukraine started by Russia, and its accompanying crises, whilst I deplore it, has provoked serious thinking about energy security, and the exploitation of Britain's natural resources. These issues have been bubbling under for a while, and the current Government's approach has been found severely wanting. It is likely that the UK hydrocarbon industry will now be pushed forward, UK gas storage will be re-opened, new innovations and approaches to renewables will be sought (it's good that Liz has made a vaguely positive statement on tidal), and our whole energy strategy will become more robust.
3. The Government being poor for a while isn't necessarily a terrible thing. It will force them to look at what is really necessary spending, and what's a white elephant. It's reasonable to expect that the business of governing and providing services to the public will get leaner and more efficient, and that is a good thing. Spending which promises a return on investment is likely to be prioritised.
4. Though I hope the NHS and other public institutions improve quickly, their current doldrums probably mean that people, in their turn, are likely to come to depend on the State a lot less. Look after health actively to minimise the need for hospital care, staying active and stimulated to delay and potentially avoid completely the need for social care. Continuing to work flexibly well past retirement age to supplement pensions, benefiting the labour market. If we do those things, they will have a massively beneficial effect on well-being and happiness.
5. As an Island/s, with a temperate, often rainy climate, able to produce great food, plentiful sources of renewable and carbon-based energy, the English language, and a high degree of political autonomy, we have been placed in an extremely advantageous position in dealing with the current challenges faced by the world. It may not be '1st place in the lottery of life', but it ain't bad.
I must admit I was expecting a bit more insight and illumination from the Oxley piece. It is pretty vacuous. If that's the best level of analysis the right is capable of then the Tories really are in a rudderless tailspin.
It has been obvious to me that they ran out of ideas after May left.
That's potentially fine. A lot of the better strands of Conservatism aren't really keen on ideas beyond a preference for not intervening, doing so competently if you must and a certain amount of patriotism. Thatcher went wrong when she started having big ideas and rearranging reality to match them. Ideas... far better not, thank you. It's what made the Conservative party great.
Cummings was brought into government to have ideas, but they turned out to largely be bad ones. Truss is bubbling with ideas, but they are worse ones. Badenoch has a bag full of ideas, just waiting...
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Woke? Naah. Even your "they're cutting the tits off teenage girls" panic affects what 0.00000000001% of the population?
Meanwhile the country is sinking and you are cheering on the sinking.
In a world which can sometimes seem grey and menacing, I am always consoled by the thought that ludicrous, clueless twats like you voted for the Brexit I wanted. So, for that, many thanks
You're always calmer after a drink or two. Sober; WOKE! THEY'RE COMING TO GET US Drinks: This quite engaging guy Too many drinks: ALIENS! THEY'RE COMING TO GET US
If a second Brexit vote was undemocratic then the referendum itself was undemocratic. If this is the level of analysis and comprehension of the right now I think Starmer will be pleased.
It's the level of analysis and comprehension of the Brexiteers. The problem for Starmer is if they remain the majority.
Johnson Oxley's article is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Sounds like you've given up on winning GE 2024. A man of sound judgement, as ever.
HYUFD has been one of the most astute posters here. He has never ever underestimated Starmer. That must tell you something
Yes. It tells me that someone on record admiring Franco also admires the Muscular Unionist (copyright M Gove) Keir Starmer.
He’s hoping that Keir also wants to bash old ladies over the head as they cast their vote at polling stations, and imprison political opponents.
I wonder how Keith Vaz feels about having led this anti-Rushdie demonstration through Leicester
"Islam's sword is mightier than the blasphemer's pen"
Forget the politics. That's definitely one for Sunil - it's the very nice porte cochère of the Midland Railway station at Leicester.
Have you been in Aberdeen since they completely ****ed up the station? It wasn’t one of the greats but it had a granitey charm, all now enclosed in yet another homogenised shopping experience.
The brai child of Sir Ian ‘the oil is running out’ Wood I believe; he appears to be able to get away with anything in Aberdeen.
Johnson Oxley's article is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Sounds like you've given up on winning GE 2024. A man of sound judgement, as ever.
HYUFD has been one of the most astute posters here. He has never ever underestimated Starmer. That must tell you something
Yes. It tells me that someone on record admiring Franco also admires the Muscular Unionist (copyright M Gove) Keir Starmer.
He’s hoping that Keir also wants to bash old ladies over the head as they cast their vote at polling stations, and imprison political opponents.
Your analysis of Starmer being crap seems to be that Labour is unpopular in Scotland. And you post the same thing every day.
I could literally write a bot that would replace you and be more interesting
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Woke? Naah. Even your "they're cutting the tits off teenage girls" panic affects what 0.00000000001% of the population?
Meanwhile the country is sinking and you are cheering on the sinking.
Oh FFS, you can care about both things at once.
Does this affect the whole population much, in aggregate? No. And it won't be a major electoral issue, despite the best efforts of people on the right.
Does this still have a devastating impact on some members of a very vulnerable group of young people? Yes. Should we care - absolutely.
It's a bit like dismissing the Rotherham stuff out of hand because it's being leveraged by right-wingers. That's cowardly - confront the issue.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Woke? Naah. Even your "they're cutting the tits off teenage girls" panic affects what 0.00000000001% of the population?
Meanwhile the country is sinking and you are cheering on the sinking.
The biggest issue facing the country is energy prices. But that is an issue which in the short term not much can be done about and in the long term we are largely agreed what should be done, and which is, in a typically stop-start way, being done. In short, high gas proces are jot the state's fault. Whereas cutting the tits off teenage girls is the fault of the state: it is being carried out by the state for reasons of ideology. It is being cheered on in secondary schools up and down the country. What proportion of schools have children who are transitioning? It seems unusual to come across a school in which there is no one transitioning. That implies it is affecting a rather larger proportion than Rochdale implies. And it is happening purely because there is an insane trans ideology at large which no one will dare gainsay.
I've always rejected the idea that it was undemocratic.
Yes
The Brexiteer line that having another vote would be undemocratic is amongst the dumbest, yet most persistent, of their lies.
Good or bad idea it was not good or bad for lack of democracy. One could argue you should enact the first decision before rescinding, you could argue where does it end do you have third or fourth referendums and so on, all valid, but it wasn't undemocratic.
A 2nd vote was absolutely undemocratic. The government swore on oath that it would enact the first vote. “The decision is yours. It will be the final decision. There will be no second vote” - david Cameron, 2014
Yeah, we've had this argument before, ministerial comments are not law and never have been. We don't run things via blood oaths or Prime Ministerial declarations. The government also effectively said the vote would be binding, but knew that to be untrue as they noted in court that the legislation did not make it binding. It could have made it so but didn't. No whinging changes that.
You can argue it would be a moral outrage to have had a second vote before the first was enacted, that parliament was honour bound to accept the outcome (many had been elected stating they would do that) that has logic behind it, but a vote being undemocratic? It makes not a lick of sense. I don't even know why intelligent people pretend they think it would be - your own comment doesn't even back up your own claim it would be undemocratic, since all you've done is quote a PM saying there would not be another vote, and what the heck does a PM saying something have to do with whether a vote by the citizenry would be, er, a vote by the citizenry, that is democratic?
So you've not even attempted to justify why its undemocratic on your own terms, you're just trying to get an outrage boner on - it's too hot for that, clearly, as you're obviously capable of making the argument yet have not done so, instead going with something entirely irrelevant.
That's the strangest thing about politics sometimes - there are often good arguments to use, yet people still end up using really really stupid ones instead which just undermine their own case. See those Corbynites who, rather than stick to pointing out how well Corbyn did versus expectations in 2017 and how close he came to winning, prefer to actually pretend he was the real winner, even though he still lost. Or remainers who rather than point out problems with the Brexit process and not being worth it but prefer to still moan about a slogan on the side of a bus 6 years ago instead.
How do you think the Scots would have reacted if, after voting Yes in 2014, they were told to vote again, without Indy ever being enacted?
Quite. There it is. End of debate
Nope. You are so lazy sometimes it is hilarious. I usually believe that people are genuine no matter how silly they are being, but I find that hard to accept in this case, as you're not even being persuasive on your own terms.
If they were told to vote again they would have reacted to it as an outrage, and we may think rightly so - how dare people be asked again?. But it would not be an undemocratic outrage because the means of overturning would still be being done via a democratic method. Can you not see that if people are voting there is democracy happening?
Voting over and over until you get the right answer can be argued to be wrong, so make that argument. But arguing a vote is undemocratic? That's just too funny for words. Hell, I reckon I've done a better job explaining why a second vote would have been wrong than you have simply in rebutting your reasoning and providing an alternative reasoning.
Since I've now argued against two of your posts to that effect I expect to be lambasted with some expletives and personal insults after this one, so I ask you try to make it a good one.
Clearly back in the past the solution to Brexit was a Norway-style relationship which we could mould over time. It was leaving but respecting the result was close and not destroying the economy.
That was all possible and had support until May decided to be Thatcher 2.0 and "Brexit means Brexit", after that there was no coming back.
Labour has responsibility for not arguing for that position from day one and sticking to it - but the issue was that Corbyn and Milne fundamentally were more Leave than May and Johnson and were leading a party that was more ultra Remain than the public.
Corbyn should have resigned after 2017, Starmer should have taken over then and right now we'd be in EEA or something similar and wouldn't be in a mess.
Yes. This was a function of the way that the issue crossed party lines in a quite distinct way. And the systems failed to work when that happened.
Given the closeness of the vote the only unifying solution was EFTA/EEA but with the addition, not in our gift but the EU's, of a derogation from strict FoM. So it required statesmanship from the EU, the UK, Brexiteers, Remainers, and especially MPs and government.
Statecraft not only failed after 2016, but even worse in the decades leading up, by which we found ourselves in a place where neither staying nor leaving was fully acceptable to a huge part of the voting population.
To some extent the same failures are happening right now with Scotland (with the sides switching) where neither union + hard Brexit nor independence + EU are sane solutions which can command a clear majority.
SFAICS there are no clear ways forward, but a Lab/LD government has the best chance, if slim, of making progress.
I must admit I was expecting a bit more insight and illumination from the Oxley piece. It is pretty vacuous. If that's the best level of analysis the right is capable of then the Tories really are in a rudderless tailspin.
It has been obvious to me that they ran out of ideas after May left.
That's potentially fine. A lot of the better strands of Conservatism aren't really keen on ideas beyond a preference for not intervening, doing so competently if you must and a certain amount of patriotism. Thatcher went wrong when she started having big ideas and rearranging reality to match them. Ideas... far better not, thank you. It's what made the Conservative party great.
Cummings was brought into government to have ideas, but they turned out to largely be bad ones. Truss is bubbling with ideas, but they are worse ones. Badenoch has a bag full of ideas, just waiting...
The issue with thar approach is that the civil service has lots of its own ideas and momentum. Really shitty ones. So a laissez faire approach on the part of politicians doesn't really work.
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
Surely it is clear where the money goes. We pay the highest taxes in 70 years yet have minimal investment, minimal social security, crap front line services. So the money is being wasted through inefficiency and corruption.
One example. We marketise the English NHS. Vast complex expensive layers of bureaucracy. So money tips into the system but isn't being spent on front line care its being spent on yet another layer of management at yet another trust managing endless contracts. Brilliant for the people involved and the companies on contract (that is the "corruption" bit - systemic, not criminal), crap for people in A&E.
How do we cut both spending and improve services? Cut the false market, recreate simpler structures that are more efficient, redirect funding where it is needed. But that is bad for the middlemen and that is why we don't do it, because they have influence.
WIth respect I think that is simplistic. The NHS employs over 1,300,000 people. How on earth do you even start organising so many people and the resouces that they need? That needs a managerial structure, it needs broken down into comprehensible units, it needs some way of allocating resources to each of those units, it requires some measurement of outputs, it has to be flexible enough to cope with a pandemic and yet meet endless targets for glaucoma and hip replacements. My experience is mainly of the Scottish NHS which is barely 1/10th of the size and yet the managerial problems that are not being addressed are manifest.
The internal market is one attempt to try and give shape to this structure. You don't like it and fair enough but if it wasn't there we would need something similar with similar measurements and at least the impression of control.
Or remainers who rather than point out problems with the Brexit process and not being worth it but prefer to still moan about a slogan on the side of a bus 6 years ago instead.
True, but...
The problem with ignoring the bus is that it's iconic. Emblematic of the whole campaign. And object lesson in delivering lies to the public.
It wasn't true.
Pointing out it wasn't true amplified the message.
The same this is happening in the leadership campaign. Rishi says that Truss Tax Cuts are bad. The members hear Tax Cuts...
A lot of this thread has been about politicians not telling the public the truth. if we can't talk about the most obvious, recent, relevant, glaring example of that on a site nominally concerned with politics then we really are fucked.
Johnson Oxley's article is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Sounds like you've given up on winning GE 2024. A man of sound judgement, as ever.
HYUFD has been one of the most astute posters here. He has never ever underestimated Starmer. That must tell you something
Yes. It tells me that someone on record admiring Franco also admires the Muscular Unionist (copyright M Gove) Keir Starmer.
He’s hoping that Keir also wants to bash old ladies over the head as they cast their vote at polling stations, and imprison political opponents.
Your analysis of Starmer being crap seems to be that Labour is unpopular in Scotland. And you post the same thing every day.
I could literally write a bot that would replace you and be more interesting
The bot wot you wrote that perpetually looks for signs of Labour recovery in Scotland is a cracker..
Johnson Oxley's article is basically saying the Tories have run out of ideas in government. In effect therefore best for them to lose the next general election and shift hard to the ideological right under Badenoch in opposition
Sounds like you've given up on winning GE 2024. A man of sound judgement, as ever.
HYUFD has been one of the most astute posters here. He has never ever underestimated Starmer. That must tell you something
Yes. It tells me that someone on record admiring Franco also admires the Muscular Unionist (copyright M Gove) Keir Starmer.
He’s hoping that Keir also wants to bash old ladies over the head as they cast their vote at polling stations, and imprison political opponents.
Your analysis of Starmer being crap seems to be that Labour is unpopular in Scotland. And you post the same thing every day.
I could literally write a bot that would replace you and be more interesting
The bot wot you wrote that perpetually looks for signs of Labour recovery in Scotland is a cracker..
Labour is going to at best win like 5 seats in Scotland. At best.
But Labour doesn't need to recover in Scotland to govern. This is why your analysis is pointless in the grand scheme of things
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Hair and eye colour are “decidedly real”. As is height. However western societies have not historically erected significant legal and cultural barriers on participation based on eye colour, hair colour (ginger jokes notwithstanding) or height. They have on skin colour.
Take drama. A somewhat trivial, but easy to understand, example is the fact that people bitched and moaned about actors in the Soarse Ronan/Margot Robbie vehicle ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ being the “wrong” skin colour for that period of British history, while failing to care that Irish actress Ronan had the wrong accent for the French raised Scottish Queen she was playing, and Australian actress Robbie the wrong hair colour, height and practically everything else for the English Queen she was portraying, shows that certain “decidedly real” factors (accent, hair colour, eye colour, age, nationality) matter far less to our society than skin colour. You’re white, you get a pass on your appearance. If you’re black, you don’t. Skin colour matters.
A black English actor would get massive pushback in playing an English historical figure on the basis of “historical accuracy”. A white actor of any nationality, even if he or she had virtually no similarity to the personage portrayed (hair, eyes, accent, height - all ‘decidedly real’) would not. Imagine the outcry if, say, Thandiwe Newton had been cast as Elizabeth I instead of Robbie. It it that kind of difference in treatment of a superficial appearance that is the societal construct.
Drama is just the (relatively minor) example I have used here. The same difference in treatment throughout society is “decidedly real”. The people you patronisingly condemn as “woke” are, often clumsily trying to correct.
I think you know all this really but enjoy the drama.
I wonder how Keith Vaz feels about having led this anti-Rushdie demonstration through Leicester
"Islam's sword is mightier than the blasphemer's pen"
Forget the politics. That's definitely one for Sunil - it's the very nice porte cochère of the Midland Railway station at Leicester.
Have you been in Aberdeen since they completely ****ed up the station? It wasn’t one of the greats but it had a granitey charm, all now enclosed in yet another homogenised shopping experience.
The brai child of Sir Ian ‘the oil is running out’ Wood I believe; he appears to be able to get away with anything in Aberdeen.
I think the shopping centre next to the Station is excellent. My only complaint would be that it has added to the demise of Union Street, which is a sad shadow of what it was before. I am off to Aberdeen on Monday for a few days for a trial. Once upon a time it was so easy to find good restaurants there but very hard to find an hotel room. Now it is the other way around.
Its truly baffling how willing people are to be taxed on their earned income every month (and its in plain site on payslips) but how angry they get at the possibility of being taxed on some potential unearned future inheritance.
Yes, I don't get it either. I've just inherited £18,000 from a relative. It's a nice windfall, and if I was poor it'd be a life-saver. But if the Government had taken 20% or 40% I'd feel pretty much the same, rich or poor - a windfall is just that. Whereas if income tax went up sharply I might intellectually approve, but I'd really feel it, because it's daily living.
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
Oi, I came up with rock in loch. I've now seen the wider photo, so I agree that it's not as simple as that. It just kinda looks like a reflection, though?
I saw the kite analysis too and that seems quite compelling, but why anyone was flying a kite in that rather remote bit of Scotland is a mystery.
I probably shouldn't say this as a Labour member but right now I'd support a Labour/LD Government over a Labour majority.
They would deliver voting reform which is clearly needed.
Depending on the level of LD recovery, the route to a viable Lab/LD government might be extremely narrow, and a very tight Lab/LD majority may struggle to get voting reform through. Its not like Lab MPs are desperate to lose numbers and rule themselves out of majority government
How do you think the Scots would have reacted if, after voting Yes in 2014, they were told to vote again, without Indy ever being enacted?
Quite. There it is. End of debate
Nope. You are so lazy sometimes it is hilarious. I usually believe that people are genuine no matter how silly they are being, but I find that hard to accept in this case, as you're not even being persuasive on your own terms.
If they were told to vote again they would have reacted to it as an outrage, and we may think rightly so - how dare people be asked again?. But it would not be an undemocratic outrage because the means of overturning would still be being done via a democratic method. Can you not see that if people are voting there is democracy happening?
Voting over and over until you get the right answer can be argued to be wrong, so make that argument. But arguing a vote is undemocratic? That's just too funny for words. Since I've now argued against two of your posts to that effect I expect to be lambasted with some expletives and personal insults after this one, so I ask you try to make it a good one.
You have become bizarrely unintelligent. Seemingly overnight
Asking the Scots to ignore a Yes vote for Indy, so as to secure a No answer in a second vote, without ever honouring the first vote, would have resulted in civil unrest in Scotland. Blood in the streets.
The 2nd vote would have been boycotted by justifiably angry Yes voters (the same applies to a 2nd Brexit vote)
Then what? What the fuck do you do then? You’ve got a heavy 2nd vote for NO/Remain but on a vastly reduced turnout
What you get then is violence, as people realise their democratic will can be flatly ignored, and voting is meaningless. Well done. Twit
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
It takes four years at light speed to get to Earth from Alpha Centauri.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Hair and eye colour are “decidedly real”. As is height. However western societies have not historically erected significant legal and cultural barriers on participation based on eye colour, hair colour (ginger jokes notwithstanding) or height. They have on skin colour.
Take drama. A somewhat trivial, but easy to understand, example is the fact that people bitched and moaned about actors in the Soarse Ronan/Margot Robbie vehicle ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ being the “wrong” skin colour for that period of British history, while failing to care that Irish actress Ronan had the wrong accent for the French raised Scottish Queen she was playing, and Australian actress Robbie the wrong hair colour, height and practically everything else for the English Queen she was portraying, shows that certain “decidedly real” factors (accent, hair colour, eye colour, age, nationality) matter far less to our society than skin colour. You’re white, you get a pass on your appearance. If you’re black, you don’t. Skin colour matters.
A black English actor would get massive pushback in playing an English historical figure on the basis of “historical accuracy”. A white actor of any nationality, even if he or she had virtually no similarity to the personage portrayed (hair, eyes, accent, height - all ‘decidedly real’) would not. Imagine the outcry if, say, Thandiwe Newton had been cast as Elizabeth I instead of Robbie. It it that kind of difference in treatment of a superficial appearance that is the societal construct.
Drama is just the (relatively minor) example I have used here. The same difference in treatment throughout society is “decidedly real”. The people you patronisingly condemn as “woke” are, often clumsily trying to correct.
I think you know all this really but enjoy the drama.
That last drama is unfortunately ambiguous
There's black actors in The Great playing courtiers who were actually white and I have to say I was surprised to find how ok I was with that. They are actors not imposters.
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
I don't think there's any photographic manipulation as such. It is a photograph of something in front of the camera.
I'll see if I can dig up a suitable reflection picture from my archives.
As for the conspiracy - who knows? The MoD policy may well be just "don't encourage them".
In the mean time, have a picture I took of Nessie:
Unfortunately the loch wasn't flat calm that day so the scale is given away. It is not a person though.
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
It takes four years at light speed to get to Earth from Alpha Centauri.
No, it doesnt. Time experienced by those doing the travelling is much less as you approach light speed. Time dilation. If you even travel by such prosaic means.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
It wasn't just in the referendum vote that remainers failed, it was their determination to see it fail in the HOC rather than act constructively that contributed to where we are today and sadly the extreme views of both sides continue to impede the path to a sensible compromise
Sorry, but that's tosh.
Lots of people who started on the Remain side moved a long way to respond to the Brexit vote. Not all of them, sure. But look at people like May, Stewart, Clarke, Boles, Letwin... They all came up with various shades of plan that respected that 52 was bigger than 48, grappled with the awkward realities that 52 isn't much bigger than 48 but 350 million is much bigger than 70 million, and that a good stable relationship with a large near neighbour is a really good idea.
The ERG, Boris, Cummings and the rest of them spat each one of those plans out, along with pretty much everyone who tried to put something together.
The Brexit Ultras had their idiot counterparts on the remain side. Both gambled on winning it all, only one succeeded.
Weirdly, Boris and JRM technically departed from that ultra side by voting for May's deal of course. They were never true believers, just using them.
Mark Francois and Dominic Grieve were two cheeks of the same arse. Neither was prepared to compromise in the slightest.
The problem with trusting "experts" is that on so many issues, the experts have proved to be incompetent and entirely self-serving. The populists would not have got much of an opening were this not the case.
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
Oi, I came up with rock in loch. I've now seen the wider photo, so I agree that it's not as simple as that. It just kinda looks like a reflection, though?
I saw the kite analysis too and that seems quite compelling, but why anyone was flying a kite in that rather remote bit of Scotland is a mystery.
Apols if it was your thesis!
Yes it still looks rather like a reflection - but the debate is ongoing. There are many problems with that simple explanation
Aren’t you near there? It would be great if a highland dwelling pb-er could go over there and take some snaps of the real location. The absence of water in the cited place is a conundrum
How do you think the Scots would have reacted if, after voting Yes in 2014, they were told to vote again, without Indy ever being enacted?
Quite. There it is. End of debate
Nope. You are so lazy sometimes it is hilarious. I usually believe that people are genuine no matter how silly they are being, but I find that hard to accept in this case, as you're not even being persuasive on your own terms.
If they were told to vote again they would have reacted to it as an outrage, and we may think rightly so - how dare people be asked again?. But it would not be an undemocratic outrage because the means of overturning would still be being done via a democratic method. Can you not see that if people are voting there is democracy happening?
Voting over and over until you get the right answer can be argued to be wrong, so make that argument. But arguing a vote is undemocratic? That's just too funny for words. Since I've now argued against two of your posts to that effect I expect to be lambasted with some expletives and personal insults after this one, so I ask you try to make it a good one.
You have become bizarrely unintelligent. Seemingly overnight
Asking the Scots to ignore a Yes vote for Indy, so as to secure a No answer in a second vote, without ever honouring the first vote, would have resulted in civil unrest in Scotland. Blood in the streets.
The 2nd vote would have been boycotted by justifiably angry Yes voters (the same applies to a 2nd Brexit vote)
Then what? What the fuck do you do then? You’ve got a heavy 2nd vote for NO/Remain but on a vastly reduced turnout
What you get then is violence, as people realise their democratic will can be flatly ignored, and voting is meaningless. Well done. Twit
We had a 2nd vote. It was the 2019GE, and Leavers won again. It did not provoke a boycott, a breakdown in respect for British democracy, or violence.
Brexit has subsequently happened. It was implemented by Leavers. Democracy won.
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
Oi, I came up with rock in loch. I've now seen the wider photo, so I agree that it's not as simple as that. It just kinda looks like a reflection, though?
I saw the kite analysis too and that seems quite compelling, but why anyone was flying a kite in that rather remote bit of Scotland is a mystery.
Apols if it was your thesis!
Yes it still looks rather like a reflection - but the debate is ongoing. There are many problems with that simple explanation
Aren’t you near there? It would be great if a highland dwelling pb-er could go over there and take some snaps of the real location. The absence of water in the cited place is a conundrum
I don’t buy the kite thesis. Nor does Twitter
My take is that it is ether
1 a reflection plus a quite elaborate hoax
2 genuinely weird tech: American or “other”
It's not far off the A9, and near a Corbett I need to bag. Perhaps.
(I imagine it's flooded with nutters at the mo though).
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
Surely it is clear where the money goes. We pay the highest taxes in 70 years yet have minimal investment, minimal social security, crap front line services. So the money is being wasted through inefficiency and corruption.
One example. We marketise the English NHS. Vast complex expensive layers of bureaucracy. So money tips into the system but isn't being spent on front line care its being spent on yet another layer of management at yet another trust managing endless contracts. Brilliant for the people involved and the companies on contract (that is the "corruption" bit - systemic, not criminal), crap for people in A&E.
How do we cut both spending and improve services? Cut the false market, recreate simpler structures that are more efficient, redirect funding where it is needed. But that is bad for the middlemen and that is why we don't do it, because they have influence.
Yes, highest taxes in 70 years combined with crap front line services starved of direct public sector investment.
Another example is housing. In the last 40 years we've stopped building council housing. Ended state planned new towns while keeping green belt restrictions, so restricting housing supply generally and vastly pushing up house prices. We've transferred what's left of the council housing stock to what were once housing associations now operating effectively as private businesses concerned primarily to enrich their management. With all building work maintenance or renovation now being undertaken exclusively by private construction companies.
So we've ended up with effectively a system of privatised social housing, paying vast amounts directly or indirectly into the pockets of private landlords renting out accommodation at vastly inflated market rates, much of which is insecure and poor quality accommodation. That includes former council housing that became RTB and has ended up being rented out privately. The taxpayer pays through the nose for this directly, but also indirectly as the effect of poor housing on families creates a litany of other long term costs.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Hair and eye colour are “decidedly real”. As is height. However western societies have not historically erected significant legal and cultural barriers on participation based on eye colour, hair colour (ginger jokes notwithstanding) or height. They have on skin colour.
Take drama. A somewhat trivial, but easy to understand, example is the fact that people bitched and moaned about actors in the Soarse Ronan/Margot Robbie vehicle ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ being the “wrong” skin colour for that period of British history, while failing to care that Irish actress Ronan had the wrong accent for the French raised Scottish Queen she was playing, and Australian actress Robbie the wrong hair colour, height and practically everything else for the English Queen she was portraying, shows that certain “decidedly real” factors (accent, hair colour, eye colour, age, nationality) matter far less to our society than skin colour. You’re white, you get a pass on your appearance. If you’re black, you don’t. Skin colour matters.
A black English actor would get massive pushback in playing an English historical figure on the basis of “historical accuracy”. A white actor of any nationality, even if he or she had virtually no similarity to the personage portrayed (hair, eyes, accent, height - all ‘decidedly real’) would not. Imagine the outcry if, say, Thandiwe Newton had been cast as Elizabeth I instead of Robbie. It it that kind of difference in treatment of a superficial appearance that is the societal construct.
Drama is just the (relatively minor) example I have used here. The same difference in treatment throughout society is “decidedly real”. The people you patronisingly condemn as “woke” are, often clumsily trying to correct.
I think you know all this really but enjoy the drama.
It isn't just relatively minor, it's ridiculous. If the actress playing Mary used (or just had) an accent that jarred with widely known fact, she deserves to be criticised. Margot Robbie afaik wore a wig and make up to make her colouring match Elizabeth's. Most are not familiar with the height of historical figures (unless from the recent past), so most would find that unimportant. If a thin actor played Henry VIII without padding, that would be an issue. Making Sir Walter Raleigh (or whoever) black is such a change, and would pull most of the viewers right out of the reality of the world portrayed in the film, assuming even a basic knowledge of British and world history. We don't cast white actors in black historical roles for the same reason.
Good piece by Oxley, if a little parochial. I think a similar piece could be written in most countries about the party in government and the consequences of the inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world can be seen throughout the west. In no particular order I would highlight:
1. The inability to plan long term. Energy is an obvious example but there are an almost infinite number of others.
2. An inability to actually implement policy. The inertia that has developed in almost every sector, the rights that have been given and the procedures in place make change indescribably difficult and prohibitively expensive. It takes a decade or more to build a road, a power station, housing, a railway line, a warship, pretty much anything.
3. Where does the money actually go? We don't know. We have the highest taxes for 70 years, record health spending and waiting lists that are only kept under control by death. Its horribly frustrating and depressing. The naive belief that throwing yet more money at a problem will somehow magically fix what the last £100bn hasn't is the battleground of our politics and yet, in terms of delivery it is almost meaningless. Boris boasted about another 50k nurses without looking at retention rates. It demonstrates the inability of our government to actually achieve almost anything.
4. Despite this we have the creduility to believe that a change in personnel will somehow make things better; that with even someone as dull as SKS things would somehow, magically, improve.
5. This demonstrates a lack of seriousness. Politicians that actually believe anything, let alone have the time or the energy to think through that policy to its logical conclusion and identify the possible negative consequences, are rare. Trump was a President whose most important policy forum was his twitter account and yet he may apparently be elected again in the absence of anything better. Where are the Crosslands, the Benns, the Sir Keith Josephs of today? I am not saying any of these people should be let near power but they gave ideas and a sense of purpose to those who did. Purpose comes with seriousness and it is lacking.
On point 5, I think Corbyn did provide ideas and a sense of purpose - it's why he in 2015 engendered such enthusiasm. The allergy that many have to him shouldn't obscure the reason. It's not that people necessarily thought that it was all deliverable, but the sense of clear direction really stood out, and when the Mail and the Sun set it all out with a view to horrifying readers, lots of them thought "Well, I quite like the sound of some of this". Part of that was not really that they yearned for thoroughly left-wing policies, but that they like the idea of a government that actually had a purpose. Thatcher provided the same from a right-wing perspective, in a way that, say, Major and Cameron really did not.
My CLP had a guest speaker recently who has been advising governments of all colours on drugs policy for quarter of a century. He said that most Ministers are up for quiet reforms if they seem likely to pay off within 5 years in terms of less consumption, less addiction, etc. Only a minority of Ministers are interested in things that will pay off over a longer period, and if they think that they will be intensely controversial in the short term (such as decriminalisation) then only a small minority remain interested (he singled out Gauke and Stewart as pretty good).
I think that is fair comment about Corbyn. The man was incompetent and his beliefs abhorrent to me but I would accept that he did at least believe in something.
Its interesting in your comments on drug policy Rory the ex Tory comes up once again. He really is the sort of politican we need. I just don't know how they thrive in the current environment in either party. I have heard those in the field saying similar things about his prison policy changes.
An interesting, though quite ranty, piece linked by Mike. It's only link is to an article by James Forsyth.
Some provocative ideas, though he's wrong on some basics - such as his statement that govt CoL support is maxed out at 10% of the cost of the *predicted* price cap. It's actially £1200 not £550.
I'd say he's right that the current Tory leadership candidates have none of the necessary collection of idea, and for me give the impression of two bald men fighting over a comb in a soapbox cart rolling down a hill into the local slurry pit.
Have other parties demonstrated that they have better ideas?
Not really a surprise prediction from the UK military, but still sobering how much longer things are likely to go on. But Gen Hockenhull still says it is unrealistic to expect a decisive shift in the south in the coming months.
He says he understands Ukraine's desire to retake territory, but adds that while there will be counter-attacks and counter-offensives, he does not believe there will be decisive action taken this year by either side.
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
It takes four years at light speed to get to Earth from Alpha Centauri.
No, it doesnt. Time experienced by those doing the travelling is much less as you approach light speed. Time dilation. If you even travel by such prosaic means.
The spaceship will take four years, same with the light from the stars of the Centauri system.
I’ve always found it odd that the Scots words for little (wee) is still in common use, but the Scots word for big (muckle) has died out.
No it hasn't.
Maybe in Sweden.
Mony a mickle maks a muckle. My parents used muckle a lot, especially my dad. I don't hear it often these days but I think it is overstating it to say it has died out.
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
It takes four years at light speed to get to Earth from Alpha Centauri.
No, it doesnt. Time experienced by those doing the travelling is much less as you approach light speed. Time dilation. If you even travel by such prosaic means.
Indeed. If one were able to travel at a constant acceleration of 1 gravity (convenient for those on board), accelerating to the midpoint, turning over and decelerating from there, then the journey would take just over 3.5 years for those on board, whilst seeming to an outside observer to take nearly six years. Maxing out at a speed of just under 95% of the speed of light at turnover and a time dilation factor of a little over 3 at the fastest point.
The engineering difficulties of arranging for a propulsion system and fuel to allow for a constant 1g acceleration for that length of time and for avoiding interplanetary gas and dust with their effects at that speed are left as an exercise for someone else.
To be honest, if you can do a one gee constant acceleration, going beyond Alpha Centauri becomes less of an issue the further you go (with those engineering difficulties brought to mind, of course).
10 light years can be done in under 5 years of ship-board time. 50 light years in under 8 years ship-board time. 100 light years in just over 9 years of ship-board time.
And so on. You start crowding closer and closer to c and having a higher and higher gamma factor (time dilation) for more and more of your voyage. However, the issues of maintaining that acceleration and avoiding any atoms of anything in interstellar space become more pronounced.
I’ve always found it odd that the Scots words for little (wee) is still in common use, but the Scots word for big (muckle) has died out.
No it hasn't.
Maybe in Sweden.
Mony a mickle maks a muckle. My parents used muckle a lot, especially my dad. I don't hear it often these days but I think it is overstating it to say it has died out.
I'm sure there's a digital agency of some sort here called Muckle media.
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
Oi, I came up with rock in loch. I've now seen the wider photo, so I agree that it's not as simple as that. It just kinda looks like a reflection, though?
I saw the kite analysis too and that seems quite compelling, but why anyone was flying a kite in that rather remote bit of Scotland is a mystery.
Apols if it was your thesis!
Yes it still looks rather like a reflection - but the debate is ongoing. There are many problems with that simple explanation
Aren’t you near there? It would be great if a highland dwelling pb-er could go over there and take some snaps of the real location. The absence of water in the cited place is a conundrum
I don’t buy the kite thesis. Nor does Twitter
My take is that it is ether
1 a reflection plus a quite elaborate hoax
2 genuinely weird tech: American or “other”
It's not far off the A9, and near a Corbett I need to bag. Perhaps.
(I imagine it's flooded with nutters at the mo though).
Every time I look at the Calvine photo I have one of two reactions
1. Oh FFS it’s just a rock in a loch. Get real
2. No. Omg. This is properly weird
As I do this I can feel two modules in my head, at work. But in opposition. The first is my Freakiness Bias. I enjoy freaky drama, I like the outlandish idea that America has super brilliant tech that ignores gravity, I like even more the idea that aliens are buzzing Pitlochry
The second is my Normalcy Bias. My brain is wired to filter out the bizarre and weird. The gorilla on the basketball court. So if I ever did see a properly inexplicable UFO photo my reflexive brain would try to explain it in a prosaic way: a rock in a loch
If nothing else, it’s a delicious psychological experiment
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Hair and eye colour are “decidedly real”. As is height. However western societies have not historically erected significant legal and cultural barriers on participation based on eye colour, hair colour (ginger jokes notwithstanding) or height. They have on skin colour.
Take drama. A somewhat trivial, but easy to understand, example is the fact that people bitched and moaned about actors in the Soarse Ronan/Margot Robbie vehicle ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ being the “wrong” skin colour for that period of British history, while failing to care that Irish actress Ronan had the wrong accent for the French raised Scottish Queen she was playing, and Australian actress Robbie the wrong hair colour, height and practically everything else for the English Queen she was portraying, shows that certain “decidedly real” factors (accent, hair colour, eye colour, age, nationality) matter far less to our society than skin colour. You’re white, you get a pass on your appearance. If you’re black, you don’t. Skin colour matters.
A black English actor would get massive pushback in playing an English historical figure on the basis of “historical accuracy”. A white actor of any nationality, even if he or she had virtually no similarity to the personage portrayed (hair, eyes, accent, height - all ‘decidedly real’) would not. Imagine the outcry if, say, Thandiwe Newton had been cast as Elizabeth I instead of Robbie. It it that kind of difference in treatment of a superficial appearance that is the societal construct.
Drama is just the (relatively minor) example I have used here. The same difference in treatment throughout society is “decidedly real”. The people you patronisingly condemn as “woke” are, often clumsily trying to correct.
I think you know all this really but enjoy the drama.
It isn't just relatively minor, it's ridiculous. If the actress playing Mary used (or just had) an accent that jarred with widely known fact, she deserves to be criticised. Margot Robbie afaik wore a wig and make up to make her colouring match Elizabeth's. Most are not familiar with the height of historical figures (unless from the recent past), so most would find that unimportant. If a thin actor played Henry VIII without padding, that would be an issue. Making Sir Walter Raleigh (or whoever) black is such a change, and would pull most of the viewers right out of the reality of the world portrayed in the film, assuming even a basic knowledge of British and world history. We don't cast white actors in black historical roles for the same reason.
We must have been very Woke at our school. In 1982, when I was aged 7 (and in my only acting credit to date!), I played one of the Three Kings in a nativity play, and the other two were played by a black boy and a white boy!
I wonder how Keith Vaz feels about having led this anti-Rushdie demonstration through Leicester
"Islam's sword is mightier than the blasphemer's pen"
Forget the politics. That's definitely one for Sunil - it's the very nice porte cochère of the Midland Railway station at Leicester.
Have you been in Aberdeen since they completely ****ed up the station? It wasn’t one of the greats but it had a granitey charm, all now enclosed in yet another homogenised shopping experience.
The brai child of Sir Ian ‘the oil is running out’ Wood I believe; he appears to be able to get away with anything in Aberdeen.
I think the shopping centre next to the Station is excellent. My only complaint would be that it has added to the demise of Union Street, which is a sad shadow of what it was before. I am off to Aberdeen on Monday for a few days for a trial. Once upon a time it was so easy to find good restaurants there but very hard to find an hotel room. Now it is the other way around.
I’m not really a fan of the good shopping centres measure of human progress, and much as the smoking, post apocalyptic wasteland of Union St provides a decent metaphor imho adding further to the demise of said street isn’t a great trade.
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
Oi, I came up with rock in loch. I've now seen the wider photo, so I agree that it's not as simple as that. It just kinda looks like a reflection, though?
I saw the kite analysis too and that seems quite compelling, but why anyone was flying a kite in that rather remote bit of Scotland is a mystery.
Apols if it was your thesis!
Yes it still looks rather like a reflection - but the debate is ongoing. There are many problems with that simple explanation
Aren’t you near there? It would be great if a highland dwelling pb-er could go over there and take some snaps of the real location. The absence of water in the cited place is a conundrum
I don’t buy the kite thesis. Nor does Twitter
My take is that it is ether
1 a reflection plus a quite elaborate hoax
2 genuinely weird tech: American or “other”
It's not far off the A9, and near a Corbett I need to bag. Perhaps.
(I imagine it's flooded with nutters at the mo though).
Every time I look at the Calvine photo I have one of two reactions
1. Oh FFS it’s just a rock in a loch. Get real
2. No. Omg. This is properly weird
As I do this I can feel two modules in my head, at work. But in opposition. The first is my Freakiness Bias. I enjoy freaky drama, I like the outlandish idea that America has super brilliant tech that ignores gravity, I like even more the idea that aliens are buzzing Pitlochry
The second is my Normalcy Bias. My brain is wired to filter out the bizarre and weird. The gorilla on the basketball court. So if I ever did see a properly inexplicable UFO photo my reflexive brain would try to explain it in a prosaic way: a rock in a loch
If nothing else, it’s a delicious psychological experiment
e don't cast white actors in black historical roles for the same reason.
We cast Jesus as white for 2000 years...
And that was stupid, but as entertainment, because the viewers would have been very familiar with images portraying Jesus as white, it worked at the time for them.
I like the idea of historical drama, but it's not easy to do well. You need dialogue that gives a sense of the period, but yet isn't so full of 'prithees' that it's unintelligible. You need a good sense of the period in costume and set but not so grimy and greasy that it's offputting. It's hard for me as a viewer not to be irritated by sloppy dialogue that pulls me out of being entertained. I'd put actors who have a very distinct ethnic background that's different to the character they're portraying in that category. It would be jarring these days to see an aryan looking Jesus.
Required: exercise bike ride, supermarket shop, water the container plants, harvest the garden, probably wash the car for the last time this summer, and some other stuff
Mr. Max, not played RTS since Red Alert 3, but that did look fairly interesting. Been liking Stellaris and Civ VI a lot, though they're real time with pause and turn-based.
Listed as PC only to start with, but some strategy games are moving to consoles, which is a nice change to how things were.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Hair and eye colour are “decidedly real”. As is height. However western societies have not historically erected significant legal and cultural barriers on participation based on eye colour, hair colour (ginger jokes notwithstanding) or height. They have on skin colour.
Take drama. A somewhat trivial, but easy to understand, example is the fact that people bitched and moaned about actors in the Soarse Ronan/Margot Robbie vehicle ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ being the “wrong” skin colour for that period of British history, while failing to care that Irish actress Ronan had the wrong accent for the French raised Scottish Queen she was playing, and Australian actress Robbie the wrong hair colour, height and practically everything else for the English Queen she was portraying, shows that certain “decidedly real” factors (accent, hair colour, eye colour, age, nationality) matter far less to our society than skin colour. You’re white, you get a pass on your appearance. If you’re black, you don’t. Skin colour matters.
A black English actor would get massive pushback in playing an English historical figure on the basis of “historical accuracy”. A white actor of any nationality, even if he or she had virtually no similarity to the personage portrayed (hair, eyes, accent, height - all ‘decidedly real’) would not. Imagine the outcry if, say, Thandiwe Newton had been cast as Elizabeth I instead of Robbie. It it that kind of difference in treatment of a superficial appearance that is the societal construct.
Drama is just the (relatively minor) example I have used here. The same difference in treatment throughout society is “decidedly real”. The people you patronisingly condemn as “woke” are, often clumsily trying to correct.
I think you know all this really but enjoy the drama.
It isn't just relatively minor, it's ridiculous. If the actress playing Mary used (or just had) an accent that jarred with widely known fact, she deserves to be criticised. Margot Robbie afaik wore a wig and make up to make her colouring match Elizabeth's. Most are not familiar with the height of historical figures (unless from the recent past), so most would find that unimportant. If a thin actor played Henry VIII without padding, that would be an issue. Making Sir Walter Raleigh (or whoever) black is such a change, and would pull most of the viewers right out of the reality of the world portrayed in the film, assuming even a basic knowledge of British and world history. We don't cast white actors in black historical roles for the same reason.
We must have been very Woke at our school. In 1982, when I was aged 7 (and in my only acting credit to date!), I played one of the Three Kings in a nativity play, and the other two were played by a black boy and a white boy!
They have become known most commonly as Balthasar, Melchior, and Gaspar (or Casper). According to Western church tradition, Balthasar is often represented as a king of Arabia or sometimes Ethiopia, Melchior as a king of Persia, and Gaspar as a king of India.
Not really a surprise prediction from the UK military, but still sobering how much longer things are likely to go on. But Gen Hockenhull still says it is unrealistic to expect a decisive shift in the south in the coming months.
He says he understands Ukraine's desire to retake territory, but adds that while there will be counter-attacks and counter-offensives, he does not believe there will be decisive action taken this year by either side.
Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of US forces in Europe, is much more optimistic and thinks Russia’s ability to fight could collapse before the winter.
“Newly released Ministry of Defence files reveal they took the unusual step of informing senior Cabinet figures after an unidentified object was captured on camera in Perthshire.”
It’s not a fucking stone reflected in a lake. It might be secret tech. But that in itself is quite the story given the description that it hovered silently for 10 mins before showing instant acceleration.
That's a stone in a loch, with an RAF or USAF jet (Harrier?) captured in the same reflection
USAF have never had Harrier apart from participation in the UK/FRG/USA Tripartite Evaluation squadron with Kestrel (not exactly Harrier) at RAF West Raynham in 1964 - 65.
Don't do this. You're not good at it. It's like me trying to discuss anchovies or something.
He's not as bad as the Mail, which thought it was a Tornado.
Here’s a long Twitter debate as to the aircraft ID. With actual pilots rather than elderly fantasists like @Dura_Ace
Nah, @Dura_Ace was pointing out that it wasn't a USAF Harrier, not saying it wasn't a Harrier at all.
Aiui, only the USMC fly Harriers?
This guy sounds authoritative
‘For me, the problem with that is that on August 4, 1990, all of the U.S.'s Harrier's should have been on-station on the USS Nassau and Tarawa in the Middle East. The Gulf War had just started 2 days prior.’
So, a RN or RAF Harrier. Sounds like the USMC Harriers weren't in the vicinity.
Fuck the jet. Who cares. The daily Mail has a photo of where the ufo photo was taken. No lochs anywhere
If they are right the mystery deepens. What is the rhomboid object in the sky?
Apologies for both reopening this and for disappearing upwards at supersonic speed after one post last night...
I suspect the MOD saw something they could not immediately explain, so General Paranoia came in and filed it in a cupboard for 50 years.
Without consulting Google Maps the Daily Mail image looks like a picture from the south side of the River Garry, looking east towards Blair Atholl. Ben Vrackie is the triangular hill in the background. So that corresponds with the claimed location.
But where is the Betula pendula? I see only a Larch on the edge of a plantation. Admittedly birch trees don't last terribly long up there but there's something not quite right.
The larch plantation surely isn't close enough to the fence in this case.
Are these locations being guessed at by researchers rather than being specified by the photographer? It is very easy to find both larch and barbed wire fences in this area and you could easily come up with 100 semi-convincing spots.
The other possibility is a double exposure - after all, if you are using black and white film in 1990 you may well have had a manual wind camera - but they tended to look washed out.
I'd still go with a rock in a loch on a very still day. Sorry.
As someone who would dearly love to have intelligent aliens spotted/confirmed (hell, any life off of Earth would be great to have reliably observed), the "evidence" presented tends to go along the lines of "But why would 'they' not publicise this/keep this quiet/say whatever/etc."
Because speculating on motives may be many things, but it sure as hell isn't extraordinary evidence, and we well know that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.
And most of the speculation on motives seems to come from a place where the speculator has never been in one of the organisations involved. Where all you need is one slightly ignorant or slightly paranoid or slightly publicity-averse senior/very senior person, and all of a sudden, it looks like "Yeah; that's not surprising."
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
It takes four years at light speed to get to Earth from Alpha Centauri.
No, it doesnt. Time experienced by those doing the travelling is much less as you approach light speed. Time dilation. If you even travel by such prosaic means.
The spaceship will take four years, same with the light from the stars of the Centauri system.
If you travel point to point, yes and if light speed is unbreachable, yes. Im going to assume homo sapiens command of the possible is incomplete
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Hair and eye colour are “decidedly real”. As is height. However western societies have not historically erected significant legal and cultural barriers on participation based on eye colour, hair colour (ginger jokes notwithstanding) or height. They have on skin colour.
Take drama. A somewhat trivial, but easy to understand, example is the fact that people bitched and moaned about actors in the Soarse Ronan/Margot Robbie vehicle ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ being the “wrong” skin colour for that period of British history, while failing to care that Irish actress Ronan had the wrong accent for the French raised Scottish Queen she was playing, and Australian actress Robbie the wrong hair colour, height and practically everything else for the English Queen she was portraying, shows that certain “decidedly real” factors (accent, hair colour, eye colour, age, nationality) matter far less to our society than skin colour. You’re white, you get a pass on your appearance. If you’re black, you don’t. Skin colour matters.
A black English actor would get massive pushback in playing an English historical figure on the basis of “historical accuracy”. A white actor of any nationality, even if he or she had virtually no similarity to the personage portrayed (hair, eyes, accent, height - all ‘decidedly real’) would not. Imagine the outcry if, say, Thandiwe Newton had been cast as Elizabeth I instead of Robbie. It it that kind of difference in treatment of a superficial appearance that is the societal construct.
Drama is just the (relatively minor) example I have used here. The same difference in treatment throughout society is “decidedly real”. The people you patronisingly condemn as “woke” are, often clumsily trying to correct.
I think you know all this really but enjoy the drama.
It isn't just relatively minor, it's ridiculous. If the actress playing Mary used (or just had) an accent that jarred with widely known fact, she deserves to be criticised. Margot Robbie afaik wore a wig and make up to make her colouring match Elizabeth's. Most are not familiar with the height of historical figures (unless from the recent past), so most would find that unimportant. If a thin actor played Henry VIII without padding, that would be an issue. Making Sir Walter Raleigh (or whoever) black is such a change, and would pull most of the viewers right out of the reality of the world portrayed in the film, assuming even a basic knowledge of British and world history. We don't cast white actors in black historical roles for the same reason.
Naah, it's an actor. Raleigh was probably not black, but he probably didn't own an iphone either. The actor probably does. So what?
e don't cast white actors in black historical roles for the same reason.
We cast Jesus as white for 2000 years...
And that's fine, and may be a reason why Christianity has spread so well. Different cultures develop Jesuses that look like them. Because the story isn't just a specific man in a specfic time and place, it's about the whole human condition.
Same with all really good stories. King Lear still works if Glenda Jackson plays the role.
A reminder that "cultural Marxism" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
That’s an incredibly biased article. People like Adorno and Marcuse were very influential, not “impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads”, and it is simply false that the term “cultural Marxism” originated on the far-right.
The right does have a long history of taking terms of art from the left & turning them into sticks to beat the left with.
Pace “political correctness” for instance, which was originally a leftist in-joke IIRC. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if the idea of “Cultural Marxism” was a term of art in a subset of the academic left that was turned into something else & then massively amplified by right-wing talking heads (talk radio in the 90s? purveyors of those insane right-wing mailshots in the US?) looking to create the next left-wing boogeyman.
If your goal is to keep your followers in a permanent state of perceived threat to their way of life, then you need to create the enemy in their heads. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s real or not, or how widespread the reality is. What’s important (from the right’s POV) is that it’s real in the heads of right-wing followers. Look at Leon & “wokeism”. “Woke” can be real, but Leon’s frothing reaction to it is out of all proportion with that reality because he’s not taking his cues from the actual left, but from the right-wing commentators creating narratives for their own purposes, sometimes out of whole cloth & sometimes by cherry picking bits and pieces from left discource & piecing them together into a monster to frighten & dismay.
If, at this stage in your life, you still think “Woke” is just a made-up scary monster, then there is no hope for you
There are 17 year old girls out there with double mastectomies because Woke believes gender is a “social construct” just like race
Gender and race *are* social constructs. Sex is biological. Cats and invertibrates have sexes, they don't have genders.
So you think skin colour is just a social construct? It has no actual reality?
The Woke tell us, simultaneously, that race is a biological fiction, a nullity, a construct in our heads, while absolutely obsessing about skin colour - a fact of human variation which, to my amateur eyes, looks decidedly real
So race exists yet doesn’t exist. Schrodinger says Hi
Hair and eye colour are “decidedly real”. As is height. However western societies have not historically erected significant legal and cultural barriers on participation based on eye colour, hair colour (ginger jokes notwithstanding) or height. They have on skin colour.
Take drama. A somewhat trivial, but easy to understand, example is the fact that people bitched and moaned about actors in the Soarse Ronan/Margot Robbie vehicle ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ being the “wrong” skin colour for that period of British history, while failing to care that Irish actress Ronan had the wrong accent for the French raised Scottish Queen she was playing, and Australian actress Robbie the wrong hair colour, height and practically everything else for the English Queen she was portraying, shows that certain “decidedly real” factors (accent, hair colour, eye colour, age, nationality) matter far less to our society than skin colour. You’re white, you get a pass on your appearance. If you’re black, you don’t. Skin colour matters.
A black English actor would get massive pushback in playing an English historical figure on the basis of “historical accuracy”. A white actor of any nationality, even if he or she had virtually no similarity to the personage portrayed (hair, eyes, accent, height - all ‘decidedly real’) would not. Imagine the outcry if, say, Thandiwe Newton had been cast as Elizabeth I instead of Robbie. It it that kind of difference in treatment of a superficial appearance that is the societal construct.
Drama is just the (relatively minor) example I have used here. The same difference in treatment throughout society is “decidedly real”. The people you patronisingly condemn as “woke” are, often clumsily trying to correct.
I think you know all this really but enjoy the drama.
It isn't just relatively minor, it's ridiculous. If the actress playing Mary used (or just had) an accent that jarred with widely known fact, she deserves to be criticised. Margot Robbie afaik wore a wig and make up to make her colouring match Elizabeth's. Most are not familiar with the height of historical figures (unless from the recent past), so most would find that unimportant. If a thin actor played Henry VIII without padding, that would be an issue. Making Sir Walter Raleigh (or whoever) black is such a change, and would pull most of the viewers right out of the reality of the world portrayed in the film, assuming even a basic knowledge of British and world history. We don't cast white actors in black historical roles for the same reason.
We must have been very Woke at our school. In 1982, when I was aged 7 (and in my only acting credit to date!), I played one of the Three Kings in a nativity play, and the other two were played by a black boy and a white boy!
What does a good old definitely-non-anti-semitic-but-anti-zionist activist do when they go to a pro-Palestine demo and find themselves stood next to this?
Talk to them? Walk away? It's difficult. When I went on the big anti war demo in 2003 I remember being pissed off that Blair had put me on the same side as a load of Trot wankers. Unfortunately it happens sometimes.
Most trot wankers on demos are not trots at all. They are ordinary people who, having come unequipped, have picked up one of the very many SWP posters/banners left lying around in piles for their use.
“Newly released Ministry of Defence files reveal they took the unusual step of informing senior Cabinet figures after an unidentified object was captured on camera in Perthshire.”
It’s not a fucking stone reflected in a lake. It might be secret tech. But that in itself is quite the story given the description that it hovered silently for 10 mins before showing instant acceleration.
That's a stone in a loch, with an RAF or USAF jet (Harrier?) captured in the same reflection
USAF have never had Harrier apart from participation in the UK/FRG/USA Tripartite Evaluation squadron with Kestrel (not exactly Harrier) at RAF West Raynham in 1964 - 65.
Don't do this. You're not good at it. It's like me trying to discuss anchovies or something.
He's not as bad as the Mail, which thought it was a Tornado.
Here’s a long Twitter debate as to the aircraft ID. With actual pilots rather than elderly fantasists like @Dura_Ace
Nah, @Dura_Ace was pointing out that it wasn't a USAF Harrier, not saying it wasn't a Harrier at all.
Aiui, only the USMC fly Harriers?
This guy sounds authoritative
‘For me, the problem with that is that on August 4, 1990, all of the U.S.'s Harrier's should have been on-station on the USS Nassau and Tarawa in the Middle East. The Gulf War had just started 2 days prior.’
So, a RN or RAF Harrier. Sounds like the USMC Harriers weren't in the vicinity.
Fuck the jet. Who cares. The daily Mail has a photo of where the ufo photo was taken. No lochs anywhere
If they are right the mystery deepens. What is the rhomboid object in the sky?
Apologies for both reopening this and for disappearing upwards at supersonic speed after one post last night...
I suspect the MOD saw something they could not immediately explain, so General Paranoia came in and filed it in a cupboard for 50 years.
Without consulting Google Maps the Daily Mail image looks like a picture from the south side of the River Garry, looking east towards Blair Atholl. Ben Vrackie is the triangular hill in the background. So that corresponds with the claimed location.
But where is the Betula pendula? I see only a Larch on the edge of a plantation. Admittedly birch trees don't last terribly long up there but there's something not quite right.
The larch plantation surely isn't close enough to the fence in this case.
Are these locations being guessed at by researchers rather than being specified by the photographer? It is very easy to find both larch and barbed wire fences in this area and you could easily come up with 100 semi-convincing spots.
The other possibility is a double exposure - after all, if you are using black and white film in 1990 you may well have had a manual wind camera - but they tended to look washed out.
I'd still go with a rock in a loch on a very still day. Sorry.
As someone who would dearly love to have intelligent aliens spotted/confirmed (hell, any life off of Earth would be great to have reliably observed), the "evidence" presented tends to go along the lines of "But why would 'they' not publicise this/keep this quiet/say whatever/etc."
Because speculating on motives may be many things, but it sure as hell isn't extraordinary evidence, and we well know that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.
And most of the speculation on motives seems to come from a place where the speculator has never been in one of the organisations involved. Where all you need is one slightly ignorant or slightly paranoid or slightly publicity-averse senior/very senior person, and all of a sudden, it looks like "Yeah; that's not surprising."
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
It takes four years at light speed to get to Earth from Alpha Centauri.
No, it doesnt. Time experienced by those doing the travelling is much less as you approach light speed. Time dilation. If you even travel by such prosaic means.
The spaceship will take four years, same with the light from the stars of the Centauri system.
If you travel point to point, yes and if light speed is unbreachable, yes. Im going to assume homo sapiens command of the possible is incomplete
So how likely is the object in Leon's photo to be an alien spaceship?
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
Oi, I came up with rock in loch. I've now seen the wider photo, so I agree that it's not as simple as that. It just kinda looks like a reflection, though?
I saw the kite analysis too and that seems quite compelling, but why anyone was flying a kite in that rather remote bit of Scotland is a mystery.
Apols if it was your thesis!
Yes it still looks rather like a reflection - but the debate is ongoing. There are many problems with that simple explanation
Aren’t you near there? It would be great if a highland dwelling pb-er could go over there and take some snaps of the real location. The absence of water in the cited place is a conundrum
I don’t buy the kite thesis. Nor does Twitter
My take is that it is ether
1 a reflection plus a quite elaborate hoax
2 genuinely weird tech: American or “other”
It's not far off the A9, and near a Corbett I need to bag. Perhaps.
(I imagine it's flooded with nutters at the mo though).
Every time I look at the Calvine photo I have one of two reactions
1. Oh FFS it’s just a rock in a loch. Get real
2. No. Omg. This is properly weird
As I do this I can feel two modules in my head, at work. But in opposition. The first is my Freakiness Bias. I enjoy freaky drama, I like the outlandish idea that America has super brilliant tech that ignores gravity, I like even more the idea that aliens are buzzing Pitlochry
The second is my Normalcy Bias. My brain is wired to filter out the bizarre and weird. The gorilla on the basketball court. So if I ever did see a properly inexplicable UFO photo my reflexive brain would try to explain it in a prosaic way: a rock in a loch
If nothing else, it’s a delicious psychological experiment
Comments
'Little England' is up there with basket of deplorables.
I said you need a Thatcher and Labour need a Blair because its true - someone who can actually implement a platform that actually works. People object to Blair and Thatcher but at least their governments did something...
Where is the politician that can speak truth to the electorate?
Cameron did it.
The Little Englanders supported Nigel Fucking Farage.
Have a look at a variety of text (newspaper articles, novels, social media etc) written by Scottish writers in 2010-20 and compare with 1910-20 or 1810-20.
Folk regularly use the word wee both written and spoken. I can’t recall ever hearing or seeing muckle since my grandmother died. Perhaps my parents have occasionally spoken it, but I don’t think either of them has ever written it.
Meanwhile the country is sinking and you are cheering on the sinking.
But a struggling government beats a batso opposition. See 2005 and (controversially, I admit) 2019.
And in the UK context, Badenoch is batso.
Maybe they spotted me as a Lowlander and were just taking the piss...
A man of sound judgement, as ever.
And how did that work out?
You think you were right. And you lost. The pro-EU types had done precious little to promote the EU even economically (which should have been the easy part) and sod all on identity, so to then mock the identity of such a large slice of the electorate was obvious stupidity.
Very sceptical MPs get knocked here for being stupid, but at least when they voted against May's deal they were voting for what they wanted. How many pro-EU MPs now realise, belatedly, that marching through the lobbies with people diametrically opposed to their own views was not actually a good move?
Note that the Chinese are now using the denial of indyref2 as justification for their treatment of Taiwan.
For instance a football site I occasionally post at replaces any mention of Sutton with S**ton.
Because speculating on motives may be many things, but it sure as hell isn't extraordinary evidence, and we well know that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.
And most of the speculation on motives seems to come from a place where the speculator has never been in one of the organisations involved. Where all you need is one slightly ignorant or slightly paranoid or slightly publicity-averse senior/very senior person, and all of a sudden, it looks like "Yeah; that's not surprising."
For RTS lovers out there! This looks like it satisfies all of the CnC crowd and it's not from shitty EA. Already can't wait until it's out next year.
1. We are about to get a new political leader, with new priorities, bringing in new Ministers, both of whom will have a profound determination to improve voters' lives and therefore survive the next general election. Either will be a distinct improvement on the current zombie Government, and both are likely to be a material improvement on the Government of Boris Johnson, which seems to have been characterised by drift and responding to events rather than setting the agenda.
2. The war in Ukraine started by Russia, and its accompanying crises, whilst I deplore it, has provoked serious thinking about energy security, and the exploitation of Britain's natural resources. These issues have been bubbling under for a while, and the current Government's approach has been found severely wanting. It is likely that the UK hydrocarbon industry will now be pushed forward, UK gas storage will be re-opened, new innovations and approaches to renewables will be sought (it's good that Liz has made a vaguely positive statement on tidal), and our whole energy strategy will become more robust.
3. The Government being poor for a while isn't necessarily a terrible thing. It will force them to look at what is really necessary spending, and what's a white elephant. It's reasonable to expect that the business of governing and providing services to the public will get leaner and more efficient, and that is a good thing. Spending which promises a return on investment is likely to be prioritised.
4. Though I hope the NHS and other public institutions improve quickly, their current doldrums probably mean that people, in their turn, are likely to come to depend on the State a lot less. Look after health actively to minimise the need for hospital care, staying active and stimulated to delay and potentially avoid completely the need for social care. Continuing to work flexibly well past retirement age to supplement pensions, benefiting the labour market. If we do those things, they will have a massively beneficial effect on well-being and happiness.
5. As an Island/s, with a temperate, often rainy climate, able to produce great food, plentiful sources of renewable and carbon-based energy, the English language, and a high degree of political autonomy, we have been placed in an extremely advantageous position in dealing with the current challenges faced by the world. It may not be '1st place in the lottery of life', but it ain't bad.
Cummings was brought into government to have ideas, but they turned out to largely be bad ones. Truss is bubbling with ideas, but they are worse ones. Badenoch has a bag full of ideas, just waiting...
They voted against what they thought they didn't want.
Not the same thing at all.
Also true of the referendum. How many people are now saying "this is not the Brexit we voted for"
But it is though. They voted against the status quo they had. This is the result. There was no other result their vote could have produced.
There has always been a fundamental contradiction in the post-2019 Tory tradition.
The new voters want taxes on the rich, massive investment, ending austerity and not Corbyn.
The old voters want tax cuts, austerity and not Corbyn.
The only thing that unified them was Corbyn, he's now gone - and we see now the result, the Tories have no ideas.
I remain unconcerned that "boring" is a net negative for Starmer, at the moment he is boring competence vs slightly odd Thatcherite. I like his odds
Sober; WOKE! THEY'RE COMING TO GET US
Drinks: This quite engaging guy
Too many drinks: ALIENS! THEY'RE COMING TO GET US
Quite. There it is. End of debate
He’s hoping that Keir also wants to bash old ladies over the head as they cast their vote at polling stations, and imprison political opponents.
The brai child of Sir Ian ‘the oil is running out’ Wood I believe; he appears to be able to get away with anything in Aberdeen.
I could literally write a bot that would replace you and be more interesting
Does this affect the whole population much, in aggregate? No. And it won't be a major electoral issue, despite the best efforts of people on the right.
Does this still have a devastating impact on some members of a very vulnerable group of young people? Yes. Should we care - absolutely.
It's a bit like dismissing the Rotherham stuff out of hand because it's being leveraged by right-wingers. That's cowardly - confront the issue.
Whereas cutting the tits off teenage girls is the fault of the state: it is being carried out by the state for reasons of ideology. It is being cheered on in secondary schools up and down the country. What proportion of schools have children who are transitioning? It seems unusual to come across a school in which there is no one transitioning. That implies it is affecting a rather larger proportion than Rochdale implies. And it is happening purely because there is an insane trans ideology at large which no one will dare gainsay.
You can argue it would be a moral outrage to have had a second vote before the first was enacted, that parliament was honour bound to accept the outcome (many had been elected stating they would do that) that has logic behind it, but a vote being undemocratic? It makes not a lick of sense. I don't even know why intelligent people pretend they think it would be - your own comment doesn't even back up your own claim it would be undemocratic, since all you've done is quote a PM saying there would not be another vote, and what the heck does a PM saying something have to do with whether a vote by the citizenry would be, er, a vote by the citizenry, that is democratic?
So you've not even attempted to justify why its undemocratic on your own terms, you're just trying to get an outrage boner on - it's too hot for that, clearly, as you're obviously capable of making the argument yet have not done so, instead going with something entirely irrelevant.
That's the strangest thing about politics sometimes - there are often good arguments to use, yet people still end up using really really stupid ones instead which just undermine their own case. See those Corbynites who, rather than stick to pointing out how well Corbyn did versus expectations in 2017 and how close he came to winning, prefer to actually pretend he was the real winner, even though he still lost. Or remainers who rather than point out problems with the Brexit process and not being worth it but prefer to still moan about a slogan on the side of a bus 6 years ago instead.
"I would vote to stay in the single market. I want to trade freely with the EU." - Boris Johnson
If they were told to vote again they would have reacted to it as an outrage, and we may think rightly so - how dare people be asked again?. But it would not be an undemocratic outrage because the means of overturning would still be being done via a democratic method. Can you not see that if people are voting there is democracy happening?
Voting over and over until you get the right answer can be argued to be wrong, so make that argument. But arguing a vote is undemocratic? That's just too funny for words. Hell, I reckon I've done a better job explaining why a second vote would have been wrong than you have simply in rebutting your reasoning and providing an alternative reasoning.
Since I've now argued against two of your posts to that effect I expect to be lambasted with some expletives and personal insults after this one, so I ask you try to make it a good one.
Given the closeness of the vote the only unifying solution was EFTA/EEA but with the addition, not in our gift but the EU's, of a derogation from strict FoM. So it required statesmanship from the EU, the UK, Brexiteers, Remainers, and especially MPs and government.
Statecraft not only failed after 2016, but even worse in the decades leading up, by which we found ourselves in a place where neither staying nor leaving was fully acceptable to a huge part of the voting population.
To some extent the same failures are happening right now with Scotland (with the sides switching) where neither union + hard Brexit nor independence + EU are sane solutions which can command a clear majority.
SFAICS there are no clear ways forward, but a Lab/LD government has the best chance, if slim, of making progress.
They would deliver voting reform which is clearly needed.
I, likewise, have been examining that UFO photo again. As have many people on Twitter
Your “rock in a loch” hypothesis is still reasonable, but it has flaws. The location cited doesn’t fit. No bodies of water. The airplane is not a reflection? The rock isn’t credible in its angularity. And no ripples? At all?
To get to a rock in a loch you have to presume:
1 quite a lot of people conspiring over decades. Why?
2 an element of photographic manipulation. Which the one pro analysis we have - the photographic prof at Sheffield Hallam - says has not happened
I note that Debunker General Mick West is unusually hesitant to pronounce. It’s a tricky one
The internal market is one attempt to try and give shape to this structure. You don't like it and fair enough but if it wasn't there we would need something similar with similar measurements and at least the impression of control.
The problem with ignoring the bus is that it's iconic. Emblematic of the whole campaign. And object lesson in delivering lies to the public.
It wasn't true.
Pointing out it wasn't true amplified the message.
The same this is happening in the leadership campaign. Rishi says that Truss Tax Cuts are bad. The members hear Tax Cuts...
A lot of this thread has been about politicians not telling the public the truth. if we can't talk about the most obvious, recent, relevant, glaring example of that on a site nominally concerned with politics then we really are fucked.
But Labour doesn't need to recover in Scotland to govern. This is why your analysis is pointless in the grand scheme of things
height. However western societies have not historically erected significant legal and cultural barriers on participation based on eye colour, hair colour (ginger jokes notwithstanding) or height. They have on skin colour.
Take drama. A somewhat trivial, but easy to understand, example is the fact that people bitched and moaned about actors in the Soarse Ronan/Margot Robbie vehicle ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ being the “wrong” skin colour for that period of British history, while failing to care that Irish actress Ronan had the wrong accent for the French raised Scottish Queen she was playing, and Australian actress Robbie the wrong hair colour, height and practically everything else for the English Queen she was portraying, shows that certain “decidedly real” factors (accent, hair colour, eye colour, age, nationality) matter far less to our society than skin colour. You’re white, you get a pass on your appearance. If you’re black, you don’t. Skin colour matters.
A black English actor would get massive pushback in playing an English historical figure on the basis of “historical accuracy”. A white actor of any nationality, even if he or she had virtually no similarity to the personage portrayed (hair, eyes, accent, height - all ‘decidedly real’) would not. Imagine the outcry if, say, Thandiwe Newton had been cast as Elizabeth I instead of Robbie. It it that kind of difference in treatment of a superficial appearance that is the societal construct.
Drama is just the (relatively minor) example I have used here. The same difference in treatment throughout society is “decidedly real”. The people you patronisingly condemn as “woke” are, often clumsily trying to correct.
I think you know all this really but enjoy the drama.
I saw the kite analysis too and that seems quite compelling, but why anyone was flying a kite in that rather remote bit of Scotland is a mystery.
Asking the Scots to ignore a Yes vote for Indy, so as to secure a No answer in a second vote, without ever honouring the first vote, would have resulted in civil unrest in Scotland. Blood in the streets.
The 2nd vote would have been boycotted by justifiably angry Yes voters (the same applies to a 2nd Brexit vote)
Then what? What the fuck do you do then? You’ve got a heavy 2nd vote for NO/Remain but on a vastly reduced turnout
What you get then is violence, as people realise their democratic will can be flatly ignored, and voting is meaningless. Well done. Twit
There's black actors in The Great playing courtiers who were actually white and I have to say I was surprised to find how ok I was with that. They are actors not imposters.
I'll see if I can dig up a suitable reflection picture from my archives.
As for the conspiracy - who knows? The MoD policy may well be just "don't encourage them".
In the mean time, have a picture I took of Nessie:
Unfortunately the loch wasn't flat calm that day so the scale is given away. It is not a person though.
The problem with trusting "experts" is that on so many issues, the experts have proved to be incompetent and entirely self-serving. The populists would not have got much of an opening were this not the case.
Yes it still looks rather like a reflection - but the debate is ongoing. There are many problems with that simple explanation
Aren’t you near there? It would be great if a highland dwelling pb-er could go over there and take some snaps of the real location. The absence of water in the cited place is a conundrum
I don’t buy the kite thesis. Nor does Twitter
My take is that it is ether
1 a reflection plus a quite elaborate hoax
2 genuinely weird tech: American or “other”
The country is in a perilous state and the Conservative government is guilty of a level of negligence that ought to be illegal.
Meanwhile, apparently oblivious to the irony, @Leon is banging on about 'woke' and Brexit.
Wake up you idiot!
Brexit has subsequently happened. It was implemented by Leavers. Democracy won.
(I imagine it's flooded with nutters at the mo though).
Another example is housing. In the last 40 years we've stopped building council housing. Ended state planned new towns while keeping green belt restrictions, so restricting housing supply generally and vastly pushing up house prices. We've transferred what's left of the council housing stock to what were once housing associations now operating effectively as private businesses concerned primarily to enrich their management. With all building work maintenance or renovation now being undertaken exclusively by private construction companies.
So we've ended up with effectively a system of privatised social housing, paying vast amounts directly or indirectly into the pockets of private landlords renting out accommodation at vastly inflated market rates, much of which is insecure and poor quality accommodation. That includes former council housing that became RTB and has ended up being rented out privately. The taxpayer pays through the nose for this directly, but also indirectly as the effect of poor housing on families creates a litany of other long term costs.
Its interesting in your comments on drug policy Rory the ex Tory comes up once again. He really is the sort of politican we need. I just don't know how they thrive in the current environment in either party. I have heard those in the field saying similar things about his prison policy changes.
An interesting, though quite ranty, piece linked by Mike. It's only link is to an article by James Forsyth.
Some provocative ideas, though he's wrong on some basics - such as his statement that govt CoL support is maxed out at 10% of the cost of the *predicted* price cap. It's actially £1200 not £550.
I'd say he's right that the current Tory leadership candidates have none of the necessary collection of idea, and for me give the impression of two bald men fighting over a comb in a soapbox cart rolling down a hill into the local slurry pit.
Have other parties demonstrated that they have better ideas?
But Gen Hockenhull still says it is unrealistic to expect a decisive shift in the south in the coming months.
He says he understands Ukraine's desire to retake territory, but adds that while there will be counter-attacks and counter-offensives, he does not believe there will be decisive action taken this year by either side.
His expectation is for a long conflict.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62520743
The engineering difficulties of arranging for a propulsion system and fuel to allow for a constant 1g acceleration for that length of time and for avoiding interplanetary gas and dust with their effects at that speed are left as an exercise for someone else.
To be honest, if you can do a one gee constant acceleration, going beyond Alpha Centauri becomes less of an issue the further you go (with those engineering difficulties brought to mind, of course).
10 light years can be done in under 5 years of ship-board time.
50 light years in under 8 years ship-board time.
100 light years in just over 9 years of ship-board time.
And so on. You start crowding closer and closer to c and having a higher and higher gamma factor (time dilation) for more and more of your voyage. However, the issues of maintaining that acceleration and avoiding any atoms of anything in interstellar space become more pronounced.
1. Oh FFS it’s just a rock in a loch. Get real
2. No. Omg. This is properly weird
As I do this I can feel two modules in my head, at work. But in opposition. The first is my Freakiness Bias. I enjoy freaky drama, I like the outlandish idea that America has super brilliant tech that ignores gravity, I like even more the idea that aliens are buzzing Pitlochry
The second is my Normalcy Bias. My brain is wired to filter out the bizarre and weird. The gorilla on the basketball court. So if I ever did see a properly inexplicable UFO photo my reflexive brain would try to explain it in a prosaic way: a rock in a loch
If nothing else, it’s a delicious psychological experiment
I like the idea of historical drama, but it's not easy to do well. You need dialogue that gives a sense of the period, but yet isn't so full of 'prithees' that it's unintelligible. You need a good sense of the period in costume and set but not so grimy and greasy that it's offputting. It's hard for me as a viewer not to be irritated by sloppy dialogue that pulls me out of being entertained. I'd put actors who have a very distinct ethnic background that's different to the character they're portraying in that category. It would be jarring these days to see an aryan looking Jesus.
19C inside. 24C outside. 33C predicted for later.
Required: exercise bike ride, supermarket shop, water the container plants, harvest the garden, probably wash the car for the last time this summer, and some other stuff
Hmmm.
Listed as PC only to start with, but some strategy games are moving to consoles, which is a nice change to how things were.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Magi
Same with all really good stories. King Lear still works if Glenda Jackson plays the role.