The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Where do you get you list of “ majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists” ?
Because the claimed views don’t seem to match polling, voting or any other definition of “majority”
You made an excellent point about how plants are - effectively - little solar power stations, converting the sun's radiation into biomass.
And it's true! They are.
The efficiency of photosynthesis ranges, depending on the vegetation, from 0.1% to about 2%. Modern factory farmed crops that have been engineered for efficiency are closer to 2%. Nature's own inventions tend to be at the bottom end of the range.
By contrast, the latest solar panels achieve efficiencies are close to 20%, with some super efficient models managing as high as 23-24%.
With a lot of vegetation, though, as it decomposes it gives off that solar energy as heat and releases the CO2 it captured during the growth process. So, unless you can bury the organic material, put it under enormous pressure and starve of it of oxygen*, then you end up releasing all that energy back into the atmosphere and undoing all the good work of photosynthesis.
* Trees also work.
Otherwise known as a peat bog - although you don't actually need enormous pressure.
We have two in the Flatlands in dire need of restoration.
BBC Twitter Sussex “Boy left unclothed after Burgess Hill sexual assault by two women”
Which gets even *weirder* when you read the deets
“Both women were between 18 and 20 years old, one being 6ft 3in (1.9m) tall and with bright dyed red hair. She was wearing blue shorts and black crop top with pink Air Jordan trainers, and had glasses, a police spokesman said. The other was about 5ft 9in (1.75m) tall with long white blonde hair and spoke with a Merseyside accent.”
Sad I missed the ULEZ battle earlier. It's a load of pearl clutching from SUV owners who think they are next (they are) plus anti-vax 5G weirdos.
The false concern for poor people is cringeworthy. 30% of people don't have access to a car. That rises to 60% for people on low incomes. These people tend to live in the areas with highest air pollution too.
People also flippantly claim this is an attack on disabled people. Again, low car ownership in that cohort. If you really cared about disabled people, you'd been torching every car that sits on a pavement.
This is different for people in rural areas. That's why ULEZ is fair - it goes after polluters in cities, rather than where older cars or vans might be essential for survival. On that basis, I'd scrap VED, fuel duty etc and replace with congestion charging only. 60% of all car commutes in Edinburgh are less than 6 miles. 30% are less than 5.
30% are less than 3 miles* (converting to imperial for PB...)
I am not giving up my SUV for any quinoa munching sandal wearer.
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
You need a single-ear sports earpiece. They attach to one ear and you can Cycle just fine because you can hear the road noise. A good one costs about a tenner and they make cycling and running so much less tedious.
I actually like Boris-biking through London with all senses focused on the cycling and my surroundings; outside London likewise, actually. Always something to see or take in. Especially in London over the bridges, along the embankment, etc.
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Where do you get you list of “ majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists” ?
Because the claimed views don’t seem to match polling, voting or any other definition of “majority”
Well, the left is highly underrepresented in the most obvious modern English nationalist movements.
Look at the English Democrats, for instance. They have been the most electorally successful English nationalist group ; A mighty odd lot of coves. Billy Bragg is really the only well-known modern left-wing "Anglicist" figure than I can think of, at all. The rest of the most politically organised " Anglicists " tend to be mainly nutters.
Oh, well, I'm glad that the genius Elon Musk took over Twitter to make it such a better platform...
How are the Musk defenders doing atm, anyway? Still want to claim tech daddy is a business genius / knows his arse from his elbow?
The fixation that some progressives have with starting a culture war over Elon Musk is quite bizarre.
I have no desire to start a culture war over Elon Musk - he is just such a great example of the great lie that capitalism is a meritocratic system that rewards hard work, ingenuity and good ideas and also a great example of how it actually replicates intergenerational wealth and allows rich people to have a significant influence on the lives of millions of people across the planet. He bought twitter, a platform that has been used by countless independent journalists, activists and just average people to organise, investigate and talk to each other and he has, time and time again, made it a worse and worse experience to use. He has proven that his wealth and his ability to leverage it is a social negative.
Twitter was build using venture capital based on the promise of selling advertising to target consumers. If you are using that as an example of something precious that is threatened by capitalism then you are hopelessly confused.
the Brazilians for Bolsonaro, the Israelis for Netanyahu, the Germans who vote AfD and the Russians who voted for Putin and Spanish for Vox or even the Scots who vote SNP or Irish SF, English nationalism is just a damp squib
I've told you BEFORE, dick-wad:
Only 37% of Indians voted for Modi (in a country that is 80% Hindu).
Well yes, but only 37% also voted for Brexit, or in fact less because of who chose to vote.
The Brexiters are still a reasonable sized constituency.
No, you misunderstand: the 37% is 37% of those who voted in the Indian GE of 2019, NOT the total Indian electorate. 80% refers to the Hindu % of the total Indian population at Census 2011.
I'm currently listening to the Slate podcast* on the Watergate scandal (Slow Burn) and it is absolutely outstanding. I highly recommend it, and I can absolutely guarantee that - however much you think you know about it - you will learn a lot.
* I have a swimming MP3 player. It makes long swims an almost transcendental experience.
What's the swimming MP3?
I love swimming but find it, simultaneously, very boring. This would be a gamechanger
It is a complete gamechanger. Before, swimming was very boring. Now, I just listen to a podcast and zone out. Then - bam - you realise you've done 60 lengths.
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Don't you mean nonconformists, such as the Wesleyans and Independents? Or am I missing something?
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
You need a single-ear sports earpiece. They attach to one ear and you can Cycle just fine because you can hear the road noise. A good one costs about a tenner and they make cycling and running so much less tedious.
I actually like Boris-biking through London with all senses focused on the cycling and my surroundings; outside London likewise, actually. Always something to see or take in. Especially in London over the bridges, along the embankment, etc.
I think that the loss of awareness from wearing noise blocking headphones is a serious cause of various types of accident.
IIRC there is some science on this - to the point that it may be next on banned list for driving.
Blessing now from the Chief Imam, Honorary Hindu Priest and a Rabbi and Buddhist Temple director on the King and Queen
I do have a bit of sympathy for old jug ears. It must be pretty tedious doing this sort of thing. The worst of it must be knowing that other than the partially lobotomised, nobody cares.
The streets were packed in Edinburgh today and most of them were monarchists, plenty care including me
You made an excellent point about how plants are - effectively - little solar power stations, converting the sun's radiation into biomass.
And it's true! They are.
The efficiency of photosynthesis ranges, depending on the vegetation, from 0.1% to about 2%. Modern factory farmed crops that have been engineered for efficiency are closer to 2%. Nature's own inventions tend to be at the bottom end of the range.
By contrast, the latest solar panels achieve efficiencies are close to 20%, with some super efficient models managing as high as 23-24%.
With a lot of vegetation, though, as it decomposes it gives off that solar energy as heat and releases the CO2 it captured during the growth process. So, unless you can bury the organic material, put it under enormous pressure and starve of it of oxygen*, then you end up releasing all that energy back into the atmosphere and undoing all the good work of photosynthesis.
* Trees also work.
Well that's interesting. I'd had no idea nature would be that inefficient. You'd have thought natural selection would, by now, have managed a bit better than that.
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Don't you mean nonconformists, such as the Wesleyans and Independents? Or am I missing something?
Yes, sorry ! Ofcourse. The long English tradition of religious Nonconformism.
Interesting developments overnight, each seemingly as a consequence of the war against cars meeting political reality.
No 1
Cambridge City Council elects a Conservative for the first time since 2012! The Conservative's fought this by-election on a platform of scrapping the city's proposed congestion charge - Labour, LDs & Greens all said they would reform, not scrap it.
King's Hedges (Cambridge) Council By-Election Result:
Wow. The first election leaflet I ever wrote was for Kings Hedges ward, back when it was solid Labour, and in the days when you used a typewriter and letraset for the headlines. When you ran out of a certain letter the fun was trying to make it from rubbing down bits of other letters.
You made an excellent point about how plants are - effectively - little solar power stations, converting the sun's radiation into biomass.
And it's true! They are.
The efficiency of photosynthesis ranges, depending on the vegetation, from 0.1% to about 2%. Modern factory farmed crops that have been engineered for efficiency are closer to 2%. Nature's own inventions tend to be at the bottom end of the range.
By contrast, the latest solar panels achieve efficiencies are close to 20%, with some super efficient models managing as high as 23-24%.
With a lot of vegetation, though, as it decomposes it gives off that solar energy as heat and releases the CO2 it captured during the growth process. So, unless you can bury the organic material, put it under enormous pressure and starve of it of oxygen*, then you end up releasing all that energy back into the atmosphere and undoing all the good work of photosynthesis.
* Trees also work.
Well that's interesting. I'd had no idea nature would be that inefficient. You'd have thought natural selection would, by now, have managed a bit better than that.
Is King Charles III the first King of Scotland since Idi Amin?
You don't have a King of Scotland, the people are sovereign, you have A king of Scots and only if they have been crowned at Scone and taken an oathof feilty to the Scots.
I'm currently listening to the Slate podcast* on the Watergate scandal (Slow Burn) and it is absolutely outstanding. I highly recommend it, and I can absolutely guarantee that - however much you think you know about it - you will learn a lot.
* I have a swimming MP3 player. It makes long swims an almost transcendental experience.
What's the swimming MP3?
I love swimming but find it, simultaneously, very boring. This would be a gamechanger
It is a complete gamechanger. Before, swimming was very boring. Now, I just listen to a podcast and zone out. Then - bam - you realise you've done 60 lengths.
Fantastic, ta
I've got so bored of swimming I've actually switched to the gym - because at the gym I can listen to podcasts and audiobooks or even watch TV
But ultimately I prefer swimming as exercise. This could be transformative!
Seems to me to be a case of "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is". Except Toyota are a legitimate company so are they really just trying to blow smoke?
If it's genuine then it seems a real game changer. But if it is, is a big if.
You made an excellent point about how plants are - effectively - little solar power stations, converting the sun's radiation into biomass.
And it's true! They are.
The efficiency of photosynthesis ranges, depending on the vegetation, from 0.1% to about 2%. Modern factory farmed crops that have been engineered for efficiency are closer to 2%. Nature's own inventions tend to be at the bottom end of the range.
By contrast, the latest solar panels achieve efficiencies are close to 20%, with some super efficient models managing as high as 23-24%.
With a lot of vegetation, though, as it decomposes it gives off that solar energy as heat and releases the CO2 it captured during the growth process. So, unless you can bury the organic material, put it under enormous pressure and starve of it of oxygen*, then you end up releasing all that energy back into the atmosphere and undoing all the good work of photosynthesis.
* Trees also work.
Well that's interesting. I'd had no idea nature would be that inefficient. You'd have thought natural selection would, by now, have managed a bit better than that.
Not a fair comparison, surely? The photosynthetic process includes storing the energy as carbohydrate (by definition of photosynthesis). That is absent from the solar cell comparison. You need to include batteries or storage as H2 or whatever.
Of course, tech allows the cells and batteries to work in various solid and/or toxic liquid states, which are impossible for plants.
I'm currently listening to the Slate podcast* on the Watergate scandal (Slow Burn) and it is absolutely outstanding. I highly recommend it, and I can absolutely guarantee that - however much you think you know about it - you will learn a lot.
* I have a swimming MP3 player. It makes long swims an almost transcendental experience.
What's the swimming MP3?
I love swimming but find it, simultaneously, very boring. This would be a gamechanger
It is a complete gamechanger. Before, swimming was very boring. Now, I just listen to a podcast and zone out. Then - bam - you realise you've done 60 lengths.
Fantastic, ta
I've got so bored of swimming I've actually switched to the gym - because at the gym I can listen to podcasts and audiobooks or even watch TV
But ultimately I prefer swimming as exercise. This could be transformative!
Bored with.
Tsk.
Just as well you have a physical job and not something that requires writing skills, eh?
Oh, well, I'm glad that the genius Elon Musk took over Twitter to make it such a better platform...
How are the Musk defenders doing atm, anyway? Still want to claim tech daddy is a business genius / knows his arse from his elbow?
The fixation that some progressives have with starting a culture war over Elon Musk is quite bizarre.
I have no desire to start a culture war over Elon Musk - he is just such a great example of the great lie that capitalism is a meritocratic system that rewards hard work, ingenuity and good ideas and also a great example of how it actually replicates intergenerational wealth and allows rich people to have a significant influence on the lives of millions of people across the planet. He bought twitter, a platform that has been used by countless independent journalists, activists and just average people to organise, investigate and talk to each other and he has, time and time again, made it a worse and worse experience to use. He has proven that his wealth and his ability to leverage it is a social negative.
Twitter was build using venture capital based on the promise of selling advertising to target consumers. If you are using that as an example of something precious that is threatened by capitalism then you are hopelessly confused.
1.Social media platform gets big because it offers users what they want (e.g. a digital space you can hang out with friends)
2. Then once it's captured the lion's share of the market, the platform becomes bad for users and good for advertisers (less of your friends content, more of the crap advertisers are trying to push)
3. Then, once you have the advertisers locked in, you screw them over too (not reaching enough users on our crappy platform? oh, it's not all the crappy content we're serving them, it's because you're not paying for this premium service to boost your post over all the other posts...)
This is what has happened to more or less every big online service over the years, from Facebook and Instagram, the term "enshittification" comes from people saying it is now happening to TikTok, it has also happened to amazon and google as useful searches get buried under paid content.
PB will outlast them all, fundamentally, because it's never gone past stage 1 - giving users what they want (a place to argue about politics, and cricket).
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Don't you mean nonconformists, such as the Wesleyans and Independents? Or am I missing something?
Yes, sorry ! Ofcourse. The long English tradition of religious Nonconformism.
A lot to be proud of there.
Indeed. The Quakers and Unitarians are also very interesting.
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
Swimming is great physical and mental exercise. I love it. However I also hate it, as it is so numbingly dull. I've ALWAYS wanted to find a genuine waterproof MP3 player. I wonder if @rcs1000 is talking about something like this:
The interesting thing about swimming is either you can or you can't. Throughout the years I have prided myself on being, ahem, quite - let's say very fit. All kinds of exercise/activities without breaking too much of a sweat or at least seeing it through while still in control.
But one length of swimming front crawl breathing every three or even two arm raises, or whatever they're called, and I'm fucked. I'm the idiot standing or treading water at the end of the pool after each and every length clawing for air while these 5'2" 15 stone folk happily swim length after length after length like sleek amphibians.
Yes it's unusual. I've seen guys like you - no offense - apparently very athletic, yet absolutely useless at swimming (and also rich and educated so it's not like they never learned). I've no doubt that they'd - like you - would beat me at every single other physical exercise, yet I can power past them in the pool
The particular advantage for me in swimming is that it is kind on the knees. As I advance in years, my knees are the dodgiest bits. They creak, and sometimes cause me pain. Not in a pool
That's the third significant concrete example I've seen of the tech sector favouring the UK over the EU as a result of Brexit.
Benefit? They just want to be allowed to mine your data and sell it with as little interference from regulators as possible.
It is a benefit - but not for the end users.
That they can do that in the UK but not the EU absolutely is a Brexit benefit.
Bring on deregulation. Well done Brexit Britain.
If HMG insisted that everyone eat live tapeworm larvae as a result of liberalisation from the EU, you'd claim was a benefit. Shame it's a benefit to the tapeworms.
Oh, well, I'm glad that the genius Elon Musk took over Twitter to make it such a better platform...
How are the Musk defenders doing atm, anyway? Still want to claim tech daddy is a business genius / knows his arse from his elbow?
The fixation that some progressives have with starting a culture war over Elon Musk is quite bizarre.
I have no desire to start a culture war over Elon Musk - he is just such a great example of the great lie that capitalism is a meritocratic system that rewards hard work, ingenuity and good ideas and also a great example of how it actually replicates intergenerational wealth and allows rich people to have a significant influence on the lives of millions of people across the planet. He bought twitter, a platform that has been used by countless independent journalists, activists and just average people to organise, investigate and talk to each other and he has, time and time again, made it a worse and worse experience to use. He has proven that his wealth and his ability to leverage it is a social negative.
Twitter was build using venture capital based on the promise of selling advertising to target consumers. If you are using that as an example of something precious that is threatened by capitalism then you are hopelessly confused.
1.Social media platform gets big because it offers users what they want (e.g. a digital space you can hang out with friends)
2. Then once it's captured the lion's share of the market, the platform becomes bad for users and good for advertisers (less of your friends content, more of the crap advertisers are trying to push)
3. Then, once you have the advertisers locked in, you screw them over too (not reaching enough users on our crappy platform? oh, it's not all the crappy content we're serving them, it's because you're not paying for this premium service to boost your post over all the other posts...)
This is what has happened to more or less every big online service over the years, from Facebook and Instagram, the term "enshittification" comes from people saying it is now happening to TikTok, it has also happened to amazon and google as useful searches get buried under paid content.
PB will outlast them all, fundamentally, because it's never gone past stage 1 - giving users what they want (a place to argue about politics, and cricket).
You made an excellent point about how plants are - effectively - little solar power stations, converting the sun's radiation into biomass.
And it's true! They are.
The efficiency of photosynthesis ranges, depending on the vegetation, from 0.1% to about 2%. Modern factory farmed crops that have been engineered for efficiency are closer to 2%. Nature's own inventions tend to be at the bottom end of the range.
By contrast, the latest solar panels achieve efficiencies are close to 20%, with some super efficient models managing as high as 23-24%.
With a lot of vegetation, though, as it decomposes it gives off that solar energy as heat and releases the CO2 it captured during the growth process. So, unless you can bury the organic material, put it under enormous pressure and starve of it of oxygen*, then you end up releasing all that energy back into the atmosphere and undoing all the good work of photosynthesis.
* Trees also work.
Well that's interesting. I'd had no idea nature would be that inefficient. You'd have thought natural selection would, by now, have managed a bit better than that.
Not a fair comparison, surely? The photosynthetic process includes storing the energy as carbohydrate (by definition of photosynthesis). That is absent from the solar cell comparison. You need to include batteries or storage as H2 or whatever.
Of course, tech allows the cells and batteries to work in various solid and/or toxic liquid states, which are impossible for plants.
Edit: also need to allow for life cycle costs. The plants produce their own plant, so to speak. But solar cells and power lines ...
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
Swimming is great physical and mental exercise. I love it. However I also hate it, as it is so numbingly dull. I've ALWAYS wanted to find a genuine waterproof MP3 player. I wonder if @rcs1000 is talking about something like this:
The interesting thing about swimming is either you can or you can't. Throughout the years I have prided myself on being, ahem, quite - let's say very fit. All kinds of exercise/activities without breaking too much of a sweat or at least seeing it through while still in control.
But one length of swimming front crawl breathing every three or even two arm raises, or whatever they're called, and I'm fucked. I'm the idiot standing or treading water at the end of the pool after each and every length clawing for air while these 5'2" 15 stone folk happily swim length after length after length like sleek amphibians.
Yes it's unusual. I've seen guys like you - no offense - apparently very athletic, yet absolutely useless at swimming (and also rich and educated so it's not like they never learned). I've no doubt that they'd - like you - would beat me at every single other physical exercise, yet I can power past them in the pool
The particular advantage for me in swimming is that it is kind on the knees. As I advance in years, my knees are the dodgiest bits. They creak, and sometimes cause me pain. Not in a pool
It's all breathing. For a long time, I favoured back stroke as that was the only one I could do really well, due to the breathing being more flexible. Was in my 30s before I mastered front crawl (my now wife first mocked me, then taught me, once she'd stopped laughing*)
*which, ironically enough, caused her to also have breathing difficulties
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, well, I'm glad that the genius Elon Musk took over Twitter to make it such a better platform...
How are the Musk defenders doing atm, anyway? Still want to claim tech daddy is a business genius / knows his arse from his elbow?
The fixation that some progressives have with starting a culture war over Elon Musk is quite bizarre.
I have no desire to start a culture war over Elon Musk - he is just such a great example of the great lie that capitalism is a meritocratic system that rewards hard work, ingenuity and good ideas and also a great example of how it actually replicates intergenerational wealth and allows rich people to have a significant influence on the lives of millions of people across the planet. He bought twitter, a platform that has been used by countless independent journalists, activists and just average people to organise, investigate and talk to each other and he has, time and time again, made it a worse and worse experience to use. He has proven that his wealth and his ability to leverage it is a social negative.
Twitter was build using venture capital based on the promise of selling advertising to target consumers. If you are using that as an example of something precious that is threatened by capitalism then you are hopelessly confused.
1.Social media platform gets big because it offers users what they want (e.g. a digital space you can hang out with friends)
2. Then once it's captured the lion's share of the market, the platform becomes bad for users and good for advertisers (less of your friends content, more of the crap advertisers are trying to push)
3. Then, once you have the advertisers locked in, you screw them over too (not reaching enough users on our crappy platform? oh, it's not all the crappy content we're serving them, it's because you're not paying for this premium service to boost your post over all the other posts...)
This is what has happened to more or less every big online service over the years, from Facebook and Instagram, the term "enshittification" comes from people saying it is now happening to TikTok, it has also happened to amazon and google as useful searches get buried under paid content.
PB will outlast them all, fundamentally, because it's never gone past stage 1 - giving users what they want (a place to argue about politics, and cricket).
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
Swimming is great physical and mental exercise. I love it. However I also hate it, as it is so numbingly dull. I've ALWAYS wanted to find a genuine waterproof MP3 player. I wonder if @rcs1000 is talking about something like this:
The interesting thing about swimming is either you can or you can't. Throughout the years I have prided myself on being, ahem, quite - let's say very fit. All kinds of exercise/activities without breaking too much of a sweat or at least seeing it through while still in control.
But one length of swimming front crawl breathing every three or even two arm raises, or whatever they're called, and I'm fucked. I'm the idiot standing or treading water at the end of the pool after each and every length clawing for air while these 5'2" 15 stone folk happily swim length after length after length like sleek amphibians.
Yes it's unusual. I've seen guys like you - no offense - apparently very athletic, yet absolutely useless at swimming (and also rich and educated so it's not like they never learned). I've no doubt that they'd - like you - would beat me at every single other physical exercise, yet I can power past them in the pool
The particular advantage for me in swimming is that it is kind on the knees. As I advance in years, my knees are the dodgiest bits. They creak, and sometimes cause me pain. Not in a pool
Sit with your legs sticking out (one at a time) in a chair. While you bone up on your spelling.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
Swimming is great physical and mental exercise. I love it. However I also hate it, as it is so numbingly dull. I've ALWAYS wanted to find a genuine waterproof MP3 player. I wonder if @rcs1000 is talking about something like this:
The interesting thing about swimming is either you can or you can't. Throughout the years I have prided myself on being, ahem, quite - let's say very fit. All kinds of exercise/activities without breaking too much of a sweat or at least seeing it through while still in control.
But one length of swimming front crawl breathing every three or even two arm raises, or whatever they're called, and I'm fucked. I'm the idiot standing or treading water at the end of the pool after each and every length clawing for air while these 5'2" 15 stone folk happily swim length after length after length like sleek amphibians.
Yes it's unusual. I've seen guys like you - no offense - apparently very athletic, yet absolutely useless at swimming (and also rich and educated so it's not like they never learned). I've no doubt that they'd - like you - would beat me at every single other physical exercise, yet I can power past them in the pool
The particular advantage for me in swimming is that it is kind on the knees. As I advance in years, my knees are the dodgiest bits. They creak, and sometimes cause me pain. Not in a pool
It's all breathing. For a long time, I favoured back stroke as that was the only one I could do really well, due to the breathing being more flexible. Was in my 30s before I mastered front crawl (my now wife first mocked me, then taught me, once she'd stopped laughing*)
*which, ironically enough, caused her to also have breathing difficulties
For me it was breaststroke. Took me til my 30s - like you - to get it right, Now I mainly use that but mix it up with a dash of front crawl for excitement and variation. I'm good at front crawl but don;t want to do it for fifty lengths
Probaby my best stroke tho is back stroke, but the problem is, unless you have the pool to youself you are gonna hit someone
Butterfly has always been entirely beyond me. A stupid idea
That's the third significant concrete example I've seen of the tech sector favouring the UK over the EU as a result of Brexit.
Benefit? They just want to be allowed to mine your data and sell it with as little interference from regulators as possible.
It is a benefit - but not for the end users.
That they can do that in the UK but not the EU absolutely is a Brexit benefit.
Bring on deregulation. Well done Brexit Britain.
If HMG insisted that everyone eat live tapeworm larvae as a result of liberalisation from the EU, you'd claim was a benefit. Shame it's a benefit to the tapeworms.
That multinationals want to be based in the UK, hiring staff here and paying taxes here, absolutely is in the UKs interests.
As far as the data is concerned there's a very simple way to keep your data private too. If you don't want Meta to have your data, don't use their services.
You made an excellent point about how plants are - effectively - little solar power stations, converting the sun's radiation into biomass.
And it's true! They are.
The efficiency of photosynthesis ranges, depending on the vegetation, from 0.1% to about 2%. Modern factory farmed crops that have been engineered for efficiency are closer to 2%. Nature's own inventions tend to be at the bottom end of the range.
By contrast, the latest solar panels achieve efficiencies are close to 20%, with some super efficient models managing as high as 23-24%.
With a lot of vegetation, though, as it decomposes it gives off that solar energy as heat and releases the CO2 it captured during the growth process. So, unless you can bury the organic material, put it under enormous pressure and starve of it of oxygen*, then you end up releasing all that energy back into the atmosphere and undoing all the good work of photosynthesis.
* Trees also work.
Well that's interesting. I'd had no idea nature would be that inefficient. You'd have thought natural selection would, by now, have managed a bit better than that.
It's the combination of things you need for photosynthesis that causes the problem, especially the compromise between absorbing enough carbon dioxide through the leaves and water through the roots (especially since water will go out through the holes where the carbon dioxide goes in).
It's why a greenhouse with elevated levels of CO₂ is a useful strategy for growing crops quickly, as the Dutch have worked out; they use about 800 ppm, around twice the current atmospheric level. (Probably not so useful in the whole atmosphere, because of the other harms.)
Which in turn is why crops still go tolerably well in the partial shade under solar panel arrays; unless it's really gloomy, light levels aren't the limiting factor for plant growth. (And also why solar panels are a better bet for converting light into energy- that is a one thing in, one thing out process, which is much easier to optimise.)
Seems to me to be a case of "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is". Except Toyota are a legitimate company so are they really just trying to blow smoke?
If it's genuine then it seems a real game changer. But if it is, is a big if.
It’s an output from their prototype factory.
Mercedes have built a prototype EV car with a 1,200km range, which is quite astonishing, and genuinely game-changing. But it was hand-built by the guys who build the F1 car, and the battery is passively cooled which brings its own issues. Awesome demonstrator though. https://youtube.com/watch?v=hFrKzH2UZ1c
You made an excellent point about how plants are - effectively - little solar power stations, converting the sun's radiation into biomass.
And it's true! They are.
The efficiency of photosynthesis ranges, depending on the vegetation, from 0.1% to about 2%. Modern factory farmed crops that have been engineered for efficiency are closer to 2%. Nature's own inventions tend to be at the bottom end of the range.
By contrast, the latest solar panels achieve efficiencies are close to 20%, with some super efficient models managing as high as 23-24%.
With a lot of vegetation, though, as it decomposes it gives off that solar energy as heat and releases the CO2 it captured during the growth process. So, unless you can bury the organic material, put it under enormous pressure and starve of it of oxygen*, then you end up releasing all that energy back into the atmosphere and undoing all the good work of photosynthesis.
* Trees also work.
Well that's interesting. I'd had no idea nature would be that inefficient. You'd have thought natural selection would, by now, have managed a bit better than that.
Energy efficiency is not as important as discouraging critters from eating you!
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Wasn't Merrie England an invention of Professor Welch?
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
ONS and OSR are different bodies, although both under UKSA, I believe. The ONS would have no business commenting on statistics not produced by themselves. That is, explicitly, the OSR's role.
On the substantive point, these schemes should aim to be revenue neutral, with e.g. all funds raised ploughed back into transport infrastructure (including supporting transition to compliant vehicles).
That's the third significant concrete example I've seen of the tech sector favouring the UK over the EU as a result of Brexit.
Benefit? They just want to be allowed to mine your data and sell it with as little interference from regulators as possible.
It is a benefit - but not for the end users.
That they can do that in the UK but not the EU absolutely is a Brexit benefit.
Bring on deregulation. Well done Brexit Britain.
If HMG insisted that everyone eat live tapeworm larvae as a result of liberalisation from the EU, you'd claim was a benefit. Shame it's a benefit to the tapeworms.
That multinationals want to be based in the UK, hiring staff here and paying taxes here, absolutely is in the UKs interests.
As far as the data is concerned there's a very simple way to keep your data private too. If you don't want Meta to have your data, don't use their services.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Wasn't Merrie England an invention of Professor Welch?
Indeed, and a romanticised idyll long before that.
But it also reflects an important strain of English democratic thinking and dissent, because it was just such an idyll, or dream.
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
Swimming is great physical and mental exercise. I love it. However I also hate it, as it is so numbingly dull. I've ALWAYS wanted to find a genuine waterproof MP3 player. I wonder if @rcs1000 is talking about something like this:
The interesting thing about swimming is either you can or you can't. Throughout the years I have prided myself on being, ahem, quite - let's say very fit. All kinds of exercise/activities without breaking too much of a sweat or at least seeing it through while still in control.
But one length of swimming front crawl breathing every three or even two arm raises, or whatever they're called, and I'm fucked. I'm the idiot standing or treading water at the end of the pool after each and every length clawing for air while these 5'2" 15 stone folk happily swim length after length after length like sleek amphibians.
I was like you. I could barely (if at all) swim a length of the pool with front crawl. And breast stroke? Forget about it.
Then one holiday almost exactly 10 years ago, in the hotel pool, I would see how far I could swim (front crawl). Then I would stop. Rest a bit. Try again. And I got up to being able to swim a length.
So when I got back to London, I went to the swimming pool round the corner from work, and would swim a length. Then I'd spend a minute or so recovering. Then I'd swim back. Over the course of 30 or 40 minutes, I might get 10 or 12 lengths in.
But my rest periods got shorter as I practiced. Maybe my stroke was more efficient. Maybe those muscles were better developed. But I was improving. Before long, I was going two or three lengths without taking a break.
Then, about six months after I started, I found I didn't need to take breaks at all. Now I could swim a length in a minute, and do a kilometer in 40 minutes.
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
Swimming is great physical and mental exercise. I love it. However I also hate it, as it is so numbingly dull. I've ALWAYS wanted to find a genuine waterproof MP3 player. I wonder if @rcs1000 is talking about something like this:
The interesting thing about swimming is either you can or you can't. Throughout the years I have prided myself on being, ahem, quite - let's say very fit. All kinds of exercise/activities without breaking too much of a sweat or at least seeing it through while still in control.
But one length of swimming front crawl breathing every three or even two arm raises, or whatever they're called, and I'm fucked. I'm the idiot standing or treading water at the end of the pool after each and every length clawing for air while these 5'2" 15 stone folk happily swim length after length after length like sleek amphibians.
I was like you. I could barely (if at all) swim a length of the pool with front crawl. And breast stroke? Forget about it.
Then one holiday almost exactly 10 years ago, in the hotel pool, I would see how far I could swim (front crawl). Then I would stop. Rest a bit. Try again. And I got up to being able to swim a length.
So when I got back to London, I went to the swimming pool round the corner from work, and would swim a length. Then I'd spend a minute or so recovering. Then I'd swim back. Over the course of 30 or 40 minutes, I might get 10 or 12 lengths in.
But my rest periods got shorter as I practiced. Maybe my stroke was more efficient. Maybe those muscles were better developed. But I was improving. Before long, I was going two or three lengths without taking a break.
Then, about six months after I started, I found I didn't need to take breaks at all. Now I could swim a length in a minute, and do a kilometer in 40 minutes.
Keep at it. You'll get there.
Also: watch YouTube videos about good front crawl technique. And remember to breath out when your face is in the water.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Wasn't Merrie England an invention of Professor Welch?
I thought the (imaginary) Merrie England was Elizabethan? Elizabeth I of course. Pre that we had the various Reformation’s and Counter Reformations and before that bands of thugs were roaming about expressing loyalty to various claimants to the throne.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Wasn't Merrie England an invention of Professor Welch?
I thought the (imaginary) Merrie England was Elizabethan? Elizabeth I of course. Pre that we had the various Reformation’s and Counter Reformations and before that bands of thugs were roaming about expressing loyalty to various claimants to the throne.
I thought it was the last decades before the reformation?
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Wasn't Merrie England an invention of Professor Welch?
Controversial I know, but as someone writing a dissertation about iconoclasm in the English Reformation and Renaissance, England was a lot more merry when it was Catholic and had a multitude of actual “holy-days” where communities got together. I’m not at all religious, much less Catholic, but Gross National Happiness went down when the prods took over and started to worry about Gross National Product.
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Wasn't Merrie England an invention of Professor Welch?
I thought the (imaginary) Merrie England was Elizabethan? Elizabeth I of course. Pre that we had the various Reformation’s and Counter Reformations and before that bands of thugs were roaming about expressing loyalty to various claimants to the throne.
Many English democratic and dissenting movements have tended to imagine an ancient , pre-Norman state of peaceful anarchy and co-operation, but whether this was actually true is anyone's guess.
As mentioned, I think these kind of ideas were mainly important for what they represented to people who wanted to change things, over centuries, rather than necessarily the historical reality.
That's the third significant concrete example I've seen of the tech sector favouring the UK over the EU as a result of Brexit.
Benefit? They just want to be allowed to mine your data and sell it with as little interference from regulators as possible.
It is a benefit - but not for the end users.
That they can do that in the UK but not the EU absolutely is a Brexit benefit.
Bring on deregulation. Well done Brexit Britain.
If HMG insisted that everyone eat live tapeworm larvae as a result of liberalisation from the EU, you'd claim was a benefit. Shame it's a benefit to the tapeworms.
That multinationals want to be based in the UK, hiring staff here and paying taxes here, absolutely is in the UKs interests.
As far as the data is concerned there's a very simple way to keep your data private too. If you don't want Meta to have your data, don't use their services.
30 million in tax from 230 million in profit according to that link. Not to be sniffed at, how many teachers, doctors and nurses can that 30 million fund? Would you rather we didn't have it.
Though absolutely taxes will vary year on year depending upon tax rates, allowances, investments etc
Quoting billions in revenues is a stupid thing the media does since corporation tax is not and never has been and never will be a tax on revenue. It's a tax on profit.
VAT is levied on revenues and I'd be curious if VAT is included in that 30 mn. It isn't normally, it's normally ignored by the media going for a fake small number versus big number story.
Yes, Leon, but was there anything unusual about the appearances of the two women?
(Sorry, couldn't resist that old punch line, in the US usually told about Greenwich Village:
Officer: "Can you describe the man who attacked you?" Victim: "Well, he was wearing a purple dress with pink dots. . . " Officer, getting impatient, cuts in: "Yes, but, was there anything unusual about his clothes?")
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Seems to me to be a case of "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is". Except Toyota are a legitimate company so are they really just trying to blow smoke?
If it's genuine then it seems a real game changer. But if it is, is a big if.
You’ll probably find, if you dig, that they have lab results that indicate they have a battery tech, that if scaled up, would indicate an increase in batter density and charging rate that would support the above figures.
Which would put it about a decade from being in a car.
Toyota are way, way behind in the EV race and badly need something like this.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
£12.50 a day. All day, every day.
You can get a compliant car for less than that.
Can you? Link please, to car that’s £12.50 a day. Presumably one of these American-style “Buy Here Pay Here” dealerships now has one available?
£12.50/day is £375/month. That's going to buy something reasonable, if not DuraAce-compliant.
The important point is that no deposit and no credit rating needs to be required - a product available for someone on a zero-hours contract, let’s say delivering parcels.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
£12.50 a day. All day, every day.
You can get a compliant car for less than that.
Can you? Link please, to car that’s £12.50 a day. Presumably one of these American-style “Buy Here Pay Here” dealerships now has one available?
£12.50/day is £375/month. That's going to buy something reasonable, if not DuraAce-compliant.
You are assuming those people have sufficient credit rating to access it, a lot will be people having to use payday loans and probably can't. Sure probably no problem for most here but for those living paycheck to paycheck it will be. Instead they will end up having to pay the charge as they haven't got a lump sum to buy a car outright or the credit rating to lease one
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Wasn't Merrie England an invention of Professor Welch?
Controversial I know, but as someone writing a dissertation about iconoclasm in the English Reformation and Renaissance, England was a lot more merry when it was Catholic and had a multitude of actual “holy-days” where communities got together. I’m not at all religious, much less Catholic, but Gross National Happiness went down when the prods took over and started to worry about Gross National Product.
You could well be right. Once Henry Tudor had put an end to the Wars of the Roses of course.
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
Swimming is great physical and mental exercise. I love it. However I also hate it, as it is so numbingly dull. I've ALWAYS wanted to find a genuine waterproof MP3 player. I wonder if @rcs1000 is talking about something like this:
The interesting thing about swimming is either you can or you can't. Throughout the years I have prided myself on being, ahem, quite - let's say very fit. All kinds of exercise/activities without breaking too much of a sweat or at least seeing it through while still in control.
But one length of swimming front crawl breathing every three or even two arm raises, or whatever they're called, and I'm fucked. I'm the idiot standing or treading water at the end of the pool after each and every length clawing for air while these 5'2" 15 stone folk happily swim length after length after length like sleek amphibians.
Yes it's unusual. I've seen guys like you - no offense - apparently very athletic, yet absolutely useless at swimming (and also rich and educated so it's not like they never learned). I've no doubt that they'd - like you - would beat me at every single other physical exercise, yet I can power past them in the pool
The particular advantage for me in swimming is that it is kind on the knees. As I advance in years, my knees are the dodgiest bits. They creak, and sometimes cause me pain. Not in a pool
Yes it is super great technique, no doubt about it. I mean before I go into the pool I 2x check my banking app to confirm my net worth but nope, still founder around like a drunk turtle.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
£12.50 a day. All day, every day.
You can get a compliant car for less than that.
Can you? Link please, to car that’s £12.50 a day. Presumably one of these American-style “Buy Here Pay Here” dealerships now has one available?
£12.50/day is £375/month. That's going to buy something reasonable, if not DuraAce-compliant.
The important point is that no deposit and no credit rating needs to be required - a product available for someone on a zero-hours contract, let’s say delivering parcels.
While we are taking about people who are in such positions…
A while back we were discussing bank account access for the poor. Given the profusion of accounts with rapid sign up, offering no credit, but with all the other facilities of a bank account, from both the banks and the alt-banks, what is the significant blocker for poor people getting a simple account like that?
Credit worthiness shouldn’t be the block there - what is?
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
£12.50 a day. All day, every day.
You can get a compliant car for less than that.
Can you? Link please, to car that’s £12.50 a day. Presumably one of these American-style “Buy Here Pay Here” dealerships now has one available?
£12.50/day is £375/month. That's going to buy something reasonable, if not DuraAce-compliant.
You are assuming those people have sufficient credit rating to access it, a lot will be people having to use payday loans and probably can't. Sure probably no problem for most here but for those living paycheck to paycheck it will be. Instead they will end up having to pay the charge as they haven't got a lump sum to buy a car outright or the credit rating to lease one
Absolutely. Way too many people here have never been a ‘poor’ person in a ‘rich’ country. It totally sucks, and access to debt is one of the top reasons. Been there, done that. Still have my 18-year-old car.
Apparently we have to formulate transport policy for the comfort of penniless, undischarged bankrupts who use a Mk.1 Mondeo to deliver packages in central London.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
£12.50 a day. All day, every day.
You can get a compliant car for less than that.
Can you? Link please, to car that’s £12.50 a day. Presumably one of these American-style “Buy Here Pay Here” dealerships now has one available?
£12.50/day is £375/month. That's going to buy something reasonable, if not DuraAce-compliant.
The important point is that no deposit and no credit rating needs to be required - a product available for someone on a zero-hours contract, let’s say delivering parcels.
While we are taking about people who are in such positions…
A while back we were discussing bank account access for the poor. Given the profusion of accounts with rapid sign up, offering no credit, but with all the other facilities of a bank account, from both the banks and the alt-banks, what is the significant blocker for poor people getting a simple account like that?
Credit worthiness shouldn’t be the block there - what is?
It isnt an account, leasing a car requires a credit check. The bank accounts aren't offering credit so they don't
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
Swimming is great physical and mental exercise. I love it. However I also hate it, as it is so numbingly dull. I've ALWAYS wanted to find a genuine waterproof MP3 player. I wonder if @rcs1000 is talking about something like this:
The interesting thing about swimming is either you can or you can't. Throughout the years I have prided myself on being, ahem, quite - let's say very fit. All kinds of exercise/activities without breaking too much of a sweat or at least seeing it through while still in control.
But one length of swimming front crawl breathing every three or even two arm raises, or whatever they're called, and I'm fucked. I'm the idiot standing or treading water at the end of the pool after each and every length clawing for air while these 5'2" 15 stone folk happily swim length after length after length like sleek amphibians.
I was like you. I could barely (if at all) swim a length of the pool with front crawl. And breast stroke? Forget about it.
Then one holiday almost exactly 10 years ago, in the hotel pool, I would see how far I could swim (front crawl). Then I would stop. Rest a bit. Try again. And I got up to being able to swim a length.
So when I got back to London, I went to the swimming pool round the corner from work, and would swim a length. Then I'd spend a minute or so recovering. Then I'd swim back. Over the course of 30 or 40 minutes, I might get 10 or 12 lengths in.
But my rest periods got shorter as I practiced. Maybe my stroke was more efficient. Maybe those muscles were better developed. But I was improving. Before long, I was going two or three lengths without taking a break.
Then, about six months after I started, I found I didn't need to take breaks at all. Now I could swim a length in a minute, and do a kilometer in 40 minutes.
Keep at it. You'll get there.
Also: watch YouTube videos about good front crawl technique. And remember to breath out when your face is in the water.
Yes I prob need to keep at it because, as @Leon notes, it is the best non-impact exercise where everything is moving/working. I mean you hope that biking is non-impact but some of the HGVs and buses in London have different ideas.
Oh sweet bleeding Jesus, the Daily Mail Notifications are back
I've not known anything like it. I have installed every possible ad blocker, cleared all data, ticked every No Notifications thingy, yet still they come. The Alien of the internet, the perfect assailant
It's getting to the stage where I might have to do an entire factory reset of the laptop, or buy a new one
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
ONS is the Office For (not "of") National Statistics. It is the government funded organisation (hence "Office") tasked with compiling statistics. As they are an office, the statistics they produce are also "Official Statistics". Some (but not all) of the statistics they produce are produced to a specific standard: such statistics are referred to as "National Statistics".
OSR is the Office for Statistics Regulation. It is the regulatory arm of the UKSA: statistics cops if you will. It sets codes of practice and checks to see if they're obeyed, and assesses and grades statistics.
UKSA is the UK Statistics Authority. It promote and regulates the production and publication of official statistics. Imagine Saachi&Saachi crossed with the Supreme Court. They say that statistics are lovely and if you f**k up they send the OSR round to give you a Brick-Top speech
In terms people understand, ONS are the grunts, UKSA are the generals and OSR are the military police.
I thought some of what she was saying was reasonable, other parts as much.
TBH I just find her unbearably smug, these days, when I used to really enjoy her writing. She got lost somewhere in the 2010s
How To Be A Woman was genuinely good and funny. I reckon she's simply run out of subjects and thought, Sod it, I'll write about men in the same way
The book does sound properly BAD, judging by that review and the excerpts being cruelly mocked on Twitter
Yes, I remember finding a some of her columns years ago hilarious.
Yesterday, she mentioned one good point that fears of being seen as "gay" stopped mens's self-help groups and hugging in the 60s and 70s, etc, but some of the rest of what she was saying, I thought was less on-target.
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
Swimming is great physical and mental exercise. I love it. However I also hate it, as it is so numbingly dull. I've ALWAYS wanted to find a genuine waterproof MP3 player. I wonder if @rcs1000 is talking about something like this:
The interesting thing about swimming is either you can or you can't. Throughout the years I have prided myself on being, ahem, quite - let's say very fit. All kinds of exercise/activities without breaking too much of a sweat or at least seeing it through while still in control.
But one length of swimming front crawl breathing every three or even two arm raises, or whatever they're called, and I'm fucked. I'm the idiot standing or treading water at the end of the pool after each and every length clawing for air while these 5'2" 15 stone folk happily swim length after length after length like sleek amphibians.
Yes it's unusual. I've seen guys like you - no offense - apparently very athletic, yet absolutely useless at swimming (and also rich and educated so it's not like they never learned). I've no doubt that they'd - like you - would beat me at every single other physical exercise, yet I can power past them in the pool
The particular advantage for me in swimming is that it is kind on the knees. As I advance in years, my knees are the dodgiest bits. They creak, and sometimes cause me pain. Not in a pool
Yes it is super great technique, no doubt about it. I mean before I go into the pool I 2x check my banking app to confirm my net worth but nope, still founder around like a drunk turtle.
Can I also hold my hand up here? I have always been pretty strong, I have stamina, in my heyday I could run 100m in under 12s. But put me in water and I have the grace and athleticism of a cow and the buoyancy of a rock.
She is bearable. The one I simply don't get is Robert Crampton (actually had to google him so unmemorable are his columns). His are the equivalent of bad stand up: "woke up today and, as an older bloke, thought I'd try to take the bins out two at a time. Well I can tell you taking the bins out two at a time isn't so easy...."
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
£12.50 a day. All day, every day.
You can get a compliant car for less than that.
Can you? Link please, to car that’s £12.50 a day. Presumably one of these American-style “Buy Here Pay Here” dealerships now has one available?
£12.50/day is £375/month. That's going to buy something reasonable, if not DuraAce-compliant.
The important point is that no deposit and no credit rating needs to be required - a product available for someone on a zero-hours contract, let’s say delivering parcels.
While we are taking about people who are in such positions…
A while back we were discussing bank account access for the poor. Given the profusion of accounts with rapid sign up, offering no credit, but with all the other facilities of a bank account, from both the banks and the alt-banks, what is the significant blocker for poor people getting a simple account like that?
Credit worthiness shouldn’t be the block there - what is?
Political opinions, according to a number of stories this week that follow up from the Farage case.
IIRC the post office and a number of HS banks will give you a basic account, so long as you pass their ‘person’ check (for terrorist lists, sanctions etc). Farage was specifically refused a number of these.
Most of the rapid-sign-up alt-banks are very much aimed at the moderately wealthy, rather than the poor.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
£12.50 a day. All day, every day.
You can get a compliant car for less than that.
Can you? Link please, to car that’s £12.50 a day. Presumably one of these American-style “Buy Here Pay Here” dealerships now has one available?
£12.50/day is £375/month. That's going to buy something reasonable, if not DuraAce-compliant.
The important point is that no deposit and no credit rating needs to be required - a product available for someone on a zero-hours contract, let’s say delivering parcels.
While we are taking about people who are in such positions…
A while back we were discussing bank account access for the poor. Given the profusion of accounts with rapid sign up, offering no credit, but with all the other facilities of a bank account, from both the banks and the alt-banks, what is the significant blocker for poor people getting a simple account like that?
Credit worthiness shouldn’t be the block there - what is?
It isnt an account, leasing a car requires a credit check. The bank accounts aren't offering credit so they don't
Obviously - but I was asking a subsidiary question about no overdraft bank accounts. In theory they should be easily accessible. In practise, there are millions without access to a bank account. Why?
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Wasn't Merrie England an invention of Professor Welch?
Controversial I know, but as someone writing a dissertation about iconoclasm in the English Reformation and Renaissance, England was a lot more merry when it was Catholic and had a multitude of actual “holy-days” where communities got together. I’m not at all religious, much less Catholic, but Gross National Happiness went down when the prods took over and started to worry about Gross National Product.
Of course we were at our least merry when we were a republic under the ultra Protestant Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, who even outlawed the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, as well as banning Christmas and the Theatre and May Day
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Wasn't Merrie England an invention of Professor Welch?
Controversial I know, but as someone writing a dissertation about iconoclasm in the English Reformation and Renaissance, England was a lot more merry when it was Catholic and had a multitude of actual “holy-days” where communities got together. I’m not at all religious, much less Catholic, but Gross National Happiness went down when the prods took over and started to worry about Gross National Product.
Also, a bit shit when the (sometimes) kind monks down the road got the heave-ho and their land and monastery were privatised by grasping businessmen and their hospital shut down.
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
Swimming is great physical and mental exercise. I love it. However I also hate it, as it is so numbingly dull. I've ALWAYS wanted to find a genuine waterproof MP3 player. I wonder if @rcs1000 is talking about something like this:
The interesting thing about swimming is either you can or you can't. Throughout the years I have prided myself on being, ahem, quite - let's say very fit. All kinds of exercise/activities without breaking too much of a sweat or at least seeing it through while still in control.
But one length of swimming front crawl breathing every three or even two arm raises, or whatever they're called, and I'm fucked. I'm the idiot standing or treading water at the end of the pool after each and every length clawing for air while these 5'2" 15 stone folk happily swim length after length after length like sleek amphibians.
I was like you. I could barely (if at all) swim a length of the pool with front crawl. And breast stroke? Forget about it.
Then one holiday almost exactly 10 years ago, in the hotel pool, I would see how far I could swim (front crawl). Then I would stop. Rest a bit. Try again. And I got up to being able to swim a length.
So when I got back to London, I went to the swimming pool round the corner from work, and would swim a length. Then I'd spend a minute or so recovering. Then I'd swim back. Over the course of 30 or 40 minutes, I might get 10 or 12 lengths in.
But my rest periods got shorter as I practiced. Maybe my stroke was more efficient. Maybe those muscles were better developed. But I was improving. Before long, I was going two or three lengths without taking a break.
Then, about six months after I started, I found I didn't need to take breaks at all. Now I could swim a length in a minute, and do a kilometer in 40 minutes.
Keep at it. You'll get there.
That's interesting - I'm the same as Topping. Breast stroke OKish, head in the water with a snorkel on and I can go pretty much forever, but crawl - no chance. I'm absolutely knackered after a length.
I went for front crawl lessons a few years ago because I couldn't understand it. The teacher couldn't get me to improve and it is something to do with panic response, he said, making me unable to breathe anywhere near well enough and so panic and exhaustion sets in. I found this unconvincing as I'm not the sort to panic so I still can't understand why some do it so easily with seemingly no effort and I can't.
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Wasn't Merrie England an invention of Professor Welch?
Controversial I know, but as someone writing a dissertation about iconoclasm in the English Reformation and Renaissance, England was a lot more merry when it was Catholic and had a multitude of actual “holy-days” where communities got together. I’m not at all religious, much less Catholic, but Gross National Happiness went down when the prods took over and started to worry about Gross National Product.
Of course we were at our least merry when we were a republic under the ultra Protestant Cromwell as Lord Protector, who even outlawed the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, as well as banning Christmas and the Theatre and May Day
He wasn't an ultra Protestant. Far from it. Middle of the roader. Between the Levellers and the Royalist bishops.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
£12.50 a day. All day, every day.
You can get a compliant car for less than that.
Can you? Link please, to car that’s £12.50 a day. Presumably one of these American-style “Buy Here Pay Here” dealerships now has one available?
£12.50/day is £375/month. That's going to buy something reasonable, if not DuraAce-compliant.
The important point is that no deposit and no credit rating needs to be required - a product available for someone on a zero-hours contract, let’s say delivering parcels.
While we are taking about people who are in such positions…
A while back we were discussing bank account access for the poor. Given the profusion of accounts with rapid sign up, offering no credit, but with all the other facilities of a bank account, from both the banks and the alt-banks, what is the significant blocker for poor people getting a simple account like that?
Credit worthiness shouldn’t be the block there - what is?
It isnt an account, leasing a car requires a credit check. The bank accounts aren't offering credit so they don't
Obviously - but I was asking a subsidiary question about no overdraft bank accounts. In theory they should be easily accessible. In practise, there are millions without access to a bank account. Why?
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
£12.50 a day. All day, every day.
You can get a compliant car for less than that.
Can you? Link please, to car that’s £12.50 a day. Presumably one of these American-style “Buy Here Pay Here” dealerships now has one available?
£12.50/day is £375/month. That's going to buy something reasonable, if not DuraAce-compliant.
The important point is that no deposit and no credit rating needs to be required - a product available for someone on a zero-hours contract, let’s say delivering parcels.
While we are taking about people who are in such positions…
A while back we were discussing bank account access for the poor. Given the profusion of accounts with rapid sign up, offering no credit, but with all the other facilities of a bank account, from both the banks and the alt-banks, what is the significant blocker for poor people getting a simple account like that?
Credit worthiness shouldn’t be the block there - what is?
Political opinions, according to a number of stories this week that follow up from the Farage case.
IIRC the post office and a number of HS banks will give you a basic account, so long as you pass their ‘person’ check (for terrorist lists, sanctions etc). Farage was specifically refused a number of these.
Most of the rapid-sign-up alt-banks are very much aimed at the moderately wealthy, rather than the poor.
When I go on walks, runs, cycles, h*rs*b*ck r*d*ng, etc I am often tempted to listen to podcasts (The Anti-Trans Hate Machine on the one hand; and Gender: A Wider Lens on the other, for example).
However, I invariably don't. In London because I once, rightly, got a bollocking from a black cab driver about wearing headphones and cycling; and otherwise because I like to take in my surroundings. That said, if I had to use a public pool doing length after length, than which I can think of nothing more boring, I might be tempted to listen to something.
Swimming is great physical and mental exercise. I love it. However I also hate it, as it is so numbingly dull. I've ALWAYS wanted to find a genuine waterproof MP3 player. I wonder if @rcs1000 is talking about something like this:
The interesting thing about swimming is either you can or you can't. Throughout the years I have prided myself on being, ahem, quite - let's say very fit. All kinds of exercise/activities without breaking too much of a sweat or at least seeing it through while still in control.
But one length of swimming front crawl breathing every three or even two arm raises, or whatever they're called, and I'm fucked. I'm the idiot standing or treading water at the end of the pool after each and every length clawing for air while these 5'2" 15 stone folk happily swim length after length after length like sleek amphibians.
Yes it's unusual. I've seen guys like you - no offense - apparently very athletic, yet absolutely useless at swimming (and also rich and educated so it's not like they never learned). I've no doubt that they'd - like you - would beat me at every single other physical exercise, yet I can power past them in the pool
The particular advantage for me in swimming is that it is kind on the knees. As I advance in years, my knees are the dodgiest bits. They creak, and sometimes cause me pain. Not in a pool
Yes it is super great technique, no doubt about it. I mean before I go into the pool I 2x check my banking app to confirm my net worth but nope, still founder around like a drunk turtle.
Can I also hold my hand up here? I have always been pretty strong, I have stamina, in my heyday I could run 100m in under 12s. But put me in water and I have the grace and athleticism of a cow and the buoyancy of a rock.
Ah you too. It can't be anything to do with buoyancy. Stick a snorkel and mask on me and I'm set for the day but without I'm crap. So it must be something to do with an inability to keep mouth above the waterline I guess.
Oh sweet bleeding Jesus, the Daily Mail Notifications are back
I've not known anything like it. I have installed every possible ad blocker, cleared all data, ticked every No Notifications thingy, yet still they come. The Alien of the internet, the perfect assailant
It's getting to the stage where I might have to do an entire factory reset of the laptop, or buy a new one
The "London isn't an English city" stuff shows how unsustainable a lot of modern English nationalism is.
You can't build a new separate nation, England, on the basis of an exclusively ethnic identity, when so many millions in the big cities are very commonly partly, or at other times indeed entirely, from all Continental Europe, Africa and Asia. There are much more transcendent English traditions of Dissent and freedom, and an idyll of collaborative pastoral harmony, even, predating even the Normans, but sadly this escapes the average modern English nationalist.
I am not an advocate of any type of nationalism , but how is that any different to, say, Scottish nationalism?
I can answer that!
Nationalism during the colonialist period was seen as a model that could be used by the colonised to assert their right to self determination - they could point to the idea of the nation state and organise based on that. Whilst it is dubious to call Scotland a colony of England, it is more reasonable to argue they are a nation state that doesn't really have self determination - and what they have based their political campaign on is that desire for self governance. The major Nationalist party, the SNP, has for a long time not based their view of Scottishness on race or being born in Scotland but rather shared ideals and politics. They do not say Scotland for the Scottish and therefore the non Scottish must leave.
English nationalism, however, is not based on a desire for increased self determination from a colonising force (as much as the EU has had that idea projected on them as a rationalisation) but typically based on a form of racial purity - that the "browning" of England is a bad thing, that increased immigration (even from people who were born in the British Empire and therefore were British and had every legal right to come back to the Mother Country) destroys something fundamental about Englishness, that the best of England lays in it's past (ie when it was an Empire that subjugated other races for it's material benefit) and not it's present or future. Even amongst the "intellectuals" of the movement it relies heavily on an uncritical view of English past and present, and refuses to accept any criticism, instead retreating to a form of English exceptionalism or whataboutery.
The claims of "London not being a real English city" clearly falls in the latter, not the former. If the criticism was "why does the City of London have it's own secret form of government, including a representative in the HoC, that doesn't actually represent the people of London but the interests of capital - we should make London a real English city by incorporating it fully into the British state and give the people who live in it a real democratic system" I would put that more in the former.
What a load of rubbish, the UK even has an English Asian Tory PM now
What is interesting is the savage hatred of “English” people, often evinced in “intellectual” thinking, despite the actual evidence.
In measurable terms - low levels of ghettoisation, inter-marriage, low levels of racist attacks, minority group success etc.. England is one of leaders in Europe in the integration of non native people into their society.
When Rotherham was breaking, frantic messages were sent in various agencies, demanding plans for the army to be sent in, detention camps, powers of arbitrary arrest.
For use against the locals. Because a pogrom was about to break out.
Yet, the response of the locals was (nearly entirely) through legal and social channels. No one from, even the families of the victims, led the pitchfork wielding genocidal mob that was supposed to happen. In the face of an issue that was tailor made (practically) for racial tension and violence… crickets.
And yet this integration mainly happens in urban areas, like London, which also have large ancestral English populations, and yet rural English nationalists then insist on seeing both this process and these places as then entirely "not English".
This integration has tended to be processed officially through a narrative of Britain. not England..
Which is the old game of defining X by taking the subset of X that I define as the True X.
Essentially, you defining English nationalism as the bits of England you really don’t like.
The CiRA are the real representatives of Irish Nationalism - discuss.
No, I wouldn't agree there. "London isn't an English city" is the majority of modern, rightwing English nationalists defining the parts of England they don't like, not me.
England to me is rural 18th century religious conformists and pre-Norman "Merrie Englande", and tolerance in modern London. The majority of people who call themselves modern english nationalists often have a much more one-dimensional view.
Wasn't Merrie England an invention of Professor Welch?
Controversial I know, but as someone writing a dissertation about iconoclasm in the English Reformation and Renaissance, England was a lot more merry when it was Catholic and had a multitude of actual “holy-days” where communities got together. I’m not at all religious, much less Catholic, but Gross National Happiness went down when the prods took over and started to worry about Gross National Product.
Of course we were at our least merry when we were a republic under the ultra Protestant Cromwell as Lord Protector, who even outlawed the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, as well as banning Christmas and the Theatre and May Day
He wasn't an ultra Protestant. Far from it. Middle of the roader. Between the Levellers and the Royalist bishops.
He was an odd fish for his time - doctrine wasn’t his shibboleth. As long as you were very much a not-Catholic, he was ok with you. Note that he didn’t religiously persecute anyone to the… er… “Low Church” of him?
His argument with the Levellers was more economic/political than religious - they wanted universal suffrage. He very much didn’t. See the Putney Debates.
You made an excellent point about how plants are - effectively - little solar power stations, converting the sun's radiation into biomass.
And it's true! They are.
The efficiency of photosynthesis ranges, depending on the vegetation, from 0.1% to about 2%. Modern factory farmed crops that have been engineered for efficiency are closer to 2%. Nature's own inventions tend to be at the bottom end of the range.
By contrast, the latest solar panels achieve efficiencies are close to 20%, with some super efficient models managing as high as 23-24%.
With a lot of vegetation, though, as it decomposes it gives off that solar energy as heat and releases the CO2 it captured during the growth process. So, unless you can bury the organic material, put it under enormous pressure and starve of it of oxygen*, then you end up releasing all that energy back into the atmosphere and undoing all the good work of photosynthesis.
* Trees also work.
You’re not comparing like with like, though, as I’m sure you’re aware.
What’s the efficiency of fixing CO2 from the air into (for example) carbohydrates, using electricity generated by solar power ? Not even close to 2%, I’ll bet.
And you’d need rather more substantial kit than a blade of grass. Kit which doesn’t grow itself.
ONS, or OSR as they now style themselves, rebukes Sadiq Khan for his figures that suggest only 10% of vehicles currently driving in the expanded zone, are not exempt from paying the charge.
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
£12.50 a day. All day, every day.
You can get a compliant car for less than that.
Can you? Link please, to car that’s £12.50 a day. Presumably one of these American-style “Buy Here Pay Here” dealerships now has one available?
£12.50/day is £375/month. That's going to buy something reasonable, if not DuraAce-compliant.
The important point is that no deposit and no credit rating needs to be required - a product available for someone on a zero-hours contract, let’s say delivering parcels.
While we are taking about people who are in such positions…
A while back we were discussing bank account access for the poor. Given the profusion of accounts with rapid sign up, offering no credit, but with all the other facilities of a bank account, from both the banks and the alt-banks, what is the significant blocker for poor people getting a simple account like that?
Credit worthiness shouldn’t be the block there - what is?
Political opinions, according to a number of stories this week that follow up from the Farage case.
IIRC the post office and a number of HS banks will give you a basic account, so long as you pass their ‘person’ check (for terrorist lists, sanctions etc). Farage was specifically refused a number of these.
Most of the rapid-sign-up alt-banks are very much aimed at the moderately wealthy, rather than the poor.
Says something about the perception of Farage!
I don’t particularly like the guy either, but the case is seriously worrying - both for client confidentiality (bank employee apparently leaking personal details of account holders to the press), and for the basic idea that it’s impossible to live in the world in 2023 without a bank account. There have been dozens of similar incidents in the last few months, but it’s only this week that the mainstream media have picked up on it.
Comments
Because the claimed views don’t seem to match polling, voting or any other definition of “majority”
We have two in the Flatlands in dire need of restoration.
NEVER BUY PEAT BASED COMPOST!
(Sorry for shouting)
Look at the English Democrats, for instance. They have been the most electorally successful English nationalist group ; A mighty odd lot of coves. Billy Bragg is really the only well-known modern left-wing "Anglicist" figure than I can think of, at all. The rest of the most politically organised " Anglicists " tend to be mainly nutters.
It is a complete gamechanger. Before, swimming was very boring. Now, I just listen to a podcast and zone out. Then - bam - you realise you've done 60 lengths.
IIRC there is some science on this - to the point that it may be next on banned list for driving.
I'd had no idea nature would be that inefficient. You'd have thought natural selection would, by now, have managed a bit better than that.
A lot to be proud of there.
It is a benefit - but not for the end users.
I've got so bored of swimming I've actually switched to the gym - because at the gym I can listen to podcasts and audiobooks or even watch TV
But ultimately I prefer swimming as exercise. This could be transformative!
Seems to me to be a case of "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is". Except Toyota are a legitimate company so are they really just trying to blow smoke?
If it's genuine then it seems a real game changer. But if it is, is a big if.
Of course, tech allows the cells and batteries to work in various solid and/or toxic liquid states, which are impossible for plants.
Tsk.
Just as well you have a physical job and not something that requires writing skills, eh?
Bring on deregulation. Well done Brexit Britain.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-advertisers-we-are-all-trapped-in-the-enshittification-of-the-internet
1.Social media platform gets big because it offers users what they want (e.g. a digital space you can hang out with friends)
2. Then once it's captured the lion's share of the market, the platform becomes bad for users and good for advertisers (less of your friends content, more of the crap advertisers are trying to push)
3. Then, once you have the advertisers locked in, you screw them over too (not reaching enough users on our crappy platform? oh, it's not all the crappy content we're serving them, it's because you're not paying for this premium service to boost your post over all the other posts...)
This is what has happened to more or less every big online service over the years, from Facebook and Instagram, the term "enshittification" comes from people saying it is now happening to TikTok, it has also happened to amazon and google as useful searches get buried under paid content.
PB will outlast them all, fundamentally, because it's never gone past stage 1 - giving users what they want (a place to argue about politics, and cricket).
The particular advantage for me in swimming is that it is kind on the knees. As I advance in years, my knees are the dodgiest bits. They creak, and sometimes cause me pain. Not in a pool
(* a jigsaw puzzle and some confetti were thrown on Court 18)
*which, ironically enough, caused her to also have breathing difficulties
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/30/sadiq-khan-london-mayor-rebuked-transparency-ulez/
Meanwhile, figures for last year, with the smaller zone around the A406 and A205 (north circular and south circular roads) show revenues of £230m (including £75m in fines), and outstanding fines of £250m.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/great-ulez-revolt-drivers-snub-fines-250m-unpaid/
Definitely not a money grab, not at all.
Oh, and the expansion zone is many times bigger than the existing zone.
Blair's 90 days detention without charge is looking good right now.
Probaby my best stroke tho is back stroke, but the problem is, unless you have the pool to youself you are gonna hit someone
Butterfly has always been entirely beyond me. A stupid idea
As far as the data is concerned there's a very simple way to keep your data private too. If you don't want Meta to have your data, don't use their services.
It's why a greenhouse with elevated levels of CO₂ is a useful strategy for growing crops quickly, as the Dutch have worked out; they use about 800 ppm, around twice the current atmospheric level. (Probably not so useful in the whole atmosphere, because of the other harms.)
Which in turn is why crops still go tolerably well in the partial shade under solar panel arrays; unless it's really gloomy, light levels aren't the limiting factor for plant growth. (And also why solar panels are a better bet for converting light into energy- that is a one thing in, one thing out process, which is much easier to optimise.)
Mercedes have built a prototype EV car with a 1,200km range, which is quite astonishing, and genuinely game-changing. But it was hand-built by the guys who build the F1 car, and the battery is passively cooled which brings its own issues. Awesome demonstrator though. https://youtube.com/watch?v=hFrKzH2UZ1c
On the substantive point, these schemes should aim to be revenue neutral, with e.g. all funds raised ploughed back into transport infrastructure (including supporting transition to compliant vehicles).
But it also reflects an important strain of English democratic thinking and dissent, because it was just such an idyll, or dream.
Then one holiday almost exactly 10 years ago, in the hotel pool, I would see how far I could swim (front crawl). Then I would stop. Rest a bit. Try again. And I got up to being able to swim a length.
So when I got back to London, I went to the swimming pool round the corner from work, and would swim a length. Then I'd spend a minute or so recovering. Then I'd swim back. Over the course of 30 or 40 minutes, I might get 10 or 12 lengths in.
But my rest periods got shorter as I practiced. Maybe my stroke was more efficient. Maybe those muscles were better developed. But I was improving. Before long, I was going two or three lengths without taking a break.
Then, about six months after I started, I found I didn't need to take breaks at all. Now I could swim a length in a minute, and do a kilometer in 40 minutes.
Keep at it. You'll get there.
As mentioned, I think these kind of ideas were mainly important for what they represented to people who wanted to change things, over centuries, rather than necessarily the historical reality.
Though absolutely taxes will vary year on year depending upon tax rates, allowances, investments etc
Quoting billions in revenues is a stupid thing the media does since corporation tax is not and never has been and never will be a tax on revenue. It's a tax on profit.
VAT is levied on revenues and I'd be curious if VAT is included in that 30 mn. It isn't normally, it's normally ignored by the media going for a fake small number versus big number story.
(Sorry, couldn't resist that old punch line, in the US usually told about Greenwich Village:
Officer: "Can you describe the man who attacked you?"
Victim: "Well, he was wearing a purple dress with pink dots. . . "
Officer, getting impatient, cuts in: "Yes, but, was there anything unusual about his clothes?")
This take down in the New Statesman is especially sharp
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2023/07/has-caitlin-moran-met-man
Which would put it about a decade from being in a car.
Toyota are way, way behind in the EV race and badly need something like this.
I thought some of what she was saying was reasonable, other parts not so much.
How To Be A Woman was genuinely good and funny. I reckon she's simply run out of subjects and thought, Sod it, I'll write about men in the same way
The book does sound properly BAD, judging by that review and the excerpts being cruelly mocked on Twitter
A while back we were discussing bank account access for the poor. Given the profusion of accounts with rapid sign up, offering no credit, but with all the other facilities of a bank account, from both the banks and the alt-banks, what is the significant blocker for poor people getting a simple account like that?
Credit worthiness shouldn’t be the block there - what is?
I've not known anything like it. I have installed every possible ad blocker, cleared all data, ticked every No Notifications thingy, yet still they come. The Alien of the internet, the perfect assailant
It's getting to the stage where I might have to do an entire factory reset of the laptop, or buy a new one
(Yes, I am aware of the irony)
ONS
https://www.ons.gov.uk/
ONS is the Office For (not "of") National Statistics. It is the government funded organisation (hence "Office") tasked with compiling statistics. As they are an office, the statistics they produce are also "Official Statistics". Some (but not all) of the statistics they produce are produced to a specific standard: such statistics are referred to as "National Statistics".
OSR
https://osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/
OSR is the Office for Statistics Regulation. It is the regulatory arm of the UKSA: statistics cops if you will. It sets codes of practice and checks to see if they're obeyed, and assesses and grades statistics.
UKSA
https://uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/
UKSA is the UK Statistics Authority. It promote and regulates the production and publication of official statistics. Imagine Saachi&Saachi crossed with the Supreme Court. They say that statistics are lovely and if you f**k up they send the OSR round to give you a Brick-Top speech
In terms people understand, ONS are the grunts, UKSA are the generals and OSR are the military police.
See also https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/
Yesterday, she mentioned one good point that fears of being seen as "gay" stopped mens's self-help groups and hugging in the 60s and 70s, etc, but some of the rest of what she was saying, I thought was less on-target.
etc
IIRC the post office and a number of HS banks will give you a basic account, so long as you pass their ‘person’ check (for terrorist lists, sanctions etc). Farage was specifically refused a number of these.
Most of the rapid-sign-up alt-banks are very much aimed at the moderately wealthy, rather than the poor.
Not to mention the start of the enclosures.
I went for front crawl lessons a few years ago because I couldn't understand it. The teacher couldn't get me to improve and it is something to do with panic response, he said, making me unable to breathe anywhere near well enough and so panic and exhaustion sets in. I found this unconvincing as I'm not the sort to panic so I still can't understand why some do it so easily with seemingly no effort and I can't.
Use a different browser
Disable notifications in the operating system. https://windowsreport.com/windows-11-disable-notifications/
Create a new user on your computer. Make sure it’s a local user not a Microsoft account.
(Alternatively, buy yourself a new laptop and I’ll fix your old one and keep it for my own nefarious browsing habits).
His argument with the Levellers was more economic/political than religious - they wanted universal suffrage. He very much didn’t. See the Putney Debates.
What’s the efficiency of fixing CO2 from the air into (for example) carbohydrates, using electricity generated by solar power ?
Not even close to 2%, I’ll bet.
And you’d need rather more substantial kit than a blade of grass.
Kit which doesn’t grow itself.
Some of the maths here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency