I think we need to get a little perspective on the Queue.
Let's say 100 people file past every minute. That is 6000 per hour. That is 144,000 per day That is 860,000 over six days
860,000 is approximately 1.3% of the UK population or 1 in 78 people. Still a lot and noteworthy given the queuing time but a fairly small minority of the population.
860,000 people…. PREPARED TO QUEUE FOR 14 HOURS IN THE COLD AND DARK… so they get 5 seconds to stare at a flag over a box with a dead woman inside
How about the appeal of getting the latest phone that does essentially the same as the last one? Horses for courses.
We haven't spent two weeks talking about it or having post after post on it, I think I've commented on it twice!
I’m just trying to show that people have different things that get them going.
There's getting you going and just being over the top, I think we are there now with the Queen.
In what way? TV back to normal mostly, sport is on, some people are taking the chance to pay respects, or be part of something. Is it interfering with your day to day life? I’m no royalist, I can’t stand Charles and would happily see the U.K. become a republic. But on this if people want to queue to pat their respects fine. I saw somewhere suggesting how respectful republicans in the U.K. have been. We have, and rightly so.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I had to check, did the victims die? Sure did. One was struck 23 times, the other 24 times.
How about the appeal of getting the latest phone that does essentially the same as the last one? Horses for courses.
We haven't spent two weeks talking about it or having post after post on it, I think I've commented on it twice!
I’m just trying to show that people have different things that get them going.
There's getting you going and just being over the top, I think we are there now with the Queen.
In what way? TV back to normal mostly, sport is on, some people are taking the chance to pay respects, or be part of something. Is it interfering with your day to day life? I’m no royalist, I can’t stand Charles and would happily see the U.K. become a republic. But on this if people want to queue to pat their respects fine. I saw somewhere suggesting how respectful republicans in the U.K. have been. We have, and rightly so.
I am being told I am being disrespectful by some friends because I am not interested!
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I wonder if an unintended consequence of armed police is a tendency to hair trigger(!) paranoia about possible suspects being armed. The shooting of that unarmed rapper guy in London suggests that.
Incidentally, why does the hot water dispenser in the hotel breakfast have "CAUTION: HOT WATER" on it. It's an urn for hot water. Of course it has hot water inside it. Why do we need to be warned about something we are expecting?
Since McDonalds got sued for millions after someone burned themselves with coffee, and successfully argued that no-one told them it was hot.
I forgot about that. Surely it's possible to have a courts system to tell malicious and stupid claimants to go forth and multiply so that the rest of us can get on with our lives?
Such mechanism exists for a court to label someone a vexatious litigant, which limits their access to the system in order to stop wasting their time. Doesn’t happen very often though, the closest in recent years has been Jolyon, who’s probably one more frivolous claim away from being barred from the court.
I think we need to get a little perspective on the Queue.
Let's say 100 people file past every minute. That is 6000 per hour. That is 144,000 per day That is 860,000 over six days
860,000 is approximately 1.3% of the UK population or 1 in 78 people. Still a lot and noteworthy given the queuing time but a fairly small minority of the population.
How many other single-location events will have so many visitors in only four and a half days, where everyone knows that they will queue on average ten hours or so?
Trying to minimise this exceptionally unusual event is a form of denial.
How about the appeal of getting the latest phone that does essentially the same as the last one? Horses for courses.
We haven't spent two weeks talking about it or having post after post on it, I think I've commented on it twice!
I’m just trying to show that people have different things that get them going.
There's getting you going and just being over the top, I think we are there now with the Queen.
In what way? TV back to normal mostly, sport is on, some people are taking the chance to pay respects, or be part of something. Is it interfering with your day to day life? I’m no royalist, I can’t stand Charles and would happily see the U.K. become a republic. But on this if people want to queue to pat their respects fine. I saw somewhere suggesting how respectful republicans in the U.K. have been. We have, and rightly so.
I am being told I am being disrespectful by some friends because I am not interested!
It may be more about your constant talking about not being interested, rather than the lack of interest itself.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
My favourite is the tired lady cop who on returning home finds a black accountant (I think) cooking in her kitchen. She opens fire, blows the mother...... away before realising she is in fact in his flat. Still no harm done.
I think we need to get a little perspective on the Queue.
Let's say 100 people file past every minute. That is 6000 per hour. That is 144,000 per day That is 860,000 over six days
860,000 is approximately 1.3% of the UK population or 1 in 78 people. Still a lot and noteworthy given the queuing time but a fairly small minority of the population.
How many other single-location events will have so many visitors in only four and a half days, where everyone knows that they will queue on average ten hours or so?
Trying to minimise this exceptionally unusual event is a form of denial.
So have any PBers been to see the Queen or is it all mouth and no trousers on here?
Eabhal (in Edinburgh) and Casino_Royale (London) have both paid their respects in person, while Garethofthevale is currently in The Queue.
There may be others I have missed.
@Casino_Royale wrote a very moving description of his visit on the previous thread. Worth seeking out and reading.
Yes that long comment by @Casino_Royale was a really good explanation of why an intelligent royalist/patriot like him might want to do this seemingly bizarre thing. The queue itself was half the point. A penitential pilgrimage. And a chance to meet others with similar feelings
And then he saw her majesty at rest and he got some closure on his angry grief
Because some people really are grieving. Quite unexpected people too
How about the appeal of getting the latest phone that does essentially the same as the last one? Horses for courses.
We haven't spent two weeks talking about it or having post after post on it, I think I've commented on it twice!
I’m just trying to show that people have different things that get them going.
There's getting you going and just being over the top, I think we are there now with the Queen.
In what way? TV back to normal mostly, sport is on, some people are taking the chance to pay respects, or be part of something. Is it interfering with your day to day life? I’m no royalist, I can’t stand Charles and would happily see the U.K. become a republic. But on this if people want to queue to pat their respects fine. I saw somewhere suggesting how respectful republicans in the U.K. have been. We have, and rightly so.
I am being told I am being disrespectful by some friends because I am not interested!
Then your friends are rude and disrespectful of you.
How about the appeal of getting the latest phone that does essentially the same as the last one? Horses for courses.
We haven't spent two weeks talking about it or having post after post on it, I think I've commented on it twice!
I’m just trying to show that people have different things that get them going.
There's getting you going and just being over the top, I think we are there now with the Queen.
In what way? TV back to normal mostly, sport is on, some people are taking the chance to pay respects, or be part of something. Is it interfering with your day to day life? I’m no royalist, I can’t stand Charles and would happily see the U.K. become a republic. But on this if people want to queue to pat their respects fine. I saw somewhere suggesting how respectful republicans in the U.K. have been. We have, and rightly so.
I am being told I am being disrespectful by some friends because I am not interested!
It may be more about your constant talking about not being interested, rather than the lack of interest itself.
To be honest I actually haven't brought it up, it's just situational at the moment I guess.
This guy is dancing flamenco REALLY WELL under a tree shaped like a CUBE
Pretentious git ... (that flamenco dancer)
Part of the joy of the place.
Blooming nightmare if you want to get anything done, mind you.
Yes, I'm sure. Just kidding.
But from the photo what it reminds me of - and quite strongly too - is the infamous performance of Hit My Baby One More Time by the sadly recently departed Daris Danesh on ITV's 'Popstars' 2015.
Of all the things to worry about in Britain right now, the monarchy is not in my top 100.
I'm more concerned with the fact that about 78,000 largely male elderly voters got to choose an uncharismatic dishcloth and impose her as PM, frankly.
You are surprised that those elderly men voted for a blonde woman who wears well-fitted dresses, (allegedly) kinky jewellery, and who promised them the world on a plate and all for free?
I thought you understood the world better than that.
[Note to PB: The Oxford comma above was used as an act of rebellion]
I am not surprised. Annoyed. As I was when they did it with Boris and May. The Tory party is behaving as if Britain is their private rotten borough.
What an exceedingly sexist view of events you're both putting your names to.
Nothing sexist about criticising the Tory party. Or Liz Truss for having no charisma - which does matter in a leader because persuading and inspiring others is a necessary part of leadership. I have criticised Boris far more harshly.
My mother often used the phrase but it was in the 1950s and it was "all mouth and trousers", then. That is the trappings of authority without the wit to use it. All mouth and no trousers suggests a nudist on the loose. I think it's often mixed up with fur coat and no knickers - used in Merseyside.
Yes, I nearly went with "all fur coat and no knockers" - which is one of my mum's, but decided it wasn't quite right for this.
"Fur coat, no knickers" is surely the correct phrasing?
I once had a girlfriend who wore a fur coat around London - and nothing underneath. For an evening and a dare. So she was literally fur coat and no knickers
She was beautiful and 19, she stole the fur coat from her mum
*sobs existentially in Seville*
I will be so relieved when you move on to the next destination. I keep subliminally reading your posts peppered with the word "Seville", as "Savile".
O/t. but as an Essex man and cricket follower and therefore a traditional enemy of those from south of the river, who is married to a Lancashire lass, I am delighted with the start of the One Day cup final! Kent 0-1
Everything we’ve seen and heard from the Truss government strongly indicates that its driving force is all about making the rich richer in the hope that some of this wealth will trickle down to everyone else. It’s definitely a coherent strategy. Whether it’ll work is another matter entirely. My guess is that we’ll just end up a lot more like the US - undoubtedly the best country in the world in which to be seriously well-off, but not so great for the rest.
Is the US the best place to be seriously well-off or "just" to become seriously well-off?
Worth reposting the Guardian article on the super-rich and their anxieties when the people turn on them.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I wonder if an unintended consequence of armed police is a tendency to hair trigger(!) paranoia about possible suspects being armed. The shooting of that unarmed rapper guy in London suggests that.
Here's the US cops' idea of a Ford Anglia in panda colours.
Everything we’ve seen and heard from the Truss government strongly indicates that its driving force is all about making the rich richer in the hope that some of this wealth will trickle down to everyone else. It’s definitely a coherent strategy. Whether it’ll work is another matter entirely. My guess is that we’ll just end up a lot more like the US - undoubtedly the best country in the world in which to be seriously well-off, but not so great for the rest.
Is the US the best place to be seriously well-off or "just" to become seriously well-off?
The wealthy in the US get the very best of just about everything the world has to offer in terms of things like healthcare, education, technology, culture, food etc. You get what you pay for - and you pay a hell of a lot.
The problem though is endless anxiety about security etc. Living in a gilded prison is an odd sort of ambition.
NEW: income inequality in US & UK is so wide that while the richest are very well off, the poorest have a worse standard of living than the poorest in countries like Slovenia ft.com/content/ef2654…
Essentially, US & UK are poor societies with some very rich people.
This is very important work and chimes absolutely with my own experience. The UK and US are great countries to be rich in. They are not great countries to be poor in. But perhaps more importantly, they are not great countries to have average incomes in, either. Anyone who has travelled will know that the average person in most EU countries has a far higher standard of living than the average person here. And our new government thinks the answer to this is more of the same voodoo medicine that got us here. Madness.
It's interesting seeing the responses. Even here, there's been some messenger-shooting, or attempts to unpick details.
Which is odd, because it does chime with people's experience of visiting not-Britain. It also matches the sense that 2016-9 was driven by the feeling that Britain wasn't delivering a good life for lots of its citizens. (Right target, possibly wrong culprit fingered.)
Even the Truss-Kwarteng prescription- City reptiles may not do much for the UK as a whole, but we need their taxes- speaks of a certain weakness.
So before starting on solutions, how do we collectively accept there is a problem without Talking Britain Down?
An investigator speaks: The very first thing you have to do, if you genuinely want to resolve a problem, is describe it accurately.
Not pretend it doesn't exist.
Or that it's not as bad as you think.
Or that it will go away if you do nothing.
Or that describing it accurately is talking Britain / organization down.
Avoidance techniques / not facing up to harsh reality / focusing on anything but the problem / consoling yourself with the things you do well are very very common human reactions but they are disastrous when you have real problems. Which is why you need ruthless hard-edged people unafraid to describe problems accurately and unflinchingly and speak truth to power.
It's the old joke about how many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb.
(All together now: One, but only if the lightbulb really wants to change.)
Mostly, we only face up to unpleasant realities when they become so awful as to be unavoidable. At the scale of countries, that is usually a military defeat or an economic disaster. And I'd rather not live through one of those, thanks. In the meantime, we bumble on in genteel decline.
(And the talk of Tesla is another manifestation of weakness that we don't want to talk about. Countries that are sucessful and confident in what they are doing don't need to offer businesses pretty much anything they want to set up shop. Success gives you the power to set the rules.)
I think we need to get a little perspective on the Queue.
Let's say 100 people file past every minute. That is 6000 per hour. That is 144,000 per day That is 860,000 over six days
860,000 is approximately 1.3% of the UK population or 1 in 78 people. Still a lot and noteworthy given the queuing time but a fairly small minority of the population.
860,000 people…. PREPARED TO QUEUE FOR 14 HOURS IN THE COLD AND DARK… so they get 5 seconds to stare at a flag over a box with a dead woman inside
I’d say that’s fairly astounding
Thats nothing. Tens of thousands go to watch the likes of Sunderland and Sheffield Wednesday for decades on end, and pay a fortune for it, all in the glimmer of hope, that one day, if they are very, very lucky, they might just get to be Norwich.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I wonder if an unintended consequence of armed police is a tendency to hair trigger(!) paranoia about possible suspects being armed. The shooting of that unarmed rapper guy in London suggests that.
Here's the US cops' idea of a Ford Anglia in panda colours.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
My favourite is the tired lady cop who on returning home finds a black accountant (I think) cooking in her kitchen. She opens fire, blows the mother...... away before realising she is in fact in his flat. Still no harm done.
Where do they find these people?
Are you talking about this case? Convicted of murder and sentenced to ten years.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I wonder if an unintended consequence of armed police is a tendency to hair trigger(!) paranoia about possible suspects being armed. The shooting of that unarmed rapper guy in London suggests that.
It’s the classic “if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail” situation.
If the police feel they have all this overwhelming firepower and invulnerability then I imagine often they don’t think “is there maybe a better way to deal with this situation”.
If you know there are four police cars free to help you then you react differently and maybe smarter in getting the “criminal’s” car somewhere safe but blocked then stand off at a safe distance and try and resolve the situation.
When you have 67 cars and shed loads of armed officers on their way then you inevitably get gung-ho and pile in. Add to that the extra adrenaline from the massed group it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
So have any PBers been to see the Queen or is it all mouth and no trousers on here?
Eabhal (in Edinburgh) and Casino_Royale (London) have both paid their respects in person, while Garethofthevale is currently in The Queue.
There may be others I have missed.
@Casino_Royale wrote a very moving description of his visit on the previous thread. Worth seeking out and reading.
Yes that long comment by @Casino_Royale was a really good explanation of why an intelligent royalist/patriot like him might want to do this seemingly bizarre thing. The queue itself was half the point. A penitential pilgrimage. And a chance to meet others with similar feelings
And then he saw her majesty at rest and he got some closure on his angry grief
Because some people really are grieving. Quite unexpected people too
And that grief encompasses so much. Those that are grieving directly for the loss of the Queen Those of us grieving by proxy for the recently deceased, many of those during lockdown when grief itself was assaulted (this now is the communal grief stolen from us) Those that have taken stock at this momemt of national change and grieve for where we are and where we are headed Those grieving for times past that we shall not see again Those caught up in the tide of emotion and swept along by it
I think we need to get a little perspective on the Queue.
Let's say 100 people file past every minute. That is 6000 per hour. That is 144,000 per day That is 860,000 over six days
860,000 is approximately 1.3% of the UK population or 1 in 78 people. Still a lot and noteworthy given the queuing time but a fairly small minority of the population.
How many other single-location events will have so many visitors in only four and a half days, where everyone knows that they will queue on average ten hours or so?
Trying to minimise this exceptionally unusual event is a form of denial.
Not denying it at all. It's clearly remarkable but we should be a little careful. Ultimately it is only a tiny minority of the UK population who are doing this. I'm sure many more would, heck maybe even I would, if the circumstances were somehow easier. As it is, better to leave it to those who really want to be there.
I think we need to get a little perspective on the Queue.
Let's say 100 people file past every minute. That is 6000 per hour. That is 144,000 per day That is 860,000 over six days
860,000 is approximately 1.3% of the UK population or 1 in 78 people. Still a lot and noteworthy given the queuing time but a fairly small minority of the population.
How many other single-location events will have so many visitors in only four and a half days, where everyone knows that they will queue on average ten hours or so?
Trying to minimise this exceptionally unusual event is a form of denial.
It's big - but I still don't care
I'm not saying that you have to care, I was saying that another poster is fooling themselves if they think the number of people queueing isn't significant about how a large proportion of the population does care.
What is this peculiar graffiti on the walls of Seville Cathedral? It seems important
Hard to read in your photo, but I read it as [re]colitur memoria passionis eius, and a quick google fixes it as from O sacrum convivium. I suspect the rest is on the other walls.
O sacrum convivium! in quo Christus sumitur: recolitur memoria passionis eius: mens impletur gratia: et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur. Alleluia.
Translation of original Latin
O sacred banquet! in which Christ is received, the memory of his Passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory to us is given. Alleluia.
My mother often used the phrase but it was in the 1950s and it was "all mouth and trousers", then. That is the trappings of authority without the wit to use it. All mouth and no trousers suggests a nudist on the loose. I think it's often mixed up with fur coat and no knickers - used in Merseyside.
Yes, I nearly went with "all fur coat and no knockers" - which is one of my mum's, but decided it wasn't quite right for this.
"Fur coat, no knickers" is surely the correct phrasing?
I once had a girlfriend who wore a fur coat around London - and nothing underneath. For an evening and a dare. So she was literally fur coat and no knickers
She was beautiful and 19, she stole the fur coat from her mum
*sobs existentially in Seville*
I will be so relieved when you move on to the next destination. I keep subliminally reading your posts peppered with the word "Seville", as "Savile".
Soon it will be a good time for people on the West side of London to take a visit to Kew Gardens a few times. I find it a bit underwhelming during the summer except for the glasshouse, but because the trees are of such diverse types and densely planted, the panoply of colour changes between September and November can be quite stunning. A perfect place to think and reflect about things in an autumnal way.
A spectacular autumn day in Leics, kids football teams on in the park, and a slight nip in the sunshine. A great day for gardening, interspersed with ample tea breaks. Loads of apples and pears to harvest. Who needs foreign parts when it is so glorious at home?
The problem the monarchy have is a bit like the ref in football - your best days are the ones where you're mostly in the background not really getting noticed just letting the game flow. And as soon as you start getting fussy and officious everyone boos you.
Agree. Quite happy for the monarchy to carry on doing its thing as it has for all my lifetime, but the wall to wall coverage of the last few days makes me wonder if the rest of the world nods and smiles to itself going, yep, North Korea.
We laugh at other countries for their cult of personality and yet eagerly lap it up here. The monarchy works best when it works quietly in the background - part of the nation's soft power. Bringing it front and centre in this way just makes us look like a third world dictatorship.
True story:
I just got stopped on my way into my v pleasant Seville apartment by the woman who manages it. I thought I’d done something wrong, let burglars in through the roof terrace or something, but no, she stopped me because she wanted to earnestly express her condolences on the death of Ze Queen, Your Queen, i am Zo Zorry
She really meant it. She looked personally sad. Much sadder than me
Can you imagine doing that to any foreigner on the death of any foreign personage? Americans for JFK perhaps, but after that, nope
That is soft power. Foreigners do not look at Britain and see North Korea, FFS, they see an ancient foreign institution which has somehow emotionally engaged them. We mess with this magical mixture, which projects a fine British brand of stability and pageantry, at our peril
I personally find it absolutely barking mad. I enjoyed the jubilee, I felt a little bit sad when the Queen passed - the way one might feel about a distant but elderly relative. But the mawkishness of the last week or so has not been for me.
What was it Lennon said? You think you're so clever and classless and free...
It’s like religion. Most people are hard-wired to believe and are happier believing. For a similar reason most people are naturally royalist, and this is why great republics often acquire the trappings - the pomp and circumstance - of monarchies even when they started out aiming to avoid this. France and America are the obvious examples. People WANT the mystique and ritual
However a percentage of people just don’t have the mental circuitry for religious belief, and maybe a similar number lack the wiring for royalism. And there is clearly a large overlap between the two
These people just need to accept that they are usually - but not always - in a minority
Look at the popularity of Game of Thrones. Game of Figurehead Presidents? - not so exciting
Religion doesn't require rituals, indeed the revolutionary force of Protestantism and of Islam was in part a reaction to the idolatry of liturgical religion with its costumes, idols and statues. As indeed was the motivating force or political revolutionaries. It is no coincidence that revolutionaries so often start with shooting priests.
Ritual is how rich people bend religion to serve the hierarchy.
All religion has rituals. All religion involves earthly hierarchy. Protestantism and Islam have never been exceptions to those two rules.
Are you confusing belief in God with religion?
Royalism is always religious. Most kings and pharoahs and emperors have claimed to reign by divine right or themselves to be divine.
Some arrangements are religious even if they declare themselves not to be (as Karl Marx knew well), but I wonder how many kings there have been in the history of the world who have proclaimed themselves to be either non-religious or atheist. Can anybody think of a single one?
IMO that's too narrow. All humans and human communities have rituals, whether they say they do or not. Just part of the punctuation of life.
Gay pride is a ritual. Organised humanists have a retual to deny being a religious viewpoint, when it fulfils the same role. Sports occasions are full of ritual. Ritual happens when a cat or a dog dies, or a child gets exam results.
In response to @Dynamo , the hereditary rulers of North Korea have proclaimed themselves atheist in an atheist state. There is no shortage of others. Pretty much all dictatorships have an hereditary aspect in that wealth looted from the country is directed to family members and children. Putin's certainly does.
I agree that all humans and human communities have rituals. I was contesting Foxy's assertion that religion does not require rituals. It does.
Inheritance of wealth, though, does not imply the inheritance of high positions in a state hierarchy, whether of the same positions or of positions of the same rank. That did not occur in Stalin's USSR and it does not occur in Putin's Russia either.
North Korea (where the DPRK has already lasted longer than the USSR) is a very different case. The regime is of course a hereditary dictatorship. It also makes deep references to ancient Korea and it makes use of traditional religious practices and ideology (as also does the ROK in South Korea) but I shall not discuss that here. It should not be considered in the same category as so-called "Marxist" regimes in the USSR, China, etc.
Lenin may have been buried in a step pyramid, but the ruler of North Korea is practically a god-king. That's on a different level. Stalin and Mao were dictators with personality cults, but they did not pass office to their sons and they were a long way from being god-kings. As Marx pointed out in the text I referred to there is a sense in which the atheist state is the most perfect religious state, so even if the three rulers so far of the DPRK had proclaimed themselves atheists that would by no means undermine my contention regarding the regime's religious character, but nevertheless I would still be interested if you could provide a source for your notion that they have declared that they are atheists in an atheist state. Where specifically did they do that? Formal religion is certainly not banned in North Korea. For the record, Kim il-Sung said he had a Presbyterian upbringing and some have argued that Juche is marked by that. There is no reference to atheism in the 10 Principles. In the most recent version of the 10P the solar reference is out in the open.
My challenge was to name an atheist king. What I am asking for is someone who has been recognised as a king, or under some other traditional hereditary title (sultan, grand prince, etc.), and who has declared in public that they are an atheist, that nothing is divine, that the material world is all we've got. I realise this is theoretically possible, but has it ever occurred?
What is this peculiar graffiti on the walls of Seville Cathedral? It seems important
Hard to read in your photo, but I read it as [re]colitur memoria passionis eius, and a quick google fixes it as from O sacrum convivium. I suspect the rest is on the other walls.
O sacrum convivium! in quo Christus sumitur: recolitur memoria passionis eius: mens impletur gratia: et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur. Alleluia.
Translation of original Latin
O sacred banquet! in which Christ is received, the memory of his Passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory to us is given. Alleluia.
Impressive
Apparently these scrawls are called “victories” - Boastful remarks. I feel an uncanny and inexplicable association with them
What is this peculiar graffiti on the walls of Seville Cathedral? It seems important
Hard to read in your photo, but I read it as [re]colitur memoria passionis eius, and a quick google fixes it as from O sacrum convivium. I suspect the rest is on the other walls.
O sacrum convivium! in quo Christus sumitur: recolitur memoria passionis eius: mens impletur gratia: et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur. Alleluia.
Translation of original Latin
O sacred banquet! in which Christ is received, the memory of his Passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory to us is given. Alleluia.
Impressive
Apparently these scrawls are called “victories” - Boastful remarks. I feel an uncanny and inexplicable association with them
I was thinking of the higher inscription on the frieze, had stopped there and not noticed the lower ones.
Part of the issue with the monarchy these days is the appalling coverage of it.
We either get ludicrous fawning (harmless enough I guess) or endless spiteful and probably inaccurate tittle tattle (see pretty much any edition of the Daily Mail).
What we do not get enough of is the stuff that they do well eg it was only recently that I learnt that Camilla has been helping to raise money for packages of necessities for women at domestic violence shelters when they leave. Sophie, Edward's wife, has been working with charities in Africa helping women and girls get access to safe loos and sanitary products, including torches, so that when they go to the loo at night they can protect themselves. Small things maybe but of great help to the women concerned. Anne too came up to a Barrow charity working with the poor to help raise their profile and this was appreciated by those at the charity.
Now maybe government should do this stuff and we shouldn't need charity. But we are not in a perfect world and the desire to help will always be there. If famous people use their fame/status to help others (just as Marcus Rashford did) I think that is to be applauded. I wish the press covered more of this.
Whether we have a monarchy or not is a separate issue. But while they are there it would be better if we heard a bit more about this side of what they do rather than the soap opera bit.
I think we need to get a little perspective on the Queue.
Let's say 100 people file past every minute. That is 6000 per hour. That is 144,000 per day That is 860,000 over six days
860,000 is approximately 1.3% of the UK population or 1 in 78 people. Still a lot and noteworthy given the queuing time but a fairly small minority of the population.
How many other single-location events will have so many visitors in only four and a half days, where everyone knows that they will queue on average ten hours or so?
Trying to minimise this exceptionally unusual event is a form of denial.
It's big - but I still don't care
I'm not saying that you have to care, I was saying that another poster is fooling themselves if they think the number of people queueing isn't significant about how a large proportion of the population does care.
This is a bit like my mate who had an interesting late night encounter on a stag do and spent the rest of the next day telling us he had "no regrets".
Even more royal coverage, for those fed up ! This is in fact quite a good and interesting twentieth-century recap and retrospective, with the Queen happening to be at its centre.
The bottom picture is also accidentally funny, with the fact that Penelope Keith is curtseying reverentially forward and Felicity Kendall standing stock still making it look as if the Queen has actually entered the episode of The Good Life they're filming.
Of all the things to worry about in Britain right now, the monarchy is not in my top 100.
I'm more concerned with the fact that about 78,000 largely male elderly voters got to choose an uncharismatic dishcloth and impose her as PM, frankly.
You are surprised that those elderly men voted for a blonde woman who wears well-fitted dresses, (allegedly) kinky jewellery, and who promised them the world on a plate and all for free?
I thought you understood the world better than that.
[Note to PB: The Oxford comma above was used as an act of rebellion]
I am not surprised. Annoyed. As I was when they did it with Boris and May. The Tory party is behaving as if Britain is their private rotten borough.
What an exceedingly sexist view of events you're both putting your names to.
Being a woman does not insulate her from criticism of her policies. If I had said "What can you expect from a woman politician?" then you would have a point, but that is not what I am saying. As a matter of fact, if you read what was posted above you will see my criticism was more aimed at the Conservative selectorate.
Simon Jenkins and Paul Johnson have both claimed that the great mediaeval European cathedrals are the greatest works of art ever accomplished by mankind. They might be right
I think we need to get a little perspective on the Queue.
Let's say 100 people file past every minute. That is 6000 per hour. That is 144,000 per day That is 860,000 over six days
860,000 is approximately 1.3% of the UK population or 1 in 78 people. Still a lot and noteworthy given the queuing time but a fairly small minority of the population.
I suspect a lot that would like to go won’t because it’s not practical . The true number who would like to pay their respects is probably much more than that figure .
It shouldn’t be a big thing for a male footballer to come out as gay… but it’s still so rare, that it is. Love, strength and Pride to Zander Murray, the first openly gay footballer in the Scottish leagues since Justin Fashanu, who is making it easier for those who will follow.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I grew up thinking Hollywood car chases were so unbelievable because of the number of police cars involved (not to mention the idiocy of the police drivers). Would we even have 67 armed cars in the whole of London? Probably this weekend, but normally?
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I wonder if an unintended consequence of armed police is a tendency to hair trigger(!) paranoia about possible suspects being armed. The shooting of that unarmed rapper guy in London suggests that.
It’s the classic “if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail” situation.
If the police feel they have all this overwhelming firepower and invulnerability then I imagine often they don’t think “is there maybe a better way to deal with this situation”.
If you know there are four police cars free to help you then you react differently and maybe smarter in getting the “criminal’s” car somewhere safe but blocked then stand off at a safe distance and try and resolve the situation.
When you have 67 cars and shed loads of armed officers on their way then you inevitably get gung-ho and pile in. Add to that the extra adrenaline from the massed group it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Also remember that in the US, police have "Qualified Immunity" which means that they are almost impossible to sue for anything they do in the course of their duty.
There was a recent case where a suspect ran into a random property to elude the cops and they destroyed the house. The householder had no legal redress because of Qualified Immunity.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I wonder if an unintended consequence of armed police is a tendency to hair trigger(!) paranoia about possible suspects being armed. The shooting of that unarmed rapper guy in London suggests that.
It’s the classic “if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail” situation.
If the police feel they have all this overwhelming firepower and invulnerability then I imagine often they don’t think “is there maybe a better way to deal with this situation”.
If you know there are four police cars free to help you then you react differently and maybe smarter in getting the “criminal’s” car somewhere safe but blocked then stand off at a safe distance and try and resolve the situation.
When you have 67 cars and shed loads of armed officers on their way then you inevitably get gung-ho and pile in. Add to that the extra adrenaline from the massed group it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Also remember that in the US, police have "Qualified Immunity" which means that they are almost impossible to sue for anything they do in the course of their duty.
There was a recent case where a suspect ran into a random property to elude the cops and they destroyed the house. The householder had no legal redress because of Qualified Immunity.
De facto so do ours. Armed police are never prosecuted because all the others threaten to resign in protest, so prosecution is always dropped as not in the public interest
Simon Jenkins and Paul Johnson have both claimed that the great mediaeval European cathedrals are the greatest works of art ever accomplished by mankind. They might be right
The destruction of English and Welsh religious art by first the Reformation and secondly by the Puritans must rank as some of the greatest vandalisms of human history.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
Yeah but the Civil War will happen because the faux outraged minority are vexing the majority.
I heard a woman being interviewed a few years ago who explained how after watching Fox News her father became very angry. She disabled Fox News and her father no longer became angry.
People like Steve Bannon make the bullets for an angry and frustrated testosterone filled teenage virgin to shoot up a Congregationalist Chapel, or alternatively make him (and it is mainly him) so angry he feels the urge to drive his F100 truck through a crowd of black revellers.
Appalling but it is a mistake to think the problem only exists on the right. Defund the police is madness.
Defund the police may be madness, but so is keeping funding them with military levels of guns and weapons, which is a bigger problem in the US than unfunded police departments. Don't hear quite so much criticism of that type of madness.
I used to instinctively hate the calls to “defund the police” but I think I get that there is an element of sense in it. Defunding and making them consider their priorities and responses in the US might lead to less drastic encounters between the police and the public.
The clincher for me was watching a Netflix doc called 137 shots. The long and short of it is that a car with two black people in it drives quickly past a policeman in Cleveland one night and it backfires.
The policeman radios that he’s been shot at in a drive-by. The police catch up to the car and surround it and shoot 137 (minimum) times from feet away.
The reasons it made me consider more carefully defunding the US police were that having 15 police surrounding a car shooting (and they ended up shooting at each other thinking it was coming from the car) is overkill (pun unintended). If they had fewer officers then a stand off might have resulted in a less frenzied attack on the car. One of the officers at the end was standing on the car bonnet and fired about twenty times through the windshield.
The craziest thing was the footage of 67 police cars lit up racing after the car. 67! If you have 67 cars free to chase one car then something is wrong. If they had fewer resources then they would have to be more careful about how they approach situations and rather than shock and awe so the police feel invulnerable and thus don’t think cleverly they would have to act smarter and hopefully with less crazy consequences.
Spoiler alert below:
The victims in the car were unarmed. Nobody went to jail. One officer lost his job years later.
Nuts.
I grew up thinking Hollywood car chases were so unbelievable because of the number of police cars involved (not to mention the idiocy of the police drivers). Would we even have 67 armed cars in the whole of London? Probably this weekend, but normally?
The footage is unbelievable. You would think it was some sort of comedy like the cannonball run - tens of police cars packed together with lights flashing barrelling down the roads and in car footage of other police cars overtaking police cars in the madness to get there.
I think we need to get a little perspective on the Queue.
Let's say 100 people file past every minute. That is 6000 per hour. That is 144,000 per day That is 860,000 over six days
860,000 is approximately 1.3% of the UK population or 1 in 78 people. Still a lot and noteworthy given the queuing time but a fairly small minority of the population.
How many other single-location events will have so many visitors in only four and a half days, where everyone knows that they will queue on average ten hours or so?
Trying to minimise this exceptionally unusual event is a form of denial.
It's big - but I still don't care
Mosr people dont care. When im out and about noone talks about it or mentions it to me. A very small proportion of the population are interested in this mainly white middle aged and old ladies
Nah, a certain level of VIPness is accepted at these things. To take the most obvious example, King Charles won't queue for 16 hours ro see his mum lie in state. Philip Schofield ? Fuck off.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
The alt-right seem to be working themselves into a frenzy, but most "left-leaning" American I know are looking on and going "WTF???". It seems very one-sided with rifles and bibles being waved around
There’s only one side seriously threatening civil war if they don’t get their way here.
Leon’s perseverating over lefty Twitter loudmouths notwithstanding.
So Biden calling Republican voters “fascists” and “white supremacists” and thereby suggesting they can be democratically ignored was…. a peace offering? Or it didn’t happen?
Confused now
That’s the liberal establishment finally waking up to the very real threat posed by these people. And he didn’t call out Republican voters en masse - just the MAGA crowd who have committed themselves to Trump uber alles.
They tried to overthrow the democratically elected government of the USA. They are still attempting to infliltrate the machinery of government so they can do it again, only more effectively, at the next presidential election.
I know the word gets thrown around a lot, but this sub group really have committed themselves to fascism. What else could you call it?
The rest of the US establishment, both Democrats & Republicans, waking up to this fact and giving this crowd the justice they so fully deserve is something to be celebrated frankly.
Mr. Pete, was it Mr. Leon or Mr. Royale who constructed the kneeling police, or the desire of the former Met Commissioner to explicitly have an anti-white hiring practice?
The culture was cooked up and prosecuted by the left, who are aghast that the right have the temerity to actually disagree with it.
Oh come off it Morris, and when we produce our very own Anders Brevik, we will regret the fuss we made over nothing.
If and when we produve our own Anders Brevik it will be precisley because of what Morris describes.
Nonsense, it is alt- right shock jocks like @Leon winding the coiled spring and stirring the pot.
So f*****' what if a footballer takes the knee?
The culture wars are pushing America close to actual civil war. But, sure, they don’t exist and they are all invented by the “alt right”
The alt-right seem to be working themselves into a frenzy, but most "left-leaning" American I know are looking on and going "WTF???". It seems very one-sided with rifles and bibles being waved around
There’s only one side seriously threatening civil war if they don’t get their way here.
Leon’s perseverating over lefty Twitter loudmouths notwithstanding.
So Biden calling Republican voters “fascists” and “white supremacists” and thereby suggesting they can be democratically ignored was…. a peace offering? Or it didn’t happen?
Confused now
Calling MAGA semi- fascist, as he did, is not quite what you say. And not inaccurate either.
Nah, a certain level of VIPness is accepted at these things. To take the most obvious example, King Charles won't queue for 16 hours ro see his mum lie in state. Philip Schofield ? Fuck off.
I think politicians - given two have been murdered in recent memory do get a pass on “queue jumping”. As to celebs, they can either burnish their reputation, and queue (Beckham reportedly turned down an invitation to queue jump, or Susannah Reid with her mum), or trash it as Schofield has done.
Nah, a certain level of VIPness is accepted at these things. To take the most obvious example, King Charles won't queue for 16 hours ro see his mum lie in state. Philip Schofield ? Fuck off.
I think politicians - given two have been murdered in recent memory do get a pass on “queue jumping”. As to celebs, they can either burnish their reputation, and queue (Beckham reportedly turned down an invitation to queue jump, or Susannah Reid with her mum), or trash it as Schofield has done.
People won't know MPs from Adam in the queue, but perhaps they're "expected" to attend so I'm prepared to give them a pass - certainly any members of the government should be able to attend. That doesn't extend to general celebs
One of the things that has really hit home for me the last week, is just how much the UK is a two-tier system - plebs and patricians. It is that binary. A lot of ink has been spilled since the financial crisis about the 1%, the vanishing middle class and so on, but there is altogether something different at work in Britain.
I think societies work best when there is a degree of social mobility for all. The "football pyramid" model of society if you like. But what we actually have is a super league to which the likes of 99% of us will never be invited.
The ossification of our society and class system is exactly what makes the UK such a popular place for the elites of other countries to launder their ill gotten gains. They know it's safe from revolution and regime change here. And the last week has been a fantastic ad for that...
Congratulations to Charles III who today equals the reign of Jane Grey Now on to the hotly disputed 16 days of Aelfweard, son of Edward the Elder
Always felt very sorry for poor Lady Jane Grey! She really didn't deserve the treatment Bloody Mary gave her. Her father-in-law of course was a different matter!
Another point on Tesla and why the UK is a natural fit and nowhere in the EU will now work. The EU approved subsidy programme requires IP transfer/sharing with the EU, lots of companies including Tesla will never do that. Outside of the EU we can build a subsidy programme that doesn't require it and attract those high value jobs and exports we're currently lacking and put the companies in areas where the likes of Slovenia are competing in living standards.
Kwasi must do whatever it takes, this is up to a million very well paid jobs at stake over the next decade. It's the difference between the UK being a huge net exporter of EVs and being a huge net importer.
Whether Tesla, or a Korean manufacturer - though the latter are building multiple battery plants in Europe already. Energy costs as well as (US) federal subsidies seem to be part of the reason for Tesla looking at producing its batteries for Europe in the US.
Brexit undoubtedly has hampered severely the chances of the UK getting a share of the major manufacturing investments decided on over the last five years. There isn’t much time left to recover some of that.
I agree with you on the urgency of this. For me it’s one of the bigger consequences of Brexit.
The point now is that the EU has got a sub optimal subsidy programme so we can, outside of the EU, act separately and come up with a better one. A plan on energy prices would also be very useful right now.
I quite agree with you on that. I'm not one of those who thinks it would be a good thing if we make Brexit worse than it is.
One of the things that has really hit home for me the last week, is just how much the UK is a two-tier system - plebs and patricians. It is that binary. A lot of ink has been spilled since the financial crisis about the 1%, the vanishing middle class and so on, but there is altogether something different at work in Britain.
I think societies work best when there is a degree of social mobility for all. The "football pyramid" model of society if you like. But what we actually have is a super league to which the likes of 99% of us will never be invited.
The ossification of our society and class system is exactly what makes the UK such a popular place for the elites of other countries to launder their ill gotten gains. They know it's safe from revolution and regime change here. And the last week has been a fantastic ad for that...
Yes and many of the sons and daughters of aristocrats end up working in the City and enrich themselves further....the UK under a patina of modernity is still a very cap doffing place....thankfully as the country becomes multi ethnic things will change and this is the hope fir the future
Why is this one of the most important documents in human history?
El nixo de Googlo! Nada googlio! Niente los googlios!
Is it the papal carve up of the new World? Or Columbus's instructions?
Ooh. I think I have to give you this. Well done
Yes. It’s the first - the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the entire new world between Portugal and Spain and thus explaining why Latin America and much of North America is how it is today
Incidentally, why does the hot water dispenser in the hotel breakfast have "CAUTION: HOT WATER" on it. It's an urn for hot water. Of course it has hot water inside it. Why do we need to be warned about something we are expecting?
Since McDonalds got sued for millions after someone burned themselves with coffee, and successfully argued that no-one told them it was hot.
I forgot about that. Surely it's possible to have a courts system to tell malicious and stupid claimants to go forth and multiply so that the rest of us can get on with our lives?
Such mechanism exists for a court to label someone a vexatious litigant, which limits their access to the system in order to stop wasting their time. Doesn’t happen very often though, the closest in recent years has been Jolyon, who’s probably one more frivolous claim away from being barred from the court.
Compared to Trump, he's a model of restraint in his dealing with the courts.
More i think about it i understand what the Blair govt was trying to do. The best way to get rid of the old cap doffing Britain is to turn it into a highly multi ethnic society. They executed the plan well and we will see the benefits in the next 20 to 30 years
One of the things that has really hit home for me the last week, is just how much the UK is a two-tier system - plebs and patricians. It is that binary. A lot of ink has been spilled since the financial crisis about the 1%, the vanishing middle class and so on, but there is altogether something different at work in Britain.
I think societies work best when there is a degree of social mobility for all. The "football pyramid" model of society if you like. But what we actually have is a super league to which the likes of 99% of us will never be invited.
The ossification of our society and class system is exactly what makes the UK such a popular place for the elites of other countries to launder their ill gotten gains. They know it's safe from revolution and regime change here. And the last week has been a fantastic ad for that...
Yes and many of the sons and daughters of aristocrats end up working in the City and enrich themselves further....the UK under a patina of modernity is still a very cap doffing place....thankfully as the country becomes multi ethnic things will change and this is the hope fir the future
A bunch more of the real aristo kids do nothing or art or drugs, like kids from all parts of society, just with more money to burn. If you wanted diversity you'd get more in the City than in the aristo class or Whitehall or dare I say in the BBC where diversity is skin deep.
Looking at the FT's charts in detail, it seems to be that the median household has actually done quite well over the past 20 years, seeing their income go from about $30,000 to $44,000, in real terms. Even the bottom 10% haven't done that badly, and the top 10% have done very well. Oddly, the top 3% have barely seen any improvement over that period.
I'm not sure why the comparison to Slovenia is meant to be damning. Slovenia is a rich country, and like most of Eastern Europe, its standard of living was artificially depressed by first Nazism, and then decades of communism. Pre War, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic countries had living standards similar to the UK.
Here are three of the welfare programs some of you, apparently, think the United States doesn't have:
Medicare: "It primarily provides health insurance for Americans aged 65 and older, but also for some younger people with disability status as determined by the SSA, including people with end stage renal disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease).
In 2018, according to the 2019 Medicare Trustees Report, Medicare provided health insurance for over 59.9 million individuals—more than 52 million people aged 65 and older and about 8 million younger people.[1] According to annual Medicare Trustees reports and research by the government's MedPAC group, Medicare covers about half of healthcare expenses of those enrolled. Enrollees almost always cover most of the remaining costs by taking additional private insurance and/or by joining a public Part C or Part D Medicare health plan.[2] In 2020, US federal government spending on Medicare was $776.2 billion." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
Medicaid: "Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with low income in the United States, providing free health insurance to 74 million low-income and disabled people (23% of Americans) as of 2017,[3][4][5] as well as paying for half of all U.S. births in 2019.[6] It is a means-tested program that is jointly funded by the state and federal governments and managed by the states,[7] with each state currently having broad leeway to determine who is eligible for its implementation of the program. As of 2017, the total annual cost of Medicaid was just over $600 billion, of which the federal government contributed $375 billion and states an additional $230 billion." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
SNAP: In the United States, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),[1] formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, is a federal program that provides food-purchasing assistance for low- and no-income people. It is a federal aid program, administered by the United States Department of Agriculture under the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), though benefits are distributed by specific departments of U.S. states (e.g. Division of Social Services, Department of Health and Human Services, etc.).
Interesting spot on the Today program about the queue. An academic and four research assistants have been trying to address how 'representative' it is of the country, and have spent a day or so counting and interviewing samples of those in line. Politically it's a little odd - well over 50% Conservative voters, but also majority Remainer. And a large majority saying they are there as an expression of gratitude, rather than grief.
(Somewhere in the first half an hour if you're interested.)
Ok after that visit to, first, Seville Cathedral and then the Archive of the Indies I am OFFICIALLY raising the Spanish from 9 to 8 in Leon’s Official List of Most Important Human Race, neatly leap frogging the Japanese
If lunch is really good they might break into the top 7. Watch out The Mongols
Interesting spot on the Today program about the queue. An academic and four research assistants have been trying to address how 'representative' it is of the country, and have spent a day or so counting and interviewing samples of those in line. Politically it's a little odd - well over 50% Conservative voters, but also majority Remainer. And a large majority saying they are there as an expression of gratitude, rather than grief.
(Somewhere in the first half an hour if you're interested.)
I don't find it at all surprising that people who value the Queens work ethic and the institutions that support that and are willing to, and can afford to, stand for a long time to say thanks include a much higher than average proportion of traditional Conservative Remainers.
Interesting spot on the Today program about the queue. An academic and four research assistants have been trying to address how 'representative' it is of the country, and have spent a day or so counting and interviewing samples of those in line. Politically it's a little odd - well over 50% Conservative voters, but also majority Remainer. And a large majority saying they are there as an expression of gratitude, rather than grief.
(Somewhere in the first half an hour if you're interested.)
I don't find it at all surprising that people who value the Queens work ethic and the institutions that support that and are willing to, and can afford to, stand for a long time to say thanks include a much higher than average proportion of traditional Conservative Remainers.
Don't understand this work ethic stuff. She had a job. She did it.
Btw, for anyone near Leeds, the current production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the West Yorkshire Playhouse is very good.
Probably nearly four decades since I last saw a stage production. Had I known the leads are all straight out of drama school, I might not have gone, but glad I did. Those bothered by woke might be put off by it's having an all black cast. Don't be.
One of the things that has really hit home for me the last week, is just how much the UK is a two-tier system - plebs and patricians. It is that binary. A lot of ink has been spilled since the financial crisis about the 1%, the vanishing middle class and so on, but there is altogether something different at work in Britain.
I think societies work best when there is a degree of social mobility for all. The "football pyramid" model of society if you like. But what we actually have is a super league to which the likes of 99% of us will never be invited.
The ossification of our society and class system is exactly what makes the UK such a popular place for the elites of other countries to launder their ill gotten gains. They know it's safe from revolution and regime change here. And the last week has been a fantastic ad for that...
Yes and many of the sons and daughters of aristocrats end up working in the City and enrich themselves further....the UK under a patina of modernity is still a very cap doffing place....thankfully as the country becomes multi ethnic things will change and this is the hope fir the future
A bunch more of the real aristo kids do nothing or art or drugs, like kids from all parts of society, just with more money to burn. If you wanted diversity you'd get more in the City than in the aristo class or Whitehall or dare I say in the BBC where diversity is skin deep.
No-one said it was mainly aristos who work in the City. It isn't. At least when there was still open outcry there were some like Nick Leeson who came from the proletariat. Many in the City work in fairly menial roles too. And the City has always welcomed spivs. It's spiv heaven FFS.
Nor is it especially common among aristos to go into the City.
The contention as I understood it was that some aristos and landed types fall into banks etc. in the City just because of their backgrounds, not because they've got any skill or intelligence. They remain as thick as pigsh*t. Leeson describes how a member of the Baring family itself declared that it "isn't terribly difficult" to make loads of money trading the derivatives markets in Singapore. He'd read the bottom line, but he was unaware at that time that Leeson's apparently huge profits were illusory. What is idiotic is that he genuinely thought it was really easy to make loads of money. Of course it isn't easy. The guy had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, was a respected figure at one of the nobbiest banks in the City, and he had no idea! It is NOT easy to make loads of money trading the markets. It's extremely difficult. Leeson coming from a working class background is of course aware of that.
Interesting spot on the Today program about the queue. An academic and four research assistants have been trying to address how 'representative' it is of the country, and have spent a day or so counting and interviewing samples of those in line. Politically it's a little odd - well over 50% Conservative voters, but also majority Remainer. And a large majority saying they are there as an expression of gratitude, rather than grief.
(Somewhere in the first half an hour if you're interested.)
I don't find it at all surprising that people who value the Queens work ethic and the institutions that support that and are willing to, and can afford to, stand for a long time to say thanks include a much higher than average proportion of traditional Conservative Remainers.
Yes, this seems to be ignored
To do the queue you need to have time, and probably money, and easy access to London
That narrows the pool of possible visitors considerably
Of all the things to worry about in Britain right now, the monarchy is not in my top 100.
I'm more concerned with the fact that about 78,000 largely male elderly voters got to choose an uncharismatic dishcloth and impose her as PM, frankly.
Then there's the justice system, the police, prisons, the education system, the fact that we can't build so much as a garden shed without it costing three trillion quid and taking 38 years, greedy executives at the top, the lack of housing unaffordable by anyone who isn't already a squillionaire, a social care system which is creaking at the seams, ditto the NHS, our gross negligence and worse to children in our care etc.,. And so on. Plenty more could go on the list.
More constitutional tinkering is yet another avoidance technique - to not face up to and take action about the very real problems politicians have talked about for years and done the square root of fuck all about.
Good night.
Those elderly mostly male voters did nothing of the sort. They chose a new leader for their party, nothing more.
At no time did that take away or change the right of our elected MPs to vote down that new leader and either pick another one from the exiting Parliament or call a GE. Nothing about how Truss was chosen changed the basic principle that we elect our MPs and they then choose who will be PM.
Constitutionally, that’s absolutely correct.
Looked at from a point of view of democracy, though, it’s pretty piss poor. As is, of course, FPTP - which it would also be absurd to criticise from a constitutional perspective.
Why is first past the post piss poor? I think there are arguments for and against first past the post, but I don’t think it’s obviously worse than PR systems.
Oh yes it is! FPTP really means the leading candidate (or party) grabs the lot. Conservatives see nothing wrong in this, of course. But everybody else does - or ought to.
This is why I do not understand the position of the Labour Party over the years.
Perhaps because they understand that in many PR systems it is the electorate who lose as the parties carve things up for themselves and ignore the wishes of the electorate all in the name of 'compromise'.
Here are three of the welfare programs some of you, apparently, think the United States doesn't have:
Medicare: "It primarily provides health insurance for Americans aged 65 and older, but also for some younger people with disability status as determined by the SSA, including people with end stage renal disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease).
In 2018, according to the 2019 Medicare Trustees Report, Medicare provided health insurance for over 59.9 million individuals—more than 52 million people aged 65 and older and about 8 million younger people.[1] According to annual Medicare Trustees reports and research by the government's MedPAC group, Medicare covers about half of healthcare expenses of those enrolled. Enrollees almost always cover most of the remaining costs by taking additional private insurance and/or by joining a public Part C or Part D Medicare health plan.[2] In 2020, US federal government spending on Medicare was $776.2 billion." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
Medicaid: "Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with low income in the United States, providing free health insurance to 74 million low-income and disabled people (23% of Americans) as of 2017,[3][4][5] as well as paying for half of all U.S. births in 2019.[6] It is a means-tested program that is jointly funded by the state and federal governments and managed by the states,[7] with each state currently having broad leeway to determine who is eligible for its implementation of the program. As of 2017, the total annual cost of Medicaid was just over $600 billion, of which the federal government contributed $375 billion and states an additional $230 billion." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
SNAP: In the United States, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),[1] formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, is a federal program that provides food-purchasing assistance for low- and no-income people. It is a federal aid program, administered by the United States Department of Agriculture under the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), though benefits are distributed by specific departments of U.S. states (e.g. Division of Social Services, Department of Health and Human Services, etc.).
Looking at the FT's charts in detail, it seems to be that the median household has actually done quite well over the past 20 years, seeing their income go from about $30,000 to $44,000, in real terms. Even the bottom 10% haven't done that badly, and the top 10% have done very well. Oddly, the top 3% have barely seen any improvement over that period.
I'm not sure why the comparison to Slovenia is meant to be damning. Slovenia is a rich country, and like most of Eastern Europe, its standard of living was artificially depressed by first Nazism, and then decades of communism. Pre War, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic countries had living standards similar to the UK.
There were a few methodological problem with it. It omitted welfare state spend like the NHS that doesn't go into household incomes, and it omitted income spent on housing spend even though the typical UK or US household has more space and better dwelling quality than a little flat in Slovenia or even Germany. (Edit: and Burn-Murdoch's claim about equality preferences isn't sound, because mass migration tends to be to the more unequal places like the USA, and indeed causes a lot of the inequality relative to a hermit kingdom like Finland or Japan.)
Of all the things to worry about in Britain right now, the monarchy is not in my top 100.
I'm more concerned with the fact that about 78,000 largely male elderly voters got to choose an uncharismatic dishcloth and impose her as PM, frankly.
Then there's the justice system, the police, prisons, the education system, the fact that we can't build so much as a garden shed without it costing three trillion quid and taking 38 years, greedy executives at the top, the lack of housing unaffordable by anyone who isn't already a squillionaire, a social care system which is creaking at the seams, ditto the NHS, our gross negligence and worse to children in our care etc.,. And so on. Plenty more could go on the list.
More constitutional tinkering is yet another avoidance technique - to not face up to and take action about the very real problems politicians have talked about for years and done the square root of fuck all about.
Good night.
Those elderly mostly male voters did nothing of the sort. They chose a new leader for their party, nothing more.
At no time did that take away or change the right of our elected MPs to vote down that new leader and either pick another one from the exiting Parliament or call a GE. Nothing about how Truss was chosen changed the basic principle that we elect our MPs and they then choose who will be PM.
Constitutionally, that’s absolutely correct.
Looked at from a point of view of democracy, though, it’s pretty piss poor. As is, of course, FPTP - which it would also be absurd to criticise from a constitutional perspective.
Why is first past the post piss poor? I think there are arguments for and against first past the post, but I don’t think it’s obviously worse than PR systems.
Oh yes it is! FPTP really means the leading candidate (or party) grabs the lot. Conservatives see nothing wrong in this, of course. But everybody else does - or ought to.
This is why I do not understand the position of the Labour Party over the years.
Perhaps because they understand that in many PR systems it is the electorate who lose as the parties carve things up for themselves and ignore the wishes of the electorate all in the name of 'compromise'.
Comments
I’d say that’s fairly astounding
Blooming nightmare if you want to get anything done, mind you.
I am annoyed that people I know are getting wound up about the fact I am not very interested
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Timothy_Russell_and_Malissa_Williams
Trying to minimise this exceptionally unusual event is a form of denial.
Where do they find these people?
And then he saw her majesty at rest and he got some closure on his angry grief
Because some people really are grieving. Quite unexpected people too
Running shoes are on, see ya!
But from the photo what it reminds me of - and quite strongly too - is the infamous performance of Hit My Baby One More Time by the sadly recently departed Daris Danesh on ITV's 'Popstars' 2015.
This one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaXGUhCi29g
https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/2022/09/10/mourners-visit-dubais-qe2-to-sign-book-of-condolences-after-queen-elizabeth-iis-death/
Kent 0-1
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
https://twitter.com/Mariana_Betsa/status/1571016063692996610
https://tankandafvnews.com/2015/11/28/police-m113-gallery/
Now replaced by assorted wheeled equivalents as used in Iraq and the 'Stan.
(All together now: One, but only if the lightbulb really wants to change.)
Mostly, we only face up to unpleasant realities when they become so awful as to be unavoidable. At the scale of countries, that is usually a military defeat or an economic disaster. And I'd rather not live through one of those, thanks. In the meantime, we bumble on in genteel decline.
(And the talk of Tesla is another manifestation of weakness that we don't want to talk about. Countries that are sucessful and confident in what they are doing don't need to offer businesses pretty much anything they want to set up shop. Success gives you the power to set the rules.)
Only recently uncovered when the whole city was cleaned
https://owaytours.com/en/blog/the-graffiti-of-seville-cathedral/
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/fb502895-017f-4846-960a-18d7e5d6ba4e
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/02/766454839/amber-guyger-ex-officer-who-killed-man-in-his-apartment-given-10-years-in-prison
If the police feel they have all this overwhelming firepower and invulnerability then I imagine often they don’t think “is there maybe a better way to deal with this situation”.
If you know there are four police cars free to help you then you react differently and maybe smarter in getting the “criminal’s” car somewhere safe but blocked then stand off at a safe distance and try and resolve the situation.
When you have 67 cars and shed loads of armed officers on their way then you inevitably get gung-ho and pile in. Add to that the extra adrenaline from the massed group it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Those that are grieving directly for the loss of the Queen
Those of us grieving by proxy for the recently deceased, many of those during lockdown when grief itself was assaulted (this now is the communal grief stolen from us)
Those that have taken stock at this momemt of national change and grieve for where we are and where we are headed
Those grieving for times past that we shall not see again
Those caught up in the tide of emotion and swept along by it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_sacrum_convivium
Original Latin (punctuation from Liber Usualis)
O sacrum convivium!
in quo Christus sumitur:
recolitur memoria passionis eius:
mens impletur gratia:
et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.
Alleluia.
Translation of original Latin
O sacred banquet!
in which Christ is received,
the memory of his Passion is renewed,
the mind is filled with grace,
and a pledge of future glory to us is given.
Alleluia.
Inheritance of wealth, though, does not imply the inheritance of high positions in a state hierarchy, whether of the same positions or of positions of the same rank. That did not occur in Stalin's USSR and it does not occur in Putin's Russia either.
North Korea (where the DPRK has already lasted longer than the USSR) is a very different case. The regime is of course a hereditary dictatorship. It also makes deep references to ancient Korea and it makes use of traditional religious practices and ideology (as also does the ROK in South Korea) but I shall not discuss that here. It should not be considered in the same category as so-called "Marxist" regimes in the USSR, China, etc.
Lenin may have been buried in a step pyramid, but the ruler of North Korea is practically a god-king. That's on a different level. Stalin and Mao were dictators with personality cults, but they did not pass office to their sons and they were a long way from being god-kings. As Marx pointed out in the text I referred to there is a sense in which the atheist state is the most perfect religious state, so even if the three rulers so far of the DPRK had proclaimed themselves atheists that would by no means undermine my contention regarding the regime's religious character, but nevertheless I would still be interested if you could provide a source for your notion that they have declared that they are atheists in an atheist state. Where specifically did they do that? Formal religion is certainly not banned in North Korea. For the record, Kim il-Sung said he had a Presbyterian upbringing and some have argued that Juche is marked by that. There is no reference to atheism in the 10 Principles. In the most recent version of the 10P the solar reference is out in the open.
My challenge was to name an atheist king. What I am asking for is someone who has been recognised as a king, or under some other traditional hereditary title (sultan, grand prince, etc.), and who has declared in public that they are an atheist, that nothing is divine, that the material world is all we've got. I realise this is theoretically possible, but has it ever occurred?
Apparently these scrawls are called “victories” -
Boastful remarks. I feel an uncanny and inexplicable association with them
We either get ludicrous fawning (harmless enough I guess) or endless spiteful and probably inaccurate tittle tattle (see pretty much any edition of the Daily Mail).
What we do not get enough of is the stuff that they do well eg it was only recently that I learnt that Camilla has been helping to raise money for packages of necessities for women at domestic violence shelters when they leave. Sophie, Edward's wife, has been working with charities in Africa helping women and girls get access to safe loos and sanitary products, including torches, so that when they go to the loo at night they can protect themselves. Small things maybe but of great help to the women concerned. Anne too came up to a Barrow charity working with the poor to help raise their profile and this was appreciated by those at the charity.
Now maybe government should do this stuff and we shouldn't need charity. But we are not in a perfect world and the desire to help will always be there. If famous people use their fame/status to help others (just as Marcus Rashford did) I think that is to be applauded. I wish the press covered more of this.
Whether we have a monarchy or not is a separate issue. But while they are there it would be better if we heard a bit more about this side of what they do rather than the soap opera bit.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11221707/Wellwisher-gives-King-Charles-pen-just-case-beset-ink-disasters.html
The bottom picture is also accidentally funny, with the fact that Penelope Keith is curtseying reverentially forward and Felicity Kendall standing stock still making it look as if the Queen has actually entered the episode of The Good Life they're filming.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2022/sep/17/glamour-overload-queen-elizabeth-meets-the-stars-in-pictures
Being a woman does not insulate her from criticism of her policies. If I had said "What can you expect from a woman politician?" then you would have a point, but that is not what I am saying. As a matter of fact, if you read what was posted above you will see my criticism was more aimed at the Conservative selectorate.
No doubt the Tories who complained when Labour failed to follow fiscal rules and spent wildly will be up in arms about this.
Oh and of course Ms Truss said that such cuts would fall within fiscal headroom. Maybe that was another "misunderstanding".
Has he had laser eye surgery do we think? He doesn't wear glasses to sign things.
I’d forgotten its sheer size
Simon Jenkins and Paul Johnson have both claimed that the great mediaeval European cathedrals are the greatest works of art ever accomplished by mankind. They might be right
It shouldn’t be a big thing for a male footballer to come out as gay… but it’s still so rare, that it is.
Love, strength and Pride to Zander Murray, the first openly gay footballer in the Scottish leagues since Justin Fashanu, who is making it easier for those who will follow.
https://twitter.com/Matthew_Hodson/status/1571028669442953216
There was a recent case where a suspect ran into a random property to elude the cops and they destroyed the house. The householder had no legal redress because of Qualified Immunity.
Philip Schofield ? Fuck off.
They tried to overthrow the democratically elected government of the USA. They are still attempting to infliltrate the machinery of government so they can do it again, only more effectively, at the next presidential election.
I know the word gets thrown around a lot, but this sub group really have committed themselves to fascism. What else could you call it?
The rest of the US establishment, both Democrats & Republicans, waking up to this fact and giving this crowd the justice they so fully deserve is something to be celebrated frankly.
Now on to the hotly disputed 16 days of Aelfweard, son of Edward the Elder
Why is this one of the most important documents in human history?
El nixo de Googlo! Nada googlio! Niente los googlios!
Sweyn Forkbeards 41 days and
Edward V 78 days
I think societies work best when there is a degree of social mobility for all. The "football pyramid" model of society if you like. But what we actually have is a super league to which the likes of 99% of us will never be invited.
The ossification of our society and class system is exactly what makes the UK such a popular place for the elites of other countries to launder their ill gotten gains. They know it's safe from revolution and regime change here. And the last week has been a fantastic ad for that...
Yes. It’s the first - the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the entire new world between Portugal and Spain and thus explaining why Latin America and much of North America is how it is today
10/10
Just sitting here in the archives
https://twitter.com/nowthensunshine/status/1570540040073412610?s=21&t=ZdN7BDC4aeGz4oJYAYdyRw
https://www.hln.be/buitenland/kathedraal-barcelona-besmeurd-met-z-symbool-ter-ondersteuning-van-russische-invasie~aeda054f/?referrer=https://www.google.co.uk/
I'm not sure why the comparison to Slovenia is meant to be damning. Slovenia is a rich country, and like most of Eastern Europe, its standard of living was artificially depressed by first Nazism, and then decades of communism. Pre War, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic countries had living standards similar to the UK.
Medicare: "It primarily provides health insurance for Americans aged 65 and older, but also for some younger people with disability status as determined by the SSA, including people with end stage renal disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease).
In 2018, according to the 2019 Medicare Trustees Report, Medicare provided health insurance for over 59.9 million individuals—more than 52 million people aged 65 and older and about 8 million younger people.[1] According to annual Medicare Trustees reports and research by the government's MedPAC group, Medicare covers about half of healthcare expenses of those enrolled. Enrollees almost always cover most of the remaining costs by taking additional private insurance and/or by joining a public Part C or Part D Medicare health plan.[2] In 2020, US federal government spending on Medicare was $776.2 billion."
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
Medicaid: "Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with low income in the United States, providing free health insurance to 74 million low-income and disabled people (23% of Americans) as of 2017,[3][4][5] as well as paying for half of all U.S. births in 2019.[6] It is a means-tested program that is jointly funded by the state and federal governments and managed by the states,[7] with each state currently having broad leeway to determine who is eligible for its implementation of the program. As of 2017, the total annual cost of Medicaid was just over $600 billion, of which the federal government contributed $375 billion and states an additional $230 billion."
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
SNAP: In the United States, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),[1] formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, is a federal program that provides food-purchasing assistance for low- and no-income people. It is a federal aid program, administered by the United States Department of Agriculture under the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), though benefits are distributed by specific departments of U.S. states (e.g. Division of Social Services, Department of Health and Human Services, etc.).
SNAP benefits supplied roughly 40 million Americans in 2018, at an expenditure of $57.1 billion.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assistance_Program
There are many others, with many variations from state to state.
I would not say these vast systems are a model for the rest of the world, but it is an error to say they don't exist.
An academic and four research assistants have been trying to address how 'representative' it is of the country, and have spent a day or so counting and interviewing samples of those in line.
Politically it's a little odd - well over 50% Conservative voters, but also majority Remainer.
And a large majority saying they are there as an expression of gratitude, rather than grief.
(Somewhere in the first half an hour if you're interested.)
If lunch is really good they might break into the top 7. Watch out The Mongols
Saturday:
🇦🇺 Albanese
🇳🇿 Ardern
Sunday
🇮🇪 Martin
🇨🇦 Trudeau
🇺🇲 Biden
🇵🇱 Duda”
https://twitter.com/terraorbust/status/1571077125276602369
Probably nearly four decades since I last saw a stage production.
Had I known the leads are all straight out of drama school, I might not have gone, but glad I did.
Those bothered by woke might be put off by it's having an all black cast. Don't be.
Nor is it especially common among aristos to go into the City.
The contention as I understood it was that some aristos and landed types fall into banks etc. in the City just because of their backgrounds, not because they've got any skill or intelligence. They remain as thick as pigsh*t. Leeson describes how a member of the Baring family itself declared that it "isn't terribly difficult" to make loads of money trading the derivatives markets in Singapore. He'd read the bottom line, but he was unaware at that time that Leeson's apparently huge profits were illusory. What is idiotic is that he genuinely thought it was really easy to make loads of money. Of course it isn't easy. The guy had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, was a respected figure at one of the nobbiest banks in the City, and he had no idea! It is NOT easy to make loads of money trading the markets. It's extremely difficult. Leeson coming from a working class background is of course aware of that.
To do the queue you need to have time, and probably money, and easy access to London
That narrows the pool of possible visitors considerably