The betting money goes on Trump for the WH2024 GOP nomination – politicalbetting.com

System

The betting money goes on Trump for the WH2024 GOP nomination – politicalbetting.com

We have not discussed Trump for some time but he continues to be doing well in WH2024 nomination polling as well as the betting. I’m less convinced. I wonder whether he polls well because as an ex-President he has far higher name recognition but there are a lot of negatives.

Read the full story here

Sunil_Prasannan

First

londonpubman

Top two 👍

RochdalePioneers

Sense of humour from Celtic fans at their linesman today:

https://twitter.com/Celticcurio/status/1624466492761821186?t=sZJChprR0MnUrCfGboyQ4A&s=19

Stuartinromford

Three is the magic number.

And OT, any Republican candidate needs to find an answer to January 6th that bridges those who backed Trump and those who respect democracy. Tricky.

Verulamius

Save Brexit summit.

I think that it was leaked by a rejoiner. They want to highlight the confirmation that Brexit is bad for the economy and the Labour is not being radical enough and cosiing up to the arch enemy the Conservatives.

The alternative would be an arch brexitier as part of the tory wars with the aim of embarasing the brexit realists.

HYUFD

Biden would certainly prefer Trump to DeSantis unless Trump ran as an Independent if DeSantis beat him for the GOP nomination.

Haley is too RINO for most Republicans now, Pence will be a contender too if he wins evangelicals

carnforth

Have we done this?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wwii-era-bomb-explodes-in-england-in-unplanned-detonation/

Benpointer

carnforth said:

Have we done this?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wwii-era-bomb-explodes-in-england-in-unplanned-detonation/

I don't know if we did but... CBS news? Really?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-64609394

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/10/second-world-war-bomb-detonates-unexpectedly-in-great-yarmouth

CarlottaVance

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

Jim_Miller

Prediction: Haley will gain two or three more points after her formal announcement. She will still, of course, be far behind the loser, and the governor flirting with the anti-vaxxers, but that will be enough to give her a little momentum.

Note that a plurality of Republicans want a nominee other than Trump: "Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 49 percent say they prefer someone other than Trump as their nominee in 2024, compared with 44 percent who favor the former president. That too is statistically unchanged from last September."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/05/poll-biden-trump-2024/

(I don't know how important this is to many of you, but Haley is qualified, unlike the two leaders.)

Theuniondivvie

Sam’s looking well.

kle4

Jim_Miller said:

Prediction: Haley will gain two or three more points after her formal announcement. She will still, of course, be far behind the loser, and the governor flirting with the anti-vaxxers, but that will be enough to give her a little momentum.

Note that a plurality of Republicans want a nominee other than Trump: "Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 49 percent say they prefer someone other than Trump as their nominee in 2024, compared with 44 percent who favor the former president. That too is statistically unchanged from last September."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/05/poll-biden-trump-2024/

(I don't know how important this is to many of you, but Haley is qualified, unlike the two leaders.)

As I cannot reasonably judge who might be best on a policy basis for the american people, at least being hopefully not crazy, corrupt or incompetent would be high on my list of qualifiers.

Being a recognised figure putting their name forward even as a no hoper is at least showing a bit more courage than most others.

kle4

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

Doesn't look very dexterous, how will they sample the cocktail sausages and other nibblies I assume will be on hand?

Malmesbury

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

The access to virtually unlimited and *untouchable* resources in the Americas was key.

Even as for the Battle of Britain - there was a pipeline of trained pilots from Canada that Dowding could rely on to replace losses in the medium term. So he could throw in everyone who was immediately available.

Sealion was demented more and more you look at it. A personal favourite - the German Army gave an engineering unit raised (and based) in Bavaria the job of improvising sea going transport capability…. Now, what don’t they have in Bavaria?

Malmesbury

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

For politicians? Looks like adding big pockets into that outfit should be easy….

williamglenn

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

I believe that's an original Billy Connolly design.

LostPassword

But there are a lot of negatives particularly his continued refusal to accept the WH2020 result. He’s the world’s leading example of a bad loser.

Trump's continuing refusal to accept that he lost in 2020, combined with his success in getting most of the GOP to also refuse to accept that defeat, is the only thing that gives him a chance in the 2024 nomination race.

If he accepted his defeat then he wouldn't gain any brownie points for respecting democracy. He'd simply be a loser. This way most of the primary voters she with him that he isn't a loser, let alone a bad loser, but the rightful winner who had the election stolen from him.

It's that victory of Trump against reality, in the minds of GOP primary voters, that makes him the favourite for the nomination.

turbotubbs

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

On tanks, one of the best advantages that the western allies had was the ability to replace knocked out vehicles. A British tank regiment could lose half its tanks in an egagement and be up to strength in days, with replacements and repairs. The Germans simply couldn’t. The German tanks were good, for sure, but the vast majority weren’t Tiger I or Tiger II’s, but we’re panzer IV’s leavened with Panthers. Arguably the Sherman Firefly was not outclassed, and the allies deployed vast numbers of Tank destroyers too.
There is no question that the loss of the air war in the west doomed the Wehrmacht - a complete inability to move in daylight for fear of fighter-bombers crippled attempts to repel D-Day.

We are drawn to the big set pieces for the narrative, but it’s surely true that the war was won in the factories of the USA and across the Atlantic.

Sean_F

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

Get the logistics right, and the battles so often win themselves

FrankBooth

Lots of discussion yesterday about the cost of childcare. But more broadly do we want to be encouraging more use of group daycare for babies and toddlers? Most of what I hear about it suggests it isn't great for kids. Wouldn't it be better to focus on things like housing costs and why parents need to have two incomes?

FrankBooth

Malmesbury said:

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

The access to virtually unlimited and *untouchable* resources in the Americas was key.

Even as for the Battle of Britain - there was a pipeline of trained pilots from Canada that Dowding could rely on to replace losses in the medium term. So he could throw in everyone who was immediately available.

Sealion was demented more and more you look at it. A personal favourite - the German Army gave an engineering unit raised (and based) in Bavaria the job of improvising sea going transport capability…. Now, what don’t they have in Bavaria?

But the invasion of Britain was never a serious idea anyway. Hitler wanted a peace deal with us, no?

JosiasJessop

williamglenn said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

I believe that's an original Billy Connolly design.

Shades of Issey Mityake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btjn6yQV9eo

Yours for $5,500

kle4

Sean_F said:

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

Get the logistics right, and the battles so often win themselves

Get the logistics really right and you won't need a battle at all?

Malmesbury

Benpointer said:

carnforth said:

Have we done this?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wwii-era-bomb-explodes-in-england-in-unplanned-detonation/

I don't know if we did but... CBS news? Really?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-64609394

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/10/second-world-war-bomb-detonates-unexpectedly-in-great-yarmouth

Fiddling with ancient bombs, with probable boobs traps included. Brave people.

kjh

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

I have heard of so many pivotal events as to why we won or the Germans lost the war. Literally dozens of them. I'm guessing none were key individually but were cumulatively.

JosiasJessop

Way off-topic:

One of my favourite twiter feeds is this one, where someone has taken a photo of Cambridge every day since 2010. There are over 4,700 in total.

They give new angles on a city I know well.

https://mobile.twitter.com/acambridgediary

Malmesbury

kle4 said:

Sean_F said:

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

Get the logistics right, and the battles so often win themselves

Get the logistics really right and you won't need a battle at all?

Trident - “We always deliver, day or night, anywhere on the planet. For when you really care about your logistics.”

JosiasJessop

turbotubbs said:

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

On tanks, one of the best advantages that the western allies had was the ability to replace knocked out vehicles. A British tank regiment could lose half its tanks in an egagement and be up to strength in days, with replacements and repairs. The Germans simply couldn’t. The German tanks were good, for sure, but the vast majority weren’t Tiger I or Tiger II’s, but we’re panzer IV’s leavened with Panthers. Arguably the Sherman Firefly was not outclassed, and the allies deployed vast numbers of Tank destroyers too.
There is no question that the loss of the air war in the west doomed the Wehrmacht - a complete inability to move in daylight for fear of fighter-bombers crippled attempts to repel D-Day.

We are drawn to the big set pieces for the narrative, but it’s surely true that the war was won in the factories of the USA and across the Atlantic.

I heard something interesting about this in a recent podcast, which affects the way historians see battles. From memory, in ww2, the Germans were very reluctant to call a tank their equivalent of destroyed (panzerknackered?). If there was a chance it could be rebuilt, it was kept on the books. Hence some German regiments at the end of the war had loads of tanks, but could barely field any.

Whereas the British (and I think US) rules were to take a count of all the tanks available last thing at night. Any that were usable the next day, were operational. Any that could be fixed within a few days were in another category, and ones requiring longer-term work in another. Finally there were the destroyed out ones.

So our tank numbers in the records vary wildly from day to day, with large numbers coming back online when spares come in. I can imagine the German situation caused them significant issues with not knowing how many tanks they had available at any time.

(I hope I got that right!)

SeaShantyIrish2

Battle of the Atlantic was crucial, and it was fought and won in many ways.

Not the least being the Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, United States Navy and other allied naval forces; AND British, American, etc. merchant marine; PLUS the men and women in shipyards up and down the East AND West coasts of the USA who built the Liberty ships and other cargo vessels that broke the back of the wolf packs even before the navies, air forces and code breakers sent most of the U-boats to the bottom of Davy Jones' locker.

Cyclefree

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

Does the poor man not own a mirror?

turbotubbs

Cyclefree said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

Does the poor man not own a mirror?

I’m intrigued as to whether the volume is achieved by padding or inflation.

Malmesbury

JosiasJessop said:

turbotubbs said:

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

On tanks, one of the best advantages that the western allies had was the ability to replace knocked out vehicles. A British tank regiment could lose half its tanks in an egagement and be up to strength in days, with replacements and repairs. The Germans simply couldn’t. The German tanks were good, for sure, but the vast majority weren’t Tiger I or Tiger II’s, but we’re panzer IV’s leavened with Panthers. Arguably the Sherman Firefly was not outclassed, and the allies deployed vast numbers of Tank destroyers too.
There is no question that the loss of the air war in the west doomed the Wehrmacht - a complete inability to move in daylight for fear of fighter-bombers crippled attempts to repel D-Day.

We are drawn to the big set pieces for the narrative, but it’s surely true that the war was won in the factories of the USA and across the Atlantic.

I heard something interesting about this in a recent podcast, which affects the way historians see battles. From memory, in ww2, the Germans were very reluctant to call a tank their equivalent of destroyed (panzerknackered?). If there was a chance it could be rebuilt, it was kept on the books. Hence some German regiments at the end of the war had loads of tanks, but could barely field any.

Whereas the British (and I think US) rules were to take a count of all the tanks available last thing at night. Any that were usable the next day, were operational. Any that could be fixed within a few days were in another category, and ones requiring longer-term work in another. Finally there were the destroyed out ones.

So our tank numbers in the records vary wildly from day to day, with large numbers coming back online when spares come in. I can imagine the German situation caused them significant issues with not knowing how many tanks they had available at any time.

(I hope I got that right!)

Nearly all tank led offensives stopped when they ran out of running tanks. All the way back to Cambrai in WWI. Not knocked out, mainly, but broken down

This was one reason that the first Gulf War startled military analysts - especially Russian. The Americans, through a combination of logistics, integrated repair and plain reliability, had created wholly armoured forces (tanks, APCs etc) that could move around the map as they liked. Plan 1919 made real.

Theuniondivvie

williamglenn said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

I believe that's an original Billy Connolly design.

Please don’t hint that man pee is involved, half the Mail readership may have strictures.
Actually..

Andy_JS

JosiasJessop said:

Way off-topic:

One of my favourite twiter feeds is this one, where someone has taken a photo of Cambridge every day since 2010. There are over 4,700 in total.

They give new angles on a city I know well.

https://mobile.twitter.com/acambridgediary

I visited Cambridge a lot between 1999 and 2004 because my brother was a student there. Thanks for the link.

Sunil_Prasannan

JosiasJessop said:

Way off-topic:

One of my favourite twiter feeds is this one, where someone has taken a photo of Cambridge every day since 2010. There are over 4,700 in total.

They give new angles on a city I know well.

https://mobile.twitter.com/acambridgediary

A bit later than "my" era, I worked at the Biochem department between 2004 and 2007, but interesting none the less. Thanks!

kinabalu

kjh said:

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

I have heard of so many pivotal events as to why we won or the Germans lost the war. Literally dozens of them. I'm guessing none were key individually but were cumulatively.

Yes, it reminds me of - and I am sorry for this - Brexit. It panned out the way it did because of (insert any of 157 things here, my entry is The Tory Party). Or the 08 Bank Crash (for me, Bankers). I like to keep things simple if I can. But WW2 probably has even more options than those 2 complex events.

LostPassword

FrankBooth said:

Malmesbury said:

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

The access to virtually unlimited and *untouchable* resources in the Americas was key.

Even as for the Battle of Britain - there was a pipeline of trained pilots from Canada that Dowding could rely on to replace losses in the medium term. So he could throw in everyone who was immediately available.

Sealion was demented more and more you look at it. A personal favourite - the German Army gave an engineering unit raised (and based) in Bavaria the job of improvising sea going transport capability…. Now, what don’t they have in Bavaria?

But the invasion of Britain was never a serious idea anyway. Hitler wanted a peace deal with us, no?

Perhaps, but on what terms?

Cyclefree

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

kinabalu

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

Maybe easier to list places that don't.

kle4

kinabalu said:

kjh said:

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

I have heard of so many pivotal events as to why we won or the Germans lost the war. Literally dozens of them. I'm guessing none were key individually but were cumulatively.

Yes, it reminds me of - and I am sorry for this - Brexit. It panned out the way it did because of (insert any of 157 things here, my entry is The Tory Party). Or the 08 Bank Crash (for me, Bankers). I like to keep things simple if I can. But WW2 probably has even more options than those 2 complex events.

Pretty sure it was caused by a bus.

Malmesbury

LostPassword said:

FrankBooth said:

Malmesbury said:

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

The access to virtually unlimited and *untouchable* resources in the Americas was key.

Even as for the Battle of Britain - there was a pipeline of trained pilots from Canada that Dowding could rely on to replace losses in the medium term. So he could throw in everyone who was immediately available.

Sealion was demented more and more you look at it. A personal favourite - the German Army gave an engineering unit raised (and based) in Bavaria the job of improvising sea going transport capability…. Now, what don’t they have in Bavaria?

But the invasion of Britain was never a serious idea anyway. Hitler wanted a peace deal with us, no?

Perhaps, but on what terms?

According to various diaries, Hitler was actually fine with the U.K. simply being neutral.

Fine that is, before he later (probably) discovered he wanted more.

DJ41a

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

kinabalu said:

turbotubbs said:

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

Chris said:

Leon said:

Jonathan said:

kle4 said:

Jonathan said:

The other addiction that holds this country back is nostalgia. Left or right, choose your poison, but myths about the sixties or ww2 make us fat and lazy. We are quite content to rest on the laurels of others.

I don't think nostalgia is a peculiarly British problem, but anecdotally it does feel as though we have little sense of what positively want, and so are very conservsative and seek to just revisit old battles and policies, with only tokenistic tweaks otherwise even as we shy away from anything dramatic.

Nostalgia is clearly not unique to Britain, but we are drunk on it. It’s everywhere. Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. Scottish independence is an exercise in nostalgia. Corbyn was an exercise in nostalgia.

You don’t travel much, do you?

Every single serious nation on earth is, by its nature, an exercise in nostalgia

Because it says: We are these people, who live here in this particular place, as we have done for X years, and we do these things, as we have done for generations, and this makes us different to the people next door

That IS a nation. It is nostalgia turned into politics. How else do you define it?

Any every serious nation is absolutely soaked in this stuff. UK, America, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Holland, Mexico - even newer nations like Canada and Oz and South Africa. They are all “drunken exercises in nostalgia”

Perhaps we'd be better off with only silly nations.

In all seriousness I don't think so. A sense of shared identity at a more local level than 'all humanity' may be necessary to mobilise groups to achieve great things. Yes it can often be misused, but that's the peril of identity for you.

I'm very skeptical of there being such a thing as a national character or identity.

I tend to disagree. It won’t be for everyone but there is a group identity. Overlaid on that is your own character. For some people, perhaps like your good self, that overwhelms everything else, so you don’t understand what being English, or Scottish, or Danish means to some.
A bit like me, as a 100% straight male cannot understand how a man can be attracted to another man, but I accept that is no the case for all men.

But a 'nation' is such a large and diverse entity. The differences between individuals within it absolutely dwarf those between its population as a whole and those of other nations. So I don't think it has much meaning to talk about national identity or character. I think it's mainly just a technique to communicate seductive falsehoods. Often harmless but sometimes not.

I don't think I agree with you, at least not completely. A nation is like a family. You don't choose your family, you might love them or hate them, you might much prefer the company of your friends and have way more in common with them, but you still have a history and a kinship with your family that you can't deny or ignore. Sometimes a family becomes toxic and unhealthy, and sometimes nationhood can be twisted too, but in the main it is simply a natural and healthy way for people to organise themselves, just like families are.

If someone belongs to an exploited class and has been exploited all their life - which accounts for a majority of the population - why should they buy into the idea of commonality with the local members of the ruling class? They're not friends. Those on opposite sides of the divide don't treat each other as equals or give a damn about each other or invite the other into their home. Karl Marx was right: the working class have no country. Class hatred is especially strong in Britain - flowing downward in society, not upward. Screw country - it's just a brand. That said, of course culture affects personality. To my taste, some places have much sh*ttier cultures than others. Can't see any good in denying I feel that way.

Almost no one in the “Exploited Class” thinks like that. Nationalism always trumps class.

Your point is? The reigning ideas are the ideas imposed by the reigning class. The day nationalism no longer trumps class, the whole exploitative caboodle explodes - and the working class revolution abolishes class.

Happened once in eastern Ukraine. The Makhnovshchina weren't nationalist in the slightest.

Happened in places in Spain.

Have a look at Rojava too, in the present tense.

"Revolution is the only form of 'war' ... in which ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats". (Rosa Luxemburg.)

What's sad is when nationalist nutters think they're being so alpha, often seeking out all-male environments in which they enjoy showing off to other men.

Alphas are a subcategory of betas and they're just as cucky.

Sigmas are where it's at.

(And absolutely not those of the racist and sexist Nick Krauser kind. They're worse than anyone. Krauser was a neo-Nazi the last I heard. A person who thinks they're "sigma" at the same time they are nationalist, racist, and pro-hierarchy is an idiot.)

Malmesbury

Cyclefree said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

Does the poor man not own a mirror?

Given the shinyness, he owns several poor mirrors

kinabalu

kle4 said:

kinabalu said:

kjh said:

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

I have heard of so many pivotal events as to why we won or the Germans lost the war. Literally dozens of them. I'm guessing none were key individually but were cumulatively.

Yes, it reminds me of - and I am sorry for this - Brexit. It panned out the way it did because of (insert any of 157 things here, my entry is The Tory Party). Or the 08 Bank Crash (for me, Bankers). I like to keep things simple if I can. But WW2 probably has even more options than those 2 complex events.

Pretty sure it was caused by a bus.

WW2 was caused by a bus? - nice original one!

Malmesbury

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

CorrectHorseBattery3

I condemn the appalling disorder in Knowsley last night. The alleged behaviour of some asylum seekers is never an excuse for violence and intimidation. Thank you to
@merseypolice
officers for keeping everyone safe.

https://twitter.com/SuellaBraverman/status/1624450521154129920

Suella Braverman is encouraging violence against human beings. This version of the Tory Party is nasty and cruel and has to go.

Sunil_Prasannan

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

kinabalu said:

kjh said:

CarlottaVance said:

Just finished Phillips P O’Brien’s book “How the war was won”. Interesting read. Argues that the focus on land battles (El Alamein, Kursk etc) misses the point that the materiel destroyed there was not that great in the context of materiel production, what mattered was how materiel production in total was degraded by sea and air power.

So the Nazis didn’t lose the war because of the Soviets on the Eastern Front, but because they lost the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. This meant that the full weight of American production could be brought to bear via both sea and air - and that while the Germans had (much) better tanks it didn’t really matter if they had limited fuel or no air cover. Also makes the point that while the “Battle of Britain” is a great story, its outcome was never in doubt, and Operation Sealion would have been an unmitigated disaster - for the Nazis.

It’s an interesting (if averagely written) read, and ignores “what ifs” like the Nazis taking
Suez, but certainly thought provoking and a move on from the “big battles” historiography of WWII.

I have heard of so many pivotal events as to why we won or the Germans lost the war. Literally dozens of them. I'm guessing none were key individually but were cumulatively.

Yes, it reminds me of - and I am sorry for this - Brexit. It panned out the way it did because of (insert any of 157 things here, my entry is The Tory Party). Or the 08 Bank Crash (for me, Bankers). I like to keep things simple if I can. But WW2 probably has even more options than those 2 complex events.

Pretty sure it was caused by a bus.

WW2 was caused by a bus? - nice original one!

Nationalist Express.

MattW

Evening all. And I'm on topic ish for once.

An impressively brutal and slick advert for Lucas Kunce on Josh Hawley in the MIssouri race.

"Keep on Running".

https://twitter.com/mmpadellan/status/1611402211443068928

kjh

For @NerysHughes who always sees the bright side of life (particularly for the economy and tells us all the boozers are doing so well). I went to my local last night. Car park empty, lights out and a cryptic note on the door apologising to customers. I look on their Facebook page and they have gone into administration.

Sigh.

dixiedean

kjh said:

For @NerysHughes who always sees the bright side of life (particularly for the economy and tells us all the boozers are doing so well). I went to my local last night. Car park empty, lights out and a cryptic note on the door apologising to customers. I look on their Facebook page and they have gone into administration.

Sigh.

Far too pessimistic a take.
One pub closes one prime car park dogging spot springs up.

Sean_F

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

kinabalu said:

turbotubbs said:

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

Chris said:

Leon said:

Jonathan said:

kle4 said:

Jonathan said:

The other addiction that holds this country back is nostalgia. Left or right, choose your poison, but myths about the sixties or ww2 make us fat and lazy. We are quite content to rest on the laurels of others.

I don't think nostalgia is a peculiarly British problem, but anecdotally it does feel as though we have little sense of what positively want, and so are very conservsative and seek to just revisit old battles and policies, with only tokenistic tweaks otherwise even as we shy away from anything dramatic.

Nostalgia is clearly not unique to Britain, but we are drunk on it. It’s everywhere. Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. Scottish independence is an exercise in nostalgia. Corbyn was an exercise in nostalgia.

You don’t travel much, do you?

Every single serious nation on earth is, by its nature, an exercise in nostalgia

Because it says: We are these people, who live here in this particular place, as we have done for X years, and we do these things, as we have done for generations, and this makes us different to the people next door

That IS a nation. It is nostalgia turned into politics. How else do you define it?

Any every serious nation is absolutely soaked in this stuff. UK, America, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Holland, Mexico - even newer nations like Canada and Oz and South Africa. They are all “drunken exercises in nostalgia”

Perhaps we'd be better off with only silly nations.

In all seriousness I don't think so. A sense of shared identity at a more local level than 'all humanity' may be necessary to mobilise groups to achieve great things. Yes it can often be misused, but that's the peril of identity for you.

I'm very skeptical of there being such a thing as a national character or identity.

I tend to disagree. It won’t be for everyone but there is a group identity. Overlaid on that is your own character. For some people, perhaps like your good self, that overwhelms everything else, so you don’t understand what being English, or Scottish, or Danish means to some.
A bit like me, as a 100% straight male cannot understand how a man can be attracted to another man, but I accept that is no the case for all men.

But a 'nation' is such a large and diverse entity. The differences between individuals within it absolutely dwarf those between its population as a whole and those of other nations. So I don't think it has much meaning to talk about national identity or character. I think it's mainly just a technique to communicate seductive falsehoods. Often harmless but sometimes not.

I don't think I agree with you, at least not completely. A nation is like a family. You don't choose your family, you might love them or hate them, you might much prefer the company of your friends and have way more in common with them, but you still have a history and a kinship with your family that you can't deny or ignore. Sometimes a family becomes toxic and unhealthy, and sometimes nationhood can be twisted too, but in the main it is simply a natural and healthy way for people to organise themselves, just like families are.

If someone belongs to an exploited class and has been exploited all their life - which accounts for a majority of the population - why should they buy into the idea of commonality with the local members of the ruling class? They're not friends. Those on opposite sides of the divide don't treat each other as equals or give a damn about each other or invite the other into their home. Karl Marx was right: the working class have no country. Class hatred is especially strong in Britain - flowing downward in society, not upward. Screw country - it's just a brand. That said, of course culture affects personality. To my taste, some places have much sh*ttier cultures than others. Can't see any good in denying I feel that way.

Almost no one in the “Exploited Class” thinks like that. Nationalism always trumps class.

Your point is? The reigning ideas are the ideas imposed by the reigning class. The day nationalism no longer trumps class, the whole exploitative caboodle explodes - and the working class revolution abolishes class.

Happened once in eastern Ukraine. The Makhnovshchina weren't nationalist in the slightest.

Happened in places in Spain.

Have a look at Rojava too, in the present tense.

"Revolution is the only form of 'war' ... in which ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats". (Rosa Luxemburg.)

What's sad is when nationalist nutters think they're being so alpha, often seeking out all-male environments in which they enjoy showing off to other men.

Alphas are a subcategory of betas and they're
just as cucky.

Sigmas are where it's at

(And absolutely not those of the racist and sexist



Nick Krauser kind. They're worse than anyone. Krauser was a neo-Nazi the last I heard. A person who thinks they're "sigma" at the same time they are nationalist, racist, and pro-hierarchy is an idiot.)

My point is that hardly anyone gives a flying fuck about class conflict.

The working class revolution won’t happen because the working class aren’t interested.

Cyclefree

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

Andy_JS

"Consider what happened when David Smerdon, an economist at the University of Queensland, asked the leading chatbot ChatGPT: “What is the most cited economics paper of all time?” ChatGPT said that it was “A Theory of Economic History” by Douglass North and Robert Thomas, published in the Journal of Economic History in 1969 and cited more than 30,000 times since. It added that the article is “considered a classic in the field of economic history”. A good answer, in some ways. In other ways, not a good answer, because the paper does not exist.

Why did ChatGPT invent this article? Smerdon speculates as follows: the most cited economics papers often have “theory” and “economic” in them; if an article starts “a theory of economic . . . ” then “ . . . history” is a likely continuation. Douglass North, Nobel laureate, is a heavily cited economic historian, and he wrote a book with Robert Thomas. In other words, the citation is magnificently plausible. What ChatGPT deals in is not truth; it is plausibility."

https://www.ft.com/content/6c2de6dd-b679-4074-bffa-438d41430c31

Foxy

kjh said:

For @NerysHughes who always sees the bright side of life (particularly for the economy and tells us all the boozers are doing so well). I went to my local last night. Car park empty, lights out and a cryptic note on the door apologising to customers. I look on their Facebook page and they have gone into administration.

Sigh.

My local pub seems the busiest it has been since pre covid. They seem to struggle for kitchen staff but there were plenty of barstaff. Makes me feel old when the barmaid was a primary school classmate of Fox Jr.

algarkirk

Worth a look for those who think tectonic plates need to shift


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/11/revealed-secret-cross-party-summit-held-to-confront-failings-of-brexit

Malmesbury

Foxy said:

kjh said:

For @NerysHughes who always sees the bright side of life (particularly for the economy and tells us all the boozers are doing so well). I went to my local last night. Car park empty, lights out and a cryptic note on the door apologising to customers. I look on their Facebook page and they have gone into administration.

Sigh.

My local pub seems the busiest it has been since pre covid. They seem to struggle for kitchen staff but there were plenty of barstaff. Makes me feel old when the barmaid was a primary school classmate of Fox Jr.

Quite a few pubs are essentially a con, where people put their life savings in and lose them to the big pub companies. When they go bust, another sucker is required.

Malmesbury

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But that would require holding people accountable for the organisations they are running?

Are you suggesting that just because someone gets a job with a guaranteed pension bigger than the Prime Minster’s salary, that they should be… Responsible?!!!?

Razedabode

algarkirk said:

Worth a look for those who think tectonic plates need to shift


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/11/revealed-secret-cross-party-summit-held-to-confront-failings-of-brexit

The fact this is happening is interesting. I’d not be surprised if we see big shifts toward the EU in the future

Foxy

Malmesbury said:

Foxy said:

kjh said:

For @NerysHughes who always sees the bright side of life (particularly for the economy and tells us all the boozers are doing so well). I went to my local last night. Car park empty, lights out and a cryptic note on the door apologising to customers. I look on their Facebook page and they have gone into administration.

Sigh.

My local pub seems the busiest it has been since pre covid. They seem to struggle for kitchen staff but there were plenty of barstaff. Makes me feel old when the barmaid was a primary school classmate of Fox Jr.

Quite a few pubs are essentially a con, where people put their life savings in and lose them to the big pub companies. When they go bust, another sucker is required.

Ours is a tied house for Everards, but no landlord seems to last for more than a few years.

Peter_the_Punter

Malmesbury said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

For politicians? Looks like adding big pockets into that outfit should be easy….

I think it's a Strictly Come Dancing outfit - plenty of ball room.





Where's the cloakroom?

TimS

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

TimS

Razedabode said:

algarkirk said:

Worth a look for those who think tectonic plates need to shift


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/11/revealed-secret-cross-party-summit-held-to-confront-failings-of-brexit

The fact this is happening is interesting. I’d not be surprised if we see big shifts toward the EU in the future

The Brexiteers probably think this is sensible. But Gorbachev thought perestroika was sensible too. Once you breach the dyke the water starts to flood in and you’re powerless to stop it. Rejoin just became un petit peu more likely.

Cyclefree

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But that would require holding people accountable for the organisations they are running?

Are you suggesting that just because someone gets a job with a guaranteed pension bigger than the Prime Minster’s salary, that they should be… Responsible?!!!?

Yes. I am suggesting that. That's what they're bloody paid for - to take responsibility.

Shocking, I realise.

Carnyx

Peter_the_Punter said:

Malmesbury said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

For politicians? Looks like adding big pockets into that outfit should be easy….

I think it's a Strictly Come Dancing outfit - plenty of ball room.





Where's the cloakroom?

Perhaps yes, in another sense. Some folk are channelling Billy Connolly's incontinence pads sketch:

https://twitter.com/TSting18/status/1624509990613446664

DJ41a

On-topic: my finger-to-the-wind hello clouds hello sky method which has several times knocked spreadsheets into a cocked hat says that the betting markets may well be right to have Trump as the favourite for the Republican nomination for USPE2024, and perhaps they should have him as favourite for winning the PE too.

In 2016 Trump had a lot of support in Europe - active support from people who did stuff to help him. Two of the most powerful "troll" armies were on his side. A strong Democratic candidate is needed - one who can take the fight to Trump and really sock it to the b*stard - but where is he or she? If Biden runs for re-election the amount of incumbency bias may turn out to be inappreciably small or even negative, and the Trump brand I fear is well configured for taking on Harris.

The amount of buildup for the Knowsley violence was scary. A Faecesbook rumour of sexual assault, so I am informed. Classy.

Of course there is nothing new about the far-right use of such rumours, but that doesn't make them any the less effective.

They featured in a sizeable proportion of lynchings in the US.

Sooner or later there will be another Koln. One thing to watch for when it happens is the timing. Might happen in Britain.

The betting markets are wrong about Labour though...

Razedabode

TimS said:

Razedabode said:

algarkirk said:

Worth a look for those who think tectonic plates need to shift


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/11/revealed-secret-cross-party-summit-held-to-confront-failings-of-brexit

The fact this is happening is interesting. I’d not be surprised if we see big shifts toward the EU in the future

The Brexiteers probably think this is sensible. But Gorbachev thought perestroika was sensible too. Once you breach the dyke the water starts to flood in and you’re powerless to stop it. Rejoin just became un petit peu more likely.

I reckon so. Demographics probably lean toward it as well - if there’s a conversation of this going on now, we’ll inevitably rejoin. Probably more convinced of it now then I’ve ever been

turbotubbs

TimS said:

Razedabode said:

algarkirk said:

Worth a look for those who think tectonic plates need to shift


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/11/revealed-secret-cross-party-summit-held-to-confront-failings-of-brexit

The fact this is happening is interesting. I’d not be surprised if we see big shifts toward the EU in the future

The Brexiteers probably think this is sensible. But Gorbachev thought perestroika was sensible too. Once you breach the dyke the water starts to flood in and you’re powerless to stop it. Rejoin just became un petit peu more likely.

And if we did rejoin then at least we can say we tried being out and it was a bit poo.

It’s a long way off though. I suspect getting the free trade actually working is the first step.

ydoethur

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But that would require holding people accountable for the organisations they are running?

Are you suggesting that just because someone gets a job with a guaranteed pension bigger than the Prime Minster’s salary, that they should be… Responsible?!!!?

Yes. I am suggesting that. That's what they're bloody paid for - to take responsibility.

Shocking, I realise.

That's outrageous.

You'll be suggesting they should do a competent job next.

And from there, it's only a step to suggesting people should be appointed on merit and not on background or who they're Bessie mates with.

And then the whole structure of government and society will unravel.

Mexicanpete

kjh said:

For @NerysHughes who always sees the bright side of life (particularly for the economy and tells us all the boozers are doing so well). I went to my local last night. Car park empty, lights out and a cryptic note on the door apologising to customers. I look on their Facebook page and they have gone into administration.

Sigh.

Punch Taverns bought out all but a few of the free and what were then brewery tied houses about twenty years ago. It looks like a flawed business model. Many are mothballed for months, open for a year, and then mothballed for months, rinse and repeat.

I'd very much like to blame Brexit and the Conservative Government, but the reality is less complicated. The food is invariably an expensive add water and stir disappointment.

Cyclefree

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

Well, maybe genetics is part, maybe a large part of the reason why men are more likely to be violent. But we don't simply act solely on the basis of our genetic inheritance. We also have choices. We can learn to control our violent urges, as many decent men are able to do.

And just as pretty much all societies have been patriarchal, in very many of those societies over many times there have also been movements to control and channel men's urges and to teach and encourage them to behave well, especially to women.

What puzzles me is that a time when we are supposed to believe in equality and be against bad 'isms, like sexism, it seems to be as bad as ever. We pay lip service to equality but the reality seems to be darker in many ways. There is a glorification of violence, of sexual violence, a view that women fundamentally only exist for the benefit of men and not in their own right that makes it harder than it need be for men to rise above their genetic inheritance.

But if you are right and men are basically wolves then yes we will have to restrict their freedoms to stop them being such a nuisance.

ydoethur

Cyclefree said:

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

Well, maybe genetics is part, maybe a large part of the reason why men are more likely to be violent. But we don't simply act solely on the basis of our genetic inheritance. We also have choices. We can learn to control our violent urges, as many decent men are able to do.

And just as pretty much all societies have been patriarchal, in very many of those societies over many times there have also been movements to control and channel men's urges and to teach and encourage them to behave well, especially to women.

What puzzles me is that a time when we are supposed to believe in equality and be against bad 'isms, like sexism, it seems to be as bad as ever. We pay lip service to equality but the reality seems to be darker in many ways. There is a glorification of violence, of sexual violence, a view that women fundamentally only exist for the benefit of men and not in their own right that makes it harder than it need be for men to rise above their genetic inheritance.

But if you are right and men are basically wolves then yes we will have to restrict their freedoms to stop them being such a nuisance.

Not of all us, please. Those of us who are asexuals are not likely to behave in such a fashion.

Cyclefree

ydoethur said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But that would require holding people accountable for the organisations they are running?

Are you suggesting that just because someone gets a job with a guaranteed pension bigger than the Prime Minster’s salary, that they should be… Responsible?!!!?

Yes. I am suggesting that. That's what they're bloody paid for - to take responsibility.

Shocking, I realise.

That's outrageous.

You'll be suggesting they should do a competent job next.

And from there, it's only a step to suggesting people should be appointed on merit and not on background or who they're Bessie mates with.

And then the whole structure of government and society will unravel.

Yeah - sorry about that. But I don't care - a society run by irresponsible incompetents should unravel.

ydoethur

Cyclefree said:

ydoethur said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But that would require holding people accountable for the organisations they are running?

Are you suggesting that just because someone gets a job with a guaranteed pension bigger than the Prime Minster’s salary, that they should be… Responsible?!!!?

Yes. I am suggesting that. That's what they're bloody paid for - to take responsibility.

Shocking, I realise.

That's outrageous.

You'll be suggesting they should do a competent job next.

And from there, it's only a step to suggesting people should be appointed on merit and not on background or who they're Bessie mates with.

And then the whole structure of government and society will unravel.

Yeah - sorry about that. But I don't care - a society run by irresponsible incompetents should unravel.

I would incredibly sorry if the DfE and their ilk were all forced to resign in favour of people who, y'know, had functioning brains and integrity and a dim knowledge of what they were supposed to be doing. Or the likes of Fred the Shred were driven from banking.

I would be as sorry as I was this morning when Australia were given the most epic shellacking of all time by India.

I was so sorry that tears were running down my face.

Mind you, the hysterical laughter may have had something to do with that.

LostPassword

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

If it were simply a matter if individual people making individual decisions then it would imply a very large proportion of people making very bad decisions. That seems too pessimistic a view.

I think misogyny is so deeply ingrained in our culture that people will often act in a misogynistic way without making a choice to do so. This means that if we can get to the root of this culture, and change it, then we can make a large difference to behavioural outcomes without everyone having to make a conscious decision about every action (which is unrealistic, as we know from cognitive science that most decisions are made using cognitive shortcuts for reasons of speed and efficiency, so we have to tackle the cognitive shortcuts directly, and then it shouldn't take effort for people to choose to behave well).

That's not to say that individuals don't have responsibility for their actions, but I think it's a more accurate understanding of human behaviour and how you might change it.

Cyclefree

ydoethur said:

Cyclefree said:

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

Well, maybe genetics is part, maybe a large part of the reason why men are more likely to be violent. But we don't simply act solely on the basis of our genetic inheritance. We also have choices. We can learn to control our violent urges, as many decent men are able to do.

And just as pretty much all societies have been patriarchal, in very many of those societies over many times there have also been movements to control and channel men's urges and to teach and encourage them to behave well, especially to women.

What puzzles me is that a time when we are supposed to believe in equality and be against bad 'isms, like sexism, it seems to be as bad as ever. We pay lip service to equality but the reality seems to be darker in many ways. There is a glorification of violence, of sexual violence, a view that women fundamentally only exist for the benefit of men and not in their own right that makes it harder than it need be for men to rise above their genetic inheritance.

But if you are right and men are basically wolves then yes we will have to restrict their freedoms to stop them being such a nuisance.

Not of all us, please. Those of us who are asexuals are not likely to behave in such a fashion.

Since you ask nicely .....

I shall tiptoe out of this conversation now before @Leon discovers it .......

kle4

Cyclefree said:

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

What puzzles me is that a time when we are supposed to believe in equality and be against bad 'isms, like sexism, it seems to be as bad as ever. We pay lip service to equality but the reality seems to be darker in many ways.

Perhaps some people, by doing various superficially correct things and saying the right things, contrarily feel empowered to act in improper ways as they surely must be good people. Their sexism cannot be sexism because they'd never do that. Or authorities presume since they have all the right policies and words about it that they don't need to keep a proper eye out for poor behaviour.

DJ41a

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

kinabalu said:

turbotubbs said:

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

Chris said:

Leon said:

Jonathan said:

kle4 said:

Jonathan said:

The other addiction that holds this country back is nostalgia. Left or right, choose your poison, but myths about the sixties or ww2 make us fat and lazy. We are quite content to rest on the laurels of others.

I don't think nostalgia is a peculiarly British problem, but anecdotally it does feel as though we have little sense of what positively want, and so are very conservsative and seek to just revisit old battles and policies, with only tokenistic tweaks otherwise even as we shy away from anything dramatic.

Nostalgia is clearly not unique to Britain, but we are drunk on it. It’s everywhere. Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. Scottish independence is an exercise in nostalgia. Corbyn was an exercise in nostalgia.

You don’t travel much, do you?

Every single serious nation on earth is, by its nature, an exercise in nostalgia

Because it says: We are these people, who live here in this particular place, as we have done for X years, and we do these things, as we have done for generations, and this makes us different to the people next door

That IS a nation. It is nostalgia turned into politics. How else do you define it?

Any every serious nation is absolutely soaked in this stuff. UK, America, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Holland, Mexico - even newer nations like Canada and Oz and South Africa. They are all “drunken exercises in nostalgia”

Perhaps we'd be better off with only silly nations.

In all seriousness I don't think so. A sense of shared identity at a more local level than 'all humanity' may be necessary to mobilise groups to achieve great things. Yes it can often be misused, but that's the peril of identity for you.

I'm very skeptical of there being such a thing as a national character or identity.

I tend to disagree. It won’t be for everyone but there is a group identity. Overlaid on that is your own character. For some people, perhaps like your good self, that overwhelms everything else, so you don’t understand what being English, or Scottish, or Danish means to some.
A bit like me, as a 100% straight male cannot understand how a man can be attracted to another man, but I accept that is no the case for all men.

But a 'nation' is such a large and diverse entity. The differences between individuals within it absolutely dwarf those between its population as a whole and those of other nations. So I don't think it has much meaning to talk about national identity or character. I think it's mainly just a technique to communicate seductive falsehoods. Often harmless but sometimes not.

I don't think I agree with you, at least not completely. A nation is like a family. You don't choose your family, you might love them or hate them, you might much prefer the company of your friends and have way more in common with them, but you still have a history and a kinship with your family that you can't deny or ignore. Sometimes a family becomes toxic and unhealthy, and sometimes nationhood can be twisted too, but in the main it is simply a natural and healthy way for people to organise themselves, just like families are.

If someone belongs to an exploited class and has been exploited all their life - which accounts for a majority of the population - why should they buy into the idea of commonality with the local members of the ruling class? They're not friends. Those on opposite sides of the divide don't treat each other as equals or give a damn about each other or invite the other into their home. Karl Marx was right: the working class have no country. Class hatred is especially strong in Britain - flowing downward in society, not upward. Screw country - it's just a brand. That said, of course culture affects personality. To my taste, some places have much sh*ttier cultures than others. Can't see any good in denying I feel that way.

Almost no one in the “Exploited Class” thinks like that. Nationalism always trumps class.

Your point is? The reigning ideas are the ideas imposed by the reigning class. The day nationalism no longer trumps class, the whole exploitative caboodle explodes - and the working class revolution abolishes class.

Happened once in eastern Ukraine. The Makhnovshchina weren't nationalist in the slightest.

Happened in places in Spain.

Have a look at Rojava too, in the present tense.

"Revolution is the only form of 'war' ... in which ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats". (Rosa Luxemburg.)

What's sad is when nationalist nutters think they're being so alpha, often seeking out all-male environments in which they enjoy showing off to other men.

Alphas are a subcategory of betas and they're
just as cucky.

Sigmas are where it's at

(And absolutely not those of the racist and sexist



Nick Krauser kind. They're worse than anyone. Krauser was a neo-Nazi the last I heard. A person who thinks they're "sigma" at the same time they are nationalist, racist, and pro-hierarchy is an idiot.)

My point is that hardly anyone gives a flying fuck about class conflict.

The working class revolution won’t happen because the working class aren’t interested.

Everything the rulers do as a gang, as a collective, is about class. They know that. You can't have class without class conflict. It's not about the As versus the Bs, chosen one morning at random.

In Britain, the culture in many parts of society is also about class to an exceptional degree, even when in principle it doesn't have to be. Exclusionism is written right the way through British culture as if it were a stick of rock.

Most working class people haven't got a clue how anyone in the ruling class thinks, for the simple reason that they haven't met any. The richest person they ever meet on a one-to-one basis is probably a local GP or dentist (or used to meet, in the case of the former).

TimS

Cyclefree said:

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

Well, maybe genetics is part, maybe a large part of the reason why men are more likely to be violent. But we don't simply act solely on the basis of our genetic inheritance. We also have choices. We can learn to control our violent urges, as many decent men are able to do.

And just as pretty much all societies have been patriarchal, in very many of those societies over many times there have also been movements to control and channel men's urges and to teach and encourage them to behave well, especially to women.

What puzzles me is that a time when we are supposed to believe in equality and be against bad 'isms, like sexism, it seems to be as bad as ever. We pay lip service to equality but the reality seems to be darker in many ways. There is a glorification of violence, of sexual violence, a view that women fundamentally only exist for the benefit of men and not in their own right that makes it harder than it need be for men to rise above their genetic inheritance.

But if you are right and men are basically wolves then yes we will have to restrict their freedoms to stop them being such a nuisance.

You are absolutely right that social pressure has the ability to blunt male instincts: and it has done. I don’t think it’s as bad as ever. What is now considered toxic behaviour was in many eras and societies considered the normal exercise of gender roles.

But there is a residual genetic and/or hormonal echo, which pervades the Met police and other organisations up this day.

What’s the answer? I wonder about a future where, with selective IVF, we become more like lions. Ten women for every man. Women get what they want: to run things and make the important decisions, and to ogle at thick but handsome men. Males get what they want: a life of leisure, the occasional low risk fight with other men, a comically inflated sense of their own importance, no actual responsibilities, and a wide choice of female love interest. They’d probably in that scenario be allowed to mansplain from time to time, because it would be quaint.

It wouldn’t appeal to me. I’d probably go gay or join some new eunuch class. But I could see it working for a lot of people.

But cutting through the sci fi perhaps, in a less obvious way, that is the appropriate direction of travel.

TimS

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

kinabalu said:

turbotubbs said:

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

Chris said:

Leon said:

Jonathan said:

kle4 said:

Jonathan said:

The other addiction that holds this country back is nostalgia. Left or right, choose your poison, but myths about the sixties or ww2 make us fat and lazy. We are quite content to rest on the laurels of others.

I don't think nostalgia is a peculiarly British problem, but anecdotally it does feel as though we have little sense of what positively want, and so are very conservsative and seek to just revisit old battles and policies, with only tokenistic tweaks otherwise even as we shy away from anything dramatic.

Nostalgia is clearly not unique to Britain, but we are drunk on it. It’s everywhere. Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. Scottish independence is an exercise in nostalgia. Corbyn was an exercise in nostalgia.

You don’t travel much, do you?

Every single serious nation on earth is, by its nature, an exercise in nostalgia

Because it says: We are these people, who live here in this particular place, as we have done for X years, and we do these things, as we have done for generations, and this makes us different to the people next door

That IS a nation. It is nostalgia turned into politics. How else do you define it?

Any every serious nation is absolutely soaked in this stuff. UK, America, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Holland, Mexico - even newer nations like Canada and Oz and South Africa. They are all “drunken exercises in nostalgia”

Perhaps we'd be better off with only silly nations.

In all seriousness I don't think so. A sense of shared identity at a more local level than 'all humanity' may be necessary to mobilise groups to achieve great things. Yes it can often be misused, but that's the peril of identity for you.

I'm very skeptical of there being such a thing as a national character or identity.

I tend to disagree. It won’t be for everyone but there is a group identity. Overlaid on that is your own character. For some people, perhaps like your good self, that overwhelms everything else, so you don’t understand what being English, or Scottish, or Danish means to some.
A bit like me, as a 100% straight male cannot understand how a man can be attracted to another man, but I accept that is no the case for all men.

But a 'nation' is such a large and diverse entity. The differences between individuals within it absolutely dwarf those between its population as a whole and those of other nations. So I don't think it has much meaning to talk about national identity or character. I think it's mainly just a technique to communicate seductive falsehoods. Often harmless but sometimes not.

I don't think I agree with you, at least not completely. A nation is like a family. You don't choose your family, you might love them or hate them, you might much prefer the company of your friends and have way more in common with them, but you still have a history and a kinship with your family that you can't deny or ignore. Sometimes a family becomes toxic and unhealthy, and sometimes nationhood can be twisted too, but in the main it is simply a natural and healthy way for people to organise themselves, just like families are.

If someone belongs to an exploited class and has been exploited all their life - which accounts for a majority of the population - why should they buy into the idea of commonality with the local members of the ruling class? They're not friends. Those on opposite sides of the divide don't treat each other as equals or give a damn about each other or invite the other into their home. Karl Marx was right: the working class have no country. Class hatred is especially strong in Britain - flowing downward in society, not upward. Screw country - it's just a brand. That said, of course culture affects personality. To my taste, some places have much sh*ttier cultures than others. Can't see any good in denying I feel that way.

Almost no one in the “Exploited Class” thinks like that. Nationalism always trumps class.

Your point is? The reigning ideas are the ideas imposed by the reigning class. The day nationalism no longer trumps class, the whole exploitative caboodle explodes - and the working class revolution abolishes class.

Happened once in eastern Ukraine. The Makhnovshchina weren't nationalist in the slightest.

Happened in places in Spain.

Have a look at Rojava too, in the present tense.

"Revolution is the only form of 'war' ... in which ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats". (Rosa Luxemburg.)

What's sad is when nationalist nutters think they're being so alpha, often seeking out all-male environments in which they enjoy showing off to other men.

Alphas are a subcategory of betas and they're
just as cucky.

Sigmas are where it's at

(And absolutely not those of the racist and sexist



Nick Krauser kind. They're worse than anyone. Krauser was a neo-Nazi the last I heard. A person who thinks they're "sigma" at the same time they are nationalist, racist, and pro-hierarchy is an idiot.)

My point is that hardly anyone gives a flying fuck about class conflict.

The working class revolution won’t happen because the working class aren’t interested.

Everything the rulers do as a gang, as a collective, is about class. They know that. You can't have class without class conflict. It's not about the As versus the Bs, chosen one morning at random.

In Britain, the culture in many parts of society is also about class to an exceptional degree, even when in principle it doesn't have to be. Exclusionism is written right the way through British culture as if it were a stick of rock.

Most working class people haven't got a clue how anyone in the ruling class thinks, for the simple reason that they haven't met any. The richest person they ever meet on a one-to-one basis is probably a local GP or dentist (or used to meet, in the case of the former).

Those cultural briefings on the British and their class system you got are really quite good. Almost - but not quite - convincing.

sarissa

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

Should have stayed away from the baked beans…

TimS

sarissa said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Sam’s looking well.

Should have stayed away from the baked beans…

I’m enjoying the latest Sam Smith stuff. He’s having fun at the expense of all the people it’s good to have fun at the expense of.

WillG

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

kinabalu said:

turbotubbs said:

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

Chris said:

Leon said:

Jonathan said:

kle4 said:

Jonathan said:

The other addiction that holds this country back is nostalgia. Left or right, choose your poison, but myths about the sixties or ww2 make us fat and lazy. We are quite content to rest on the laurels of others.

I don't think nostalgia is a peculiarly British problem, but anecdotally it does feel as though we have little sense of what positively want, and so are very conservsative and seek to just revisit old battles and policies, with only tokenistic tweaks otherwise even as we shy away from anything dramatic.

Nostalgia is clearly not unique to Britain, but we are drunk on it. It’s everywhere. Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. Scottish independence is an exercise in nostalgia. Corbyn was an exercise in nostalgia.

You don’t travel much, do you?

Every single serious nation on earth is, by its nature, an exercise in nostalgia

Because it says: We are these people, who live here in this particular place, as we have done for X years, and we do these things, as we have done for generations, and this makes us different to the people next door

That IS a nation. It is nostalgia turned into politics. How else do you define it?

Any every serious nation is absolutely soaked in this stuff. UK, America, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Holland, Mexico - even newer nations like Canada and Oz and South Africa. They are all “drunken exercises in nostalgia”

Perhaps we'd be better off with only silly nations.

In all seriousness I don't think so. A sense of shared identity at a more local level than 'all humanity' may be necessary to mobilise groups to achieve great things. Yes it can often be misused, but that's the peril of identity for you.

I'm very skeptical of there being such a thing as a national character or identity.

I tend to disagree. It won’t be for everyone but there is a group identity. Overlaid on that is your own character. For some people, perhaps like your good self, that overwhelms everything else, so you don’t understand what being English, or Scottish, or Danish means to some.
A bit like me, as a 100% straight male cannot understand how a man can be attracted to another man, but I accept that is no the case for all men.

But a 'nation' is such a large and diverse entity. The differences between individuals within it absolutely dwarf those between its population as a whole and those of other nations. So I don't think it has much meaning to talk about national identity or character. I think it's mainly just a technique to communicate seductive falsehoods. Often harmless but sometimes not.

I don't think I agree with you, at least not completely. A nation is like a family. You don't choose your family, you might love them or hate them, you might much prefer the company of your friends and have way more in common with them, but you still have a history and a kinship with your family that you can't deny or ignore. Sometimes a family becomes toxic and unhealthy, and sometimes nationhood can be twisted too, but in the main it is simply a natural and healthy way for people to organise themselves, just like families are.

If someone belongs to an exploited class and has been exploited all their life - which accounts for a majority of the population - why should they buy into the idea of commonality with the local members of the ruling class? They're not friends. Those on opposite sides of the divide don't treat each other as equals or give a damn about each other or invite the other into their home. Karl Marx was right: the working class have no country. Class hatred is especially strong in Britain - flowing downward in society, not upward. Screw country - it's just a brand. That said, of course culture affects personality. To my taste, some places have much sh*ttier cultures than others. Can't see any good in denying I feel that way.

Almost no one in the “Exploited Class” thinks like that. Nationalism always trumps class.

Your point is? The reigning ideas are the ideas imposed by the reigning class. The day nationalism no longer trumps class, the whole exploitative caboodle explodes - and the working class revolution abolishes class.

Happened once in eastern Ukraine. The Makhnovshchina weren't nationalist in the slightest.

Happened in places in Spain.

Have a look at Rojava too, in the present tense.

"Revolution is the only form of 'war' ... in which ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats". (Rosa Luxemburg.)

What's sad is when nationalist nutters think they're being so alpha, often seeking out all-male environments in which they enjoy showing off to other men.

Alphas are a subcategory of betas and they're
just as cucky.

Sigmas are where it's at

(And absolutely not those of the racist and sexist



Nick Krauser kind. They're worse than anyone. Krauser was a neo-Nazi the last I heard. A person who thinks they're "sigma" at the same time they are nationalist, racist, and pro-hierarchy is an idiot.)

My point is that hardly anyone gives a flying fuck about class conflict.

The working class revolution won’t happen because the working class aren’t interested.

Everything the rulers do as a gang, as a collective, is about class. They know that. You can't have class without class conflict. It's not about the As versus the Bs, chosen one morning at random.

In Britain, the culture in many parts of society is also about class to an exceptional degree, even when in principle it doesn't have to be. Exclusionism is written right the way through British culture as if it were a stick of rock.

Most working class people haven't got a clue how anyone in the ruling class thinks, for the simple reason that they haven't met any. The richest person they ever meet on a one-to-one basis is probably a local GP or dentist (or used to meet, in the case of the former).

What mindless drivel, which could only be said by someone with no knowledge of British society. Britain is a country of class intermingling and has been noted as such back to the middle ages. There are pubs in every county where lawyers and plumbers drink together. This isn't like Putin the gollum, who embezzles billions from the Russian poor, and then enjoys it on his secluded estates.

LostPassword

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

Well, maybe genetics is part, maybe a large part of the reason why men are more likely to be violent. But we don't simply act solely on the basis of our genetic inheritance. We also have choices. We can learn to control our violent urges, as many decent men are able to do.

And just as pretty much all societies have been patriarchal, in very many of those societies over many times there have also been movements to control and channel men's urges and to teach and encourage them to behave well, especially to women.

What puzzles me is that a time when we are supposed to believe in equality and be against bad 'isms, like sexism, it seems to be as bad as ever. We pay lip service to equality but the reality seems to be darker in many ways. There is a glorification of violence, of sexual violence, a view that women fundamentally only exist for the benefit of men and not in their own right that makes it harder than it need be for men to rise above their genetic inheritance.

But if you are right and men are basically wolves then yes we will have to restrict their freedoms to stop them being such a nuisance.

You are absolutely right that social pressure has the ability to blunt male instincts: and it has done. I don’t think it’s as bad as ever. What is now considered toxic behaviour was in many eras and societies considered the normal exercise of gender roles.

But there is a residual genetic and/or hormonal echo, which pervades the Met police and other organisations up this day.

What’s the answer? I wonder about a future where, with selective IVF, we become more like lions. Ten women for every man. Women get what they want: to run things and make the important decisions, and to ogle at thick but handsome men. Males get what they want: a life of leisure, the occasional low risk fight with other men, a comically inflated sense of their own importance, no actual responsibilities, and a wide choice of female love interest. They’d probably in that scenario be allowed to mansplain from time to time, because it would be quaint.

It wouldn’t appeal to me. I’d probably go gay or join some new eunuch class. But I could see it working for a lot of people.

But cutting through the sci fi perhaps, in a less obvious way, that is the appropriate direction of travel.

We could be even more like lions, and have fatal contests between adolescent males in order to reduce the numbers of the male population to reach your 10:1 ratio. Anyway, it would seem that the counterproductive part of your scenario is that a shortage of men would reduce the incentives for men to behave well - and this is a key part of the puzzle.

Since male reproduction is in general less likely than female reproduction, then it is women who should be playing the main role in selecting for male traits that are successful and passed on to the next generation. So why haven't women selected for men who behave well and treat them right?

I think the explanation for this is culture, and one of the examples is the fact that women on juries are generally less willing to convict for rape than men. Women are as much part of our misogynistic culture as men, even though they are the principal victims of that culture, and so they help to perpetuate that culture down the generations. I think this means we need to do a couple of things.

Firstly, we need to work out what we can do with early years education to create a new culture for the next generation. Secondly, we should be prepared to take what might seem like exaggerated actions to tackle the problem, actions that would feel like an over-reaction, to shock adult generations in to re-thinking their ingrained culture.

For example, I would consider things like a curfew one day a week for all men. A lower tax rate for women to compensate for the average gender pay gap. Make it compulsory for married couples to take the woman's surname. Some of these could be permanent measures that would largely become redundant as the problem went away, and others could be explicitly time-limited measures while society was forced into reforming itself.

ydoethur

WillG said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

kinabalu said:

turbotubbs said:

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

Chris said:

Leon said:

Jonathan said:

kle4 said:

Jonathan said:

The other addiction that holds this country back is nostalgia. Left or right, choose your poison, but myths about the sixties or ww2 make us fat and lazy. We are quite content to rest on the laurels of others.

I don't think nostalgia is a peculiarly British problem, but anecdotally it does feel as though we have little sense of what positively want, and so are very conservsative and seek to just revisit old battles and policies, with only tokenistic tweaks otherwise even as we shy away from anything dramatic.

Nostalgia is clearly not unique to Britain, but we are drunk on it. It’s everywhere. Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. Scottish independence is an exercise in nostalgia. Corbyn was an exercise in nostalgia.

You don’t travel much, do you?

Every single serious nation on earth is, by its nature, an exercise in nostalgia

Because it says: We are these people, who live here in this particular place, as we have done for X years, and we do these things, as we have done for generations, and this makes us different to the people next door

That IS a nation. It is nostalgia turned into politics. How else do you define it?

Any every serious nation is absolutely soaked in this stuff. UK, America, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Holland, Mexico - even newer nations like Canada and Oz and South Africa. They are all “drunken exercises in nostalgia”

Perhaps we'd be better off with only silly nations.

In all seriousness I don't think so. A sense of shared identity at a more local level than 'all humanity' may be necessary to mobilise groups to achieve great things. Yes it can often be misused, but that's the peril of identity for you.

I'm very skeptical of there being such a thing as a national character or identity.

I tend to disagree. It won’t be for everyone but there is a group identity. Overlaid on that is your own character. For some people, perhaps like your good self, that overwhelms everything else, so you don’t understand what being English, or Scottish, or Danish means to some.
A bit like me, as a 100% straight male cannot understand how a man can be attracted to another man, but I accept that is no the case for all men.

But a 'nation' is such a large and diverse entity. The differences between individuals within it absolutely dwarf those between its population as a whole and those of other nations. So I don't think it has much meaning to talk about national identity or character. I think it's mainly just a technique to communicate seductive falsehoods. Often harmless but sometimes not.

I don't think I agree with you, at least not completely. A nation is like a family. You don't choose your family, you might love them or hate them, you might much prefer the company of your friends and have way more in common with them, but you still have a history and a kinship with your family that you can't deny or ignore. Sometimes a family becomes toxic and unhealthy, and sometimes nationhood can be twisted too, but in the main it is simply a natural and healthy way for people to organise themselves, just like families are.

If someone belongs to an exploited class and has been exploited all their life - which accounts for a majority of the population - why should they buy into the idea of commonality with the local members of the ruling class? They're not friends. Those on opposite sides of the divide don't treat each other as equals or give a damn about each other or invite the other into their home. Karl Marx was right: the working class have no country. Class hatred is especially strong in Britain - flowing downward in society, not upward. Screw country - it's just a brand. That said, of course culture affects personality. To my taste, some places have much sh*ttier cultures than others. Can't see any good in denying I feel that way.

Almost no one in the “Exploited Class” thinks like that. Nationalism always trumps class.

Your point is? The reigning ideas are the ideas imposed by the reigning class. The day nationalism no longer trumps class, the whole exploitative caboodle explodes - and the working class revolution abolishes class.

Happened once in eastern Ukraine. The Makhnovshchina weren't nationalist in the slightest.

Happened in places in Spain.

Have a look at Rojava too, in the present tense.

"Revolution is the only form of 'war' ... in which ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats". (Rosa Luxemburg.)

What's sad is when nationalist nutters think they're being so alpha, often seeking out all-male environments in which they enjoy showing off to other men.

Alphas are a subcategory of betas and they're
just as cucky.

Sigmas are where it's at

(And absolutely not those of the racist and sexist



Nick Krauser kind. They're worse than anyone. Krauser was a neo-Nazi the last I heard. A person who thinks they're "sigma" at the same time they are nationalist, racist, and pro-hierarchy is an idiot.)

My point is that hardly anyone gives a flying fuck about class conflict.

The working class revolution won’t happen because the working class aren’t interested.

Everything the rulers do as a gang, as a collective, is about class. They know that. You can't have class without class conflict. It's not about the As versus the Bs, chosen one morning at random.

In Britain, the culture in many parts of society is also about class to an exceptional degree, even when in principle it doesn't have to be. Exclusionism is written right the way through British culture as if it were a stick of rock.

Most working class people haven't got a clue how anyone in the ruling class thinks, for the simple reason that they haven't met any. The richest person they ever meet on a one-to-one basis is probably a local GP or dentist (or used to meet, in the case of the former).

What mindless drivel, which could only be said by someone with no knowledge of British society. Britain is a country of class intermingling and has been noted as such back to the middle ages. There are pubs in every county where lawyers and plumbers drink together. This isn't like Putin the gollum, who embezzles billions from the Russian poor, and then enjoys it on his secluded estates.

It's not actually wrong. Lots of thick poshos in positions of power and cocking up because mummy was shagging the right man nine months before giving birth.

What it is, is backwards. It's not about working class not understanding the rulers. We understand them very well. They're useless scum floating on the top.

It's rather the ruling class have no idea how normal people think, because they never meet us.

Must give them a hell of a shock if they ever do meet people they rule.

WillG

Cyclefree said:

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

Well, maybe genetics is part, maybe a large part of the reason why men are more likely to be violent. But we don't simply act solely on the basis of our genetic inheritance. We also have choices. We can learn to control our violent urges, as many decent men are able to do.

And just as pretty much all societies have been patriarchal, in very many of those societies over many times there have also been movements to control and channel men's urges and to teach and encourage them to behave well, especially to women.

What puzzles me is that a time when we are supposed to believe in equality and be against bad 'isms, like sexism, it seems to be as bad as ever. We pay lip service to equality but the reality seems to be darker in many ways. There is a glorification of violence, of sexual violence, a view that women fundamentally only exist for the benefit of men and not in their own right that makes it harder than it need be for men to rise above their genetic inheritance.

But if you are right and men are basically wolves then yes we will have to restrict their freedoms to stop them being such a nuisance.

This is just ridiculous group prejudice. The vast majority of men, just like the vast majority of women, are non-violent law abiding citizens. The bell curve is slightly more aggressive than women, due to testosterone levels. That means at the very tail end of aggressiveness there are a lot more men than women due to the nature of statistics. But punishing a whole group due to the bad behaviour of a tiny minority is authoritarian and wrong, whether that is a gender, a racial group or a sexuality.

Malmesbury

Foxy said:

Malmesbury said:

Foxy said:

kjh said:

For @NerysHughes who always sees the bright side of life (particularly for the economy and tells us all the boozers are doing so well). I went to my local last night. Car park empty, lights out and a cryptic note on the door apologising to customers. I look on their Facebook page and they have gone into administration.

Sigh.

My local pub seems the busiest it has been since pre covid. They seem to struggle for kitchen staff but there were plenty of barstaff. Makes me feel old when the barmaid was a primary school classmate of Fox Jr.

Quite a few pubs are essentially a con, where people put their life savings in and lose them to the big pub companies. When they go bust, another sucker is required.

Ours is a tied house for Everards, but no landlord seems to last for more than a few years.

I’ve known a few like that. The money goes through the tills, but the landlord doesn’t keep much.

A chap I vaguely knew quit the city for health reasons. Ran a high end country hotel/coaching inn style place. Wasn’t really intending to run it as a pub - but said he could not believe the difference between what he had to charge (owned the buildings outright) to make a very nice profit vs the tied pubs.

IanB2

Malmesbury said:

Foxy said:

Malmesbury said:

Foxy said:

kjh said:

For @NerysHughes who always sees the bright side of life (particularly for the economy and tells us all the boozers are doing so well). I went to my local last night. Car park empty, lights out and a cryptic note on the door apologising to customers. I look on their Facebook page and they have gone into administration.

Sigh.

My local pub seems the busiest it has been since pre covid. They seem to struggle for kitchen staff but there were plenty of barstaff. Makes me feel old when the barmaid was a primary school classmate of Fox Jr.

Quite a few pubs are essentially a con, where people put their life savings in and lose them to the big pub companies. When they go bust, another sucker is required.

Ours is a tied house for Everards, but no landlord seems to last for more than a few years.

I’ve known a few like that. The money goes through the tills, but the landlord doesn’t keep much.

A chap I vaguely knew quit the city for health reasons. Ran a high end country hotel/coaching inn style place. Wasn’t really intending to run it as a pub - but said he could not believe the difference between what he had to charge (owned the buildings outright) to make a very nice profit vs the tied pubs.

Just like the supermarkets driving down margins for producers, the power of semi-oligarchic big business.

WillG

ydoethur said:

WillG said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

kinabalu said:

turbotubbs said:

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

Chris said:

Leon said:

Jonathan said:

kle4 said:

Jonathan said:

The other addiction that holds this country back is nostalgia. Left or right, choose your poison, but myths about the sixties or ww2 make us fat and lazy. We are quite content to rest on the laurels of others.

I don't think nostalgia is a peculiarly British problem, but anecdotally it does feel as though we have little sense of what positively want, and so are very conservsative and seek to just revisit old battles and policies, with only tokenistic tweaks otherwise even as we shy away from anything dramatic.

Nostalgia is clearly not unique to Britain, but we are drunk on it. It’s everywhere. Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. Scottish independence is an exercise in nostalgia. Corbyn was an exercise in nostalgia.

You don’t travel much, do you?

Every single serious nation on earth is, by its nature, an exercise in nostalgia

Because it says: We are these people, who live here in this particular place, as we have done for X years, and we do these things, as we have done for generations, and this makes us different to the people next door

That IS a nation. It is nostalgia turned into politics. How else do you define it?

Any every serious nation is absolutely soaked in this stuff. UK, America, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Holland, Mexico - even newer nations like Canada and Oz and South Africa. They are all “drunken exercises in nostalgia”

Perhaps we'd be better off with only silly nations.

In all seriousness I don't think so. A sense of shared identity at a more local level than 'all humanity' may be necessary to mobilise groups to achieve great things. Yes it can often be misused, but that's the peril of identity for you.

I'm very skeptical of there being such a thing as a national character or identity.

I tend to disagree. It won’t be for everyone but there is a group identity. Overlaid on that is your own character. For some people, perhaps like your good self, that overwhelms everything else, so you don’t understand what being English, or Scottish, or Danish means to some.
A bit like me, as a 100% straight male cannot understand how a man can be attracted to another man, but I accept that is no the case for all men.

But a 'nation' is such a large and diverse entity. The differences between individuals within it absolutely dwarf those between its population as a whole and those of other nations. So I don't think it has much meaning to talk about national identity or character. I think it's mainly just a technique to communicate seductive falsehoods. Often harmless but sometimes not.

I don't think I agree with you, at least not completely. A nation is like a family. You don't choose your family, you might love them or hate them, you might much prefer the company of your friends and have way more in common with them, but you still have a history and a kinship with your family that you can't deny or ignore. Sometimes a family becomes toxic and unhealthy, and sometimes nationhood can be twisted too, but in the main it is simply a natural and healthy way for people to organise themselves, just like families are.

If someone belongs to an exploited class and has been exploited all their life - which accounts for a majority of the population - why should they buy into the idea of commonality with the local members of the ruling class? They're not friends. Those on opposite sides of the divide don't treat each other as equals or give a damn about each other or invite the other into their home. Karl Marx was right: the working class have no country. Class hatred is especially strong in Britain - flowing downward in society, not upward. Screw country - it's just a brand. That said, of course culture affects personality. To my taste, some places have much sh*ttier cultures than others. Can't see any good in denying I feel that way.

Almost no one in the “Exploited Class” thinks like that. Nationalism always trumps class.

Your point is? The reigning ideas are the ideas imposed by the reigning class. The day nationalism no longer trumps class, the whole exploitative caboodle explodes - and the working class revolution abolishes class.

Happened once in eastern Ukraine. The Makhnovshchina weren't nationalist in the slightest.

Happened in places in Spain.

Have a look at Rojava too, in the present tense.

"Revolution is the only form of 'war' ... in which ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats". (Rosa Luxemburg.)

What's sad is when nationalist nutters think they're being so alpha, often seeking out all-male environments in which they enjoy showing off to other men.

Alphas are a subcategory of betas and they're
just as cucky.

Sigmas are where it's at

(And absolutely not those of the racist and sexist



Nick Krauser kind. They're worse than anyone. Krauser was a neo-Nazi the last I heard. A person who thinks they're "sigma" at the same time they are nationalist, racist, and pro-hierarchy is an idiot.)

My point is that hardly anyone gives a flying fuck about class conflict.

The working class revolution won’t happen because the working class aren’t interested.

Everything the rulers do as a gang, as a collective, is about class. They know that. You can't have class without class conflict. It's not about the As versus the Bs, chosen one morning at random.

In Britain, the culture in many parts of society is also about class to an exceptional degree, even when in principle it doesn't have to be. Exclusionism is written right the way through British culture as if it were a stick of rock.

Most working class people haven't got a clue how anyone in the ruling class thinks, for the simple reason that they haven't met any. The richest person they ever meet on a one-to-one basis is probably a local GP or dentist (or used to meet, in the case of the former).

What mindless drivel, which could only be said by someone with no knowledge of British society. Britain is a country of class intermingling and has been noted as such back to the middle ages. There are pubs in every county where lawyers and plumbers drink together. This isn't like Putin the gollum, who embezzles billions from the Russian poor, and then enjoys it on his secluded estates.

It's not actually wrong. Lots of thick poshos in positions of power and cocking up because mummy was shagging the right man nine months before giving birth.

What it is, is backwards. It's not about working class not understanding the rulers. We understand them very well. They're useless scum floating on the top.

It's rather the ruling class have no idea how normal people think, because they never meet us.

Must give them a hell of a shock if they ever do meet people they rule.

Its nonsense. Lets start by defining terms. What income level by do you mean by "ruling class"? To be a whole class, it must be a reasonable number of people. So lets say its the income brackets of people that become MPs. As an MP, you earn 85k a year. A bit more for junior ministerial positions, so lets say 100k. I don't think most of them have pay cuts to join parliament.

Do you really think people on 100k never mix with those earning 30-40k, the typical salary? People earning 100k go to pubs, go to restaurants, go to village fetes.

TimS

LostPassword said:

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

Well, maybe genetics is part, maybe a large part of the reason why men are more likely to be violent. But we don't simply act solely on the basis of our genetic inheritance. We also have choices. We can learn to control our violent urges, as many decent men are able to do.

And just as pretty much all societies have been patriarchal, in very many of those societies over many times there have also been movements to control and channel men's urges and to teach and encourage them to behave well, especially to women.

What puzzles me is that a time when we are supposed to believe in equality and be against bad 'isms, like sexism, it seems to be as bad as ever. We pay lip service to equality but the reality seems to be darker in many ways. There is a glorification of violence, of sexual violence, a view that women fundamentally only exist for the benefit of men and not in their own right that makes it harder than it need be for men to rise above their genetic inheritance.

But if you are right and men are basically wolves then yes we will have to restrict their freedoms to stop them being such a nuisance.

You are absolutely right that social pressure has the ability to blunt male instincts: and it has done. I don’t think it’s as bad as ever. What is now considered toxic behaviour was in many eras and societies considered the normal exercise of gender roles.

But there is a residual genetic and/or hormonal echo, which pervades the Met police and other organisations up this day.

What’s the answer? I wonder about a future where, with selective IVF, we become more like lions. Ten women for every man. Women get what they want: to run things and make the important decisions, and to ogle at thick but handsome men. Males get what they want: a life of leisure, the occasional low risk fight with other men, a comically inflated sense of their own importance, no actual responsibilities, and a wide choice of female love interest. They’d probably in that scenario be allowed to mansplain from time to time, because it would be quaint.

It wouldn’t appeal to me. I’d probably go gay or join some new eunuch class. But I could see it working for a lot of people.

But cutting through the sci fi perhaps, in a less obvious way, that is the appropriate direction of travel.

We could be even more like lions, and have fatal contests between adolescent males in order to reduce the numbers of the male population to reach your 10:1 ratio. Anyway, it would seem that the counterproductive part of your scenario is that a shortage of men would reduce the incentives for men to behave well - and this is a key part of the puzzle.

Since male reproduction is in general less likely than female reproduction, then it is women who should be playing the main role in selecting for male traits that are successful and passed on to the next generation. So why haven't women selected for men who behave well and treat them right?

I think the explanation for this is culture, and one of the examples is the fact that women on juries are generally less willing to convict for rape than men. Women are as much part of our misogynistic culture as men, even though they are the principal victims of that culture, and so they help to perpetuate that culture down the generations. I think this means we need to do a couple of things.

Firstly, we need to work out what we can do with early years education to create a new culture for the next generation. Secondly, we should be prepared to take what might seem like exaggerated actions to tackle the problem, actions that would feel like an over-reaction, to shock adult generations in to re-thinking their ingrained culture.

For example, I would consider things like a curfew one day a week for all men. A lower tax rate for women to compensate for the average gender pay gap. Make it compulsory for married couples to take the woman's surname. Some of these could be permanent measures that would largely become redundant as the problem went away, and others could be explicitly time-limited measures while society was forced into reforming itself.

I mean, putting aside the sci fi (which would I think make for a very good dystopian novel), realistically the right things to do are fairly prosaic. Do the boring stuff more, better and with greater energy.

Educate better, from early years onwards. Overhaul recruitment and training for the police (and in some cases dismantle entire forces and rebuild them), reform the court process and sentencing. Properly fund social services.

DJ41a

Alaska UFO news:report from CNN:

"F-35 fighter jets were sent up to investigate after the object was first detected on Thursday, according to a US official. Kirby told reporters that the first fly-by of US fighter aircraft happened Thursday night, and the second happened Friday morning. Both brought back 'limited' information about the object.

But the pilots later gave differing reports of what they observed, the source briefed on the intelligence said.

Some pilots said the object 'interfered with their sensors' on the planes, but not all pilots reported experiencing that.

Some pilots also claimed to have seen no identifiable propulsion on the object, and could not explain how it was staying in the air, despite the object cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet.

The conflicting eyewitness accounts are partly why the Pentagon has been unable to fully explain what the object is, the source briefed on the matter said."

Aaannnddd...

there's another unidentified craft in the skies, this time above northern Canada: CTV News:

"The North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad) [a combined USA-Canadian command] says it is monitoring a high-altitude airborne object flying over Northern Canada."

kle4

ydoethur said:

WillG said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

kinabalu said:

turbotubbs said:

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

Chris said:

Leon said:

Jonathan said:

kle4 said:

Jonathan said:

The other addiction that holds this country back is nostalgia. Left or right, choose your poison, but myths about the sixties or ww2 make us fat and lazy. We are quite content to rest on the laurels of others.

I don't think nostalgia is a peculiarly British problem, but anecdotally it does feel as though we have little sense of what positively want, and so are very conservsative and seek to just revisit old battles and policies, with only tokenistic tweaks otherwise even as we shy away from anything dramatic.

Nostalgia is clearly not unique to Britain, but we are drunk on it. It’s everywhere. Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. Scottish independence is an exercise in nostalgia. Corbyn was an exercise in nostalgia.

You don’t travel much, do you?

Every single serious nation on earth is, by its nature, an exercise in nostalgia

Because it says: We are these people, who live here in this particular place, as we have done for X years, and we do these things, as we have done for generations, and this makes us different to the people next door

That IS a nation. It is nostalgia turned into politics. How else do you define it?

Any every serious nation is absolutely soaked in this stuff. UK, America, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Holland, Mexico - even newer nations like Canada and Oz and South Africa. They are all “drunken exercises in nostalgia”

Perhaps we'd be better off with only silly nations.

In all seriousness I don't think so. A sense of shared identity at a more local level than 'all humanity' may be necessary to mobilise groups to achieve great things. Yes it can often be misused, but that's the peril of identity for you.

I'm very skeptical of there being such a thing as a national character or identity.

I tend to disagree. It won’t be for everyone but there is a group identity. Overlaid on that is your own character. For some people, perhaps like your good self, that overwhelms everything else, so you don’t understand what being English, or Scottish, or Danish means to some.
A bit like me, as a 100% straight male cannot understand how a man can be attracted to another man, but I accept that is no the case for all men.

But a 'nation' is such a large and diverse entity. The differences between individuals within it absolutely dwarf those between its population as a whole and those of other nations. So I don't think it has much meaning to talk about national identity or character. I think it's mainly just a technique to communicate seductive falsehoods. Often harmless but sometimes not.

I don't think I agree with you, at least not completely. A nation is like a family. You don't choose your family, you might love them or hate them, you might much prefer the company of your friends and have way more in common with them, but you still have a history and a kinship with your family that you can't deny or ignore. Sometimes a family becomes toxic and unhealthy, and sometimes nationhood can be twisted too, but in the main it is simply a natural and healthy way for people to organise themselves, just like families are.

If someone belongs to an exploited class and has been exploited all their life - which accounts for a majority of the population - why should they buy into the idea of commonality with the local members of the ruling class? They're not friends. Those on opposite sides of the divide don't treat each other as equals or give a damn about each other or invite the other into their home. Karl Marx was right: the working class have no country. Class hatred is especially strong in Britain - flowing downward in society, not upward. Screw country - it's just a brand. That said, of course culture affects personality. To my taste, some places have much sh*ttier cultures than others. Can't see any good in denying I feel that way.

Almost no one in the “Exploited Class” thinks like that. Nationalism always trumps class.

Your point is? The reigning ideas are the ideas imposed by the reigning class. The day nationalism no longer trumps class, the whole exploitative caboodle explodes - and the working class revolution abolishes class.

Happened once in eastern Ukraine. The Makhnovshchina weren't nationalist in the slightest.

Happened in places in Spain.

Have a look at Rojava too, in the present tense.

"Revolution is the only form of 'war' ... in which ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats". (Rosa Luxemburg.)

What's sad is when nationalist nutters think they're being so alpha, often seeking out all-male environments in which they enjoy showing off to other men.

Alphas are a subcategory of betas and they're
just as cucky.

Sigmas are where it's at

(And absolutely not those of the racist and sexist



Nick Krauser kind. They're worse than anyone. Krauser was a neo-Nazi the last I heard. A person who thinks they're "sigma" at the same time they are nationalist, racist, and pro-hierarchy is an idiot.)

My point is that hardly anyone gives a flying fuck about class conflict.

The working class revolution won’t happen because the working class aren’t interested.

Everything the rulers do as a gang, as a collective, is about class. They know that. You can't have class without class conflict. It's not about the As versus the Bs, chosen one morning at random.

In Britain, the culture in many parts of society is also about class to an exceptional degree, even when in principle it doesn't have to be. Exclusionism is written right the way through British culture as if it were a stick of rock.

Most working class people haven't got a clue how anyone in the ruling class thinks, for the simple reason that they haven't met any. The richest person they ever meet on a one-to-one basis is probably a local GP or dentist (or used to meet, in the case of the former).

What mindless drivel, which could only be said by someone with no knowledge of British society. Britain is a country of class intermingling and has been noted as such back to the middle ages. There are pubs in every county where lawyers and plumbers drink together. This isn't like Putin the gollum, who embezzles billions from the Russian poor, and then enjoys it on his secluded estates.

It's not actually wrong. Lots of thick poshos in positions of power and cocking up because mummy was shagging the right man nine months before giving birth.

What it is, is backwards. It's not about working class not understanding the rulers. We understand them very well. They're useless scum floating on the top.

It's rather the ruling class have no idea how normal people think, because they never meet us.

Must give them a hell of a shock if they ever do meet people they rule.

Don't they employ people expressly to prevent that?

ydoethur

WillG said:

ydoethur said:

WillG said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

kinabalu said:

turbotubbs said:

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

Chris said:

Leon said:

Jonathan said:

kle4 said:

Jonathan said:

The other addiction that holds this country back is nostalgia. Left or right, choose your poison, but myths about the sixties or ww2 make us fat and lazy. We are quite content to rest on the laurels of others.

I don't think nostalgia is a peculiarly British problem, but anecdotally it does feel as though we have little sense of what positively want, and so are very conservsative and seek to just revisit old battles and policies, with only tokenistic tweaks otherwise even as we shy away from anything dramatic.

Nostalgia is clearly not unique to Britain, but we are drunk on it. It’s everywhere. Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. Scottish independence is an exercise in nostalgia. Corbyn was an exercise in nostalgia.

You don’t travel much, do you?

Every single serious nation on earth is, by its nature, an exercise in nostalgia

Because it says: We are these people, who live here in this particular place, as we have done for X years, and we do these things, as we have done for generations, and this makes us different to the people next door

That IS a nation. It is nostalgia turned into politics. How else do you define it?

Any every serious nation is absolutely soaked in this stuff. UK, America, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Holland, Mexico - even newer nations like Canada and Oz and South Africa. They are all “drunken exercises in nostalgia”

Perhaps we'd be better off with only silly nations.

In all seriousness I don't think so. A sense of shared identity at a more local level than 'all humanity' may be necessary to mobilise groups to achieve great things. Yes it can often be misused, but that's the peril of identity for you.

I'm very skeptical of there being such a thing as a national character or identity.

I tend to disagree. It won’t be for everyone but there is a group identity. Overlaid on that is your own character. For some people, perhaps like your good self, that overwhelms everything else, so you don’t understand what being English, or Scottish, or Danish means to some.
A bit like me, as a 100% straight male cannot understand how a man can be attracted to another man, but I accept that is no the case for all men.

But a 'nation' is such a large and diverse entity. The differences between individuals within it absolutely dwarf those between its population as a whole and those of other nations. So I don't think it has much meaning to talk about national identity or character. I think it's mainly just a technique to communicate seductive falsehoods. Often harmless but sometimes not.

I don't think I agree with you, at least not completely. A nation is like a family. You don't choose your family, you might love them or hate them, you might much prefer the company of your friends and have way more in common with them, but you still have a history and a kinship with your family that you can't deny or ignore. Sometimes a family becomes toxic and unhealthy, and sometimes nationhood can be twisted too, but in the main it is simply a natural and healthy way for people to organise themselves, just like families are.

If someone belongs to an exploited class and has been exploited all their life - which accounts for a majority of the population - why should they buy into the idea of commonality with the local members of the ruling class? They're not friends. Those on opposite sides of the divide don't treat each other as equals or give a damn about each other or invite the other into their home. Karl Marx was right: the working class have no country. Class hatred is especially strong in Britain - flowing downward in society, not upward. Screw country - it's just a brand. That said, of course culture affects personality. To my taste, some places have much sh*ttier cultures than others. Can't see any good in denying I feel that way.

Almost no one in the “Exploited Class” thinks like that. Nationalism always trumps class.

Your point is? The reigning ideas are the ideas imposed by the reigning class. The day nationalism no longer trumps class, the whole exploitative caboodle explodes - and the working class revolution abolishes class.

Happened once in eastern Ukraine. The Makhnovshchina weren't nationalist in the slightest.

Happened in places in Spain.

Have a look at Rojava too, in the present tense.

"Revolution is the only form of 'war' ... in which ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats". (Rosa Luxemburg.)

What's sad is when nationalist nutters think they're being so alpha, often seeking out all-male environments in which they enjoy showing off to other men.

Alphas are a subcategory of betas and they're
just as cucky.

Sigmas are where it's at

(And absolutely not those of the racist and sexist



Nick Krauser kind. They're worse than anyone. Krauser was a neo-Nazi the last I heard. A person who thinks they're "sigma" at the same time they are nationalist, racist, and pro-hierarchy is an idiot.)

My point is that hardly anyone gives a flying fuck about class conflict.

The working class revolution won’t happen because the working class aren’t interested.

Everything the rulers do as a gang, as a collective, is about class. They know that. You can't have class without class conflict. It's not about the As versus the Bs, chosen one morning at random.

In Britain, the culture in many parts of society is also about class to an exceptional degree, even when in principle it doesn't have to be. Exclusionism is written right the way through British culture as if it were a stick of rock.

Most working class people haven't got a clue how anyone in the ruling class thinks, for the simple reason that they haven't met any. The richest person they ever meet on a one-to-one basis is probably a local GP or dentist (or used to meet, in the case of the former).

What mindless drivel, which could only be said by someone with no knowledge of British society. Britain is a country of class intermingling and has been noted as such back to the middle ages. There are pubs in every county where lawyers and plumbers drink together. This isn't like Putin the gollum, who embezzles billions from the Russian poor, and then enjoys it on his secluded estates.

It's not actually wrong. Lots of thick poshos in positions of power and cocking up because mummy was shagging the right man nine months before giving birth.

What it is, is backwards. It's not about working class not understanding the rulers. We understand them very well. They're useless scum floating on the top.

It's rather the ruling class have no idea how normal people think, because they never meet us.

Must give them a hell of a shock if they ever do meet people they rule.

Its nonsense. Lets start by defining terms. What income level by do you mean by "ruling class"? To be a whole class, it must be a reasonable number of people. So lets say its the income brackets of people that become MPs. As an MP, you earn 85k a year. A bit more for junior ministerial positions, so lets say 100k. I don't think most of them have pay cuts to join parliament.

Do you really think people on 100k never mix with those earning 30-40k, the typical salary? People earning 100k go to pubs, go to restaurants, go to village fetes.

I don't mean income. I mean those who make decisions. Some are actually on quite low salaries. But most of them seem to be there despite their ineptitude rather than because of their talent.

If you think that, for example, Jacob Rees-Mogg got into Parliament because of his intellect and high character, or Amanda Spielman has had any of her last three jobs on merit I have a bridge to sell you.

Malmesbury

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But that would require holding people accountable for the organisations they are running?

Are you suggesting that just because someone gets a job with a guaranteed pension bigger than the Prime Minster’s salary, that they should be… Responsible?!!!?

Yes. I am suggesting that. That's what they're bloody paid for - to take responsibility.

Shocking, I realise.

But but… we are talking about people who rose on the shear merit of their Mummy having been to university with someone who ended up in a good spot in the charitable sector. They rose through their own efforts to join the New Upper 10,000.

Responsibility suggests that they are one of the Head Count - what is the point of all that joining the right societies at uni, doing all the Common Purpose courses without falling asleep, all the right charity events …. If not to reach the Olympian Plains. The Valhalla, where after a disaster, the next morning Our Heros and Heroines awake refreshed and unscratched?

ydoethur

kle4 said:

ydoethur said:

WillG said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

kinabalu said:

turbotubbs said:

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

Chris said:

Leon said:

Jonathan said:

kle4 said:

Jonathan said:

The other addiction that holds this country back is nostalgia. Left or right, choose your poison, but myths about the sixties or ww2 make us fat and lazy. We are quite content to rest on the laurels of others.

I don't think nostalgia is a peculiarly British problem, but anecdotally it does feel as though we have little sense of what positively want, and so are very conservsative and seek to just revisit old battles and policies, with only tokenistic tweaks otherwise even as we shy away from anything dramatic.

Nostalgia is clearly not unique to Britain, but we are drunk on it. It’s everywhere. Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. Scottish independence is an exercise in nostalgia. Corbyn was an exercise in nostalgia.

You don’t travel much, do you?

Every single serious nation on earth is, by its nature, an exercise in nostalgia

Because it says: We are these people, who live here in this particular place, as we have done for X years, and we do these things, as we have done for generations, and this makes us different to the people next door

That IS a nation. It is nostalgia turned into politics. How else do you define it?

Any every serious nation is absolutely soaked in this stuff. UK, America, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Holland, Mexico - even newer nations like Canada and Oz and South Africa. They are all “drunken exercises in nostalgia”

Perhaps we'd be better off with only silly nations.

In all seriousness I don't think so. A sense of shared identity at a more local level than 'all humanity' may be necessary to mobilise groups to achieve great things. Yes it can often be misused, but that's the peril of identity for you.

I'm very skeptical of there being such a thing as a national character or identity.

I tend to disagree. It won’t be for everyone but there is a group identity. Overlaid on that is your own character. For some people, perhaps like your good self, that overwhelms everything else, so you don’t understand what being English, or Scottish, or Danish means to some.
A bit like me, as a 100% straight male cannot understand how a man can be attracted to another man, but I accept that is no the case for all men.

But a 'nation' is such a large and diverse entity. The differences between individuals within it absolutely dwarf those between its population as a whole and those of other nations. So I don't think it has much meaning to talk about national identity or character. I think it's mainly just a technique to communicate seductive falsehoods. Often harmless but sometimes not.

I don't think I agree with you, at least not completely. A nation is like a family. You don't choose your family, you might love them or hate them, you might much prefer the company of your friends and have way more in common with them, but you still have a history and a kinship with your family that you can't deny or ignore. Sometimes a family becomes toxic and unhealthy, and sometimes nationhood can be twisted too, but in the main it is simply a natural and healthy way for people to organise themselves, just like families are.

If someone belongs to an exploited class and has been exploited all their life - which accounts for a majority of the population - why should they buy into the idea of commonality with the local members of the ruling class? They're not friends. Those on opposite sides of the divide don't treat each other as equals or give a damn about each other or invite the other into their home. Karl Marx was right: the working class have no country. Class hatred is especially strong in Britain - flowing downward in society, not upward. Screw country - it's just a brand. That said, of course culture affects personality. To my taste, some places have much sh*ttier cultures than others. Can't see any good in denying I feel that way.

Almost no one in the “Exploited Class” thinks like that. Nationalism always trumps class.

Your point is? The reigning ideas are the ideas imposed by the reigning class. The day nationalism no longer trumps class, the whole exploitative caboodle explodes - and the working class revolution abolishes class.

Happened once in eastern Ukraine. The Makhnovshchina weren't nationalist in the slightest.

Happened in places in Spain.

Have a look at Rojava too, in the present tense.

"Revolution is the only form of 'war' ... in which ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats". (Rosa Luxemburg.)

What's sad is when nationalist nutters think they're being so alpha, often seeking out all-male environments in which they enjoy showing off to other men.

Alphas are a subcategory of betas and they're
just as cucky.

Sigmas are where it's at

(And absolutely not those of the racist and sexist



Nick Krauser kind. They're worse than anyone. Krauser was a neo-Nazi the last I heard. A person who thinks they're "sigma" at the same time they are nationalist, racist, and pro-hierarchy is an idiot.)

My point is that hardly anyone gives a flying fuck about class conflict.

The working class revolution won’t happen because the working class aren’t interested.

Everything the rulers do as a gang, as a collective, is about class. They know that. You can't have class without class conflict. It's not about the As versus the Bs, chosen one morning at random.

In Britain, the culture in many parts of society is also about class to an exceptional degree, even when in principle it doesn't have to be. Exclusionism is written right the way through British culture as if it were a stick of rock.

Most working class people haven't got a clue how anyone in the ruling class thinks, for the simple reason that they haven't met any. The richest person they ever meet on a one-to-one basis is probably a local GP or dentist (or used to meet, in the case of the former).

What mindless drivel, which could only be said by someone with no knowledge of British society. Britain is a country of class intermingling and has been noted as such back to the middle ages. There are pubs in every county where lawyers and plumbers drink together. This isn't like Putin the gollum, who embezzles billions from the Russian poor, and then enjoys it on his secluded estates.

It's not actually wrong. Lots of thick poshos in positions of power and cocking up because mummy was shagging the right man nine months before giving birth.

What it is, is backwards. It's not about working class not understanding the rulers. We understand them very well. They're useless scum floating on the top.

It's rather the ruling class have no idea how normal people think, because they never meet us.

Must give them a hell of a shock if they ever do meet people they rule.

Don't they employ people expressly to prevent that?

One did. And it worked for a time. Chauffeur so good.

IanB2

DJ41a said:

Alaska UFO news:report from CNN:

"F-35 fighter jets were sent up to investigate after the object was first detected on Thursday, according to a US official. Kirby told reporters that the first fly-by of US fighter aircraft happened Thursday night, and the second happened Friday morning. Both brought back 'limited' information about the object.

But the pilots later gave differing reports of what they observed, the source briefed on the intelligence said.

Some pilots said the object 'interfered with their sensors' on the planes, but not all pilots reported experiencing that.

Some pilots also claimed to have seen no identifiable propulsion on the object, and could not explain how it was staying in the air, despite the object cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet.

The conflicting eyewitness accounts are partly why the Pentagon has been unable to fully explain what the object is, the source briefed on the matter said."

Aaannnddd...

there's another unidentified craft in the skies, this time above northern Canada: CTV News:

"The North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad) [a combined USA-Canadian command] says it is monitoring a high-altitude airborne object flying over Northern Canada."

“did not appear to be manned” doesn’t sound quite certain enough given that they went and shot it down?

Sean_F

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks
departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal
responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

Contrary to the fantasies of incels, patriarchal societies are often governed by very strict codes of conduct that rule male behaviour towards women.

If we lived in an Islamic society, and did things like sending dick pics to women, flashing at them at work, making endless lewd comments, telling them how much we’d like to rape them, posting online fantasies about torture and rape, we would get into extremely hot water.

A young man almost certainly finds it easier to have consequence-free sex with young women in modern Western societies than at any point in history.

But there is something nasty in human nature that enjoys cruelty and degradation.

I think we’ve dropped one set of ethics that governed male behaviour towards women (the pre 1960’s) without putting another in their place. Added to which is a dreadful corporate and public sector culture that holds no one to account for their actions.

TimS

WillG said:

Cyclefree said:

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

Well, maybe genetics is part, maybe a large part of the reason why men are more likely to be violent. But we don't simply act solely on the basis of our genetic inheritance. We also have choices. We can learn to control our violent urges, as many decent men are able to do.

And just as pretty much all societies have been patriarchal, in very many of those societies over many times there have also been movements to control and channel men's urges and to teach and encourage them to behave well, especially to women.

What puzzles me is that a time when we are supposed to believe in equality and be against bad 'isms, like sexism, it seems to be as bad as ever. We pay lip service to equality but the reality seems to be darker in many ways. There is a glorification of violence, of sexual violence, a view that women fundamentally only exist for the benefit of men and not in their own right that makes it harder than it need be for men to rise above their genetic inheritance.

But if you are right and men are basically wolves then yes we will have to restrict their freedoms to stop them being such a nuisance.

This is just ridiculous group prejudice. The vast majority of men, just like the vast majority of women, are non-violent law abiding citizens. The bell curve is slightly more aggressive than women, due to testosterone levels. That means at the very tail end of aggressiveness there are a lot more men than women due to the nature of statistics. But punishing a whole group due to the bad behaviour of a tiny minority is authoritarian and wrong, whether that is a gender, a racial group or a sexuality.

The bell curve point is interesting - not something I’d visualised before.

Group responsibility is an interesting phenomenon. It has its good and bad points.

When the latest story of a missing woman hits the news I have that familiar fear: please let it not be yet another predatory man doing the all too predictable thing. I imagine it’s not a dissimilar feeling to that Muslims have when the latest bomb hits the news. Please let it not be islamist terrorism. In both cases the question is the same: why don’t men/Muslims more loudly denounce their fellow men/coreligionists. And it’s a fair question.

As with islamism the big question is bad apples vs something more structural.

Sean_F

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

Sean_F said:

DJ41a said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

kinabalu said:

turbotubbs said:

kinabalu said:

kle4 said:

Chris said:

Leon said:

Jonathan said:

kle4 said:

Jonathan said:

The other addiction that holds this country back is nostalgia. Left or right, choose your poison, but myths about the sixties or ww2 make us fat and lazy. We are quite content to rest on the laurels of others.

I don't think nostalgia is a peculiarly British problem, but anecdotally it does feel as though we have little sense of what positively want, and so are very conservsative and seek to just revisit old battles and policies, with only tokenistic tweaks otherwise even as we shy away from anything dramatic.

Nostalgia is clearly not unique to Britain, but we are drunk on it. It’s everywhere. Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. Scottish independence is an exercise in nostalgia. Corbyn was an exercise in nostalgia.

You don’t travel much, do you?

Every single serious nation on earth is, by its nature, an exercise in nostalgia

Because it says: We are these people, who live here in this particular place, as we have done for X years, and we do these things, as we have done for generations, and this makes us different to the people next door

That IS a nation. It is nostalgia turned into politics. How else do you define it?

Any every serious nation is absolutely soaked in this stuff. UK, America, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Holland, Mexico - even newer nations like Canada and Oz and South Africa. They are all “drunken exercises in nostalgia”

Perhaps we'd be better off with only silly nations.

In all seriousness I don't think so. A sense of shared identity at a more local level than 'all humanity' may be necessary to mobilise groups to achieve great things. Yes it can often be misused, but that's the peril of identity for you.

I'm very skeptical of there being such a thing as a national character or identity.

I tend to disagree. It won’t be for everyone but there is a group identity. Overlaid on that is your own character. For some people, perhaps like your good self, that overwhelms everything else, so you don’t understand what being English, or Scottish, or Danish means to some.
A bit like me, as a 100% straight male cannot understand how a man can be attracted to another man, but I accept that is no the case for all men.

But a 'nation' is such a large and diverse entity. The differences between individuals within it absolutely dwarf those between its population as a whole and those of other nations. So I don't think it has much meaning to talk about national identity or character. I think it's mainly just a technique to communicate seductive falsehoods. Often harmless but sometimes not.

I don't think I agree with you, at least not completely. A nation is like a family. You don't choose your family, you might love them or hate them, you might much prefer the company of your friends and have way more in common with them, but you still have a history and a kinship with your family that you can't deny or ignore. Sometimes a family becomes toxic and unhealthy, and sometimes nationhood can be twisted too, but in the main it is simply a natural and healthy way for people to organise themselves, just like families are.

If someone belongs to an exploited class and has been exploited all their life - which accounts for a majority of the population - why should they buy into the idea of commonality with the local members of the ruling class? They're not friends. Those on opposite sides of the divide don't treat each other as equals or give a damn about each other or invite the other into their home. Karl Marx was right: the working class have no country. Class hatred is especially strong in Britain - flowing downward in society, not upward. Screw country - it's just a brand. That said, of course culture affects personality. To my taste, some places have much sh*ttier cultures than others. Can't see any good in denying I feel that way.

Almost no one in the “Exploited Class” thinks like that. Nationalism always trumps class.

Your point is? The reigning ideas are the ideas imposed by the reigning class. The day nationalism no longer trumps class, the whole exploitative caboodle explodes - and the working class revolution abolishes class.

Happened once in eastern Ukraine. The Makhnovshchina weren't nationalist in the slightest.

Happened in places in Spain.

Have a look at Rojava too, in the present tense.

"Revolution is the only form of 'war' ... in which ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of defeats". (Rosa Luxemburg.)

What's sad is when nationalist nutters think they're being so alpha, often seeking out all-male environments in which they enjoy showing off to other men.

Alphas are a subcategory of betas and they're
just as cucky.

Sigmas are where it's at

(And absolutely not those of the racist and sexist



Nick Krauser kind. They're worse than anyone. Krauser was a neo-Nazi the last I heard. A person who thinks they're "sigma" at the same time they are nationalist, racist, and pro-hierarchy is an idiot.)

My point is that hardly anyone gives a flying fuck about class conflict.

The working class revolution won’t happen because the working class aren’t interested.

Everything the rulers do as a gang, as a collective, is about class. They know that. You can't have class without class conflict. It's not about the As versus the Bs, chosen one morning at random.

In Britain, the culture in many parts of society is also about class to an exceptional degree, even when in principle it doesn't have to be. Exclusionism is written right the way through British culture as if it were a stick of rock.

Most working class people haven't got a clue how anyone in the ruling class thinks, for the simple reason that they haven't met any. The richest person they ever meet on a one-to-one basis is probably a local GP or dentist (or used to meet, in the case of the former).

Do you actually know anything about working class life?

WillG

Sean_F said:

TimS said:

Cyclefree said:

Malmesbury said:

Cyclefree said:

I know I am sounding like a broken record on this. But still. We can add the TSSA union as another place with an appalling culture when it comes to women.

The number of reports would fill a sizeable library at this rate. I wonder if anyone ever reads them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/damning-report-uncovers-years-of-sexual-harassment-at-transport-union

That list again

- Parliament
- The army
- The air force
- The London fire brigade and other fire brigades
- The police
- The NHS
- The Labour Party
- The TSSA

And those are the ones we know about.

So we can divide organisations by their status regarding sexual harassment into

- Found out
- Not found out. Yet

It is not hard to treat people, whoever they are, well. It is not hard for men to treat women well. It really isn't. "Do unto others...." for instance and a bit of basic empathy.

Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act. And if they choose to act in the way that far too many men do, that is down to their individual responsibility. The culture helps create a sort of ethical blindness, a sort of boiling the frog syndrome. But ultimately each individual has responsibility for their own behaviour and a conscience and should be ashamed of behaving in the ways described in these endless reports.

I am sick of this. I am sick of hearing about more organisations treating their staff, especially their female staff, like shit. I am sick of reading the same things over and over again in reports. I am sick of hearing insincere apologies and the "lessons will be learned" cliche. I am sick of hearing that it is all very hard. It bloody well isn't hard to behave well, with consideration, politeness and empathy.

But. But (and I say this with trepidation because I’ll be treading into a range of types of dangerous territory here), what if “ Men are not animals, obliged to follow their urges. They are human beings, able to make choices about how they act” is not entirely true?

What if men are evolutionarily and genetically
predisposed to violence, including violence against women. And therefore we can’t rely on appealing to some better nature to prevent violence in future?

There seem to be 3 explanations for the predominance of male violence, against their own sex and the opposite sex:

1. It’s in their genes. There were evolutionary fitness reasons for male humans to behave in a warlike manner, and to commit sexual violence, spurred on by a different hormonal chemistry
3. It’s cultural: we live in a patriarchy which celebrates or at least excuses violent male behaviour, so men feel cultural pressure to behave according to type (but why? is there an evolutionary reason?)
4. There is no cultural or genetic effect here, we are all able to exercise free choice; men just happen - coincidentally - to do more of this shit

3 seems unlikely. 2 is the most common explanation in the West. But why do we see the same patterns in just about every society, throughout history? Why is almost every human society patriarchal?

What if actually we need to accept males are a genetically more dangerous group in this particular species, and restrain their freedoms accordingly? Sure, there are gentle (“feeble”) men who defy the genes - I’m probably one of them. But are they like Ferdinand the bull who refused to fight and preferred to sniff flowers until a bee stung his behind? In other words freaks
departing from an otherwise violent norm.

You will say this is a cop out as it denies personal
responsibility. A fair point, but I still come back to that question: can there really be an explanation for male violence that doesn’t take into account genetics?

Contrary to the fantasies of incels, patriarchal societies are often governed by very strict codes of conduct that rule male behaviour towards women.

If we lived in an Islamic society, and did things like sending dick pics to women, flashing at them at work, making endless lewd comments, telling them how much we’d like to rape them, posting online fantasies about torture and rape, we would get into extremely hot water.

A young man almost certainly finds it easier to have consequence-free sex with young women in modern Western societies than at any point in history.

But there is something nasty in human nature that enjoys cruelty and degradation.

I think we’ve dropped one set of ethics that governed male behaviour towards women (the pre 1960’s) without putting another in their place. Added to which is a dreadful corporate and public sector culture that holds no one to account for their actions.

If you look at patriarchal Islamic societies like Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt, rates of sexual assault are through the roof. It is basically impossible for a young woman to travel on Egyptian public transport and not be groped.

DavidL

IanB2 said:

DJ41a said:

Alaska UFO news:report from CNN:

"F-35 fighter jets were sent up to investigate after the object was first detected on Thursday, according to a US official. Kirby told reporters that the first fly-by of US fighter aircraft happened Thursday night, and the second happened Friday morning. Both brought back 'limited' information about the object.

But the pilots later gave differing reports of what they observed, the source briefed on the intelligence said.

Some pilots said the object 'interfered with their sensors' on the planes, but not all pilots reported experiencing that.

Some pilots also claimed to have seen no identifiable propulsion on the object, and could not explain how it was staying in the air, despite the object cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet.

The conflicting eyewitness accounts are partly why the Pentagon has been unable to fully explain what the object is, the source briefed on the matter said."

Aaannnddd...

there's another unidentified craft in the skies, this time above northern Canada: CTV News:

"The North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad) [a combined USA-Canadian command] says it is monitoring a high-altitude airborne object flying over Northern Canada."

“did not appear to be manned” doesn’t sound quite certain enough given that they went and shot it down?

Surely these are just more balloons from China.