I think context is important here. I have certainly said 'Should be put against a wall and shot' and 'All xxx should be shot' when commenting about some individual or group of people who have done something stupid. It is a saying we use and not meant literally.
We should all be able to distinguish between this sort of stuff and real hate speech which is harmful.
Real hate speech 'All LDs should be put up against a wall and shot' just jest 'All Tories should be shot'?
Almost certainly more important to the fate of the govt than Mad Nad
A brief thread on gilts. Apologies, it's an arcane subject. But the market in government debt, much more than the Bank of England, determines the interest rate homeowners and businesses pay. Today, the yield on 2 year money rose by 26 basis points. 1/6
Yes the Bank of England has admitted to have completely misjudged second round inflationary pressures.
Markets now expect base rates to increase from 4.5% to 5.75% by year-end (i.e. a rate increase at each remaining meeting, albeit it could be front loaded).
We're starting to get to levels where we'll see more people unable to meet their mortgage when they come off their fixed term.
The timing of interest rates peaking and the subsequent pain is terrible for Sunak.
The government should have cleaned house and sacked Bailey two years ago when the extent of his oversight failure at the FCA became clear. We need a proper inflation hawk at the BoE, Raghuram Rajan could probably be tempted into taking over. The failure to push interest rates up earlier and more significantly is really hurting now because we've got ourselves into an inflationary spiral with pay.
This all lands at the feet of Bailey and the MPC.
Wasn't Bailey's main qualification that he said the right things about Brexit?
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
Well said.
To me the whole "24 weeks" cut-off is arbitrary and absurd. A bit like Sunday trading laws. A silly, messy compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone but most people are content to live with because they'd rather not rock the boat and compromise just sounds reasonable.
To me logically birth is the inflection point as you say, so while I would find the idea of a 32 week abortion to be utterly horrible, I wouldn't make it illegal. Horrible things should not be unlawful. At approximately 37 weeks I believe the NHS could perhaps offer induction as an alternative, so that seems a reasonable cut-off, terminate the pregnancy but with a live-birth at that stage, but 24 is just a messy compromise. They're never going to voluntarily induce then.
I actually have more intellectual respect for people who want the practice outlawed altogether, than for the 24 week cut-off. At least they're intellectually consistent. I don't agree with them, but I can see where they're coming from much better.
The logic behind 24 weeks is that is the approximate age of viability.
At that point the child can live independently of the mother.
It seems a reasonable cut off point to say “at this point the child has rights as an independent human being”
There is nothing magical about passage through the birth canal that imbues any mystic rights
Neither magic nor mysticism exist, so nor should there be.
There certainly is something about a babies first breath that is a reasonable point to mark that as when it is born and life begins from there.
There is nothing magical about a babies first breath that justifies murdering a 38 week old baby
So why does the God you worship cause so many miscarriages?
It’s rather unpleasant that you are trying to make a cheap debating point from something as tragic as a miscarriage
But they occur naturally when pregnancies are non viable
If your God exists, why doesn't He act to prevent them?
Because He sets the framework and doesn’t intervene at the point of demand.
It’s the same question - how can God allow earthquakes? They are a natural event based on movement of tectonic plates. I’m sure there is a good scientific reason why tectonic plates work in the way they do, but that’s beyond my Ken (I just have faith in science)
So why did God intervene and free the Israelites from the bondage of slavery in Egypt but didn't intervene in the holocaust?
Not to mention NOT helping the Palestinians or Kashmiris!
I think context is important here. I have certainly said 'Should be put against a wall and shot' and 'All xxx should be shot' when commenting about some individual or group of people who have done something stupid. It is a saying we use and not meant literally.
We should all be able to distinguish between this sort of stuff and real hate speech which is harmful.
Real hate speech 'All LDs should be put up against a wall and shot' just jest 'All Tories should be shot'?
If she doesn't resign then this is most embarrassing thing Nadine Dorries has done since she ate a kangaroo's bunghole live on TV.
A less influential version of Clare Short.
Tbh I do have some sympathy for Nadine Dorries who, after making her way in life without the old school tie advantages of, say, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has run smack into the reality that her political career is now over, that her peerage is just a pawn in the power game between Boris and Rishi, and that neither man cares about her.
I don't like her politics, and want the HoL abolished, but have a certain sympathy for her. There is something tragic about political suttee on the binfire of Johnson's career. He corrodes everything and everyone he comes into contact with.
No - in politics you are either a leader, or pick a leader.
She chose… poorly.
And will end up with an excellent pension for life, and should be able make a fair bit of money in various “consultancy” roles, like other ex MPs. Hardly starving to death in a garret in Paris, Dickens style.
I think she’s quite wealthy from her book sales isn’t she? So hers will not be a bleak house.
Indeed, I doubt she'll fall on hard times.
Although if she keeps wittering on about London and Liverpool her Great Expectations will became A Tale of Two Cities.
And the whole lot definitely seems to be sketches by Bozza.
Not Little Dorries?
Is Nad the Woman in White?
I did ask yesterday, when all the LD’s on here were ringing round the AirB&B’s in Mid Beds, whether she’d actually resigned yet.
Bright, sunny but breezy here this morning!
Sunak is certainly no longer Johnson and Dorries' Mutual Friend.
Probably time to draw the black veil over these Dickens puns now.
Almost certainly more important to the fate of the govt than Mad Nad
A brief thread on gilts. Apologies, it's an arcane subject. But the market in government debt, much more than the Bank of England, determines the interest rate homeowners and businesses pay. Today, the yield on 2 year money rose by 26 basis points. 1/6
Yes the Bank of England has admitted to have completely misjudged second round inflationary pressures.
Markets now expect base rates to increase from 4.5% to 5.75% by year-end (i.e. a rate increase at each remaining meeting, albeit it could be front loaded).
We're starting to get to levels where we'll see more people unable to meet their mortgage when they come off their fixed term.
The timing of interest rates peaking and the subsequent pain is terrible for Sunak.
The government should have cleaned house and sacked Bailey two years ago when the extent of his oversight failure at the FCA became clear. We need a proper inflation hawk at the BoE, Raghuram Rajan could probably be tempted into taking over. The failure to push interest rates up earlier and more significantly is really hurting now because we've got ourselves into an inflationary spiral with pay.
This all lands at the feet of Bailey and the MPC.
The BoE gets quite a kicking in the Lex column in the FT today - says it is much too in thrall to the Government's political initiatives, rather than displaying it's much-vaunted independence.
Why should Rishi want to "reduce the damage"? If the Conservatives win the next election, he remains Prime Minister. If they lose, then Starmer becomes Prime Minister and Rishi is out.
And that is true whether Labour wins by a landslide or can barely scrape together a minority government. Rishi is out.
So it is of no benefit to "reduce the damage". It's a complete turnaround or hang on till the bitter end.
If she doesn't resign then this is most embarrassing thing Nadine Dorries has done since she ate a kangaroo's bunghole live on TV.
A less influential version of Clare Short.
Tbh I do have some sympathy for Nadine Dorries who, after making her way in life without the old school tie advantages of, say, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has run smack into the reality that her political career is now over, that her peerage is just a pawn in the power game between Boris and Rishi, and that neither man cares about her.
I don't like her politics, and want the HoL abolished, but have a certain sympathy for her. There is something tragic about political suttee on the binfire of Johnson's career. He corrodes everything and everyone he comes into contact with.
No - in politics you are either a leader, or pick a leader.
She chose… poorly.
And will end up with an excellent pension for life, and should be able make a fair bit of money in various “consultancy” roles, like other ex MPs. Hardly starving to death in a garret in Paris, Dickens style.
I think she’s quite wealthy from her book sales isn’t she? So hers will not be a bleak house.
Indeed, I doubt she'll fall on hard times.
Although if she keeps wittering on about London and Liverpool her Great Expectations will became A Tale of Two Cities.
And the whole lot definitely seems to be sketches by Bozza.
Not Little Dorries?
Is Nad the Woman in White?
I did ask yesterday, when all the LD’s on here were ringing round the AirB&B’s in Mid Beds, whether she’d actually resigned yet.
Bright, sunny but breezy here this morning!
Sunak is certainly no longer Johnson and Dorries' Mutual Friend.
Probably time to draw the black veil over these Dickens puns now.
I think context is important here. I have certainly said 'Should be put against a wall and shot' and 'All xxx should be shot' when commenting about some individual or group of people who have done something stupid. It is a saying we use and not meant literally.
We should all be able to distinguish between this sort of stuff and real hate speech which is harmful.
Real hate speech 'All LDs should be put up against a wall and shot' just jest 'All Tories should be shot'?
Just jest:
"Those LibDems you sold me, they won't mate! They just walk around all day Tweeting, and not mating. You sold me... queer LibDems - I want my money back!"
Almost certainly more important to the fate of the govt than Mad Nad
A brief thread on gilts. Apologies, it's an arcane subject. But the market in government debt, much more than the Bank of England, determines the interest rate homeowners and businesses pay. Today, the yield on 2 year money rose by 26 basis points. 1/6
Yes the Bank of England has admitted to have completely misjudged second round inflationary pressures.
Markets now expect base rates to increase from 4.5% to 5.75% by year-end (i.e. a rate increase at each remaining meeting, albeit it could be front loaded).
We're starting to get to levels where we'll see more people unable to meet their mortgage when they come off their fixed term.
The timing of interest rates peaking and the subsequent pain is terrible for Sunak.
The government should have cleaned house and sacked Bailey two years ago when the extent of his oversight failure at the FCA became clear. We need a proper inflation hawk at the BoE, Raghuram Rajan could probably be tempted into taking over. The failure to push interest rates up earlier and more significantly is really hurting now because we've got ourselves into an inflationary spiral with pay.
This all lands at the feet of Bailey and the MPC.
I certainly agree that Bailey has been incompetent and is not up to the job but it is a mistake to exaggerate the degree of autonomy that the Bank has on these matters. Super low interest rates were not a UK phenomenon but a western one from the period of the GFC until relatively recently.
The Bank were asleep at the wheel and did not respond to world trends fast enough but inflation was an inevitable consequence of such low rates eventually, once the offsetting deflationary pressures had eased. This has affected our inflation but only marginally, most of it was built in by international factors beyond our control.
Our biggest problem is that we are still hooked on debt and beholden to the market to fund the standard of living we think we deserve. That is not really down to Bailey. As for this latest meme of a "Tory mortgage penalty", Lord save us. The degree of economic ignorance and misunderstanding it demonstrates does not bode well for the incoming government, it really doesn't.
I think context is important here. I have certainly said 'Should be put against a wall and shot' and 'All xxx should be shot' when commenting about some individual or group of people who have done something stupid. It is a saying we use and not meant literally.
We should all be able to distinguish between this sort of stuff and real hate speech which is harmful.
Real hate speech 'All LDs should be put up against a wall and shot' just jest 'All Tories should be shot'?
I certainly wouldn't consider it hate speech if you said that, particularly if the LDs did something you thought particularly stupid, because it is clear you don't mean it and are just venting on their stupidity.
I do accept however, as others have said, if you are in public life it might be imprudent.
Why are the Welsh so insular and bigoted towards the English?
A rapper had his performance at an arts festival in Wales cancelled – because his lyrics were too English.
The Welsh musician Sage Todz, 29, boasts a large following of fans for his songs, which he performs in both Welsh and English.
He was set to showcase his music at the Eisteddfod festival which celebrates the Welsh language and culture through singing, art, composition, dance and instrumental events.
But his appearance was later cancelled after he refused to change his set – after being told his songs contained “too much English”.
Because it is a Welsh language festival and competition. Would be the same with an Esperanto competition. You can't expect to turn up to a rugger meeting and expect to play soccer.
Do people turn up to Union matches expecting the younger and more useless cousin League?
*grabs tinfoil hat and ducks*
All right, I tackle this. Anyone who does so is missing a fast, often open, game and instead watching a slower, maul and scrum-infested game.
Actually, I quite like rugby league as a spectator sport. It's better than football. But it's a bit limited. It's basically a training exercise for rugby union. I like scrums and mauls. I lament that in rugby union scrums have been made less competitive (like in rugby league) and the length of time you can spend mauling has been reduced.
Why are the Welsh so insular and bigoted towards the English?
A rapper had his performance at an arts festival in Wales cancelled – because his lyrics were too English.
The Welsh musician Sage Todz, 29, boasts a large following of fans for his songs, which he performs in both Welsh and English.
He was set to showcase his music at the Eisteddfod festival which celebrates the Welsh language and culture through singing, art, composition, dance and instrumental events.
But his appearance was later cancelled after he refused to change his set – after being told his songs contained “too much English”.
Because it is a Welsh language festival and competition. Would be the same with an Esperanto competition. You can't expect to turn up to a rugger meeting and expect to play soccer.
Do people turn up to Union matches expecting the younger and more useless cousin League?
*grabs tinfoil hat and ducks*
All right, I tackle this. Anyone who does so is missing a fast, often open, game and instead watching a slower, maul and scrum-infested game.
Does that work better when you take a line out?
No; no capital letter at the beginning of a sentence. And you a teacher!
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
Well said.
To me the whole "24 weeks" cut-off is arbitrary and absurd. A bit like Sunday trading laws. A silly, messy compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone but most people are content to live with because they'd rather not rock the boat and compromise just sounds reasonable.
To me logically birth is the inflection point as you say, so while I would find the idea of a 32 week abortion to be utterly horrible, I wouldn't make it illegal. Horrible things should not be unlawful. At approximately 37 weeks I believe the NHS could perhaps offer induction as an alternative, so that seems a reasonable cut-off, terminate the pregnancy but with a live-birth at that stage, but 24 is just a messy compromise. They're never going to voluntarily induce then.
I actually have more intellectual respect for people who want the practice outlawed altogether, than for the 24 week cut-off. At least they're intellectually consistent. I don't agree with them, but I can see where they're coming from much better.
The logic behind 24 weeks is that is the approximate age of viability.
At that point the child can live independently of the mother.
It seems a reasonable cut off point to say “at this point the child has rights as an independent human being”
There is nothing magical about passage through the birth canal that imbues any mystic rights
Neither magic nor mysticism exist, so nor should there be.
There certainly is something about a babies first breath that is a reasonable point to mark that as when it is born and life begins from there.
There is nothing magical about a babies first breath that justifies murdering a 38 week old baby
So why does the God you worship cause so many miscarriages?
It’s rather unpleasant that you are trying to make a cheap debating point from something as tragic as a miscarriage
But they occur naturally when pregnancies are non viable
If your God exists, why doesn't He act to prevent them?
Because He sets the framework and doesn’t intervene at the point of demand.
It’s the same question - how can God allow earthquakes? They are a natural event based on movement of tectonic plates. I’m sure there is a good scientific reason why tectonic plates work in the way they do, but that’s beyond my Ken (I just have faith in science)
So why did God intervene and free the Israelites from the bondage of slavery in Egypt but didn't intervene in the holocaust?
As the God of the Old Testament was the Jewish God then (although as the God of Abraham ultimately the Christian and Muslim God too but they came along later). He also ensured the Allies won the war and so ultimately the Jews were able to defeat the Nazis as they had defeated the Egyptians
Why are the Welsh so insular and bigoted towards the English?
A rapper had his performance at an arts festival in Wales cancelled – because his lyrics were too English.
The Welsh musician Sage Todz, 29, boasts a large following of fans for his songs, which he performs in both Welsh and English.
He was set to showcase his music at the Eisteddfod festival which celebrates the Welsh language and culture through singing, art, composition, dance and instrumental events.
But his appearance was later cancelled after he refused to change his set – after being told his songs contained “too much English”.
Because it is a Welsh language festival and competition. Would be the same with an Esperanto competition. You can't expect to turn up to a rugger meeting and expect to play soccer.
Israel the Eurovision Song Contest.
IRMC.
Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation are members of the European Broadcasting Union, they have their rightful place you anti-semite! ()
What you can't do is expect to turn up to Eurovision with a good song and win.
Why are the Welsh so insular and bigoted towards the English?
A rapper had his performance at an arts festival in Wales cancelled – because his lyrics were too English.
The Welsh musician Sage Todz, 29, boasts a large following of fans for his songs, which he performs in both Welsh and English.
He was set to showcase his music at the Eisteddfod festival which celebrates the Welsh language and culture through singing, art, composition, dance and instrumental events.
But his appearance was later cancelled after he refused to change his set – after being told his songs contained “too much English”.
Because it is a Welsh language festival and competition. Would be the same with an Esperanto competition. You can't expect to turn up to a rugger meeting and expect to play soccer.
Do people turn up to Union matches expecting the younger and more useless cousin League?
*grabs tinfoil hat and ducks*
All right, I tackle this. Anyone who does so is missing a fast, often open, game and instead watching a slower, maul and scrum-infested game.
Actually, I quite like rugby league as a spectator sport. It's better than football. But it's a bit limited. It's basically a training exercise for rugby union. I like scrums and mauls. I lament that in rugby union scrums have been made less competitive (like in rugby league) and the length of time you can spend mauling has been reduced.
An old friend believed that Union should roll the laws back to 1991, when rugby was about right.
Now I don't really advocate that, but it was the era that I played, you could maul and if going forward, retain the put in. You could ruck, and if going forward, retained the put in. There was no debate about crossing - passes were always in front of players.
It may be bollocks, but it felt that the Southern hemisphere drove the law changes to remove the forward play elements of the game, in favour of the basketball style they prefered. And I think the game is poorer for it.
I think context is important here. I have certainly said 'Should be put against a wall and shot' and 'All xxx should be shot' when commenting about some individual or group of people who have done something stupid. It is a saying we use and not meant literally.
We should all be able to distinguish between this sort of stuff and real hate speech which is harmful.
Real hate speech 'All LDs should be put up against a wall and shot' just jest 'All Tories should be shot'?
I certainly wouldn't consider it hate speech if you said that, particularly if the LDs did something you thought particularly stupid, because it is clear you don't mean it and are just venting on their stupidity.
I do accept however, as others have said, if you are in public life it might be imprudent.
I agree with you on that distinction at least, in public life, whether elected as a councillor, MP, MSP, AM or MLA or a member of the Government or House of Lords you have to watch what you say, certainly in public or on social media. You are held to a higher public standard.
Albeit even an ordinary member of the public could face criminal charges now if they say something in public or on social media believed to constitute a death threat or harassment
On June 14th 1941 the occupying Soviet authorities ordered the deportation of over 10,000 people, including over 7,500 women and children to the camps of Siberia. Less than half returned and those that did were broken in spirit and in health. It was far from the only round of deportation, but it was one of the worst. Over the course of 1940-49 over a quarter of the population of Estonia was murdered, deported or fled to the West. Though the terror weakened after the death of Stalin in 1953, the oppression of the country continued, and resistance - even wearing the national colours of blue, black and white- could get you 25 years in the GULAG camps.
"Post" Soviet Russia has never acknowledged the scale of the tortures and murders that were committed, nor the vile Nazi-Soviet pact that they signed with Hitler to occupy the Baltic. Russia continues to hold onto, for example, the chain of office of the Pre-war President of Estonia as part of the "spoils of war".
The Estonians speak of this little- it is simply too painful to consider how cruel the deaths of so many totally innocent people really was.
To live well is the best revenge, and modern Estonia is prosperous and free. Russians, by contrast continue to bend the knee to a tin-pot tyrant and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers and increasing economic squalor is part of the result. However, Estonians do remember and until Russia repents and seeks the forgiveness of the world, then Estonia will remain an implacable foe of Putin and the murderous and criminal state that he leads. The continuing and outrageous crimes of the Russian war against Ukraine shows how far away Russia is from being a civilized state.
"Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream" and may the souls of the dead rest in peace.
Almost certainly more important to the fate of the govt than Mad Nad
A brief thread on gilts. Apologies, it's an arcane subject. But the market in government debt, much more than the Bank of England, determines the interest rate homeowners and businesses pay. Today, the yield on 2 year money rose by 26 basis points. 1/6
Yes the Bank of England has admitted to have completely misjudged second round inflationary pressures.
Markets now expect base rates to increase from 4.5% to 5.75% by year-end (i.e. a rate increase at each remaining meeting, albeit it could be front loaded).
We're starting to get to levels where we'll see more people unable to meet their mortgage when they come off their fixed term.
The timing of interest rates peaking and the subsequent pain is terrible for Sunak.
The government should have cleaned house and sacked Bailey two years ago when the extent of his oversight failure at the FCA became clear. We need a proper inflation hawk at the BoE, Raghuram Rajan could probably be tempted into taking over. The failure to push interest rates up earlier and more significantly is really hurting now because we've got ourselves into an inflationary spiral with pay.
This all lands at the feet of Bailey and the MPC.
I doubt that Rajan would take the job, but I agree he would be an excellent hire.
On June 14th 1941 the occupying Soviet authorities ordered the deportation of over 10,000 people, including over 7,500 women and children to the camps of Siberia. Less than half returned and those that did were broken in spirit and in health. It was far from the only round of deportation, but it was one of the worst. Over the course of 1940-49 over a quarter of the population of Estonia was murdered, deported or fled to the West. Though the terror weakened after the death of Stalin in 1953, the oppression of the country continued, and resistance - even wearing the national colours of blue, black and white- could get you 25 years in the GULAG camps.
"Post" Soviet Russia has never acknowledged the scale of the tortures and murders that were committed, nor the vile Nazi-Soviet pact that they signed with Hitler to occupy the Baltic. Russia continues to hold onto, for example, the chain of office of the Pre-war President of Estonia as part of the "spoils of war".
The Estonians speak of this little- it is simply too painful to consider how cruel the deaths of so many totally innocent people really was.
To live well is the best revenge, and modern Estonia is prosperous and free. Russians, by contrast continue to bend the knee to a tin-pot tyrant and the deaths of hundreds of the thousands of Russian soldiers is part of the result. However, Estonians do remember and until Russia repents and seeks the forgiveness of the world, then Estonia will remain an implacable foe of Putin and the murderous and criminal state that he leads. The continuing and outrageous crimes of the Russian war against Ukraine shows how far away Russia is from being a civilized state.
"Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream" and may the souls of the dead rest in peace.
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
Well said.
To me the whole "24 weeks" cut-off is arbitrary and absurd. A bit like Sunday trading laws. A silly, messy compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone but most people are content to live with because they'd rather not rock the boat and compromise just sounds reasonable.
To me logically birth is the inflection point as you say, so while I would find the idea of a 32 week abortion to be utterly horrible, I wouldn't make it illegal. Horrible things should not be unlawful. At approximately 37 weeks I believe the NHS could perhaps offer induction as an alternative, so that seems a reasonable cut-off, terminate the pregnancy but with a live-birth at that stage, but 24 is just a messy compromise. They're never going to voluntarily induce then.
I actually have more intellectual respect for people who want the practice outlawed altogether, than for the 24 week cut-off. At least they're intellectually consistent. I don't agree with them, but I can see where they're coming from much better.
The logic behind 24 weeks is that is the approximate age of viability.
At that point the child can live independently of the mother.
It seems a reasonable cut off point to say “at this point the child has rights as an independent human being”
There is nothing magical about passage through the birth canal that imbues any mystic rights
Neither magic nor mysticism exist, so nor should there be.
There certainly is something about a babies first breath that is a reasonable point to mark that as when it is born and life begins from there.
There is nothing magical about a babies first breath that justifies murdering a 38 week old baby
So why does the God you worship cause so many miscarriages?
It’s rather unpleasant that you are trying to make a cheap debating point from something as tragic as a miscarriage
But they occur naturally when pregnancies are non viable
If your God exists, why doesn't He act to prevent them?
Because He sets the framework and doesn’t intervene at the point of demand.
It’s the same question - how can God allow earthquakes? They are a natural event based on movement of tectonic plates. I’m sure there is a good scientific reason why tectonic plates work in the way they do, but that’s beyond my Ken (I just have faith in science)
So why did God intervene and free the Israelites from the bondage of slavery in Egypt but didn't intervene in the holocaust?
Go and read your Karen Armstrong you naughty boy.
Unless you are a fundy* Exodus is mythos not logos
Although the events can all be explained by physical events (eg the rivers of blood are likely an algae bloom) at its heart Exodus is a folk memory of a tribal migration. Whether various physical events occurred along the way who knows. Even if they did they could be explained by consequential events (eg algae bloom > less oxygen in water > fish die and frogs migrate to land; locust swarms triggered by weather patterns in the Indian Ocean eat all the crops > cattle die > flies > pestilence etc)
Exodus is not meant to be read literally
* in the C19 American sense of insisting on a literal reading of the Bible
Why should Rishi want to "reduce the damage"? If the Conservatives win the next election, he remains Prime Minister. If they lose, then Starmer becomes Prime Minister and Rishi is out.
And that is true whether Labour wins by a landslide or can barely scrape together a minority government. Rishi is out.
So it is of no benefit to "reduce the damage". It's a complete turnaround or hang on till the bitter end.
It is, however, a useful short-term expedient to convince the Westminster cliques that an early election is in the offing. It would tend to encourage potential plotters to wait for the post-election leadership campaign, rather than agitate for a pre-election change of leader.
Mr. HYUFD, some say the God of the Old Testament is just Zeus with a rebrand.
I don't think so.
The OT God evolves from a partisan and bloodthirsty tribal deity into a more ethereal and remote being, even within the book of Genesis, and even more so by the OT prophets.
I would interpret this as our understanding of God evolving rather than the being themself. I see no reason too for that evolving understanding to end when the Apostolic period ended. There are always new insights and understandings as well as revisions of old understandings.
To interpret the texts literally is to misunderstand them. They are a web of history, theology, poetry and parable intertwined.
Almost certainly more important to the fate of the govt than Mad Nad
A brief thread on gilts. Apologies, it's an arcane subject. But the market in government debt, much more than the Bank of England, determines the interest rate homeowners and businesses pay. Today, the yield on 2 year money rose by 26 basis points. 1/6
Yes the Bank of England has admitted to have completely misjudged second round inflationary pressures.
Markets now expect base rates to increase from 4.5% to 5.75% by year-end (i.e. a rate increase at each remaining meeting, albeit it could be front loaded).
We're starting to get to levels where we'll see more people unable to meet their mortgage when they come off their fixed term.
The timing of interest rates peaking and the subsequent pain is terrible for Sunak.
The government should have cleaned house and sacked Bailey two years ago when the extent of his oversight failure at the FCA became clear. We need a proper inflation hawk at the BoE, Raghuram Rajan could probably be tempted into taking over. The failure to push interest rates up earlier and more significantly is really hurting now because we've got ourselves into an inflationary spiral with pay.
This all lands at the feet of Bailey and the MPC.
I certainly agree that Bailey has been incompetent and is not up to the job but it is a mistake to exaggerate the degree of autonomy that the Bank has on these matters. Super low interest rates were not a UK phenomenon but a western one from the period of the GFC until relatively recently.
The Bank were asleep at the wheel and did not respond to world trends fast enough but inflation was an inevitable consequence of such low rates eventually, once the offsetting deflationary pressures had eased. This has affected our inflation but only marginally, most of it was built in by international factors beyond our control.
Our biggest problem is that we are still hooked on debt and beholden to the market to fund the standard of living we think we deserve. That is not really down to Bailey. As for this latest meme of a "Tory mortgage penalty", Lord save us. The degree of economic ignorance and misunderstanding it demonstrates does not bode well for the incoming government, it really doesn't.
But that's politics, baby.
If things go well on their watch, a government takes the credit, even if it's nothing to do with them or it stores up problems for the future.
If they go badly, the government cops the blame, even if it's not their fault.
Fair or not, that's the deal politicians and voters have. It's the price for pretending governments have more control than they do.
We used to play rugby league in training, but at least union give's everyone a chance Playing as usual at tight head, I was wandering around minding my own business when one of our backs found himself lost, with the opposing forwards descnding on him. With no other 'proper' player in sight he tossed the ball to me and said "Run."
I immediately formed a maul. Later on, he ran up and asked what I was l was playing at. "I could have done that," he said.
At some point the Cons are going to have to reclaim the economy safe in our hands mantle.
Not sure how this happens tbh.
They don't know how. The failure of Truss was a hammer-blow to the Conservatives conceptually: they had somebody who was willing to implement the full-fat version and it blew up in their face. The reason why they are so big on culture war issues, and why Rishi has retreated into managerialism, is because they no longer know how to run a country economically or commercially. They badly need a theoretician to show them the way and - as the NatCon conference demonstrated - they haven't got one.
They had Hannan to provide a theoretical framework for Brexit (it was dumb, but it existed). They now have Goodwin to provide a theoretical framework for a culture war, but they do not know and do not care how to run a country (see their ongoing failure on immigration). They live in a world where food comes in a van and complaining works. They are idiots in the way that only rich people can be - voluntarily.
Dr. Foxy, the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is a clunky retelling of Prometheus giving fire to man against the instruction of Zeus. Unlike the Christian version, the Greek one makes sense. But in Genesis, the guy who gives us knowledge is 'bad' and the one who punishes us is 'good'.
Why are the Welsh so insular and bigoted towards the English?
A rapper had his performance at an arts festival in Wales cancelled – because his lyrics were too English.
The Welsh musician Sage Todz, 29, boasts a large following of fans for his songs, which he performs in both Welsh and English.
He was set to showcase his music at the Eisteddfod festival which celebrates the Welsh language and culture through singing, art, composition, dance and instrumental events.
But his appearance was later cancelled after he refused to change his set – after being told his songs contained “too much English”.
Because it is a Welsh language festival and competition. Would be the same with an Esperanto competition. You can't expect to turn up to a rugger meeting and expect to play soccer.
Do people turn up to Union matches expecting the younger and more useless cousin League?
*grabs tinfoil hat and ducks*
All right, I tackle this. Anyone who does so is missing a fast, often open, game and instead watching a slower, maul and scrum-infested game.
Actually, I quite like rugby league as a spectator sport. It's better than football. But it's a bit limited. It's basically a training exercise for rugby union. I like scrums and mauls. I lament that in rugby union scrums have been made less competitive (like in rugby league) and the length of time you can spend mauling has been reduced.
An old friend believed that Union should roll the laws back to 1991, when rugby was about right.
Now I don't really advocate that, but it was the era that I played, you could maul and if going forward, retain the put in. You could ruck, and if going forward, retained the put in. There was no debate about crossing - passes were always in front of players.
It may be bollocks, but it felt that the Southern hemisphere drove the law changes to remove the forward play elements of the game, in favour of the basketball style they prefered. And I think the game is poorer for it.
It's not really about the laws. Two things changed. Rugby Union turned professional, and the game was moved from winter to summer. No more overweight shamateurs who could barely catch the ball with frozen hands as they plodded through the mud. Suddenly there were rugby union players who could actually play rugby.
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
Well said.
To me the whole "24 weeks" cut-off is arbitrary and absurd. A bit like Sunday trading laws. A silly, messy compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone but most people are content to live with because they'd rather not rock the boat and compromise just sounds reasonable.
To me logically birth is the inflection point as you say, so while I would find the idea of a 32 week abortion to be utterly horrible, I wouldn't make it illegal. Horrible things should not be unlawful. At approximately 37 weeks I believe the NHS could perhaps offer induction as an alternative, so that seems a reasonable cut-off, terminate the pregnancy but with a live-birth at that stage, but 24 is just a messy compromise. They're never going to voluntarily induce then.
I actually have more intellectual respect for people who want the practice outlawed altogether, than for the 24 week cut-off. At least they're intellectually consistent. I don't agree with them, but I can see where they're coming from much better.
The logic behind 24 weeks is that is the approximate age of viability.
At that point the child can live independently of the mother.
It seems a reasonable cut off point to say “at this point the child has rights as an independent human being”
There is nothing magical about passage through the birth canal that imbues any mystic rights
Neither magic nor mysticism exist, so nor should there be.
There certainly is something about a babies first breath that is a reasonable point to mark that as when it is born and life begins from there.
There is nothing magical about a babies first breath that justifies murdering a 38 week old baby
So why does the God you worship cause so many miscarriages?
It’s rather unpleasant that you are trying to make a cheap debating point from something as tragic as a miscarriage
But they occur naturally when pregnancies are non viable
If your God exists, why doesn't He act to prevent them?
Because He sets the framework and doesn’t intervene at the point of demand.
It’s the same question - how can God allow earthquakes? They are a natural event based on movement of tectonic plates. I’m sure there is a good scientific reason why tectonic plates work in the way they do, but that’s beyond my Ken (I just have faith in science)
So why did God intervene and free the Israelites from the bondage of slavery in Egypt but didn't intervene in the holocaust?
Go and read your Karen Armstrong you naughty boy.
Unless you are a fundy* Exodus is mythos not logos
Although the events can all be explained by physical events (eg the rivers of blood are likely an algae bloom) at its heart Exodus is a folk memory of a tribal migration. Whether various physical events occurred along the way who knows. Even if they did they could be explained by consequential events (eg algae bloom > less oxygen in water > fish die and frogs migrate to land; locust swarms triggered by weather patterns in the Indian Ocean eat all the crops > cattle die > flies > pestilence etc)
Exodus is not meant to be read literally
* in the C19 American sense of insisting on a literal reading of the Bible
Most scholars, Jewish, Christian and Secular, agree that Moses is likely not an historic figure and the events of Exodus is non historic.
As for the suggestion that Yahweh is just a reskinned Zeus, I have also heard that it could have originated as another volcano cult - Sinai was probably active at some point in the last 10,000 years, and so local religions probably worshipped that. It is also noticeable that early Jewish / Yahweh worship likely would have been polytheistic / henotheistic - with the commandment of "you shall have no other god before me" as an acceptance that other gods exist, but that Yahweh was the primary god of the Israelites. This was more common before polytheism, as certain areas would have a founder god / primary patron deity (think Romulus for Rome) and then a lot of other deities for specific things, and even specific families (if my memory is correct a lot of other idols have been found in old temples to Yahweh that also resemble contemporary cults, such as Mithridates). You can see an evolution from animism to polytheism to henotheism to monotheism, with early Judaism and Christianity as intermediator stages from henotheism to monotheism (the trinity kind of acts as a henotheism and monotheism at the same time, by taking what previously would have been understood as separate angels / lesser deities / servants of Yahweh and combining them into a singular God who is all of them and one at the same time).
Almost certainly more important to the fate of the govt than Mad Nad
A brief thread on gilts. Apologies, it's an arcane subject. But the market in government debt, much more than the Bank of England, determines the interest rate homeowners and businesses pay. Today, the yield on 2 year money rose by 26 basis points. 1/6
Yes the Bank of England has admitted to have completely misjudged second round inflationary pressures.
Markets now expect base rates to increase from 4.5% to 5.75% by year-end (i.e. a rate increase at each remaining meeting, albeit it could be front loaded).
We're starting to get to levels where we'll see more people unable to meet their mortgage when they come off their fixed term.
The timing of interest rates peaking and the subsequent pain is terrible for Sunak.
The government should have cleaned house and sacked Bailey two years ago when the extent of his oversight failure at the FCA became clear. We need a proper inflation hawk at the BoE, Raghuram Rajan could probably be tempted into taking over. The failure to push interest rates up earlier and more significantly is really hurting now because we've got ourselves into an inflationary spiral with pay.
This all lands at the feet of Bailey and the MPC.
I certainly agree that Bailey has been incompetent and is not up to the job but it is a mistake to exaggerate the degree of autonomy that the Bank has on these matters. Super low interest rates were not a UK phenomenon but a western one from the period of the GFC until relatively recently.
The Bank were asleep at the wheel and did not respond to world trends fast enough but inflation was an inevitable consequence of such low rates eventually, once the offsetting deflationary pressures had eased. This has affected our inflation but only marginally, most of it was built in by international factors beyond our control.
Our biggest problem is that we are still hooked on debt and beholden to the market to fund the standard of living we think we deserve. That is not really down to Bailey. As for this latest meme of a "Tory mortgage penalty", Lord save us. The degree of economic ignorance and misunderstanding it demonstrates does not bode well for the incoming government, it really doesn't.
The complacent stupidity of some people is now being revealed.
Here we have the deputy property editor of the Times casually admitting he's on an interest only mortgage while bewailing rising mortgage costs:
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
Well said.
To me the whole "24 weeks" cut-off is arbitrary and absurd. A bit like Sunday trading laws. A silly, messy compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone but most people are content to live with because they'd rather not rock the boat and compromise just sounds reasonable.
To me logically birth is the inflection point as you say, so while I would find the idea of a 32 week abortion to be utterly horrible, I wouldn't make it illegal. Horrible things should not be unlawful. At approximately 37 weeks I believe the NHS could perhaps offer induction as an alternative, so that seems a reasonable cut-off, terminate the pregnancy but with a live-birth at that stage, but 24 is just a messy compromise. They're never going to voluntarily induce then.
I actually have more intellectual respect for people who want the practice outlawed altogether, than for the 24 week cut-off. At least they're intellectually consistent. I don't agree with them, but I can see where they're coming from much better.
The logic behind 24 weeks is that is the approximate age of viability.
At that point the child can live independently of the mother.
It seems a reasonable cut off point to say “at this point the child has rights as an independent human being”
There is nothing magical about passage through the birth canal that imbues any mystic rights
Neither magic nor mysticism exist, so nor should there be.
There certainly is something about a babies first breath that is a reasonable point to mark that as when it is born and life begins from there.
There is nothing magical about a babies first breath that justifies murdering a 38 week old baby
So why does the God you worship cause so many miscarriages?
It’s rather unpleasant that you are trying to make a cheap debating point from something as tragic as a miscarriage
But they occur naturally when pregnancies are non viable
If your God exists, why doesn't He act to prevent them?
Because He sets the framework and doesn’t intervene at the point of demand.
It’s the same question - how can God allow earthquakes? They are a natural event based on movement of tectonic plates. I’m sure there is a good scientific reason why tectonic plates work in the way they do, but that’s beyond my Ken (I just have faith in science)
So why did God intervene and free the Israelites from the bondage of slavery in Egypt but didn't intervene in the holocaust?
There is a great TV play called "God on Trial" based on the (potentially apocryphal) story that in the camps a Jewish court had been arranged to answer the question of whether God had broken the covenant on the eve of what they all assume is their deaths. It's a really moving story, with some great performances, and covers a wide range of theological and political arguments about this. Obviously very heavy and depressing, considering the topic.
Why are the Welsh so insular and bigoted towards the English?
A rapper had his performance at an arts festival in Wales cancelled – because his lyrics were too English.
The Welsh musician Sage Todz, 29, boasts a large following of fans for his songs, which he performs in both Welsh and English.
He was set to showcase his music at the Eisteddfod festival which celebrates the Welsh language and culture through singing, art, composition, dance and instrumental events.
But his appearance was later cancelled after he refused to change his set – after being told his songs contained “too much English”.
Because it is a Welsh language festival and competition. Would be the same with an Esperanto competition. You can't expect to turn up to a rugger meeting and expect to play soccer.
Do people turn up to Union matches expecting the younger and more useless cousin League?
*grabs tinfoil hat and ducks*
All right, I tackle this. Anyone who does so is missing a fast, often open, game and instead watching a slower, maul and scrum-infested game.
Actually, I quite like rugby league as a spectator sport. It's better than football. But it's a bit limited. It's basically a training exercise for rugby union. I like scrums and mauls. I lament that in rugby union scrums have been made less competitive (like in rugby league) and the length of time you can spend mauling has been reduced.
An old friend believed that Union should roll the laws back to 1991, when rugby was about right.
Now I don't really advocate that, but it was the era that I played, you could maul and if going forward, retain the put in. You could ruck, and if going forward, retained the put in. There was no debate about crossing - passes were always in front of players.
It may be bollocks, but it felt that the Southern hemisphere drove the law changes to remove the forward play elements of the game, in favour of the basketball style they prefered. And I think the game is poorer for it.
It's not really about the laws. Two things changed. Rugby Union turned professional, and the game was moved from winter to summer. No more overweight shamateurs who could barely catch the ball with frozen hands as they plodded through the mud. Suddenly there were rugby union players who could actually play rugby.
I saw a clip recently of some famous Welsh rugby player from the 70s, and all the players were essentially skinny midgets compared to today's players. They should probably put a weight limit on rugby players - maybe insist they all have a BMI below 30, or whatever, and it would limit the force of the impacts between players and perhaps put more emphasis on different parts of the game.
Why are the Welsh so insular and bigoted towards the English?
A rapper had his performance at an arts festival in Wales cancelled – because his lyrics were too English.
The Welsh musician Sage Todz, 29, boasts a large following of fans for his songs, which he performs in both Welsh and English.
He was set to showcase his music at the Eisteddfod festival which celebrates the Welsh language and culture through singing, art, composition, dance and instrumental events.
But his appearance was later cancelled after he refused to change his set – after being told his songs contained “too much English”.
Because it is a Welsh language festival and competition. Would be the same with an Esperanto competition. You can't expect to turn up to a rugger meeting and expect to play soccer.
Why not, the reverse literally happened when rugby was created?
You're just being silly here. I'm not a fan of all welsh language policies but what is the point of a welsh language festival if you're going to have English language performers? Might as well bemoan cars not being allowed at a motorbike event.
Almost certainly more important to the fate of the govt than Mad Nad
A brief thread on gilts. Apologies, it's an arcane subject. But the market in government debt, much more than the Bank of England, determines the interest rate homeowners and businesses pay. Today, the yield on 2 year money rose by 26 basis points. 1/6
Yes the Bank of England has admitted to have completely misjudged second round inflationary pressures.
Markets now expect base rates to increase from 4.5% to 5.75% by year-end (i.e. a rate increase at each remaining meeting, albeit it could be front loaded).
We're starting to get to levels where we'll see more people unable to meet their mortgage when they come off their fixed term.
The timing of interest rates peaking and the subsequent pain is terrible for Sunak.
The government should have cleaned house and sacked Bailey two years ago when the extent of his oversight failure at the FCA became clear. We need a proper inflation hawk at the BoE, Raghuram Rajan could probably be tempted into taking over. The failure to push interest rates up earlier and more significantly is really hurting now because we've got ourselves into an inflationary spiral with pay.
This all lands at the feet of Bailey and the MPC.
I certainly agree that Bailey has been incompetent and is not up to the job but it is a mistake to exaggerate the degree of autonomy that the Bank has on these matters. Super low interest rates were not a UK phenomenon but a western one from the period of the GFC until relatively recently.
The Bank were asleep at the wheel and did not respond to world trends fast enough but inflation was an inevitable consequence of such low rates eventually, once the offsetting deflationary pressures had eased. This has affected our inflation but only marginally, most of it was built in by international factors beyond our control.
Our biggest problem is that we are still hooked on debt and beholden to the market to fund the standard of living we think we deserve. That is not really down to Bailey. As for this latest meme of a "Tory mortgage penalty", Lord save us. The degree of economic ignorance and misunderstanding it demonstrates does not bode well for the incoming government, it really doesn't.
The complacent stupidity of some people is now being revealed.
Here we have the deputy property editor of the Times casually admitting he's on an interest only mortgage while bewailing rising mortgage costs:
At some point the Cons are going to have to reclaim the economy safe in our hands mantle.
Not sure how this happens tbh.
They don't know how. The failure of Truss was a hammer-blow to the Conservatives conceptually: they had somebody who was willing to implement the full-fat version and it blew up in their face. The reason why they are so big on culture war issues, and why Rishi has retreated into managerialism, is because they no longer know how to run a country economically or commercially. They badly need a theoretician to show them the way and - as the NatCon conference demonstrated - they haven't got one.
They had Hannan to provide a theoretical framework for Brexit (it was dumb, but it existed). They now have Goodwin to provide a theoretical framework for a culture war, but they do not know and do not care how to run a country (see their ongoing failure on immigration). They live in a world where food comes in a van and complaining works. They are idiots in the way that only rich people can be - voluntarily.
In retrospect its difficult to understand what Truss was trying to achieve given that the UK already has full employment, inflation problems and unaffordable housing.
A problem with any 'go for growth' strategy is that it doesn't align with what many people want.
And what do people want ?
A job, a house, a lifestyle, a better lifestyle.
But after a while that better lifestyle doesn't come from having more money it comes from having more free time.
So ultimately, for most people, having more money makes you want to work less not more.
Why are the Welsh so insular and bigoted towards the English?
A rapper had his performance at an arts festival in Wales cancelled – because his lyrics were too English.
The Welsh musician Sage Todz, 29, boasts a large following of fans for his songs, which he performs in both Welsh and English.
He was set to showcase his music at the Eisteddfod festival which celebrates the Welsh language and culture through singing, art, composition, dance and instrumental events.
But his appearance was later cancelled after he refused to change his set – after being told his songs contained “too much English”.
Because it is a Welsh language festival and competition. Would be the same with an Esperanto competition. You can't expect to turn up to a rugger meeting and expect to play soccer.
Do people turn up to Union matches expecting the younger and more useless cousin League?
*grabs tinfoil hat and ducks*
All right, I tackle this. Anyone who does so is missing a fast, often open, game and instead watching a slower, maul and scrum-infested game.
Actually, I quite like rugby league as a spectator sport. It's better than football. But it's a bit limited. It's basically a training exercise for rugby union. I like scrums and mauls. I lament that in rugby union scrums have been made less competitive (like in rugby league) and the length of time you can spend mauling has been reduced.
An old friend believed that Union should roll the laws back to 1991, when rugby was about right.
Now I don't really advocate that, but it was the era that I played, you could maul and if going forward, retain the put in. You could ruck, and if going forward, retained the put in. There was no debate about crossing - passes were always in front of players.
It may be bollocks, but it felt that the Southern hemisphere drove the law changes to remove the forward play elements of the game, in favour of the basketball style they prefered. And I think the game is poorer for it.
Yes, I agree. Though when did five points for a try come in? I was all for that. I do admit that modern rugby is a better spectacle. But there is more to sport than spectacle. You need to be able to feel that the right things are being rewarded. The balance between attacker and defender has been tilted a bit too far in the interest of the attacker; and it's quite hard now, as a spectator, to be able to tell whether a turnover is legal or not. I also liked the amateurism of 1991. Though that can no longer be put back in the bottle and arguably was never really fully in the bottle in the first place, which was why it was let out.
Henotheism...A term coined by the Indologist Max Müller in an attempt to convey his idea that each deity in the apparently polytheistic Vedic pantheon was actually experienced as supreme when focused on by a particular individual. It is adherence to one particular god out of several, especially by a family, tribe, or other group. Analogous to football team supporters.
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
And as almost all scientists agree human life, consciousness as well as ability to feel pain starts from 24 weeks.
Be assured we will fight you secular liberals with such gross disrespect for human life you would abort up to birth every step of the way.
This is not true.
I think most scientists would say that gametes are living cells, so there is a continuum of life from adult to gamete to zygote to foetus to baby. "Life" doesn't start at 24 weeks. But lots of things are living: bacteria, amoeba, mosquitoes, cabbages. What is living isn't particularly important to the ethical debate.
I think most scientists would shy away from claims as to when consciousness begins. That's a hugely complicated question. There are brain structures associated with consciousness that develop around 24-28 weeks, so that's a possible lower limit for consciousness, but most scientists would couch that with a lot of caveats. But animals have some degree of consciousness and we don't give them many rights, so the ethical debate is more complicated than finding a simple cut-off for consciousness anyway. Because there isn't a simple cut-off for consciousness: it's something that develops over time, through to maybe 18 months post-birth.
The ability to feel pain is... guess what? Complicated. Yes, there are brain structures around 24-28 weeks that may be necessary, although other parts of the system are developed much earlier. We're not quite certain. So, with caveats, maybe we could say the cut-off is around 24 weeks. But, again, animals can feel pain and we don't give them many rights, so the ethical debate is more complicated than finding a simple cut-off for pain.
Science is complicated. Legislation often has to be somewhat simpler and I'm not saying 24 weeks isn't a good cut-off for legislative purposes. I note 90% of abortions are done before 12 weeks. I also note that the demand for post-24 week abortions is very small and tends to involve very difficult and complicated cases.
We use stun guns before we kill animals.
And even them the fact we kill animals for food is no argument for legalising murder
Speak for yourself, I've been a vegetarian for over 30 years!
You should go see a doctor. Humans are not meant to ve veggies
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
Well said.
To me the whole "24 weeks" cut-off is arbitrary and absurd. A bit like Sunday trading laws. A silly, messy compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone but most people are content to live with because they'd rather not rock the boat and compromise just sounds reasonable.
To me logically birth is the inflection point as you say, so while I would find the idea of a 32 week abortion to be utterly horrible, I wouldn't make it illegal. Horrible things should not be unlawful. At approximately 37 weeks I believe the NHS could perhaps offer induction as an alternative, so that seems a reasonable cut-off, terminate the pregnancy but with a live-birth at that stage, but 24 is just a messy compromise. They're never going to voluntarily induce then.
I actually have more intellectual respect for people who want the practice outlawed altogether, than for the 24 week cut-off. At least they're intellectually consistent. I don't agree with them, but I can see where they're coming from much better.
The logic behind 24 weeks is that is the approximate age of viability.
At that point the child can live independently of the mother.
It seems a reasonable cut off point to say “at this point the child has rights as an independent human being”
There is nothing magical about passage through the birth canal that imbues any mystic rights
That ain't strictly true. Vaginally birth is well documented to be more beneficial to the newborn over caesarean. Gets the lungs working quicker and stronger, there's research into transfer of beneficial bacteria via that route, quicker to get breast fed and there is research via lots of studies into asthma, obesity and other conditions.
Almost certainly more important to the fate of the govt than Mad Nad
A brief thread on gilts. Apologies, it's an arcane subject. But the market in government debt, much more than the Bank of England, determines the interest rate homeowners and businesses pay. Today, the yield on 2 year money rose by 26 basis points. 1/6
Yes the Bank of England has admitted to have completely misjudged second round inflationary pressures.
Markets now expect base rates to increase from 4.5% to 5.75% by year-end (i.e. a rate increase at each remaining meeting, albeit it could be front loaded).
We're starting to get to levels where we'll see more people unable to meet their mortgage when they come off their fixed term.
The timing of interest rates peaking and the subsequent pain is terrible for Sunak.
The government should have cleaned house and sacked Bailey two years ago when the extent of his oversight failure at the FCA became clear. We need a proper inflation hawk at the BoE, Raghuram Rajan could probably be tempted into taking over. The failure to push interest rates up earlier and more significantly is really hurting now because we've got ourselves into an inflationary spiral with pay.
This all lands at the feet of Bailey and the MPC.
I certainly agree that Bailey has been incompetent and is not up to the job but it is a mistake to exaggerate the degree of autonomy that the Bank has on these matters. Super low interest rates were not a UK phenomenon but a western one from the period of the GFC until relatively recently.
The Bank were asleep at the wheel and did not respond to world trends fast enough but inflation was an inevitable consequence of such low rates eventually, once the offsetting deflationary pressures had eased. This has affected our inflation but only marginally, most of it was built in by international factors beyond our control.
Our biggest problem is that we are still hooked on debt and beholden to the market to fund the standard of living we think we deserve. That is not really down to Bailey. As for this latest meme of a "Tory mortgage penalty", Lord save us. The degree of economic ignorance and misunderstanding it demonstrates does not bode well for the incoming government, it really doesn't.
The complacent stupidity of some people is now being revealed.
Here we have the deputy property editor of the Times casually admitting he's on an interest only mortgage while bewailing rising mortgage costs:
There's a moment in If This Is A Man where Levi describes the absurdity of a rabbi thanking God for being spared after half the prisoners in his section are selected to be taken to the extermination camp
Why would a Tory try and create maximum problems for Sunak given where the Tories are in the polls? It’s sociopathic.
Because she's acting like a spoilt toddler throwing her toys out of the pram as she hasn't been given the bauble she wanted.
Next thread please.
I surprise myself sometimes and I do here. I feel a teeny bit sorry for Nadine. Seems she's been shafted by Boris (and not in the way she might have dreamt of). She does not merit a peerage but by recent standards it wouldn't be beyond the pale.
I think context is important here. I have certainly said 'Should be put against a wall and shot' and 'All xxx should be shot' when commenting about some individual or group of people who have done something stupid. It is a saying we use and not meant literally.
We should all be able to distinguish between this sort of stuff and real hate speech which is harmful.
Real hate speech 'All LDs should be put up against a wall and shot' just jest 'All Tories should be shot'?
I certainly wouldn't consider it hate speech if you said that, particularly if the LDs did something you thought particularly stupid, because it is clear you don't mean it and are just venting on their stupidity.
I do accept however, as others have said, if you are in public life it might be imprudent.
I agree with you on that distinction at least, in public life, whether elected as a councillor, MP, MSP, AM or MLA or a member of the Government or House of Lords you have to watch what you say, certainly in public or on social media. You are held to a higher public standard.
Albeit even an ordinary member of the public could face criminal charges now if they say something in public or on social media believed to constitute a death threat or harassment
I've liked your post @HYUFD but re the last paragraph I think most people can determine the difference between a turn of phrase and a real threat and those that can't were in my day considered 'politically correct' or 'jobs worths' or today 'woke'
Almost certainly more important to the fate of the govt than Mad Nad
A brief thread on gilts. Apologies, it's an arcane subject. But the market in government debt, much more than the Bank of England, determines the interest rate homeowners and businesses pay. Today, the yield on 2 year money rose by 26 basis points. 1/6
Yes the Bank of England has admitted to have completely misjudged second round inflationary pressures.
Markets now expect base rates to increase from 4.5% to 5.75% by year-end (i.e. a rate increase at each remaining meeting, albeit it could be front loaded).
We're starting to get to levels where we'll see more people unable to meet their mortgage when they come off their fixed term.
The timing of interest rates peaking and the subsequent pain is terrible for Sunak.
The government should have cleaned house and sacked Bailey two years ago when the extent of his oversight failure at the FCA became clear. We need a proper inflation hawk at the BoE, Raghuram Rajan could probably be tempted into taking over. The failure to push interest rates up earlier and more significantly is really hurting now because we've got ourselves into an inflationary spiral with pay.
This all lands at the feet of Bailey and the MPC.
I certainly agree that Bailey has been incompetent and is not up to the job but it is a mistake to exaggerate the degree of autonomy that the Bank has on these matters. Super low interest rates were not a UK phenomenon but a western one from the period of the GFC until relatively recently.
The Bank were asleep at the wheel and did not respond to world trends fast enough but inflation was an inevitable consequence of such low rates eventually, once the offsetting deflationary pressures had eased. This has affected our inflation but only marginally, most of it was built in by international factors beyond our control.
Our biggest problem is that we are still hooked on debt and beholden to the market to fund the standard of living we think we deserve. That is not really down to Bailey. As for this latest meme of a "Tory mortgage penalty", Lord save us. The degree of economic ignorance and misunderstanding it demonstrates does not bode well for the incoming government, it really doesn't.
The complacent stupidity of some people is now being revealed.
Here we have the deputy property editor of the Times casually admitting he's on an interest only mortgage while bewailing rising mortgage costs:
There's a moment in If This Is A Man where Levi describes the absurdity of a rabbi thanking God for being spared after half the prisoners in his section are selected to be taken to the extermination camp
Oops don't know how that ended up here. Obviously meant for 148grss
Mr. HYUFD, some say the God of the Old Testament is just Zeus with a rebrand.
I would interpret this as our understanding of God evolving
Is the bit that I just don't get but hey good luck with it all. If it's luck, that is, and not predestination.
I don't think that an unusual concept, indeed most Churches would hold that, albeit in some disagreement of what that understanding should be.
Like many other things, it isn't linear progress, and there can be wrong turns and blind alleys along the way.
Oh absolutely and my apologies for making anything of it but I just don't get the god thing and hence it interests me when people use phrases such as you did "our understanding of god is evolving..."
I'll abide by my rules on what not to discuss henceforth...
is going to be everywhere from now on. Behold the future of mankind: searching for nuggets of content in a sea of LLM / Stable Diffusion generated garbage.
Why would a Tory try and create maximum problems for Sunak given where the Tories are in the polls? It’s sociopathic.
Because she's acting like a spoilt toddler throwing her toys out of the pram as she hasn't been given the bauble she wanted.
Next thread please.
I surprise myself sometimes and I do here. I feel a teeny bit sorry for Nadine. Seems she's been shafted by Boris (and not in the way she might have dreamt of). She does not merit a peerage but by recent standards it wouldn't be beyond the pale.
All a bit smallest violin for me, I'm afraid. There's no entitlement to a peerage - the very idea is absurd - and she's rarely been restrained in celebrating the disappointments of others.
It's not as though this condemns her to a life of poverty, or any such thing. Just irrelevance.
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
Well said.
To me the whole "24 weeks" cut-off is arbitrary and absurd. A bit like Sunday trading laws. A silly, messy compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone but most people are content to live with because they'd rather not rock the boat and compromise just sounds reasonable.
To me logically birth is the inflection point as you say, so while I would find the idea of a 32 week abortion to be utterly horrible, I wouldn't make it illegal. Horrible things should not be unlawful. At approximately 37 weeks I believe the NHS could perhaps offer induction as an alternative, so that seems a reasonable cut-off, terminate the pregnancy but with a live-birth at that stage, but 24 is just a messy compromise. They're never going to voluntarily induce then.
I actually have more intellectual respect for people who want the practice outlawed altogether, than for the 24 week cut-off. At least they're intellectually consistent. I don't agree with them, but I can see where they're coming from much better.
The logic behind 24 weeks is that is the approximate age of viability.
At that point the child can live independently of the mother.
It seems a reasonable cut off point to say “at this point the child has rights as an independent human being”
There is nothing magical about passage through the birth canal that imbues any mystic rights
Neither magic nor mysticism exist, so nor should there be.
There certainly is something about a babies first breath that is a reasonable point to mark that as when it is born and life begins from there.
There is nothing magical about a babies first breath that justifies murdering a 38 week old baby
So why does the God you worship cause so many miscarriages?
It’s rather unpleasant that you are trying to make a cheap debating point from something as tragic as a miscarriage
But they occur naturally when pregnancies are non viable
If your God exists, why doesn't He act to prevent them?
Because He sets the framework and doesn’t intervene at the point of demand.
It’s the same question - how can God allow earthquakes? They are a natural event based on movement of tectonic plates. I’m sure there is a good scientific reason why tectonic plates work in the way they do, but that’s beyond my Ken (I just have faith in science)
So why did God intervene and free the Israelites from the bondage of slavery in Egypt but didn't intervene in the holocaust?
As the God of the Old Testament was the Jewish God then (although as the God of Abraham ultimately the Christian and Muslim God too but they came along later). He also ensured the Allies won the war and so ultimately the Jews were able to defeat the Nazis as they had defeated the Egyptians
You're taking the pish, right? Trolling us? You don't actually believe all that, do you? If you do believe it, I tip my hat to you and retire from the field.
Mr. HYUFD, some say the God of the Old Testament is just Zeus with a rebrand.
I would interpret this as our understanding of God evolving
Is the bit that I just don't get but hey good luck with it all. If it's luck, that is, and not predestination.
I don't think that an unusual concept, indeed most Churches would hold that, albeit in some disagreement of what that understanding should be.
Like many other things, it isn't linear progress, and there can be wrong turns and blind alleys along the way.
Oh absolutely and my apologies for making anything of it but I just don't get the god thing and hence it interests me when people use phrases such as you did "our understanding of god is evolving..."
I'll abide by my rules on what not to discuss henceforth...
I don't understand how God can evolve. Why does he need to? He's God, the main man. He's an old white bloke, long flowing hair and beard, a bit wrathful, likes women in their place, not a fan of the gays. Likes a bit of a disaster. Now? He's a woke lefty liberal who let's women be bishops, let's gays get married, goes on pride marches and probably carries an iPhone. I don't get it.
I think context is important here. I have certainly said 'Should be put against a wall and shot' and 'All xxx should be shot' when commenting about some individual or group of people who have done something stupid. It is a saying we use and not meant literally.
We should all be able to distinguish between this sort of stuff and real hate speech which is harmful.
Real hate speech 'All LDs should be put up against a wall and shot' just jest 'All Tories should be shot'?
As a former member of the LDs I can quite honestly say that I have heard a Green Party Member say exactly, or almost exactly, those words about members of the party and I took it in the spirit intended.
My Grandfather's cigarette case that I keep in my breast pocket saved me anyway.
If she doesn't resign then this is most embarrassing thing Nadine Dorries has done since she ate a kangaroo's bunghole live on TV.
A less influential version of Clare Short.
Tbh I do have some sympathy for Nadine Dorries who, after making her way in life without the old school tie advantages of, say, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has run smack into the reality that her political career is now over, that her peerage is just a pawn in the power game between Boris and Rishi, and that neither man cares about her.
I don't like her politics, and want the HoL abolished, but have a certain sympathy for her. There is something tragic about political suttee on the binfire of Johnson's career. He corrodes everything and everyone he comes into contact with.
She was well rusted before she got a crush on Bozo.
is going to be everywhere from now on. Behold the future of mankind: searching for nuggets of content in a sea of LLM / Stable Diffusion generated garbage.
This reminds me of that science fiction story about wormhole cameras, which essentially ended privacy, because you could send a camera to any point in space and history, leading to people routinely copulating in public, because it was impossible to do so in private anyway. One wrinkle of the story was that so many people were interested in the same possibly historical events, such as Christ's resurrection, that the interference from all the wormhole cameras from all of the future meant that no-one could see anything anyway, and so it still remained unknown what the truth of those events was.
Anyway, that's what looks likely is going to happen to the internet, the noise is going to be cracked up so high that finding any signal will be nigh on impossible.
Perhaps it's time to go back to curating link lists, so that people can find useful websites from people they trust?
As some of you may remember I was venting on here a few weeks ago re the inability to take unboxed bikes on Eurostar because of Brexit (i have no idea why because you can on a ferry so brexit doesn't sound like a good excuse to me). I go tomorrow. My journey now consists of 6 trains and a ferry and 2 days starting at 4 am tomorrow instead of just 3 trains leaving mid morning and arriving late afternoon the same day. And a lot, lot more expensive and huge opportunities for missing connections. Still it is there so has to be done (unless of course I spend the whole time in Calais, which is possible)
Anyway if it goes to plan I will be cycling from Poitier to ile d'Aix on the tiniest roads possible and then to Angouleme on Greeways. About 250 - 300 miles.
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
Well said.
To me the whole "24 weeks" cut-off is arbitrary and absurd. A bit like Sunday trading laws. A silly, messy compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone but most people are content to live with because they'd rather not rock the boat and compromise just sounds reasonable.
To me logically birth is the inflection point as you say, so while I would find the idea of a 32 week abortion to be utterly horrible, I wouldn't make it illegal. Horrible things should not be unlawful. At approximately 37 weeks I believe the NHS could perhaps offer induction as an alternative, so that seems a reasonable cut-off, terminate the pregnancy but with a live-birth at that stage, but 24 is just a messy compromise. They're never going to voluntarily induce then.
I actually have more intellectual respect for people who want the practice outlawed altogether, than for the 24 week cut-off. At least they're intellectually consistent. I don't agree with them, but I can see where they're coming from much better.
The logic behind 24 weeks is that is the approximate age of viability.
At that point the child can live independently of the mother.
It seems a reasonable cut off point to say “at this point the child has rights as an independent human being”
There is nothing magical about passage through the birth canal that imbues any mystic rights
How do you mean "independently"? Newborn babies aren't independent. Probably even a fit and healthy 30 year old person isn't independent, not truly.
You could envisage a situation where a zygote can be extracted from the Fallopian tube of a woman shortly after conception and then grown in a machine, or implanted into another woman. So does that mean it's a child that has rights as an independent human? It doesn't seem so different that a newborn, still entirely dependent on others for its survival, being given up by its biological parents and nurtured by someone or something else.
All cut off points are somewhat arbitrary. The "24 weeks" is one that has common currency, and not for insignificant reasons, but it's really an even less magical and mystical moment than passage through the birth canal (or surgical opening!)
"Viability" is not really as obvious as it first seems.
Has a reasonable chance of surviving to adulthood. Below about 21/22 weeks it is very low.
Surrogacy doesn’t offer additional rights vs traditional pregnancy
And a zygote can’t be grown in a machine at present
"at present" is the issue here. I'd add to that "at present and here". You see, technology changes and is unevenly distributed. The purpose of my "you could envisage" was to get you to think about whether the law should track technological availability. Also think about whether that technology was available but only at huge cost. Who should pay for someone to fulfil their legal obligations? The woman? The state? What if the state cut back on the service but didn't change the law? What if some device were invented that could beam a foetus harmlessly out, Star-Trek style, into an incubator?
The problem with the viability argument is it's contingent on all these things. It's not a fatal flaw, but it's considerably murkier than it first appears.
The law should evolve with science and capabilities. Ignoring the ethical concerns with your straw man, as viability moves earlier than should the latest date for abortion. The principle is at what point does the child have an effectively independent existence from mother.
24 weeks is not an absolute position for ever and always
Ethical concerns are a straw man?
If you think viability is the only relevant part of this debate, you're wrong. You might wish to discount other elements from your reasoning, and that's fine, but that doesn't mean other people should.
The main problem with viability is that is smuggles "should" under the cloak of "could". Just because something is possible, doesn't mean it's desirable.
is going to be everywhere from now on. Behold the future of mankind: searching for nuggets of content in a sea of LLM / Stable Diffusion generated garbage.
It's going to be way worse than that. One of the apparent abilities of AIs is the ability to fairly convincingly simulate empathy.
That's going to be very dangerous indeed, if not impossible for the conduct of democracy, as political discourse gets flooded with this stuff.
Surely the mistake from the Bank of England was in underestimating the economy? They didn't expect it to grow at the start of this year. Obviously they were also behind the curve initially but it would be an interesting counterfactual to know what would have happened if the war in Ukraine had not happened. I'm also a little surprised that people on here are obsessing about monetary policy and not for once on 'supply side reforms'. Is there not rather a lot wrong with our energy market?
Almost certainly more important to the fate of the govt than Mad Nad
A brief thread on gilts. Apologies, it's an arcane subject. But the market in government debt, much more than the Bank of England, determines the interest rate homeowners and businesses pay. Today, the yield on 2 year money rose by 26 basis points. 1/6
Yes the Bank of England has admitted to have completely misjudged second round inflationary pressures.
Markets now expect base rates to increase from 4.5% to 5.75% by year-end (i.e. a rate increase at each remaining meeting, albeit it could be front loaded).
We're starting to get to levels where we'll see more people unable to meet their mortgage when they come off their fixed term.
The timing of interest rates peaking and the subsequent pain is terrible for Sunak.
The government should have cleaned house and sacked Bailey two years ago when the extent of his oversight failure at the FCA became clear. We need a proper inflation hawk at the BoE, Raghuram Rajan could probably be tempted into taking over. The failure to push interest rates up earlier and more significantly is really hurting now because we've got ourselves into an inflationary spiral with pay.
This all lands at the feet of Bailey and the MPC.
I certainly agree that Bailey has been incompetent and is not up to the job but it is a mistake to exaggerate the degree of autonomy that the Bank has on these matters. Super low interest rates were not a UK phenomenon but a western one from the period of the GFC until relatively recently.
The Bank were asleep at the wheel and did not respond to world trends fast enough but inflation was an inevitable consequence of such low rates eventually, once the offsetting deflationary pressures had eased. This has affected our inflation but only marginally, most of it was built in by international factors beyond our control.
Our biggest problem is that we are still hooked on debt and beholden to the market to fund the standard of living we think we deserve. That is not really down to Bailey. As for this latest meme of a "Tory mortgage penalty", Lord save us. The degree of economic ignorance and misunderstanding it demonstrates does not bode well for the incoming government, it really doesn't.
The complacent stupidity of some people is now being revealed.
Here we have the deputy property editor of the Times casually admitting he's on an interest only mortgage while bewailing rising mortgage costs:
There's a moment in If This Is A Man where Levi describes the absurdity of a rabbi thanking God for being spared after half the prisoners in his section are selected to be taken to the extermination camp
The problem is, there's never a control. You never know what the outcome would have been had God not intervened. He may have done an amazing job (half saved vs none saved) or a terrible job (half saved vs all saved) or he may not have made any difference (maybe he's not very good at intervention) or it may be that he's not on our side (maybe he's on the side of the French or the emporor penguins or beetles or gut parasites or aliens and we're allowed to come too as long as we don't get in the way). We can never know.
Almost certainly more important to the fate of the govt than Mad Nad
A brief thread on gilts. Apologies, it's an arcane subject. But the market in government debt, much more than the Bank of England, determines the interest rate homeowners and businesses pay. Today, the yield on 2 year money rose by 26 basis points. 1/6
Yes the Bank of England has admitted to have completely misjudged second round inflationary pressures.
Markets now expect base rates to increase from 4.5% to 5.75% by year-end (i.e. a rate increase at each remaining meeting, albeit it could be front loaded).
We're starting to get to levels where we'll see more people unable to meet their mortgage when they come off their fixed term.
The timing of interest rates peaking and the subsequent pain is terrible for Sunak.
The government should have cleaned house and sacked Bailey two years ago when the extent of his oversight failure at the FCA became clear. We need a proper inflation hawk at the BoE, Raghuram Rajan could probably be tempted into taking over. The failure to push interest rates up earlier and more significantly is really hurting now because we've got ourselves into an inflationary spiral with pay.
This all lands at the feet of Bailey and the MPC.
I certainly agree that Bailey has been incompetent and is not up to the job but it is a mistake to exaggerate the degree of autonomy that the Bank has on these matters. Super low interest rates were not a UK phenomenon but a western one from the period of the GFC until relatively recently.
The Bank were asleep at the wheel and did not respond to world trends fast enough but inflation was an inevitable consequence of such low rates eventually, once the offsetting deflationary pressures had eased. This has affected our inflation but only marginally, most of it was built in by international factors beyond our control.
Our biggest problem is that we are still hooked on debt and beholden to the market to fund the standard of living we think we deserve. That is not really down to Bailey. As for this latest meme of a "Tory mortgage penalty", Lord save us. The degree of economic ignorance and misunderstanding it demonstrates does not bode well for the incoming government, it really doesn't.
However David, the buck stops with the Tories, it is on their watch and down to their incompetent handling of the economy. They have no-one to blame and "A big boy did it and ran away" will not cut the mustard. Armageddon lies ahead for them.
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
And as almost all scientists agree human life, consciousness as well as ability to feel pain starts from 24 weeks.
Be assured we will fight you secular liberals with such gross disrespect for human life you would abort up to birth every step of the way.
Subcortical responses to stimuli are not enough to demonstrate suffering.
A foetus isn't conscious. By 28 weeks it has the physical structure that could give rise to consiousness, but that doesn't mean it is. It simply isn't conscious.
They aren't enough to demonstrate suffering for your ideological, ultra liberal agenda.
For you wish to advocate baby murder so there can be abortion on demand until birth
"baby murder" is an emotive attack, but worse than that, it begs the question. You want to call a foetus a baby because it answers the question about whether it's wrong to terminate it.
Since it's always impossible to get agreement on when something should be called a "baby", let me ask you this instead: when does a foetus stop being a foetus?
No it is precisely what you advocate. Baby murder. Certainly by the time of the 27th week the foetus has already got most of the characteristics and size of a baby ready for birth
So at 27 weeks it's still a foetus?
No it has most of the characteristics of a baby and abortion at that point is murder
Except it’s not.
Except it is
Show me that statute.
Fetal personhood does not exist in English law; just your mind.
It does effectively by the 24 week rule, after which abortion becomes murder
No, it doesn’t. Not does it exist in your favoured guide to morality - see for example Exodus 21:22-25
Yes it does.
Taking life for life in Exodus if a pregnant woman is injured if anything only reinforces the point
Doctrinaire and ignorant. Not an unusual combination.
The biblical law draws a clear distinction between the life of a mother, or any other person - 'a life for a life' - and that of a foetus, which may be compensated by a cash payment.
Nope, only mentions her giving birth prematurely after being hit with no serious injury requiring a cash payment. Not a word in the actual biblical text there about cash payment for death of the foetus
Plus as King David tells God at Psalm 139:16 'Your eyes even saw me as an embryo; All its parts were written in your book Regarding the days when they were formed, Before any of them existed.'
"embryo" is, of course, a useful translation if you want to support your point (and it's weak support anyway, who cares what some book says?)
But what if it's not the best translation? After all, it wasn't written in English. So who has chosen "embryo"... and why?
The NIV reads: My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
So.. unformed body? Frame? (And by the way, what of these days being written beforehand... does that mean even a murder is preordained by God?)
The Hebrew, גָּלְמִ֤י, comes from גולם, meaing "golem" (yes, really!) meaning -an inchoate object, an amorphous mass -a dummy, a form -(mythology, Jewish folklore) a golem, a clay automaton -(entomology) a pupa -(colloquial) a fool, a clod, an oaf, an awkward person
Not very convincing any more, is it? But here's the final nail: your eyes saw my unformed body... all the days ordained for me... before one of them came to be That... that reads an awful lot to me like this "unformed body" or "embryo" is... before his numbered days. Doesn't sound like your God is counting the embryo stage.
'Unformed body' ie a human life created by God, David was of course anointed King by God, the reference to days being days on earth ultimately ending in that role, his human body already having been formed well before. Murder has nothing to do with it, that is down to human will, as free will has been present since Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge.
Oh it is very convincing and in the everlasting and eternal fight against ideological secular liberals like you we remain steadfast in upholding the word of God
But you aren't upholding the word of God. You're upholding a politically useful translation. You choose the word "embryo" because you think it helps your politics, then you externalise that choice and pretend it was delivered unto you by the Divine. It's abject. Even your source implies the opposite of what you want it to say.
And THIS is your evidence? Why has your God armed you with such flimsy, ambiguous, hole-infested nonsense? Why has he reduced you to poring over the equivalent Haifa subsamples, trying to excavate strands of coherence from a clogged mass of words? Don't you feel let down? Don't you feel the sting of shame at being sent out to the crease with your bat already broken?
No, I am just reinforced in my strength to fight you even harder in the eternal battle for the risen Christ given you will always refute him no matter what the evidence
Yes, the thinness of the evidence means you have to fight very hard indeed. It must be exhausting for you.
Had a small sell of Labour in Selby. It'll be on the same day as Uxbridge which will garner the headlines as it inevitably goes Tory and the swing required is something Labour simply haven't achieved close to this parliament to take the seat. If Nads holds off on her resignation it leaves the Lib Dems free to pump the seat also so it becomes a potential Lib Dem gain even though I think that's odds against too.
As some of you may remember I was venting on here a few weeks ago re the inability to take unboxed bikes on Eurostar because of Brexit (i have no idea why because you can on a ferry so brexit doesn't sound like a good excuse to me). I go tomorrow. My journey now consists of 6 trains and a ferry and 2 days starting at 4 am tomorrow instead of just 3 trains leaving mid morning and arriving late afternoon the same day. And a lot, lot more expensive and huge opportunities for missing connections. Still it is there so has to be done (unless of course I spend the whole time in Calais, which is possible)
Anyway if it goes to plan I will be cycling from Poitier to ile d'Aix on the tiniest roads possible and then to Angouleme on Greeways. About 250 - 300 miles.
Sounds like you would have been cheaper just buying a bike when you got there.
As some of you may remember I was venting on here a few weeks ago re the inability to take unboxed bikes on Eurostar because of Brexit (i have no idea why because you can on a ferry so brexit doesn't sound like a good excuse to me). I go tomorrow. My journey now consists of 6 trains and a ferry and 2 days starting at 4 am tomorrow instead of just 3 trains leaving mid morning and arriving late afternoon the same day. And a lot, lot more expensive and huge opportunities for missing connections. Still it is there so has to be done (unless of course I spend the whole time in Calais, which is possible)
Anyway if it goes to plan I will be cycling from Poitier to ile d'Aix on the tiniest roads possible and then to Angouleme on Greeways. About 250 - 300 miles.
@kjh - I'm a fairly low-grade cyclist but interested in getting into cycling of that sort of scale. What bike do you use and do you carry your stuff on panniers, and how much can you carry? And how many days do you expect that to take?
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
Well said.
To me the whole "24 weeks" cut-off is arbitrary and absurd. A bit like Sunday trading laws. A silly, messy compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone but most people are content to live with because they'd rather not rock the boat and compromise just sounds reasonable.
To me logically birth is the inflection point as you say, so while I would find the idea of a 32 week abortion to be utterly horrible, I wouldn't make it illegal. Horrible things should not be unlawful. At approximately 37 weeks I believe the NHS could perhaps offer induction as an alternative, so that seems a reasonable cut-off, terminate the pregnancy but with a live-birth at that stage, but 24 is just a messy compromise. They're never going to voluntarily induce then.
I actually have more intellectual respect for people who want the practice outlawed altogether, than for the 24 week cut-off. At least they're intellectually consistent. I don't agree with them, but I can see where they're coming from much better.
The logic behind 24 weeks is that is the approximate age of viability.
At that point the child can live independently of the mother.
It seems a reasonable cut off point to say “at this point the child has rights as an independent human being”
There is nothing magical about passage through the birth canal that imbues any mystic rights
Neither magic nor mysticism exist, so nor should there be.
There certainly is something about a babies first breath that is a reasonable point to mark that as when it is born and life begins from there.
There is nothing magical about a babies first breath that justifies murdering a 38 week old baby
So why does the God you worship cause so many miscarriages?
It’s rather unpleasant that you are trying to make a cheap debating point from something as tragic as a miscarriage
But they occur naturally when pregnancies are non viable
If your God exists, why doesn't He act to prevent them?
Because He sets the framework and doesn’t intervene at the point of demand.
It’s the same question - how can God allow earthquakes? They are a natural event based on movement of tectonic plates. I’m sure there is a good scientific reason why tectonic plates work in the way they do, but that’s beyond my Ken (I just have faith in science)
So why did God intervene and free the Israelites from the bondage of slavery in Egypt but didn't intervene in the holocaust?
As the God of the Old Testament was the Jewish God then (although as the God of Abraham ultimately the Christian and Muslim God too but they came along later). He also ensured the Allies won the war and so ultimately the Jews were able to defeat the Nazis as they had defeated the Egyptians
You're taking the pish, right? Trolling us? You don't actually believe all that, do you? If you do believe it, I tip my hat to you and retire from the field.
is going to be everywhere from now on. Behold the future of mankind: searching for nuggets of content in a sea of LLM / Stable Diffusion generated garbage.
This reminds me of that science fiction story about wormhole cameras, which essentially ended privacy, because you could send a camera to any point in space and history, leading to people routinely copulating in public, because it was impossible to do so in private anyway. One wrinkle of the story was that so many people were interested in the same possibly historical events, such as Christ's resurrection, that the interference from all the wormhole cameras from all of the future meant that no-one could see anything anyway, and so it still remained unknown what the truth of those events was.
Anyway, that's what looks likely is going to happen to the internet, the noise is going to be cracked up so high that finding any signal will be nigh on impossible.
Perhaps it's time to go back to curating link lists, so that people can find useful websites from people they trust?
You're assuming that people want to find the truth on any given subject. I don't believe this to be the case.
Why would a Tory try and create maximum problems for Sunak given where the Tories are in the polls? It’s sociopathic.
Because she's acting like a spoilt toddler throwing her toys out of the pram as she hasn't been given the bauble she wanted.
Next thread please.
I surprise myself sometimes and I do here. I feel a teeny bit sorry for Nadine. Seems she's been shafted by Boris (and not in the way she might have dreamt of). She does not merit a peerage but by recent standards it wouldn't be beyond the pale.
Not you as well! She was only shafted by Boris because she made the fatal mistake of worshipping him. Anybody who worships Boris obviously lacks both judgment and common sense, and is by definition unfit for a role in public life. Also, she's as daft as a brush (not always a bar, I grant you).
So why isn't the headline "Will Voters Give Biden Credit for Trump's Indictment"?.. ... (voters *shouldn't* give Biden credit for Trump's indictment; he had nothing to do with it. I'm illustrating the deep bias in this headline; the version that is actually consistent with public opinion is not one any journalist would ever think to write.)
Had a small sell of Labour in Selby. It'll be on the same day as Uxbridge which will garner the headlines as it inevitably goes Tory and the swing required is something Labour simply haven't achieved close to this parliament to take the seat. If Nads holds off on her resignation it leaves the Lib Dems free to pump the seat also so it becomes a potential Lib Dem gain even though I think that's odds against too.
Against that Electoral calculus reckons Selby goes Labour at the next GE currently. It is shown as seat 407 for Labour and 168 for the Tories.
So why isn't the headline "Will Voters Give Biden Credit for Trump's Indictment"?.. ... (voters *shouldn't* give Biden credit for Trump's indictment; he had nothing to do with it. I'm illustrating the deep bias in this headline; the version that is actually consistent with public opinion is not one any journalist would ever think to write.)
We should give Biden credit in one limited respect: he beat Trump. Were Trump still president, no indictment would have happened.
Mr. HYUFD, some say the God of the Old Testament is just Zeus with a rebrand.
I would interpret this as our understanding of God evolving
Is the bit that I just don't get but hey good luck with it all. If it's luck, that is, and not predestination.
I don't think that an unusual concept, indeed most Churches would hold that, albeit in some disagreement of what that understanding should be.
Like many other things, it isn't linear progress, and there can be wrong turns and blind alleys along the way.
Oh absolutely and my apologies for making anything of it but I just don't get the god thing and hence it interests me when people use phrases such as you did "our understanding of god is evolving..."
I'll abide by my rules on what not to discuss henceforth...
I don't understand how God can evolve. Why does he need to? He's God, the main man. He's an old white bloke, long flowing hair and beard, a bit wrathful, likes women in their place, not a fan of the gays. Likes a bit of a disaster. Now? He's a woke lefty liberal who let's women be bishops, let's gays get married, goes on pride marches and probably carries an iPhone. I don't get it.
It may well be that God too evolves in relationship to the rest of creation, but it may just be our understanding that changes, like seeing different bits of the elephant.
Maximum BMI of 30 sounds like an excellent idea for Rugby Union.
Isn't the other big problem that the players are so much fitter now that you either need to make the pitch bigger or reduce the number of players. Why not go down to 14 a side? Get rid of lifting in the lineouts and somehow sort out the scrums.
Why would a Tory try and create maximum problems for Sunak given where the Tories are in the polls? It’s sociopathic.
Because she's acting like a spoilt toddler throwing her toys out of the pram as she hasn't been given the bauble she wanted.
Next thread please.
I surprise myself sometimes and I do here. I feel a teeny bit sorry for Nadine. Seems she's been shafted by Boris (and not in the way she might have dreamt of). She does not merit a peerage but by recent standards it wouldn't be beyond the pale.
Not you as well! She was only shafted by Boris because she made the fatal mistake of worshipping him. Anybody who worships Boris obviously lacks both judgment and common sense, and is by definition unfit for a role in public life. Also, she's as daft as a brush (not always a bar, I grant you).
Nadine Dorries isn't materially more stupid than the average Tory MP, it's just that as a woman, and a Northern working class woman, she gets called out on it more. Of course she was dumb to believe a single thing that comes out of Boris Johnson's mouth, but she is hardly alone in having made that mistake - yes PB Tories I am talking about you!
Maximum BMI of 30 sounds like an excellent idea for Rugby Union.
Isn't the other big problem that the players are so much fitter now that you either need to make the pitch bigger or reduce the number of players. Why not go down to 14 a side? Get rid of lifting in the lineouts and somehow sort out the scrums.
If you set the max BMI at 30 then you'd rule out ~ 90% of forwards and probably half the backs too.
Mr. HYUFD, some say the God of the Old Testament is just Zeus with a rebrand.
I would interpret this as our understanding of God evolving
Is the bit that I just don't get but hey good luck with it all. If it's luck, that is, and not predestination.
I don't think that an unusual concept, indeed most Churches would hold that, albeit in some disagreement of what that understanding should be.
Like many other things, it isn't linear progress, and there can be wrong turns and blind alleys along the way.
Oh absolutely and my apologies for making anything of it but I just don't get the god thing and hence it interests me when people use phrases such as you did "our understanding of god is evolving..."
I'll abide by my rules on what not to discuss henceforth...
I don't understand how God can evolve. Why does he need to? He's God, the main man. He's an old white bloke, long flowing hair and beard, a bit wrathful, likes women in their place, not a fan of the gays. Likes a bit of a disaster. Now? He's a woke lefty liberal who let's women be bishops, let's gays get married, goes on pride marches and probably carries an iPhone. I don't get it.
The only thing needed to understand God and his evolution down the Millenia is that man creates God in his own image.
Mr. HYUFD, some say the God of the Old Testament is just Zeus with a rebrand.
I would interpret this as our understanding of God evolving
Is the bit that I just don't get but hey good luck with it all. If it's luck, that is, and not predestination.
I don't think that an unusual concept, indeed most Churches would hold that, albeit in some disagreement of what that understanding should be.
Like many other things, it isn't linear progress, and there can be wrong turns and blind alleys along the way.
Oh absolutely and my apologies for making anything of it but I just don't get the god thing and hence it interests me when people use phrases such as you did "our understanding of god is evolving..."
I'll abide by my rules on what not to discuss henceforth...
I don't understand how God can evolve. Why does he need to? He's God, the main man. He's an old white bloke, long flowing hair and beard, a bit wrathful, likes women in their place, not a fan of the gays. Likes a bit of a disaster. Now? He's a woke lefty liberal who let's women be bishops, let's gays get married, goes on pride marches and probably carries an iPhone. I don't get it.
The only thing needed to understand God and his evolution down the Millenia is that man creates God in his own image.
So why isn't the headline "Will Voters Give Biden Credit for Trump's Indictment"?.. ... (voters *shouldn't* give Biden credit for Trump's indictment; he had nothing to do with it. I'm illustrating the deep bias in this headline; the version that is actually consistent with public opinion is not one any journalist would ever think to write.)
In the same poll / article it says that 47% think the indictment is politically motivated, a greater plurality. That is considered something bad (although I can imagine some Dems / left wing independents saying they agree with that statement and think that's a good thing).
I guess we also still haven't seen the outcome of the indictment - if a plurality are happy with the outcome, maybe Biden will get credit. I think it is more likely most people will be dissatisfied - the GOP supporters will see it as unacceptable that Trump was indicted in the first place and it is unlikely that the court will throw the book at Trump and give him the maximum (or even the realistic) sentence he deserves, therefore disappointing Democratic supporters.
Mr. HYUFD, some say the God of the Old Testament is just Zeus with a rebrand.
I would interpret this as our understanding of God evolving
Is the bit that I just don't get but hey good luck with it all. If it's luck, that is, and not predestination.
I don't think that an unusual concept, indeed most Churches would hold that, albeit in some disagreement of what that understanding should be.
Like many other things, it isn't linear progress, and there can be wrong turns and blind alleys along the way.
Oh absolutely and my apologies for making anything of it but I just don't get the god thing and hence it interests me when people use phrases such as you did "our understanding of god is evolving..."
I'll abide by my rules on what not to discuss henceforth...
I don't understand how God can evolve. Why does he need to? He's God, the main man. He's an old white bloke, long flowing hair and beard, a bit wrathful, likes women in their place, not a fan of the gays. Likes a bit of a disaster. Now? He's a woke lefty liberal who let's women be bishops, let's gays get married, goes on pride marches and probably carries an iPhone. I don't get it.
The only thing needed to understand God and his evolution down the Millenia is that man creates God in his own image.
Yes, it's amazing how consistently those who interpret his message tell us that God's views on things accord with the norms of the elite of the day.
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
And as almost all scientists agree human life, consciousness as well as ability to feel pain starts from 24 weeks.
Be assured we will fight you secular liberals with such gross disrespect for human life you would abort up to birth every step of the way.
This is not true.
I think most scientists would say that gametes are living cells, so there is a continuum of life from adult to gamete to zygote to foetus to baby. "Life" doesn't start at 24 weeks. But lots of things are living: bacteria, amoeba, mosquitoes, cabbages. What is living isn't particularly important to the ethical debate.
I think most scientists would shy away from claims as to when consciousness begins. That's a hugely complicated question. There are brain structures associated with consciousness that develop around 24-28 weeks, so that's a possible lower limit for consciousness, but most scientists would couch that with a lot of caveats. But animals have some degree of consciousness and we don't give them many rights, so the ethical debate is more complicated than finding a simple cut-off for consciousness anyway. Because there isn't a simple cut-off for consciousness: it's something that develops over time, through to maybe 18 months post-birth.
The ability to feel pain is... guess what? Complicated. Yes, there are brain structures around 24-28 weeks that may be necessary, although other parts of the system are developed much earlier. We're not quite certain. So, with caveats, maybe we could say the cut-off is around 24 weeks. But, again, animals can feel pain and we don't give them many rights, so the ethical debate is more complicated than finding a simple cut-off for pain.
Science is complicated. Legislation often has to be somewhat simpler and I'm not saying 24 weeks isn't a good cut-off for legislative purposes. I note 90% of abortions are done before 12 weeks. I also note that the demand for post-24 week abortions is very small and tends to involve very difficult and complicated cases.
We use stun guns before we kill animals.
And even them the fact we kill animals for food is no argument for legalising murder
Speak for yourself, I've been a vegetarian for over 30 years!
You should go see a doctor. Humans are not meant to ve veggies
Humans are omnivores and so can survive and prosper on a variety of diets without recourse to medical intervention. Like our good friend above I am on my fourth decade of being a vegetarian with no ill-effects - in fact I'm considerably healthier than the average 47 year old British male (not a high bar, admittedly).
is going to be everywhere from now on. Behold the future of mankind: searching for nuggets of content in a sea of LLM / Stable Diffusion generated garbage.
This reminds me of that science fiction story about wormhole cameras, which essentially ended privacy, because you could send a camera to any point in space and history, leading to people routinely copulating in public, because it was impossible to do so in private anyway. One wrinkle of the story was that so many people were interested in the same possibly historical events, such as Christ's resurrection, that the interference from all the wormhole cameras from all of the future meant that no-one could see anything anyway, and so it still remained unknown what the truth of those events was.
Anyway, that's what looks likely is going to happen to the internet, the noise is going to be cracked up so high that finding any signal will be nigh on impossible.
Perhaps it's time to go back to curating link lists, so that people can find useful websites from people they trust?
You're assuming that people want to find the truth on any given subject. I don't believe this to be the case.
As some of you may remember I was venting on here a few weeks ago re the inability to take unboxed bikes on Eurostar because of Brexit (i have no idea why because you can on a ferry so brexit doesn't sound like a good excuse to me). I go tomorrow. My journey now consists of 6 trains and a ferry and 2 days starting at 4 am tomorrow instead of just 3 trains leaving mid morning and arriving late afternoon the same day. And a lot, lot more expensive and huge opportunities for missing connections. Still it is there so has to be done (unless of course I spend the whole time in Calais, which is possible)
Anyway if it goes to plan I will be cycling from Poitier to ile d'Aix on the tiniest roads possible and then to Angouleme on Greeways. About 250 - 300 miles.
@kjh - I'm a fairly low-grade cyclist but interested in getting into cycling of that sort of scale. What bike do you use and do you carry your stuff on panniers, and how much can you carry? And how many days do you expect that to take?
Surly Disc Trucker/Fuji Touring. Ortleib rack and panniers.
The brakes are junk but you aren't going to be going that fast anyway.
Maximum BMI of 30 sounds like an excellent idea for Rugby Union.
Isn't the other big problem that the players are so much fitter now that you either need to make the pitch bigger or reduce the number of players. Why not go down to 14 a side? Get rid of lifting in the lineouts and somehow sort out the scrums.
If you set the max BMI at 30 then you'd rule out ~ 90% of forwards and probably half the backs too.
Then maybe they’d lose some weight and we wouldn’t keep seeing packs nudging 1,000kg for eight men, a 20st average.
While they say that abortions post-24 weeks would not be legalised, any woman who did so should not be subject to prosecution. Which effectively means you can terminate the pregnancy up to the point of birth and not suffer any (legal) consequences.
Quite right too.
Why would it be right? I'm interested in the logic. I am assuming it is a libertarian argument.
My argument would be that, given we know foetuses can feel pain etc in the womb past a certain point, allowing such procedures effectively represents the legalisation of torture.
Her body, her choice. Animals can feel pain, I still eat meat and wouldn't outlaw fishing.
Life begins at birth for me - and no woman should ever be compelled to carry a pregnancy she doesn't want to carry.
If there is to be a weeks limit then I would set the limit as where the NHS would/could induce the baby, ie at full-term. If its too premature to induce the birth, then termination should be an option - however unpleasant that is.
The concept of pain is a tricky one, and I think the religiously motivated tend to make unjustified assumptions about how early a foetus is capable of pain. The external evidence about nerve growth and stimulus response tells one story, but similar stimulus-response experiments can lead people to surprising (and wrong) conclusions about insects and plants feeling "pain". The difficulty we have to overcome is the tendency to anthropomorphise physical responses and assume our internal experience is a good model. It usually isn't. Human conscious experience is not the same as that which would be "experienced" by a fly, a fig, or a foetus. We know that foetuses are endogenously sedated, and anybody here who has experienced "pain" under sedation will know it's a curious experience and certainly not, in my experience at least, deserving of the label "suffering".
Part of the problem for the religiously minded is this idea of the soul as a model for humanity is because of the sense that a soul is seen as rather like an on-off, a binary. It's either there or it isn't. But such a mental model is very poor map for conscious experience. Foetuses aren't conscious, not in the way people are. And if you have a -- something -- that isn't and has never been conscious, trying to lump it into the same category as a walking talking person is really quite problematic. Ultimately the being-with-a-soul argument pervades this debate even to the extent that people who do not believe in souls end up thinking in unscientific ways about it. A person doesn't suddenly go from not existing to existing in a moment. It happens gradually and one of the biggest inflection points in that curve-of-becoming is at birth.
Well said.
To me the whole "24 weeks" cut-off is arbitrary and absurd. A bit like Sunday trading laws. A silly, messy compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone but most people are content to live with because they'd rather not rock the boat and compromise just sounds reasonable.
To me logically birth is the inflection point as you say, so while I would find the idea of a 32 week abortion to be utterly horrible, I wouldn't make it illegal. Horrible things should not be unlawful. At approximately 37 weeks I believe the NHS could perhaps offer induction as an alternative, so that seems a reasonable cut-off, terminate the pregnancy but with a live-birth at that stage, but 24 is just a messy compromise. They're never going to voluntarily induce then.
I actually have more intellectual respect for people who want the practice outlawed altogether, than for the 24 week cut-off. At least they're intellectually consistent. I don't agree with them, but I can see where they're coming from much better.
The logic behind 24 weeks is that is the approximate age of viability.
At that point the child can live independently of the mother.
It seems a reasonable cut off point to say “at this point the child has rights as an independent human being”
There is nothing magical about passage through the birth canal that imbues any mystic rights
Neither magic nor mysticism exist, so nor should there be.
There certainly is something about a babies first breath that is a reasonable point to mark that as when it is born and life begins from there.
There is nothing magical about a babies first breath that justifies murdering a 38 week old baby
So why does the God you worship cause so many miscarriages?
It’s rather unpleasant that you are trying to make a cheap debating point from something as tragic as a miscarriage
But they occur naturally when pregnancies are non viable
If your God exists, why doesn't He act to prevent them?
Because He sets the framework and doesn’t intervene at the point of demand.
It’s the same question - how can God allow earthquakes? They are a natural event based on movement of tectonic plates. I’m sure there is a good scientific reason why tectonic plates work in the way they do, but that’s beyond my Ken (I just have faith in science)
So why did God intervene and free the Israelites from the bondage of slavery in Egypt but didn't intervene in the holocaust?
As the God of the Old Testament was the Jewish God then (although as the God of Abraham ultimately the Christian and Muslim God too but they came along later). He also ensured the Allies won the war and so ultimately the Jews were able to defeat the Nazis as they had defeated the Egyptians
Wow.
So God didn't intervene to prevent the Nazis. He didn't intervene to prevent the Holocaust.
But he did intervene to ensure the Allies won the war?
Ooookkkkaaayyy ..
I seriously hope you're trolling us now as that's the nuttiest thing I've ever seen from you and that's saying something.
Mr. HYUFD, some say the God of the Old Testament is just Zeus with a rebrand.
I would interpret this as our understanding of God evolving
Is the bit that I just don't get but hey good luck with it all. If it's luck, that is, and not predestination.
I don't think that an unusual concept, indeed most Churches would hold that, albeit in some disagreement of what that understanding should be.
Like many other things, it isn't linear progress, and there can be wrong turns and blind alleys along the way.
Oh absolutely and my apologies for making anything of it but I just don't get the god thing and hence it interests me when people use phrases such as you did "our understanding of god is evolving..."
I'll abide by my rules on what not to discuss henceforth...
I don't understand how God can evolve. Why does he need to? He's God, the main man. He's an old white bloke, long flowing hair and beard, a bit wrathful, likes women in their place, not a fan of the gays. Likes a bit of a disaster. Now? He's a woke lefty liberal who let's women be bishops, let's gays get married, goes on pride marches and probably carries an iPhone. I don't get it.
The only thing needed to understand God and his evolution down the Millenia is that man creates God in his own image.
Yes, it's amazing how consistently those who interpret his message tell us that God's views on things accord with the norms of the elite of the day.
Hence the radical Nonconformist insistence on direct experience rather than second hand interpretation by powers that be.
The "elite of the day" don't like this of course, as they want control.
Why would a Tory try and create maximum problems for Sunak given where the Tories are in the polls? It’s sociopathic.
Because she's acting like a spoilt toddler throwing her toys out of the pram as she hasn't been given the bauble she wanted.
Next thread please.
I surprise myself sometimes and I do here. I feel a teeny bit sorry for Nadine. Seems she's been shafted by Boris (and not in the way she might have dreamt of). She does not merit a peerage but by recent standards it wouldn't be beyond the pale.
Not you as well! She was only shafted by Boris because she made the fatal mistake of worshipping him. Anybody who worships Boris obviously lacks both judgment and common sense, and is by definition unfit for a role in public life. Also, she's as daft as a brush (not always a bar, I grant you).
Nadine Dorries isn't materially more stupid than the average Tory MP, it's just that as a woman, and a Northern working class woman, she gets called out on it more. Of course she was dumb to believe a single thing that comes out of Boris Johnson's mouth, but she is hardly alone in having made that mistake - yes PB Tories I am talking about you!
I disagree, she would be in top 5% of Dumbasses in Westminster , despite huge competition.
Mr. HYUFD, some say the God of the Old Testament is just Zeus with a rebrand.
I would interpret this as our understanding of God evolving
Is the bit that I just don't get but hey good luck with it all. If it's luck, that is, and not predestination.
I don't think that an unusual concept, indeed most Churches would hold that, albeit in some disagreement of what that understanding should be.
Like many other things, it isn't linear progress, and there can be wrong turns and blind alleys along the way.
Oh absolutely and my apologies for making anything of it but I just don't get the god thing and hence it interests me when people use phrases such as you did "our understanding of god is evolving..."
I'll abide by my rules on what not to discuss henceforth...
I don't understand how God can evolve. Why does he need to? He's God, the main man. He's an old white bloke, long flowing hair and beard, a bit wrathful, likes women in their place, not a fan of the gays. Likes a bit of a disaster. Now? He's a woke lefty liberal who let's women be bishops, let's gays get married, goes on pride marches and probably carries an iPhone. I don't get it.
The only thing needed to understand God and his evolution down the Millenia is that man creates God in his own image.
*her* own image.
Jeez(us)
God might be a bit more civilised if women were creating her.
Maximum BMI of 30 sounds like an excellent idea for Rugby Union.
Isn't the other big problem that the players are so much fitter now that you either need to make the pitch bigger or reduce the number of players. Why not go down to 14 a side? Get rid of lifting in the lineouts and somehow sort out the scrums.
But rugby is a game for all shapes and sizes. Props of the old-fashioned club sort will often have a BMI over 30 without necessarily being a danger to life and limb of their opponents.
Mr. HYUFD, some say the God of the Old Testament is just Zeus with a rebrand.
I would interpret this as our understanding of God evolving
Is the bit that I just don't get but hey good luck with it all. If it's luck, that is, and not predestination.
I don't think that an unusual concept, indeed most Churches would hold that, albeit in some disagreement of what that understanding should be.
Like many other things, it isn't linear progress, and there can be wrong turns and blind alleys along the way.
Oh absolutely and my apologies for making anything of it but I just don't get the god thing and hence it interests me when people use phrases such as you did "our understanding of god is evolving..."
I'll abide by my rules on what not to discuss henceforth...
I don't understand how God can evolve. Why does he need to? He's God, the main man. He's an old white bloke, long flowing hair and beard, a bit wrathful, likes women in their place, not a fan of the gays. Likes a bit of a disaster. Now? He's a woke lefty liberal who let's women be bishops, let's gays get married, goes on pride marches and probably carries an iPhone. I don't get it.
The only thing needed to understand God and his evolution down the Millenia is that man creates God in his own image.
Yes, it's amazing how consistently those who interpret his message tell us that God's views on things accord with the norms of the elite of the day.
It is all a load of Bollocks, a crutch for insecure people.
As some of you may remember I was venting on here a few weeks ago re the inability to take unboxed bikes on Eurostar because of Brexit (i have no idea why because you can on a ferry so brexit doesn't sound like a good excuse to me). I go tomorrow. My journey now consists of 6 trains and a ferry and 2 days starting at 4 am tomorrow instead of just 3 trains leaving mid morning and arriving late afternoon the same day. And a lot, lot more expensive and huge opportunities for missing connections. Still it is there so has to be done (unless of course I spend the whole time in Calais, which is possible)
Anyway if it goes to plan I will be cycling from Poitier to ile d'Aix on the tiniest roads possible and then to Angouleme on Greeways. About 250 - 300 miles.
@kjh - I'm a fairly low-grade cyclist but interested in getting into cycling of that sort of scale. What bike do you use and do you carry your stuff on panniers, and how much can you carry? And how many days do you expect that to take?
I'm a low grade cyclist as well. I live in cycleland (the Surrey Hills) and the real cyclists go hammering past me. I don't wear lycra other than the shorts. The bike has not been out until a couple of weeks ago when I started practising. I have lost 8 kg for the trip and I look for routes that lack hills because I am over weight for a cyclist.
In terms of my bike it is a converted town bike, but with a pannier added, armoured and slightly thinner tyres and butterfly handlebars. Otherwise bog standard.
There are two of us. Typically we cycle about 50 miles a day everyday. Most I have done in a day is 70 miles and that was a killer.
I do it for the beer, wine and food and the views and I love planning it which takes 4 times as long as doing it (this time it was stressful though).
A route I would recommend is Bordeaux to Biarritz. Flat as a pancake, real solitude in places, fantastic views.
I have stayed in some fantastic B&Bs and small hostels in the middle of nowhere. Converted railway lines and river paths are good and are often well maintained in France.
I can get everything I need in 2 pannier bags for 9 days plus a bike bag between them for tools, maps, phone, gloves, glasses, etc. I might smell though.
Comments
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7813097/Andrew-Bailey-replaces-Mark-Carney-Bank-England-governor.html
And that is true whether Labour wins by a landslide or can barely scrape together a minority government. Rishi is out.
So it is of no benefit to "reduce the damage". It's a complete turnaround or hang on till the bitter end.
"Those LibDems you sold me, they won't mate! They just walk around all day Tweeting, and not mating. You sold me... queer LibDems - I want my money back!"
The Bank were asleep at the wheel and did not respond to world trends fast enough but inflation was an inevitable consequence of such low rates eventually, once the offsetting deflationary pressures had eased. This has affected our inflation but only marginally, most of it was built in by international factors beyond our control.
Our biggest problem is that we are still hooked on debt and beholden to the market to fund the standard of living we think we deserve. That is not really down to Bailey. As for this latest meme of a "Tory mortgage penalty", Lord save us. The degree of economic ignorance and misunderstanding it demonstrates does not bode well for the incoming government, it really doesn't.
I do accept however, as others have said, if you are in public life it might be imprudent.
Roll, pass, run, thud.
Roll, pass, run, thud.
Roll, pass, run, thud.
Roll, pass, run, thud.
Kick.
Roll, pass, run, thud...
Actually, I quite like rugby league as a spectator sport. It's better than football. But it's a bit limited. It's basically a training exercise for rugby union.
I like scrums and mauls. I lament that in rugby union scrums have been made less competitive (like in rugby league) and the length of time you can spend mauling has been reduced.
What you can't do is expect to turn up to Eurovision with a good song and win.
Now I don't really advocate that, but it was the era that I played, you could maul and if going forward, retain the put in. You could ruck, and if going forward, retained the put in. There was no debate about crossing - passes were always in front of players.
It may be bollocks, but it felt that the Southern hemisphere drove the law changes to remove the forward play elements of the game, in favour of the basketball style they prefered. And I think the game is poorer for it.
Albeit even an ordinary member of the public could face criminal charges now if they say something in public or on social media believed to constitute a death threat or harassment
On June 14th 1941 the occupying Soviet authorities ordered the deportation of over 10,000 people, including over 7,500 women and children to the camps of Siberia. Less than half returned and those that did were broken in spirit and in health. It was far from the only round of deportation, but it was one of the worst. Over the course of 1940-49 over a quarter of the population of Estonia was murdered, deported or fled to the West. Though the terror weakened after the death of Stalin in 1953, the oppression of the country continued, and resistance - even wearing the national colours of blue, black and white- could get you 25 years in the GULAG camps.
"Post" Soviet Russia has never acknowledged the scale of the tortures and murders that were committed, nor the vile Nazi-Soviet pact that they signed with Hitler to occupy the Baltic. Russia continues to hold onto, for example, the chain of office of the Pre-war President of Estonia as part of the "spoils of war".
The Estonians speak of this little- it is simply too painful to consider how cruel the deaths of so many totally innocent people really was.
To live well is the best revenge, and modern Estonia is prosperous and free. Russians, by contrast continue to bend the knee to a tin-pot tyrant and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers and increasing economic squalor is part of the result. However, Estonians do remember and until Russia repents and seeks the forgiveness of the world, then Estonia will remain an implacable foe of Putin and the murderous and criminal state that he leads. The continuing and outrageous crimes of the Russian war against Ukraine shows how far away Russia is from being a civilized state.
"Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream" and may the souls of the dead rest in peace.
Unless you are a fundy* Exodus is mythos not logos
Although the events can all be explained by physical events (eg the rivers of blood are likely an algae bloom) at its heart Exodus is a folk memory of a tribal migration. Whether various physical events occurred along the way who knows. Even if they did they could be explained by consequential events (eg algae bloom > less oxygen in water > fish die and frogs migrate to land; locust swarms triggered by weather patterns in the Indian Ocean eat all the crops > cattle die > flies > pestilence etc)
Exodus is not meant to be read literally
* in the C19 American sense of insisting on a literal reading of the Bible
The OT God evolves from a partisan and bloodthirsty tribal deity into a more ethereal and remote being, even within the book of Genesis, and even more so by the OT prophets.
I would interpret this as our understanding of God evolving rather than the being themself. I see no reason too for that evolving understanding to end when the Apostolic period ended. There are always new insights and understandings as well as revisions of old understandings.
To interpret the texts literally is to misunderstand them. They are a web of history, theology, poetry and parable intertwined.
If things go well on their watch, a government takes the credit, even if it's nothing to do with them or it stores up problems for the future.
If they go badly, the government cops the blame, even if it's not their fault.
Fair or not, that's the deal politicians and voters have. It's the price for pretending governments have more control than they do.
I immediately formed a maul. Later on, he ran up and asked what I was l was playing at. "I could have done that," he said.
"Yes, Ged,"I said. "But not as well."
They had Hannan to provide a theoretical framework for Brexit (it was dumb, but it existed). They now have Goodwin to provide a theoretical framework for a culture war, but they do not know and do not care how to run a country (see their ongoing failure on immigration). They live in a world where food comes in a van and complaining works. They are idiots in the way that only rich people can be - voluntarily.
As for the suggestion that Yahweh is just a reskinned Zeus, I have also heard that it could have originated as another volcano cult - Sinai was probably active at some point in the last 10,000 years, and so local religions probably worshipped that. It is also noticeable that early Jewish / Yahweh worship likely would have been polytheistic / henotheistic - with the commandment of "you shall have no other god before me" as an acceptance that other gods exist, but that Yahweh was the primary god of the Israelites. This was more common before polytheism, as certain areas would have a founder god / primary patron deity (think Romulus for Rome) and then a lot of other deities for specific things, and even specific families (if my memory is correct a lot of other idols have been found in old temples to Yahweh that also resemble contemporary cults, such as Mithridates). You can see an evolution from animism to polytheism to henotheism to monotheism, with early Judaism and Christianity as intermediator stages from henotheism to monotheism (the trinity kind of acts as a henotheism and monotheism at the same time, by taking what previously would have been understood as separate angels / lesser deities / servants of Yahweh and combining them into a singular God who is all of them and one at the same time).
Here we have the deputy property editor of the Times casually admitting he's on an interest only mortgage while bewailing rising mortgage costs:
https://twitter.com/davidbyers26/status/1667778168499974144?cxt=HHwWgMC9mY7akaUuAAAA
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1173494/
https://twitter.com/jruddy99/status/1668878436213960704
For expat BBC2 quiz fans, presumably.
Utterly madness!
A problem with any 'go for growth' strategy is that it doesn't align with what many people want.
And what do people want ?
A job, a house, a lifestyle, a better lifestyle.
But after a while that better lifestyle doesn't come from having more money it comes from having more free time.
So ultimately, for most people, having more money makes you want to work less not more.
I do admit that modern rugby is a better spectacle. But there is more to sport than spectacle. You need to be able to feel that the right things are being rewarded. The balance between attacker and defender has been tilted a bit too far in the interest of the attacker; and it's quite hard now, as a spectator, to be able to tell whether a turnover is legal or not.
I also liked the amateurism of 1991. Though that can no longer be put back in the bottle and arguably was never really fully in the bottle in the first place, which was why it was let out.
Henotheism...A term coined by the Indologist Max Müller in an attempt to convey his idea that each deity in the apparently polytheistic Vedic pantheon was actually experienced as supreme when focused on by a particular individual. It is adherence to one particular god out of several, especially by a family, tribe, or other group. Analogous to football team supporters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henotheism
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095930851
Like many other things, it isn't linear progress, and there can be wrong turns and blind alleys along the way.
I'll abide by my rules on what not to discuss henceforth...
https://www.lihpao.com/comprehensive-instructions-on-installing-solar-panels-in-2023-2/
is going to be everywhere from now on. Behold the future of mankind: searching for nuggets of content in a sea of LLM / Stable Diffusion generated garbage.
There's no entitlement to a peerage - the very idea is absurd - and she's rarely been restrained in celebrating the disappointments of others.
It's not as though this condemns her to a life of poverty, or any such thing. Just irrelevance.
My Grandfather's cigarette case that I keep in my breast pocket saved me anyway.
Anyway, that's what looks likely is going to happen to the internet, the noise is going to be cracked up so high that finding any signal will be nigh on impossible.
Perhaps it's time to go back to curating link lists, so that people can find useful websites from people they trust?
Anyway if it goes to plan I will be cycling from Poitier to ile d'Aix on the tiniest roads possible and then to Angouleme on Greeways. About 250 - 300 miles.
If you think viability is the only relevant part of this debate, you're wrong. You might wish to discount other elements from your reasoning, and that's fine, but that doesn't mean other people should.
The main problem with viability is that is smuggles "should" under the cloak of "could". Just because something is possible, doesn't mean it's desirable.
One of the apparent abilities of AIs is the ability to fairly convincingly simulate empathy.
That's going to be very dangerous indeed, if not impossible for the conduct of democracy, as political discourse gets flooded with this stuff.
If Nads holds off on her resignation it leaves the Lib Dems free to pump the seat also so it becomes a potential Lib Dem gain even though I think that's odds against too.
Also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_of_Other_Days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past
https://twitter.com/jamisonfoser/status/1668813086789353475
According to the polling cited in this very article, a plurality of Americans think the indictment was justified.
So why isn't the headline "Will Voters Give Biden Credit for Trump's Indictment"?..
...
(voters *shouldn't* give Biden credit for Trump's indictment; he had nothing to do with it. I'm illustrating the deep bias in this headline; the version that is actually consistent with public opinion is not one any journalist would ever think to write.)
Isn't the other big problem that the players are so much fitter now that you either need to make the pitch bigger or reduce the number of players. Why not go down to 14 a side? Get rid of lifting in the lineouts and somehow sort out the scrums.
Jeez(us)
I guess we also still haven't seen the outcome of the indictment - if a plurality are happy with the outcome, maybe Biden will get credit. I think it is more likely most people will be dissatisfied - the GOP supporters will see it as unacceptable that Trump was indicted in the first place and it is unlikely that the court will throw the book at Trump and give him the maximum (or even the realistic) sentence he deserves, therefore disappointing Democratic supporters.
Thanks for the links. I didn't realise the Clarke/Baxter novel had antecedents.
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1668911534184038403
The brakes are junk but you aren't going to be going that fast anyway.
So God didn't intervene to prevent the Nazis.
He didn't intervene to prevent the Holocaust.
But he did intervene to ensure the Allies won the war?
Ooookkkkaaayyy ..
I seriously hope you're trolling us now as that's the nuttiest thing I've ever seen from you and that's saying something.
The "elite of the day" don't like this of course, as they want control.
https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1668905434910978050
In terms of my bike it is a converted town bike, but with a pannier added, armoured and slightly thinner tyres and butterfly handlebars. Otherwise bog standard.
There are two of us. Typically we cycle about 50 miles a day everyday. Most I have done in a day is 70 miles and that was a killer.
I do it for the beer, wine and food and the views and I love planning it which takes 4 times as long as doing it (this time it was stressful though).
A route I would recommend is Bordeaux to Biarritz. Flat as a pancake, real solitude in places, fantastic views.
I have stayed in some fantastic B&Bs and small hostels in the middle of nowhere. Converted railway lines and river paths are good and are often well maintained in France.
I can get everything I need in 2 pannier bags for 9 days plus a bike bag between them for tools, maps, phone, gloves, glasses, etc. I might smell though.