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
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?
Its a craft. Its either man made or its not. Im open to either possibility
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!
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.
In Cusco Peru I visited a cathedral with a fresco of the Last Supper, which shows Christ dining on cuy - the Peruvian guinea pig
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.
That is the problem. Rishi is trying to argue for reality and is being howled down.
Again, ignorance has been weaponised to be a virtue. How to tell ignorant people that actually they are wrong?
Rishi is arguing in favour of a hard Brexit, tearing up the NI protocol, and deporting refugees to Rwanda. You're obviously just a sucker for anyone who talks like Tony Blair.
He is saying what needs to be said to get elected. He doesn't believe chunks of it. But on basic maths he is right and Mistress Truss is wrong.
Borrowing money to pay for tax cuts for the well off is insanity
Rishi isn't going to be elected. So what good does it do for him to go along with unreality instead of arguing his case, if he has one, in favour of reality?
When Mistress Truss makes a horrible mess of it, he will sound like a sage. Setting himself up to win the election after this one
Rishi does at least have a point on corporation tax. Put it up a bit (and it will still be lower than most) but then give discounts for R&D and investment. As he says, Liz's plan (revert to the status quo ante) has been tried and found wanting for the last decade.
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.
My childhood recollection is mainly to do with boots. "Don't bring those great muckle boots in here", for example.
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.
Income tax and VAT being a daily example.
How about Employers National Insurance, Employees National Insurance and Income Tax and the Health and Social Care levy. 4 simultaneous taxes?
Or how about VAT applying to Fuel Duty? Quite literally taxing a tax.
I won't lose any sleep about being taxed 'twice' when we're taxed dozens of ways to sundown every day.
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’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.
My childhood recollection is mainly to do with boots. "Don't bring those great muckle boots in here", for example.
Yon muckle loon (to combine with another Scoticism) for me, possibly literally when I had my first growth spurt.
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?
Zero chance.
No hypothesis has zero chance of being true
Man Utd to win the league this season with the current squad?
Typical rightwing hystericising, could never happen.
Paulie Walnuts would come out as trans, Tony's crew would have at least three different ethnic minorities, the bada bing would be a drag bar, and Satriale's would go vegan.
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?
Zero chance.
No hypothesis has zero chance of being true
A chance so close to zero that it might as well be zero.
As ever, you gravitate towards the most DRAMATIC and OH-MI-GAWD! position in a topic.
IMV: proof of extra-terrestrial live visiting us requires a massive amount more 'proof' than a grainy photo or two. And given the ubiquity of cameras nowadays, I'd have expected a flood of them over the last two decades.
But there have not been.
(I'd recommend you read 'Intervention' by Julian May to show the way alien races might intervene on Earth. You might like 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
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!
It is generally accepted that one of the Three Kings was Black. As for the other two, it depends how thoroughly you sieve race. If you say there are only three or four races (which few do these days) then your play was spot on.
Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather Whiplash girl child in the dark Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him Strike, dear Liz Truss, and cure his heart
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?
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.
We lost the economic depth of the state with the privatisation reforms. It takes so much more money to continually rent back what we had than to maintain it.
Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather Whiplash girl child in the dark Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him Strike, dear Liz Truss, and cure his heart
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?
I'm now faintly remembering a BBC dramatisation of Treasure Island (late 70s maybe?) where a load of treasure spills out of a wall and a viewer noticed there was a bus ticket(?) in amongst the coins. I think they won a prize or something for spotting 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
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!
It is generally accepted that one of the Three Kings was Black.
Pretty remarkable, considering the only thing the source material says is that they came from the East!
Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather Whiplash girl child in the dark Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him Strike, dear Liz Truss, and cure his heart
A tiny package of dead meat being carried off the Liz Truss... anyone know if Rishi is OK?
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?
Because he's not using the iPhone during his portrayal?
Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather Whiplash girl child in the dark Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him Strike, dear Liz Truss, and cure his heart
"Keir Starmer brands Boris Johnson a 'bulls*****r' who 'never intended to keep promises"
SKS clearly has zero self awareness
You could almost believe they've had a strategy meeting where someone's done a deck on that Democrat swearing in America and decided that rude words are the way for Starmer to really 'cut through' and 'connect'.
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
Unionists think that Scotland is “pointless”.
They don’t say that when they steal our oil, gas, electricity and water.
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?
I'm now faintly remembering a BBC dramatisation of Treasure Island (late 70s maybe?) where a load of treasure spills out of a wall and a viewer noticed there was a bus ticket(?) in amongst the coins. I think they won a prize or something for spotting it.
nowadays it would be a train ticket, bearing in mind how expensive they are....
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.
John Bolton warning in Telegraph today that Putin could well announce a ceasefire in the autumn and try and negotiate everything being frozen where it is, so he can spend a couple of years regrouping. He warns that West and NATO had better start thinking what their response is going to be.
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
I stand by my Schiehallion experiment theory
Lol. Schiehallion is an excellent place for a conspiracy. It definitely has vibes, as well as being the subject of experiment.
I didn't see that you'd also proposed a rock in a loch - sorry. Funny that two 'baggers' saw the same thing though.
I'm not sure I'd be able to work up the enthusiasm for any of the Corbetts local to that area apart from Ben Vrackie. Beinn Dearg was dull enough!
Mind you, I do like a good conspiracy theory. They can be very attractive.
I think the problem is that the real scientific mysteries to be found these days are too hard for most of us.
"Keir Starmer brands Boris Johnson a 'bulls*****r' who 'never intended to keep promises"
SKS clearly has zero self awareness
You could almost believe they've had a strategy meeting where someone's done a deck on that Democrat swearing in America and decided that rude words are the way for Starmer to really 'cut through' and 'connect'.
It might work though. If sks focuses all his effort on this attack line I can almost imagine circumstances in which Johnson might have to resign.
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.
John Bolton warning in Telegraph today that Putin could well announce a ceasefire in the autumn and try and negotiate everything being frozen where it is, so he can spend a couple of years regrouping. He warns that West and NATO had better start thinking what their response is going to be.
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.
John Bolton warning in Telegraph today that Putin could well announce a ceasefire in the autumn and try and negotiate everything being frozen where it is, so he can spend a couple of years regrouping. He warns that West and NATO had better start thinking what their response is going to be.
I am seeing a degree of similarity between Russia/Ukraine and Brexit. Everyone assumes that there will be a deal, but it may well not happen; nor will it be as clean and favourable as people expect.
Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather Whiplash girl child in the dark Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him Strike, dear Liz Truss, and cure his heart
Spot the gammon.
It is the kind of place where you'd want to do a quick sweep for golliwogs before your photo op. Goodness knows what that thing riding the rolling pin is.
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
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.
John Bolton warning in Telegraph today that Putin could well announce a ceasefire in the autumn and try and negotiate everything being frozen where it is, so he can spend a couple of years regrouping. He warns that West and NATO had better start thinking what their response is going to be.
I think their response would be "it's not to us, it's up to Ukraine"?
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.
John Bolton warning in Telegraph today that Putin could well announce a ceasefire in the autumn and try and negotiate everything being frozen where it is, so he can spend a couple of years regrouping. He warns that West and NATO had better start thinking what their response is going to be.
I think the response should be to take advantage of a ceasefire offer to continue to train and equip the Ukrainians, while trying to extract some concessions from Russia that will make the winter easier for civilians, returning those deported to Russia, etc.
Hopefully, by the spring, the Ukrainians will be trained and equipped with F-16s and other NATO equipment, and a Ukrainian counteroffensive would be a success.
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.
Union Square mall is built on where the goods yard was. It hasn't replaced the station. Which is finishing an extensive refit
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.
I care. And it should be managed better. But Leon makes it out to be a sociwty-ending threat. Which it isn't.
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.
John Bolton warning in Telegraph today that Putin could well announce a ceasefire in the autumn and try and negotiate everything being frozen where it is, so he can spend a couple of years regrouping. He warns that West and NATO had better start thinking what their response is going to be.
I think their response would be "it's not to us, it's up to Ukraine"?
Really, it's over when Biden turns off the money tap so it's up to him.
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.
My childhood recollection is mainly to do with boots. "Don't bring those great muckle boots in here", for example.
There is a terms linguists use for that phenomenon where speakers use the same word in two languages, in this case ‘great’ and ‘muckle’ (also great). It is because they don’t feel confident that the person listening will understand the foreign word. Or because they do not themselves appreciate that they are cognates.
I’ve forgotten the linguists’ term. Any smarty pants out there?
People often do it with geographical features, eg when folk ignorant of Scots call Dundee Law the “Law Hill”.
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.
The last protest I considered going to - about 7 years ago - was a protest about the sale of social housing which was being organised by architects. They got a lot of publicity. But the trots turned up with their socialist worker banners, making it about ending austerity and freeing palestine. They just completely ruin every vaguely left wing protest.
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.
I care. And it should be managed better. But Leon makes it out to be a sociwty-ending threat. Which it isn't.
its a sociwty-ending threat in the same way that giving votes to poor people and women was.
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!
It is generally accepted that one of the Three Kings was Black.
Pretty remarkable, considering the only thing the source material says is that they came from the East!
The Bible doesn’t call them Kings and doesn’t even say how many there were. There are traditions, dating back to the middle to late first millennium perhaps, in western Christianity that there were 3 of them, that they were Kings, and that one is from Persia, one is from India and the last is from Arabia or Ethiopia (and is thus black). However, traditions vary. There is a Syriac Christian tradition that there were 12 of them.
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.
Union Square mall is built on where the goods yard was. It hasn't replaced the station. Which is finishing an extensive refit
The carpark and bus stop stands used to be there as well. I remember taking National Express buses down south from there because the ticket was less than half of the train ticket.
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
I don't think you need to apologise; there were a lot of people in the Labour party and on the left generally who were in favour of lockdown forever. It is a useful reminder.
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.
John Bolton warning in Telegraph today that Putin could well announce a ceasefire in the autumn and try and negotiate everything being frozen where it is, so he can spend a couple of years regrouping. He warns that West and NATO had better start thinking what their response is going to be.
I think their response would be "it's not to us, it's up to Ukraine"?
Good. Except some countries might prefer lower food and fuel prices to another 24 months of fighting over a couple of acres, half of whose inhabitants might prefer to be part of the other country.
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.
Union Square mall is built on where the goods yard was. It hasn't replaced the station. Which is finishing an extensive refit
The carpark and bus stop stands used to be there as well. I remember taking National Express buses down south from there because the ticket was less than half of the train ticket.
The car park is still there above the mall and another attached to the other side of the station. There is no lack of parking. The bus station is also attached to the mall on the other side - about 150 yards walk through an enclosed space lined woith shops and restaurants. It is, altogether, a far more coherent and well planned transport hub than you would find in most cities.
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.
My childhood recollection is mainly to do with boots. "Don't bring those great muckle boots in here", for example.
There is a terms linguists use for that phenomenon where speakers use the same word in two languages, in this case ‘great’ and ‘muckle’ (also great). It is because they don’t feel confident that the person listening will understand the foreign word. Or because they do not themselves appreciate that they are cognates.
I’ve forgotten the linguists’ term. Any smarty pants out there?
People often do it with geographical features, eg when folk ignorant of Scots call Dundee Law the “Law Hill”.
No - not a matter of apologetics, simply the availabilit yof the words and one way of producing emphasis. if you call someome a muckle great glaikit nyaff the muckle and great are functionally equivalent to "great big". Compare the Scots quintuple diminutive (three prefatory adjectives and two suffixes):
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
What an absolute crock!
Cameron said that in the full expectation he would win. Farage corrected him by saying if it is close we can have another vote in a couple of years.
The will of the people is the will of the people, they are allowed to change their minds.
P.S. How's the head? It sounded like you were giving it some last evening.
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.
Union Square mall is built on where the goods yard was. It hasn't replaced the station. Which is finishing an extensive refit
The carpark and bus stop stands used to be there as well. I remember taking National Express buses down south from there because the ticket was less than half of the train ticket.
The car park is still there above the mall and another attached to the other side of the station. There is no lack of parking. The bus station is also attached to the mall on the other side - about 150 yards walk through an enclosed space lined woith shops and restaurants. It is, altogether, a far more coherent and well planned transport hub than you would find in most cities.
Hm. It took me 15 years to discover the similar, if open, cut-through path from Inverness rail to bus station ...
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Don't forget the 'behavioural scientists' whose advice to the govt. was to delay lockdown and end it as soon as possible because it wouldn't be tolerated for more than a few weeks. The govt. was treading a fine line between those who craved lockdown (and even today may be seen shopping in 35° temperatures wearing black face masks) and those who ignored it and created public order problems for the police to mop up. The actual level of compliance was a pleasant surprise to everyone.
The Ukrainian view - and Zelensky's spokesman does a daily broadcast - is that Russia desperately wants a ceasefire because they know they're in big trouble - make of that what you will. I'd be astonished if the Ukrainians agreed to it. I wouldn't even bet on it if the west withdrew all military support and unaffected by Russia's gas stoppage the US will carry on regardless.
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.
Union Square mall is built on where the goods yard was. It hasn't replaced the station. Which is finishing an extensive refit
The carpark and bus stop stands used to be there as well. I remember taking National Express buses down south from there because the ticket was less than half of the train ticket.
The car park is still there above the mall and another attached to the other side of the station. There is no lack of parking. The bus station is also attached to the mall on the other side - about 150 yards walk through an enclosed space lined woith shops and restaurants. It is, altogether, a far more coherent and well planned transport hub than you would find in most cities.
Hm. It took me 15 years to discover the similar, if open, cut-through path from Inverness rail to bus station ...
Things have changed a lot in 35 years since I left my alma mater. I used to work in the office blocks dotted around the Guild Base area as a security guard during university holidays. The smell of bananas and other fruit and veg used to permeate the area, not forgetting the fish, and drunks falling out of bars.
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.
Let's say they are travelling at 0.125 light speed, they have light speed communications, and that was a vessel out looking for civilisations to conquer.
They found us 32 years ago. It took 4 years for the signal to get back home, and it will take them 32 years to get the fleet to us. So we can expect our SciFi fate to befall us sometime in 2026.
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Don't forget the 'behavioural scientists' whose advice to the govt. was to delay lockdown and end it as soon as possible because it wouldn't be tolerated for more than a few weeks. The govt. was treading a fine line between those who craved lockdown (and even today may be seen shopping in 35° temperatures wearing black face masks) and those who ignored it and created public order problems for the police to mop up. The actual level of compliance was a pleasant surprise to everyone.
I’m not certain it was the behavioural scientists who were saying that, rather than other disciplines, but, yes, lots of people said lots of different things, and lots of us got things wrong, in those first few months. I am not overly critical of the errors around the first lockdown. It was an unprecedented situation with many unknowns.
By the time of the second and third lockdowns, however, we had a much better idea of what to do and how to do it. And Boris got the big calls wrong.
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Don't forget the 'behavioural scientists' whose advice to the govt. was to delay lockdown and end it as soon as possible because it wouldn't be tolerated for more than a few weeks. The govt. was treading a fine line between those who craved lockdown (and even today may be seen shopping in 35° temperatures wearing black face masks) and those who ignored it and created public order problems for the police to mop up. The actual level of compliance was a pleasant surprise to everyone.
That was a good excuse for late action the first time. The second & third time? Not so much.
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.
My childhood recollection is mainly to do with boots. "Don't bring those great muckle boots in here", for example.
There is a terms linguists use for that phenomenon where speakers use the same word in two languages, in this case ‘great’ and ‘muckle’ (also great). It is because they don’t feel confident that the person listening will understand the foreign word. Or because they do not themselves appreciate that they are cognates.
I’ve forgotten the linguists’ term. Any smarty pants out there?
People often do it with geographical features, eg when folk ignorant of Scots call Dundee Law the “Law Hill”.
Is great not a word in Scots then? It certainly is in Geordie, just over the border. (Geet). And muckle is English dialect, from Yorkshire for example.
The Ukrainian view - and Zelensky's spokesman does a daily broadcast - is that Russia desperately wants a ceasefire because they know they're in big trouble - make of that what you will. I'd be astonished if the Ukrainians agreed to it. I wouldn't even bet on it if the west withdrew all military support and unaffected by Russia's gas stoppage the US will carry on regardless.
Is a significant amount of Russian gas still flowing to Europe through Ukraine? When I last checked, it was - which will mitigate against any moves in Europe to walk away from supporting Ukraine.
On a different note, a surprising amount of Ukrainian agricultural land is owned by foreigners - especially Americans and Chinese, plus European.
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
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.
Union Square mall is built on where the goods yard was. It hasn't replaced the station. Which is finishing an extensive refit
The carpark and bus stop stands used to be there as well. I remember taking National Express buses down south from there because the ticket was less than half of the train ticket.
The car park is still there above the mall and another attached to the other side of the station. There is no lack of parking. The bus station is also attached to the mall on the other side - about 150 yards walk through an enclosed space lined woith shops and restaurants. It is, altogether, a far more coherent and well planned transport hub than you would find in most cities.
Hm. It took me 15 years to discover the similar, if open, cut-through path from Inverness rail to bus station ...
It took me months of going to a local park during lockdown(s) and going in through the 'proper entrance' before I realised 'Whoah! There isn't a fence round the park! I could just walk in *through the trees*!".
I felt like such a rebel. I think of it as my Theresa May moment.
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.
John Bolton warning in Telegraph today that Putin could well announce a ceasefire in the autumn and try and negotiate everything being frozen where it is, so he can spend a couple of years regrouping. He warns that West and NATO had better start thinking what their response is going to be.
I think the response should be to take advantage of a ceasefire offer to continue to train and equip the Ukrainians, while trying to extract some concessions from Russia that will make the winter easier for civilians, returning those deported to Russia, etc.
Hopefully, by the spring, the Ukrainians will be trained and equipped with F-16s and other NATO equipment, and a Ukrainian counteroffensive would be a success.
The problem is, there would be pressure to make a ceasefire permanent. Many people seem to be saying that a Ukrainian victory in the spring is possible, and to my mind the only potential reason for supplying and supporting Ukraine as we have done is to press for a military defeat of Russia.
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.
My childhood recollection is mainly to do with boots. "Don't bring those great muckle boots in here", for example.
There is a terms linguists use for that phenomenon where speakers use the same word in two languages, in this case ‘great’ and ‘muckle’ (also great). It is because they don’t feel confident that the person listening will understand the foreign word. Or because they do not themselves appreciate that they are cognates.
I’ve forgotten the linguists’ term. Any smarty pants out there?
People often do it with geographical features, eg when folk ignorant of Scots call Dundee Law the “Law Hill”.
Is great not a word in Scots then? It certainly is in Geordie, just over the border. (Geet). And muckle is English dialect, from Yorkshire for example.
There are several laws up here too. Tow Law for example.
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.
John Bolton warning in Telegraph today that Putin could well announce a ceasefire in the autumn and try and negotiate everything being frozen where it is, so he can spend a couple of years regrouping. He warns that West and NATO had better start thinking what their response is going to be.
Which of those three have the better, more up to date, intelligence? (Bearing in mind that both UK and US intelligence communities have a very good record in this conflict - to the extent of calling it right before even the Ukraine Govt wanted to accept the interpretation of an impending invasion.
I'd like it if Ukraine had the capability in place to repeat the recent attack at all the other Russian air bases in the Crimea, and they have continually surprised all of us with their capabilities - though I wonder how far that extends to US/UK intelligence.
It's quite ironic that 'military intelligence' is the boilerplate quip in some circles about a contradiction in terms.
Nonsense. Other than the knob Conan Doyle almost nobody believed in them. Even the Wikipedia article you link to says that. Edit - leaving aside things like sprites etc generically and looking at cottingley only they are obviously and always were obviously cut out pictures of fairytale fairies. So they are 'real' photos, of kids looking at cut out pictures positioned by them
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
The Ukrainian view - and Zelensky's spokesman does a daily broadcast - is that Russia desperately wants a ceasefire because they know they're in big trouble - make of that what you will. I'd be astonished if the Ukrainians agreed to it. I wouldn't even bet on it if the west withdrew all military support and unaffected by Russia's gas stoppage the US will carry on regardless.
Yes, the Ukranians are not planning on the war ending, until the enemy have withdrawn to the pre-2014 border. The momentum is with them, and there are serious suggestions that the enemy is close to collapsing in places, starved of supply lines and with frequent attacks on stores and supply infrastructure. The key battle in the coming weeks is that around Kherson, the only area West of the river Deniper held by the enemy.
The Russians were totally spooked by whatever went down at the Crimean airfield last week. The initial thought was that it was American-made ATACMS rockets (the big brother of the usual HIMARS MLRS missiles) that were rumoured to be on the way a few weeks ago, but the Americans have denied this. Other possibilities are the Ukranian-made Neptune anti-ship missile, adapted for land use, or more likely a Ukranian special forces operation deep behind enemy lines. Ukranian SF have been trained by the UK and US, so this sort of tactical operation is probably not past them.
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.
My childhood recollection is mainly to do with boots. "Don't bring those great muckle boots in here", for example.
There is a terms linguists use for that phenomenon where speakers use the same word in two languages, in this case ‘great’ and ‘muckle’ (also great). It is because they don’t feel confident that the person listening will understand the foreign word. Or because they do not themselves appreciate that they are cognates.
I’ve forgotten the linguists’ term. Any smarty pants out there?
People often do it with geographical features, eg when folk ignorant of Scots call Dundee Law the “Law Hill”.
Is great not a word in Scots then? It certainly is in Geordie, just over the border. (Geet). And muckle is English dialect, from Yorkshire for example.
It is - in various forms also gryte, gret etc. But on checking the DSL I find I had forgotten it can also mean coarse, as in grain
m.Sc. 1994 John Burns in James Robertson A Tongue in Yer Heid 25: He lookt up an saw the two o them: Jock, big an sweity and hairy wi his muckle gret moustache an the hairs pokin oot the en o his nose, an Tam wi his wizent wee futret face scruncht up ablow his bunnet.
Sc. 1901 N.E.D.: That meal (or salt) is ower gryte; I like it sma'.
Yes it is super slow and yes you have to super zoom in to see the progress as it is on such a small scale but if they take Soledar then the Siversk-Bakhmut line is penetrated and the Ukrainians will have to withdraw to the next line which will allow the Russians to take a big bite.
The Ukrainian view - and Zelensky's spokesman does a daily broadcast - is that Russia desperately wants a ceasefire because they know they're in big trouble - make of that what you will. I'd be astonished if the Ukrainians agreed to it. I wouldn't even bet on it if the west withdrew all military support and unaffected by Russia's gas stoppage the US will carry on regardless.
I believe the Russians currently occupy 20% of the Ukraine (including presumably Crimea). What we are probably looking at (short of any surprise escalation which you can never rule out) is a point whether neither side can lose and neither side can win and that's probably where we are now.
It may well be the conflict will drag on for months at a lower level (still plenty of death and destruction) without significant progress on either side. Zelenskyy's perfectly reasonable demand is the complete and unconditional withdrawal of all Russian forces from Ukrainian territory - that seems pretty unambiguous to me.
Except we have Crimea which we all think of as part of the Ukraine but Russia sees differently. That is the stumbling block - I suspect Putin could throw Donetsk and Lubansk under the bus (possibly continuing to tacitly support post-war guerrilla activity?) but to give up Sebastopol would be too much of a personal political humiliation.
The problem is without a resolution to the Crimea issue the rest of it remains unresolved.
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
I would recommend Balmford et al. (Environ. Resour. Econ., 76 (2020), pp. 525-551) and Coccia (2021, Sci Environ, 775, art no 145801) for starters.
Stuart cares so deeply about the cause of Scottish independence that he lives in Sweden
What an odd little bigot you are. Are you sure that the Labour Party is happy with one of their members making ad hominem attacks on immigrants online?
The Ukrainian view - and Zelensky's spokesman does a daily broadcast - is that Russia desperately wants a ceasefire because they know they're in big trouble - make of that what you will. I'd be astonished if the Ukrainians agreed to it. I wouldn't even bet on it if the west withdrew all military support and unaffected by Russia's gas stoppage the US will carry on regardless.
I believe the Russians currently occupy 20% of the Ukraine (including presumably Crimea). What we are probably looking at (short of any surprise escalation which you can never rule out) is a point whether neither side can lose and neither side can win and that's probably where we are now.
It may well be the conflict will drag on for months at a lower level (still plenty of death and destruction) without significant progress on either side. Zelenskyy's perfectly reasonable demand is the complete and unconditional withdrawal of all Russian forces from Ukrainian territory - that seems pretty unambiguous to me.
Except we have Crimea which we all think of as part of the Ukraine but Russia sees differently. That is the stumbling block - I suspect Putin could throw Donetsk and Lubansk under the bus (possibly continuing to tacitly support post-war guerrilla activity?) but to give up Sebastopol would be too much of a personal political humiliation.
The problem is without a resolution to the Crimea issue the rest of it remains unresolved.
Is it possible Russia could agree to buy Crimea for a couple of hundred billion dollars? That would seem the obvious compromise, and one not unknown in American history.
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.
John Bolton warning in Telegraph today that Putin could well announce a ceasefire in the autumn and try and negotiate everything being frozen where it is, so he can spend a couple of years regrouping. He warns that West and NATO had better start thinking what their response is going to be.
Which of those three have the better, more up to date, intelligence? (Bearing in mind that both UK and US intelligence communities have a very good record in this conflict - to the extent of calling it right before even the Ukraine Govt wanted to accept the interpretation of an impending invasion.
I'd like it if Ukraine had the capability in place to repeat the recent attack at all the other Russian air bases in the Crimea, and they have continually surprised all of us with their capabilities - though I wonder how far that extends to US/UK intelligence.
It's quite ironic that 'military intelligence' is the boilerplate quip in some circles about a contradiction in terms.
The intelligence getting to the Ukranian defenders has been brilliant in this war, and even in the run-up to the war as the enemy assembled close to Ukraine. It was rather amusing to see, among other things, hi-res satellite photos of the Crimean airfield, taken the day before and the day after the attack. It’s no co-incidence that the day-before photo existed, a fact that won’t be lost on the enemy. Apart from the satellites, there’s been a constant NATO airbourne surveillance task force over Poland, Romania and in the Black Sea since 24th February.
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
The thousands of lives saved are people in institutions. If anything like the rest of Europe, these are places where most people have dementia and nobody is coming out alive. To sacrifice everyone's wellbeing for two years is an excessive price to pay for nursing home safety.
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.
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!
It is generally accepted that one of the Three Kings was Black.
Pretty remarkable, considering the only thing the source material says is that they came from the East!
The Bible doesn’t call them Kings and doesn’t even say how many there were. There are traditions, dating back to the middle to late first millennium perhaps, in western Christianity that there were 3 of them, that they were Kings, and that one is from Persia, one is from India and the last is from Arabia or Ethiopia (and is thus black). However, traditions vary. There is a Syriac Christian tradition that there were 12 of them.
There are very few Biblical traditions suggesting Jesus was blond, blue eyed and clean shaven. Indeed he wasn’t. Yet casting a blond, blue eyed actor to play him has never been an issue. Cast a black man, or even a Palestinian (who would likely fit the bill better than most) and watch the sparks fly. This idea of “historical realism” is BS. Our culture can suspend disbelief, apparently, when it comes to everything but skin colour.
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
And they maintained their restrictions far longer than us, anyway. It took them until Feb/Mar this year to relax as far as we did in July 2021.
I am reminded of someone on a different forum who hated lockdowns - and advocated in September and early December for them. Because the sooner we had them, the sooner they could be released (that 3:1 ratio of slope down to slope up).
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
I would recommend Balmford et al. (Environ. Resour. Econ., 76 (2020), pp. 525-551) and Coccia (2021, Sci Environ, 775, art no 145801) for starters.
Just a name for starters please, which country on our interconnected continent had a short, sharp lockdown that worked and was rapidly ended without having to be repeated after the virus was reimported from it's neighbours?
Not a theoretical "if we'd done this" that can't be proven but an actuality, which one?
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
The Ukrainian view - and Zelensky's spokesman does a daily broadcast - is that Russia desperately wants a ceasefire because they know they're in big trouble - make of that what you will. I'd be astonished if the Ukrainians agreed to it. I wouldn't even bet on it if the west withdrew all military support and unaffected by Russia's gas stoppage the US will carry on regardless.
I believe the Russians currently occupy 20% of the Ukraine (including presumably Crimea). What we are probably looking at (short of any surprise escalation which you can never rule out) is a point whether neither side can lose and neither side can win and that's probably where we are now.
It may well be the conflict will drag on for months at a lower level (still plenty of death and destruction) without significant progress on either side. Zelenskyy's perfectly reasonable demand is the complete and unconditional withdrawal of all Russian forces from Ukrainian territory - that seems pretty unambiguous to me.
Except we have Crimea which we all think of as part of the Ukraine but Russia sees differently. That is the stumbling block - I suspect Putin could throw Donetsk and Lubansk under the bus (possibly continuing to tacitly support post-war guerrilla activity?) but to give up Sebastopol would be too much of a personal political humiliation.
The problem is without a resolution to the Crimea issue the rest of it remains unresolved.
Is it possible Russia could agree to buy Crimea for a couple of hundred billion dollars? That would seem the obvious compromise, and one not unknown in American history.
I think they'll end up buying or 'leasing' the Eastern bits. With Crimea perhaps there should be an internationally-monitored plebiscite if such a thing is possible.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
As you say and then there's hindsight.
In March 2020, Governments took action which you may say now was excessive but was to limit the spread of the original virus in turn to reduce the pressure on medical and hospital services which were buckling under the strain of patients needing ventilation. The best way to limit the virus spread was to reduce contact between human beings - hardly original, the villagers of Eyam had the same thought.
Even then, it was known the elderly were the most vulnerable so I suppose there's a school of thought we should have only confined the over-70s plus the immuno-compromised - how practical that would have been I don't know but we might have avoided the shutdown of, for example, construction and some other parts of retail.
Asking those who could to work from home seemed perfectly sensible though whether anyone envisaged it as a semi-permanent change of working culture for hundreds of thousands of admin staff I don't know.
The worst aspect, however, if proven, was knowingly sending elderly people likely to have the virus (no testing then of course) back to care homes with the significant and certainly non-negligible chance of infecting other residents and staff but with bed spaces critically short and patients needing ventilation, what else could be done?
The other issue was or were the borders - decisions were taken not to close the borders and there will be many who will question the viability of that decision. There's plenty of evidence it wouldn't have made any difference - the favoured culprits seem to be the school half-term holidays in mid-February but I suspect time will tell the virus was in the country long before that.
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
I would recommend Balmford et al. (Environ. Resour. Econ., 76 (2020), pp. 525-551) and Coccia (2021, Sci Environ, 775, art no 145801) for starters.
Just a name for starters please, which country on our interconnected continent had a short, sharp lockdown that worked and was rapidly ended without having to be repeated after the virus was reimported from it's neighbours?
Not a theoretical "if we'd done this" that can't be proven but an actuality, which one?
Neither paper is theoretical. They give details based on international comparisons.
If you are interested in engaging with the evidence base, I’ve given you two papers to read. If you’re not actually interested, OK, it’s a free country.
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
Is it just me, or do Scot Nats dislike Starmer way more than they did either Milliband or Magic Grandpa? I mean it's not just on PB. Wasn't Tommy Shephard saying some bollocks in the National about how Starmer was the worst Labour leader ever the other day? My guess is because unlike the previous two leaders, they fear Starmer is going to win and get Labour back in office, which they very much don't want.
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.
Union Square mall is built on where the goods yard was. It hasn't replaced the station. Which is finishing an extensive refit
The money would have been better spent reopening the Fraserburgh and Peterhead lines, at least as far as Ellon initially.
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.
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!
It is generally accepted that one of the Three Kings was Black.
Pretty remarkable, considering the only thing the source material says is that they came from the East!
The Bible doesn’t call them Kings and doesn’t even say how many there were. There are traditions, dating back to the middle to late first millennium perhaps, in western Christianity that there were 3 of them, that they were Kings, and that one is from Persia, one is from India and the last is from Arabia or Ethiopia (and is thus black). However, traditions vary. There is a Syriac Christian tradition that there were 12 of them.
There are very few Biblical traditions suggesting Jesus was blond, blue eyed and clean shaven. Indeed he wasn’t. Yet casting a blond, blue eyed actor to play him has never been an issue. Cast a black man, or even a Palestinian (who would likely fit the bill better than most) and watch the sparks fly. This idea of “historical realism” is BS. Our culture can suspend disbelief, apparently, when it comes to everything but skin colour.
An aryan looking Jesus wasn't an issue in the 1950's - it certainly would be a serious issue today and would be mocked and condemned. In recent decades, Jesus has been portrayed with a Mediterranean complexion, though there have been a few prominent performers with blue eyes. A think a Palestinian actor portraying Jesus would be welcomed.
We are talking about entertainment. I am not going to 'be entertained' or pretend to be entertained, because you think it's morally correct that I should. If others are, that's fine, and those productions will be successful. Ishmael says he was surprised by how OK with it he was - to me that's an acknowledgenent that he has been pulled out of the story to muse on the casting decisions.
In dramas that use historical settings merely as a colourful backdrop,like Bridgerton, quite obviously all is fair game. I'm not a huge fan of that genre, but nothing against those who are.
Since you've suggested that Thandie Newton could play Elizabeth I, I would be interested to know whether you would find it jarring to see a white actor play Martin Luther King. I think most would, and rightly so.
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
And they maintained their restrictions far longer than us, anyway. It took them until Feb/Mar this year to relax as far as we did in July 2021.
I am reminded of someone on a different forum who hated lockdowns - and advocated in September and early December for them. Because the sooner we had them, the sooner they could be released (that 3:1 ratio of slope down to slope up).
The central paradox here is that, by hating lockdowns so much, Johnson probably condemned the UK to more time under restrictions than it would have otherwise had. Sometimes because of not understanding the world (that 3:1 ratio of slopes), and sometimes becuase of utter incompetence (that one day at school in January 2021).
So do you prefer someone who talks about loving freedom, or someone who is more willing to do the unpleasant thing of taking freedom away when that has the effect of more freedom overall?
In a world of three words slogans, a lot of people will go for the first.
No one ever answered the question as to whether they would visit an immunocompronised friend if they (not the friend) were not symptomatic but did have a positive Covid test result.
Nonsense. Other than the knob Conan Doyle almost nobody believed in them. Even the Wikipedia article you link to says that. Edit - leaving aside things like sprites etc generically and looking at cottingley only they are obviously and always were obviously cut out pictures of fairytale fairies. So they are 'real' photos, of kids looking at cut out pictures positioned by them
As I say, when I was a kid there were books (perhaps written by a close relative of Leon) which gave them as the perfect evidence of the existence of fairies. ISTR they were also featured on a TV program in the late 1970s. People did 'believe' it.
The point is that the photos did not show fairies; the fact that they were 'real' photos does not mean they showed 'real' fairies.
See also the 'Face on Mars'. I wonder why we don't hear more about that?
I would add 'crop circles', but some people still believe aliens cause them...
Is it just me, or do Scot Nats dislike Starmer way more than they did either Milliband or Magic Grandpa? I mean it's not just on PB. Wasn't Tommy Shephard saying some bollocks in the National about how Starmer was the worst Labour leader ever the other day? My guess is because unlike the previous two leaders, they fear Starmer is going to win and get Labour back in office, which they very much don't want.
If Scottish Labour were still in power, many of the people who have attached themselves to the SNP would still be Labour. If SLAB’s continuing irrational hatred of the SNP didn’t colour all their decisions, they could win back some nationalists. Fortunately for the SNP, SLAB are unable to change, ensuring their failure to progress.
No one ever answered the question as to whether they would visit an immunocompronised friend if they (not the friend) were not symptomatic but did have a positive Covid test result.
There was masses of deflection but no answer.
I wouldn’t. I would be too busy visiting immunocompromised enemies. 😈
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.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
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.
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!
It is generally accepted that one of the Three Kings was Black.
Pretty remarkable, considering the only thing the source material says is that they came from the East!
The Bible doesn’t call them Kings and doesn’t even say how many there were. There are traditions, dating back to the middle to late first millennium perhaps, in western Christianity that there were 3 of them, that they were Kings, and that one is from Persia, one is from India and the last is from Arabia or Ethiopia (and is thus black). However, traditions vary. There is a Syriac Christian tradition that there were 12 of them.
There are very few Biblical traditions suggesting Jesus was blond, blue eyed and clean shaven. Indeed he wasn’t. Yet casting a blond, blue eyed actor to play him has never been an issue. Cast a black man, or even a Palestinian (who would likely fit the bill better than most) and watch the sparks fly. This idea of “historical realism” is BS. Our culture can suspend disbelief, apparently, when it comes to everything but skin colour.
An aryan looking Jesus wasn't an issue in the 1950's - it certainly would be a serious issue today and would be mocked and condemned. In recent decades, Jesus has been portrayed with a Mediterranean complexion, though there have been a few prominent performers with blue eyes. A think a Palestinian actor portraying Jesus would be welcomed.
We are talking about entertainment. I am not going to 'be entertained' or pretend to be entertained, because you think it's morally correct that I should. If others are, that's fine, and those productions will be successful. Ishmael says he was surprised by how OK with it he was - to me that's an acknowledgenent that he has been pulled out of the story to muse on the casting decisions.
In dramas that use historical settings merely as a colourful backdrop,like Bridgerton, quite obviously all is fair game. I'm not a huge fan of that genre, but nothing against those who are.
Since you've suggested that Thandie Newton could play Elizabeth I, I would be interested to know whether you would find it jarring to see a white actor play Martin Luther King. I think most would, and rightly so.
Who is allowed to play Tiger Woods in his biopic? Good luck finding your one quarter Thai, one quarter Chinese, one quarter Caucasian, one eighth African American and one eight native American actors to choose from.
It is make believe, anyone can play anyone as long as it done with respect and consideration.
Is it just me, or do Scot Nats dislike Starmer way more than they did either Milliband or Magic Grandpa? I mean it's not just on PB. Wasn't Tommy Shephard saying some bollocks in the National about how Starmer was the worst Labour leader ever the other day? My guess is because unlike the previous two leaders, they fear Starmer is going to win and get Labour back in office, which they very much don't want.
I, like approx one third of Scots, would prefer a PM Starmer to a PM Truss. If we choose to stay in the Union.
Which of the following do you think would make the best Prime Minister? - Scotland
Comments
Or how about VAT applying to Fuel Duty? Quite literally taxing a tax.
I won't lose any sleep about being taxed 'twice' when we're taxed dozens of ways to sundown every day.
Watchable.
As ever, you gravitate towards the most DRAMATIC and OH-MI-GAWD! position in a topic.
IMV: proof of extra-terrestrial live visiting us requires a massive amount more 'proof' than a grainy photo or two. And given the ubiquity of cameras nowadays, I'd have expected a flood of them over the last two decades.
But there have not been.
(I'd recommend you read 'Intervention' by Julian May to show the way alien races might intervene on Earth. You might like it.)
Otoh, my school never had a nativity play.
Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather
Whiplash girl child in the dark
Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him
Strike, dear Liz Truss, and cure his heart
"Keir Starmer brands Boris Johnson a 'bulls*****r' who 'never intended to keep promises"
SKS clearly has zero self awareness
They don’t say that when they steal our oil, gas, electricity and water.
I didn't see that you'd also proposed a rock in a loch - sorry. Funny that two 'baggers' saw the same thing though.
I'm not sure I'd be able to work up the enthusiasm for any of the Corbetts local to that area apart from Ben Vrackie. Beinn Dearg was dull enough!
Mind you, I do like a good conspiracy theory. They can be very attractive.
I think the problem is that the real scientific mysteries to be found these days are too hard for most of us.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_Kingdom_general_election_in_Scotland
Everyone assumes that there will be a deal, but it may well not happen; nor will it be as clean and favourable as people expect.
Hopefully, by the spring, the Ukrainians will be trained and equipped with F-16s and other NATO equipment, and a Ukrainian counteroffensive would be a success.
The gorilla on the basketball is not seen. You don't see it and explain it away, you just don't see it.
Inattentional blindness.
I’ve forgotten the linguists’ term. Any smarty pants out there?
People often do it with geographical features, eg when folk ignorant of Scots call Dundee Law the “Law Hill”.
http://earthlike.world/
Although in reality, any aliens may be from a *very* different form of world...
*little wee bit lassockie*
Cameron said that in the full expectation he would win. Farage corrected him by saying if it is close we can have another vote in a couple of years.
The will of the people is the will of the people, they are allowed to change their minds.
P.S. How's the head? It sounded like you were giving it some last evening.
They found us 32 years ago. It took 4 years for the signal to get back home, and it will take them 32 years to get the fleet to us. So we can expect our SciFi fate to befall us sometime in 2026.
By the time of the second and third lockdowns, however, we had a much better idea of what to do and how to do it. And Boris got the big calls wrong.
When I was growing up, the photo was used as absolute evidence that fairies existed, and 'experts' proclaimed the photos had not been manipulated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
On a different note, a surprising amount of Ukrainian agricultural land is owned by foreigners - especially Americans and Chinese, plus European.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
I felt like such a rebel. I think of it as my Theresa May moment.
Tow Law for example.
I'd like it if Ukraine had the capability in place to repeat the recent attack at all the other Russian air bases in the Crimea, and they have continually surprised all of us with their capabilities - though I wonder how far that extends to US/UK intelligence.
It's quite ironic that 'military intelligence' is the boilerplate quip in some circles about a contradiction in terms.
Edit - leaving aside things like sprites etc generically and looking at cottingley only they are obviously and always were obviously cut out pictures of fairytale fairies. So they are 'real' photos, of kids looking at cut out pictures positioned by them
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
The Russians were totally spooked by whatever went down at the Crimean airfield last week. The initial thought was that it was American-made ATACMS rockets (the big brother of the usual HIMARS MLRS missiles) that were rumoured to be on the way a few weeks ago, but the Americans have denied this. Other possibilities are the Ukranian-made Neptune anti-ship missile, adapted for land use, or more likely a Ukranian special forces operation deep behind enemy lines. Ukranian SF have been trained by the UK and US, so this sort of tactical operation is probably not past them.
m.Sc. 1994 John Burns in James Robertson A Tongue in Yer Heid 25:
He lookt up an saw the two o them: Jock, big an sweity and hairy wi his muckle gret moustache an the hairs pokin oot the en o his nose, an Tam wi his wizent wee futret face scruncht up ablow his bunnet.
Sc. 1901 N.E.D.:
That meal (or salt) is ower gryte; I like it sma'.
Yes it is super slow and yes you have to super zoom in to see the progress as it is on such a small scale but if they take Soledar then the Siversk-Bakhmut line is penetrated and the Ukrainians will have to withdraw to the next line which will allow the Russians to take a big bite.
It may well be the conflict will drag on for months at a lower level (still plenty of death and destruction) without significant progress on either side. Zelenskyy's perfectly reasonable demand is the complete and unconditional withdrawal of all Russian forces from Ukrainian territory - that seems pretty unambiguous to me.
Except we have Crimea which we all think of as part of the Ukraine but Russia sees differently. That is the stumbling block - I suspect Putin could throw Donetsk and Lubansk under the bus (possibly continuing to tacitly support post-war guerrilla activity?) but to give up Sebastopol would be too much of a personal political humiliation.
The problem is without a resolution to the Crimea issue the rest of it remains unresolved.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
It took them until Feb/Mar this year to relax as far as we did in July 2021.
I am reminded of someone on a different forum who hated lockdowns - and advocated in September and early December for them. Because the sooner we had them, the sooner they could be released (that 3:1 ratio of slope down to slope up).
- It’s better to be a consumer in Sweden than Britain
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/08/11/which-european-countries-are-most-vulnerable-to-surging-energy-prices
That graph is shocking: the poorest 20% in England & her satellite states are going to get absolutely hammered compared to the richest 20%.
While the poor suffer more than the rich nearly everywhere, they are better protected in France, Italy, Germany etc
Not a theoretical "if we'd done this" that can't be proven but an actuality, which one?
Half of those in ICUs were under 60.
A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In March 2020, Governments took action which you may say now was excessive but was to limit the spread of the original virus in turn to reduce the pressure on medical and hospital services which were buckling under the strain of patients needing ventilation. The best way to limit the virus spread was to reduce contact between human beings - hardly original, the villagers of Eyam had the same thought.
Even then, it was known the elderly were the most vulnerable so I suppose there's a school of thought we should have only confined the over-70s plus the immuno-compromised - how practical that would have been I don't know but we might have avoided the shutdown of, for example, construction and some other parts of retail.
Asking those who could to work from home seemed perfectly sensible though whether anyone envisaged it as a semi-permanent change of working culture for hundreds of thousands of admin staff I don't know.
The worst aspect, however, if proven, was knowingly sending elderly people likely to have the virus (no testing then of course) back to care homes with the significant and certainly non-negligible chance of infecting other residents and staff but with bed spaces critically short and patients needing ventilation, what else could be done?
The other issue was or were the borders - decisions were taken not to close the borders and there will be many who will question the viability of that decision. There's plenty of evidence it wouldn't have made any difference - the favoured culprits seem to be the school half-term holidays in mid-February but I suspect time will tell the virus was in the country long before that.
If you are interested in engaging with the evidence base, I’ve given you two papers to read. If you’re not actually interested, OK, it’s a free country.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
I mean it's not just on PB. Wasn't Tommy Shephard saying some bollocks in the National about how Starmer was the worst Labour leader ever the other day?
My guess is because unlike the previous two leaders, they fear Starmer is going to win and get Labour back in office, which they very much don't want.
We are talking about entertainment. I am not going to 'be entertained' or pretend to be entertained, because you think it's morally correct that I should. If others are, that's fine, and those productions will be successful. Ishmael says he was surprised by how OK with it he was - to me that's an acknowledgenent that he has been pulled out of the story to muse on the casting decisions.
In dramas that use historical settings merely as a colourful backdrop,like Bridgerton, quite obviously all is fair game. I'm not a huge fan of that genre, but nothing against those who are.
Since you've suggested that Thandie Newton could play Elizabeth I, I would be interested to know whether you would find it jarring to see a white actor play Martin Luther King. I think most would, and rightly so.
So do you prefer someone who talks about loving freedom, or someone who is more willing to do the unpleasant thing of taking freedom away when that has the effect of more freedom overall?
In a world of three words slogans, a lot of people will go for the first.
There was masses of deflection but no answer.
The point is that the photos did not show fairies; the fact that they were 'real' photos does not mean they showed 'real' fairies.
See also the 'Face on Mars'. I wonder why we don't hear more about that?
I would add 'crop circles', but some people still believe aliens cause them...
Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU.
Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
It is make believe, anyone can play anyone as long as it done with respect and consideration.
Which of the following do you think would make the best Prime Minister? - Scotland
Liz Truss 19%
Keir Starmer 34%
Not sure 43%
Refused 5%
(YouGov/The Times; 4-5 August)
What makes Starmer so unpalatable, compared to previous Labour leaders, is his ‘Muscular Unionism’. Just another term for bullying.