He drafted a hate crimes bill so badly that it was criticised by both religious organisations and the National Secular Society. He also wanted to make it illegal to express "hateful" views in one's own home.
He and his wife first brought, than dropped, a legal actions against a nursery, alleging racial discrimination against their child.
In the interests of balance BBC R4 WATO has a Putin apologist defending "Russia's liberation of Ukraine" by the "illegal Neo-Nazi regime" in Kyiv.
In the interests of balance the BBC really needs to lose its charter.
I assume the BBC is seeking to understand the context and reasons behind the war.
Watching a bit of Putin this morning on the BBC he was full of Western aggression this, and encirclement that.
All helping to understand the Russian viewpoint and justification for the war.
I suggest that if you are unable to listen critically to different points of view then perhaps the BBC is an intellectual step too far for you.
Thing is, if you make the BBC into a propaganda machine then sure as eggs is eggs it will eventually turn on you because you will be on the wrong side of "the accepted" viewpoint.
It wasn't an alternative viewpoint it was pro-Putin propaganda. Just read the absurd language I have quoted. It gave Team Putin an opportunity to propagate their bullsh*t narrative.
The BBC are so lost in the notion of non-partisanship they insist on balance when none is needed.
So what? The BBC didn't sit there and say "this message is endorsed by the BBC." They allowed someone to express their standpoint and let listeners decide.
There was a similar fuss over Nick Griffin on QT. Turned out to be the best thing to deflate the BNP threat. People saw he was useless.
We all know where this goes. 'Unacceptable' views get blocked but, like always, who gets to define what is unacceptable is never open to public debate. It's a small influential group that decides the meaning and, consequently, shuts out the opinions it doesn't like
In the interests of balance BBC R4 WATO has a Putin apologist defending "Russia's liberation of Ukraine" by the "illegal Neo-Nazi regime" in Kyiv.
In the interests of balance the BBC really needs to lose its charter.
I assume the BBC is seeking to understand the context and reasons behind the war.
Watching a bit of Putin this morning on the BBC he was full of Western aggression this, and encirclement that.
All helping to understand the Russian viewpoint and justification for the war.
I suggest that if you are unable to listen critically to different points of view then perhaps the BBC is an intellectual step too far for you.
Thing is, if you make the BBC into a propaganda machine then sure as eggs is eggs it will eventually turn on you because you will be on the wrong side of "the accepted" viewpoint.
Such guests shouldn't be banned but I very much hope they were challenged.
Sarah Montague is such a poor interrogator the reality is no, the guest talked all over her. She actually appeared to be blindsided at the direction the guest chose to follow.
She has surely fucked her campaign, as her very own campaign aide says (never a good sign in a campaign). However in the interests of diversity and equality I REALLY hope some journalist is going to ask the same questions of Humza Yousaf. He may well have some interesting answers, and it would never do to encourage the perception that Muslims are given an easier ride than Wee Free white Hebrideans
Yousaf said at his own launch that "I don't legislate on the basis of my faith", arguing that as a member of a minority group he knows his rights "don't exist in some kind of vacuum... My rights are interdependent on other people's rights... I'll always fight for the equal rights of others regardless of who they are." This seems to me exactly the right answer to the question that Forbes was asked, and I'm not sure that Yousaf really needs to say anything else on the subject.
Unfortunately, Yousaf is an arsehole.
Not having followed any of it, why so?
He drafted a hate crimes bill so badly that it was criticised by both religious organisations and the National Secular Society. He also wanted to make it illegal to express "hateful" views in one's own home.
He and his wife first brought, than dropped, a legal actions against a nursery, alleging racial discrimination against their child.
"He also wanted to make it illegal to express "hateful" views in one's own home."
That's the end point of the idea that no ideas are private. I've heard people suggesting that "problem families" should have 24/7 video surveillance in their homes.
The tone and mood around the Forbes debacle amounts to this: She is expected to take a properly liberal view about those she disagrees with, but no-one is expected to take a properly liberal view about her.
I don't agree with the SNP on independence, and I don't agree with most of the evangelical take on the world. But KF seems to me to be acting in a more genuinely liberal way than her army of detractors. it looks to me like bullying.
No, it’s more than that
She morally disapproves - in a really quite serious, “you are going to hell“ fashion - of gay marriage, of children born out of wedlock, even just sex outside marriage. She thinks people that do this - ie 90% of Scots? - are evil sinners. Sure, they can be redeemed, IF THEY JOIN HER CHURCH AND SHAPE UP, but until then they are evil sinners
Those who call the FCS and FPCS "evangelical" use the word differently from how I use it. They are nothing like evangelical churches in say Brazil or evangelical networks in the CofE, which try to practice happiness and work hard to win adherents.
I can't see how predestination and evangelism can go together without specious logic-chopping.
They don't want us in their church, Leon. They think God predestined us to go to hell.
The meaning of the term "Evangelical" has changed recently. It was originally in strict contrast to Fundamentalism. Of which these small Presbyterian Scottish sects are prime examples. Thanks to the USA Right Evangelical tends to mean strongly Christian now.
But in the historical Scottish context Evangelical meant those Christians who do not pander to the state or bow down to Mammon in the form of nice Established livings selected by the Tory landowners and bishops selected by the Crown. Hence the Evangelicals split off in 1843 to form the Free Church (which arguably ultimately absorbed the rump Church of Sciotland itself when the latter merged with one dervative of the FC) They were, and remain, absolutely horrified by the C of E and episcopacy.
Agreed, I admire her for sticking to her principles. The answer to her question is probably yes however: If the tenets of your faith put you out of step with the mainstream of UK opinion on social issues & you’re public about it, you’re going to have problems politically. There’s a reason Alasdair Campbell cut off questions about Blair’s faith with “We don’t do God”.
The UK is very socially liberal these days on many questions that in the past would have been much more controversial & that holds true across the political spectrum. It’s one of the reasons I’m still proud to be British.
We should just be honest then and say "if you hold strong religious views, you cannot be Prime Minister / FM as your views disqualify you from being a possible appointment."
Instead, we have this hypocritical standpoint where we pretend to be all tolerant and accepting but once someone comes along with such views, we then say why they are not acceptable.
Maybe we should stop looking at this through a particular moral lens. It is not true (as KF suggests) that having any religious conviction whatever bars you from office in a democracy.
To be in office involves winning contests, ones which have a hierarchy that anyone can join from the moment they are 18. Committees, party members, voters and fellow elected people do all the deciding. All can stand, all can join, all can vote. That's democracy.
I think it's sad and mistaken if in fact X won't be voted in because of a moral or religious principle which is in no way eccentric - as may happen with KF. But what I think doesn't matter. Democracy is what it is. If, on the whole, it likes Boris or Salmond, Orban or Putin, Trump or Berlusconi better than Kate Forbes let it be. Though I think there is a price to pay.
You can have religious conviction but keep it to yourself and that is not controversial. I'm sure many do.
Where there's a problem is when you expect the law of the land to be shaped by your convictions. That is a serious problem when it comes to politics, for anyone who doesn't share your convictions, which given that all religions are minorities is going to be a majority of people not sharing your faith.
As it happens here, her views are very, very eccentric.
A good rule for modern politicians is never ever talk about sex, and even when you have to, keep it brief and perfunctory. then obfuscate. Demur. Waffle. Then move on. At best anything you say will be mortifying and cringe, at worst it will end your career
Never go into details!
Thatcher knew this and practiced it, cleverly,, to the extent that even now there are well-informed people who believe she was at heart very libertine and tolerant, and others, equally well informed, who believe she was uptight and puritan
Tony Blair too, I expect he was privately more devoutly religious than some of his successors but when seeking office simply said he wouldn't talk about it.
Make it a non issue and move on. If you can't make it a non issue, then we have a problem.
Queen Elizabeth I got it right, 500 years ago. “Do not seek to make windows into men’s souls”
What is private, is private. Thus she squared the Protestant-Catholic circle in a bitterly divided nation, and became one of our greatest monarchs
Kate Forbes wants to peer through her window into your soul, and she will find you lacking
Elizabeth I also cemented the idea of the Church of England as a Catholic and Apostolic Church except with the monarch as head not the Pope.
The BCP was neither too low nor too high. It had something for both Protestants and former Catholics therefore
Yes, she had something for vboth. The axe and/or a heap of firewood if they dared step out of line publicly.
No, QE1 has to be seen in context. And the context is the ferociously sadistic Catholic monarch, Bloody Mary, who came directly before her
Compared to Mary Tudor, Gloriana was a model of tolerance. And an infinitely superior monarch
In the interests of balance BBC R4 WATO has a Putin apologist defending "Russia's liberation of Ukraine" by the "illegal Neo-Nazi regime" in Kyiv.
In the interests of balance the BBC really needs to lose its charter.
I assume the BBC is seeking to understand the context and reasons behind the war.
Watching a bit of Putin this morning on the BBC he was full of Western aggression this, and encirclement that.
All helping to understand the Russian viewpoint and justification for the war.
I suggest that if you are unable to listen critically to different points of view then perhaps the BBC is an intellectual step too far for you.
Thing is, if you make the BBC into a propaganda machine then sure as eggs is eggs it will eventually turn on you because you will be on the wrong side of "the accepted" viewpoint.
It wasn't an alternative viewpoint it was pro-Putin propaganda. Just read the absurd language I have quoted. It gave Team Putin an opportunity to propagate their bullsh*t narrative.
The BBC are so lost in the notion of non-partisanship they insist on balance when none is needed.
Were they not challenged on their viewpoint by the BBC interviewer?
An alternative viewpoint is always interesting, and a valuable part of democracy. An unchallenged Russian propagandist, on the other hand… (Leads to headlines in the Russian Press tomorrow, that “BBC agrees with our viewpoint”)
The tone and mood around the Forbes debacle amounts to this: She is expected to take a properly liberal view about those she disagrees with, but no-one is expected to take a properly liberal view about her.
I don't agree with the SNP on independence, and I don't agree with most of the evangelical take on the world. But KF seems to me to be acting in a more genuinely liberal way than her army of detractors. it looks to me like bullying.
No, it’s more than that
She morally disapproves - in a really quite serious, “you are going to hell“ fashion - of gay marriage, of children born out of wedlock, even just sex outside marriage. She thinks people that do this - ie 90% of Scots? - are evil sinners. Sure, they can be redeemed, IF THEY JOIN HER CHURCH AND SHAPE UP, but until then they are evil sinners
Those who call the FCS and FPCS "evangelical" use the word differently from how I use it. They are nothing like evangelical churches in say Brazil or evangelical networks in the CofE, which try to practice happiness and work hard to win adherents.
I can't see how predestination and evangelism can go together without specious logic-chopping.
They don't want us in their church, Leon. They think God predestined us to go to hell.
The term 'evangelical' covers a series of, sometimes incompatible, belief systems. There is no one doctrine which they all hold which renders them distinct from other Christians.
As an evangelical you can believe in double predestination (God made two sorts of human - the saved and the lost and you can't change it). Or its opposite - God wants all to be saved by faith.
You can believe the bible is: inerrant; infallible; inspired; to be ignored when inconvenient
You can believe in modern miracles, speaking in tongues, modern prophesy; or you can believe they are the devil's work or mistaken at best.
You can be pro or anti gay; you can be pro or anti women leadership.
You can be a bishop, or believe bishops are the devil's work.
Rome may be the great scarlet whore, or an ecumenical partner.
The tone and mood around the Forbes debacle amounts to this: She is expected to take a properly liberal view about those she disagrees with, but no-one is expected to take a properly liberal view about her.
I don't agree with the SNP on independence, and I don't agree with most of the evangelical take on the world. But KF seems to me to be acting in a more genuinely liberal way than her army of detractors. it looks to me like bullying.
No, it’s more than that
She morally disapproves - in a really quite serious, “you are going to hell“ fashion - of gay marriage, of children born out of wedlock, even just sex outside marriage. She thinks people that do this - ie 90% of Scots? - are evil sinners. Sure, they can be redeemed, IF THEY JOIN HER CHURCH AND SHAPE UP, but until then they are evil sinners
Those who call the FCS and FPCS "evangelical" use the word differently from how I use it. They are nothing like evangelical churches in say Brazil or evangelical networks in the CofE, which try to practice happiness and work hard to win adherents.
I can't see how predestination and evangelism can go together without specious logic-chopping.
They don't want us in their church, Leon. They think God predestined us to go to hell.
The meaning of the term "Evangelical" has changed recently. It was originally in strict contrast to Fundamentalism. Of which these small Presbyterian Scottish sects are prime examples. Thanks to the USA Right Evangelical tends to mean strongly Christian now.
But in the historical Scottish context Evangelical meant those Christians who do not pander to the state or bow down to Mammon in the form of nice Established livings selected by the Tory landowners and bishops selected by the Crown. Hence the Evangelicals split off in 1843 to form the Free Church (which arguably ultimately absorbed the rump Church of Sciotland itself when the latter merged with one dervative of the FC) They were, and remain, absolutely horrified by the C of E and episcopacy.
So do most evangelicals.
The Southern Baptist Church in the US for instance, the largest Protestant denomination there and fiercely anti abortion and anti homosexual like the Free Church of Scotland, is very evangelical and very anti bishops too.
The smaller Anglican US Episcopalian Church though like the Anglican Scottish Episcopal Church now performs homosexual marriages in its churches and while wanting to reduce abortions believes abortion is a woman's choice
There is no reason London buses cannot be run by TfL directly, only stupid Government rules. They have at least made the best of a bad situation and TfL's technology is very good.
Too many people in politics obsess about ownership structures.
There is good management and bad management in the world, and you find both in the public and private sectors. There are also advantages from size (economies of scale, buying power) and disadvantages (bureaucracy, slowness).
The two main reasons to keep something in the public sector are control, and where public good is incompatible with the profit motive. You can replicate control to some extent through regulation of private providers though we all see the issues. You can fix the profit motive incompatibility issue by subsidising private companies - eg to run unprofitable bus routes - but that can create inefficiencies.
The main reasons to have something private are competition and innovation. Efforts to replicate these in the public sector have a chequered history. But privatisation doesn’t always lead to either real competition or innovation. That’s why I don’t think ownership per se is the most important factor.
I know you alluded to it but competition and innovation do seem to drift into rent seeking and financialisaton.
Which is why markets need regulating. Monopolies and all that.
The US space launch industry is a fascinating example of the varying models and why they cause problems.
You mean that spending $20bn on turning a dozen re-usable rocket motors, into disposable rocket motors, isn’t good value for the American taxpayer?
Rocket engines. Motors are solids, by convention.
SLS is the totally state controlled mode. Then you have ULA who are supposed to be the tame contractors. Then you have SpaceX - the pirates who are tearing the market place up Then you have Blue Origin - who are turning a lot of money into.... not a lot.
It is costing SpaceX $20 million and falling to get 16 tons (and growing) to LEO. None of the other come close to matching that. Why?
Why don't they want to do that? Yes, they don't want to do that.
Yes yes, engines and motors.
It does indeed appear that no-one wants to challenge SX in the commercial and government LEO space, preferring instead to do their own thing on a different basis, that sees them take no business risk.
The mad one is Blue Origin. The whole business of which, with hindsight, seemed to be about Bezos getting his personal joyride - and now it happened, no-one there cares about the bigger project any more.
You then end up with another danger, of an effective private monopoly in launch services which needs regulating at some point. Thankfully, so far SX have been behaving themselves in this regard, including stepping in to launch OneWeb hardware when the Russians got boycotted.
No-one really knows what Blue Origin is for. Bezos seems to have a love for space in a kind of Big Coffee Table Book kind of way. Not actually mad about the details of how you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner or anything, but likes Space. Hence the F1 engine recovery project. According to people who've spoken to him, he's an O'Neil colony fan.
(Snip)
I utterly disagree with that, and sadly it comes across as a bit of a Musk-loving diatribe. It also follows the rather dubious idea that Musk himself knows how 'you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner'. Given his proclaimed software 'knowledge', that's dubious. It also rather assumes the most useful a boss of a massive, multi-faceted organisation can be doing is mirco-managing.
Bezos has had a love of space from when he was a kid; IIRC his speech at uni was on man's future in space. Musk, in comparison, is a newcomer.
If you look, SpaceX has done *nothing* for space science, let alone Mars. Yes, they've launched probes (and been paid handsomely for it), but the amount of space science done is negligible. They have leant heavily on NASA and DOD contracts; 'inventions' like their PICA-X are just rehashed NASA research.
As for Blue Origin; they just seem to be getting on with what they're doing. e.g. the following:
Actually, SpaceX have been doing quite bit of original research. Retro propulsion for one. Hence NASA sending the WB-57 out to watch the relights during entry. That was something that NASA wanted for a long long time, but couldn't get funded for test.
The NASA plan to retrieve the samples from Mars they are laying down depends on retro-propulsion for the lander. The current techniques don't scale to something large enough to get back to Mars orbit.
PICA-X is an interesting one - the original NASA version had severe problems with cost and getting a uniform structure. As often happens, the research was canned because of a lack of immediate use. SpaceX hired the guys who'd worked on it and got them to productionise it.
Their work on FFSC is pretty unique as well. First ever FFSC for non-storables (RD-270 was hydrazine)
Yes, but that's research towards the *launch* market. It's not actual reasearch into space, or living in space. There are massive issues that await any Mars attempt, and SpaceX are ignoring them.
IMO that is the difference between the two organisations: there is clear evidence that BO is working on many different thing simultaneously. SpaceX is just launch and MAKING MONEY!!!!
It's a structural difference that began in the difference of their funding sources.
Ultimately, however, further space development is reliant on reducing the cost of doing stuff in space.
Indeed. But it's also reliant on actually doing science and increasing the infrastructure in space. SpaceX have done a brilliant job of decreasing the cost of Earth to LEO. But they're not exactly doing a lot in LEO, aside from Starlink and rides to the ISS. Even their lunar plans (*) are largely funded by NASA. Where are the Mars probes? Where are the long-duration spaceflights? Heck, they've *lost* ambition since the days of Red Dragon.
I want both to succeed, because we need at least two such organisations in space. Hopefully they will complement each other.
(*) Remember how against going to the Moon Musk was a few years back? He was firmly a Mars-firster.
SpaceX were always the shipping company. Until fairly recently, they didn't have the resources to develop (and probably still don't) a Mars habitat etc. in parallel with the launch stuff.
The next thing they are moving into is EVA space suits - see AXIOM. This will lead, fairly inevitably to surface suits for the Moon and Mars. At the moment, NASA is trying to pull itself out of a mess on suits - political blocking of going a fully commercial route on suite procurement means that they will certainly be a further mess.
The tone and mood around the Forbes debacle amounts to this: She is expected to take a properly liberal view about those she disagrees with, but no-one is expected to take a properly liberal view about her.
I don't agree with the SNP on independence, and I don't agree with most of the evangelical take on the world. But KF seems to me to be acting in a more genuinely liberal way than her army of detractors. it looks to me like bullying.
No, it’s more than that
She morally disapproves - in a really quite serious, “you are going to hell“ fashion - of gay marriage, of children born out of wedlock, even just sex outside marriage. She thinks people that do this - ie 90% of Scots? - are evil sinners. Sure, they can be redeemed, IF THEY JOIN HER CHURCH AND SHAPE UP, but until then they are evil sinners
Those who call the FCS and FPCS "evangelical" use the word differently from how I use it. They are nothing like evangelical churches in say Brazil or evangelical networks in the CofE, which try to practice happiness and work hard to win adherents.
I can't see how predestination and evangelism can go together without specious logic-chopping.
They don't want us in their church, Leon. They think God predestined us to go to hell.
The meaning of the term "Evangelical" has changed recently. It was originally in strict contrast to Fundamentalism. Of which these small Presbyterian Scottish sects are prime examples. Thanks to the USA Right Evangelical tends to mean strongly Christian now.
But in the historical Scottish context Evangelical meant those Christians who do not pander to the state or bow down to Mammon in the form of nice Established livings selected by the Tory landowners and bishops selected by the Crown. Hence the Evangelicals split off in 1843 to form the Free Church (which arguably ultimately absorbed the rump Church of Sciotland itself when the latter merged with one dervative of the FC) They were, and remain, absolutely horrified by the C of E and episcopacy.
Guess the term Evangelical has changed meaning more than once then.
On topic: If Yousaf becomes First Minister, the United Kingdom will have a Hindu leader, a Muslim leader, and a divided Christian government in Nothern Ireland. If Drakeford is an agnostic or atheist, it appears you would have reached maximum religious diversity in your leaders.
Whether that is a good thing or not is a question I will leave to those better informed than I am about religion in the UK.
Do you want that person running the country, and looking down on you, demanding you pay tax despite her regarding you as evil? Do you want her shaping social policies? For me, that’s a big No (but of course I am not Scottish etc). No more than I would want a strictly Orthodox Jew or fundamentalist Muslim running the UK, for pretty much the same reason
I say No too, but possibly she regards most of us as wicked sinners rather than evil.
Lord Mackay who was Lord Chancellor 1987-97 was a member of a Scottish Presbyterian church that was even further out in the loonysphere than Kate Forbes's.
Has anyone ever asked Jacob Rees-Mogg's view on premarital sex?
It must be a hoot in the Commons when the devouties and staunchies all have to go through the same voting lobby for religious reasons.
You're being unfair there, at least partly. Lord Mackay's treatment by the FPC leadershipfor attending the RC requiem mass of a fellow judge upset so many members they had a split there and then over the issue.
True enough. Those who hit the roof over his attendance at that service were undeniably further out than he was.
The tone and mood around the Forbes debacle amounts to this: She is expected to take a properly liberal view about those she disagrees with, but no-one is expected to take a properly liberal view about her.
I don't agree with the SNP on independence, and I don't agree with most of the evangelical take on the world. But KF seems to me to be acting in a more genuinely liberal way than her army of detractors. it looks to me like bullying.
No, it’s more than that
She morally disapproves - in a really quite serious, “you are going to hell“ fashion - of gay marriage, of children born out of wedlock, even just sex outside marriage. She thinks people that do this - ie 90% of Scots? - are evil sinners. Sure, they can be redeemed, IF THEY JOIN HER CHURCH AND SHAPE UP, but until then they are evil sinners
Those who call the FCS and FPCS "evangelical" use the word differently from how I use it. They are nothing like evangelical churches in say Brazil or evangelical networks in the CofE, which try to practice happiness and work hard to win adherents.
I can't see how predestination and evangelism can go together without specious logic-chopping.
They don't want us in their church, Leon. They think God predestined us to go to hell.
The meaning of the term "Evangelical" has changed recently. It was originally in strict contrast to Fundamentalism. Of which these small Presbyterian Scottish sects are prime examples. Thanks to the USA Right Evangelical tends to mean strongly Christian now.
But in the historical Scottish context Evangelical meant those Christians who do not pander to the state or bow down to Mammon in the form of nice Established livings selected by the Tory landowners and bishops selected by the Crown. Hence the Evangelicals split off in 1843 to form the Free Church (which arguably ultimately absorbed the rump Church of Sciotland itself when the latter merged with one dervative of the FC) They were, and remain, absolutely horrified by the C of E and episcopacy.
Scots religious history is quite a thing. I remember reading Anthony Powell's comment that the only way he could get any purchase on it was through Walter Scott novels. But, of course, the whole Wee Free thing was after Scott's day, so the Waverley novels aren't much help there. Is there a recommended guide to it?
That’s really not a controversial view, is it? A huge number of people wait until they’re married to have children, and the statistics say that outcomes for the children (in general) are much better when living in a stable household with both parents.
It is a controversial view.
I certainly waited until marriage before having children, but many of my friends and peers did not. They did nothing wrong in my eyes.
What Forbes doesn't seem to understand is that there's nothing wrong having a faith, but keeping that faith private. Its when you, especially in the political sphere, start trying to foist your faith onto others that we have a problem.
It’s a view held by millions of Brits, in practice as well as in theory.
There’s been no indication of any intention to legislate for her views, in fact such moral issues have almost always been free votes in Parliament and she gives no indication of changing that.
What it does look like, from a long way away, is journalists and opponents looking for something they can frame as a ‘gotcha’.
No it is not.
Opposing sex before marriage is not a view held by millions of Brits in either practice or theory. Certainly not amongst the young where it matters. That is a very eccentric and extreme view nowadays.
There is no reason to believe that those who wait until marriage to have kids, like myself, have a philosophical or moral objection to those that made a different choice. Or were virgins when they got married. If you offer me a choice of chicken or beef and I choose chicken, it doesn't mean I have a moral objection to beef. Waiting until marriage can simply be a choice, no morals necessary.
She has proposed to have faith exemptions to the law, which is legislating for her faith. That is a problem.
Strict Roman Catholics, Protestant evangelicals, Muslims and Orthodox Jews will all tend to abstain from sex before marriage regardless of age
And thus spake Sunil unto his PB Disciples: "Know ye that the Lord God did NOT marry the mother of His only begotten son!".
In the interests of balance BBC R4 WATO has a Putin apologist defending "Russia's liberation of Ukraine" by the "illegal Neo-Nazi regime" in Kyiv.
In the interests of balance the BBC really needs to lose its charter.
I assume the BBC is seeking to understand the context and reasons behind the war.
Watching a bit of Putin this morning on the BBC he was full of Western aggression this, and encirclement that.
All helping to understand the Russian viewpoint and justification for the war.
I suggest that if you are unable to listen critically to different points of view then perhaps the BBC is an intellectual step too far for you.
Thing is, if you make the BBC into a propaganda machine then sure as eggs is eggs it will eventually turn on you because you will be on the wrong side of "the accepted" viewpoint.
It wasn't an alternative viewpoint it was pro-Putin propaganda. Just read the absurd language I have quoted. It gave Team Putin an opportunity to propagate their bullsh*t narrative.
The BBC are so lost in the notion of non-partisanship they insist on balance when none is needed.
Were they not challenged on their viewpoint by the BBC interviewer?
An alternative viewpoint is always interesting, and a valuable part of democracy. An unchallenged Russian propagandist, on the other hand… (Leads to headlines in the Russian Press tomorrow, that “BBC agrees with our viewpoint”)
Not really Sandpit. And as you know I am a woke apologist for the Great Socialist Conspiracy, who, come the first day of Suella Braverman's premiership deserves to be taken to the nearest football stadium and punished for my treason. However on this occasion I was outraged, and disappointed by Sarah Montague's failure to address this dangerous pro-Putin clown.
Agreed, I admire her for sticking to her principles. The answer to her question is probably yes however: If the tenets of your faith put you out of step with the mainstream of UK opinion on social issues & you’re public about it, you’re going to have problems politically. There’s a reason Alasdair Campbell cut off questions about Blair’s faith with “We don’t do God”.
The UK is very socially liberal these days on many questions that in the past would have been much more controversial & that holds true across the political spectrum. It’s one of the reasons I’m still proud to be British.
We should just be honest then and say "if you hold strong religious views, you cannot be Prime Minister / FM as your views disqualify you from being a possible appointment."
Instead, we have this hypocritical standpoint where we pretend to be all tolerant and accepting but once someone comes along with such views, we then say why they are not acceptable.
Actually it isn't. If you want to be a leader of a party and a government you are required to defend the policies of your party and the decisions of your government. You can't do the job otherwise, but it is the same for everyone.
Kate Forbes seems to think her moral principles take precedence over her colleagues' That's a problem.
Does she though? She's just saying she has certain beliefs, not that they've affected governance.
At any rate, this is exactly how radical movements fail, they fracture and split over things that have nothing to do with the central goal. Oh well! We are where we are.
The correct answer for Kate Forbes as a church-going aspiring leader of the SNP and Scottish government to the question, "Do you support gay marriage?" is, Yes. Unequivocally, yes. "Do you support gender recognition by self-identification?" Yes. In this case there may be some technical issues to resolve around implementation but the principle's accepted.
These are SNP policies implemented by her government and passed in parliament. If she can't defend them she can't be leader. It's a necessary part of her job.
Do you want that person running the country, and looking down on you, demanding you pay tax despite her regarding you as evil? Do you want her shaping social policies? For me, that’s a big No (but of course I am not Scottish etc). No more than I would want a strictly Orthodox Jew or fundamentalist Muslim running the UK, for pretty much the same reason
I say No too, but possibly she regards most of us as wicked sinners rather than evil.
Lord Mackay who was Lord Chancellor 1987-97 was a member of a Scottish Presbyterian church that was even further out in the loonysphere than Kate Forbes's.
Has anyone ever asked Jacob Rees-Mogg's view on premarital sex?
It must be a hoot in the Commons when the devouties and staunchies all have to go through the same voting lobby for religious reasons.
You're being unfair there, at least partly. Lord Mackay's treatment by the FPC leadershipfor attending the RC requiem mass of a fellow judge upset so many members they had a split there and then over the issue.
True enough. Those who hit the roof over his attendance at that service were undeniably further out than he was.
IIRC he didn't actually attend. As in go into the RC church. But because he stood by the graveside when the priest said some words, was held to have attended an RC religious service.....
In the interests of balance BBC R4 WATO has a Putin apologist defending "Russia's liberation of Ukraine" by the "illegal Neo-Nazi regime" in Kyiv.
In the interests of balance the BBC really needs to lose its charter.
I assume the BBC is seeking to understand the context and reasons behind the war.
Watching a bit of Putin this morning on the BBC he was full of Western aggression this, and encirclement that.
All helping to understand the Russian viewpoint and justification for the war.
I suggest that if you are unable to listen critically to different points of view then perhaps the BBC is an intellectual step too far for you.
Thing is, if you make the BBC into a propaganda machine then sure as eggs is eggs it will eventually turn on you because you will be on the wrong side of "the accepted" viewpoint.
It wasn't an alternative viewpoint it was pro-Putin propaganda. Just read the absurd language I have quoted. It gave Team Putin an opportunity to propagate their bullsh*t narrative.
The BBC are so lost in the notion of non-partisanship they insist on balance when none is needed.
Were they not challenged on their viewpoint by the BBC interviewer?
An alternative viewpoint is always interesting, and a valuable part of democracy. An unchallenged Russian propagandist, on the other hand… (Leads to headlines in the Russian Press tomorrow, that “BBC agrees with our viewpoint”)
Not really Sandpit. And as you know I am a woke apologist for the Great Socialist Conspiracy, who, come the first day of Suella Braverman's premiership deserves to be taken to the nearest football stadium and punished for my treason. However on this occasion I was outraged, and disappointed by Sarah Montagu's failure to address this dangerous pro-Putin clown.
Ah, not good. Fair play to yourself for calling it out, and good to see that all sides of the UK political spectrum can at least agree that Putin is an evil monster. Will take a listen to it later, if they haven’t pulled it from the replay.
Putin on BBC @Mexicanpete reminds me of their approach to climate change: they have to have a climate denier on for "balance".
It's not balance, one side is truth and the other lies.
My favourite is still their substitution of the Boris Johnson cock up at the Cenotaph in 2019 for footage from 2016. In order that Johnson shouldn't be shown in a partisan bad light, he was shown in a three year old non partisan light.
On topic: If Yousaf becomes First Minister, the United Kingdom will have a Hindu leader, a Muslim leader, and a divided Christian government in Nothern Ireland. If Drakeford is an agnostic or atheist, it appears you would have reached maximum religious diversity in your leaders.
Whether that is a good thing or not is a question I will leave to those better informed than I am about religion in the UK.
Buddhist Home Secretary too, unfortunately for us.
There is no reason London buses cannot be run by TfL directly, only stupid Government rules. They have at least made the best of a bad situation and TfL's technology is very good.
Too many people in politics obsess about ownership structures.
There is good management and bad management in the world, and you find both in the public and private sectors. There are also advantages from size (economies of scale, buying power) and disadvantages (bureaucracy, slowness).
The two main reasons to keep something in the public sector are control, and where public good is incompatible with the profit motive. You can replicate control to some extent through regulation of private providers though we all see the issues. You can fix the profit motive incompatibility issue by subsidising private companies - eg to run unprofitable bus routes - but that can create inefficiencies.
The main reasons to have something private are competition and innovation. Efforts to replicate these in the public sector have a chequered history. But privatisation doesn’t always lead to either real competition or innovation. That’s why I don’t think ownership per se is the most important factor.
I know you alluded to it but competition and innovation do seem to drift into rent seeking and financialisaton.
Which is why markets need regulating. Monopolies and all that.
The US space launch industry is a fascinating example of the varying models and why they cause problems.
You mean that spending $20bn on turning a dozen re-usable rocket motors, into disposable rocket motors, isn’t good value for the American taxpayer?
Rocket engines. Motors are solids, by convention.
SLS is the totally state controlled mode. Then you have ULA who are supposed to be the tame contractors. Then you have SpaceX - the pirates who are tearing the market place up Then you have Blue Origin - who are turning a lot of money into.... not a lot.
It is costing SpaceX $20 million and falling to get 16 tons (and growing) to LEO. None of the other come close to matching that. Why?
Why don't they want to do that? Yes, they don't want to do that.
Yes yes, engines and motors.
It does indeed appear that no-one wants to challenge SX in the commercial and government LEO space, preferring instead to do their own thing on a different basis, that sees them take no business risk.
The mad one is Blue Origin. The whole business of which, with hindsight, seemed to be about Bezos getting his personal joyride - and now it happened, no-one there cares about the bigger project any more.
You then end up with another danger, of an effective private monopoly in launch services which needs regulating at some point. Thankfully, so far SX have been behaving themselves in this regard, including stepping in to launch OneWeb hardware when the Russians got boycotted.
No-one really knows what Blue Origin is for. Bezos seems to have a love for space in a kind of Big Coffee Table Book kind of way. Not actually mad about the details of how you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner or anything, but likes Space. Hence the F1 engine recovery project. According to people who've spoken to him, he's an O'Neil colony fan.
(Snip)
I utterly disagree with that, and sadly it comes across as a bit of a Musk-loving diatribe. It also follows the rather dubious idea that Musk himself knows how 'you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner'. Given his proclaimed software 'knowledge', that's dubious. It also rather assumes the most useful a boss of a massive, multi-faceted organisation can be doing is mirco-managing.
Bezos has had a love of space from when he was a kid; IIRC his speech at uni was on man's future in space. Musk, in comparison, is a newcomer.
If you look, SpaceX has done *nothing* for space science, let alone Mars. Yes, they've launched probes (and been paid handsomely for it), but the amount of space science done is negligible. They have leant heavily on NASA and DOD contracts; 'inventions' like their PICA-X are just rehashed NASA research.
As for Blue Origin; they just seem to be getting on with what they're doing. e.g. the following:
Actually, SpaceX have been doing quite bit of original research. Retro propulsion for one. Hence NASA sending the WB-57 out to watch the relights during entry. That was something that NASA wanted for a long long time, but couldn't get funded for test.
The NASA plan to retrieve the samples from Mars they are laying down depends on retro-propulsion for the lander. The current techniques don't scale to something large enough to get back to Mars orbit.
PICA-X is an interesting one - the original NASA version had severe problems with cost and getting a uniform structure. As often happens, the research was canned because of a lack of immediate use. SpaceX hired the guys who'd worked on it and got them to productionise it.
Their work on FFSC is pretty unique as well. First ever FFSC for non-storables (RD-270 was hydrazine)
Yes, but that's research towards the *launch* market. It's not actual reasearch into space, or living in space. There are massive issues that await any Mars attempt, and SpaceX are ignoring them.
IMO that is the difference between the two organisations: there is clear evidence that BO is working on many different thing simultaneously. SpaceX is just launch and MAKING MONEY!!!!
It's a structural difference that began in the difference of their funding sources.
Ultimately, however, further space development is reliant on reducing the cost of doing stuff in space.
Indeed. But it's also reliant on actually doing science and increasing the infrastructure in space. SpaceX have done a brilliant job of decreasing the cost of Earth to LEO. But they're not exactly doing a lot in LEO, aside from Starlink and rides to the ISS. Even their lunar plans (*) are largely funded by NASA. Where are the Mars probes? Where are the long-duration spaceflights? Heck, they've *lost* ambition since the days of Red Dragon.
I want both to succeed, because we need at least two such organisations in space. Hopefully they will complement each other.
(*) Remember how against going to the Moon Musk was a few years back? He was firmly a Mars-firster.
SpaceX were always the shipping company. Until fairly recently, they didn't have the resources to develop (and probably still don't) a Mars habitat etc. in parallel with the launch stuff.
The next thing they are moving into is EVA space suits - see AXIOM. This will lead, fairly inevitably to surface suits for the Moon and Mars. At the moment, NASA is trying to pull itself out of a mess on suits - political blocking of going a fully commercial route on suite procurement means that they will certainly be a further mess.
But here you fall into the problem. Musk said he wanted to put man on Mars in ten years. Back in 2011. even if we say it's ten years from 2023, then there's a massive amount of really, really expensive stuff to sort out (and that's leaving out the problem caused by the 25-month synods). *If* he really wants to go, then he'd be doing as much of it as possible consecutively.
In other words, the BO route.
Instead, he just ignores or cancels the stuff that could really help.
In the interests of balance BBC R4 WATO has a Putin apologist defending "Russia's liberation of Ukraine" by the "illegal Neo-Nazi regime" in Kyiv.
In the interests of balance the BBC really needs to lose its charter.
I assume the BBC is seeking to understand the context and reasons behind the war.
Watching a bit of Putin this morning on the BBC he was full of Western aggression this, and encirclement that.
All helping to understand the Russian viewpoint and justification for the war.
I suggest that if you are unable to listen critically to different points of view then perhaps the BBC is an intellectual step too far for you.
Thing is, if you make the BBC into a propaganda machine then sure as eggs is eggs it will eventually turn on you because you will be on the wrong side of "the accepted" viewpoint.
It wasn't an alternative viewpoint it was pro-Putin propaganda. Just read the absurd language I have quoted. It gave Team Putin an opportunity to propagate their bullsh*t narrative.
The BBC are so lost in the notion of non-partisanship they insist on balance when none is needed.
Were they not challenged on their viewpoint by the BBC interviewer?
An alternative viewpoint is always interesting, and a valuable part of democracy. An unchallenged Russian propagandist, on the other hand… (Leads to headlines in the Russian Press tomorrow, that “BBC agrees with our viewpoint”)
Not really Sandpit. And as you know I am a woke apologist for the Great Socialist Conspiracy, who, come the first day of Suella Braverman's premiership deserves to be taken to the nearest football stadium and punished for my treason. However on this occasion I was outraged, and disappointed by Sarah Montagu's failure to address this dangerous pro-Putin clown.
Ah, not good. Fair play to yourself for calling it out, and good to see that all sides of the UK political spectrum can at least agree that Putin is an evil monster. Will take a listen to it later, if they haven’t pulled it from the replay.
I suspect you will be both disappointed and annoyed.
Do you want that person running the country, and looking down on you, demanding you pay tax despite her regarding you as evil? Do you want her shaping social policies? For me, that’s a big No (but of course I am not Scottish etc). No more than I would want a strictly Orthodox Jew or fundamentalist Muslim running the UK, for pretty much the same reason
I say No too, but possibly she regards most of us as wicked sinners rather than evil.
Lord Mackay who was Lord Chancellor 1987-97 was a member of a Scottish Presbyterian church that was even further out in the loonysphere than Kate Forbes's.
Has anyone ever asked Jacob Rees-Mogg's view on premarital sex?
It must be a hoot in the Commons when the devouties and staunchies all have to go through the same voting lobby for religious reasons.
You're being unfair there, at least partly. Lord Mackay's treatment by the FPC leadershipfor attending the RC requiem mass of a fellow judge upset so many members they had a split there and then over the issue.
True enough. Those who hit the roof over his attendance at that service were undeniably further out than he was.
IIRC he didn't actually attend. As in go into the RC church. But because he stood by the graveside when the priest said some words, was held to have attended an RC religious service.....
Mmm. Does that apply if you are channel surfing and accidentally catch a few seconds of Midnight Mass or the Pope on the news? Or is watching TV sinful too?
There is no reason London buses cannot be run by TfL directly, only stupid Government rules. They have at least made the best of a bad situation and TfL's technology is very good.
Too many people in politics obsess about ownership structures.
There is good management and bad management in the world, and you find both in the public and private sectors. There are also advantages from size (economies of scale, buying power) and disadvantages (bureaucracy, slowness).
The two main reasons to keep something in the public sector are control, and where public good is incompatible with the profit motive. You can replicate control to some extent through regulation of private providers though we all see the issues. You can fix the profit motive incompatibility issue by subsidising private companies - eg to run unprofitable bus routes - but that can create inefficiencies.
The main reasons to have something private are competition and innovation. Efforts to replicate these in the public sector have a chequered history. But privatisation doesn’t always lead to either real competition or innovation. That’s why I don’t think ownership per se is the most important factor.
I know you alluded to it but competition and innovation do seem to drift into rent seeking and financialisaton.
Which is why markets need regulating. Monopolies and all that.
The US space launch industry is a fascinating example of the varying models and why they cause problems.
You mean that spending $20bn on turning a dozen re-usable rocket motors, into disposable rocket motors, isn’t good value for the American taxpayer?
Rocket engines. Motors are solids, by convention.
SLS is the totally state controlled mode. Then you have ULA who are supposed to be the tame contractors. Then you have SpaceX - the pirates who are tearing the market place up Then you have Blue Origin - who are turning a lot of money into.... not a lot.
It is costing SpaceX $20 million and falling to get 16 tons (and growing) to LEO. None of the other come close to matching that. Why?
Why don't they want to do that? Yes, they don't want to do that.
Yes yes, engines and motors.
It does indeed appear that no-one wants to challenge SX in the commercial and government LEO space, preferring instead to do their own thing on a different basis, that sees them take no business risk.
The mad one is Blue Origin. The whole business of which, with hindsight, seemed to be about Bezos getting his personal joyride - and now it happened, no-one there cares about the bigger project any more.
You then end up with another danger, of an effective private monopoly in launch services which needs regulating at some point. Thankfully, so far SX have been behaving themselves in this regard, including stepping in to launch OneWeb hardware when the Russians got boycotted.
No-one really knows what Blue Origin is for. Bezos seems to have a love for space in a kind of Big Coffee Table Book kind of way. Not actually mad about the details of how you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner or anything, but likes Space. Hence the F1 engine recovery project. According to people who've spoken to him, he's an O'Neil colony fan.
(Snip)
I utterly disagree with that, and sadly it comes across as a bit of a Musk-loving diatribe. It also follows the rather dubious idea that Musk himself knows how 'you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner'. Given his proclaimed software 'knowledge', that's dubious. It also rather assumes the most useful a boss of a massive, multi-faceted organisation can be doing is mirco-managing.
Bezos has had a love of space from when he was a kid; IIRC his speech at uni was on man's future in space. Musk, in comparison, is a newcomer.
If you look, SpaceX has done *nothing* for space science, let alone Mars. Yes, they've launched probes (and been paid handsomely for it), but the amount of space science done is negligible. They have leant heavily on NASA and DOD contracts; 'inventions' like their PICA-X are just rehashed NASA research.
As for Blue Origin; they just seem to be getting on with what they're doing. e.g. the following:
Actually, SpaceX have been doing quite bit of original research. Retro propulsion for one. Hence NASA sending the WB-57 out to watch the relights during entry. That was something that NASA wanted for a long long time, but couldn't get funded for test.
The NASA plan to retrieve the samples from Mars they are laying down depends on retro-propulsion for the lander. The current techniques don't scale to something large enough to get back to Mars orbit.
PICA-X is an interesting one - the original NASA version had severe problems with cost and getting a uniform structure. As often happens, the research was canned because of a lack of immediate use. SpaceX hired the guys who'd worked on it and got them to productionise it.
Their work on FFSC is pretty unique as well. First ever FFSC for non-storables (RD-270 was hydrazine)
Yes, but that's research towards the *launch* market. It's not actual reasearch into space, or living in space. There are massive issues that await any Mars attempt, and SpaceX are ignoring them.
IMO that is the difference between the two organisations: there is clear evidence that BO is working on many different thing simultaneously. SpaceX is just launch and MAKING MONEY!!!!
It's a structural difference that began in the difference of their funding sources.
Ultimately, however, further space development is reliant on reducing the cost of doing stuff in space.
Indeed. But it's also reliant on actually doing science and increasing the infrastructure in space. SpaceX have done a brilliant job of decreasing the cost of Earth to LEO. But they're not exactly doing a lot in LEO, aside from Starlink and rides to the ISS. Even their lunar plans (*) are largely funded by NASA. Where are the Mars probes? Where are the long-duration spaceflights? Heck, they've *lost* ambition since the days of Red Dragon.
I want both to succeed, because we need at least two such organisations in space. Hopefully they will complement each other.
(*) Remember how against going to the Moon Musk was a few years back? He was firmly a Mars-firster.
SpaceX were always the shipping company. Until fairly recently, they didn't have the resources to develop (and probably still don't) a Mars habitat etc. in parallel with the launch stuff.
The next thing they are moving into is EVA space suits - see AXIOM. This will lead, fairly inevitably to surface suits for the Moon and Mars. At the moment, NASA is trying to pull itself out of a mess on suits - political blocking of going a fully commercial route on suite procurement means that they will certainly be a further mess.
But here you fall into the problem. Musk said he wanted to put man on Mars in ten years. Back in 2011. even if we say it's ten years from 2023, then there's a massive amount of really, really expensive stuff to sort out (and that's leaving out the problem caused by the 25-month synods). *If* he really wants to go, then he'd be doing as much of it as possible consecutively.
In other words, the BO route.
Instead, he just ignores or cancels the stuff that could really help.
He’s running a private company, that needs to a large extent fund itself.
It’s 100x better to have an eternal optimist, prepared to learn from mistakes and iterate designs quickly, in charge of the effort, rather than a Congress which prioritises the distribution of pork among as many members as possible, above the actual mission.
Are they really going to make Humza ‘WHITE’ Yousaf the leader?! Really??
He is the Liz Truss option...
Keir Starmer is the most lucky leader in decades.
Two years too early to make that claim Horse. 1992 looms large in my memory.
Definitely too early, Murdoch hasn't even started on him yet
Fair point. I still think Keir is lucky though
No. You’re quite right
Starmer is consistently lucky. He was lucky the way all his Labour rivals dropped out or screwed up (in different ways). He was lucky the way the Tories exploded. It now looks likely the SNP will do him a similar favour
Starmer IS lucky, and, as Napoleon noted, that’s an important virtue
Lucky too that Corbyn was a stubborn old fool who refused a simple apology and basically suspended himself from the Party.
Corbyn is basically a Tankie. No Tankie has ever passed up the opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot. To be fair, some put it off (for a minute or two) until they can get a belt fed weapon off the shelf to do a proper job.
No way was Corbyn a tankie. He was a wannabe trot - he couldn't even manage that. Trots are the mortal enemies of tankies. To be a real tankie you have to be on the CPSU side of the Communist Party of Great Britain / Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) split.
Whatever one thinks of Tankies, at least none of them are in the HoL, writing for Spiked Online or were policy advisors to the FLSOJ. As far as I know.
Perhaps there are some deep cover Stalinists advising the Tory party. If so, I can only admire their successful efforts at undermining British capitalism.
On topic: If Yousaf becomes First Minister, the United Kingdom will have a Hindu leader, a Muslim leader, and a divided Christian government in Nothern Ireland. If Drakeford is an agnostic or atheist, it appears you would have reached maximum religious diversity in your leaders.
Whether that is a good thing or not is a question I will leave to those better informed than I am about religion in the UK.
Buddhist Home Secretary too, unfortunately for us.
She is an unusually aggressive non- Zen kind of a Buddhist.
Do you want that person running the country, and looking down on you, demanding you pay tax despite her regarding you as evil? Do you want her shaping social policies? For me, that’s a big No (but of course I am not Scottish etc). No more than I would want a strictly Orthodox Jew or fundamentalist Muslim running the UK, for pretty much the same reason
I say No too, but possibly she regards most of us as wicked sinners rather than evil.
Lord Mackay who was Lord Chancellor 1987-97 was a member of a Scottish Presbyterian church that was even further out in the loonysphere than Kate Forbes's.
Has anyone ever asked Jacob Rees-Mogg's view on premarital sex?
It must be a hoot in the Commons when the devouties and staunchies all have to go through the same voting lobby for religious reasons.
You're being unfair there, at least partly. Lord Mackay's treatment by the FPC leadershipfor attending the RC requiem mass of a fellow judge upset so many members they had a split there and then over the issue.
True enough. Those who hit the roof over his attendance at that service were undeniably further out than he was.
IIRC he didn't actually attend. As in go into the RC church. But because he stood by the graveside when the priest said some words, was held to have attended an RC religious service.....
The committal at the graveside? That *is* the service in Scottish Presbyterian tradition. Now increasingly tempered to the weak flesh by having it in the crematorium etc.
Are they really going to make Humza ‘WHITE’ Yousaf the leader?! Really??
He is the Liz Truss option...
Keir Starmer is the most lucky leader in decades.
Two years too early to make that claim Horse. 1992 looms large in my memory.
Definitely too early, Murdoch hasn't even started on him yet
Fair point. I still think Keir is lucky though
No. You’re quite right
Starmer is consistently lucky. He was lucky the way all his Labour rivals dropped out or screwed up (in different ways). He was lucky the way the Tories exploded. It now looks likely the SNP will do him a similar favour
Starmer IS lucky, and, as Napoleon noted, that’s an important virtue
Lucky too that Corbyn was a stubborn old fool who refused a simple apology and basically suspended himself from the Party.
Corbyn is basically a Tankie. No Tankie has ever passed up the opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot. To be fair, some put it off (for a minute or two) until they can get a belt fed weapon off the shelf to do a proper job.
No way was Corbyn a tankie. He was a wannabe trot - he couldn't even manage that. Trots are the mortal enemies of tankies. To be a real tankie you have to be on the CPSU side of the Communist Party of Great Britain / Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) split.
Whatever one thinks of Tankies, at least none of them are in the HoL, writing for Spiked Online or were policy advisors to the FLSOJ. As far as I know.
Perhaps there are some deep cover Stalinists advising the Tory party. If so, I can only admire their successful efforts at undermining British capitalism.
We LibDems don't mention Liz Truss
EDIT: Oops
As Tim Farron pointed out today, our Tory mole is now even proposing an "economic NATO" as a cunning wheeze to encourage rejoin.
On topic: If Yousaf becomes First Minister, the United Kingdom will have a Hindu leader, a Muslim leader, and a divided Christian government in Nothern Ireland. If Drakeford is an agnostic or atheist, it appears you would have reached maximum religious diversity in your leaders.
Whether that is a good thing or not is a question I will leave to those better informed than I am about religion in the UK.
Buddhist Home Secretary too, unfortunately for us.
She is an unusually aggressive non- Zen kind of a Buddhist.
Well, it was Buddhists who persecuted the Muslim minority in Burma.
Putin on BBC @Mexicanpete reminds me of their approach to climate change: they have to have a climate denier on for "balance".
It's not balance, one side is truth and the other lies.
My favourite is still their substitution of the Boris Johnson cock up at the Cenotaph in 2019 for footage from 2016. In order that Johnson shouldn't be shown in a partisan bad light, he was shown in a three year old non partisan light.
I do hope so - I had a random bet on her at long odds when Robertson was still favourite, just on the basis that she had declared she was running.
Just on the face of it, she seems the best candidate based on five key criteria:
• She is not a anti-sex, homophobic bigot • She is not a known incompetent • She has red hair • She has an unusual name • She is @StuartDickson 's anointed successor, so must be Scottish subsample friendly
She’s photogenic, telegenic, sassy and anti trans.
“The co-convenor of Out for Independence, the SNP's LGBTQ+ wing, has submitted a formal complaint to the party's National Secretary after Kate Forbes said that "a trans woman is a biological male who identifies as a woman."
On topic: If Yousaf becomes First Minister, the United Kingdom will have a Hindu leader, a Muslim leader, and a divided Christian government in Nothern Ireland. If Drakeford is an agnostic or atheist, it appears you would have reached maximum religious diversity in your leaders.
Whether that is a good thing or not is a question I will leave to those better informed than I am about religion in the UK.
Buddhist Home Secretary too, unfortunately for us.
She is an unusually aggressive non- Zen kind of a Buddhist.
Well, it was Buddhists who persecuted the Muslim minority in Burma.
And the Tamil Hindu minority in Sri Lanka, and each other in Cambodia. In other words all humans have an evolutionary tendency to violence under certain circumstances, regardless of religion.
“The co-convenor of Out for Independence, the SNP's LGBTQ+ wing, has submitted a formal complaint to the party's National Secretary after Kate Forbes said that "a trans woman is a biological male who identifies as a woman."
Interesting prog on R4 about the origin of "woke". As a derivation of awoke = remain aware of the injustices of the world (and at that time, of discrimination against black people in the US) and on your guard.
Began over 80 years ago, featuring in a 1938 Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) song about the Scottsboro Boys
Off topic: Since you are discussing religion and jobs, I'll present you with a question I have been thinking about for years: In the US, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the population believes that traditional families are best for children, for religious reasons. I am thinking of evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and so forth.
Most American civil rights laws protect against religious discrimination, so employers are barred from discriminating against such groups.
But, do companies such as Apple and Google obey those laws?
Would either company hire computer scientist Donald Knuth, executive Mitt Romney, author and talk show host Michael Medved, or lawyer Amy Coney Barrett, given their religious beliefs? Would either ask Condoleeza Rice to be on their boards? Do either recruit at Notre Dame or Brigham Young?
Now, let me repeat, those are questions. And it occurs to me that some of you might have recent experiences that would give us some information on that question.
On topic: If Yousaf becomes First Minister, the United Kingdom will have a Hindu leader, a Muslim leader, and a divided Christian government in Nothern Ireland. If Drakeford is an agnostic or atheist, it appears you would have reached maximum religious diversity in your leaders.
Whether that is a good thing or not is a question I will leave to those better informed than I am about religion in the UK.
Buddhist Home Secretary too, unfortunately for us.
She is an unusually aggressive non- Zen kind of a Buddhist.
Well, it was Buddhists who persecuted the Muslim minority in Burma.
And the Tamil Hindu minority in Sri Lanka, and each other in Cambodia. In other words all humans have an evolutionary tendency to violence under certain circumstances, regardless of religion.
Not to mention their role in justifying Japanese expansionism and War Crimes in the Pacific.
“The co-convenor of Out for Independence, the SNP's LGBTQ+ wing, has submitted a formal complaint to the party's National Secretary after Kate Forbes said that "a trans woman is a biological male who identifies as a woman."
Interesting prog on R4 about the origin of "woke". As a derivation of awoke = remain aware of the injustices of the world (and at that time, of discrimination against black people in the US) and on your guard.
Began over 80 years ago, featuring in a 1938 Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) song about the Scottsboro Boys
“The co-convenor of Out for Independence, the SNP's LGBTQ+ wing, has submitted a formal complaint to the party's National Secretary after Kate Forbes said that "a trans woman is a biological male who identifies as a woman."
Putin on BBC @Mexicanpete reminds me of their approach to climate change: they have to have a climate denier on for "balance".
It's not balance, one side is truth and the other lies.
My favourite is still their substitution of the Boris Johnson cock up at the Cenotaph in 2019 for footage from 2016. In order that Johnson shouldn't be shown in a partisan bad light, he was shown in a three year old non partisan light.
I wasn't aware of that.
I used to be very pro BBC, gutted when Morecambe and Wise defected to Thames in 1978.
There was a time not too long ago when the BBC News was world beating and the go to for authority and reliability. Then, first the BBC website became less easy to negotiate and the content less authoritative. The rigid focus on the non-partisanship element of the Charter was corrupted by this insular demand for balance, and now we have Huw Edwards explaining fairly basic political constructs in the style of Sesame Street.
The Cenotaph incident was an absolute cracker though.
He seemed a little out of sorts anyway. May-esque, circa 2017, as I commented earlier. I don't think he really believes his own hype anymore.
If Russia is going to fail then we should all hope it does so with a whimper, falling into a deep catatonic depression. Rather than going out with a bang.
There is no reason London buses cannot be run by TfL directly, only stupid Government rules. They have at least made the best of a bad situation and TfL's technology is very good.
Too many people in politics obsess about ownership structures.
There is good management and bad management in the world, and you find both in the public and private sectors. There are also advantages from size (economies of scale, buying power) and disadvantages (bureaucracy, slowness).
The two main reasons to keep something in the public sector are control, and where public good is incompatible with the profit motive. You can replicate control to some extent through regulation of private providers though we all see the issues. You can fix the profit motive incompatibility issue by subsidising private companies - eg to run unprofitable bus routes - but that can create inefficiencies.
The main reasons to have something private are competition and innovation. Efforts to replicate these in the public sector have a chequered history. But privatisation doesn’t always lead to either real competition or innovation. That’s why I don’t think ownership per se is the most important factor.
I know you alluded to it but competition and innovation do seem to drift into rent seeking and financialisaton.
Which is why markets need regulating. Monopolies and all that.
The US space launch industry is a fascinating example of the varying models and why they cause problems.
You mean that spending $20bn on turning a dozen re-usable rocket motors, into disposable rocket motors, isn’t good value for the American taxpayer?
Rocket engines. Motors are solids, by convention.
SLS is the totally state controlled mode. Then you have ULA who are supposed to be the tame contractors. Then you have SpaceX - the pirates who are tearing the market place up Then you have Blue Origin - who are turning a lot of money into.... not a lot.
It is costing SpaceX $20 million and falling to get 16 tons (and growing) to LEO. None of the other come close to matching that. Why?
Why don't they want to do that? Yes, they don't want to do that.
Yes yes, engines and motors.
It does indeed appear that no-one wants to challenge SX in the commercial and government LEO space, preferring instead to do their own thing on a different basis, that sees them take no business risk.
The mad one is Blue Origin. The whole business of which, with hindsight, seemed to be about Bezos getting his personal joyride - and now it happened, no-one there cares about the bigger project any more.
You then end up with another danger, of an effective private monopoly in launch services which needs regulating at some point. Thankfully, so far SX have been behaving themselves in this regard, including stepping in to launch OneWeb hardware when the Russians got boycotted.
No-one really knows what Blue Origin is for. Bezos seems to have a love for space in a kind of Big Coffee Table Book kind of way. Not actually mad about the details of how you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner or anything, but likes Space. Hence the F1 engine recovery project. According to people who've spoken to him, he's an O'Neil colony fan.
(Snip)
I utterly disagree with that, and sadly it comes across as a bit of a Musk-loving diatribe. It also follows the rather dubious idea that Musk himself knows how 'you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner'. Given his proclaimed software 'knowledge', that's dubious. It also rather assumes the most useful a boss of a massive, multi-faceted organisation can be doing is mirco-managing.
Bezos has had a love of space from when he was a kid; IIRC his speech at uni was on man's future in space. Musk, in comparison, is a newcomer.
If you look, SpaceX has done *nothing* for space science, let alone Mars. Yes, they've launched probes (and been paid handsomely for it), but the amount of space science done is negligible. They have leant heavily on NASA and DOD contracts; 'inventions' like their PICA-X are just rehashed NASA research.
As for Blue Origin; they just seem to be getting on with what they're doing. e.g. the following:
Actually, SpaceX have been doing quite bit of original research. Retro propulsion for one. Hence NASA sending the WB-57 out to watch the relights during entry. That was something that NASA wanted for a long long time, but couldn't get funded for test.
The NASA plan to retrieve the samples from Mars they are laying down depends on retro-propulsion for the lander. The current techniques don't scale to something large enough to get back to Mars orbit.
PICA-X is an interesting one - the original NASA version had severe problems with cost and getting a uniform structure. As often happens, the research was canned because of a lack of immediate use. SpaceX hired the guys who'd worked on it and got them to productionise it.
Their work on FFSC is pretty unique as well. First ever FFSC for non-storables (RD-270 was hydrazine)
Yes, but that's research towards the *launch* market. It's not actual reasearch into space, or living in space. There are massive issues that await any Mars attempt, and SpaceX are ignoring them.
IMO that is the difference between the two organisations: there is clear evidence that BO is working on many different thing simultaneously. SpaceX is just launch and MAKING MONEY!!!!
It's a structural difference that began in the difference of their funding sources.
Ultimately, however, further space development is reliant on reducing the cost of doing stuff in space.
Indeed. But it's also reliant on actually doing science and increasing the infrastructure in space. SpaceX have done a brilliant job of decreasing the cost of Earth to LEO. But they're not exactly doing a lot in LEO, aside from Starlink and rides to the ISS. Even their lunar plans (*) are largely funded by NASA. Where are the Mars probes? Where are the long-duration spaceflights? Heck, they've *lost* ambition since the days of Red Dragon.
I want both to succeed, because we need at least two such organisations in space. Hopefully they will complement each other.
(*) Remember how against going to the Moon Musk was a few years back? He was firmly a Mars-firster.
SpaceX were always the shipping company. Until fairly recently, they didn't have the resources to develop (and probably still don't) a Mars habitat etc. in parallel with the launch stuff.
The next thing they are moving into is EVA space suits - see AXIOM. This will lead, fairly inevitably to surface suits for the Moon and Mars. At the moment, NASA is trying to pull itself out of a mess on suits - political blocking of going a fully commercial route on suite procurement means that they will certainly be a further mess.
But here you fall into the problem. Musk said he wanted to put man on Mars in ten years. Back in 2011. even if we say it's ten years from 2023, then there's a massive amount of really, really expensive stuff to sort out (and that's leaving out the problem caused by the 25-month synods). *If* he really wants to go, then he'd be doing as much of it as possible consecutively.
In other words, the BO route.
Instead, he just ignores or cancels the stuff that could really help.
He’s running a private company, that needs to a large extent fund itself.
It’s 100x better to have an eternal optimist, prepared to learn from mistakes and iterate designs quickly, in charge of the effort, rather than a Congress which prioritises the distribution of pork among as many members as possible, above the actual mission.
That may be the case. Except he is not an eternal optimist: he's an eternal liar (i.e. bullshitter) whose companies massively rely on the distribution of pork from central government.
But that misses my point: he has an aim I find laudable. But there's a heck of a lot of stuff that they do not appear to be doing. To their credit, BO appears to have a much bigger grasp of their aim, and what is needed to get there,
The tone and mood around the Forbes debacle amounts to this: She is expected to take a properly liberal view about those she disagrees with, but no-one is expected to take a properly liberal view about her.
I don't agree with the SNP on independence, and I don't agree with most of the evangelical take on the world. But KF seems to me to be acting in a more genuinely liberal way than her army of detractors. it looks to me like bullying.
No, it’s more than that
She morally disapproves - in a really quite serious, “you are going to hell“ fashion - of gay marriage, of children born out of wedlock, even just sex outside marriage. She thinks people that do this - ie 90% of Scots? - are evil sinners. Sure, they can be redeemed, IF THEY JOIN HER CHURCH AND SHAPE UP, but until then they are evil sinners
Those who call the FCS and FPCS "evangelical" use the word differently from how I use it. They are nothing like evangelical churches in say Brazil or evangelical networks in the CofE, which try to practice happiness and work hard to win adherents.
I can't see how predestination and evangelism can go together without specious logic-chopping.
They don't want us in their church, Leon. They think God predestined us to go to hell.
The meaning of the term "Evangelical" has changed recently. It was originally in strict contrast to Fundamentalism. Of which these small Presbyterian Scottish sects are prime examples. Thanks to the USA Right Evangelical tends to mean strongly Christian now.
But in the historical Scottish context Evangelical meant those Christians who do not pander to the state or bow down to Mammon in the form of nice Established livings selected by the Tory landowners and bishops selected by the Crown. Hence the Evangelicals split off in 1843 to form the Free Church (which arguably ultimately absorbed the rump Church of Sciotland itself when the latter merged with one dervative of the FC) They were, and remain, absolutely horrified by the C of E and episcopacy.
Scots religious history is quite a thing. I remember reading Anthony Powell's comment that the only way he could get any purchase on it was through Walter Scott novels. But, of course, the whole Wee Free thing was after Scott's day, so the Waverley novels aren't much help there. Is there a recommended guide to it?
Not been reading up on it lately so can't claim to be up to date. You could do worse than Drummond and Bulloch's 3-vol history but for a single vol Calum Brown Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 didn't seem bad - ISTR his People on the Pews was an earlier version perhapos with more social history but it was a long time ago and I may be misremembering. For the Highlands 1690-1900 - I've found Ansdell The People of the Great Faith.
But any decent [edit] general history should pay due regard. Knowing what denomination a C19 (and early C20 and C18) Scot belonged to is crucial for understanding that person. Like Wales, only more so. Also bound up with politics and land issues more generally - as will be clear from Tom Devine's histories. Ultimately Gladstonian rural Liberalism and the Jo Grimond stemmed from the Disruption of 1843.
He seemed a little out of sorts anyway. May-esque, circa 2017, as I commented earlier. I don't think he really believes his own hype anymore.
If Russia is going to fail then we should all hope it does so with a whimper, falling into a deep catatonic depression. Rather than going out with a bang.
Definitely the whimper please Mr Putin.
Say you’re retiring at 70, and quietly withdraw your troops back to the 2014 border with Ukraine. Way better than every alternative, both for yourself and the rest of the world.
Anything else involved hundreds of thousands of dead people, maybe one of them being you, Mr Putin.
Putin on BBC @Mexicanpete reminds me of their approach to climate change: they have to have a climate denier on for "balance".
It's not balance, one side is truth and the other lies.
My favourite is still their substitution of the Boris Johnson cock up at the Cenotaph in 2019 for footage from 2016. In order that Johnson shouldn't be shown in a partisan bad light, he was shown in a three year old non partisan light.
I wasn't aware of that.
I used to be very pro BBC, gutted when Morecambe and Wise defected to Thames in 1978.
There was a time not too long ago when the BBC News was world beating and the go to for authority and reliability. Then, first the BBC website became less easy to negotiate and the content less authoritative. The rigid focus on the non-partisanship element of the Charter was corrupted by this insular demand for balance, and now we have Huw Edwards explaining fairly basic political constructs in the style of Sesame Street.
The Cenotaph incident was an absolute cracker though.
Putin on BBC @Mexicanpete reminds me of their approach to climate change: they have to have a climate denier on for "balance".
It's not balance, one side is truth and the other lies.
My favourite is still their substitution of the Boris Johnson cock up at the Cenotaph in 2019 for footage from 2016. In order that Johnson shouldn't be shown in a partisan bad light, he was shown in a three year old non partisan light.
I wasn't aware of that.
I used to be very pro BBC, gutted when Morecambe and Wise defected to Thames in 1978.
There was a time not too long ago when the BBC News was world beating and the go to for authority and reliability. Then, first the BBC website became less easy to negotiate and the content less authoritative. The rigid focus on the non-partisanship element of the Charter was corrupted by this insular demand for balance, and now we have Huw Edwards explaining fairly basic political constructs in the style of Sesame Street.
The Cenotaph incident was an absolute cracker though.
To be fair from doing a bit of research it was only once that they did it and apologised afterwards.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
He seemed a little out of sorts anyway. May-esque, circa 2017, as I commented earlier. I don't think he really believes his own hype anymore.
If Russia is going to fail then we should all hope it does so with a whimper, falling into a deep catatonic depression. Rather than going out with a bang.
Definitely the whimper please Mr Putin.
Say you’re retiring at 70, and quietly withdraw your troops back to the 2014 border with Ukraine. Way better than every alternative, both for yourself and the rest of the world.
Anything else involved hundreds of thousands of dead people, maybe one of them being you, Mr Putin.
Can he really get away with that though? The one thing people aren't factoring in is the presidential election next year.
There is no reason London buses cannot be run by TfL directly, only stupid Government rules. They have at least made the best of a bad situation and TfL's technology is very good.
Too many people in politics obsess about ownership structures.
There is good management and bad management in the world, and you find both in the public and private sectors. There are also advantages from size (economies of scale, buying power) and disadvantages (bureaucracy, slowness).
The two main reasons to keep something in the public sector are control, and where public good is incompatible with the profit motive. You can replicate control to some extent through regulation of private providers though we all see the issues. You can fix the profit motive incompatibility issue by subsidising private companies - eg to run unprofitable bus routes - but that can create inefficiencies.
The main reasons to have something private are competition and innovation. Efforts to replicate these in the public sector have a chequered history. But privatisation doesn’t always lead to either real competition or innovation. That’s why I don’t think ownership per se is the most important factor.
I know you alluded to it but competition and innovation do seem to drift into rent seeking and financialisaton.
Which is why markets need regulating. Monopolies and all that.
The US space launch industry is a fascinating example of the varying models and why they cause problems.
You mean that spending $20bn on turning a dozen re-usable rocket motors, into disposable rocket motors, isn’t good value for the American taxpayer?
Rocket engines. Motors are solids, by convention.
SLS is the totally state controlled mode. Then you have ULA who are supposed to be the tame contractors. Then you have SpaceX - the pirates who are tearing the market place up Then you have Blue Origin - who are turning a lot of money into.... not a lot.
It is costing SpaceX $20 million and falling to get 16 tons (and growing) to LEO. None of the other come close to matching that. Why?
Why don't they want to do that? Yes, they don't want to do that.
Yes yes, engines and motors.
It does indeed appear that no-one wants to challenge SX in the commercial and government LEO space, preferring instead to do their own thing on a different basis, that sees them take no business risk.
The mad one is Blue Origin. The whole business of which, with hindsight, seemed to be about Bezos getting his personal joyride - and now it happened, no-one there cares about the bigger project any more.
You then end up with another danger, of an effective private monopoly in launch services which needs regulating at some point. Thankfully, so far SX have been behaving themselves in this regard, including stepping in to launch OneWeb hardware when the Russians got boycotted.
No-one really knows what Blue Origin is for. Bezos seems to have a love for space in a kind of Big Coffee Table Book kind of way. Not actually mad about the details of how you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner or anything, but likes Space. Hence the F1 engine recovery project. According to people who've spoken to him, he's an O'Neil colony fan.
(Snip)
I utterly disagree with that, and sadly it comes across as a bit of a Musk-loving diatribe. It also follows the rather dubious idea that Musk himself knows how 'you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner'. Given his proclaimed software 'knowledge', that's dubious. It also rather assumes the most useful a boss of a massive, multi-faceted organisation can be doing is mirco-managing.
Bezos has had a love of space from when he was a kid; IIRC his speech at uni was on man's future in space. Musk, in comparison, is a newcomer.
If you look, SpaceX has done *nothing* for space science, let alone Mars. Yes, they've launched probes (and been paid handsomely for it), but the amount of space science done is negligible. They have leant heavily on NASA and DOD contracts; 'inventions' like their PICA-X are just rehashed NASA research.
As for Blue Origin; they just seem to be getting on with what they're doing. e.g. the following:
Actually, SpaceX have been doing quite bit of original research. Retro propulsion for one. Hence NASA sending the WB-57 out to watch the relights during entry. That was something that NASA wanted for a long long time, but couldn't get funded for test.
The NASA plan to retrieve the samples from Mars they are laying down depends on retro-propulsion for the lander. The current techniques don't scale to something large enough to get back to Mars orbit.
PICA-X is an interesting one - the original NASA version had severe problems with cost and getting a uniform structure. As often happens, the research was canned because of a lack of immediate use. SpaceX hired the guys who'd worked on it and got them to productionise it.
Their work on FFSC is pretty unique as well. First ever FFSC for non-storables (RD-270 was hydrazine)
Yes, but that's research towards the *launch* market. It's not actual reasearch into space, or living in space. There are massive issues that await any Mars attempt, and SpaceX are ignoring them.
IMO that is the difference between the two organisations: there is clear evidence that BO is working on many different thing simultaneously. SpaceX is just launch and MAKING MONEY!!!!
It's a structural difference that began in the difference of their funding sources.
Ultimately, however, further space development is reliant on reducing the cost of doing stuff in space.
Indeed. But it's also reliant on actually doing science and increasing the infrastructure in space. SpaceX have done a brilliant job of decreasing the cost of Earth to LEO. But they're not exactly doing a lot in LEO, aside from Starlink and rides to the ISS. Even their lunar plans (*) are largely funded by NASA. Where are the Mars probes? Where are the long-duration spaceflights? Heck, they've *lost* ambition since the days of Red Dragon.
I want both to succeed, because we need at least two such organisations in space. Hopefully they will complement each other.
(*) Remember how against going to the Moon Musk was a few years back? He was firmly a Mars-firster.
SpaceX were always the shipping company. Until fairly recently, they didn't have the resources to develop (and probably still don't) a Mars habitat etc. in parallel with the launch stuff.
The next thing they are moving into is EVA space suits - see AXIOM. This will lead, fairly inevitably to surface suits for the Moon and Mars. At the moment, NASA is trying to pull itself out of a mess on suits - political blocking of going a fully commercial route on suite procurement means that they will certainly be a further mess.
But here you fall into the problem. Musk said he wanted to put man on Mars in ten years. Back in 2011. even if we say it's ten years from 2023, then there's a massive amount of really, really expensive stuff to sort out (and that's leaving out the problem caused by the 25-month synods). *If* he really wants to go, then he'd be doing as much of it as possible consecutively.
In other words, the BO route.
Instead, he just ignores or cancels the stuff that could really help.
He’s running a private company, that needs to a large extent fund itself.
It’s 100x better to have an eternal optimist, prepared to learn from mistakes and iterate designs quickly, in charge of the effort, rather than a Congress which prioritises the distribution of pork among as many members as possible, above the actual mission.
That may be the case. Except he is not an eternal optimist: he's an eternal liar (i.e. bullshitter) whose companies massively rely on the distribution of pork from central government.
But that misses my point: he has an aim I find laudable. But there's a heck of a lot of stuff that they do not appear to be doing. To their credit, BO appears to have a much bigger grasp of their aim, and what is needed to get there,
An eternal bullshitter, would be someone who keeps talking but never delivers.
SpaceX have always been optimistic, but they’ve also delivered. Their government contracts in the early days had specified deliverables, targets that were met and stuff actually sent upstairs.
The result being an order of magnitude reduction in the cost of sending stuff to LEO, inside a decade. Followed by a manned program to LEO, that is now the only option left for keeping the ISS up there.
Edit: I’ll agree with you that a “Full Self-Driving” Tesla, is eternal bullshit. It doesn’t meet that description until it can pick me up from the pub and take me home.
He seemed a little out of sorts anyway. May-esque, circa 2017, as I commented earlier. I don't think he really believes his own hype anymore.
If Russia is going to fail then we should all hope it does so with a whimper, falling into a deep catatonic depression. Rather than going out with a bang.
Definitely the whimper please Mr Putin.
Say you’re retiring at 70, and quietly withdraw your troops back to the 2014 border with Ukraine. Way better than every alternative, both for yourself and the rest of the world.
Anything else involved hundreds of thousands of dead people, maybe one of them being you, Mr Putin.
Can he really get away with that though? The one thing people aren't factoring in is the presidential election next year.
No opposition. If he goes it will be via palace coup / men in grey suits.
The Turkish election in May (if it happens given the earthquake) will be very interesting. Clearly Ergodan will try to fix it, but he can't get away with being as blatant as the likes of Putin or Lukashenko. It will be soft fixing. But he's certainly not certain of victory.
“The co-convenor of Out for Independence, the SNP's LGBTQ+ wing, has submitted a formal complaint to the party's National Secretary after Kate Forbes said that "a trans woman is a biological male who identifies as a woman."
Interesting prog on R4 about the origin of "woke". As a derivation of awoke = remain aware of the injustices of the world (and at that time, of discrimination against black people in the US) and on your guard.
Began over 80 years ago, featuring in a 1938 Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) song about the Scottsboro Boys
Goes back long before that: to Lincoln, the Civil War and Emancipation, at least
I've followed the thread most of the day on Ms.Forbes. As a gay man whose lived long enough to know a bit about prejudice and hate and fear and being illegal when I was much younger, I still find myself sympathetic to her honest expression of views - especially as I believe her when she says she accepts there is a difference between rekigious belief and accepting the law. The pile-on from memebers and others, including one of the declared candidates is understandable but distasteful. I accept she's porbably scuppered her chances by her honesty - I doubt the honesty of others now attacking her. But hey politics is what it is.
I do hope so - I had a random bet on her at long odds when Robertson was still favourite, just on the basis that she had declared she was running.
Just on the face of it, she seems the best candidate based on five key criteria:
• She is not a anti-sex, homophobic bigot • She is not a known incompetent • She has red hair • She has an unusual name • She is @StuartDickson 's anointed successor, so must be Scottish subsample friendly
She’s photogenic, telegenic, sassy and anti trans.
One of my oldest friends - still a good friend - is a post op trans woman. I’ve been with her through her journey. I went to Charing X hospital when she had the op. I was there when she came out to us all. I completely support her right to identify as she likes, given that she has jumped through the legal hoops
What I don’t support is radical trans activism and the absurdity of self ID and the indoctrination of ordinarily troubled kids into believing they have gender dysphoria.
Nor, out of interest, does my trans female friend. She thinks people should have to do what she did: live as a woman (or man), for two years, then do the op, then you can re-identify
“The co-convenor of Out for Independence, the SNP's LGBTQ+ wing, has submitted a formal complaint to the party's National Secretary after Kate Forbes said that "a trans woman is a biological male who identifies as a woman."
Interesting prog on R4 about the origin of "woke". As a derivation of awoke = remain aware of the injustices of the world (and at that time, of discrimination against black people in the US) and on your guard.
Began over 80 years ago, featuring in a 1938 Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) song about the Scottsboro Boys
Goes back long before that: to Lincoln, the Civil War and Emancipation, at least
Does it now.
Looking forward to seeing the instances of it then.
Off topic: Since you are discussing religion and jobs, I'll present you with a question I have been thinking about for years: In the US, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the population believes that traditional families are best for children, for religious reasons. I am thinking of evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and so forth.
Most American civil rights laws protect against religious discrimination, so employers are barred from discriminating against such groups.
But, do companies such as Apple and Google obey those laws?
Would either company hire computer scientist Donald Knuth, executive Mitt Romney, author and talk show host Michael Medved, or lawyer Amy Coney Barrett, given their religious beliefs? Would either ask Condoleeza Rice to be on their boards? Do either recruit at Notre Dame or Brigham Young?
Now, let me repeat, those are questions. And it occurs to me that some of you might have recent experiences that would give us some information on that question.
I guess it depends, in part, on whether it came up in interview.
To give a more concrete example, given the disruption that Enoch Burke is causing the school that used to employ him, I think it's very unlikely that any other school will employ him unless they closely share his religious beliefs, because he's intent on imposing those religious beliefs onto any organizations he has any contact with, and isn't prepared to discuss any disagreement in a calm and reasonable manner.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
UKLAB and SLAB have been eerily quiet. No one from either has said anything about Forbes and her beliefs. So, they probably are rooting for her. Mind you, Yousaf would be crap too.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
Josh @JMagosh · 22s Without wanting to downplay Labour's own frequent tendency towards illiberal positions, the commentary from a few days ago that the SNP are 'well to the left' of Labour certainly hasn't aged well.
8 SNP parliamentarians still currently endorse Forbes.
I've followed the thread most of the day on Ms.Forbes. As a gay man whose lived long enough to know a bit about prejudice and hate and fear and being illegal when I was much younger, I still find myself sympathetic to her honest expression of views - especially as I believe her when she says she accepts there is a difference between rekigious belief and accepting the law. The pile-on from memebers and others, including one of the declared candidates is understandable but distasteful. I accept she's porbably scuppered her chances by her honesty - I doubt the honesty of others now attacking her. But hey politics is what it is.
Politics is indeed what it is - now pretty much composed entirely of people who no-one would wish to represent them, looking out only for themselves, and aided by hacks much more interested in tripping up people than reporting what they have to say.
“The co-convenor of Out for Independence, the SNP's LGBTQ+ wing, has submitted a formal complaint to the party's National Secretary after Kate Forbes said that "a trans woman is a biological male who identifies as a woman."
Interesting prog on R4 about the origin of "woke". As a derivation of awoke = remain aware of the injustices of the world (and at that time, of discrimination against black people in the US) and on your guard.
Began over 80 years ago, featuring in a 1938 Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) song about the Scottsboro Boys
Goes back long before that: to Lincoln, the Civil War and Emancipation, at least
Does it now.
Looking forward to seeing the instances of it then.
Abolitionist “Wide Awakes” Were Woke Before “Woke”
“Now the old men are folding their arms and going to sleep,” said William H. Seward while campaigning for Lincoln, “and the young men are Wide Awake.”
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
UKLAB and SLAB have been eerily quiet. No one from either has said anything about Forbes and her beliefs. So, they probably are rooting for her. Mind you, Yousaf would be crap too.
More that interrupting when an opponent is pouring gasoline over their head while on fire is
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Is it ok "traduce, mock and bully to general applause", old ugly men with poor manners, little education and no children?
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Kate's mistake is that she is Christian. Any other religion and we would be hearing about why it doesn't matter and how Kate (although her name would be different) has made it clear she would keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation.
I do hope so - I had a random bet on her at long odds when Robertson was still favourite, just on the basis that she had declared she was running.
Just on the face of it, she seems the best candidate based on five key criteria:
• She is not a anti-sex, homophobic bigot • She is not a known incompetent • She has red hair • She has an unusual name • She is @StuartDickson 's anointed successor, so must be Scottish subsample friendly
She’s photogenic, telegenic, sassy and anti trans.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Is it ok "traduce, mock and bully to general applause", old ugly men with poor manners, little education and no children?
I guess what algarkirk is getting at is that some people might enjoy seeing such a young woman knocked off her perch.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Kate's mistake is that she is Christian. Any other religion and we would be hearing about why it doesn't matter and how Kate (although her name would be different) has made it clear she would keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation.
Except she said explicitly that she wouldn't keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation given her comments on gay marriage.
I've followed the thread most of the day on Ms.Forbes. As a gay man whose lived long enough to know a bit about prejudice and hate and fear and being illegal when I was much younger, I still find myself sympathetic to her honest expression of views - especially as I believe her when she says she accepts there is a difference between rekigious belief and accepting the law. The pile-on from memebers and others, including one of the declared candidates is understandable but distasteful. I accept she's porbably scuppered her chances by her honesty - I doubt the honesty of others now attacking her. But hey politics is what it is.
Is it a pile on? I've mostly seen people expressing the opinion that she's scuppered her chances and that personal opinions are fine, but you also have to accept that people who don't like your personal opinions might not vote for you.
Yousaf has handled this much better. His personal religious opinions are likely at odds with many people, too (it's likely, presumably, that he considers drinking alcohol to be wrong) but he's made clear that he would legislate liberally. Forbes has got herself in a pickle by being less clear on that.
I also respect her apparent honesty, but I'd be unlikely to vote for her if I was an SNP member.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Kate's mistake is that she is Christian. Any other religion and we would be hearing about why it doesn't matter and how Kate (although her name would be different) has made it clear she would keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation.
The thing is though, she has made it clear that she wouldn't keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation. That's why she is being criticised, not because she is Christian.
We (My employer) has had to register for VAT in the Netherlands in order to have VAT free shipments between our for instance French & German suppliers & Polish/ Hungarian customers. Prior to Brexit this could be done with a GB VAT registration.
I *think* if we were based in Belfast we wouldn't need to bother with Dutch accountants.
Noone seems to have noticed or mentioned this intra-EU triangulation export benefit for Northern Ireland though ?
I've never really understood the issue with B2B customers - can't they just reclaim the VAT their end?
Not if the triangulating party is ex EU, I can assure you our supplier's understanding of EU VAT rules led us to some potentially whacking great VAT bills which meant we had to get an EU VAT presence sorted pdq. There's also the risk that a claim won't be accepted - since Brexit the ability to reclaim VAT from intra-country supply is gone (Through the HMRC portal) and you need to go direct through the particular countries' VAT methods to get back VAT. With an EU VAT presence that at least limits you to where the EU customer and supplier are in the same country. We'll be trying to do a reclaim where that's the case in the next few months.
As an aside - We were told by multiple sources that the chance of a successful claim with a GB VAT reg from the German VAT authorities (Where we have some big suppliers) were basically nil. So yes in theory it could be done but you've got the expense of dealing with every countries' individual VAT authority, & the chance your claim might be rejected. With EU VAT reg you're just down to countries where the supplier and customer are in the same country.
I suppose the triangulation makes it more complicated than a simple import/export situation.
I was told yesterday that the German customs agency are making life very difficult (as in) for those who import via post. Seems to be quite the reverse of everywhere else, where importing via post is much simpler for our customers than via courier.
“The co-convenor of Out for Independence, the SNP's LGBTQ+ wing, has submitted a formal complaint to the party's National Secretary after Kate Forbes said that "a trans woman is a biological male who identifies as a woman."
Interesting prog on R4 about the origin of "woke". As a derivation of awoke = remain aware of the injustices of the world (and at that time, of discrimination against black people in the US) and on your guard.
Began over 80 years ago, featuring in a 1938 Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) song about the Scottsboro Boys
Goes back long before that: to Lincoln, the Civil War and Emancipation, at least
Does it now.
Looking forward to seeing the instances of it then.
Abolitionist “Wide Awakes” Were Woke Before “Woke”
“Now the old men are folding their arms and going to sleep,” said William H. Seward while campaigning for Lincoln, “and the young men are Wide Awake.”
Yes wide awake. We were talking about the term "woke". Derived from wide awake no doubt but (probably) first used in 1938 to symbolise being wide awake.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
As opposed to opportunities to a traduce a middle-aged, ugly, Hull educated, childless woman?
Everyone gets traduced nowadays. That is the meaning of politics.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Is it ok "traduce, mock and bully to general applause", old ugly men with poor manners, little education and no children?
QTWTAIN. I am surprised that you needed to ask the question.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Kate's mistake is that she is Christian. Any other religion and we would be hearing about why it doesn't matter and how Kate (although her name would be different) has made it clear she would keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation.
Except she said explicitly that she wouldn't keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation given her comments on gay marriage.
As Felix has pointed out, she has accepted the differences between her religious views and accepting the law.
If it comes to the point of "well, she wouldn't bring forward any more progressive measures", there have been plenty of Prime Ministers who have been overruled by their own parties and forced to take measures they didn't personally accept - either they swallowed it or they resigned.
And the point still stands. If KF was not Christian, at the least she would not be receiving the same level of pile on.
There is no reason London buses cannot be run by TfL directly, only stupid Government rules. They have at least made the best of a bad situation and TfL's technology is very good.
Too many people in politics obsess about ownership structures.
There is good management and bad management in the world, and you find both in the public and private sectors. There are also advantages from size (economies of scale, buying power) and disadvantages (bureaucracy, slowness).
The two main reasons to keep something in the public sector are control, and where public good is incompatible with the profit motive. You can replicate control to some extent through regulation of private providers though we all see the issues. You can fix the profit motive incompatibility issue by subsidising private companies - eg to run unprofitable bus routes - but that can create inefficiencies.
The main reasons to have something private are competition and innovation. Efforts to replicate these in the public sector have a chequered history. But privatisation doesn’t always lead to either real competition or innovation. That’s why I don’t think ownership per se is the most important factor.
I know you alluded to it but competition and innovation do seem to drift into rent seeking and financialisaton.
Which is why markets need regulating. Monopolies and all that.
The US space launch industry is a fascinating example of the varying models and why they cause problems.
You mean that spending $20bn on turning a dozen re-usable rocket motors, into disposable rocket motors, isn’t good value for the American taxpayer?
Rocket engines. Motors are solids, by convention.
SLS is the totally state controlled mode. Then you have ULA who are supposed to be the tame contractors. Then you have SpaceX - the pirates who are tearing the market place up Then you have Blue Origin - who are turning a lot of money into.... not a lot.
It is costing SpaceX $20 million and falling to get 16 tons (and growing) to LEO. None of the other come close to matching that. Why?
Why don't they want to do that? Yes, they don't want to do that.
Yes yes, engines and motors.
It does indeed appear that no-one wants to challenge SX in the commercial and government LEO space, preferring instead to do their own thing on a different basis, that sees them take no business risk.
The mad one is Blue Origin. The whole business of which, with hindsight, seemed to be about Bezos getting his personal joyride - and now it happened, no-one there cares about the bigger project any more.
You then end up with another danger, of an effective private monopoly in launch services which needs regulating at some point. Thankfully, so far SX have been behaving themselves in this regard, including stepping in to launch OneWeb hardware when the Russians got boycotted.
No-one really knows what Blue Origin is for. Bezos seems to have a love for space in a kind of Big Coffee Table Book kind of way. Not actually mad about the details of how you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner or anything, but likes Space. Hence the F1 engine recovery project. According to people who've spoken to him, he's an O'Neil colony fan.
(Snip)
I utterly disagree with that, and sadly it comes across as a bit of a Musk-loving diatribe. It also follows the rather dubious idea that Musk himself knows how 'you get the coatings to stick inside an oxygen rich pre burner'. Given his proclaimed software 'knowledge', that's dubious. It also rather assumes the most useful a boss of a massive, multi-faceted organisation can be doing is mirco-managing.
Bezos has had a love of space from when he was a kid; IIRC his speech at uni was on man's future in space. Musk, in comparison, is a newcomer.
If you look, SpaceX has done *nothing* for space science, let alone Mars. Yes, they've launched probes (and been paid handsomely for it), but the amount of space science done is negligible. They have leant heavily on NASA and DOD contracts; 'inventions' like their PICA-X are just rehashed NASA research.
As for Blue Origin; they just seem to be getting on with what they're doing. e.g. the following:
Actually, SpaceX have been doing quite bit of original research. Retro propulsion for one. Hence NASA sending the WB-57 out to watch the relights during entry. That was something that NASA wanted for a long long time, but couldn't get funded for test.
The NASA plan to retrieve the samples from Mars they are laying down depends on retro-propulsion for the lander. The current techniques don't scale to something large enough to get back to Mars orbit.
PICA-X is an interesting one - the original NASA version had severe problems with cost and getting a uniform structure. As often happens, the research was canned because of a lack of immediate use. SpaceX hired the guys who'd worked on it and got them to productionise it.
Their work on FFSC is pretty unique as well. First ever FFSC for non-storables (RD-270 was hydrazine)
Yes, but that's research towards the *launch* market. It's not actual reasearch into space, or living in space. There are massive issues that await any Mars attempt, and SpaceX are ignoring them.
IMO that is the difference between the two organisations: there is clear evidence that BO is working on many different thing simultaneously. SpaceX is just launch and MAKING MONEY!!!!
It's a structural difference that began in the difference of their funding sources.
Ultimately, however, further space development is reliant on reducing the cost of doing stuff in space.
Indeed. But it's also reliant on actually doing science and increasing the infrastructure in space. SpaceX have done a brilliant job of decreasing the cost of Earth to LEO. But they're not exactly doing a lot in LEO, aside from Starlink and rides to the ISS. Even their lunar plans (*) are largely funded by NASA. Where are the Mars probes? Where are the long-duration spaceflights? Heck, they've *lost* ambition since the days of Red Dragon.
I want both to succeed, because we need at least two such organisations in space. Hopefully they will complement each other.
(*) Remember how against going to the Moon Musk was a few years back? He was firmly a Mars-firster.
SpaceX were always the shipping company. Until fairly recently, they didn't have the resources to develop (and probably still don't) a Mars habitat etc. in parallel with the launch stuff.
The next thing they are moving into is EVA space suits - see AXIOM. This will lead, fairly inevitably to surface suits for the Moon and Mars. At the moment, NASA is trying to pull itself out of a mess on suits - political blocking of going a fully commercial route on suite procurement means that they will certainly be a further mess.
But here you fall into the problem. Musk said he wanted to put man on Mars in ten years. Back in 2011. even if we say it's ten years from 2023, then there's a massive amount of really, really expensive stuff to sort out (and that's leaving out the problem caused by the 25-month synods). *If* he really wants to go, then he'd be doing as much of it as possible consecutively.
In other words, the BO route.
Instead, he just ignores or cancels the stuff that could really help.
He’s running a private company, that needs to a large extent fund itself.
It’s 100x better to have an eternal optimist, prepared to learn from mistakes and iterate designs quickly, in charge of the effort, rather than a Congress which prioritises the distribution of pork among as many members as possible, above the actual mission.
That may be the case. Except he is not an eternal optimist: he's an eternal liar (i.e. bullshitter) whose companies massively rely on the distribution of pork from central government.
But that misses my point: he has an aim I find laudable. But there's a heck of a lot of stuff that they do not appear to be doing. To their credit, BO appears to have a much bigger grasp of their aim, and what is needed to get there,
An eternal bullshitter, would be someone who keeps talking but never delivers.
SpaceX have always been optimistic, but they’ve also delivered. Their government contracts in the early days had specified deliverables, targets that were met and stuff actually sent upstairs.
The result being an order of magnitude reduction in the cost of sending stuff to LEO, inside a decade. Followed by a manned program to LEO, that is now the only option left for keeping the ISS up there.
Edit: I’ll agree with you that a “Full Self-Driving” Tesla, is eternal bullshit. It doesn’t meet that description until it can pick me up from the pub and take me home.
As I said, back in 2011, he said man would be on Mars in ten years.
And in that time, aside from brilliant work getting to LEO, they appear to have done nothing in all the other work to achieve that aim. That's bullshitting, I'm afraid.
That's to take nothing away from Shotwell or SpaceX's engineers, who have done brilliant things. But it's important ot call out Musk's lies.
Given Musk's behaviour over Ukraine, I'd have thought you'd be more on my side of this argument now...
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
As opposed to opportunities to a traduce a middle-aged, ugly, Hull educated, childless woman?
Everyone gets traduced nowadays. That is the meaning of politics.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Kate's mistake is that she is Christian. Any other religion and we would be hearing about why it doesn't matter and how Kate (although her name would be different) has made it clear she would keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation.
Except she said explicitly that she wouldn't keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation given her comments on gay marriage.
As Felix has pointed out, she has accepted the differences between her religious views and accepting the law.
If it comes to the point of "well, she wouldn't bring forward any more progressive measures", there have been plenty of Prime Ministers who have been overruled by their own parties and forced to take measures they didn't personally accept - either they swallowed it or they resigned.
And the point still stands. If KF was not Christian, at the least she would not be receiving the same level of pile on.
But in your counterfactual universe where she had the same beliefs but a different religion, she would still have said that she would have voted against gay marriage. Not exactly keeping her personal beliefs out of political legislation, is it?
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
As opposed to opportunities to a traduce a middle-aged, ugly, Hull educated, childless woman?
Everyone gets traduced nowadays. That is the meaning of politics.
Hull is a proper university, not like Fenland Poly.
In the interests of balance BBC R4 WATO has a Putin apologist defending "Russia's liberation of Ukraine" by the "illegal Neo-Nazi regime" in Kyiv.
In the interests of balance the BBC really needs to lose its charter.
I assume the BBC is seeking to understand the context and reasons behind the war.
Watching a bit of Putin this morning on the BBC he was full of Western aggression this, and encirclement that.
All helping to understand the Russian viewpoint and justification for the war.
I suggest that if you are unable to listen critically to different points of view then perhaps the BBC is an intellectual step too far for you.
Thing is, if you make the BBC into a propaganda machine then sure as eggs is eggs it will eventually turn on you because you will be on the wrong side of "the accepted" viewpoint.
It wasn't an alternative viewpoint it was pro-Putin propaganda. Just read the absurd language I have quoted. It gave Team Putin an opportunity to propagate their bullsh*t narrative.
The BBC are so lost in the notion of non-partisanship they insist on balance when none is needed.
I dfon't think anyone following our coverage of the war can argue that it isn't consistently pro-Ukraine. Take last night's programme, purportedly on Russian opinion. It highlighted at length a local councillor denouncing the war, and people daubingan anti-war slogan on the wall. Apart from clips of TV broadcasters, nobody on the programme set out a different viewpoint. That's not to knock the councillor, who is brave and should obviously be covered. But as an attempt to show what Russians are thinking, it was one-sided. That isn't useful in understanding what is happening.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Is it ok "traduce, mock and bully to general applause", old ugly men with poor manners, little education and no children?
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Kate's mistake is that she is Christian. Any other religion and we would be hearing about why it doesn't matter and how Kate (although her name would be different) has made it clear she would keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation.
The thing is though, she has made it clear that she wouldn't keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation. That's why she is being criticised, not because she is Christian.
I think it's fair to say that Margaret Thatcher very much let her personal religious beliefs influence legislation.
Should she also have been disbarred for her beliefs?
There is no reason London buses cannot be run by TfL directly, only stupid Government rules. They have at least made the best of a bad situation and TfL's technology is very good.
Too many people in politics obsess about ownership structures.
There is good management and bad management in the world, and you find both in the public and private sectors. There are also advantages from size (economies of scale, buying power) and disadvantages (bureaucracy, slowness).
The two main reasons to keep something in the public sector are control, and where public good is incompatible with the profit motive. You can replicate control to some extent through regulation of private providers though we all see the issues. You can fix the profit motive incompatibility issue by subsidising private companies - eg to run unprofitable bus routes - but that can create inefficiencies.
The main reasons to have something private are competition and innovation. Efforts to replicate these in the public sector have a chequered history. But privatisation doesn’t always lead to either real competition or innovation. That’s why I don’t think ownership per se is the most important factor.
I know you alluded to it but competition and innovation do seem to drift into rent seeking and financialisaton.
Which is why markets need regulating. Monopolies and all that.
The US space launch industry is a fascinating example of the varying models and why they cause problems.
You mean that spending $20bn on turning a dozen re-usable rocket motors, into disposable rocket motors, isn’t good value for the American taxpayer?
Rocket engines. Motors are solids, by convention.
SLS is the totally state controlled mode. Then you have ULA who are supposed to be the tame contractors. Then you have SpaceX - the pirates who are tearing the market place up Then you have Blue Origin - who are turning a lot of money into.... not a lot.
It is costing SpaceX $20 million and falling to get 16 tons (and growing) to LEO. None of the other come close to matching that. Why?
Why don't they want to do that? Yes, they don't want to do that.
Yes yes, engines and motors.
It does indeed appear that no-one wants to challenge SX in the commercial and government LEO space, preferring instead to do their own thing on a different basis, that sees them take no business risk.
The mad one is Blue Origin. The whole business of which, with hindsight, seemed to be about Bezos getting his personal joyride - and now it happened, no-one there cares about the bigger project any more.
You then end up with another danger, of an effective private monopoly in launch services which needs regulating at some point. Thankfully, so far SX have been behaving themselves in this regard, including stepping in to launch OneWeb hardware when the Russians got boycotted.
If not sufficiently regulated, then someone else is likely to step up eventually. Probably one or more of Japan, China or S Korea.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
As opposed to opportunities to a traduce a middle-aged, ugly, Hull educated, childless woman?
Everyone gets traduced nowadays. That is the meaning of politics.
If that is a question the answer is No.
And No, it isn't the meaning of politics.
But why did you use all those descriptive terms?
Why 'Cambridge educated' -- as if it is something special. As if mocking the Cambridge educated is an original sin. Why 'pretty' as though mocking a pretty thing is so much worse than mocking an 'ugly' one.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Kate's mistake is that she is Christian. Any other religion and we would be hearing about why it doesn't matter and how Kate (although her name would be different) has made it clear she would keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation.
Except she said explicitly that she wouldn't keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation given her comments on gay marriage.
As Felix has pointed out, she has accepted the differences between her religious views and accepting the law.
If it comes to the point of "well, she wouldn't bring forward any more progressive measures", there have been plenty of Prime Ministers who have been overruled by their own parties and forced to take measures they didn't personally accept - either they swallowed it or they resigned.
And the point still stands. If KF was not Christian, at the least she would not be receiving the same level of pile on.
But in your counterfactual universe where she had the same beliefs but a different religion, she would still have said that she would have voted against gay marriage. Not exactly keeping her personal beliefs out of political legislation, is it?
It's tricky getting the measure of evangelical Christians. I know a few, who are very pleasant and friendly on the surface. Obviously family oriented and good parents to their children. But I also know that they more likely than not have some deeply held views which condemn me to eternal hellfire for not being a believer, and large chunks of society for not living the lifestyle mandated by the bible. But they are generally very smiley and helpful and usually do good things for charity.
1) Scots are not socially liberal - certainly no more so than the English. 2) The SNP are a mass membership party and the members, therefore, are more likely to be socially conservative than the inhabitants of the Holyrood bubble who are having a fit of the vapours at the moment. 3) Kate, and her Wee Free views, are authentically Scottish, not to say Highland Scots. SNP members, and others beside, will kinda like that. 4) And, most importantly, she IS NOT Humza "Useless" Yousaf. Who in their right mind would vote for him? A walking disaster area, when he isn't falling over in front of BBC cameramen.
Maybe the prayers of @Carnyx will be answered and someone from on high will intervene? (Though perhaps "He" already has).
Scottish Conservatives are praying for Yousaf. He will have even less appeal to their 2019 voters than Sturgeon.
Scottish Labour and the Greens however are praying for Forbes who will turn social liberals and leftwingers off the SNP
you are so right HY. Absolutely spot on. Labour need to ease up on her now to ensure she gets the job.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
The opportunity to traduce, mock and bully to general applause a young, female, pretty, nice, clever, Cambridge educated, principled, modest parent with a new baby is quite rare and must be taken in full whenever it arises.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
Kate's mistake is that she is Christian. Any other religion and we would be hearing about why it doesn't matter and how Kate (although her name would be different) has made it clear she would keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation.
Except she said explicitly that she wouldn't keep her personal beliefs out of political legislation given her comments on gay marriage.
As Felix has pointed out, she has accepted the differences between her religious views and accepting the law.
If it comes to the point of "well, she wouldn't bring forward any more progressive measures", there have been plenty of Prime Ministers who have been overruled by their own parties and forced to take measures they didn't personally accept - either they swallowed it or they resigned.
And the point still stands. If KF was not Christian, at the least she would not be receiving the same level of pile on.
But in your counterfactual universe where she had the same beliefs but a different religion, she would still have said that she would have voted against gay marriage. Not exactly keeping her personal beliefs out of political legislation, is it?
Mmmm, but that wasn't my point. My point was that, if Kate was a hardline Buddhist or Muslim or Orthodox Jew (actually the last less so), she would not be facing as much criticism.
And I go back to what I just typed - Maggie T very much let her personal religious views influence her political legislation. Take it she was unsuitable as well then?
Comments
There was a similar fuss over Nick Griffin on QT. Turned out to be the best thing to deflate the BNP threat. People saw he was useless.
We all know where this goes. 'Unacceptable' views get blocked but, like always, who gets to define what is unacceptable is never open to public debate. It's a small influential group that decides the meaning and, consequently, shuts out the opinions it doesn't like
This seems to me exactly the right answer to the question that Forbes was asked, and I'm not sure that Yousaf really needs to say anything else on the subject.
Unfortunately, Yousaf is an arsehole.
Not having followed any of it, why so?
He drafted a hate crimes bill so badly that it was criticised by both religious organisations and the National Secular Society. He also wanted to make it illegal to express "hateful" views in one's own home.
He and his wife first brought, than dropped, a legal actions against a nursery, alleging racial discrimination against their child.
"He also wanted to make it illegal to express "hateful" views in one's own home."
That's the end point of the idea that no ideas are private. I've heard people suggesting that "problem families" should have 24/7 video surveillance in their homes.
Compared to Mary Tudor, Gloriana was a model of tolerance. And an infinitely superior monarch
An alternative viewpoint is always interesting, and a valuable part of democracy. An unchallenged Russian propagandist, on the other hand… (Leads to headlines in the Russian Press tomorrow, that “BBC agrees with our viewpoint”)
It's not balance, one side is truth and the other lies.
As an evangelical you can believe in double predestination (God made two sorts of human - the saved and the lost and you can't change it). Or its opposite - God wants all to be saved by faith.
You can believe the bible is: inerrant; infallible; inspired; to be ignored when inconvenient
You can believe in modern miracles, speaking in tongues, modern prophesy; or you can believe they are the devil's work or mistaken at best.
You can be pro or anti gay; you can be pro or anti women leadership.
You can be a bishop, or believe bishops are the devil's work.
Rome may be the great scarlet whore, or an ecumenical partner.
The Southern Baptist Church in the US for instance, the largest Protestant denomination there and fiercely anti abortion and anti homosexual like the Free Church of Scotland, is very evangelical and very anti bishops too.
The smaller Anglican US Episcopalian Church though like the Anglican Scottish Episcopal Church now performs homosexual marriages in its churches and while wanting to reduce abortions believes abortion is a woman's choice
The next thing they are moving into is EVA space suits - see AXIOM. This will lead, fairly inevitably to surface suits for the Moon and Mars. At the moment, NASA is trying to pull itself out of a mess on suits - political blocking of going a fully commercial route on suite procurement means that they will certainly be a further mess.
Whether that is a good thing or not is a question I will leave to those better informed than I am about religion in the UK.
These are SNP policies implemented by her government and passed in parliament. If she can't defend them she can't be leader. It's a necessary part of her job.
In other words, the BO route.
Instead, he just ignores or cancels the stuff that could really help.
Does that apply if you are channel surfing and accidentally catch a few seconds of Midnight Mass or the Pope on the news?
Or is watching TV sinful too?
It’s 100x better to have an eternal optimist, prepared to learn from mistakes and iterate designs quickly, in charge of the effort, rather than a Congress which prioritises the distribution of pork among as many members as possible, above the actual mission.
EDIT: Oops
Leon should like her
Nice boots too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZy65uIADAs
https://twitter.com/andrewlearmonth/status/1628025219280523265?s=61&t=tmraTUYUy413Gil0S440SQ
Woke-plosion
In other words all humans have an evolutionary tendency to violence under certain circumstances, regardless of religion.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11775491/Putins-speech-blacked-major-hack-state-union-address.html
Began over 80 years ago, featuring in a 1938 Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) song about the Scottsboro Boys
Most American civil rights laws protect against religious discrimination, so employers are barred from discriminating against such groups.
But, do companies such as Apple and Google obey those laws?
Would either company hire computer scientist Donald Knuth, executive Mitt Romney, author and talk show host Michael Medved, or lawyer Amy Coney Barrett, given their religious beliefs? Would either ask Condoleeza Rice to be on their boards? Do either recruit at Notre Dame or Brigham Young?
Now, let me repeat, those are questions. And it occurs to me that some of you might have recent experiences that would give us some information on that question.
We’d love her to be asked “is bag piping okay out of wedlock.” 😈
There was a time not too long ago when the
BBC News was world beating and the go to for authority and reliability. Then, first the BBC website became less easy to negotiate and the content less authoritative. The rigid focus on the non-partisanship element of the Charter was corrupted by this insular demand for balance, and now we have Huw Edwards explaining fairly basic political constructs in the style of Sesame Street.
The Cenotaph incident was an absolute cracker though.
If Russia is going to fail then we should all hope it does so with a whimper, falling into a deep catatonic depression. Rather than going out with a bang.
But that misses my point: he has an aim I find laudable. But there's a heck of a lot of stuff that they do not appear to be doing. To their credit, BO appears to have a much bigger grasp of their aim, and what is needed to get there,
But any decent [edit] general history should pay due regard. Knowing what denomination a C19 (and early C20 and C18) Scot belonged to is crucial for understanding that person. Like Wales, only more so. Also bound up with politics and land issues more generally - as will be clear from Tom Devine's histories. Ultimately Gladstonian rural Liberalism and the Jo Grimond stemmed from the Disruption of 1843.
Say you’re retiring at 70, and quietly withdraw your troops back to the 2014 border with Ukraine. Way better than every alternative, both for yourself and the rest of the world.
Anything else involved hundreds of thousands of dead people, maybe one of them being you, Mr Putin.
I’m not easing up on her. Bloody Katey is the Scottish Putin.
euan mccolm
@euanmccolm
·
1h
someone ask the dinosaurs question and let’s be done with it.
SpaceX have always been optimistic, but they’ve also delivered. Their government contracts in the early days had specified deliverables, targets that were met and stuff actually sent upstairs.
The result being an order of magnitude reduction in the cost of sending stuff to LEO, inside a decade. Followed by a manned program to LEO, that is now the only option left for keeping the ISS up there.
Edit: I’ll agree with you that a “Full Self-Driving” Tesla, is eternal bullshit. It doesn’t meet that description until it can pick me up from the pub and take me home.
The Turkish election in May (if it happens given the earthquake) will be very interesting. Clearly Ergodan will try to fix it, but he can't get away with being as blatant as the likes of Putin or Lukashenko. It will be soft fixing. But he's certainly not certain of victory.
One of my oldest friends - still a good friend - is a post op trans woman. I’ve been with her through her journey. I went to Charing X hospital when she had the op. I was there when she came out to us all. I completely support her right to identify as she likes, given that she has jumped through the legal hoops
What I don’t support is radical trans activism and the absurdity of self ID and the indoctrination of ordinarily troubled kids into believing they have gender dysphoria.
Nor, out of interest, does my trans female friend. She thinks people should have to do what she did: live as a woman (or man), for two years, then do the op, then you can re-identify
Looking forward to seeing the instances of it then.
To give a more concrete example, given the disruption that Enoch Burke is causing the school that used to employ him, I think it's very unlikely that any other school will employ him unless they closely share his religious beliefs, because he's intent on imposing those religious beliefs onto any organizations he has any contact with, and isn't prepared to discuss any disagreement in a calm and reasonable manner.
See, for example, this news article.
https://www.thejournal.ie/enoch-burke-court-of-appeal-5997202-Feb2023/
Mind you, Yousaf would be crap too.
The sight is utterly distasteful.
Where do I join so that I can vote for her?
@JMagosh
·
22s
Without wanting to downplay Labour's own frequent tendency towards illiberal positions, the commentary from a few days ago that the SNP are 'well to the left' of Labour certainly hasn't aged well.
8 SNP parliamentarians still currently endorse Forbes.
“Now the old men are folding their arms and going to sleep,” said William H. Seward while campaigning for Lincoln, “and the young men are Wide Awake.”
https://daily.jstor.org/abolitionist-wide-awakes-were-woke-before-woke/
- Rude
- Likely to get you burnt as well
Alastair Meeks
@AlastairMeeks
·
6m
Replying to
@JMagosh
I'd be amazed if Labour weren't picking up support on the left in Scotland just now.
Personally, I always give up pancakes for lent
In any case, what's the hair report? We await with bated breath!!
Yousaf has handled this much better. His personal religious opinions are likely at odds with many people, too (it's likely, presumably, that he considers drinking alcohol to be wrong) but he's made clear that he would legislate liberally. Forbes has got herself in a pickle by being less clear on that.
I also respect her apparent honesty, but I'd be unlikely to vote for her if I was an SNP member.
I was told yesterday that the German customs agency are making life very difficult (as in) for those who import via post. Seems to be quite the reverse of everywhere else, where importing via post is much simpler for our customers than via courier.
Thinks it's wrong for children to be born out of wedlock (wtf?), opposes virtually all abortion, thinks no one can be trans, and opposes gay marriage.
What a horrible woman. Hope to god, or even God, that the SNP aren't stupid enough to select her.
https://news.sky.com/story/kate-forbes-says-her-faith-means-children-outside-of-marriage-is-wrong-12816429
Everyone gets traduced nowadays. That is the meaning of politics.
If it comes to the point of "well, she wouldn't bring forward any more progressive measures", there have been plenty of Prime Ministers who have been overruled by their own parties and forced to take measures they didn't personally accept - either they swallowed it or they resigned.
And the point still stands. If KF was not Christian, at the least she would not be receiving the same level of pile on.
And in that time, aside from brilliant work getting to LEO, they appear to have done nothing in all the other work to achieve that aim. That's bullshitting, I'm afraid.
That's to take nothing away from Shotwell or SpaceX's engineers, who have done brilliant things. But it's important ot call out Musk's lies.
Given Musk's behaviour over Ukraine, I'd have thought you'd be more on my side of this argument now...
And No, it isn't the meaning of politics.
(maybe slightly unfair on the 'incestuous' part - was a cousin, wasn't it?)
ETA: Good writer, though.
Should she also have been disbarred for her beliefs?
Probably one or more of Japan, China or S Korea.
Why 'Cambridge educated' -- as if it is something special. As if mocking the Cambridge educated is an original sin. Why 'pretty' as though mocking a pretty thing is so much worse than mocking an 'ugly' one.
Anyone can be mocked. And should be.
Especially the Cambridge educated.
And I go back to what I just typed - Maggie T very much let her personal religious views influence her political legislation. Take it she was unsuitable as well then?