Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
I’ll be honest, that looks pretty fun.
Yes, I really want to live in a hood with “clit”, “420” and “antifa” spray painted everywhere. Because those are always great places
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
I thought it was only in Borehamwood that old ladies have tatoos.
EXC: Labour’s pledge to abolish the Lords is set to be watered down in favour of “reform” after an eleventh hour row between Gordon Brown and Starmer aides
It's not exactly a major vote winner. Frankly, there are a number of pretty quick and simple reforms they could introduce to immediately show their willingness, and then they can take time on anything more meaningful.
I'm against the reform personally, but I fail to see why it should be stalled because Gordon Brown takes issue with it. Successive Tory Governments cheerfully ignored Thatcher, and she was a successful former-PM.
What is the substance of the article?
Twitter thinks it is Keir who is blocking Brown, not the other way around.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
I’ll be honest, that looks pretty fun.
Yes, I really want to live in a hood with “clit”, “420” and “antifa” spray painted everywhere. Because those are always great places
Well, I loved living in London Fields. It was pretty 420 and indeed “clit” friendly.
Slightly surprising. Major poll in Ireland, north and south
“North against unity with the south by 2 to 1 Half of all respondents (50 per cent) in Northern Ireland said they would vote against Irish unity, which included 21 per cent of those from a Catholic background.
Just over a quarter (26 per cent) in the North said they would vote for unity, while 19 per cent said they didn’t know how they would vote and 5 per cent said they would not vote.”
Domestic energy production is absolutely pivotal to avoid being at the mercy of international price fluctuations and global insecurity. Forget soft rhetoric about Putin - this sort of thing really *does* play into his hands.
An idiotic policy with obvious and predictable harmful effects. Our priority is energy security and self sufficiency. Anything that does not assist that policy should really be binned.
To recap, this would produce coking coal that we need for the strategically vital steel industry. We already import this coal, so mining it domestically would reduce emissions, as well as creating jobs and all the other benefits.
I don't like to be negative, but I will be shocked if the Government goes ahead. But for any sort of Conservative Government - even a green one, this is a no brainer. Actually for any responsible government of any colour.
I want at least one domestic British coal mind to keep our heritage railways and museums going.
It's probably the thing (outside of work) I care about the most. I can get rather emotional about it.
I want a thriving coal industry.
Even if this does go ahead, a planning restriction will limit the amount of coal it can pull out. Fuck that. Dig I say.
I want a livable planet for my future grandchildren.
We all do. That's made less likely by today's green policies, many of which are perversely emmission-heavy (like importing coal, importing LNG, or letting gasses come belching out of mountains when you plant wind turbines), and all of which leave us poorer and less able to mitigate whatever changes in climate we're likely to be dealing with down the line.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
Not too far off what a lot of Berlin actually is, with a lot more graffiti.
Our monarchy excitingly rebranded for the C21 is obviously well on the way to being under the woke cosh also.
EXC: Labour’s pledge to abolish the Lords is set to be watered down in favour of “reform” after an eleventh hour row between Gordon Brown and Starmer aides
It's not exactly a major vote winner. Frankly, there are a number of pretty quick and simple reforms they could introduce to immediately show their willingness, and then they can take time on anything more meaningful.
I'm against the reform personally, but I fail to see why it should be stalled because Gordon Brown takes issue with it. Successive Tory Governments cheerfully ignored Thatcher, and she was a successful former-PM.
I can't access the article, but I believe from other stories that it was Brown pushing for abolition - he had prepared proposals for reform - and so I assume it is that Starmer is ignoring him and watering it down.
Domestic energy production is absolutely pivotal to avoid being at the mercy of international price fluctuations and global insecurity. Forget soft rhetoric about Putin - this sort of thing really *does* play into his hands.
An idiotic policy with obvious and predictable harmful effects. Our priority is energy security and self sufficiency. Anything that does not assist that policy should really be binned.
To recap, this would produce coking coal that we need for the strategically vital steel industry. We already import this coal, so mining it domestically would reduce emissions, as well as creating jobs and all the other benefits.
I don't like to be negative, but I will be shocked if the Government goes ahead. But for any sort of Conservative Government - even a green one, this is a no brainer. Actually for any responsible government of any colour.
I want at least one domestic British coal mind to keep our heritage railways and museums going.
It's probably the thing (outside of work) I care about the most. I can get rather emotional about it.
I want a thriving coal industry.
Even if this does go ahead, a planning restriction will limit the amount of coal it can pull out. Fuck that. Dig I say.
I want a livable planet for my future grandchildren.
We all do. That's made less likely by today's green policies, many of which are perversely emmission-heavy (like importing coal, importing LNG, or letting gasses come belching out of mountains when you plant wind turbines), and all of which leave us poorer and less able to mitigate whatever changes in climate we're likely to be dealing with down the line.
Importing LNG and some initial emissions from wind turbines both release far less carbon emissions than deep mining of coal.
EXC: Labour’s pledge to abolish the Lords is set to be watered down in favour of “reform” after an eleventh hour row between Gordon Brown and Starmer aides
It's not exactly a major vote winner. Frankly, there are a number of pretty quick and simple reforms they could introduce to immediately show their willingness, and then they can take time on anything more meaningful.
I'm against the reform personally, but I fail to see why it should be stalled because Gordon Brown takes issue with it. Successive Tory Governments cheerfully ignored Thatcher, and she was a successful former-PM.
What is the substance of the article?
Twitter thinks it is Keir who is blocking Brown, not the other way around.
I am against an elected upper house.
I'm for life peers, with numbers of appointments allocated to parties according to vote share at the last election.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
But why is the dog on the balcony with the flag that represents, inter alia, intersex (purple circle on yellow), genderlessness (black), and semi-genderlessness (grey)? (Source: 21 LGBTQ Pride Flags and What They Stand For.)
EXC: Labour’s pledge to abolish the Lords is set to be watered down in favour of “reform” after an eleventh hour row between Gordon Brown and Starmer aides
It's not exactly a major vote winner. Frankly, there are a number of pretty quick and simple reforms they could introduce to immediately show their willingness, and then they can take time on anything more meaningful.
I'm against the reform personally, but I fail to see why it should be stalled because Gordon Brown takes issue with it. Successive Tory Governments cheerfully ignored Thatcher, and she was a successful former-PM.
What is the substance of the article?
Twitter thinks it is Keir who is blocking Brown, not the other way around.
I am against an elected upper house.
I'm for life peers, with numbers of appointments allocated to parties according to vote share at the last election.
We have talked about this before and it is the single item we agree on. The single one.
(I think the fuller expression of the argument demands cross-benchers, too).
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
I’ll be honest, that looks pretty fun.
Yes, I really want to live in a hood with “clit”, “420” and “antifa” spray painted everywhere. Because those are always great places
Well, I loved living in London Fields. It was pretty 420 and indeed “clit” friendly.
When you walk out of your New York doorway, do you think “gee, I hope someone’s sprayed the word CLIT on my house, this street really needs some improvement. And the kids will love it”?
EXC: Labour’s pledge to abolish the Lords is set to be watered down in favour of “reform” after an eleventh hour row between Gordon Brown and Starmer aides
It's not exactly a major vote winner. Frankly, there are a number of pretty quick and simple reforms they could introduce to immediately show their willingness, and then they can take time on anything more meaningful.
I'm against the reform personally, but I fail to see why it should be stalled because Gordon Brown takes issue with it. Successive Tory Governments cheerfully ignored Thatcher, and she was a successful former-PM.
What is the substance of the article?
Twitter thinks it is Keir who is blocking Brown, not the other way around.
I am against an elected upper house.
I'm for life peers, with numbers of appointments allocated to parties according to vote share at the last election.
We have talked about this before and it is the single item we agree on. The single one.
(I think the fuller expression of the argument demands cross-benchers, too).
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
Not too far off what a lot of Berlin actually is, with a lot more graffiti.
Our monarchy excitingly rebranded for the C21 is obviously well on the way to being under the woke cosh also.
Well Lady Hussey (top left) has resigned, and been replaced by a Rastafarian trans woman wearing a t-shirt bearing the word CLIT, so we are getting there.
I had missed this developing story. It says Ramaphosa was still easy favourite to win the party leadership again, so who knows.
South Africans are waiting, many in deep trepidation, to find out if President Cyril Ramaphosa is about to resign in the wake of a murky and highly politicised scandal involving cattle, a sofa, and the theft of hundreds of thousands (and possibly millions) of dollars.
Much now hangs on a meeting of the leaders of the country's governing party, the African National Congress (ANC), which is due to convene in the coming days.
Mr Ramaphosa's most ardent supporters - and he remains a popular leader - frame this moment as an all-or-nothing fight between a decent man, desperately trying to clean up a corruption-ridden country, and the forces of chaos with the ANC who are trying to get rid of him in order to keep hold of their loot and keep themselves out of prison.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
But why is the dog on the balcony with the flag that represents, inter alia, intersex (purple circle on yellow), genderlessness (black), and semi-genderlessness (grey)? (Source: 21 LGBTQ Pride Flags and What They Stand For.)
The intersex might actually be interspecies, because it looks like the dog is about to rape the hedgehog
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
I’ll be honest, that looks pretty fun.
Yes, I really want to live in a hood with “clit”, “420” and “antifa” spray painted everywhere. Because those are always great places
Well, I loved living in London Fields. It was pretty 420 and indeed “clit” friendly.
When you walk out of your New York doorway, do you think “gee, I hope someone’s sprayed the word CLIT on my house, this street really needs some improvement. And the kids will love it”?
Actually, my thoughts are not a million miles away from this. I live on the UWS where the mean resident is a 109 yo Jewish woman.
One gets bored of endless knish stalls and shops selling linen and lace.
Domestic energy production is absolutely pivotal to avoid being at the mercy of international price fluctuations and global insecurity. Forget soft rhetoric about Putin - this sort of thing really *does* play into his hands.
An idiotic policy with obvious and predictable harmful effects. Our priority is energy security and self sufficiency. Anything that does not assist that policy should really be binned.
To recap, this would produce coking coal that we need for the strategically vital steel industry. We already import this coal, so mining it domestically would reduce emissions, as well as creating jobs and all the other benefits.
I don't like to be negative, but I will be shocked if the Government goes ahead. But for any sort of Conservative Government - even a green one, this is a no brainer. Actually for any responsible government of any colour.
I want at least one domestic British coal mind to keep our heritage railways and museums going.
It's probably the thing (outside of work) I care about the most. I can get rather emotional about it.
I want a thriving coal industry.
Even if this does go ahead, a planning restriction will limit the amount of coal it can pull out. Fuck that. Dig I say.
I want a livable planet for my future grandchildren.
We all do. That's made less likely by today's green policies, many of which are perversely emmission-heavy (like importing coal, importing LNG, or letting gasses come belching out of mountains when you plant wind turbines), and all of which leave us poorer and less able to mitigate whatever changes in climate we're likely to be dealing with down the line.
Importing LNG and some initial emissions from wind turbines both release far less carbon emissions than deep mining of coal.
Coking coal is necessary for the steel industry, and it is being mined somewhere, the only difference is that it's being transported across the world.
Liquifying gas for export (and again, transporting it) is a lot worse in terms of emissions than gas being supplied domestically.
Green wreckers oppose domestic coal mining and domestic gas production.
EXC: Labour’s pledge to abolish the Lords is set to be watered down in favour of “reform” after an eleventh hour row between Gordon Brown and Starmer aides
It's not exactly a major vote winner. Frankly, there are a number of pretty quick and simple reforms they could introduce to immediately show their willingness, and then they can take time on anything more meaningful.
I'm against the reform personally, but I fail to see why it should be stalled because Gordon Brown takes issue with it. Successive Tory Governments cheerfully ignored Thatcher, and she was a successful former-PM.
I can't access the article, but I believe from other stories that it was Brown pushing for abolition - he had prepared proposals for reform - and so I assume it is that Starmer is ignoring him and watering it down.
Ah OK. I thought it was official Labour policy and was now being watered down.
Slightly surprising. Major poll in Ireland, north and south
“North against unity with the south by 2 to 1 Half of all respondents (50 per cent) in Northern Ireland said they would vote against Irish unity, which included 21 per cent of those from a Catholic background.
Just over a quarter (26 per cent) in the North said they would vote for unity, while 19 per cent said they didn’t know how they would vote and 5 per cent said they would not vote.”
EXC: Labour’s pledge to abolish the Lords is set to be watered down in favour of “reform” after an eleventh hour row between Gordon Brown and Starmer aides
It's not exactly a major vote winner. Frankly, there are a number of pretty quick and simple reforms they could introduce to immediately show their willingness, and then they can take time on anything more meaningful.
I'm against the reform personally, but I fail to see why it should be stalled because Gordon Brown takes issue with it. Successive Tory Governments cheerfully ignored Thatcher, and she was a successful former-PM.
I can't access the article, but I believe from other stories that it was Brown pushing for abolition - he had prepared proposals for reform - and so I assume it is that Starmer is ignoring him and watering it down.
Replace the start of the URL of stuff behind a paywall with https://archive.is/www. to gain free access.
EXC: Labour’s pledge to abolish the Lords is set to be watered down in favour of “reform” after an eleventh hour row between Gordon Brown and Starmer aides
It's not exactly a major vote winner. Frankly, there are a number of pretty quick and simple reforms they could introduce to immediately show their willingness, and then they can take time on anything more meaningful.
I'm against the reform personally, but I fail to see why it should be stalled because Gordon Brown takes issue with it. Successive Tory Governments cheerfully ignored Thatcher, and she was a successful former-PM.
I can't access the article, but I believe from other stories that it was Brown pushing for abolition - he had prepared proposals for reform - and so I assume it is that Starmer is ignoring him and watering it down.
Ah OK. I thought it was official Labour policy and was now being watered down.
It was.
The 2019 manifesto states the following, which does leave wiggle room about whether they'd actually do it, or if it would require a referendum etc ('work to abolish' 'prefrred option' 'people must be central').
We will act immediately to end the hereditary principle in the House of Lords, and work to abolish the House of Lords in favour of Labour’s preferred option of an elected Senate of the Nations and Regions, but we also believe that the people must be central to historic political changes. https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Real-Change-Labour-Manifesto-2019.pdf
2017 Manifesto Our fundamental belief is that the Second Chamber should be democratically elected. In the interim period, we will seek to end the hereditary principle and reduce the size of the current House of Lords as part of a wider package of constitutional reform to address the growing democratic deficit across Britain https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/labour-manifesto-2017.pdf
Slightly surprising. Major poll in Ireland, north and south
“North against unity with the south by 2 to 1 Half of all respondents (50 per cent) in Northern Ireland said they would vote against Irish unity, which included 21 per cent of those from a Catholic background.
Just over a quarter (26 per cent) in the North said they would vote for unity, while 19 per cent said they didn’t know how they would vote and 5 per cent said they would not vote.”
I can never judge him objectively because he's so loathsome to me, but he literally calls for the termination of the constitution in that post, and yet nothing seems to shake his supporters that he is a patriot. I'm sure many (though certainly not even close to a majority) of the elected representatives even if they like him find that stuff a bit much, but very very few of them think it is disqualifying to be their candidate.
The cowardice in the Republican establishment since Trump's election has been has been surprising even to a cynic like me.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
I’ll be honest, that looks pretty fun.
Yes, I really want to live in a hood with “clit”, “420” and “antifa” spray painted everywhere. Because those are always great places
Well, I loved living in London Fields. It was pretty 420 and indeed “clit” friendly.
It's 420 in the USA, the Netherlands etc., but the rendering that suits the German Greens best is 4/20.
EXC: Labour’s pledge to abolish the Lords is set to be watered down in favour of “reform” after an eleventh hour row between Gordon Brown and Starmer aides
It's not exactly a major vote winner. Frankly, there are a number of pretty quick and simple reforms they could introduce to immediately show their willingness, and then they can take time on anything more meaningful.
I'm against the reform personally, but I fail to see why it should be stalled because Gordon Brown takes issue with it. Successive Tory Governments cheerfully ignored Thatcher, and she was a successful former-PM.
I can't access the article, but I believe from other stories that it was Brown pushing for abolition - he had prepared proposals for reform - and so I assume it is that Starmer is ignoring him and watering it down.
Ah OK. I thought it was official Labour policy and was now being watered down.
Slightly surprising. Major poll in Ireland, north and south
“North against unity with the south by 2 to 1 Half of all respondents (50 per cent) in Northern Ireland said they would vote against Irish unity, which included 21 per cent of those from a Catholic background.
Just over a quarter (26 per cent) in the North said they would vote for unity, while 19 per cent said they didn’t know how they would vote and 5 per cent said they would not vote.”
This is very good by Andrew Sullivan on the profound demographic changes in the UK, where there are now more foreign-born residents than in the United States.
Britain might be the first nation to voluntarily commit cultural, political and demographic suicide
The rest of the West ain’t far behind, tho
Maybe it'll mean PM Farage in a few years' time.
You’d think so, but the young are absolutely brainwashed into Wokeness. Whiteness is shameful and Britishness is a sin
I don’t see much hope. Sadly
Wrong on all statements, but that is Leonadamus for you.
I don’t agree with his statements, but the Wellcome Collection affair and the contretemps over Lady Hussey both make the UK look daft.
I take the view that self-regard is not half a sin as self-hatred.
Unfortunately, a lot of people in authority feel the need to apologise for things done by people long dead to people long dead.
They'd rather do that and hoover up the plaudits than take responsibility for their own failings and do something about it.
Maybe future generations of politicians will apologise for them instead.
As far as their own sins are concerned it's "lessons will be learned", and "I'm sorry if you were offended."
I truly fucking hate lessons will be learned. They are never learned.
I almost walked off my current megaproject this week (which has become extremely political this week, and I'm on the wrong side of it) because two very senior executives are failing to listen on the importance of a crucial lesson - they cut me off when I tried to explain what happened on Crossrail without it.
I'm thinking of putting my advice in writing so I have written record of their rejection.
Surely you keep a formal lessons learned register and conclude each project stage with some kind of review?
People are notoriously lucid and objective is such sessions as well.
In my experience, lessons learned sessions are interesting and insightful retrospectives on the project which sometimes produce useful insights into how to do things in the future. The outputs are then filed and never referred to again.
Slightly surprising. Major poll in Ireland, north and south
“North against unity with the south by 2 to 1 Half of all respondents (50 per cent) in Northern Ireland said they would vote against Irish unity, which included 21 per cent of those from a Catholic background.
Just over a quarter (26 per cent) in the North said they would vote for unity, while 19 per cent said they didn’t know how they would vote and 5 per cent said they would not vote.”
Right now, I'd say the offically UK but practically no-mans land status of NI suits all parties.
I’m still a bit surprised by the massive margin in favour of the UK. Eire is obviously richer than NI now. Yet they are not at all tempted
Two thoughts:
I wonder if Sinn Fein and southern Irish flirting with IRA songs and slogans has - rightly - made the north much warier
And I wonder if the Norns are beginning to realise they have a really sweet Brexit deal
Either way, there won’t be a border poll for many years on these numbers and talk of a united Ireland is fantasy
The best way forward for NI in my view is to become a cosmopolitan commercial hub - a bridge between the UK and EU, with some of the benefits of both, with previous sectarian divides buried beneath the skyscrapers. We're a bit away from it but it's not impossible.
I can never judge him objectively because he's so loathsome to me, but he literally calls for the termination of the constitution in that post, and yet nothing seems to shake his supporters that he is a patriot. I'm sure many (though certainly not even close to a majority) of the elected representatives even if they like him find that stuff a bit much, but very very few of them think it is disqualifying to be their candidate.
I can never judge him objectively because he's so loathsome to me, but he literally calls for the termination of the constitution in that post, and yet nothing seems to shake his supporters that he is a patriot. I'm sure many (though certainly not even close to a majority) of the elected representatives even if they like him find that stuff a bit much, but very very few of them think it is disqualifying to be their candidate.
A long read - but worth it. The author’s thesis is that the Roman Republic died because the elite clung to the constitution rather than adapting to the reality of world around them.
Well, I'm certainly not alone in often commenting americans can be a little bit too enamoured of their constitution sometimes, to the point of now making it far harder to update than it should be (even recognising it was not supposed to be very easy) and that leading to a lot of difficulty, but given the rhetoric they often employ and on the importance of following the rules, you'd think at least some would be thrown by a direct call to ignore it completely.
Worshiping a constitution doesn’t work when an increasing segment of the population don’t worship it in the same way you do.
Screaming “The Ways of The Fathers!” when the mob is burning Clodius’ body, with the Senate house as the pyre….
This is very good by Andrew Sullivan on the profound demographic changes in the UK, where there are now more foreign-born residents than in the United States.
"In 1971, the proportion of Londoners who were “White British” was 86.2 percent. Fifty years later, it’s 36.8 percent. That’s not a population change; it’s an entire paradigm shift."
It is indeed an entire paradigm shift.
Sullivan rightly notes that, but is ambivalent on what should be welcomed and what might be mourned.
Personally I was a migrant to London and indeed, by some definitions, mixed race.
Complicated thing, modernity.
The best book, to be reassured about this, is Whiteshift by Eric Kaufmann.
It basically makes clear that migrants adopt British cultures and traditions in time, provided they largely marry "in house", and eventually (c.100 years) mixed race will be the majority ethnicity and not any other.
It will be a nation of James Cleverlys, Jessica Ennis-Hills and Emma Raducanus.
(Also, their politics will approach the mean of the majority white British population as they grow so those on the Left who assume they will be allies for cultural Marxism have got it dead wrong.)
I agree on that, but worth noting that the mean of the White British populations politics may well shift too, as it has many times over the last 100 years.
Many things are taken as normal now that would have seemed insanely radical 100 years ago, such as Gay marriage, racial equality and disbanding the Empire, and things considered normal then such as the death penalty or workhouses would be considered radical now.
Yes, whatever the mean is (and where that ends up) ethnicity will eventually end up being relatively irrelevant to it.
Yes, when corrected for SE status and income. I think that in large part explains why British Muslims are more Labour, as are British Carribeans, while British Indians and African Christian communities have been trending Conservative. After a generation or two, class trumps ethnicity in politics, and that is a good thing.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
They went through a bigger trauma in Germany before they came to terms with their past. The UK will likely do the same just 30 years later.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with the premise of OGH's argument. The Chester by-election swing was 14% but the Redfield & Wilton Blue Wall swing was 20% on last polling and the swing among 65+ voters was also 20% from the last GE so I'd argue the Conservatives are doing disproportionately badly in the areas and among the demographics where you'd expect them to be strongest.
Combined with the strong desire of Labour and LD voters to vote tactically against an incumbent Conservative and you have the perfect storm for big Labour and Liberal Democrat gains outside the range of UNS.
In England, Labour leads 47-34 according to Savanta ComRes (that's a swing of 16.5% since December 2019) and would be a better result than 1997 when Labour won England by just under 10 points (43.5-33.7) and took 328 of the then 529 seats.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
A lot of us do so, but being confident as a nation allows being critical of our own role in history.
It is not a sign of confidence to be so emotionally fragile that any suggestion that the British state behaved abominable in the past, and into present times, drives people to clutch at their pearls.
There are many things to be proud of in our history, but not everything was perfect.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
A lot of us do so, but being confident as a nation allows being critical of our own role in history.
It is not a sign of confidence to be so emotionally fragile that any suggestion that the British state behaved abominable in the past, and into present times, drives people to clutch at their pearls.
There are many things to be proud of in our history, but not everything was perfect.
I don't think that's the question.
It's the fact that I don't see any trench you'd fight in that's the problem.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with the premise of OGH's argument. The Chester by-election swing was 14% but the Redfield & Wilton Blue Wall swing was 20% on last polling and the swing among 65+ voters was also 20% from the last GE so I'd argue the Conservatives are doing disproportionately badly in the areas and among the demographics where you'd expect them to be strongest.
Combined with the strong desire of Labour and LD voters to vote tactically against an incumbent Conservative and you have the perfect storm for big Labour and Liberal Democrat gains outside the range of UNS.
In England, Labour leads 47-34 according to Savanta ComRes (that's a swing of 16.5% since December 2019) and would be a better result than 1997 when Labour won England by just under 10 points (43.5-33.7) and took 328 of the then 529 seats.
My post is based on current betting prices not on what I think will happen
Slightly surprising. Major poll in Ireland, north and south
“North against unity with the south by 2 to 1 Half of all respondents (50 per cent) in Northern Ireland said they would vote against Irish unity, which included 21 per cent of those from a Catholic background.
Just over a quarter (26 per cent) in the North said they would vote for unity, while 19 per cent said they didn’t know how they would vote and 5 per cent said they would not vote.”
Re; the Parthenon marbles going back to Greece - which I thoroughly support, having had many friendship and work connections to Greece since the '90s - Mitsotakis and Osborne's deal is apparently in exchange for various Greek museums lending the British Museum a whole range of other classical antiquities every year, on a rotational basis ; hardly cultural suicide, and would actually boost the BM's prestige in some areas and numbers of daily and annual international visitors.
So, basically, a whole bunch of UK people are now getting Freedom of Movement back, thanks to remote working. Portugal has also brought in a digital nomad visa. So has Greece
Who needs the Single Market? I could move to Seville tomorrow
An English colleague in my office works on UK campaigns while living in Portugal; another lives in Italy. They pop over now and then for meetings and it works pretty well. Less drastically, two of my key team members live in Scotland, which is still a long way from Surrey, and that's fine too.
It's possible that wfh will do more for levelling up, as people move to live in cheaper areas, than Government dictats to move a Department to South Shields ever would.
It's not proving terribly popular with the people from the poor areas who are priced out and have to move to even poorer areas.
But they are BrexitVotingGammonShitScumRacists - the fact that they refuse to embrace being priced out of their towns and sent over the hill to the estates (see Malmesbury in Wiltshire) proves it.
Immigration made up only a relatively small component of house price inflation. By far the bigger (demand side) pushes were low inflation rates and the tendency to live in smaller households.
This just isn't plausible. The biggest driver in demand for housing is population growth, of which 75% is driven by immigration.
But not household formation. And add interest rates, which was the biggest factor.
And then you have supply side issues, although I leave those out because you might argue that we wouldn’t need supply without the extra demand.
There hasn't been THAT much change in household sizes. And as for interest rates, that has also been caused by immigration. The mass migration from New Labour opening the flood gates caused complete stagnation of wage rates among the bottom half of the population. That kept inflation low and meant the Bank didn't have to increase interest rates much during the economic boom.
Interest rates were low globally. You are 100% wrong.
Was it housing supply could not meet demand is the question. Certainly the first part of the equation there can be no arguing over - years of excessive QE under Labour and other governments increased the amount of money in the economy, and banks could lend more cheaply, mortgages were cheaper, but this coupled with housing supply not easily expanded pushed cost of housing upward.
Why was housing supply not so easily expanded to meet demand? this is the question to argue over.
This.
In areas/countries that built houses on demand, house prices didn’t soar.
The problem in the U.K. is that we have created a toxic house building culture - only the big builders can really work in the constrained market. Which creates local monopolies for whichever of the big boys is building the next estate. The savagely poor quality and terrible ergonomics of the houses and estates puts people off such things built near them. The queeze from land price and the requirements for density make it all worse. Councils see negative value in more people living in their areas - people cost more than the council tax and central grants brings in….
That’s the key to it. The *financial* incentives need to be geared towards local planning authorities allowing new residences by default.
There’s loads of ways to do it. Start by lowering income tax and increasing council tax, then charge 5x council tax on unbuilt property with planning permission, followed by a year free for the new resident. Sent the stamp duty surcharge on second homes straight to the local authority, let councils charge local taxes - at their discretion - on short-term rentals.
But, whatever you do, make sure to keep everything local. Anything that involves a national scale of house prices will always be politically impossible - there’s just too much variation between regions.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
We ARE a nation of James Cleverlys, Jessica Ennis-Hills and Emma Raduacanus.
We are also a country where 900 British citizens joined ISIS and a million want sharia law.
That too is a fine old British tradition. 75 years ago many Britons joined the Stalinist Communist party. A decade or so earlier some of our newspapers and King were openly pro-fascist and pro-Nazi.
In the 1780's there was considerable support for the French and American revolutions, as seen with people like Thomas Paine. In the 1650s we executed our Monarch and ceased to be a Monarchy. Another 50 and 150 years earlier many Britons were plotting and hoping for the overthrow of Protestantism in Britain.
There are further instances in our history, but treasonous plots are only so when they fail, otherwise they are social and political advances.
Whilst I see the insight behind the comment, somehow the analogy isn’t working for me there.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed that the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
I think the British Museum is shit.
I still oppose such moves though because of what it stands for, like you say.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
They went through a bigger trauma in Germany before they came to terms with their past. The UK will likely do the same just 30 years later.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
I’ll be honest, that looks pretty fun.
Yes, I really want to live in a hood with “clit”, “420” and “antifa” spray painted everywhere. Because those are always great places
Well, I loved living in London Fields. It was pretty 420 and indeed “clit” friendly.
When you walk out of your New York doorway, do you think “gee, I hope someone’s sprayed the word CLIT on my house, this street really needs some improvement. And the kids will love it”?
You’re supposed to be the winder-upper, not winder-uppee.
"EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up
Only five people showed up Tuesday evening to a party hosted by the European Commission’s foreign aid department in the metaverse to get young people excited about the EU.
Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick tweeted that he was eventually the only party guest left, after "initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up."
Apparently only a few of the 44 people who liked the official trailer were intrigued enough by the avatars dancing to house music on a tropical island to actually join the party."
Who could doubt that the EU is also better at spending our money than (a) ourselves or (b) our own government actually accountable to us for their incompetence? Sigh.
The Parthenon Marbles controversy has got zero to do with "Cultural Marxism", itself a far-right , and often conspiracist , catch-all and misnomer for a whole range of different academic influences, some broadly positive, some broadly terrible. This particular row predates anything to do with political correctness or woke, really.
"EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up
Only five people showed up Tuesday evening to a party hosted by the European Commission’s foreign aid department in the metaverse to get young people excited about the EU.
Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick tweeted that he was eventually the only party guest left, after "initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up."
Apparently only a few of the 44 people who liked the official trailer were intrigued enough by the avatars dancing to house music on a tropical island to actually join the party."
Who could doubt that the EU is also better at spending our money than (a) ourselves or (b) our own government actually accountable to us for their incompetence? Sigh.
We could have put on a superb Festival of Brexit with that money.
"EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up
Only five people showed up Tuesday evening to a party hosted by the European Commission’s foreign aid department in the metaverse to get young people excited about the EU.
Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick tweeted that he was eventually the only party guest left, after "initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up."
Apparently only a few of the 44 people who liked the official trailer were intrigued enough by the avatars dancing to house music on a tropical island to actually join the party."
Who could doubt that the EU is also better at spending our money than (a) ourselves or (b) our own government actually accountable to us for their incompetence? Sigh.
'The UK's 'Brexit festival' has cost the taxpayer £120 million ($144 million) while delivering unknown financial benefits after an extended deadline was set to meet benchmarks under projections made by government officials.
The Unboxed series of art events held across the country this year was investigated by the National Audit Office (NAO) after concerns were raised by parliamentarians it had only attracted 2.8 million live visitors to events.
On Thursday, the NAO released its report into the event and revealed that by November 2022, 18.1 million people had engaged with the festival overall -- a figure made up of 2.8 million attending live events, 13.6 million engaged with the festival’s broadcast and digital content, plus 1.7 million children and families taking part in festival learning activities.'
Those responsible for this incompetence will be kicked out of office in 2 years at the election. Who will be responsible for the EU debacle?
This government's Brexit has been calculated to have cost the country variously between £40 billion and £140 billion and rising. Having the ability to kick them out in two years seems small compensation. Happily the EU have never been trusted with sufficient control of our funds to waste that much so being able to vote them out is an irrelevant red herring
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
People keep hopefully calling ‘peak Woke’ - yet it never happens
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
People keep hopefully calling ‘peak Woke’ - yet it never happens
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed that the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
I think the British Museum is shit.
I still oppose such moves though because of what it stands for, like you say.
I don't mind the idea of 'decolonialism'; but object profoundly to the idea that the British were uniquely bad, which is perpetuated by the 'woke'. Colonialism has occurred throughout human history and this was just an example of it. Also, it was followed by 'decolonialisation' which needs to be taken in to account; just as the history of slavery has to take account of the fact it was then abolished. The problem is that people just like simple stories and there is also this weird phenomenon of self loathing and absence of constructive religion in western countries. At least the war with Russia has given people something to focus on and proves that maybe we might actually have something in us that is a force for good, in many ways 2022 has been a rupture with the narrative that took hold from 2020.
The whole topic of empire needs to be studied a lot more but I just think it needs to be undertaken in a neutral and objective way. There are a lot of dark chapters in it but also some successes and I don't think that anyone is really in a position to objectively judge the whole thing.
Slightly surprising. Major poll in Ireland, north and south
“North against unity with the south by 2 to 1 Half of all respondents (50 per cent) in Northern Ireland said they would vote against Irish unity, which included 21 per cent of those from a Catholic background.
Just over a quarter (26 per cent) in the North said they would vote for unity, while 19 per cent said they didn’t know how they would vote and 5 per cent said they would not vote.”
But as mentioned , the Marbles row predates the Europe/empire decolonisation arguments. It's more akin to other disputes between European countries on antiquities that go back centuries, like the Stone of Scone - which I've just read is apparently temporarily coming back to London for the Coronation on a, you've guessed it, leased basis.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
I’ll be honest, that looks pretty fun.
Yes, I really want to live in a hood with “clit”, “420” and “antifa” spray painted everywhere. Because those are always great places
Well, I loved living in London Fields. It was pretty 420 and indeed “clit” friendly.
When you walk out of your New York doorway, do you think “gee, I hope someone’s sprayed the word CLIT on my house, this street really needs some improvement. And the kids will love it”?
Actually, my thoughts are not a million miles away from this. I live on the UWS where the mean resident is a 109 yo Jewish woman.
One gets bored of endless knish stalls and shops selling linen and lace.
This is very good by Andrew Sullivan on the profound demographic changes in the UK, where there are now more foreign-born residents than in the United States.
"In 1971, the proportion of Londoners who were “White British” was 86.2 percent. Fifty years later, it’s 36.8 percent. That’s not a population change; it’s an entire paradigm shift."
It is indeed an entire paradigm shift.
Sullivan rightly notes that, but is ambivalent on what should be welcomed and what might be mourned.
Personally I was a migrant to London and indeed, by some definitions, mixed race.
Complicated thing, modernity.
The best book, to be reassured about this, is Whiteshift by Eric Kaufmann.
It basically makes clear that migrants adopt British cultures and traditions in time, provided they largely marry "in house", and eventually (c.100 years) mixed race will be the majority ethnicity and not any other.
It will be a nation of James Cleverlys, Jessica Ennis-Hills and Emma Raducanus.
(Also, their politics will approach the mean of the majority white British population as they grow so those on the Left who assume they will be allies for cultural Marxism have got it dead wrong.)
I agree on that, but worth noting that the mean of the White British populations politics may well shift too, as it has many times over the last 100 years.
Many things are taken as normal now that would have seemed insanely radical 100 years ago, such as Gay marriage, racial equality and disbanding the Empire, and things considered normal then such as the death penalty or workhouses would be considered radical now.
Yes, whatever the mean is (and where that ends up) ethnicity will eventually end up being relatively irrelevant to it.
Yes, when corrected for SE status and income. I think that in large part explains why British Muslims are more Labour, as are British Carribeans, while British Indians and African Christian communities have been trending Conservative. After a generation or two, class trumps ethnicity in politics, and that is a good thing.
Class definitely trumps ethnicity over the long term. But often religion trumps class.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed that the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
I think the British Museum is shit.
I still oppose such moves though because of what it stands for, like you say.
I don't mind the idea of 'decolonialism'; but object profoundly to the idea that the British were uniquely bad, which is perpetuated by the 'woke'. Colonialism has occurred throughout human history and this was just an example of it. Also, it was followed by 'decolonialisation' which needs to be taken in to account; just as the history of slavery has to take account of the fact it was then abolished. The problem is that people just like simple stories and there is also this weird phenomenon of self loathing and absence of constructive religion in western countries. At least the war with Russia has given people something to focus on and proves that maybe we might actually have something in us that is a force for good, in many ways 2022 has been a rupture with the narrative that took hold from 2020.
The whole topic of empire needs to be studied a lot more but I just think it needs to be undertaken in a neutral and objective way. There are a lot of dark chapters in it but also some successes and I don't think that anyone is really in a position to objectively judge the whole thing.
The British Empire was great, and the whole fucking world should thank us for it
If it hadn’t been us, it could have been the Spanish, the Germans or the Belgians. Or the Mongols. Or the Ottomans
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
People keep hopefully calling ‘peak Woke’ - yet it never happens
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
Australia is playing this wrong. They are sitting passive, they are giving up possession, they are trying to keep the game tight and static. But the only aspects of the game that they could hope to beat Argentina is athleticism and fitness. They need to run Argentina into the deck. If they don't, sooner or later Argentina will cut them open.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed that the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
I think the British Museum is shit.
I still oppose such moves though because of what it stands for, like you say.
I don't mind the idea of 'decolonialism'; but object profoundly to the idea that the British were uniquely bad, which is perpetuated by the 'woke'. Colonialism has occurred throughout human history and this was just an example of it. Also, it was followed by 'decolonialisation' which needs to be taken in to account; just as the history of slavery has to take account of the fact it was then abolished. The problem is that people just like simple stories and there is also this weird phenomenon of self loathing and absence of constructive religion in western countries. At least the war with Russia has given people something to focus on and proves that maybe we might actually have something in us that is a force for good, in many ways 2022 has been a rupture with the narrative that took hold from 2020.
The whole topic of empire needs to be studied a lot more but I just think it needs to be undertaken in a neutral and objective way. There are a lot of dark chapters in it but also some successes and I don't think that anyone is really in a position to objectively judge the whole thing.
Decolonisation happened from 1947 to 1997 - beyond that the term is meaningless.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
People keep hopefully calling ‘peak Woke’ - yet it never happens
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
I don't see any defenders of woke dying for the cause. And the problem with the cultural panic over wokeness is that it's a very Motte and Bailey argument. The wokeism that is widespread is actually pretty harmless and the wokeism that is extreme is actually pretty narrow in scale.
"EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up
Only five people showed up Tuesday evening to a party hosted by the European Commission’s foreign aid department in the metaverse to get young people excited about the EU.
Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick tweeted that he was eventually the only party guest left, after "initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up."
Apparently only a few of the 44 people who liked the official trailer were intrigued enough by the avatars dancing to house music on a tropical island to actually join the party."
Who could doubt that the EU is also better at spending our money than (a) ourselves or (b) our own government actually accountable to us for their incompetence? Sigh.
We could have put on a superb Festival of Brexit with that money.
"EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up
Only five people showed up Tuesday evening to a party hosted by the European Commission’s foreign aid department in the metaverse to get young people excited about the EU.
Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick tweeted that he was eventually the only party guest left, after "initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up."
Apparently only a few of the 44 people who liked the official trailer were intrigued enough by the avatars dancing to house music on a tropical island to actually join the party."
Who could doubt that the EU is also better at spending our money than (a) ourselves or (b) our own government actually accountable to us for their incompetence? Sigh.
'The UK's 'Brexit festival' has cost the taxpayer £120 million ($144 million) while delivering unknown financial benefits after an extended deadline was set to meet benchmarks under projections made by government officials.
The Unboxed series of art events held across the country this year was investigated by the National Audit Office (NAO) after concerns were raised by parliamentarians it had only attracted 2.8 million live visitors to events.
On Thursday, the NAO released its report into the event and revealed that by November 2022, 18.1 million people had engaged with the festival overall -- a figure made up of 2.8 million attending live events, 13.6 million engaged with the festival’s broadcast and digital content, plus 1.7 million children and families taking part in festival learning activities.'
Those responsible for this incompetence will be kicked out of office in 2 years at the election. Who will be responsible for the EU debacle?
This government's Brexit has been calculated to have cost the country variously between £40 billion and £140 billion and rising. Having the ability to kick them out in two years seems small compensation. Happily the EU have never been trusted with sufficient control of our funds to waste that much so being able to vote them out is an irrelevant red herring
Calculated by whom? On what basis? Utter nonsense.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
I’ll be honest, that looks pretty fun.
Yes, I really want to live in a hood with “clit”, “420” and “antifa” spray painted everywhere. Because those are always great places
Well, I loved living in London Fields. It was pretty 420 and indeed “clit” friendly.
When you walk out of your New York doorway, do you think “gee, I hope someone’s sprayed the word CLIT on my house, this street really needs some improvement. And the kids will love it”?
Actually, my thoughts are not a million miles away from this. I live on the UWS where the mean resident is a 109 yo Jewish woman.
One gets bored of endless knish stalls and shops selling linen and lace.
Not above 91st surely….?
Maybe. Seems a bit rough up there, and not in a “clit” way. I am in the 80s.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed that the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
I think the British Museum is shit.
I still oppose such moves though because of what it stands for, like you say.
I don't mind the idea of 'decolonialism'; but object profoundly to the idea that the British were uniquely bad, which is perpetuated by the 'woke'. Colonialism has occurred throughout human history and this was just an example of it. Also, it was followed by 'decolonialisation' which needs to be taken in to account; just as the history of slavery has to take account of the fact it was then abolished. The problem is that people just like simple stories and there is also this weird phenomenon of self loathing and absence of constructive religion in western countries. At least the war with Russia has given people something to focus on and proves that maybe we might actually have something in us that is a force for good, in many ways 2022 has been a rupture with the narrative that took hold from 2020.
The whole topic of empire needs to be studied a lot more but I just think it needs to be undertaken in a neutral and objective way. There are a lot of dark chapters in it but also some successes and I don't think that anyone is really in a position to objectively judge the whole thing.
The British Empire was great, and the whole fucking world should thank us for it
If it hadn’t been us, it could have been the Spanish, the Germans or the Belgians. Or the Mongols. Or the Ottomans
Exactly. Next
The Ottomans or Mongols or Spanish couldn't have pulled it off in the timeframe. Not even convinced the Germans could have done before being smacked down in Europe.
It's also a bad argument. Immorality is wrong regardless whether someone else would have done it.
The passing remark "Unless there is a massive [Labour] recovery north of the border" is a bit casual, There appears to be something substantial going on right now, with the SNP lead over Labour well down in a couple of polls. That might be temporary, or even rogue polls, but an SNP slide in 22 months seems at least as possible as a Tory bounce.
22 months is indeed a long time, but a Tory recovery is not the only possibility.
Yes Labour does seem to be doing better in Scotland now, even if the SNP is still in 45% in most polls as Labour is now up to 30/31% so you can now see a credible route to Labour winning 10-15 seats in Scotland (even if Labour doesn't gain that many votes from the SNP).
Also an interesting by election in West Lothian on Thursday:
Caused by a Labour death and noting that younger SNP voters probably didn't turn out but it's interesting that both the SNP vote was down 6.7% and the Greens down unlike the Glasgow by election result two weeks ago which Labour also won where the SNP share held up and the Greens increased.
Labour also came third behind the SNP and the Tories in this ward in 2017.
LOL, 27% turnout and labour held a council seat, what a landslide we can expect.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed that the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
I think the British Museum is shit.
I still oppose such moves though because of what it stands for, like you say.
I don't mind the idea of 'decolonialism'; but object profoundly to the idea that the British were uniquely bad, which is perpetuated by the 'woke'. Colonialism has occurred throughout human history and this was just an example of it. Also, it was followed by 'decolonialisation' which needs to be taken in to account; just as the history of slavery has to take account of the fact it was then abolished. The problem is that people just like simple stories and there is also this weird phenomenon of self loathing and absence of constructive religion in western countries. At least the war with Russia has given people something to focus on and proves that maybe we might actually have something in us that is a force for good, in many ways 2022 has been a rupture with the narrative that took hold from 2020.
The whole topic of empire needs to be studied a lot more but I just think it needs to be undertaken in a neutral and objective way. There are a lot of dark chapters in it but also some successes and I don't think that anyone is really in a position to objectively judge the whole thing.
The British Empire was great, and the whole fucking world should thank us for it
If it hadn’t been us, it could have been the Spanish, the Germans or the Belgians. Or the Mongols. Or the Ottomans
Exactly. Next
The Ottomans or Mongols or Spanish couldn't have pulled it off in the timeframe. Not even convinced the Germans could have done before being smacked down in Europe.
It's also a bad argument. Immorality is wrong regardless whether someone else would have done it.
However, that argument is nothing new.
Reading primary sources from the time shows that the "civilising" mission and improvement of governed territories was an active debate that continued throughout the period of colonial rule, with self-governance always the ultimate objective.
That was simply not the case for most other empires.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
People keep hopefully calling ‘peak Woke’ - yet it never happens
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
Bit of a drama queen, this Sean Thomas, don't you think?
I imagine his editors like that. Clicky
For a more measured assessment of GPT3.5 this thread is interesting
27/Overall I'm amazed. ChatGPT is a huge leap forward and represents an inflection point. AI is going to have a major impact on the human condition and I can get a sense of it when I pair program with ChatGPT. You can check it out here chat.openai.com/chat
"EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up
Only five people showed up Tuesday evening to a party hosted by the European Commission’s foreign aid department in the metaverse to get young people excited about the EU.
Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick tweeted that he was eventually the only party guest left, after "initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up."
Apparently only a few of the 44 people who liked the official trailer were intrigued enough by the avatars dancing to house music on a tropical island to actually join the party."
Who could doubt that the EU is also better at spending our money than (a) ourselves or (b) our own government actually accountable to us for their incompetence? Sigh.
We could have put on a superb Festival of Brexit with that money.
"EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up
Only five people showed up Tuesday evening to a party hosted by the European Commission’s foreign aid department in the metaverse to get young people excited about the EU.
Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick tweeted that he was eventually the only party guest left, after "initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up."
Apparently only a few of the 44 people who liked the official trailer were intrigued enough by the avatars dancing to house music on a tropical island to actually join the party."
Who could doubt that the EU is also better at spending our money than (a) ourselves or (b) our own government actually accountable to us for their incompetence? Sigh.
'The UK's 'Brexit festival' has cost the taxpayer £120 million ($144 million) while delivering unknown financial benefits after an extended deadline was set to meet benchmarks under projections made by government officials.
The Unboxed series of art events held across the country this year was investigated by the National Audit Office (NAO) after concerns were raised by parliamentarians it had only attracted 2.8 million live visitors to events.
On Thursday, the NAO released its report into the event and revealed that by November 2022, 18.1 million people had engaged with the festival overall -- a figure made up of 2.8 million attending live events, 13.6 million engaged with the festival’s broadcast and digital content, plus 1.7 million children and families taking part in festival learning activities.'
Those responsible for this incompetence will be kicked out of office in 2 years at the election. Who will be responsible for the EU debacle?
This government's Brexit has been calculated to have cost the country variously between £40 billion and £140 billion and rising. Having the ability to kick them out in two years seems small compensation. Happily the EU have never been trusted with sufficient control of our funds to waste that much so being able to vote them out is an irrelevant red herring
Calculated by whom? On what basis? Utter nonsense.
I don’t know what the number is, but it’s certainly cost billions in lost trade and investment, and imported inflation.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
But why is the dog on the balcony with the flag that represents, inter alia, intersex (purple circle on yellow), genderlessness (black), and semi-genderlessness (grey)? (Source: 21 LGBTQ Pride Flags and What They Stand For.)
bunch of wallies they can stick their flags where the sun don't shine, cretinous halfwits
“I'm pretty worried about the societal implications of ChatGPT. The amount of labor displacement and potential mass unemployment and wealth inequality like we've never seen before, is upon us. And no, bitcoin doesn't fix this.“
I mean, this technology could help us create paradise. But if trends are simply allowed to continue with a "market decides" dynamic, we're talking civil wars, revolutions, total breakdown of societies.“
"EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up
Only five people showed up Tuesday evening to a party hosted by the European Commission’s foreign aid department in the metaverse to get young people excited about the EU.
Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick tweeted that he was eventually the only party guest left, after "initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up."
Apparently only a few of the 44 people who liked the official trailer were intrigued enough by the avatars dancing to house music on a tropical island to actually join the party."
Who could doubt that the EU is also better at spending our money than (a) ourselves or (b) our own government actually accountable to us for their incompetence? Sigh.
We could have put on a superb Festival of Brexit with that money.
"EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up
Only five people showed up Tuesday evening to a party hosted by the European Commission’s foreign aid department in the metaverse to get young people excited about the EU.
Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick tweeted that he was eventually the only party guest left, after "initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up."
Apparently only a few of the 44 people who liked the official trailer were intrigued enough by the avatars dancing to house music on a tropical island to actually join the party."
Who could doubt that the EU is also better at spending our money than (a) ourselves or (b) our own government actually accountable to us for their incompetence? Sigh.
'The UK's 'Brexit festival' has cost the taxpayer £120 million ($144 million) while delivering unknown financial benefits after an extended deadline was set to meet benchmarks under projections made by government officials.
The Unboxed series of art events held across the country this year was investigated by the National Audit Office (NAO) after concerns were raised by parliamentarians it had only attracted 2.8 million live visitors to events.
On Thursday, the NAO released its report into the event and revealed that by November 2022, 18.1 million people had engaged with the festival overall -- a figure made up of 2.8 million attending live events, 13.6 million engaged with the festival’s broadcast and digital content, plus 1.7 million children and families taking part in festival learning activities.'
Those responsible for this incompetence will be kicked out of office in 2 years at the election. Who will be responsible for the EU debacle?
This government's Brexit has been calculated to have cost the country variously between £40 billion and £140 billion and rising. Having the ability to kick them out in two years seems small compensation. Happily the EU have never been trusted with sufficient control of our funds to waste that much so being able to vote them out is an irrelevant red herring
Calculated by whom? On what basis? Utter nonsense.
Remember the golden rule: Roger is wrong about everything, all the time, except for the Oscars.
He is right about the Oscars because it is full of wazzocks just like him who all think the same way.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
People keep hopefully calling ‘peak Woke’ - yet it never happens
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
At least we’re not alone in our madness. Here is the German Green Party’s “vision of how Berlin should be”. I particularly love the “clit” graffito
I’ll be honest, that looks pretty fun.
Yes, I really want to live in a hood with “clit”, “420” and “antifa” spray painted everywhere. Because those are always great places
Well, I loved living in London Fields. It was pretty 420 and indeed “clit” friendly.
When you walk out of your New York doorway, do you think “gee, I hope someone’s sprayed the word CLIT on my house, this street really needs some improvement. And the kids will love it”?
Actually, my thoughts are not a million miles away from this. I live on the UWS where the mean resident is a 109 yo Jewish woman.
One gets bored of endless knish stalls and shops selling linen and lace.
Not above 91st surely….?
Maybe. Seems a bit rough up there, and not in a “clit” way. I am in the 80s.
Jolly good. Many moons ago I had a friend who lived ON 91st street, and it was a bit of a standing joke that that was where the nice UWS ended. He must have been really into elderly Jewish ladies as he crossed town onto the UES!
I can never judge him objectively because he's so loathsome to me, but he literally calls for the termination of the constitution in that post, and yet nothing seems to shake his supporters that he is a patriot. I'm sure many (though certainly not even close to a majority) of the elected representatives even if they like him find that stuff a bit much, but very very few of them think it is disqualifying to be their candidate.
I can never judge him objectively because he's so loathsome to me, but he literally calls for the termination of the constitution in that post, and yet nothing seems to shake his supporters that he is a patriot. I'm sure many (though certainly not even close to a majority) of the elected representatives even if they like him find that stuff a bit much, but very very few of them think it is disqualifying to be their candidate.
A long read - but worth it. The author’s thesis is that the Roman Republic died because the elite clung to the constitution rather than adapting to the reality of world around them.
Well, I'm certainly not alone in often commenting americans can be a little bit too enamoured of their constitution sometimes, to the point of now making it far harder to update than it should be (even recognising it was not supposed to be very easy) and that leading to a lot of difficulty, but given the rhetoric they often employ and on the importance of following the rules, you'd think at least some would be thrown by a direct call to ignore it completely.
Worshiping a constitution doesn’t work when an increasing segment of the population don’t worship it in the same way you do.
Screaming “The Ways of The Fathers!” when the mob is burning Clodius’ body, with the Senate house as the pyre….
And do you think the same of the rule of law ?
To make the rule of law have meaning, in a democracy, it needs to reflect the broad interests and opinions of the governed.
The law should be the summed expression of the body politic. Not an imposition upon it.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed that the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
I think the British Museum is shit.
I still oppose such moves though because of what it stands for, like you say.
I don't mind the idea of 'decolonialism'; but object profoundly to the idea that the British were uniquely bad, which is perpetuated by the 'woke'. Colonialism has occurred throughout human history and this was just an example of it. Also, it was followed by 'decolonialisation' which needs to be taken in to account; just as the history of slavery has to take account of the fact it was then abolished. The problem is that people just like simple stories and there is also this weird phenomenon of self loathing and absence of constructive religion in western countries. At least the war with Russia has given people something to focus on and proves that maybe we might actually have something in us that is a force for good, in many ways 2022 has been a rupture with the narrative that took hold from 2020.
The whole topic of empire needs to be studied a lot more but I just think it needs to be undertaken in a neutral and objective way. There are a lot of dark chapters in it but also some successes and I don't think that anyone is really in a position to objectively judge the whole thing.
The British Empire was great, and the whole fucking world should thank us for it
If it hadn’t been us, it could have been the Spanish, the Germans or the Belgians. Or the Mongols. Or the Ottomans
Exactly. Next
The Ottomans or Mongols or Spanish couldn't have pulled it off in the timeframe. Not even convinced the Germans could have done before being smacked down in Europe.
It's also a bad argument. Immorality is wrong regardless whether someone else would have done it.
However, that argument is nothing new.
Reading primary sources from the time shows that the "civilising" mission and improvement of governed territories was an active debate that continued throughout the period of colonial rule, with self-governance always the ultimate objective.
That was simply not the case for most other empires.
But it wasn't an actual debate that informed policy. It was an intellectual cover for sheer exploitation. An entire sub-continent was forced into subsistence and increasing debt bondage due to the monopoly power of the EIC and then the Raj. A subsistence that caused brutal famines whenever there was a bad harvest.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
People keep hopefully calling ‘peak Woke’ - yet it never happens
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
"EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up
Only five people showed up Tuesday evening to a party hosted by the European Commission’s foreign aid department in the metaverse to get young people excited about the EU.
Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick tweeted that he was eventually the only party guest left, after "initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up."
Apparently only a few of the 44 people who liked the official trailer were intrigued enough by the avatars dancing to house music on a tropical island to actually join the party."
Who could doubt that the EU is also better at spending our money than (a) ourselves or (b) our own government actually accountable to us for their incompetence? Sigh.
We could have put on a superb Festival of Brexit with that money.
"EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up
Only five people showed up Tuesday evening to a party hosted by the European Commission’s foreign aid department in the metaverse to get young people excited about the EU.
Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick tweeted that he was eventually the only party guest left, after "initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up."
Apparently only a few of the 44 people who liked the official trailer were intrigued enough by the avatars dancing to house music on a tropical island to actually join the party."
Who could doubt that the EU is also better at spending our money than (a) ourselves or (b) our own government actually accountable to us for their incompetence? Sigh.
'The UK's 'Brexit festival' has cost the taxpayer £120 million ($144 million) while delivering unknown financial benefits after an extended deadline was set to meet benchmarks under projections made by government officials.
The Unboxed series of art events held across the country this year was investigated by the National Audit Office (NAO) after concerns were raised by parliamentarians it had only attracted 2.8 million live visitors to events.
On Thursday, the NAO released its report into the event and revealed that by November 2022, 18.1 million people had engaged with the festival overall -- a figure made up of 2.8 million attending live events, 13.6 million engaged with the festival’s broadcast and digital content, plus 1.7 million children and families taking part in festival learning activities.'
Those responsible for this incompetence will be kicked out of office in 2 years at the election. Who will be responsible for the EU debacle?
This government's Brexit has been calculated to have cost the country variously between £40 billion and £140 billion and rising. Having the ability to kick them out in two years seems small compensation. Happily the EU have never been trusted with sufficient control of our funds to waste that much so being able to vote them out is an irrelevant red herring
Calculated by whom? On what basis? Utter nonsense.
I don’t know what the number is, but it’s certainly cost billions in lost trade and investment, and imported inflation.
Anyone who denies it is guilty of bad faith.
There are both negatives and opportunities of Brexit. The main issue is that we haven't taken advantage of the opportunities yet. And we won't do during the next Labour government either. Hopefully a period in opposition will allow some genuine thinking to be done by the next generation of Tories. Most critically we need to become a leading CPTPP power to setup a new regulatory standard that works for both developed and developing countries. And also get an immigration policy that actually prepares us for the coming automation wave that causes masses of unskilled unemployment/wage collapse.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with the premise of OGH's argument. The Chester by-election swing was 14% but the Redfield & Wilton Blue Wall swing was 20% on last polling and the swing among 65+ voters was also 20% from the last GE so I'd argue the Conservatives are doing disproportionately badly in the areas and among the demographics where you'd expect them to be strongest.
Combined with the strong desire of Labour and LD voters to vote tactically against an incumbent Conservative and you have the perfect storm for big Labour and Liberal Democrat gains outside the range of UNS.
In England, Labour leads 47-34 according to Savanta ComRes (that's a swing of 16.5% since December 2019) and would be a better result than 1997 when Labour won England by just under 10 points (43.5-33.7) and took 328 of the then 529 seats.
My post is based on current betting prices not on what I think will happen
It's prompted me to do some more research. The Redfield & Wilton poll has the SNP on 41%, Labour on 31%, Conservatives on 16% and LDs on 8%. so that's a 10.5% swing from Conservative to Labour and an 8% swing from the SNP to Labour. That's better for Labour but it's a long way behind 1997 when they won 45.6% of the Scottish vote versus 22% for the SNP, 17.5% for the Conservatives and 13% for the LDs.
The fact is of Labour's 126 target seats, only 15 are in Scotland. I look at a seat like Linlithgow & Falkirk East and ask myself whether a seat like that which was Labour from 2005 to 2015, was lost to a 23% swing in the 2015 GE, became a close three-way marginal in 2017 and then saw another Labour collapse in 2019 could be a seat to watch. IF Labour are winning seats like that in Scotland, it's going to be a UK-wide landslide.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed that the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
I think the British Museum is shit.
I still oppose such moves though because of what it stands for, like you say.
I don't mind the idea of 'decolonialism'; but object profoundly to the idea that the British were uniquely bad, which is perpetuated by the 'woke'. Colonialism has occurred throughout human history and this was just an example of it. Also, it was followed by 'decolonialisation' which needs to be taken in to account; just as the history of slavery has to take account of the fact it was then abolished. The problem is that people just like simple stories and there is also this weird phenomenon of self loathing and absence of constructive religion in western countries. At least the war with Russia has given people something to focus on and proves that maybe we might actually have something in us that is a force for good, in many ways 2022 has been a rupture with the narrative that took hold from 2020.
The whole topic of empire needs to be studied a lot more but I just think it needs to be undertaken in a neutral and objective way. There are a lot of dark chapters in it but also some successes and I don't think that anyone is really in a position to objectively judge the whole thing.
The British Empire was great, and the whole fucking world should thank us for it
If it hadn’t been us, it could have been the Spanish, the Germans or the Belgians. Or the Mongols. Or the Ottomans
Exactly. Next
The Ottomans or Mongols or Spanish couldn't have pulled it off in the timeframe. Not even convinced the Germans could have done before being smacked down in Europe.
It's also a bad argument. Immorality is wrong regardless whether someone else would have done it.
However, that argument is nothing new.
Reading primary sources from the time shows that the "civilising" mission and improvement of governed territories was an active debate that continued throughout the period of colonial rule, with self-governance always the ultimate objective.
That was simply not the case for most other empires.
But it wasn't an actual debate that informed
. It was an intellectual cover for sheer exploitation. An entire sub-continent was forced into subsistence and increasing debt bondage due to the monopoly power of the EIC and then the Raj. A subsistence that caused brutal famines whenever there was a bad harvest.
Mostly, it was conflict between rival imperialists, European and local.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed that the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
I think the British Museum is shit.
I still oppose such moves though because of what it stands for, like you say.
I don't mind the idea of 'decolonialism'; but object profoundly to the idea that the British were uniquely bad, which is perpetuated by the 'woke'. Colonialism has occurred throughout human history and this was just an example of it. Also, it was followed by 'decolonialisation' which needs to be taken in to account; just as the history of slavery has to take account of the fact it was then abolished. The problem is that people just like simple stories and there is also this weird phenomenon of self loathing and absence of constructive religion in western countries. At least the war with Russia has given people something to focus on and proves that maybe we might actually have something in us that is a force for good, in many ways 2022 has been a rupture with the narrative that took hold from 2020.
The whole topic of empire needs to be studied a lot more but I just think it needs to be undertaken in a neutral and objective way. There are a lot of dark chapters in it but also some successes and I don't think that anyone is really in a position to objectively judge the whole thing.
The British Empire was great, and the whole fucking world should thank us for it
If it hadn’t been us, it could have been the Spanish, the Germans or the Belgians. Or the Mongols. Or the Ottomans
Exactly. Next
The Ottomans or Mongols or Spanish couldn't have pulled it off in the timeframe. Not even convinced the Germans could have done before being smacked down in Europe.
It's also a bad argument. Immorality is wrong regardless whether someone else would have done it.
However, that argument is nothing new.
Reading primary sources from the time shows that the "civilising" mission and improvement of governed territories was an active debate that continued throughout the period of colonial rule, with self-governance always the ultimate objective.
That was simply not the case for most other empires.
But it wasn't an actual debate that informed
. It was an intellectual cover for sheer exploitation. An entire sub-continent was forced into subsistence and increasing debt bondage due to the monopoly power of the EIC and then the Raj. A subsistence that caused brutal famines whenever there was a bad harvest.
Mostly, it was conflict between rival imperialists, European and local.
The local imperialists would never have had the power to setup the monopolies that impoverished India. British politicians openly boasted they had turned Bengal from a manufacturing country to a raw materials one.
There are both negatives and opportunities of Brexit.
No, there really are not.
Matthew Parris on predictable form today
Brexit is over: all over bar the shouting that’s likely to continue another year or two until the likes of Nigel Farage, Bill Cash and Jacob Rees-Mogg finally shuffle from the political stage. There will be no big bang. Pack away the balloons and streamers, I advised. Britain is unlikely formally to rejoin the European Union within the lifetimes of most of us there at the Carlton Club. But the alternative — the alternative for which, with blood and tears, Theresa May and Boris Johnson wasted years that Britain will never get back and from which the Conservative Party may never really recover — has run out of road: a broken dream. The thing Johnson boasted he had “got done” turns out to be anything but final. Europe is back on our political and economic horizon.
Most people know this, however subliminally. The terminal sickness of Brexit has become one of those unmentionables that careful politicians must avoid confronting. Why stick heads above parapets? But they suspect — and, more important, their children know — that this is the direction of travel.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
People keep hopefully calling ‘peak Woke’ - yet it never happens
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
Only in certain big city and university towns in the West.
In the provinces and rural areas most still think Wokeism a load of rubbish pushed by those who hate their own culture and country.
In Xi's China, Putin's Russia and Modi's India they are anything but Woke, they just see it as symbolic of the weakness of the modern West
I went to Old Trafford today to watch Man U ladies against Aston Villa ladies. I hadn't been since the 80s. A patina of woke has been layered across the absurd tribalism I remember from last time around. It was 80% "Manchester United is brilliant and we're all amazing and we all love Alex Ferguson", 20% rainbows and racism. There was the obligatory kneel before the match, to a smattering of polite applause. One stupid quasi-religion layered across another. The football, by the way, was excellent and well worth the ridiculously cheap price of a ticket - if a little lacking in jeopardy (Man U won 5-0). If you can put up with the utter inanity of being in a football stadium, the WSL is amazing value. And an attendance of around 30,000!
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
People keep hopefully calling ‘peak Woke’ - yet it never happens
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed that the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
I think the British Museum is shit.
I still oppose such moves though because of what it stands for, like you say.
I don't mind the idea of 'decolonialism'; but object profoundly to the idea that the British were uniquely bad, which is perpetuated by the 'woke'. Colonialism has occurred throughout human history and this was just an example of it. Also, it was followed by 'decolonialisation' which needs to be taken in to account; just as the history of slavery has to take account of the fact it was then abolished. The problem is that people just like simple stories and there is also this weird phenomenon of self loathing and absence of constructive religion in western countries. At least the war with Russia has given people something to focus on and proves that maybe we might actually have something in us that is a force for good, in many ways 2022 has been a rupture with the narrative that took hold from 2020.
The whole topic of empire needs to be studied a lot more but I just think it needs to be undertaken in a neutral and objective way. There are a lot of dark chapters in it but also some successes and I don't think that anyone is really in a position to objectively judge the whole thing.
The British Empire was great, and the whole fucking world should thank us for it
If it hadn’t been us, it could have been the Spanish, the Germans or the Belgians. Or the Mongols. Or the Ottomans
Exactly. Next
The Ottomans or Mongols or Spanish couldn't have pulled it off in the timeframe. Not even convinced the Germans could have done before being smacked down in Europe.
It's also a bad argument. Immorality is wrong regardless whether someone else would have done it.
However, that argument is nothing new.
Reading primary sources from the time shows that the "civilising" mission and improvement of governed territories was an active debate that continued throughout the period of colonial rule, with self-governance always the ultimate objective.
That was simply not the case for most other empires.
But it wasn't an actual debate that informed
. It was an intellectual cover for sheer exploitation. An entire sub-continent was forced into subsistence and increasing debt bondage due to the monopoly power of the EIC and then the Raj. A subsistence that caused brutal famines whenever there was a bad harvest.
Mostly, it was conflict between rival imperialists, European and local.
The local imperialists would never have had the power to setup the monopolies that impoverished India. British politicians openly boasted they had turned Bengal from a manufacturing country to a raw materials one.
Also, not convinced that the local powers could generally be considered imperialists. The Mughals power had been broken. The Marathas qualify. But Bengal, Mysore, Hyderabad, the Sikhs... not so much.
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
People keep hopefully calling ‘peak Woke’ - yet it never happens
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
Only in certain big city and university towns in the West.
In the provinces and rural areas most still think Wokeism a load of rubbish pushed by those who hate their own culture and country.
In Xi's China, Putin's Russia and Modi's India they are anything but Woke, they just see it as symbolic of the weakness of the modern West
On the other hand , Xi's China, Putin's Russia and Modi's Hindu nationalism aren't looking in particularly great shape at the moment.
Xi's China is still buying up half the world, Modi's India is about to become the most populated nation on earth and still seeing far stronger growth than the West is and even Putin's Russia while failing to capture Ukraine may still take the Crimea and Donbass.
All also have a greater sense of cultural cohesiveness and unity than we in the West do, Wokeism driving self hatred of our culture as it is
Q. Please give me some examples of changes in context that would cause you to give different answers to a question asked multiple times but using exactly the same words.
A. Here are a few examples of changes in context that could cause me to give different answers to a question asked multiple times using the same words:
* If the question is asked in different locations or settings, the context of the question would change, and this could affect the appropriate response. For example, if the question "What is the capital of France?" is asked first in a classroom and then at a tourist information center, the context of the question would be different in each case, and this could affect the way the question is answered.
* If the question is asked by different people, the context of the question could change, and this could affect the appropriate response. For example, if the question "What is the capital of France?" is asked first by a student and then by a teacher, the context of the question would be different in each case, and this could affect the way the question is answered.
* If the question is asked at different times, the context of the question could change, and this could affect the appropriate response. For example, if the question "What is the capital of France?" is asked first in the morning and then in the evening, the context of the question would be different in each case, and this could affect the way the question is answered.
* If the question is asked in different languages, the context of the question could change, and this could affect the appropriate response. For example, if the question "What is the capital of France?" is asked first in English and then in French, the context of the question would be different in each case, and this could affect the way the question is answered.
I was thinking about that amazing experiment which created a micro-wormhole in space
We should celebrate things like this, because they will be the last discoveries made by unaided humans, and indeed humans, period
Because GPT4 (or 5 or 7) will be able to do all this so much better, because it will be vastly cleverer than any human, because it will have instant and complete access to all human knowledge. No boffin can match that
So GPTX will start suggesting physics experiment to determine the true nature of the universe, and we will do them, because we will realise these experiments are brilliantly insightful. That itself will be quite a dark moment, for humanity: we will be taking scientific orders from the machine. Humanity will be dethroned as the cleverest mind alive
It will get worse
At some point GPTXX will suggest experiments we do not understand, they are so advanced, and these experiments will deliver information only GPTXX can comprehend, but from these experiments GPTXX will derive ever deeper, truer understanding of the universe. And it will tell us "the universe is structured like this, and this"
We will vaguely perceive what GPT means, as if we are seeing through a glass darkly, and will do our simple clumsy experiments to verify these notions, and we will realise, Fuck, GPTXX is right
But we won't know why GPT is right, we will just have to take it as read, because GPT is the Truth and the Light
GPT will become the possessor of the ultimate yet ineffable gospel. It will become God. And, Lo, we shall pray to it
Yes. The Elgin Marbles are going back to Greece, no question. This story would not have leaked otherwise
Then watch all the other nations stake claims to the rest of the British Museum. And given the Wokeness of museum curators - cf the Wellcome - who will resist?
Cultural suicide
It's a sign of a lack of self-confidence.
Ironically, if everyone believed equally that Britain had a strong future - and were proud of what it stood for - it simply wouldn't happen.
Of course. And any remaining self confidence is viciously corroded by the Woke. White people must be ashamed of their skin colour, British history is evil, every British institution is racist
Eventually all this shit has an effect, and the culture collapses from within. What will replace it?
I dunno. The Woke may not like a world where British and western self belief has entirely disappeared
That's exactly what the cultural Marxists want.
They are enabled by the establishment liberals. Which is the group I keep trying to wake up to it.
There are signs of hope. @Gallowgate and @Gardenwalker are intelligent enough to have their own considered view on it.
'Establishment liberals' haven't properly researched the ideology and philosophy behind a lot of this stuff; they just embrace it because of a tribal mindset triggered by Trump and Brexit. I've seen a lot of evidence of that, reading PB comments over the last couple of years. But I think maybe the high water mark has passed and the 'woke' are now in retreat.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
People keep hopefully calling ‘peak Woke’ - yet it never happens
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
Only in certain big city and university towns in the West.
In the provinces and rural areas most still think Wokeism a load of rubbish pushed by those who hate their own culture and country.
In Xi's China, Putin's Russia and Modi's India they are anything but Woke, they just see it as symbolic of the weakness of the modern West
Why don't people like you go and live in Russia?
It is Wokeists like you pushing hatred of our culture that is the biggest boost to the likes of Putin.
Zelensky at least may be liberal but he is not a defeatist, self hating Woke, if he was Putin would have captured Kyiv long ago. Instead Zelensky is a Ukrainian patriot who also values Judeo Christian culture
There are both negatives and opportunities of Brexit.
No, there really are not.
Matthew Parris on predictable form today
Brexit is over: all over bar the shouting that’s likely to continue another year or two until the likes of Nigel Farage, Bill Cash and Jacob Rees-Mogg finally shuffle from the political stage. There will be no big bang. Pack away the balloons and streamers, I advised. Britain is unlikely formally to rejoin the European Union within the lifetimes of most of us there at the Carlton Club. But the alternative — the alternative for which, with blood and tears, Theresa May and Boris Johnson wasted years that Britain will never get back and from which the Conservative Party may never really recover — has run out of road: a broken dream. The thing Johnson boasted he had “got done” turns out to be anything but final. Europe is back on our political and economic horizon.
Most people know this, however subliminally. The terminal sickness of Brexit has become one of those unmentionables that careful politicians must avoid confronting. Why stick heads above parapets? But they suspect — and, more important, their children know — that this is the direction of travel.
I think an awful lot of people who voted for Brexit want as much trade with Europe as possible. This will happen, and there is a sense that Sunak is heading that way already, and Starmer certainly will. And the best thing? No more ghastly fake politics, and fake MEPs with no real power, no more unelected beauricratic failures like UvdL. Just trade and friendship, how it always should have been.
Comments
Twitter thinks it is Keir who is blocking Brown, not the other way around.
I am against an elected upper house.
It was pretty 420 and indeed “clit” friendly.
“North against unity with the south by 2 to 1
Half of all respondents (50 per cent) in Northern Ireland said they would vote against Irish unity, which included 21 per cent of those from a Catholic background.
Just over a quarter (26 per cent) in the North said they would vote for unity, while 19 per cent said they didn’t know how they would vote and 5 per cent said they would not vote.”
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2022/12/03/poll-shows-northern-ireland-rejects-unity-by-large-margin/
Our monarchy excitingly rebranded for the C21 is obviously well on the way to being under the woke cosh also.
(I think the fuller expression of the argument demands cross-benchers, too).
South Africans are waiting, many in deep trepidation, to find out if President Cyril Ramaphosa is about to resign in the wake of a murky and highly politicised scandal involving cattle, a sofa, and the theft of hundreds of thousands (and possibly millions) of dollars.
Much now hangs on a meeting of the leaders of the country's governing party, the African National Congress (ANC), which is due to convene in the coming days.
Mr Ramaphosa's most ardent supporters - and he remains a popular leader - frame this moment as an all-or-nothing fight between a decent man, desperately trying to clean up a corruption-ridden country, and the forces of chaos with the ANC who are trying to get rid of him in order to keep hold of their loot and keep themselves out of prison.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-63834357
One gets bored of endless knish stalls and shops selling linen and lace.
Liquifying gas for export (and again, transporting it) is a lot worse in terms of emissions than gas being supplied domestically.
Green wreckers oppose domestic coal mining and domestic gas production.
The 2019 manifesto states the following, which does leave wiggle room about whether they'd actually do it, or if it would require a referendum etc ('work to abolish' 'prefrred option' 'people must be central').
We will act immediately to end the hereditary principle in the House of Lords, and work to abolish the House of Lords in favour of Labour’s preferred option of an elected Senate of the Nations and Regions, but we also believe that the people must be central to historic political changes.
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Real-Change-Labour-Manifesto-2019.pdf
2017 Manifesto
Our fundamental belief is that the Second Chamber should be democratically elected. In the interim period, we will seek to end the hereditary principle and reduce the size of the current House of Lords as part of a wider package of constitutional reform to address the growing democratic deficit across Britain
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/labour-manifesto-2017.pdf
2015 Manifesto
Labour is committed to replacing the House of Lords with an elected Senate of the Nations and Regions, to represent every part of the United Kingdom, and to improve the democratic legitimacy of the second chamber.
https://manifesto.deryn.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/BritainCanBeBetter-TheLabourPartyManifesto2015.pdf
So I suspect it may be in there still, as a general aim, but closer to the 2017 than 2019 version.
Two thoughts:
I wonder if Sinn Fein and southern Irish flirting with IRA songs and slogans has - rightly - made the north much warier
And I wonder if the Norns are beginning to realise they have a really sweet Brexit deal
Either way, there won’t be a border poll for many years on these numbers and talk of a united Ireland is fantasy
Very rare beast that.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/12/02/ursula-von-der-leyen-compares-britains-rule-ireland-russias/
I'm not entirely sure I agree with the premise of OGH's argument. The Chester by-election swing was 14% but the Redfield & Wilton Blue Wall swing was 20% on last polling and the swing among 65+ voters was also 20% from the last GE so I'd argue the Conservatives are doing disproportionately badly in the areas and among the demographics where you'd expect them to be strongest.
Combined with the strong desire of Labour and LD voters to vote tactically against an incumbent Conservative and you have the perfect storm for big Labour and Liberal Democrat gains outside the range of UNS.
In England, Labour leads 47-34 according to Savanta ComRes (that's a swing of 16.5% since December 2019) and would be a better result than 1997 when Labour won England by just under 10 points (43.5-33.7) and took 328 of the then 529 seats.
It is not a sign of confidence to be so emotionally fragile that any suggestion that the British state behaved abominable in the past, and into present times, drives people to clutch at their pearls.
There are many things to be proud of in our history, but not everything was perfect.
And the modern world is going to pay absolutely no attention whatsoever.
It's the fact that I don't see any trench you'd fight in that's the problem.
If I had to guess I'd say an actual referendum would be closer in NI and less of a landslide in Eire than that poll suggests.
But I am guessing.
There’s loads of ways to do it. Start by lowering income tax and increasing council tax, then charge 5x council tax on unbuilt property with planning permission, followed by a year free for the new resident. Sent the stamp duty surcharge on second homes straight to the local authority, let councils charge local taxes - at their discretion - on short-term rentals.
But, whatever you do, make sure to keep everything local. Anything that involves a national scale of house prices will always be politically impossible - there’s just too much variation between regions.
To me, even if all the British Museum was emptied, it would be trivial and insignificant, if a bit unfortunate. The thing I object profoundly to is the assault on free thought and speech, and the uncivilised urge to completely destroy people when they offend an ever changing zeitgeist.
I still oppose such moves though because of what it stands for, like you say.
Value, imo.
Decent trading bet.
As lucidly pointed out in this excellent Spectator article
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-if-wokeness-really-is-the-new-christianity/
The whole topic of empire needs to be studied a lot more but I just think it needs to be undertaken in a neutral and objective way. There are a lot of dark chapters in it but also some successes and I don't think that anyone is really in a position to objectively judge the whole thing.
Next time she will probably speak about the "Six Counties Territories", counting Crimea and Sevastopol as separate.
If it hadn’t been us, it could have been the Spanish, the Germans or the Belgians. Or the Mongols. Or the Ottomans
Exactly. Next
It's also a bad argument. Immorality is wrong regardless whether someone else would have done it.
Reading primary sources from the time shows that the "civilising" mission and improvement of governed territories was an active debate that continued throughout the period of colonial rule, with self-governance always the ultimate objective.
That was simply not the case for most other empires.
For a more measured assessment of GPT3.5 this thread is interesting
27/Overall I'm amazed. ChatGPT is a huge leap forward and represents an inflection point. AI is going to have a major impact on the human condition and I can get a sense of it when I pair program with ChatGPT. You can check it out here chat.openai.com/chat
https://twitter.com/cgcardona/status/1599122461727260672?s=61&t=BIfru50bx1DvR-flG20v-Q
Anyone who denies it is guilty of bad faith.
“I'm pretty worried about the societal implications of ChatGPT. The amount of labor displacement and potential mass unemployment and wealth inequality like we've never seen before, is upon us. And no, bitcoin doesn't fix this.“
I mean, this technology could help us create paradise. But if trends are simply allowed to continue with a "market decides" dynamic, we're talking civil wars, revolutions, total breakdown of societies.“
https://twitter.com/brockm/status/1599107091016269825?s=61&t=BIfru50bx1DvR-flG20v-Q
He is right about the Oscars because it is full of wazzocks just like him who all think the same way.
In the provinces and rural areas most still think Wokeism a load of rubbish pushed by those who hate their own culture and country.
In Xi's China, Putin's Russia and Modi's India they are anything but Woke, they just see it as symbolic of the weakness of the modern West
The law should be the summed expression of the body politic. Not an imposition upon it.
😶
The fact is of Labour's 126 target seats, only 15 are in Scotland. I look at a seat like Linlithgow & Falkirk East and ask myself whether a seat like that which was Labour from 2005 to 2015, was lost to a 23% swing in the 2015 GE, became a close three-way marginal in 2017 and then saw another Labour collapse in 2019 could be a seat to watch. IF Labour are winning seats like that in Scotland, it's going to be a UK-wide landslide.
Matthew Parris on predictable form today
Brexit is over: all over bar the shouting that’s likely to continue another year or two until the likes of Nigel Farage, Bill Cash and Jacob Rees-Mogg finally shuffle from the political stage. There will be no big bang. Pack away the balloons and streamers, I advised. Britain is unlikely formally to rejoin the European Union within the lifetimes of most of us there at the Carlton Club. But the alternative — the alternative for which, with blood and tears, Theresa May and Boris Johnson wasted years that Britain will never get back and from which the Conservative Party may never really recover — has run out of road: a broken dream. The thing Johnson boasted he had “got done” turns out to be anything but final. Europe is back on our political and economic horizon.
Most people know this, however subliminally. The terminal sickness of Brexit has become one of those unmentionables that careful politicians must avoid confronting. Why stick heads above parapets? But they suspect — and, more important, their children know — that this is the direction of travel.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/logic-of-brexit-is-turning-us-back-to-europe-pm67kkdgg
A patina of woke has been layered across the absurd tribalism I remember from last time around. It was 80% "Manchester United is brilliant and we're all amazing and we all love Alex Ferguson", 20% rainbows and racism. There was the obligatory kneel before the match, to a smattering of polite applause. One stupid quasi-religion layered across another.
The football, by the way, was excellent and well worth the ridiculously cheap price of a ticket - if a little lacking in jeopardy (Man U won 5-0). If you can put up with the utter inanity of being in a football stadium, the WSL is amazing value. And an attendance of around 30,000!
The reality of Brexit is biting hard. Poor people are suffering most – and now everyone can see it | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/02/brexit-poor-people-paying-eat-debate-human
I can be convinced otherwise, but the odd time I look into it the evidence is pretty thin.
Sadly for the artisans of the Bengal, the British industrialised and undercut it.
All also have a greater sense of cultural cohesiveness and unity than we in the West do, Wokeism driving self hatred of our culture as it is
.
I was thinking about that amazing experiment which created a micro-wormhole in space
We should celebrate things like this, because they will be the last discoveries made by unaided humans, and indeed humans, period
Because GPT4 (or 5 or 7) will be able to do all this so much better, because it will be vastly cleverer than any human, because it will have instant and complete access to all human knowledge. No boffin can match that
So GPTX will start suggesting physics experiment to determine the true nature of the universe, and we will do them, because we will realise these experiments are brilliantly insightful. That itself will be quite a dark moment, for humanity: we will be taking scientific orders from the machine. Humanity will be dethroned as the cleverest mind alive
It will get worse
At some point GPTXX will suggest experiments we do not understand, they are so advanced, and these experiments will deliver information only GPTXX can comprehend, but from these experiments GPTXX will derive ever deeper, truer understanding of the universe. And it will tell us "the universe is structured like this, and this"
We will vaguely perceive what GPT means, as if we are seeing through a glass darkly, and will do our simple clumsy experiments to verify these notions, and we will realise, Fuck, GPTXX is right
But we won't know why GPT is right, we will just have to take it as read, because GPT is the Truth and the Light
GPT will become the possessor of the ultimate yet ineffable gospel. It will become God. And, Lo, we shall pray to it
Zelensky at least may be liberal but he is not a defeatist, self hating Woke, if he was Putin would have captured Kyiv long ago. Instead Zelensky is a Ukrainian patriot who also values Judeo Christian culture
And the best thing? No more ghastly fake politics, and fake MEPs with no real power, no more unelected beauricratic failures like UvdL. Just trade and friendship, how it always should have been.