I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Direct action that shit. One of the many things I learned from hunt sabbing is that broken glass from a fluorescent light tube in the oil filler will completely destroy an engine in a few hours while leaving no trace of shenanigans.
Breaking in to release the bonnet to open the oil filler might leave a few traces though, shirley?
In any event, if the dumb twat's engine is destroyed with no trace how's he going to learn that it was the poor parking that cost him.
I favour letting down a tyre for maximum inconvenience at little long-term damage/risk.
My house is conveniently close for the school run. So in the case of extremely inconsiderate parking it is an easy job to pop home, write a quick post-it note and slap it on the offending windscreen.
Most people don't park poorly out of spite or selfishness. They occupy the pavement because they think they are being considerate to road users and the inconvenience they are causing to pedestrians doesn't occur to them. And we're British, even a politely worded note wounds. And I'm not trying to inconvenience or offend, I'm trying to gently guide future behaviour. I try to as nicely as possible ask them to leave enough room for a double buggy to pass. Direct action suburban style.
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
Men Without Gods do mad things.
Lots of religious murder out there. Basically man is often pretty shit to other man.
It's a grim but interesting question.
Does the belief that they are doing God's work make the diminish the terror (because it acknowledges a higher power who might hold the terrorist accountable) or worse (because God is telling them to do it)? Would the Inquisitors, or Cromwell's Major Generals, have been crueller had God not been watching them?
The most evil regimes have often been atheistic or quasi atheistic
The Nazis The USSR under Stalin and Lenin Mao’s China Pol Pot’s Cambodia
However this may just be coincidence, atheism as a way of thinking is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it’s only recently that humanity has gained the industrial ability (trains, gas chambers, et al) to slaughter people en masse
And there were plenty of super religious societies in the past that were phenomenally sadistic, The Aztecs were quite out there
There is no point in blaming God for human evils if you think there isn't a god. If that's true then humans acting and thinking humanly do all these evils, whether they are atheist or religious. The problem of human evil is as much a problem for humanists as it is for the religious.
You can blame religion though. Although, as per my other comment replying to Leon, it's strong beliefs more than religion per se that I think can lead to such atrocities.
Religion is an abstract noun. If there is no god all religion is humanly derived. It is a humanist phenomenon. Overlooking this is common because convenient.
Nice one. Blame solicitors for the fact that government, courts and parliament decide that the law is how it is, and that courts are, like the Ritz Hotel, open to all.
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
As an occasional runner but who often has to run in the dark, albeit with a light, I find it safer generally to run on the tarmac road so I don't trip on an unexpected bumps in the pavement. I hop back onto the pavement if a car comes along. I imagine that is very difficult or impossible for you so you are very brave!
Hah yes, but I don't use the road in the dark tbf. And I am only talking about shopping high streets, which should be pedestrianised imo, resistance to which often bizarrely comes from shopkeepers.
Not that bizarre. Make it more difficult for people to put stuff in their cars and they go to out of town centres instead.
One of the other things, separate but linked to that, which is killing town centres is high parking charges.
Blimey, even I can carry a bag of shopping a few hundred yards to a car.
(Agree about car-parking charges, though. Also the sheer difficulty of paying for parking in, for example, my local town Shaftesbury last time I tried: coin-meter full, card-reader broken, pay-by-app no signal to down load yet another new parking app.)
"I can carry a bag of shopping a few hundred yards to a car"
Good for you.
But can everyone? Can the pensioner get her trolley to wheel over the crapulent pavement? Can she get it onto the bus?
The sane way to do this, is to think of use cases. A large number of them. How does each work?
As opposed to "I hate X. Lets drop a lead weight on that".
Pedestrianised streets allow blue badge holders to park on them. Also, properly pedestrianised, the surface is flat and all on one level. No kerbs.
(PS No need to tell me about the issues of getting wheels over crapulent pavements - that's where the conversation started.)
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
Men Without Gods do mad things.
Lots of religious murder out there. Basically man is often pretty shit to other man.
It's a grim but interesting question.
Does the belief that they are doing God's work make the diminish the terror (because it acknowledges a higher power who might hold the terrorist accountable) or worse (because God is telling them to do it)? Would the Inquisitors, or Cromwell's Major Generals, have been crueller had God not been watching them?
The most evil regimes have often been atheistic or quasi atheistic
The Nazis The USSR under Stalin and Lenin Mao’s China Pol Pot’s Cambodia
However this may just be coincidence, atheism as a way of thinking is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it’s only recently that humanity has gained the industrial ability (trains, gas chambers, et al) to slaughter people en masse
And there were plenty of super religious societies in the past that were phenomenally sadistic, The Aztecs were quite out there
The atheistic or quasi atheistic societies you list used a form of state religion as part of their thing. Consider -
- A book or 2 (which most didn't read) defined the society. Apparently - Only the anointed priests could interpret the book(s). DIY interpretation a major heresy. - The state is threatened by heresy everywhere. Witches under every bed. - The all powerful, perfect state is therefore under constant threat. - This is assuaged by regularly finding nests of heretics. - Problems with the society are always caused by heretics. Since the plan is perfect. Therefore the solution to every problem is to find more heretics.
Yes, the process is similar if not identical. The human brain is naturally religious, and evil atheistic regimes simply exploit this religiose tendency in our psychology. Whether you are worshipping the state, the flag, the Fuhrer, or Jehovah, Allah, Tlaloc the drinker of tears, it doesn’t matter that much
Perhaps a more interesting question is what happens when you briskly and violently destroy the faith of a religious state. The Khmers were devout Buddhists before communism, with a temple on every corner and monks everywhere. Pol Pot deliberately targeted this first, killing every monk (they used to throw them by the dozen off cliffs) and toppling many temples (the fame of Angkor Wat meant he had to spare it)
One theory of the Khmer Rouge’s unique lunacy is that this sudden annihilation of Cambodia’s spirituality led to the intense craziness thereafter. All of life’s traditional meaning was brutally stripped away, so life had no value
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
I also remember it from Blue Peter, I think. But not from 1979 as I wasn't born then - I guess they probably did a revisit some time later to see what progress had been made in rebuilding. I remember the piles of skulls in the report and it being completely shocking for me; this was before I had knowledge of the Nazi atrocities for example, they were just the bad guys from WW2. Not sure how old I was, but certainly primary rather than secondary school.
It was never covered at school, so I'd guess today's young will only know of it if it has popped up on TV/popular YouTube/Insta/whatever channels.
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
Because nobody spends any money on repairing pavements.
I think pavement parking is gong to be a big issue when the road law review comes around, as is blocking of cycle lanes. Especially around difficulty of enforcement / laws which are a mess.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Plus there is a Transport Select Committee into Accessibility in Transport at present.
Locally, they have built cycle lanes. Then closed them and rebuilt them for months. Each time the road layout becomes more and more confusing. For everyone.
They still haven't given a clear guidance on whether the crossings to the bus stops are enforced in any way. So the pensioners crossing them don't know. The cyclists don't know....
Better yet, where the cycle lanes cross entry roads, no guidance has been provided on whether cars should stop before or in the cycle lane before turning.
Indecision and confusion in traffic. What could go wrong?
The council appears to be implementing this by "Build it. Oh shit. Rebuild it....."
There's a bundle of questions there. How to avoid rabbit holes?
Good national guidelines exist in LTN 1/20, but Councils soft pedal them to save money, plus they don't have people who know how to sweat the detail and get it right - so they end up with huge amount of rework (some great examples around).
An example in London is where TFL roads follow guidelines for bus stops (ideally bus stop and waiting space and shelter on a large enough island, mini zebra crossing across the cycle track to get there, appropriate kerb heights for guide dogs and so on), but Boroughs often go for cheaper solutions that cause more conflict, known as "Bus Stop Boarders (BSBs)", where the people get off the bus straight onto the cycle track.
The BSBs are actually a second rate design for really tight spaces. Similarly in my area, for decades the Council went for the bottom possible option for cycling - shared pavements, which are not good enough for reasonable cycle commuting (too slow) and cause conflict.
I can post the legal position on crossings on bus stops if you like, but they are different to on-carriageway zebras - essentially because pedestrians are far safer around bikes at 10-12mph than bikes or peds are around motor vehicles at 20-40mph.
The "stop in the cycle lane or before" is a design issue in each case. A normal way to do the design would be a 5m space for one car next to the road after a "bent out" cycle track. Or a "bent in" cycle track crossing where the cycles cross close to the carriageway, so the driver has decent sightlines. The important thing is that everyone is able to tell what everyone else will be likely to do. In NL they have regulations about how much cycle track must be visible before it crosses a road, by type of road. That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe.
Of course there are also the complexities around transition and changing road culture, plus currently political overlays.
The bent in cycle tracks are one of the things they are re-re-re-implementing badly.
"That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe." - THIS
There's a nice proverb about designing schemes - "if you need to put signs up to tell people what to do, you've got it wrong". Which is about expectation and appearance, and eg why people drive to the "felt safe speed" appearance of the street, rather than to the marked speed limit.
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
Because nobody spends any money on repairing pavements.
I think pavement parking is gong to be a big issue when the road law review comes around, as is blocking of cycle lanes. Especially around difficulty of enforcement / laws which are a mess.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Plus there is a Transport Select Committee into Accessibility in Transport at present.
Locally, they have built cycle lanes. Then closed them and rebuilt them for months. Each time the road layout becomes more and more confusing. For everyone.
They still haven't given a clear guidance on whether the crossings to the bus stops are enforced in any way. So the pensioners crossing them don't know. The cyclists don't know....
Better yet, where the cycle lanes cross entry roads, no guidance has been provided on whether cars should stop before or in the cycle lane before turning.
Indecision and confusion in traffic. What could go wrong?
The council appears to be implementing this by "Build it. Oh shit. Rebuild it....."
There's a bundle of questions there. How to avoid rabbit holes?
Good national guidelines exist in LTN 1/20, but Councils soft pedal them to save money, plus they don't have people who know how to sweat the detail and get it right - so they end up with huge amount of rework (some great examples around).
An example in London is where TFL roads follow guidelines for bus stops (ideally bus stop and waiting space and shelter on a large enough island, mini zebra crossing across the cycle track to get there, appropriate kerb heights for guide dogs and so on), but Boroughs often go for cheaper solutions that cause more conflict, known as "Bus Stop Boarders (BSBs)", where the people get off the bus straight onto the cycle track.
The BSBs are actually a second rate design for really tight spaces. Similarly in my area, for decades the Council went for the bottom possible option for cycling - shared pavements, which are not good enough for reasonable cycle commuting (too slow) and cause conflict.
I can post the legal position on crossings on bus stops if you like, but they are different to on-carriageway zebras - essentially because pedestrians are far safer around bikes at 10-12mph than bikes or peds are around motor vehicles at 20-40mph.
The "stop in the cycle lane or before" is a design issue in each case. A normal way to do the design would be a 5m space for one car next to the road after a "bent out" cycle track. Or a "bent in" cycle track crossing where the cycles cross close to the carriageway, so the driver has decent sightlines. The important thing is that everyone is able to tell what everyone else will be likely to do. In NL they have regulations about how much cycle track must be visible before it crosses a road, by type of road. That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe.
Of course there are also the complexities around transition and changing road culture, plus currently political overlays.
The bent in cycle tracks are one of the things they are re-re-re-implementing badly.
"That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe." - THIS
There's a nice proverb about designing schemes - "if you need to put signs up to tell people what to do, you've got it wrong". Which is about expectation and appearance, and eg why people drive to the "felt safe speed" appearance of the street, rather than to the marked speed limit.
The Dutch are good at this, I think.
Careful - you'll be implying a national trait, if you are not careful...
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
Men Without Gods do mad things.
Lots of religious murder out there. Basically man is often pretty shit to other man.
It's a grim but interesting question.
Does the belief that they are doing God's work make the diminish the terror (because it acknowledges a higher power who might hold the terrorist accountable) or worse (because God is telling them to do it)? Would the Inquisitors, or Cromwell's Major Generals, have been crueller had God not been watching them?
The most evil regimes have often been atheistic or quasi atheistic
The Nazis The USSR under Stalin and Lenin Mao’s China Pol Pot’s Cambodia
However this may just be coincidence, atheism as a way of thinking is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it’s only recently that humanity has gained the industrial ability (trains, gas chambers, et al) to slaughter people en masse
And there were plenty of super religious societies in the past that were phenomenally sadistic, The Aztecs were quite out there
There is no point in blaming God for human evils if you think there isn't a god. If that's true then humans acting and thinking humanly do all these evils, whether they are atheist or religious. The problem of human evil is as much a problem for humanists as it is for the religious.
You can blame religion though. Although, as per my other comment replying to Leon, it's strong beliefs more than religion per se that I think can lead to such atrocities.
Religion is an abstract noun. If there is no god all religion is humanly derived. It is a humanist phenomenon. Overlooking this is common because convenient.
Well, indeed. Adherents to a religion then. Even if there is a god - I'm agnostic - then I blame the adherents (and particularly religious leaders) for the evils done in their name, rather than the god.
“For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.”
This is about right I think. The departure of NS makes no difference to the big question of Scottish independence - there was and is no foreseeable route to it because of: Brexit, history, economics and, critically, the Scottish voters don't want it.
It makes a lot of difference to quotidien Scottish and UK politics. NS is a force of nature, as was Salmond. Kate Forbes is the only possible 'force of nature' candidate - jury is out and we may never know. She may have better things to do that face the mob over her centre right opinions.
Finally, suppose we rejoin the EU, in truth it makes little difference whether Scotland is then 'independent' or not. It just means their 'ever closer union' is with rUK +27.
"Scottish voters don't want it" is an odd interpretation of around 50% wanting independence.
And as I keep saying, punters pile more and more and more votes onto the SNP when given the chance. There is so much they do wrong, but the idea that they aren't popular is laughable. Well, they *were* popular, we'll have to see where they go from here.
Fair assessment, I think.
There's an interesting dissonance here on PB.
SNP minority government - one party state, but not majority Tory government in London Voting in the 45-55% range - no mandate at all, no sirree, unles we are talking about the Tories or Brexiters
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
The Khmer Rouge were so horrific and cruel and the barbarities so enormous I strongly believe it should be taught. This is what happens if you pursue communism to an insane end - abolishing money, abolishing religion, abolishing value, abolishing culture (bourgeois) - you end up with a surreal nihilism when laughter is frivolous and entitled and middle class and you get your chuckling head smashed in with a pick axe
All these witless kids onTwitter and TikTok who say that want “fully automated luxury communism” should be forced to look at the baby smashing tree. Communism is not “funny” nor should it be “fashionable”
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
As an occasional runner but who often has to run in the dark, albeit with a light, I find it safer generally to run on the tarmac road so I don't trip on an unexpected bumps in the pavement. I hop back onto the pavement if a car comes along. I imagine that is very difficult or impossible for you so you are very brave!
Hah yes, but I don't use the road in the dark tbf. And I am only talking about shopping high streets, which should be pedestrianised imo, resistance to which often bizarrely comes from shopkeepers.
Not that bizarre. Make it more difficult for people to put stuff in their cars and they go to out of town centres instead.
One of the other things, separate but linked to that, which is killing town centres is high parking charges.
Blimey, even I can carry a bag of shopping a few hundred yards to a car.
(Agree about car-parking charges, though. Also the sheer difficulty of paying for parking in, for example, my local town Shaftesbury last time I tried: coin-meter full, card-reader broken, pay-by-app no signal to down load yet another new parking app.)
"I can carry a bag of shopping a few hundred yards to a car"
Good for you.
But can everyone? Can the pensioner get her trolley to wheel over the crapulent pavement? Can she get it onto the bus?
The sane way to do this, is to think of use cases. A large number of them. How does each work?
As opposed to "I hate X. Lets drop a lead weight on that".
Pedestrianised streets allow blue badge holders to park on them. Also, properly pedestrianised, the surface is flat and all on one level. No kerbs.
(PS No need to tell me about the issues of getting wheels over crapulent pavements - that's where the conversation started.)
That highlights the difficult balance though, even in that sort of space - especially if it is "shared space" rather than pedestrianised and vehicles are also allowed in.
Guide Dogs are trained to stop at kerbs which are 60mm high, and visually impaired people are used to high contrast crossings with audio signals or spinning cones to say when to cross. Plus people using walking canes navigate along kerbs or the walls of buildings (problems caused by cafe chairs on pavements).
So when you take away all the navigation help, and perhaps mix cars in, you may exclude visually impaired people from the town centre.
But other groups say "great - no more trip hazards".
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
Because nobody spends any money on repairing pavements.
I think pavement parking is gong to be a big issue when the road law review comes around, as is blocking of cycle lanes. Especially around difficulty of enforcement / laws which are a mess.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Plus there is a Transport Select Committee into Accessibility in Transport at present.
Locally, they have built cycle lanes. Then closed them and rebuilt them for months. Each time the road layout becomes more and more confusing. For everyone.
They still haven't given a clear guidance on whether the crossings to the bus stops are enforced in any way. So the pensioners crossing them don't know. The cyclists don't know....
Better yet, where the cycle lanes cross entry roads, no guidance has been provided on whether cars should stop before or in the cycle lane before turning.
Indecision and confusion in traffic. What could go wrong?
The council appears to be implementing this by "Build it. Oh shit. Rebuild it....."
There's a bundle of questions there. How to avoid rabbit holes?
Good national guidelines exist in LTN 1/20, but Councils soft pedal them to save money, plus they don't have people who know how to sweat the detail and get it right - so they end up with huge amount of rework (some great examples around).
An example in London is where TFL roads follow guidelines for bus stops (ideally bus stop and waiting space and shelter on a large enough island, mini zebra crossing across the cycle track to get there, appropriate kerb heights for guide dogs and so on), but Boroughs often go for cheaper solutions that cause more conflict, known as "Bus Stop Boarders (BSBs)", where the people get off the bus straight onto the cycle track.
The BSBs are actually a second rate design for really tight spaces. Similarly in my area, for decades the Council went for the bottom possible option for cycling - shared pavements, which are not good enough for reasonable cycle commuting (too slow) and cause conflict.
I can post the legal position on crossings on bus stops if you like, but they are different to on-carriageway zebras - essentially because pedestrians are far safer around bikes at 10-12mph than bikes or peds are around motor vehicles at 20-40mph.
The "stop in the cycle lane or before" is a design issue in each case. A normal way to do the design would be a 5m space for one car next to the road after a "bent out" cycle track. Or a "bent in" cycle track crossing where the cycles cross close to the carriageway, so the driver has decent sightlines. The important thing is that everyone is able to tell what everyone else will be likely to do. In NL they have regulations about how much cycle track must be visible before it crosses a road, by type of road. That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe.
Of course there are also the complexities around transition and changing road culture, plus currently political overlays.
The bent in cycle tracks are one of the things they are re-re-re-implementing badly.
"That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe." - THIS
There's a nice proverb about designing schemes - "if you need to put signs up to tell people what to do, you've got it wrong". Which is about expectation and appearance, and eg why people drive to the "felt safe speed" appearance of the street, rather than to the marked speed limit.
The Dutch are good at this, I think.
Careful - you'll be implying a national trait, if you are not careful...
The fact they're all tall makes them easier to spot as cyclists/pedestrians too?
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
Men Without Gods do mad things.
Lots of religious murder out there. Basically man is often pretty shit to other man.
It's a grim but interesting question.
Does the belief that they are doing God's work make the diminish the terror (because it acknowledges a higher power who might hold the terrorist accountable) or worse (because God is telling them to do it)? Would the Inquisitors, or Cromwell's Major Generals, have been crueller had God not been watching them?
The most evil regimes have often been atheistic or quasi atheistic
The Nazis The USSR under Stalin and Lenin Mao’s China Pol Pot’s Cambodia
However this may just be coincidence, atheism as a way of thinking is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it’s only recently that humanity has gained the industrial ability (trains, gas chambers, et al) to slaughter people en masse
And there were plenty of super religious societies in the past that were phenomenally sadistic, The Aztecs were quite out there
The atheistic or quasi atheistic societies you list used a form of state religion as part of their thing. Consider -
- A book or 2 (which most didn't read) defined the society. Apparently - Only the anointed priests could interpret the book(s). DIY interpretation a major heresy. - The state is threatened by heresy everywhere. Witches under every bed. - The all powerful, perfect state is therefore under constant threat. - This is assuaged by regularly finding nests of heretics. - Problems with the society are always caused by heretics. Since the plan is perfect. Therefore the solution to every problem is to find more heretics.
Yes, the process is similar if not identical. The human brain is naturally religious, and evil atheistic regimes simply exploit this religiose tendency in our psychology. Whether you are worshipping the state, the flag, the Fuhrer, or Jehovah, Allah, Tlaloc the drinker of tears, it doesn’t matter that much
Perhaps a more interesting question is what happens when you briskly and violently destroy the faith of a religious state. The Khmers were devout Buddhists before communism, with a temple on every corner and monks everywhere. Pol Pot deliberately targeted this first, killing every monk (they used to throw them by the dozen off cliffs) and toppling many temples (the fame of Angkor Wat meant he had to spare it)
One theory of the Khmer Rouge’s unique lunacy is that this sudden annihilation of Cambodia’s spirituality led to the intense craziness thereafter. All of life’s traditional meaning was brutally stripped away, so life had no value
It's about destroying religious competition. They want all that worship for themselves.
I think I have developed my thesis for the Knapper’s Gazette so thanks, PB. I’m gonna wander down the Tonle Sap where it meets the Mekong, and have a cocktail
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
Because nobody spends any money on repairing pavements.
I think pavement parking is gong to be a big issue when the road law review comes around, as is blocking of cycle lanes. Especially around difficulty of enforcement / laws which are a mess.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Plus there is a Transport Select Committee into Accessibility in Transport at present.
Locally, they have built cycle lanes. Then closed them and rebuilt them for months. Each time the road layout becomes more and more confusing. For everyone.
They still haven't given a clear guidance on whether the crossings to the bus stops are enforced in any way. So the pensioners crossing them don't know. The cyclists don't know....
Better yet, where the cycle lanes cross entry roads, no guidance has been provided on whether cars should stop before or in the cycle lane before turning.
Indecision and confusion in traffic. What could go wrong?
The council appears to be implementing this by "Build it. Oh shit. Rebuild it....."
There's a bundle of questions there. How to avoid rabbit holes?
Good national guidelines exist in LTN 1/20, but Councils soft pedal them to save money, plus they don't have people who know how to sweat the detail and get it right - so they end up with huge amount of rework (some great examples around).
An example in London is where TFL roads follow guidelines for bus stops (ideally bus stop and waiting space and shelter on a large enough island, mini zebra crossing across the cycle track to get there, appropriate kerb heights for guide dogs and so on), but Boroughs often go for cheaper solutions that cause more conflict, known as "Bus Stop Boarders (BSBs)", where the people get off the bus straight onto the cycle track.
The BSBs are actually a second rate design for really tight spaces. Similarly in my area, for decades the Council went for the bottom possible option for cycling - shared pavements, which are not good enough for reasonable cycle commuting (too slow) and cause conflict.
I can post the legal position on crossings on bus stops if you like, but they are different to on-carriageway zebras - essentially because pedestrians are far safer around bikes at 10-12mph than bikes or peds are around motor vehicles at 20-40mph.
The "stop in the cycle lane or before" is a design issue in each case. A normal way to do the design would be a 5m space for one car next to the road after a "bent out" cycle track. Or a "bent in" cycle track crossing where the cycles cross close to the carriageway, so the driver has decent sightlines. The important thing is that everyone is able to tell what everyone else will be likely to do. In NL they have regulations about how much cycle track must be visible before it crosses a road, by type of road. That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe.
Of course there are also the complexities around transition and changing road culture, plus currently political overlays.
The bent in cycle tracks are one of the things they are re-re-re-implementing badly.
"That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe." - THIS
There's a nice proverb about designing schemes - "if you need to put signs up to tell people what to do, you've got it wrong". Which is about expectation and appearance, and eg why people drive to the "felt safe speed" appearance of the street, rather than to the marked speed limit.
The Dutch are good at this, I think.
Careful - you'll be implying a national trait, if you are not careful...
The fact they're all tall makes them easier to spot as cyclists/pedestrians too?
Logic fail, it makes the rogue cyclists harder to spot because they are sitting down on their bikes.
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
Because nobody spends any money on repairing pavements.
I think pavement parking is gong to be a big issue when the road law review comes around, as is blocking of cycle lanes. Especially around difficulty of enforcement / laws which are a mess.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Plus there is a Transport Select Committee into Accessibility in Transport at present.
Locally, they have built cycle lanes. Then closed them and rebuilt them for months. Each time the road layout becomes more and more confusing. For everyone.
They still haven't given a clear guidance on whether the crossings to the bus stops are enforced in any way. So the pensioners crossing them don't know. The cyclists don't know....
Better yet, where the cycle lanes cross entry roads, no guidance has been provided on whether cars should stop before or in the cycle lane before turning.
Indecision and confusion in traffic. What could go wrong?
The council appears to be implementing this by "Build it. Oh shit. Rebuild it....."
There's a bundle of questions there. How to avoid rabbit holes?
Good national guidelines exist in LTN 1/20, but Councils soft pedal them to save money, plus they don't have people who know how to sweat the detail and get it right - so they end up with huge amount of rework (some great examples around).
An example in London is where TFL roads follow guidelines for bus stops (ideally bus stop and waiting space and shelter on a large enough island, mini zebra crossing across the cycle track to get there, appropriate kerb heights for guide dogs and so on), but Boroughs often go for cheaper solutions that cause more conflict, known as "Bus Stop Boarders (BSBs)", where the people get off the bus straight onto the cycle track.
The BSBs are actually a second rate design for really tight spaces. Similarly in my area, for decades the Council went for the bottom possible option for cycling - shared pavements, which are not good enough for reasonable cycle commuting (too slow) and cause conflict.
I can post the legal position on crossings on bus stops if you like, but they are different to on-carriageway zebras - essentially because pedestrians are far safer around bikes at 10-12mph than bikes or peds are around motor vehicles at 20-40mph.
The "stop in the cycle lane or before" is a design issue in each case. A normal way to do the design would be a 5m space for one car next to the road after a "bent out" cycle track. Or a "bent in" cycle track crossing where the cycles cross close to the carriageway, so the driver has decent sightlines. The important thing is that everyone is able to tell what everyone else will be likely to do. In NL they have regulations about how much cycle track must be visible before it crosses a road, by type of road. That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe.
Of course there are also the complexities around transition and changing road culture, plus currently political overlays.
The bent in cycle tracks are one of the things they are re-re-re-implementing badly.
"That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe." - THIS
There's a nice proverb about designing schemes - "if you need to put signs up to tell people what to do, you've got it wrong". Which is about expectation and appearance, and eg why people drive to the "felt safe speed" appearance of the street, rather than to the marked speed limit.
The Dutch are good at this, I think.
Careful - you'll be implying a national trait, if you are not careful...
The Dutch permanent government structure, local and national is good at this, I think.
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
As an occasional runner but who often has to run in the dark, albeit with a light, I find it safer generally to run on the tarmac road so I don't trip on an unexpected bumps in the pavement. I hop back onto the pavement if a car comes along. I imagine that is very difficult or impossible for you so you are very brave!
Hah yes, but I don't use the road in the dark tbf. And I am only talking about shopping high streets, which should be pedestrianised imo, resistance to which often bizarrely comes from shopkeepers.
Not that bizarre. Make it more difficult for people to put stuff in their cars and they go to out of town centres instead.
One of the other things, separate but linked to that, which is killing town centres is high parking charges.
Blimey, even I can carry a bag of shopping a few hundred yards to a car.
(Agree about car-parking charges, though. Also the sheer difficulty of paying for parking in, for example, my local town Shaftesbury last time I tried: coin-meter full, card-reader broken, pay-by-app no signal to down load yet another new parking app.)
There are some parking machines that you select the tariff and then just tap your card - easy. The RUH in Bath has this, and its great (even if expensive).
And then there are the rest... Wiltshire has a app based one, which to use I have to constantly 2FA my card. i could fully sign up I suppose, but when I can see its possible to tap and go (see above) I don't see why I should.
I refuse to use car parks that won't accept cash, though if they are rip-off prices I will tolerate a card reader. If it's App only then they can forget it (why do I need my phone just to nip to the shops, or the country park?) so the businesses of Chelmsford Borough Council and the London Borough of Redbridge live without my custom altogether.
A number of @theSNP members have been suspended from the party without due process or because of complaints of “transphobia” on a definition which is not #ECHR or #EqualityLaw compliant. They must be reinstated or the leadership result could be challenged
“For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.”
This is about right I think. The departure of NS makes no difference to the big question of Scottish independence - there was and is no foreseeable route to it because of: Brexit, history, economics and, critically, the Scottish voters don't want it.
It makes a lot of difference to quotidien Scottish and UK politics. NS is a force of nature, as was Salmond. Kate Forbes is the only possible 'force of nature' candidate - jury is out and we may never know. She may have better things to do that face the mob over her centre right opinions.
Finally, suppose we rejoin the EU, in truth it makes little difference whether Scotland is then 'independent' or not. It just means their 'ever closer union' is with rUK +27.
"Scottish voters don't want it" is an odd interpretation of around 50% wanting independence.
And as I keep saying, punters pile more and more and more votes onto the SNP when given the chance. There is so much they do wrong, but the idea that they aren't popular is laughable. Well, they *were* popular, we'll have to see where they go from here.
Fair assessment, I think.
There's an interesting dissonance here on PB.
SNP minority government - one party state, but not majority Tory government in London Voting in the 45-55% range - no mandate at all, no sirree, unles we are talking about the Tories or Brexiters
If you'd got more than 50% in your referendum, you'd have had a mandate for separation...
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Direct action that shit. One of the many things I learned from hunt sabbing is that broken glass from a fluorescent light tube in the oil filler will completely destroy an engine in a few hours while leaving no trace of shenanigans.
Breaking in to release the bonnet to open the oil filler might leave a few traces though, shirley?
In any event, if the dumb twat's engine is destroyed with no trace how's he going to learn that it was the poor parking that cost him.
I favour letting down a tyre for maximum inconvenience at little long-term damage/risk.
My house is conveniently close for the school run. So in the case of extremely inconsiderate parking it is an easy job to pop home, write a quick post-it note and slap it on the offending windscreen.
Most people don't park poorly out of spite or selfishness. They occupy the pavement because they think they are being considerate to road users and the inconvenience they are causing to pedestrians doesn't occur to them. And we're British, even a politely worded note wounds. And I'm not trying to inconvenience or offend, I'm trying to gently guide future behaviour. I try to as nicely as possible ask them to leave enough room for a double buggy to pass. Direct action suburban style.
Another reason for pavement parking is to avoid the risk of accidentally scuffing your wheel hubs against the kerb when parking on the road. That's why I sometimes guiltily place a couple of wheels on the edge of a wide pavement. Maybe I just need to learn to park better :-)
I think I have developed my thesis for the Knapper’s Gazette so thanks, PB. I’m gonna wander down the Tonle Sap where it meets the Mekong, and have a cocktail
@Leon - Robin Dunbar has done quite a lot of writing on the subject of how religion came to be and the evolutionary advantage that the religious had over the non-religious. Necessarily rather speculative, but interesting and accessible. I've just had a hunt on my bookshelf for the relevant tome but it is utterly inaccessible behind various certificates daughters have achieved which the bookshelf now seems to be the home of.
Anyway, if memory serves, the chief evolutionary advantage of religion to the advantage of religion itself was that religious groups formed stronger bonds between each other and greater levels of 'us against them' than non-religious groups. But there were others, some of which you have alluded to.
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
Men Without Gods do mad things.
Lots of religious murder out there. Basically man is often pretty shit to other man.
It's a grim but interesting question.
Does the belief that they are doing God's work make the diminish the terror (because it acknowledges a higher power who might hold the terrorist accountable) or worse (because God is telling them to do it)? Would the Inquisitors, or Cromwell's Major Generals, have been crueller had God not been watching them?
The most evil regimes have often been atheistic or quasi atheistic
The Nazis The USSR under Stalin and Lenin Mao’s China Pol Pot’s Cambodia
However this may just be coincidence, atheism as a way of thinking is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it’s only recently that humanity has gained the industrial ability (trains, gas chambers, et al) to slaughter people en masse
And there were plenty of super religious societies in the past that were phenomenally sadistic, The Aztecs were quite out there
The atheistic or quasi atheistic societies you list used a form of state religion as part of their thing. Consider -
- A book or 2 (which most didn't read) defined the society. Apparently - Only the anointed priests could interpret the book(s). DIY interpretation a major heresy. - The state is threatened by heresy everywhere. Witches under every bed. - The all powerful, perfect state is therefore under constant threat. - This is assuaged by regularly finding nests of heretics. - Problems with the society are always caused by heretics. Since the plan is perfect. Therefore the solution to every problem is to find more heretics.
Yes, the process is similar if not identical. The human brain is naturally religious, and evil atheistic regimes simply exploit this religiose tendency in our psychology. Whether you are worshipping the state, the flag, the Fuhrer, or Jehovah, Allah, Tlaloc the drinker of tears, it doesn’t matter that much
Perhaps a more interesting question is what happens when you briskly and violently destroy the faith of a religious state. The Khmers were devout Buddhists before communism, with a temple on every corner and monks everywhere. Pol Pot deliberately targeted this first, killing every monk (they used to throw them by the dozen off cliffs) and toppling many temples (the fame of Angkor Wat meant he had to spare it)
One theory of the Khmer Rouge’s unique lunacy is that this sudden annihilation of Cambodia’s spirituality led to the intense craziness thereafter. All of life’s traditional meaning was brutally stripped away, so life had no value
It's about destroying religious competition. They want all that worship for themselves.
On the subject of initially ideological massacres turning into senseless orgies of bloodshed the other one that springs to mind is Algeria. I spent a few days in Algiers a couple of years ago and talked at length with our driver about his experience as a child during the civil war. It was Khmer-rougeesque - villages massacring the neighbouring villages, children killing their parents and vice versa, infanticide on a huge scale, and most of it happening long after the original Islamist revolutionary beginnings of the war had been forgotten. And most of it within touching distance of the capital, just up in the coastal hill villages.
“For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.”
This is about right I think. The departure of NS makes no difference to the big question of Scottish independence - there was and is no foreseeable route to it because of: Brexit, history, economics and, critically, the Scottish voters don't want it.
It makes a lot of difference to quotidien Scottish and UK politics. NS is a force of nature, as was Salmond. Kate Forbes is the only possible 'force of nature' candidate - jury is out and we may never know. She may have better things to do that face the mob over her centre right opinions.
Finally, suppose we rejoin the EU, in truth it makes little difference whether Scotland is then 'independent' or not. It just means their 'ever closer union' is with rUK +27.
"Scottish voters don't want it" is an odd interpretation of around 50% wanting independence.
And as I keep saying, punters pile more and more and more votes onto the SNP when given the chance. There is so much they do wrong, but the idea that they aren't popular is laughable. Well, they *were* popular, we'll have to see where they go from here.
Fair assessment, I think.
There's an interesting dissonance here on PB.
SNP minority government - one party state, but not majority Tory government in London Voting in the 45-55% range - no mandate at all, no sirree, unles we are talking about the Tories or Brexiters
If you'd got more than 50% in your referendum, you'd have had a mandate for separation...
That was then. I was talking about a mandate *to have a referendum* as you must surely realise. As this has been refused, and the underlying and very recent Act of Parliament is not being changed, this raises major questions about what a democratic mandate really is in the UK state.
I wonder if any currently fashionable medical practices have fallen into “The Oedipus Trap”?
What the world can learn from a lobotomy surgeon’s horrible mistake….
In his zeal to change the world, Freeman had ended up violating the first principle of science, as laid out by the physicist Richard Feynman: “You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
I wonder if any currently fashionable medical practices have fallen into “The Oedipus Trap”?
What the world can learn from a lobotomy surgeon’s horrible mistake….
In his zeal to change the world, Freeman had ended up violating the first principle of science, as laid out by the physicist Richard Feynman: “You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Wacky plot - a conspiracy to create a One World government. By history teachers who want people to stop making more history.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Direct action that shit. One of the many things I learned from hunt sabbing is that broken glass from a fluorescent light tube in the oil filler will completely destroy an engine in a few hours while leaving no trace of shenanigans.
Breaking in to release the bonnet to open the oil filler might leave a few traces though, shirley?
In any event, if the dumb twat's engine is destroyed with no trace how's he going to learn that it was the poor parking that cost him.
I favour letting down a tyre for maximum inconvenience at little long-term damage/risk.
My house is conveniently close for the school run. So in the case of extremely inconsiderate parking it is an easy job to pop home, write a quick post-it note and slap it on the offending windscreen.
Most people don't park poorly out of spite or selfishness. They occupy the pavement because they think they are being considerate to road users and the inconvenience they are causing to pedestrians doesn't occur to them. And we're British, even a politely worded note wounds. And I'm not trying to inconvenience or offend, I'm trying to gently guide future behaviour. I try to as nicely as possible ask them to leave enough room for a double buggy to pass. Direct action suburban style.
Another reason for pavement parking is to avoid the risk of accidentally scuffing your wheel hubs against the kerb when parking on the road. That's why I sometimes guiltily place a couple of wheels on the edge of a wide pavement. Maybe I just need to learn to park better :-)
Wow! You think you know someone as a reasonably rational individual, and then they reveal something about themselves like this?!?
“For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.”
This is about right I think. The departure of NS makes no difference to the big question of Scottish independence - there was and is no foreseeable route to it because of: Brexit, history, economics and, critically, the Scottish voters don't want it.
It makes a lot of difference to quotidien Scottish and UK politics. NS is a force of nature, as was Salmond. Kate Forbes is the only possible 'force of nature' candidate - jury is out and we may never know. She may have better things to do that face the mob over her centre right opinions.
Finally, suppose we rejoin the EU, in truth it makes little difference whether Scotland is then 'independent' or not. It just means their 'ever closer union' is with rUK +27.
"Scottish voters don't want it" is an odd interpretation of around 50% wanting independence.
And as I keep saying, punters pile more and more and more votes onto the SNP when given the chance. There is so much they do wrong, but the idea that they aren't popular is laughable. Well, they *were* popular, we'll have to see where they go from here.
Fair assessment, I think.
There's an interesting dissonance here on PB.
SNP minority government - one party state, but not majority Tory government in London Voting in the 45-55% range - no mandate at all, no sirree, unles we are talking about the Tories or Brexiters
If you'd got more than 50% in your referendum, you'd have had a mandate for separation...
That was then. I was talking about a mandate *to have a referendum* as you must surely realise. As this has been refused, and the underlying and very recent Act of Parliament is not being changed, this raises major questions about what a democratic mandate really is in the UK state.
Referendums on separation, since they affect the entire UK, are naturally a reserved matter. You know what you need to do to get a mandate to get a second referendum sooner than everyone understood at the time of the first one.
“For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.”
This is about right I think. The departure of NS makes no difference to the big question of Scottish independence - there was and is no foreseeable route to it because of: Brexit, history, economics and, critically, the Scottish voters don't want it.
It makes a lot of difference to quotidien Scottish and UK politics. NS is a force of nature, as was Salmond. Kate Forbes is the only possible 'force of nature' candidate - jury is out and we may never know. She may have better things to do that face the mob over her centre right opinions.
Finally, suppose we rejoin the EU, in truth it makes little difference whether Scotland is then 'independent' or not. It just means their 'ever closer union' is with rUK +27.
"Scottish voters don't want it" is an odd interpretation of around 50% wanting independence.
And as I keep saying, punters pile more and more and more votes onto the SNP when given the chance. There is so much they do wrong, but the idea that they aren't popular is laughable. Well, they *were* popular, we'll have to see where they go from here.
Fair assessment, I think.
There's an interesting dissonance here on PB.
SNP minority government - one party state, but not majority Tory government in London Voting in the 45-55% range - no mandate at all, no sirree, unles we are talking about the Tories or Brexiters
If you'd got more than 50% in your referendum, you'd have had a mandate for separation...
That was then. I was talking about a mandate *to have a referendum* as you must surely realise. As this has been refused, and the underlying and very recent Act of Parliament is not being changed, this raises major questions about what a democratic mandate really is in the UK state.
A majority in the House of Commons and forming His Majesty's next government, as Crown in Parliament alone is sovereign in the UK
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
I think I have developed my thesis for the Knapper’s Gazette so thanks, PB. I’m gonna wander down the Tonle Sap where it meets the Mekong, and have a cocktail
@Leon - Robin Dunbar has done quite a lot of writing on the subject of how religion came to be and the evolutionary advantage that the religious had over the non-religious. Necessarily rather speculative, but interesting and accessible. I've just had a hunt on my bookshelf for the relevant tome but it is utterly inaccessible behind various certificates daughters have achieved which the bookshelf now seems to be the home of.
Anyway, if memory serves, the chief evolutionary advantage of religion to the advantage of religion itself was that religious groups formed stronger bonds between each other and greater levels of 'us against them' than non-religious groups. But there were others, some of which you have alluded to.
Or the evolutionary advantage was irrelevant while the reality is Jesus Christ is the Messiah for humankind
“For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.”
This is about right I think. The departure of NS makes no difference to the big question of Scottish independence - there was and is no foreseeable route to it because of: Brexit, history, economics and, critically, the Scottish voters don't want it.
It makes a lot of difference to quotidien Scottish and UK politics. NS is a force of nature, as was Salmond. Kate Forbes is the only possible 'force of nature' candidate - jury is out and we may never know. She may have better things to do that face the mob over her centre right opinions.
Finally, suppose we rejoin the EU, in truth it makes little difference whether Scotland is then 'independent' or not. It just means their 'ever closer union' is with rUK +27.
"Scottish voters don't want it" is an odd interpretation of around 50% wanting independence.
And as I keep saying, punters pile more and more and more votes onto the SNP when given the chance. There is so much they do wrong, but the idea that they aren't popular is laughable. Well, they *were* popular, we'll have to see where they go from here.
Fair assessment, I think.
There's an interesting dissonance here on PB.
SNP minority government - one party state, but not majority Tory government in London Voting in the 45-55% range - no mandate at all, no sirree, unles we are talking about the Tories or Brexiters
If you'd got more than 50% in your referendum, you'd have had a mandate for separation...
That was then. I was talking about a mandate *to have a referendum* as you must surely realise. As this has been refused, and the underlying and very recent Act of Parliament is not being changed, this raises major questions about what a democratic mandate really is in the UK state.
It's a good point. Take for example something which no matter way 40% say of the people would always want. Be it Scottish independence or Brexit or Death Penalty.
Would that mean there's 'always' a mandate for a referendum. What if that loses in the 40-50% range? What then? Like a few things which have actually happened.
Would there always be a permanent mandate for a referendum on that basis. What a bout a mandate for the other position if it passed etc etc.
At end of the politics is about power and using power. It's what you can argue and get away with.
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Good question. Off the top of my head, they would be: WW2 End of the Roman Empire - 1066. (Very difficult this one as so much is unknown, but if it were possible to teach it I'd include it.) The industrial revolution Tudors (how we got from the medeival period through the reformation to an England we'd vaguely recognise as modern) Stuarts (civil wars and the birth of parliamentary democracy)
Admittedly that pretty much covers all of English* history.
*Yes, I recognise Scotland might be slightly different - though I'd probably propose a very similar answer for Scotland.
I think I have developed my thesis for the Knapper’s Gazette so thanks, PB. I’m gonna wander down the Tonle Sap where it meets the Mekong, and have a cocktail
@Leon - Robin Dunbar has done quite a lot of writing on the subject of how religion came to be and the evolutionary advantage that the religious had over the non-religious. Necessarily rather speculative, but interesting and accessible. I've just had a hunt on my bookshelf for the relevant tome but it is utterly inaccessible behind various certificates daughters have achieved which the bookshelf now seems to be the home of.
Anyway, if memory serves, the chief evolutionary advantage of religion to the advantage of religion itself was that religious groups formed stronger bonds between each other and greater levels of 'us against them' than non-religious groups. But there were others, some of which you have alluded to.
Or the evolutionary advantage was irrelevant while the reality is Jesus Christ is the Messiah for humankind
If it helps you get out of bed in the morning, then you believe that, but if you start using that belief to justify more problematic behaviour I would kindly suggest a rethink.
I'm off out before we get even further off-topic, but I just reminded myself of problems of distracted drivers on UK roads.
Here's a distracted (Land Rover, inevitably) driver who was eating a bowl of cornflakes whilst commuting to work. https://youtu.be/0elsNDRqLtQ?t=29
Does this happen in other countries?
...thereby breaking two cardinal rules: - don't drive while distracted by eating a bowl of cornflakes - don't eat a bowl of cornflakes while distracted by driving.
There is no way she isn't going to get to work without a big mess of milk and soggy regret in her lap.
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
As an occasional runner but who often has to run in the dark, albeit with a light, I find it safer generally to run on the tarmac road so I don't trip on an unexpected bumps in the pavement. I hop back onto the pavement if a car comes along. I imagine that is very difficult or impossible for you so you are very brave!
Hah yes, but I don't use the road in the dark tbf. And I am only talking about shopping high streets, which should be pedestrianised imo, resistance to which often bizarrely comes from shopkeepers.
Not that bizarre. Make it more difficult for people to put stuff in their cars and they go to out of town centres instead.
One of the other things, separate but linked to that, which is killing town centres is high parking charges.
Blimey, even I can carry a bag of shopping a few hundred yards to a car.
(Agree about car-parking charges, though. Also the sheer difficulty of paying for parking in, for example, my local town Shaftesbury last time I tried: coin-meter full, card-reader broken, pay-by-app no signal to down load yet another new parking app.)
There are some parking machines that you select the tariff and then just tap your card - easy. The RUH in Bath has this, and its great (even if expensive).
And then there are the rest... Wiltshire has a app based one, which to use I have to constantly 2FA my card. i could fully sign up I suppose, but when I can see its possible to tap and go (see above) I don't see why I should.
We parked in Leeds Victoria on Monday night (once you hit 5pm it's cheaper there than the outside car parks).
Trying to get to the card reader using my watch was not an exercise I'm going to repeat.
I think I have developed my thesis for the Knapper’s Gazette so thanks, PB. I’m gonna wander down the Tonle Sap where it meets the Mekong, and have a cocktail
@Leon - Robin Dunbar has done quite a lot of writing on the subject of how religion came to be and the evolutionary advantage that the religious had over the non-religious. Necessarily rather speculative, but interesting and accessible. I've just had a hunt on my bookshelf for the relevant tome but it is utterly inaccessible behind various certificates daughters have achieved which the bookshelf now seems to be the home of.
Anyway, if memory serves, the chief evolutionary advantage of religion to the advantage of religion itself was that religious groups formed stronger bonds between each other and greater levels of 'us against them' than non-religious groups. But there were others, some of which you have alluded to.
Or the evolutionary advantage was irrelevant while the reality is Jesus Christ is the Messiah for humankind
If it helps you get out of bed in the morning, then you believe that, but if you start using that belief to justify more problematic behaviour I would kindly suggest a rethink.
Following the words of Christ avoids problematic behaviour is the point and ensures eternal salvation with him
I wonder if any currently fashionable medical practices have fallen into “The Oedipus Trap”?
What the world can learn from a lobotomy surgeon’s horrible mistake….
In his zeal to change the world, Freeman had ended up violating the first principle of science, as laid out by the physicist Richard Feynman: “You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
Because nobody spends any money on repairing pavements.
I think pavement parking is gong to be a big issue when the road law review comes around, as is blocking of cycle lanes. Especially around difficulty of enforcement / laws which are a mess.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Plus there is a Transport Select Committee into Accessibility in Transport at present.
Locally, they have built cycle lanes. Then closed them and rebuilt them for months. Each time the road layout becomes more and more confusing. For everyone.
They still haven't given a clear guidance on whether the crossings to the bus stops are enforced in any way. So the pensioners crossing them don't know. The cyclists don't know....
Better yet, where the cycle lanes cross entry roads, no guidance has been provided on whether cars should stop before or in the cycle lane before turning.
Indecision and confusion in traffic. What could go wrong?
The council appears to be implementing this by "Build it. Oh shit. Rebuild it....."
There's a bundle of questions there. How to avoid rabbit holes?
Good national guidelines exist in LTN 1/20, but Councils soft pedal them to save money, plus they don't have people who know how to sweat the detail and get it right - so they end up with huge amount of rework (some great examples around).
An example in London is where TFL roads follow guidelines for bus stops (ideally bus stop and waiting space and shelter on a large enough island, mini zebra crossing across the cycle track to get there, appropriate kerb heights for guide dogs and so on), but Boroughs often go for cheaper solutions that cause more conflict, known as "Bus Stop Boarders (BSBs)", where the people get off the bus straight onto the cycle track.
The BSBs are actually a second rate design for really tight spaces. Similarly in my area, for decades the Council went for the bottom possible option for cycling - shared pavements, which are not good enough for reasonable cycle commuting (too slow) and cause conflict.
I can post the legal position on crossings on bus stops if you like, but they are different to on-carriageway zebras - essentially because pedestrians are far safer around bikes at 10-12mph than bikes or peds are around motor vehicles at 20-40mph.
The "stop in the cycle lane or before" is a design issue in each case. A normal way to do the design would be a 5m space for one car next to the road after a "bent out" cycle track. Or a "bent in" cycle track crossing where the cycles cross close to the carriageway, so the driver has decent sightlines. The important thing is that everyone is able to tell what everyone else will be likely to do. In NL they have regulations about how much cycle track must be visible before it crosses a road, by type of road. That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe.
Of course there are also the complexities around transition and changing road culture, plus currently political overlays.
The bent in cycle tracks are one of the things they are re-re-re-implementing badly.
"That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe." - THIS
There's a nice proverb about designing schemes - "if you need to put signs up to tell people what to do, you've got it wrong". Which is about expectation and appearance, and eg why people drive to the "felt safe speed" appearance of the street, rather than to the marked speed limit.
The Dutch are good at this, I think.
Careful - you'll be implying a national trait, if you are not careful...
🙂 - some guidance
They have a good cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. Much better than here. YES.
Cycling lane design skills are in the Dutch DNA. It's part of their national character. NO.
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
The moment that Momentum et al start campaigning against Labour candidates - oblivion.
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
He can if some Labour voters in marginal seats go Green or stay home on polling day in protest at Corbyn's deselection
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
Or they get elected under a labour banner then defect which will cause problems for starmer
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
Because nobody spends any money on repairing pavements.
I think pavement parking is gong to be a big issue when the road law review comes around, as is blocking of cycle lanes. Especially around difficulty of enforcement / laws which are a mess.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Plus there is a Transport Select Committee into Accessibility in Transport at present.
Locally, they have built cycle lanes. Then closed them and rebuilt them for months. Each time the road layout becomes more and more confusing. For everyone.
They still haven't given a clear guidance on whether the crossings to the bus stops are enforced in any way. So the pensioners crossing them don't know. The cyclists don't know....
Better yet, where the cycle lanes cross entry roads, no guidance has been provided on whether cars should stop before or in the cycle lane before turning.
Indecision and confusion in traffic. What could go wrong?
The council appears to be implementing this by "Build it. Oh shit. Rebuild it....."
There's a bundle of questions there. How to avoid rabbit holes?
Good national guidelines exist in LTN 1/20, but Councils soft pedal them to save money, plus they don't have people who know how to sweat the detail and get it right - so they end up with huge amount of rework (some great examples around).
An example in London is where TFL roads follow guidelines for bus stops (ideally bus stop and waiting space and shelter on a large enough island, mini zebra crossing across the cycle track to get there, appropriate kerb heights for guide dogs and so on), but Boroughs often go for cheaper solutions that cause more conflict, known as "Bus Stop Boarders (BSBs)", where the people get off the bus straight onto the cycle track.
The BSBs are actually a second rate design for really tight spaces. Similarly in my area, for decades the Council went for the bottom possible option for cycling - shared pavements, which are not good enough for reasonable cycle commuting (too slow) and cause conflict.
I can post the legal position on crossings on bus stops if you like, but they are different to on-carriageway zebras - essentially because pedestrians are far safer around bikes at 10-12mph than bikes or peds are around motor vehicles at 20-40mph.
The "stop in the cycle lane or before" is a design issue in each case. A normal way to do the design would be a 5m space for one car next to the road after a "bent out" cycle track. Or a "bent in" cycle track crossing where the cycles cross close to the carriageway, so the driver has decent sightlines. The important thing is that everyone is able to tell what everyone else will be likely to do. In NL they have regulations about how much cycle track must be visible before it crosses a road, by type of road. That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe.
Of course there are also the complexities around transition and changing road culture, plus currently political overlays.
The bent in cycle tracks are one of the things they are re-re-re-implementing badly.
"That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe." - THIS
There's a nice proverb about designing schemes - "if you need to put signs up to tell people what to do, you've got it wrong". Which is about expectation and appearance, and eg why people drive to the "felt safe speed" appearance of the street, rather than to the marked speed limit.
The Dutch are good at this, I think.
Careful - you'll be implying a national trait, if you are not careful...
🙂 - some guidance
They have a good cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. Much better than here. YES.
Cycling lane design skills are in the Dutch DNA. It's part of their national character. NO.
I'd add that the cycling infrastructure works *with* the traffic system as a whole, in the Netherlands. Rather than as a tacked on "Fuck You" to everyone else on the road.
Almost as if designing something to work rather than as a "statement" is the way to go.
I think I have developed my thesis for the Knapper’s Gazette so thanks, PB. I’m gonna wander down the Tonle Sap where it meets the Mekong, and have a cocktail
@Leon - Robin Dunbar has done quite a lot of writing on the subject of how religion came to be and the evolutionary advantage that the religious had over the non-religious. Necessarily rather speculative, but interesting and accessible. I've just had a hunt on my bookshelf for the relevant tome but it is utterly inaccessible behind various certificates daughters have achieved which the bookshelf now seems to be the home of.
Anyway, if memory serves, the chief evolutionary advantage of religion to the advantage of religion itself was that religious groups formed stronger bonds between each other and greater levels of 'us against them' than non-religious groups. But there were others, some of which you have alluded to.
Or the evolutionary advantage was irrelevant while the reality is Jesus Christ is the Messiah for humankind
If it helps you get out of bed in the morning, then you believe that, but if you start using that belief to justify more problematic behaviour I would kindly suggest a rethink.
Following the words of Christ avoids problematic behaviour is the point and ensures eternal salvation with him
I'm off out before we get even further off-topic, but I just reminded myself of problems of distracted drivers on UK roads.
Here's a distracted (Land Rover, inevitably) driver who was eating a bowl of cornflakes whilst commuting to work. https://youtu.be/0elsNDRqLtQ?t=29
Does this happen in other countries?
...thereby breaking two cardinal rules: - don't drive while distracted by eating a bowl of cornflakes - don't eat a bowl of cornflakes while distracted by driving.
There is no way she isn't going to get to work without a big mess of milk and soggy regret in her lap.
The driver handed herself in and got a ticket for "not being in proper control of a motor vehicle", which seems about right tbh.
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Good question. Off the top of my head, they would be: WW2 End of the Roman Empire - 1066. (Very difficult this one as so much is unknown, but if it were possible to teach it I'd include it.) The industrial revolution Tudors (how we got from the medeival period through the reformation to an England we'd vaguely recognise as modern) Stuarts (civil wars and the birth of parliamentary democracy)
Admittedly that pretty much covers all of English* history.
*Yes, I recognise Scotland might be slightly different - though I'd probably propose a very similar answer for Scotland.
You forgot Empire and Slavery (to keep both sides equally happy or unhappy, delete to taste).
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
As an occasional runner but who often has to run in the dark, albeit with a light, I find it safer generally to run on the tarmac road so I don't trip on an unexpected bumps in the pavement. I hop back onto the pavement if a car comes along. I imagine that is very difficult or impossible for you so you are very brave!
Hah yes, but I don't use the road in the dark tbf. And I am only talking about shopping high streets, which should be pedestrianised imo, resistance to which often bizarrely comes from shopkeepers.
Not that bizarre. Make it more difficult for people to put stuff in their cars and they go to out of town centres instead.
One of the other things, separate but linked to that, which is killing town centres is high parking charges.
Blimey, even I can carry a bag of shopping a few hundred yards to a car.
(Agree about car-parking charges, though. Also the sheer difficulty of paying for parking in, for example, my local town Shaftesbury last time I tried: coin-meter full, card-reader broken, pay-by-app no signal to down load yet another new parking app.)
There are some parking machines that you select the tariff and then just tap your card - easy. The RUH in Bath has this, and its great (even if expensive).
And then there are the rest... Wiltshire has a app based one, which to use I have to constantly 2FA my card. i could fully sign up I suppose, but when I can see its possible to tap and go (see above) I don't see why I should.
We parked in Leeds Victoria on Monday night (once you hit 5pm it's cheaper there than the outside car parks).
Trying to get to the card reader using my watch was not an exercise I'm going to repeat.
ANPR pay on exit is the best system I think - no working out how long you're going to be there on arrival.
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
Because nobody spends any money on repairing pavements.
I think pavement parking is gong to be a big issue when the road law review comes around, as is blocking of cycle lanes. Especially around difficulty of enforcement / laws which are a mess.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Plus there is a Transport Select Committee into Accessibility in Transport at present.
Locally, they have built cycle lanes. Then closed them and rebuilt them for months. Each time the road layout becomes more and more confusing. For everyone.
They still haven't given a clear guidance on whether the crossings to the bus stops are enforced in any way. So the pensioners crossing them don't know. The cyclists don't know....
Better yet, where the cycle lanes cross entry roads, no guidance has been provided on whether cars should stop before or in the cycle lane before turning.
Indecision and confusion in traffic. What could go wrong?
The council appears to be implementing this by "Build it. Oh shit. Rebuild it....."
There's a bundle of questions there. How to avoid rabbit holes?
Good national guidelines exist in LTN 1/20, but Councils soft pedal them to save money, plus they don't have people who know how to sweat the detail and get it right - so they end up with huge amount of rework (some great examples around).
An example in London is where TFL roads follow guidelines for bus stops (ideally bus stop and waiting space and shelter on a large enough island, mini zebra crossing across the cycle track to get there, appropriate kerb heights for guide dogs and so on), but Boroughs often go for cheaper solutions that cause more conflict, known as "Bus Stop Boarders (BSBs)", where the people get off the bus straight onto the cycle track.
The BSBs are actually a second rate design for really tight spaces. Similarly in my area, for decades the Council went for the bottom possible option for cycling - shared pavements, which are not good enough for reasonable cycle commuting (too slow) and cause conflict.
I can post the legal position on crossings on bus stops if you like, but they are different to on-carriageway zebras - essentially because pedestrians are far safer around bikes at 10-12mph than bikes or peds are around motor vehicles at 20-40mph.
The "stop in the cycle lane or before" is a design issue in each case. A normal way to do the design would be a 5m space for one car next to the road after a "bent out" cycle track. Or a "bent in" cycle track crossing where the cycles cross close to the carriageway, so the driver has decent sightlines. The important thing is that everyone is able to tell what everyone else will be likely to do. In NL they have regulations about how much cycle track must be visible before it crosses a road, by type of road. That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe.
Of course there are also the complexities around transition and changing road culture, plus currently political overlays.
The bent in cycle tracks are one of the things they are re-re-re-implementing badly.
"That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe." - THIS
There's a nice proverb about designing schemes - "if you need to put signs up to tell people what to do, you've got it wrong". Which is about expectation and appearance, and eg why people drive to the "felt safe speed" appearance of the street, rather than to the marked speed limit.
The Dutch are good at this, I think.
Careful - you'll be implying a national trait, if you are not careful...
🙂 - some guidance
They have a good cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. Much better than here. YES.
Cycling lane design skills are in the Dutch DNA. It's part of their national character. NO.
I've had a quick google and can't find it, and I'm too busy to persevere - but there is a very good photo somewhere of Dam Square Amsterdam in about 1967. It was basically a massive car park. The Netherlands in the 1960s had followed a similar post-war trajectory in accommodating the car at the expense of other modes that we had. Dutch cycle infrastructure hasn't come about by accident or quirk. It's happened as a result of 60 years of hard work and deliberate policy making. Having started at least 30 years later, we can't expect to get there instantly.
I think I have developed my thesis for the Knapper’s Gazette so thanks, PB. I’m gonna wander down the Tonle Sap where it meets the Mekong, and have a cocktail
@Leon - Robin Dunbar has done quite a lot of writing on the subject of how religion came to be and the evolutionary advantage that the religious had over the non-religious. Necessarily rather speculative, but interesting and accessible. I've just had a hunt on my bookshelf for the relevant tome but it is utterly inaccessible behind various certificates daughters have achieved which the bookshelf now seems to be the home of.
Anyway, if memory serves, the chief evolutionary advantage of religion to the advantage of religion itself was that religious groups formed stronger bonds between each other and greater levels of 'us against them' than non-religious groups. But there were others, some of which you have alluded to.
Or the evolutionary advantage was irrelevant while the reality is Jesus Christ is the Messiah for humankind
If it helps you get out of bed in the morning, then you believe that, but if you start using that belief to justify more problematic behaviour I would kindly suggest a rethink.
Following the words of Christ avoids problematic behaviour is the point and ensures eternal salvation with him
Tin foil puzzles me, given conspiracy theorists tend to be loons surely they should suspect the CIA has tampered with tin foil manufacturers so its permeable to the mind control rays?
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
No such thing as "uniquely dark streaks in national characters"
... but ok it lubes the wheels of this sort of conversation, so I'll butt out.
I’m not sure there is “no such thing”, but, more pertinently, this is not my theory. It’s a theory i have heard from historians, some of them actually Cambodian, so there you go
Cultures do persist over many generations, so it's entirely conceivable without getting mired in the nonsense of race.
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Good question. Off the top of my head, they would be: WW2 End of the Roman Empire - 1066. (Very difficult this one as so much is unknown, but if it were possible to teach it I'd include it.) The industrial revolution Tudors (how we got from the medeival period through the reformation to an England we'd vaguely recognise as modern) Stuarts (civil wars and the birth of parliamentary democracy)
Admittedly that pretty much covers all of English* history.
*Yes, I recognise Scotland might be slightly different - though I'd probably propose a very similar answer for Scotland.
You forgot Empire and Slavery (to keep both sides equally happy or unhappy, delete to taste).
The question asked was which five events would you cover. You can't add any unless you take one away. That's the point and the central problem.
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
He can if some Labour voters in marginal seats go Green or stay home on polling day in protest at Corbyn's deselection
For a 2024 Labour Marginal Seat where exactly are you talking about - Chester, Uxbridge (albeit very unlikely to go Green because of Heathrow) or Maidenhead?
I think I have developed my thesis for the Knapper’s Gazette so thanks, PB. I’m gonna wander down the Tonle Sap where it meets the Mekong, and have a cocktail
@Leon - Robin Dunbar has done quite a lot of writing on the subject of how religion came to be and the evolutionary advantage that the religious had over the non-religious. Necessarily rather speculative, but interesting and accessible. I've just had a hunt on my bookshelf for the relevant tome but it is utterly inaccessible behind various certificates daughters have achieved which the bookshelf now seems to be the home of.
Anyway, if memory serves, the chief evolutionary advantage of religion to the advantage of religion itself was that religious groups formed stronger bonds between each other and greater levels of 'us against them' than non-religious groups. But there were others, some of which you have alluded to.
Or the evolutionary advantage was irrelevant while the reality is Jesus Christ is the Messiah for humankind
No, because that would only explain the success of Christian communities. Other religious communities have also developed.
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
Never ever forget that Starmer is a proven lawyer. As such, he won't have asked this question of the Labour left without gaming the answers first.
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Good question. Off the top of my head, they would be: WW2 End of the Roman Empire - 1066. (Very difficult this one as so much is unknown, but if it were possible to teach it I'd include it.) The industrial revolution Tudors (how we got from the medeival period through the reformation to an England we'd vaguely recognise as modern) Stuarts (civil wars and the birth of parliamentary democracy)
Admittedly that pretty much covers all of English* history.
*Yes, I recognise Scotland might be slightly different - though I'd probably propose a very similar answer for Scotland.
You forgot Empire and Slavery (to keep both sides equally happy or unhappy, delete to taste).
The question asked was which five events would you cover. You can't add any unless you take one away. That's the point and the central problem.
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
Men Without Gods do mad things.
Lots of religious murder out there. Basically man is often pretty shit to other man.
It's a grim but interesting question.
Does the belief that they are doing God's work make the diminish the terror (because it acknowledges a higher power who might hold the terrorist accountable) or worse (because God is telling them to do it)? Would the Inquisitors, or Cromwell's Major Generals, have been crueller had God not been watching them?
The most evil regimes have often been atheistic or quasi atheistic
The Nazis The USSR under Stalin and Lenin Mao’s China Pol Pot’s Cambodia
However this may just be coincidence, atheism as a way of thinking is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it’s only recently that humanity has gained the industrial ability (trains, gas chambers, et al) to slaughter people en masse
And there were plenty of super religious societies in the past that were phenomenally sadistic, The Aztecs were quite out there
The atheistic or quasi atheistic societies you list used a form of state religion as part of their thing. Consider -
- A book or 2 (which most didn't read) defined the society. Apparently - Only the anointed priests could interpret the book(s). DIY interpretation a major heresy. - The state is threatened by heresy everywhere. Witches under every bed. - The all powerful, perfect state is therefore under constant threat. - This is assuaged by regularly finding nests of heretics. - Problems with the society are always caused by heretics. Since the plan is perfect. Therefore the solution to every problem is to find more heretics.
Yes, the process is similar if not identical. The human brain is naturally religious, and evil atheistic regimes simply exploit this religiose tendency in our psychology. Whether you are worshipping the state, the flag, the Fuhrer, or Jehovah, Allah, Tlaloc the drinker of tears, it doesn’t matter that much
Perhaps a more interesting question is what happens when you briskly and violently destroy the faith of a religious state. The Khmers were devout Buddhists before communism, with a temple on every corner and monks everywhere. Pol Pot deliberately targeted this first, killing every monk (they used to throw them by the dozen off cliffs) and toppling many temples (the fame of Angkor Wat meant he had to spare it)
One theory of the Khmer Rouge’s unique lunacy is that this sudden annihilation of Cambodia’s spirituality led to the intense craziness thereafter. All of life’s traditional meaning was brutally stripped away, so life had no value
Edmund Burke has similar thoughts on the French Revolution
I'm off out before we get even further off-topic, but I just reminded myself of problems of distracted drivers on UK roads.
Here's a distracted (Land Rover, inevitably) driver who was eating a bowl of cornflakes whilst commuting to work. https://youtu.be/0elsNDRqLtQ?t=29
Does this happen in other countries?
...thereby breaking two cardinal rules: - don't drive while distracted by eating a bowl of cornflakes - don't eat a bowl of cornflakes while distracted by driving.
There is no way she isn't going to get to work without a big mess of milk and soggy regret in her lap.
For our American friends - Driving while reloading a magazine for a firearm is distracting.
I think Labour now have an opportunity to have their case heard in Scotland for the first time in almost a decade. Whether they make that case and how it lands is more uncertain. But at least they have some agency in the process now.
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
No such thing as "uniquely dark streaks in national characters"
... but ok it lubes the wheels of this sort of conversation, so I'll butt out.
I’m not sure there is “no such thing”, but, more pertinently, this is not my theory. It’s a theory i have heard from historians, some of them actually Cambodian, so there you go
Cultures do persist over many generations, so it's entirely conceivable without getting mired in the nonsense of race.
National character is definitely a thing. See how everything changes in the 10km between Menton, France, and Ventimigila, Italy. It’s the same scenery, same climate, same place basically. Yet the dyspeptic, decorous, vaguely snooty French become the garrulous, messy, gesticulating Italians in that short distance
I'm off out before we get even further off-topic, but I just reminded myself of problems of distracted drivers on UK roads.
Here's a distracted (Land Rover, inevitably) driver who was eating a bowl of cornflakes whilst commuting to work. https://youtu.be/0elsNDRqLtQ?t=29
Does this happen in other countries?
...thereby breaking two cardinal rules: - don't drive while distracted by eating a bowl of cornflakes - don't eat a bowl of cornflakes while distracted by driving.
There is no way she isn't going to get to work without a big mess of milk and soggy regret in her lap.
For our American friends - Driving while reloading a magazine for a firearm is distracting.
Saw this last time I was in the states.
Reloading the mag with rounds, or inserting the mag into the Armalite?
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
As an occasional runner but who often has to run in the dark, albeit with a light, I find it safer generally to run on the tarmac road so I don't trip on an unexpected bumps in the pavement. I hop back onto the pavement if a car comes along. I imagine that is very difficult or impossible for you so you are very brave!
Hah yes, but I don't use the road in the dark tbf. And I am only talking about shopping high streets, which should be pedestrianised imo, resistance to which often bizarrely comes from shopkeepers.
Not that bizarre. Make it more difficult for people to put stuff in their cars and they go to out of town centres instead.
One of the other things, separate but linked to that, which is killing town centres is high parking charges.
Blimey, even I can carry a bag of shopping a few hundred yards to a car.
(Agree about car-parking charges, though. Also the sheer difficulty of paying for parking in, for example, my local town Shaftesbury last time I tried: coin-meter full, card-reader broken, pay-by-app no signal to down load yet another new parking app.)
There are some parking machines that you select the tariff and then just tap your card - easy. The RUH in Bath has this, and its great (even if expensive).
And then there are the rest... Wiltshire has a app based one, which to use I have to constantly 2FA my card. i could fully sign up I suppose, but when I can see its possible to tap and go (see above) I don't see why I should.
We parked in Leeds Victoria on Monday night (once you hit 5pm it's cheaper there than the outside car parks).
Trying to get to the card reader using my watch was not an exercise I'm going to repeat.
Well, serve you right. Use your feet to get to them like the rest of us.*
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Good question. Off the top of my head, they would be: WW2 End of the Roman Empire - 1066. (Very difficult this one as so much is unknown, but if it were possible to teach it I'd include it.) The industrial revolution Tudors (how we got from the medeival period through the reformation to an England we'd vaguely recognise as modern) Stuarts (civil wars and the birth of parliamentary democracy)
Admittedly that pretty much covers all of English* history.
*Yes, I recognise Scotland might be slightly different - though I'd probably propose a very similar answer for Scotland.
You forgot Empire and Slavery (to keep both sides equally happy or unhappy, delete to taste).
The question asked was which five events would you cover. You can't add any unless you take one away. That's the point and the central problem.
five is very hard
Like above, you 'have' to cover Roman England 1066 Split from Rome (Henry VIII) English Civil War WW2
But, that does miss out The Industrial Revolutions' and British Empire, which are just as vital.
If anything, possibly ditch the Romans as crazy as that sounds.
I think I have developed my thesis for the Knapper’s Gazette so thanks, PB. I’m gonna wander down the Tonle Sap where it meets the Mekong, and have a cocktail
@Leon - Robin Dunbar has done quite a lot of writing on the subject of how religion came to be and the evolutionary advantage that the religious had over the non-religious. Necessarily rather speculative, but interesting and accessible. I've just had a hunt on my bookshelf for the relevant tome but it is utterly inaccessible behind various certificates daughters have achieved which the bookshelf now seems to be the home of.
Anyway, if memory serves, the chief evolutionary advantage of religion to the advantage of religion itself was that religious groups formed stronger bonds between each other and greater levels of 'us against them' than non-religious groups. But there were others, some of which you have alluded to.
Or the evolutionary advantage was irrelevant while the reality is Jesus Christ is the Messiah for humankind
No, because that would only explain the success of Christian communities. Other religious communities have also developed.
Yes, other religions communities had even developed when Jesus walked the earth, not least the Jews and Roman Gods.
That doesn't mean Jesus is not the Messiah for humankind
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
Because nobody spends any money on repairing pavements.
I think pavement parking is gong to be a big issue when the road law review comes around, as is blocking of cycle lanes. Especially around difficulty of enforcement / laws which are a mess.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Plus there is a Transport Select Committee into Accessibility in Transport at present.
Locally, they have built cycle lanes. Then closed them and rebuilt them for months. Each time the road layout becomes more and more confusing. For everyone.
They still haven't given a clear guidance on whether the crossings to the bus stops are enforced in any way. So the pensioners crossing them don't know. The cyclists don't know....
Better yet, where the cycle lanes cross entry roads, no guidance has been provided on whether cars should stop before or in the cycle lane before turning.
Indecision and confusion in traffic. What could go wrong?
The council appears to be implementing this by "Build it. Oh shit. Rebuild it....."
There's a bundle of questions there. How to avoid rabbit holes?
Good national guidelines exist in LTN 1/20, but Councils soft pedal them to save money, plus they don't have people who know how to sweat the detail and get it right - so they end up with huge amount of rework (some great examples around).
An example in London is where TFL roads follow guidelines for bus stops (ideally bus stop and waiting space and shelter on a large enough island, mini zebra crossing across the cycle track to get there, appropriate kerb heights for guide dogs and so on), but Boroughs often go for cheaper solutions that cause more conflict, known as "Bus Stop Boarders (BSBs)", where the people get off the bus straight onto the cycle track.
The BSBs are actually a second rate design for really tight spaces. Similarly in my area, for decades the Council went for the bottom possible option for cycling - shared pavements, which are not good enough for reasonable cycle commuting (too slow) and cause conflict.
I can post the legal position on crossings on bus stops if you like, but they are different to on-carriageway zebras - essentially because pedestrians are far safer around bikes at 10-12mph than bikes or peds are around motor vehicles at 20-40mph.
The "stop in the cycle lane or before" is a design issue in each case. A normal way to do the design would be a 5m space for one car next to the road after a "bent out" cycle track. Or a "bent in" cycle track crossing where the cycles cross close to the carriageway, so the driver has decent sightlines. The important thing is that everyone is able to tell what everyone else will be likely to do. In NL they have regulations about how much cycle track must be visible before it crosses a road, by type of road. That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe.
Of course there are also the complexities around transition and changing road culture, plus currently political overlays.
The bent in cycle tracks are one of the things they are re-re-re-implementing badly.
"That's what I mean by sweating the detail to make it practical and safe." - THIS
There's a nice proverb about designing schemes - "if you need to put signs up to tell people what to do, you've got it wrong". Which is about expectation and appearance, and eg why people drive to the "felt safe speed" appearance of the street, rather than to the marked speed limit.
The Dutch are good at this, I think.
Careful - you'll be implying a national trait, if you are not careful...
🙂 - some guidance
They have a good cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. Much better than here. YES.
Cycling lane design skills are in the Dutch DNA. It's part of their national character. NO.
I'd add that the cycling infrastructure works *with* the traffic system as a whole, in the Netherlands. Rather than as a tacked on "Fuck You" to everyone else on the road.
Almost as if designing something to work rather than as a "statement" is the way to go.
Two points I'd add.
1 - Back in 1970 NL was in exactly the same motor vehicle dominated state as we were, and still basically are. They changed it after they decided to change it. The question here is whether the current work will continue for the necessary time period; it will involve a lot of change including things like a return to better public transport to make largely car-free life practical.
2 - One interesting thing about NL is that they have a principle which translates roughly as "unravelling the modes", which is separating motor traffic from people using bikes and people on foot. Modal filtering also comes in.
In Amsterdam they even have 3 separate identified networks of streets optimised for each mode, with space allocated and designed as appropriate for each setting, plus separate strategic routes (certainly for cycles) which are not even on the roads. So you may be cycling down a road with minimal cyclists, and move across to a parallel one 100m away which will have 10x as many people on bikes - because you were on the wrong network.
We are beginning to see a bit of that in London, and Cambridge have been doing something similar for a long time with their 'quiet ways' as they are known, but Cambridge have not done direct and strategic dedicated cycleways very much aiui. Also Edinburgh in some respects.
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Good question. Off the top of my head, they would be: WW2 End of the Roman Empire - 1066. (Very difficult this one as so much is unknown, but if it were possible to teach it I'd include it.) The industrial revolution Tudors (how we got from the medeival period through the reformation to an England we'd vaguely recognise as modern) Stuarts (civil wars and the birth of parliamentary democracy)
Admittedly that pretty much covers all of English* history.
*Yes, I recognise Scotland might be slightly different - though I'd probably propose a very similar answer for Scotland.
There should be a school term dedicated to human evil, especially genocide
Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Rwanda, Namibia, and yes Pol Pot, plus global slavery (by Muslims and Africans and Romans just as much as white Europeans)
Because this shit is so important and because it can come from anywhere and arise with great speed
Also the gorier bits would be entertaining for bored kids
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
He can if some Labour voters in marginal seats go Green or stay home on polling day in protest at Corbyn's deselection
For a 2024 Labour Marginal Seat where exactly are you talking about - Chester, Uxbridge (albeit very unlikely to go Green because of Heathrow) or Maidenhead?
All of them potentially.
Say what you like about Blair, he was tactically aware enough not to deselect Tony Benn and Corbyn as he knew he needed leftwing votes for a majority under FPTP.
Cameron too never deselected Bill Cash or IDS as he knew he needed rightwing votes under FPTP too.
Starmer is taking a big risk here if leftwingers go Green or stay home
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
Men Without Gods do mad things.
Lots of religious murder out there. Basically man is often pretty shit to other man.
It's a grim but interesting question.
Does the belief that they are doing God's work make the diminish the terror (because it acknowledges a higher power who might hold the terrorist accountable) or worse (because God is telling them to do it)? Would the Inquisitors, or Cromwell's Major Generals, have been crueller had God not been watching them?
The most evil regimes have often been atheistic or quasi atheistic
The Nazis The USSR under Stalin and Lenin Mao’s China Pol Pot’s Cambodia
However this may just be coincidence, atheism as a way of thinking is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it’s only recently that humanity has gained the industrial ability (trains, gas chambers, et al) to slaughter people en masse
And there were plenty of super religious societies in the past that were phenomenally sadistic, The Aztecs were quite out there
The atheistic or quasi atheistic societies you list used a form of state religion as part of their thing. Consider -
- A book or 2 (which most didn't read) defined the society. Apparently - Only the anointed priests could interpret the book(s). DIY interpretation a major heresy. - The state is threatened by heresy everywhere. Witches under every bed. - The all powerful, perfect state is therefore under constant threat. - This is assuaged by regularly finding nests of heretics. - Problems with the society are always caused by heretics. Since the plan is perfect. Therefore the solution to every problem is to find more heretics.
Yes, the process is similar if not identical. The human brain is naturally religious, and evil atheistic regimes simply exploit this religiose tendency in our psychology. Whether you are worshipping the state, the flag, the Fuhrer, or Jehovah, Allah, Tlaloc the drinker of tears, it doesn’t matter that much
Perhaps a more interesting question is what happens when you briskly and violently destroy the faith of a religious state. The Khmers were devout Buddhists before communism, with a temple on every corner and monks everywhere. Pol Pot deliberately targeted this first, killing every monk (they used to throw them by the dozen off cliffs) and toppling many temples (the fame of Angkor Wat meant he had to spare it)
One theory of the Khmer Rouge’s unique lunacy is that this sudden annihilation of Cambodia’s spirituality led to the intense craziness thereafter. All of life’s traditional meaning was brutally stripped away, so life had no value
Edmund Burke has similar thoughts on the French Revolution
Hannah Arendt made an analogous point about totalitarianism thriving not amongst those who believe the lies, but those who believe that everything is a lie.
I'm off out before we get even further off-topic, but I just reminded myself of problems of distracted drivers on UK roads.
Here's a distracted (Land Rover, inevitably) driver who was eating a bowl of cornflakes whilst commuting to work. https://youtu.be/0elsNDRqLtQ?t=29
Does this happen in other countries?
...thereby breaking two cardinal rules: - don't drive while distracted by eating a bowl of cornflakes - don't eat a bowl of cornflakes while distracted by driving.
There is no way she isn't going to get to work without a big mess of milk and soggy regret in her lap.
For our American friends - Driving while reloading a magazine for a firearm is distracting.
Saw this last time I was in the states.
Reloading the mag with rounds, or inserting the mag into the Armalite?
What were they shooting??
They were doing the classic crawl in traffic, stop/start, hands off steering wheel.
Just the activity was pushing rounds into a magazine. Looked like 5.56 at a guess.
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
No such thing as "uniquely dark streaks in national characters"
... but ok it lubes the wheels of this sort of conversation, so I'll butt out.
I’m not sure there is “no such thing”, but, more pertinently, this is not my theory. It’s a theory i have heard from historians, some of them actually Cambodian, so there you go
Cultures do persist over many generations, so it's entirely conceivable without getting mired in the nonsense of race.
National character is definitely a thing. See how everything changes in the 10km between Menton, France, and Ventimigila, Italy. It’s the same scenery, same climate, same place basically. Yet the dyspeptic, decorous, vaguely snooty French become the garrulous, messy, gesticulating Italians in that short distance
Not necessarily national - you see similar things within the US.
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Good question. Off the top of my head, they would be: WW2 End of the Roman Empire - 1066. (Very difficult this one as so much is unknown, but if it were possible to teach it I'd include it.) The industrial revolution Tudors (how we got from the medeival period through the reformation to an England we'd vaguely recognise as modern) Stuarts (civil wars and the birth of parliamentary democracy)
Admittedly that pretty much covers all of English* history.
*Yes, I recognise Scotland might be slightly different - though I'd probably propose a very similar answer for Scotland.
Things I'm surprised school history doesn't cover more thoroughly:
- European wars of religion - The mediaeval empires: Byzantine, Islamic caliphate, Mongol, Russian, Viking - Early colonialism and US war of independence - Cromwell and the civil war (and related Anglo-Irish history)
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
He can if some Labour voters in marginal seats go Green or stay home on polling day in protest at Corbyn's deselection
I think on balance Starmer has the political calculus right with ejecting JC but a note of caution from my own little world.
Neither my wife nor son are hard lefties but both of them are on Corbyn's side here. They say this is vindictive and Jeremy deserves better.
There is affection for the man out there. So, you know, I wonder. Was this really necessary?
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Good question. Off the top of my head, they would be: WW2 End of the Roman Empire - 1066. (Very difficult this one as so much is unknown, but if it were possible to teach it I'd include it.) The industrial revolution Tudors (how we got from the medeival period through the reformation to an England we'd vaguely recognise as modern) Stuarts (civil wars and the birth of parliamentary democracy)
Admittedly that pretty much covers all of English* history.
*Yes, I recognise Scotland might be slightly different - though I'd probably propose a very similar answer for Scotland.
You forgot Empire and Slavery (to keep both sides equally happy or unhappy, delete to taste).
The question asked was which five events would you cover. You can't add any unless you take one away. That's the point and the central problem.
This can't be done. Best I can do:
Modern global world:
Jesus and aftermath Mohammed and aftermath Empire as global concept Rise of liberalism Marx
Modern Britain:
Alfred 1066 Black death Reformations 1517-1690 Industrialisation from Watt-Internet.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Direct action that shit. One of the many things I learned from hunt sabbing is that broken glass from a fluorescent light tube in the oil filler will completely destroy an engine in a few hours while leaving no trace of shenanigans.
Breaking in to release the bonnet to open the oil filler might leave a few traces though, shirley?
In any event, if the dumb twat's engine is destroyed with no trace how's he going to learn that it was the poor parking that cost him.
I favour letting down a tyre for maximum inconvenience at little long-term damage/risk.
My house is conveniently close for the school run. So in the case of extremely inconsiderate parking it is an easy job to pop home, write a quick post-it note and slap it on the offending windscreen.
Most people don't park poorly out of spite or selfishness. They occupy the pavement because they think they are being considerate to road users and the inconvenience they are causing to pedestrians doesn't occur to them. And we're British, even a politely worded note wounds. And I'm not trying to inconvenience or offend, I'm trying to gently guide future behaviour. I try to as nicely as possible ask them to leave enough room for a double buggy to pass. Direct action suburban style.
Yes, I had a very British experience like that. I parked a bit close to someone's driveway. She left me a note saying sorry to be a nuisance, but can you park a metre or so further along next time as it's hard to get out safely. I did, and a few days later she saw me and said oh thank you, and I do feel bad about hassling you, I hope it was all right, and I said no, no, I feel bad that I caused you inconvenience, thank you for telling me.
There are countries where this culture would seem utterly ridiculous, but unlike flags and parades and stuff, I do think it's something that we can be rather proud of in Britain - it's OK to be OTT in making each other feel good.
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Good question. Off the top of my head, they would be: WW2 End of the Roman Empire - 1066. (Very difficult this one as so much is unknown, but if it were possible to teach it I'd include it.) The industrial revolution Tudors (how we got from the medeival period through the reformation to an England we'd vaguely recognise as modern) Stuarts (civil wars and the birth of parliamentary democracy)
Admittedly that pretty much covers all of English* history.
*Yes, I recognise Scotland might be slightly different - though I'd probably propose a very similar answer for Scotland.
There should be a school term dedicated to human evil, especially genocide
Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Rwanda, Namibia, and yes Pol Pot, plus global slavery (by Muslims and Africans and Romans just as much as white Europeans)
Because this shit is so important and because it can come from anywhere and arise with great speed
Also the gorier bits would be entertaining for bored kids
Themed terms would be an interesting idea, cutting across eras and regions. Other themes:
- Revolutions and revolts - Major political & constitutional changes (from greek city democracy through magna carta to William of Orange and the French republic) - Empires - Religious schisms
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Direct action that shit. One of the many things I learned from hunt sabbing is that broken glass from a fluorescent light tube in the oil filler will completely destroy an engine in a few hours while leaving no trace of shenanigans.
Breaking in to release the bonnet to open the oil filler might leave a few traces though, shirley?
In any event, if the dumb twat's engine is destroyed with no trace how's he going to learn that it was the poor parking that cost him.
I favour letting down a tyre for maximum inconvenience at little long-term damage/risk.
My house is conveniently close for the school run. So in the case of extremely inconsiderate parking it is an easy job to pop home, write a quick post-it note and slap it on the offending windscreen.
Most people don't park poorly out of spite or selfishness. They occupy the pavement because they think they are being considerate to road users and the inconvenience they are causing to pedestrians doesn't occur to them. And we're British, even a politely worded note wounds. And I'm not trying to inconvenience or offend, I'm trying to gently guide future behaviour. I try to as nicely as possible ask them to leave enough room for a double buggy to pass. Direct action suburban style.
Getting rid of the school run would be better. Let's go back to the days of relatively small, neighbourhood schools within walking distance. Less traffic, more walking, fewer obesity.
The 15-minute cities article struck a chord. Why are the pavements so shocking in our towns and cities?
As a wheelchair user I find myself increasingly deciding to wheel along roads in town centres - nice smooth tarmac compared to uneven, unstable, narrow, highly-cambered pavements.
As an occasional runner but who often has to run in the dark, albeit with a light, I find it safer generally to run on the tarmac road so I don't trip on an unexpected bumps in the pavement. I hop back onto the pavement if a car comes along. I imagine that is very difficult or impossible for you so you are very brave!
Hah yes, but I don't use the road in the dark tbf. And I am only talking about shopping high streets, which should be pedestrianised imo, resistance to which often bizarrely comes from shopkeepers.
Not that bizarre. Make it more difficult for people to put stuff in their cars and they go to out of town centres instead.
One of the other things, separate but linked to that, which is killing town centres is high parking charges.
Blimey, even I can carry a bag of shopping a few hundred yards to a car.
(Agree about car-parking charges, though. Also the sheer difficulty of paying for parking in, for example, my local town Shaftesbury last time I tried: coin-meter full, card-reader broken, pay-by-app no signal to down load yet another new parking app.)
There are some parking machines that you select the tariff and then just tap your card - easy. The RUH in Bath has this, and its great (even if expensive).
And then there are the rest... Wiltshire has a app based one, which to use I have to constantly 2FA my card. i could fully sign up I suppose, but when I can see its possible to tap and go (see above) I don't see why I should.
I refuse to use car parks that won't accept cash, though if they are rip-off prices I will tolerate a card reader. If it's App only then they can forget it (why do I need my phone just to nip to the shops, or the country park?) so the businesses of Chelmsford Borough Council and the London Borough of Redbridge live without my custom altogether.
I'm the opposite. I never carry cash and therefore refuse to use the ludicrous outdated 'cash-only' carparks that you still encounter in the darkest corners of the provinces. I mean, who in their right mind carries notes, never mind coinage, around in this day and age? Cash is pointless – wasteful, environmentally unjustifiable, inconvenient, outdated, slow, expensive. What is the point of it? There is none.
I think you do not have to be a Momentum supporter to believe that the treatment of Corbyn has been shabby.
It feels ugly & vindictive.
I suspect that it will be a net loser of votes.
SKS and the Labour Right had already won. Magnaminity in victory is wisest.
Not sure I agree with that. Remember that a significant driver against Labour in 2019 was revulsion towards Corbyn and Corbynism. Any action that Starmer takes to repel the party away from that position is a vote winner.
Yes there will be some embittered trots unhappy about it. But these are not Labour voters anyway so no loss.
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
He can if some Labour voters in marginal seats go Green or stay home on polling day in protest at Corbyn's deselection
For a 2024 Labour Marginal Seat where exactly are you talking about - Chester, Uxbridge (albeit very unlikely to go Green because of Heathrow) or Maidenhead?
All of them potentially.
Say what you like about Blair, he was tactically aware enough not to deselect Tony Benn and Corbyn as he knew he needed leftwing votes for a majority under FPTP.
Cameron too never deselected Bill Cash or IDS as he knew he needed rightwing votes under FPTP too.
Starmer is taking a big risk here if leftwingers go Green or stay home
Both Benn and Corbyn were playing the part of Loyal, But With Concerns, under New Labour.
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
No such thing as "uniquely dark streaks in national characters"
... but ok it lubes the wheels of this sort of conversation, so I'll butt out.
I’m not sure there is “no such thing”, but, more pertinently, this is not my theory. It’s a theory i have heard from historians, some of them actually Cambodian, so there you go
Cultures do persist over many generations, so it's entirely conceivable without getting mired in the nonsense of race.
National character is definitely a thing. See how everything changes in the 10km between Menton, France, and Ventimigila, Italy. It’s the same scenery, same climate, same place basically. Yet the dyspeptic, decorous, vaguely snooty French become the garrulous, messy, gesticulating Italians in that short distance
Indeed. The Italian side is notably noisy, messy and stressful compared to the elegant, refined French side.
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
He can if some Labour voters in marginal seats go Green or stay home on polling day in protest at Corbyn's deselection
I think on balance Starmer has the political calculus right with ejecting JC but a note of caution from my own little world.
Neither my wife nor son are hard lefties but both of them are on Corbyn's side here. They say this is vindictive and Jeremy deserves better.
There is affection for the man out there. So, you know, I wonder. Was this really necessary?
Yes. He defied an instruction from the leadership to apologise and rejected an independent report that demonstrated under his leadership the party had a serious problem with racism.
Now, it is his right to not apologise, and to reject the report, is he genuinely feels he has nothing to apologise for and the report is wrong. But with that right, comes the right to take the consequences. It marks him out as somebody who isn't suitable to be a Labour MP, because he is either racist himself or so dim he can't recognise racism when he sees it, and that is why Starmer has withdrawn the whip.
It is my fervent hope that Sunak will have the courage to do the same to Johnson over the SPC report, but unhappily I fear Sunak doesn't have Starmer's steel.
“For the SNP, Brexit has turned out to be both the casus belli for its second push for independence and a strategic disaster. The best thing that could happen to Scottish nationalism would be for Britain to rejoin the European Union.”
This is about right I think. The departure of NS makes no difference to the big question of Scottish independence - there was and is no foreseeable route to it because of: Brexit, history, economics and, critically, the Scottish voters don't want it.
It makes a lot of difference to quotidien Scottish and UK politics. NS is a force of nature, as was Salmond. Kate Forbes is the only possible 'force of nature' candidate - jury is out and we may never know. She may have better things to do that face the mob over her centre right opinions.
Finally, suppose we rejoin the EU, in truth it makes little difference whether Scotland is then 'independent' or not. It just means their 'ever closer union' is with rUK +27.
"Scottish voters don't want it" is an odd interpretation of around 50% wanting independence.
And as I keep saying, punters pile more and more and more votes onto the SNP when given the chance. There is so much they do wrong, but the idea that they aren't popular is laughable. Well, they *were* popular, we'll have to see where they go from here.
Fair assessment, I think.
There's an interesting dissonance here on PB.
SNP minority government - one party state, but not majority Tory government in London Voting in the 45-55% range - no mandate at all, no sirree, unles we are talking about the Tories or Brexiters
If you'd got more than 50% in your referendum, you'd have had a mandate for separation...
That was then. I was talking about a mandate *to have a referendum* as you must surely realise. As this has been refused, and the underlying and very recent Act of Parliament is not being changed, this raises major questions about what a democratic mandate really is in the UK state.
Carnyx, the smartarse will not be interested in your civil answer. These clowns are happy for a minority party to have full control of not only England but Scotland as well and the arses also are happy to have a revolving chair re PM's , sheep shagging hypocrite and only one of many.
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
Men Without Gods do mad things.
Lots of religious murder out there. Basically man is often pretty shit to other man.
It's a grim but interesting question.
Does the belief that they are doing God's work make the diminish the terror (because it acknowledges a higher power who might hold the terrorist accountable) or worse (because God is telling them to do it)? Would the Inquisitors, or Cromwell's Major Generals, have been crueller had God not been watching them?
The most evil regimes have often been atheistic or quasi atheistic
The Nazis The USSR under Stalin and Lenin Mao’s China Pol Pot’s Cambodia
However this may just be coincidence, atheism as a way of thinking is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it’s only recently that humanity has gained the industrial ability (trains, gas chambers, et al) to slaughter people en masse
And there were plenty of super religious societies in the past that were phenomenally sadistic, The Aztecs were quite out there
The atheistic or quasi atheistic societies you list used a form of state religion as part of their thing. Consider -
- A book or 2 (which most didn't read) defined the society. Apparently - Only the anointed priests could interpret the book(s). DIY interpretation a major heresy. - The state is threatened by heresy everywhere. Witches under every bed. - The all powerful, perfect state is therefore under constant threat. - This is assuaged by regularly finding nests of heretics. - Problems with the society are always caused by heretics. Since the plan is perfect. Therefore the solution to every problem is to find more heretics.
Yes, the process is similar if not identical. The human brain is naturally religious, and evil atheistic regimes simply exploit this religiose tendency in our psychology. Whether you are worshipping the state, the flag, the Fuhrer, or Jehovah, Allah, Tlaloc the drinker of tears, it doesn’t matter that much
Perhaps a more interesting question is what happens when you briskly and violently destroy the faith of a religious state. The Khmers were devout Buddhists before communism, with a temple on every corner and monks everywhere. Pol Pot deliberately targeted this first, killing every monk (they used to throw them by the dozen off cliffs) and toppling many temples (the fame of Angkor Wat meant he had to spare it)
One theory of the Khmer Rouge’s unique lunacy is that this sudden annihilation of Cambodia’s spirituality led to the intense craziness thereafter. All of life’s traditional meaning was brutally stripped away, so life had no value
Edmund Burke has similar thoughts on the French Revolution
Hannah Arendt made an analogous point about totalitarianism thriving not amongst those who believe the lies, but those who believe that everything is a lie.
Which is where the decline of religion may come in. The monotheistic concept of the omnicompetent god gives a notional focus of the idea of objectivity - the view from nowhere, and the knowledge of everything, including stuff like right and wrong, belonging uniquely to the one god.
Armed with that many of course become self important fundamentalists, but you could also become a humble liberal - the truth is out there, it exists, but epistemology for us is hard, even if it is easy for god.
Without that notional focus it is quite hard to ground either objectivity or the concept of truth. And it is hard to find another such focus.
I have just been to the Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, south of Phnom Penh
I am glad I went, I fervently never want to see anything like it, ever again. Never never never. “Desolating” does not cover it
A fair few lefties who think Hitler was the most evil of all evil dictators might want to swing by though.
I’m not really using an evil-o-meter. Hitler would surely be right at the top of that, with maybe Mao and Stalin
It’s the weird self-harming sadism of the Khmer Rouge that strikes me
Lots of historians have tried to explain it, and failed. Yes it was commie and class based but they also slaughtered trillions of peasants. Yes initially it was urban v rural but in the end the entire nation was crucified by itself. They nailed themselves up
The Khmers themselves sometimes say they have a uniquely dark streak in their national character. The Black Khmer, the Khmer Noir (hence the Khmer Rouge). Normally this is reined in by Buddhism, but if you take that away….or so the theory goes
Men Without Gods do mad things
No such thing as "uniquely dark streaks in national characters"
... but ok it lubes the wheels of this sort of conversation, so I'll butt out.
I’m not sure there is “no such thing”, but, more pertinently, this is not my theory. It’s a theory i have heard from historians, some of them actually Cambodian, so there you go
Cultures do persist over many generations, so it's entirely conceivable without getting mired in the nonsense of race.
National character is definitely a thing. See how everything changes in the 10km between Menton, France, and Ventimigila, Italy. It’s the same scenery, same climate, same place basically. Yet the dyspeptic, decorous, vaguely snooty French become the garrulous, messy, gesticulating Italians in that short distance
Not necessarily national - you see similar things within the US.
The Swiss have the term Rostigraben for the huge and sudden change in everything between French and German Switzerland.
Closer to home we have Shooter's hill, famous in history and the opening pages of a tale of 2 cities as the hangout of highwaymen, and now our own Rostigraben. The aesthetics, architecture, culture, socio-economics, demographics and politics on the West and East sides of the hill are utterly different.
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
He can if some Labour voters in marginal seats go Green or stay home on polling day in protest at Corbyn's deselection
For a 2024 Labour Marginal Seat where exactly are you talking about - Chester, Uxbridge (albeit very unlikely to go Green because of Heathrow) or Maidenhead?
All of them potentially.
Say what you like about Blair, he was tactically aware enough not to deselect Tony Benn and Corbyn as he knew he needed leftwing votes for a majority under FPTP.
Cameron too never deselected Bill Cash or IDS as he knew he needed rightwing votes under FPTP too.
Starmer is taking a big risk here if leftwingers go Green or stay home
"Leftwingers" of the kind you describe do not vote Labour. They have long-since scabbed off to a multitude of groups (TUSC, NHA, Socialist Labour etc etc) which get laughingly housed under the "left unity" umbrella.
Them coming to Labour under Corbyn added a small number of votes. The mainstream being repelled by them from Labour cost a great deal more votes.
If we assume that all of the embittered left decide to back the TUSC candidate in whichever seat, thats all of 0.3% off the Labour tally. Whereas them not being around brings in 5% off the Tory tally...
Do young people in the West have any awareness of the Khmer Rouge, or Pol Pot, or any of it?
My guess is no. I remember being shocked when my then 22 year old niece asked me (after a discussion of this subject) “who is Pol Pot”? She was and is well educated and intelligent, yet this horribly important chunk of history had completely passed her by
That was 10 years ago and I seriously doubt that things have got better, indeed I have evidence they have not (someone else asked me a similar question recently)
For a while, it was huge. One of my first news memories is Blue Peter covering the story (checks- it was their 1979 Christmas appeal, which was to rebuild the country after Pol Pot).
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
Before WWII British kids would be taught the history of the Napoleonic and Boer Wars (WWI was too recent to be in the syllabus), but they've long since been dropped to fit in more recent history.
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Good question. Off the top of my head, they would be: WW2 End of the Roman Empire - 1066. (Very difficult this one as so much is unknown, but if it were possible to teach it I'd include it.) The industrial revolution Tudors (how we got from the medeival period through the reformation to an England we'd vaguely recognise as modern) Stuarts (civil wars and the birth of parliamentary democracy)
Admittedly that pretty much covers all of English* history.
*Yes, I recognise Scotland might be slightly different - though I'd probably propose a very similar answer for Scotland.
There should be a school term dedicated to human evil, especially genocide
Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Rwanda, Namibia, and yes Pol Pot, plus global slavery (by Muslims and Africans and Romans just as much as white Europeans)
Because this shit is so important and because it can come from anywhere and arise with great speed
Also the gorier bits would be entertaining for bored kids
Given the Horrors of Bakhmut, evil is also on the Modern Studies syllabus.
I currently have a van regularly parked 90% across the pavement which is the walking route to the local primary school, and to the shops. Council can't enforce as it is not marked double yellow or zone, and is not yet adopted. Police generally aren't interested.
Direct action that shit. One of the many things I learned from hunt sabbing is that broken glass from a fluorescent light tube in the oil filler will completely destroy an engine in a few hours while leaving no trace of shenanigans.
Breaking in to release the bonnet to open the oil filler might leave a few traces though, shirley?
In any event, if the dumb twat's engine is destroyed with no trace how's he going to learn that it was the poor parking that cost him.
I favour letting down a tyre for maximum inconvenience at little long-term damage/risk.
My house is conveniently close for the school run. So in the case of extremely inconsiderate parking it is an easy job to pop home, write a quick post-it note and slap it on the offending windscreen.
Most people don't park poorly out of spite or selfishness. They occupy the pavement because they think they are being considerate to road users and the inconvenience they are causing to pedestrians doesn't occur to them. And we're British, even a politely worded note wounds. And I'm not trying to inconvenience or offend, I'm trying to gently guide future behaviour. I try to as nicely as possible ask them to leave enough room for a double buggy to pass. Direct action suburban style.
Getting rid of the school run would be better. Let's go back to the days of relatively small, neighbourhood schools within walking distance. Less traffic, more walking, fewer obesity.
Apparently School Buses in the UK would destroy the spacetime continuum or something.
Despite
1) Private Schools running them 2) A number of school bus systems actually being set up in parts of the UK. Saw one in Cornwall - local taxi driver had amalgamated his morning taxi runs for various children, bought a properly equipped mini bus etc.
As a result of yesterday's conspiracy against the people's princess, we're talking about Nicola Sturgeon and not Jeremy Corbyn.
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
He can if some Labour voters in marginal seats go Green or stay home on polling day in protest at Corbyn's deselection
For a 2024 Labour Marginal Seat where exactly are you talking about - Chester, Uxbridge (albeit very unlikely to go Green because of Heathrow) or Maidenhead?
All of them potentially.
Say what you like about Blair, he was tactically aware enough not to deselect Tony Benn and Corbyn as he knew he needed leftwing votes for a majority under FPTP.
Cameron too never deselected Bill Cash or IDS as he knew he needed rightwing votes under FPTP too.
Starmer is taking a big risk here if leftwingers go Green or stay home
Both Benn and Corbyn were playing the part of Loyal, But With Concerns, under New Labour.
Corbyn? Loyal? He voted with the Tories literal hundreds of time during Blair's tenure.
Comments
Most people don't park poorly out of spite or selfishness. They occupy the pavement because they think they are being considerate to road users and the inconvenience they are causing to pedestrians doesn't occur to them. And we're British, even a politely worded note wounds. And I'm not trying to inconvenience or offend, I'm trying to gently guide future behaviour. I try to as nicely as possible ask them to leave enough room for a double buggy to pass. Direct action suburban style.
But sadly, it's one of a chain of horrible things done by and to people in faraway countries. See also Biafra. Collectively, we'd rather not store too many of them in our heads.
(And, with my teacher hat on, there is a limit to how much stuff we can teach the young about the world in school, and we're pretty close to it now. Beyond that, we need them to find podcasts.)
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/feb/16/uk-solicitors-warned-not-to-act-as-hired-guns-to-silence-critics-of-super-rich
(PS No need to tell me about the issues of getting wheels over crapulent pavements - that's where the conversation started.)
Perhaps a more interesting question is what happens when you briskly and violently destroy the faith of a religious state. The Khmers were devout Buddhists before communism, with a temple on every corner and monks everywhere. Pol Pot deliberately targeted this first, killing every monk (they used to throw them by the dozen off cliffs) and toppling many temples (the fame of Angkor Wat meant he had to spare it)
One theory of the Khmer Rouge’s unique lunacy is that this sudden annihilation of Cambodia’s spirituality led to the intense craziness thereafter. All of life’s traditional meaning was brutally stripped away, so life had no value
It was never covered at school, so I'd guess today's young will only know of it if it has popped up on TV/popular YouTube/Insta/whatever channels.
https://www.khmertimeskh.com/501239699/dcts-to-govern-cambodia-united-kingdom-trade-from-april/
Blame the god for plenty of other things, though
There's an interesting dissonance here on PB.
SNP minority government - one party state, but not majority Tory government in London
Voting in the 45-55% range - no mandate at all, no sirree, unles we are talking about the Tories or Brexiters
All these witless kids onTwitter and TikTok who say that want “fully automated luxury communism” should be forced to look at the baby smashing tree. Communism is not “funny” nor should it be “fashionable”
Guide Dogs are trained to stop at kerbs which are 60mm high, and visually impaired people are used to high contrast crossings with audio signals or spinning cones to say when to cross. Plus people using walking canes navigate along kerbs or the walls of buildings (problems caused by cafe chairs on pavements).
So when you take away all the navigation help, and perhaps mix cars in, you may exclude visually impaired people from the town centre.
But other groups say "great - no more trip hazards".
It's a tricky thing to get right.
A number of @theSNP members have been suspended from the party without due process or because of complaints of “transphobia” on a definition which is not #ECHR or #EqualityLaw compliant. They must be reinstated or the leadership result could be challenged
https://twitter.com/joannaccherry/status/1626145568169816066?s=20
Anyway, if memory serves, the chief evolutionary advantage of religion to the advantage of religion itself was that religious groups formed stronger bonds between each other and greater levels of 'us against them' than non-religious groups. But there were others, some of which you have alluded to.
What the world can learn from a lobotomy surgeon’s horrible mistake….
In his zeal to change the world, Freeman had ended up violating the first principle of science, as laid out by the physicist Richard Feynman: “You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/14/walter-freeman-lobotomy-regret/
If you want to add more recent history - like China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, or even the War on Terror - then you have to drop something else from the history curriculum.
There's a lot to cover, for English kids, in the Romans, the Norman conquest, Henry VIII, the Armada, the slave trade, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (with the Welsh and Scots covering some different bits instead of the first four). And even then you've missed out Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, Wars of conquest in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, Empire and a whole bunch of other important stuff.
I think History must be a uniquely difficult subject to teach. It just keeps on expanding. Reading, writing and arithmetic are essentially still the same as they always were.
What are the five most important historical events that you'd want someone to learn about, in order to understand the modern world, and modern Britain? I wouldn't know where to start.
Here's a distracted (Land Rover, inevitably) driver who was eating a bowl of cornflakes whilst commuting to work.
https://youtu.be/0elsNDRqLtQ?t=29
Does this happen in other countries?
It is the first principle of politics as well.
And betting.
And life.
Also the subject of an episode of the always hilarious 'It's always sunny in Philadelphia'
government, as Crown in Parliament alone is sovereign in the UK
That is worth a look though. Absolute rage and fury from the hard left which is largely demanding that Jezbollah turn his Peace and Justice Project into a party.
If his "Brexiteer-at-heart"-ness does this, or even runs as an independent, it threatens a schism in the party where the Jeremy forever activists and MPs will have to choose whether they want to follow him out of the now Tory Labour Party into the socialist promised land.
Jeremy running in a seat he has held for decades has a shot at winning. But the rest? Jumping out of a party likely to win a chunky majority to form a hard left version of The Independent Group of Change is likely to deliver the same result - oblivion.
So its stick or twist time. How much are the likes of Ricky Dickie Ding Dong Burgon ideologically pure or how much are they sell-out scab faux-Tories? If they follow the people's princess they will likely lose their seats. If they follow him to the end, that end may be swift.
Starmer can't lose either way!
Would that mean there's 'always' a mandate for a referendum. What if that loses in the 40-50% range? What then? Like a few things which have actually happened.
Would there always be a permanent mandate for a referendum on that basis. What a bout a mandate for the other position if it passed etc etc.
At end of the politics is about power and using power. It's what you can argue and get away with.
WW2
End of the Roman Empire - 1066. (Very difficult this one as so much is unknown, but if it were possible to teach it I'd include it.)
The industrial revolution
Tudors (how we got from the medeival period through the reformation to an England we'd vaguely recognise as modern)
Stuarts (civil wars and the birth of parliamentary democracy)
Admittedly that pretty much covers all of English* history.
*Yes, I recognise Scotland might be slightly different - though I'd probably propose a very similar answer for Scotland.
Organisation of the election for new SNP leader ought not be in the hands of anybody under active police investigation for fraud.
They should call in the Electoral Reform Society to run it.
They won't. Pete & Nic'll fix it.
https://twitter.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/1626175673768239104?s=20
- don't drive while distracted by eating a bowl of cornflakes
- don't eat a bowl of cornflakes while distracted by driving.
There is no way she isn't going to get to work without a big mess of milk and soggy regret in her lap.
Trying to get to the card reader using my watch was not an exercise I'm going to repeat.
It’s motherfucking gold.
They have a good cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. Much better than here. YES.
Cycling lane design skills are in the Dutch DNA. It's part of their national character. NO.
Militant Part Deux.
https://whatscotlandthinks.org/2023/02/could-labour-profit-from-nicola-sturgeons-resignation/
Almost as if designing something to work rather than as a "statement" is the way to go.
Dutch cycle infrastructure hasn't come about by accident or quirk. It's happened as a result of 60 years of hard work and deliberate policy making. Having started at least 30 years later, we can't expect to get there instantly.
"Why ethnic minorities and young people are more conspiratorial
Eric Kaufmann"
https://unherd.com/thepost/why-ethnic-minorities-and-young-people-are-more-conspiratorial/
Scrub [edit] the Tudors.
Saw this last time I was in the states.
I think you do not have to be a Momentum supporter to believe that the treatment of Corbyn has been shabby.
It feels ugly & vindictive.
I suspect that it will be a net loser of votes.
SKS and the Labour Right had already won. Magnaminity in victory is wisest.
What were they shooting??
*wheelchair users obviously excepted.
Like above, you 'have' to cover
Roman England
1066
Split from Rome (Henry VIII)
English Civil War
WW2
But, that does miss out The Industrial Revolutions' and British Empire, which are just as vital.
If anything, possibly ditch the Romans as crazy as that sounds.
That doesn't mean Jesus is not the Messiah for humankind
1 - Back in 1970 NL was in exactly the same motor vehicle dominated state as we were, and still basically are. They changed it after they decided to change it. The question here is whether the current work will continue for the necessary time period; it will involve a lot of change including things like a return to better public transport to make largely car-free life practical.
2 - One interesting thing about NL is that they have a principle which translates roughly as "unravelling the modes", which is separating motor traffic from people using bikes and people on foot. Modal filtering also comes in.
In Amsterdam they even have 3 separate identified networks of streets optimised for each mode, with space allocated and designed as appropriate for each setting, plus separate strategic routes (certainly for cycles) which are not even on the roads. So you may be cycling down a road with minimal cyclists, and move across to a parallel one 100m away which will have 10x as many people on bikes - because you were on the wrong network.
We are beginning to see a bit of that in London, and Cambridge have been doing something similar for a long time with their 'quiet ways' as they are known, but Cambridge have not done direct and strategic dedicated cycleways very much aiui. Also Edinburgh in some respects.
Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Rwanda, Namibia, and yes Pol Pot, plus global slavery (by Muslims and Africans and Romans just as much as white Europeans)
Because this shit is so important and because it can come from anywhere and arise with great speed
Also the gorier bits would be entertaining for bored kids
Say what you like about Blair, he was tactically aware enough not to deselect Tony Benn and Corbyn as he knew he needed leftwing votes for a majority under FPTP.
Cameron too never deselected Bill Cash or IDS as he knew he needed rightwing votes under FPTP too.
Starmer is taking a big risk here if leftwingers go Green or stay home
believe that everything is a lie.
Just the activity was pushing rounds into a magazine. Looked like 5.56 at a guess.
- European wars of religion
- The mediaeval empires: Byzantine, Islamic caliphate, Mongol, Russian, Viking
- Early colonialism and US war of independence
- Cromwell and the civil war (and related Anglo-Irish history)
Neither my wife nor son are hard lefties but both of them are on Corbyn's side here. They say this is vindictive and Jeremy deserves better.
There is affection for the man out there. So, you know, I wonder. Was this really necessary?
Modern global world:
Jesus and aftermath
Mohammed and aftermath
Empire as global concept
Rise of liberalism
Marx
Modern Britain:
Alfred
1066
Black death
Reformations 1517-1690
Industrialisation from Watt-Internet.
There are countries where this culture would seem utterly ridiculous, but unlike flags and parades and stuff, I do think it's something that we can be rather proud of in Britain - it's OK to be OTT in making each other feel good.
- Revolutions and revolts
- Major political & constitutional changes (from greek city democracy through magna carta to William of Orange and the French republic)
- Empires
- Religious schisms
Yes there will be some embittered trots unhappy about it. But these are not Labour voters anyway so no loss.
Now, it is his right to not apologise, and to reject the report, is he genuinely feels he has nothing to apologise for and the report is wrong. But with that right, comes the right to take the consequences. It marks him out as somebody who isn't suitable to be a Labour MP, because he is either racist himself or so dim he can't recognise racism when he sees it, and that is why Starmer has withdrawn the whip.
It is my fervent hope that Sunak will have the courage to do the same to Johnson over the SPC report, but unhappily I fear Sunak doesn't have Starmer's steel.
Armed with that many of course become self important fundamentalists, but you could also become a humble liberal - the truth is out there, it exists, but epistemology for us is hard, even if it is easy for god.
Without that notional focus it is quite hard to ground either objectivity or the concept of truth. And it is hard to find another such focus.
Closer to home we have Shooter's hill, famous in history and the opening pages of a tale of 2 cities as the hangout of highwaymen, and now our own Rostigraben. The aesthetics, architecture, culture, socio-economics, demographics and politics on the West and East sides of the hill are utterly different.
Them coming to Labour under Corbyn added a small number of votes. The mainstream being repelled by them from Labour cost a great deal more votes.
If we assume that all of the embittered left decide to back the TUSC candidate in whichever seat, thats all of 0.3% off the Labour tally. Whereas them not being around brings in 5% off the Tory tally...
Despite
1) Private Schools running them
2) A number of school bus systems actually being set up in parts of the UK. Saw one in Cornwall - local taxi driver had amalgamated his morning taxi runs for various children, bought a properly equipped mini bus etc.