It'll be the end of darts as we know it. Eventually all the players will be so good the outcome will be determined by whoever goes first, like draughts. It may be necessary to make the board smaller, or further away, or introduce a random element like weather.
A rotating board would add to the fun.
Boomerang darts?
A giant rotating dartboard with a brave volunteer strapped to it. And the darts swapped for throwing knives ?
And Roger Moore saving Berlin from nuclear annihilation.
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Utterly baffling, and now I'm totally confused. I'd always guessed that my attitudes to stuff would make me pretty 'woke' in the eyes of most on here. But, hand on heart, I don't meet any one of the 9 criteria set out there. Least of all the last one, which strikes me as more characteristic of the fiercely anti-woke.
Once you realise accusations of "woke" say more about the accusers then the accused, it becomes less baffling.
Let's take diversity training as an example. People objecting to it aren't going to say, we don't need diversity, I'm cool with the place being run by and for privately educated white middle-aged men. But equally they are not going to say, this is tokenistic, let's have training with a lot more rigour. So it's easier, and intellectually lazier to dismiss the idea and the people bought into it as "woke"
It'll be the end of darts as we know it. Eventually all the players will be so good the outcome will be determined by whoever goes first, like draughts. It may be necessary to make the board smaller, or further away, or introduce a random element like weather.
Snooker is infinitely more complex. It's a field sport with constantly changing geography. Darts is unidimensional.
One possible improvement would be to leave your arrows in the board after each shot, closing off areas from your opponent. Eventually it would look like a multicoloured porcupine. This would introduce some of the guile normally associated with croquet.
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Utterly baffling, and now I'm totally confused. I'd always guessed that my attitudes to stuff would make me pretty 'woke' in the eyes of most on here. But, hand on heart, I don't meet any one of the 9 criteria set out there. Least of all the last one, which strikes me as more characteristic of the fiercely anti-woke.
"These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics.."
Suggested by whom ? It's just an incoherent list of stuff someone doesn't like.
There are going to be some fascinating academic papers on the subject of "What is woke?"
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Utterly baffling, and now I'm totally confused. I'd always guessed that my attitudes to stuff would make me pretty 'woke' in the eyes of most on here. But, hand on heart, I don't meet any one of the 9 criteria set out there. Least of all the last one, which strikes me as more characteristic of the fiercely anti-woke.
The tenets of critical race theory have been very widely set down. I suppose that similar documents exist for trans issues and other 'isms'. That would seem to make woke pretty easy to define to me. The innovation of 'woke' seems to me to be the 'silence is violence' thing - it's not enough to treat everyone equally and as you would wish to be treated; just existing in your 'privileged' state without showing sufficient penitence is an affront. That's why as far as I'm concerned it can do one.
It's far easier to win an argument if you start by making up a charicatured position and pretending that is your opponents position, for example:
"The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided.
Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” Senator Ted Cruz has said. “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,” said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle."
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Utterly baffling, and now I'm totally confused. I'd always guessed that my attitudes to stuff would make me pretty 'woke' in the eyes of most on here. But, hand on heart, I don't meet any one of the 9 criteria set out there. Least of all the last one, which strikes me as more characteristic of the fiercely anti-woke.
Once you realise accusations of "woke" say more about the accusers then the accused, it becomes less baffling.
Let's take diversity training as an example. People objecting to it aren't going to say, we don't need diversity, I'm cool with the place being run by and for privately educated white middle-aged men. But equally they are not going to say, this is tokenistic, let's have training with a lot more rigour. So it's easier, and intellectually lazier to dismiss the idea and the people bought into it as "woke"
Quite. I can't recognise the diversity training I had recently (to be able to work as a volunteer at a university) with the pictures portrayed on PB, never mind more generally. I'm thinking ' I could have done with this stuff when I was a student in the 1970s and those guys think it dangerously advanced by 2020s standards?!?'
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Here are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of the alt-right:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the non-alt-right or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Here are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of the alt-right:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the non-alt-right or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Here are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of the alt-right:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the non-alt-right or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
GB news have borrowed that for their criteria when interviewing potential presenters.
Looks like the rain has finally stopped, which is good because about 75% of the roads round here are flooded to some extent.
This is the new normal.
Warm and very wet winters.
I think I'd ban the phrase 'the new normal'. It seems to function as an excuse for spineless politicians and greasy corporates to enforce unpleasant situations on the public with no prospect of abatement.
We've had a good fiddle with climate this year, banning those maritime fuels, the effect of which was to make temperatures (sea temperatures at any rate) rise significantly. So far I don't think that situation has been reversed or any attempt made to mitigate it, despite various private jet-fuelled junkets. 'Decarbonise' is the only show in town, despite it seeming to have all the impact on climate that housewives donating their pots and pans had on Spitfire production.
We need creative solutions to optimise the climate, that work quickly, and to be prepared to bug out quickly it they're found not to work. Net Zero is tangential at best in this regard.
We need geo-engineering solutions to suck carbon back out the atmosphere en-masse, is what we need - and pronto.
Yes… and that’s why lots of people are working on making these solutions a reality. What I don’t understand is why Luckyguy1983 keeps posting as if no-one is looking into this.
I am not saying that nobody is 'looking into this'. I have posted on the issue of sea heating caused by maritime fuel regulations (and the resultant lack of cloudiness) specifically, as that was a very bad misstep that required a quick reversal/solution, which I don't think has happened. Finding such solutions is surely exactly the type of thing that things like COP28 style conferences would be useful for, but the participants instead tend to bravely commit their populations to bearing the cost of decarbonisation.
I'm not clear why a COP28-style conference would be useful for finding technological solutions. You want a scientific conference for that, of which there are many. COP is about making political decisions.
The situation is poor. We need to cut carbon output and research new technologies and and and... No one approach will be enough.
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Here are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of the alt-right:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the non-alt-right or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Wasn't that the checklist used in developing character (in more ways than one) of Hyacinth Bucket?
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Here are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of the alt-right:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the non-alt-right or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Looks like the rain has finally stopped, which is good because about 75% of the roads round here are flooded to some extent.
This is the new normal.
Warm and very wet winters.
Warm, wet winters with westerly winds is the very definition of a Mediterranean climate.
(Now, if we could just sort the summers out.)
It is minus 17 here in Finland, you can't do anything it is just too cold. The 'warm and wet' winter back in the UK is actually quite pleasant in contrast.
Not with winds of 50mph gusting to 80 or 90, it isn’t!
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Utterly baffling, and now I'm totally confused. I'd always guessed that my attitudes to stuff would make me pretty 'woke' in the eyes of most on here. But, hand on heart, I don't meet any one of the 9 criteria set out there. Least of all the last one, which strikes me as more characteristic of the fiercely anti-woke.
"These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics.."
Suggested by whom ? It's just an incoherent list of stuff someone doesn't like.
There are going to be some fascinating academic papers on the subject of "What is woke?"
Most of the unreadable.
Great novel of the early 19th century - The Red and the Black
Great novel of the early 21st century - The Woke and the Wack
Looks like the rain has finally stopped, which is good because about 75% of the roads round here are flooded to some extent.
This is the new normal.
Warm and very wet winters.
Warm, wet winters with westerly winds is the very definition of a Mediterranean climate.
(Now, if we could just sort the summers out.)
It is minus 17 here in Finland, you can't do anything it is just too cold. The 'warm and wet' winter back in the UK is actually quite pleasant in contrast.
Not with winds of 50mph gusting to 80 or 90, it isn’t!
Slightly less windy in the Midlands but the warm wet weather is setting off my daffodils.
Part 2 of the Bates/Post Office drama was on tonight.
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar: - the refusal to listen - the lies and cover ups - the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation - the refusal to accept responsibility - the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all: - The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second? - An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible...... It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
When Alexander of Macedon was 33, he cried salt tears for there were no more worlds to conquer; Luke Littler can't even buy a packet of fags, for fuck's sake.
Part 2 of the Bates/Post Office drama was on tonight.
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar: - the refusal to listen - the lies and cover ups - the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation - the refusal to accept responsibility - the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all: - The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second? - An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible...... It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
What you also see in those other cases is how those responsible for harm done to others got away with it, were not made accountable, suffered no adverse consequences.
It feels as if this is more of the same: the powerful abusing the powerless because they can, because they know they are untouchable, because even if disciplinary or criminal proceedings are brought, those PO prosecutors, investigators and lawyers, external lawyers and Fujitsu employees will benefit from the protections and rights and compliance with the rules and a fair trial which Post Office prosecutors denied the subpostmasters.
Will those who did wrong be held to account this time?
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Utterly baffling, and now I'm totally confused. I'd always guessed that my attitudes to stuff would make me pretty 'woke' in the eyes of most on here. But, hand on heart, I don't meet any one of the 9 criteria set out there. Least of all the last one, which strikes me as more characteristic of the fiercely anti-woke.
The tenets of critical race theory have been very widely set down. I suppose that similar documents exist for trans issues and other 'isms'. That would seem to make woke pretty easy to define to me. The innovation of 'woke' seems to me to be the 'silence is violence' thing - it's not enough to treat everyone equally and as you would wish to be treated; just existing in your 'privileged' state without showing sufficient penitence is an affront. That's why as far as I'm concerned it can do one.
It's far easier to win an argument if you start by making up a charicatured position and pretending that is your opponents position, for example:
"The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided.
Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” Senator Ted Cruz has said. “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,” said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle."
Everyone is a racist, in that we will tend to look more favourably on people who look and sound like us.
(Indeed, one of the fascinating things - particularly in the UK - is how much we are all suffer from biases around accents. If a person sounds like you, they probably have a life experience like you, and is therefore more trustworthy. Conmen know this well.)
It'll be the end of darts as we know it. Eventually all the players will be so good the outcome will be determined by whoever goes first, like draughts. It may be necessary to make the board smaller, or further away, or introduce a random element like weather.
Snooker is infinitely more complex. It's a field sport with constantly changing geography. Darts is unidimensional.
One possible improvement would be to leave your arrows in the board after each shot, closing off areas from your opponent. Eventually it would look like a multicoloured porcupine. This would introduce some of the guile normally associated with croquet.
Also gives a greater risk of altering the score mid-game by knocking out 1) your opponent's darts and 2) your own darts.
Also, more likelihood of a ricocheting dart coming off the board and killing a player. Or a spectator.
Part 2 of the Bates/Post Office drama was on tonight.
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar: - the refusal to listen - the lies and cover ups - the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation - the refusal to accept responsibility - the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all: - The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second? - An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible...... It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
What you also see in those other cases is how those responsible for harm done to others got away with it, were not made accountable, suffered no adverse consequences.
It feels as if this is more of the same: the powerful abusing the powerless because they can, because they know they are untouchable, because even if disciplinary or criminal proceedings are brought, those PO prosecutors, investigators and lawyers, external lawyers and Fujitsu employees will benefit from the protections and rights and compliance with the rules and a fair trial which Post Office prosecutors denied the subpostmasters.
Will those who did wrong be held to account this time?
Hard to say, but I expect they will not.
What do you think of the idea of a television series on a matter which is currently the subject of a lengthy Inquiry, as a result of which there may be prosecutions? Does the series not damage the chances of success for any such prosecution?
I am thinking particularly of the case of Paula Vennells, who must surely be a prime candidate for a charge of perverting the course of justice. Can she not now simply claim that it would be impossible for her to receive a fair trial?
Part 2 of the Bates/Post Office drama was on tonight.
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar: - the refusal to listen - the lies and cover ups - the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation - the refusal to accept responsibility - the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all: - The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second? - An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible...... It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
What you also see in those other cases is how those responsible for harm done to others got away with it, were not made accountable, suffered no adverse consequences.
It feels as if this is more of the same: the powerful abusing the powerless because they can, because they know they are untouchable, because even if disciplinary or criminal proceedings are brought, those PO prosecutors, investigators and lawyers, external lawyers and Fujitsu employees will benefit from the protections and rights and compliance with the rules and a fair trial which Post Office prosecutors denied the subpostmasters.
Will those who did wrong be held to account this time?
Hard to say, but I expect they will not.
What do you think of the idea of a television series on a matter which is currently the subject of a lengthy Inquiry, as a result of which there may be prosecutions? Does the series not damage the chances of success for any such prosecution?
I am thinking particularly of the case of Paula Vennells, who must surely be a prime candidate for a charge of perverting the course of justice. Can she not now simply claim that it would be impossible for her to receive a fair trial?
I think re the last paragraph the solution is to find jurors who have not watched the programme. I wouldn't imagine it is insurmountable.
And, yes, the people responsible should be prosecuted to the hilt.
When Alexander of Macedon was 33, he cried salt tears for there were no more worlds to conquer; Luke Littler can't even buy a packet of fags, for fuck's sake.
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Utterly baffling, and now I'm totally confused. I'd always guessed that my attitudes to stuff would make me pretty 'woke' in the eyes of most on here. But, hand on heart, I don't meet any one of the 9 criteria set out there. Least of all the last one, which strikes me as more characteristic of the fiercely anti-woke.
"These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics.."
Suggested by whom ? It's just an incoherent list of stuff someone doesn't like.
There are going to be some fascinating academic papers on the subject of "What is woke?"
Most of the unreadable.
Great novel of the early 19th century - The Red and the Black
Great novel of the early 21st century - The Woke and the Wack
Can somebody please tell me how The Nigger of the Narcissus should be renamed?
Looks like the rain has finally stopped, which is good because about 75% of the roads round here are flooded to some extent.
This is the new normal.
Warm and very wet winters.
I think I'd ban the phrase 'the new normal'. It seems to function as an excuse for spineless politicians and greasy corporates to enforce unpleasant situations on the public with no prospect of abatement.
We've had a good fiddle with climate this year, banning those maritime fuels, the effect of which was to make temperatures (sea temperatures at any rate) rise significantly. So far I don't think that situation has been reversed or any attempt made to mitigate it, despite various private jet-fuelled junkets. 'Decarbonise' is the only show in town, despite it seeming to have all the impact on climate that housewives donating their pots and pans had on Spitfire production.
We need creative solutions to optimise the climate, that work quickly, and to be prepared to bug out quickly it they're found not to work. Net Zero is tangential at best in this regard.
We need geo-engineering solutions to suck carbon back out the atmosphere en-masse, is what we need - and pronto.
Yes… and that’s why lots of people are working on making these solutions a reality. What I don’t understand is why Luckyguy1983 keeps posting as if no-one is looking into this.
The reason large scale geo-engineering isn’t being carried out (yet) is because of simple - and understandable - liability issues.
Global warming is the archetype of joint and several liability. Every country, every company, every government shares some responsibility and everyone shares in the effects, albeit unevenly. You can’t - despite some efforts - pin the blame on one actor.
When you geoengineer you create a specific and immediate effect which while predictable at global level is unpredictable at regional level, but provable. So if a nation or bloc decides to geoengineer and that causes drought in region x, they’re going to get sued. Whereas reducing an existing contribution to change, like CO2, NO2 or CH4 is not introducing a new trigger for change, it’s mitigating an existing one.
As for cutting maritime sulphate emissions, this is what’s known as a termination shock. Still to be definitively proven, but looking likely as a culprit for the sudden jump in North Atlantic temperatures this year. They were hiding the true scale of global warming, by a bit. But those emissions are dirty stuff and are a pretty fixed input - they probably held back warming by around 0.1C, and regionally possibly up to 0.4C. You either go cold turkey now or later.
Geoengineering solutions will be put into place as a last resort if everything else fails.
This is an utterly indefensible post. When people are being asked effectively to accept a precipitous fall in their living standards and outrageous infringements on their freedoms, you can wave away a huge change in temperature, entirely attributable to human regulatory meddling by the same fuckwits lecturing us about 'the real price of energy' and 'the new normal' and suggest that any solutions to this will be applied 'as a last resort is everything (for which read the impoverishment of the West) else fails'.
A more cynical person than myself might suspect that policy makers and their corporate sponsors are quite delighted with the temperature increase their meddling has caused - it has created even more lovely alarm around the climate after all.
Your attitude is I’m afraid indefensible. You are seemingly perfectly at ease with the idea human emissions can and do have major effects on the climate, as you’ve jumped on the impact of sulphate emissions with great gusto, yet remain completely unbothered by - indeed enthusiastically supportive of - continuing the mass experiment of burning through our fossil fuels until the world burns.
150 years ago you’d have been arguing that regulating mercury dumping into the Mersey was an outrageous infringement on people’s livelihoods.
Irrelevant twaddle. You insist that the UK must grind to an economical standstill in order to repair the damage caused by 1% of global manmade carbon emissions, which themselves comprise 2% of the whole. Yet you wave away a momumental regulatory cock up that has caused significant *actual* warming as 'going cold Turkey'.
People have gone to quite a dark psychological place when they care less about actual warming than they do about enforcing the privations they claim are about the warming on people. I hope they get the help and support they clearly need.
“You insist that the UK must grind to an economical standstill”.
Give it a rest. You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
Take a Google at shipping emissions impacts on human mortality sometime, when you’re taking a break from tilting at windmills. “Yet you wave it away” - yes, you do.
Oh I see. All about peoples' lungs now is it? I thought we were in the business of averting a climate catastrophe. A weekly briefing on which global crisis we're doing and which we're ignoring would be most helpful.
And for the record, I haven't suggested we put sulphur back into the fuel - spraying seawater is clean and seems just as effective. I assume there are very good reasons why this isn't being tried already - certainly better ones than this discussion has thrown up so far.
You gave a pretty good impression of wanting to put the sulphur back into the fuel. “A monumental regulatory cockup”? Which of course included reducing NOx emissions too, which contribute to global warming.
There are good reasons large scale geoengineering isn’t being implemented at scale yet and they are exactly as described here. It is very difficult to predict regional impacts of solar attenuation, particularly anything that affects albedo, but one thing you can be sure of is it will cause provable effects like drought in some locations. I interviewed someone a few years ago whose doctorate was on uses of foams on the Atlantic sea surface to boost albedo. Very promising, fascinating stuff, but miles off getting any kind of international approval because of those sorts of downstream impacts.
So either someone like the US says FU and does it anyway, or nothing happens because you are unlikely ever to get consensus on measures like these in the UN and no private company will do it for obvious liability reasons.
In @Luckyguy1983's defence, IIRC, the UN were warned that taking out Sulphur Dioxide from ships' fuel would have exactly this effect (which seems, so far, tio be the case) but refused to listen.
Part 2 of the Bates/Post Office drama was on tonight.
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar: - the refusal to listen - the lies and cover ups - the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation - the refusal to accept responsibility - the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all: - The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second? - An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible...... It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
What you also see in those other cases is how those responsible for harm done to others got away with it, were not made accountable, suffered no adverse consequences.
It feels as if this is more of the same: the powerful abusing the powerless because they can, because they know they are untouchable, because even if disciplinary or criminal proceedings are brought, those PO prosecutors, investigators and lawyers, external lawyers and Fujitsu employees will benefit from the protections and rights and compliance with the rules and a fair trial which Post Office prosecutors denied the subpostmasters.
Will those who did wrong be held to account this time?
Hard to say, but I expect they will not.
What do you think of the idea of a television series on a matter which is currently the subject of a lengthy Inquiry, as a result of which there may be prosecutions? Does the series not damage the chances of success for any such prosecution?
I am thinking particularly of the case of Paula Vennells, who must surely be a prime candidate for a charge of perverting the course of justice. Can she not now simply claim that it would be impossible for her to receive a fair trial?
I think re the last paragraph the solution is to find jurors who have not watched the programme. I wouldn't imagine it is insurmountable.
And, yes, the people responsible should be prosecuted to the hilt.
Perhaps Dura Ace should be recruited. He claims to know nothing about the scandal.
Looks like the rain has finally stopped, which is good because about 75% of the roads round here are flooded to some extent.
This is the new normal.
Warm and very wet winters.
I think I'd ban the phrase 'the new normal'. It seems to function as an excuse for spineless politicians and greasy corporates to enforce unpleasant situations on the public with no prospect of abatement.
We've had a good fiddle with climate this year, banning those maritime fuels, the effect of which was to make temperatures (sea temperatures at any rate) rise significantly. So far I don't think that situation has been reversed or any attempt made to mitigate it, despite various private jet-fuelled junkets. 'Decarbonise' is the only show in town, despite it seeming to have all the impact on climate that housewives donating their pots and pans had on Spitfire production.
We need creative solutions to optimise the climate, that work quickly, and to be prepared to bug out quickly it they're found not to work. Net Zero is tangential at best in this regard.
We need geo-engineering solutions to suck carbon back out the atmosphere en-masse, is what we need - and pronto.
Yes… and that’s why lots of people are working on making these solutions a reality. What I don’t understand is why Luckyguy1983 keeps posting as if no-one is looking into this.
The reason large scale geo-engineering isn’t being carried out (yet) is because of simple - and understandable - liability issues.
Global warming is the archetype of joint and several liability. Every country, every company, every government shares some responsibility and everyone shares in the effects, albeit unevenly. You can’t - despite some efforts - pin the blame on one actor.
When you geoengineer you create a specific and immediate effect which while predictable at global level is unpredictable at regional level, but provable. So if a nation or bloc decides to geoengineer and that causes drought in region x, they’re going to get sued. Whereas reducing an existing contribution to change, like CO2, NO2 or CH4 is not introducing a new trigger for change, it’s mitigating an existing one.
As for cutting maritime sulphate emissions, this is what’s known as a termination shock. Still to be definitively proven, but looking likely as a culprit for the sudden jump in North Atlantic temperatures this year. They were hiding the true scale of global warming, by a bit. But those emissions are dirty stuff and are a pretty fixed input - they probably held back warming by around 0.1C, and regionally possibly up to 0.4C. You either go cold turkey now or later.
Geoengineering solutions will be put into place as a last resort if everything else fails.
This is an utterly indefensible post. When people are being asked effectively to accept a precipitous fall in their living standards and outrageous infringements on their freedoms, you can wave away a huge change in temperature, entirely attributable to human regulatory meddling by the same fuckwits lecturing us about 'the real price of energy' and 'the new normal' and suggest that any solutions to this will be applied 'as a last resort is everything (for which read the impoverishment of the West) else fails'.
A more cynical person than myself might suspect that policy makers and their corporate sponsors are quite delighted with the temperature increase their meddling has caused - it has created even more lovely alarm around the climate after all.
Your attitude is I’m afraid indefensible. You are seemingly perfectly at ease with the idea human emissions can and do have major effects on the climate, as you’ve jumped on the impact of sulphate emissions with great gusto, yet remain completely unbothered by - indeed enthusiastically supportive of - continuing the mass experiment of burning through our fossil fuels until the world burns.
150 years ago you’d have been arguing that regulating mercury dumping into the Mersey was an outrageous infringement on people’s livelihoods.
Irrelevant twaddle. You insist that the UK must grind to an economical standstill in order to repair the damage caused by 1% of global manmade carbon emissions, which themselves comprise 2% of the whole. Yet you wave away a momumental regulatory cock up that has caused significant *actual* warming as 'going cold Turkey'.
People have gone to quite a dark psychological place when they care less about actual warming than they do about enforcing the privations they claim are about the warming on people. I hope they get the help and support they clearly need.
“You insist that the UK must grind to an economical standstill”.
Give it a rest. You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
Take a Google at shipping emissions impacts on human mortality sometime, when you’re taking a break from tilting at windmills. “Yet you wave it away” - yes, you do.
Oh I see. All about peoples' lungs now is it? I thought we were in the business of averting a climate catastrophe. A weekly briefing on which global crisis we're doing and which we're ignoring would be most helpful.
And for the record, I haven't suggested we put sulphur back into the fuel - spraying seawater is clean and seems just as effective. I assume there are very good reasons why this isn't being tried already - certainly better ones than this discussion has thrown up so far.
You gave a pretty good impression of wanting to put the sulphur back into the fuel. “A monumental regulatory cockup”? Which of course included reducing NOx emissions too, which contribute to global warming.
There are good reasons large scale geoengineering isn’t being implemented at scale yet and they are exactly as described here. It is very difficult to predict regional impacts of solar attenuation, particularly anything that affects albedo, but one thing you can be sure of is it will cause provable effects like drought in some locations. I interviewed someone a few years ago whose doctorate was on uses of foams on the Atlantic sea surface to boost albedo. Very promising, fascinating stuff, but miles off getting any kind of international approval because of those sorts of downstream impacts.
So either someone like the US says FU and does it anyway, or nothing happens because you are unlikely ever to get consensus on measures like these in the UN and no private company will do it for obvious liability reasons.
In @Luckyguy1983's defence, IIRC, the UN were warned that taking out Sulphur Dioxide from ships' fuel would have exactly this effect (which seems, so far, tio be the case) but refused to listen.
Doesn't the original paper acknowledge that a reduction in soot particles will enable more sunlight to reach the surface? I will dig it out.
Part 2 of the Bates/Post Office drama was on tonight.
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar: - the refusal to listen - the lies and cover ups - the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation - the refusal to accept responsibility - the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all: - The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second? - An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible...... It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
One of the things the tv play captures so well i think is how ordinarily english the post masters/mistresses are. Polite, diffident, baking cakes, helping pensioners, touching belief in the rule of law, going for walks, doing a bit of sewing, not understanding bloody computers.
It is so well done.
Chesterton would have been pleased. They are everymen.
Looks like the rain has finally stopped, which is good because about 75% of the roads round here are flooded to some extent.
This is the new normal.
Warm and very wet winters.
I think I'd ban the phrase 'the new normal'. It seems to function as an excuse for spineless politicians and greasy corporates to enforce unpleasant situations on the public with no prospect of abatement.
We've had a good fiddle with climate this year, banning those maritime fuels, the effect of which was to make temperatures (sea temperatures at any rate) rise significantly. So far I don't think that situation has been reversed or any attempt made to mitigate it, despite various private jet-fuelled junkets. 'Decarbonise' is the only show in town, despite it seeming to have all the impact on climate that housewives donating their pots and pans had on Spitfire production.
We need creative solutions to optimise the climate, that work quickly, and to be prepared to bug out quickly it they're found not to work. Net Zero is tangential at best in this regard.
We need geo-engineering solutions to suck carbon back out the atmosphere en-masse, is what we need - and pronto.
Yes… and that’s why lots of people are working on making these solutions a reality. What I don’t understand is why Luckyguy1983 keeps posting as if no-one is looking into this.
The reason large scale geo-engineering isn’t being carried out (yet) is because of simple - and understandable - liability issues.
Global warming is the archetype of joint and several liability. Every country, every company, every government shares some responsibility and everyone shares in the effects, albeit unevenly. You can’t - despite some efforts - pin the blame on one actor.
When you geoengineer you create a specific and immediate effect which while predictable at global level is unpredictable at regional level, but provable. So if a nation or bloc decides to geoengineer and that causes drought in region x, they’re going to get sued. Whereas reducing an existing contribution to change, like CO2, NO2 or CH4 is not introducing a new trigger for change, it’s mitigating an existing one.
As for cutting maritime sulphate emissions, this is what’s known as a termination shock. Still to be definitively proven, but looking likely as a culprit for the sudden jump in North Atlantic temperatures this year. They were hiding the true scale of global warming, by a bit. But those emissions are dirty stuff and are a pretty fixed input - they probably held back warming by around 0.1C, and regionally possibly up to 0.4C. You either go cold turkey now or later.
Geoengineering solutions will be put into place as a last resort if everything else fails.
This is an utterly indefensible post. When people are being asked effectively to accept a precipitous fall in their living standards and outrageous infringements on their freedoms, you can wave away a huge change in temperature, entirely attributable to human regulatory meddling by the same fuckwits lecturing us about 'the real price of energy' and 'the new normal' and suggest that any solutions to this will be applied 'as a last resort is everything (for which read the impoverishment of the West) else fails'.
A more cynical person than myself might suspect that policy makers and their corporate sponsors are quite delighted with the temperature increase their meddling has caused - it has created even more lovely alarm around the climate after all.
Your attitude is I’m afraid indefensible. You are seemingly perfectly at ease with the idea human emissions can and do have major effects on the climate, as you’ve jumped on the impact of sulphate emissions with great gusto, yet remain completely unbothered by - indeed enthusiastically supportive of - continuing the mass experiment of burning through our fossil fuels until the world burns.
150 years ago you’d have been arguing that regulating mercury dumping into the Mersey was an outrageous infringement on people’s livelihoods.
Irrelevant twaddle. You insist that the UK must grind to an economical standstill in order to repair the damage caused by 1% of global manmade carbon emissions, which themselves comprise 2% of the whole. Yet you wave away a momumental regulatory cock up that has caused significant *actual* warming as 'going cold Turkey'.
People have gone to quite a dark psychological place when they care less about actual warming than they do about enforcing the privations they claim are about the warming on people. I hope they get the help and support they clearly need.
“You insist that the UK must grind to an economical standstill”.
Give it a rest. You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
Take a Google at shipping emissions impacts on human mortality sometime, when you’re taking a break from tilting at windmills. “Yet you wave it away” - yes, you do.
Oh I see. All about peoples' lungs now is it? I thought we were in the business of averting a climate catastrophe. A weekly briefing on which global crisis we're doing and which we're ignoring would be most helpful.
And for the record, I haven't suggested we put sulphur back into the fuel - spraying seawater is clean and seems just as effective. I assume there are very good reasons why this isn't being tried already - certainly better ones than this discussion has thrown up so far.
You gave a pretty good impression of wanting to put the sulphur back into the fuel. “A monumental regulatory cockup”? Which of course included reducing NOx emissions too, which contribute to global warming.
There are good reasons large scale geoengineering isn’t being implemented at scale yet and they are exactly as described here. It is very difficult to predict regional impacts of solar attenuation, particularly anything that affects albedo, but one thing you can be sure of is it will cause provable effects like drought in some locations. I interviewed someone a few years ago whose doctorate was on uses of foams on the Atlantic sea surface to boost albedo. Very promising, fascinating stuff, but miles off getting any kind of international approval because of those sorts of downstream impacts.
So either someone like the US says FU and does it anyway, or nothing happens because you are unlikely ever to get consensus on measures like these in the UN and no private company will do it for obvious liability reasons.
In @Luckyguy1983's defence, IIRC, the UN were warned that taking out Sulphur Dioxide from ships' fuel would have exactly this effect (which seems, so far, tio be the case) but refused to listen.
Doesn't the original paper acknowledge that a reduction in soot particles will enable more sunlight to reach the surface? I will dig it out.
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Utterly baffling, and now I'm totally confused. I'd always guessed that my attitudes to stuff would make me pretty 'woke' in the eyes of most on here. But, hand on heart, I don't meet any one of the 9 criteria set out there. Least of all the last one, which strikes me as more characteristic of the fiercely anti-woke.
"These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics.."
Suggested by whom ? It's just an incoherent list of stuff someone doesn't like.
There are going to be some fascinating academic papers on the subject of "What is woke?"
Most of the unreadable.
Great novel of the early 19th century - The Red and the Black
Great novel of the early 21st century - The Woke and the Wack
Can somebody please tell me how The Nigger of the Narcissus should be renamed?
Or is the book now cancelled?
It was originally published as "The Children of the Sea: a Tale of the Forecastle" in the USA in 1897, because of the title.
Glad you enjoyed the programme. Personally I found it a bit soapy, but then I have read the book, and believe me the TV version tones the awfulness of the scandal down a bit. Nevertheless it should help to publicise it, which will be a good thing.
I just hope it doesn't jeopardise any prosecutions.
Luke Humphries semi final average was 108.74. Luke Littler 106.2. Whilst it's quite rightly such a huge sports story, Humphries' performances have gone under the radar. May be value betting against the kid?
Part 2 of the Bates/Post Office drama was on tonight.
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar: - the refusal to listen - the lies and cover ups - the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation - the refusal to accept responsibility - the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all: - The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second? - An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible...... It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
One of the things the tv play captures so well i think is how ordinarily english the post masters/mistresses are. Polite, diffident, baking cakes, helping pensioners, touching belief in the rule of law, going for walks, doing a bit of sewing, not understanding bloody computers.
It is so well done.
Chesterton would have been pleased. They are everymen.
Chesterton would have also failed at selling sub-standard PPE to the NHS via cronies for massive personal gain. What a loser.
In some ways this is the tale of the current Tory party. Which as even someone mildly to the left, makes me quite sad.
When Alexander of Macedon was 33, he cried salt tears for there were no more worlds to conquer; Luke Littler can't even buy a packet of fags, for fuck's sake.
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Utterly baffling, and now I'm totally confused. I'd always guessed that my attitudes to stuff would make me pretty 'woke' in the eyes of most on here. But, hand on heart, I don't meet any one of the 9 criteria set out there. Least of all the last one, which strikes me as more characteristic of the fiercely anti-woke.
"These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics.."
Suggested by whom ? It's just an incoherent list of stuff someone doesn't like.
There are going to be some fascinating academic papers on the subject of "What is woke?"
Most of the unreadable.
Great novel of the early 19th century - The Red and the Black
Great novel of the early 21st century - The Woke and the Wack
Can somebody please tell me how The Nigger of the Narcissus should be renamed?
Or is the book now cancelled?
It was originally published as "The Children of the Sea: a Tale of the Forecastle" in the USA in 1897, because of the title.
Luke Humphries semi final average was 108.74. Luke Littler 106.2. Whilst it's quite rightly such a huge sports story, Humphries' performances have gone under the radar. May be value betting against the kid?
Part 2 of the Bates/Post Office drama was on tonight.
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar: - the refusal to listen - the lies and cover ups - the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation - the refusal to accept responsibility - the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all: - The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second? - An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible...... It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
One of the things the tv play captures so well i think is how ordinarily english the post masters/mistresses are. Polite, diffident, baking cakes, helping pensioners, touching belief in the rule of law, going for walks, doing a bit of sewing, not understanding bloody computers.
It is so well done.
Chesterton would have been pleased. They are everymen.
Chesterton would have also failed at selling sub-standard PPE to the NHS via cronies for massive personal gain. What a loser.
In some ways this is the tale of the current Tory party. Which as even someone mildly to the left, makes me quite sad.
It's a tale of all three major Parties. The LibDems play a surprisingly large part in it.
The tenets of critical race theory have been very widely set down. I suppose that similar documents exist for trans issues and other 'isms'. That would seem to make woke pretty easy to define to me. The innovation of 'woke' seems to me to be the 'silence is violence' thing - it's not enough to treat everyone equally and as you would wish to be treated; just existing in your 'privileged' state without showing sufficient penitence is an affront. That's why as far as I'm concerned it can do one.
I partially agree. I don’t think that showing penitence is required, but I would hope that people would recognise that success is down to a combination of innate talent, hard work and perseverance, but also opportunity, and that a kid from Brixton has more chance of becoming PM than making the England polo team.
Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump “I’m entitled to total immunity”
The corrupt former president wants immunity because it was his “duty” to try to overturn the results of the election he clearly lost. Good luck with that in court.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said in an order that it would not revive a lawsuit that a lower-court judge had tossed out because the law did not seem to provide a damages remedy for most claims that someone was jailed in retaliation for their criticisms of a president…
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
Here are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of the alt-right:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the non-alt-right or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
You've missed out :
* Buying/Selling "supplements"
It's a big deal on the alt-right world. I suspect because you can buy a tonne of them for 1p and sell them on for £12 for 10 - unregulated.
But I may be being cynical about alt-right twitter.
PS, on a betting post, have just switched from October to massively invested on a May election. Can’t believe that a March budget would happen otherwise
PS, on a betting post, have just switched from October to massively invested on a May election. Can’t believe that a March budget would happen otherwise
Thing about woke is. Like Brexit. Everyone's got their own definition.
I think a more helpful way to look at 'woke' is that there's a wide definition - which is close to useless, and a narrow one - which is actually quite useful in identifying and defining how certain parts of progressive politics have changed in relatively recent memory. Though the conflation of the two means we may need a better word for the latter ('identity politics' is preferred by some).
The former is basically anything the dug in right take against. There's an overlap with the old 'PC gone mad' but it's even more ludicrous because it gets applied to anything. And because everything from Creme Eggs to trains, and more importantly some basic values that are shared pretty widely, gets called 'woke' it damages the right.
The GB News wing of the Tory party has talked itself up a blind alley of idiocy whereby any legitimate points are drowned out by genuinely crackers stuff. It would likely view Genghis Khan as suspiciously 'woke' because he used a decimal system.
Yet the more important argument is on the liberal and left side of politics itself. Where the fiercest arguments often are. Notably on gender and race.
In the former case you have a significant number of left-wing feminists (and some gay campaigners) profoundly at odds with LGBTQ+ activists. In the latter there's been significant pushback against perceived overreach of a political and academic approach that sees race and injustice in general through a prism of identity and oppression - and shuts down dissenting views by defining disagreement itself as oppressive of and in itself.
Plus, recently with discussions on antisemitism how it copes with prejudice that doesn't fit its framework and can lead people to absurd, dangerous conclusions that are racist themselves.
Understanding and defining a more narrow definition is important in understanding why those debates and disagreements are occurring among those who were formerly allies. Which is a much more interesting and worthwhile debate. But one large parts of the right seem to be incapable of having as they would rather moan about the modern world and stuff they dislike.
Part 2 of the Bates/Post Office drama was on tonight.
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar: - the refusal to listen - the lies and cover ups - the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation - the refusal to accept responsibility - the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all: - The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second? - An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible...... It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
One of the things the tv play captures so well i think is how ordinarily english the post masters/mistresses are. Polite, diffident, baking cakes, helping pensioners, touching belief in the rule of law, going for walks, doing a bit of sewing, not understanding bloody computers.
It is so well done.
Chesterton would have been pleased. They are everymen.
Chesterton would have also failed at selling sub-standard PPE to the NHS via cronies for massive personal gain. What a loser.
In some ways this is the tale of the current Tory party. Which as even someone mildly to the left, makes me quite sad.
It's a tale of all three major Parties. The LibDems play a surprisingly large part in it.
Though in their defence they had nothing to do with brexit.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private. Millions have minor ailments which are debilitating, but can't afford to.
Memorial Device @memorialdevice · 1h How long before Conservative HQ put out a badly designed graphic claiming the success of Luke Littler is down to their massive grassroots sports investment and Sunak has always been a keen dartist?
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
I hear this kind of story all the time these days. Mates, relatives, ex-colleagues, online etc etc
So I consider myself incredibly blessed that - so far - I can ring my named doctor and get an appointment (telephone first but sees you if it is physical/spot etc etc) within a week. If urgent - phone at 8am and someone from practice will deal with that day.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
There is a lot of this about. Be careful with steroids on undiagnosed conditions.
PS, on a betting post, have just switched from October to massively invested on a May election. Can’t believe that a March budget would happen otherwise
It will be November.
No way is Sunak giving up that last six months in Downing Street.
Federal appeals court says it’s OK to let pregnant women just die in the emergency room.
Emergency rooms not required to perform life-saving abortions, federal appeals court rules The Biden administration reminded hospitals of their obligation to perform life-saving abortions under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Texas sued, arguing it was an overstep that mandated abortions. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/02/texas-abortion-fifth-circuit/
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
If it's any cheaper - 'Moo Goo' is worth a shot. I have mild eczema/psoriasis (not 100% as it's never been explained to me) and it's helped a lot.
And despite me having had a prescription for Hydrocortisone since age about 14 the GP always gives me grief if I ask for a repeat prescription even if I eek out a tiny, tiny tube for 2-3 years... because I know the GP will give me grief about it even if I'm scratching my face off.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
There is a lot of this about. Be careful with steroids on undiagnosed conditions.
Thanks. Yeah. Read up on scabies (not everyone will). Pretty sure it isn't that. Was rather taken aback by the pharmacist just giving me it without even a look, mind.
Bit of a blast from the past: this theme tune for the Radio 4 PM programme takes me back to being about 6 years old. It sounds like something Kraftwerk might have composed in about 1972, but it was still being used by the programme as late as 1988. 🙂
Part 2 of the Bates/Post Office drama was on tonight.
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar: - the refusal to listen - the lies and cover ups - the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation - the refusal to accept responsibility - the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all: - The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second? - An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible...... It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
What you also see in those other cases is how those responsible for harm done to others got away with it, were not made accountable, suffered no adverse consequences.
It feels as if this is more of the same: the powerful abusing the powerless because they can, because they know they are untouchable, because even if disciplinary or criminal proceedings are brought, those PO prosecutors, investigators and lawyers, external lawyers and Fujitsu employees will benefit from the protections and rights and compliance with the rules and a fair trial which Post Office prosecutors denied the subpostmasters.
Will those who did wrong be held to account this time?
Hard to say, but I expect they will not.
What do you think of the idea of a television series on a matter which is currently the subject of a lengthy Inquiry, as a result of which there may be prosecutions? Does the series not damage the chances of success for any such prosecution?
I am thinking particularly of the case of Paula Vennells, who must surely be a prime candidate for a charge of perverting the course of justice. Can she not now simply claim that it would be impossible for her to receive a fair trial?
She didn’t seem to worry about whether the sub-postmasters received a fair trial.
So? I know some moron Tory MP is tweeting about it, but this isn't news. Easter confectionery lines go into wholesalers in December, Christmas ones in August. Its an expandable consumption category, so if you get products in early you sell more. Some stuff (Creme Eggs, The Big Purple One) would sell all year round.
I have no idea about a Tory mp tweets and to be fair nearly 60 years ago my family and I owned a newsagents and grocers and we did display Easter eggs in the new year
I expect it may not surprise many
I have no problem with you responding to Jake Berry. I have a problem with Jake Berry trying to create another culture wars woke issue with something that happens *every single year*.
Have you got your culture war/woke issue mixed up? I don’t think people have ever said it was woke to have Easter Eggs in the shops too early, the complaint from that angle is that they’re not called Easter Eggs isn’t it?
Looking at that Jake Berry video, he’s just saying he surprised Easter Eggs are in shops when Christmas was only last week, hardly attacking anyone for being woke.
Moaning about Christmas stuff being on sale earlier and earlier is traditional.
There probably graffiti about that at Pompeii.
Yes, the political correctness gone mad/woke angle is lack of religious narrative on the eggs, not when they go on sale
We’ve crossed the line now where people defending ‘woke’ are caricatures of the Daily Express readers they think they’re mocking
Remember how builders talking about their feelings made them ”woke builders”? That wasn’t people defending woke, it was the surely-never-a-self-caricature Daily Mail.
That wasn’t, but the matter we are talking about now seems to be - why would Easter Eggs going on sale in January be woke? Surely the complaint , if there is one, is that it’s crass commercialisation
Agree, not a woke issue. But what I find strange is that a 'senior' MP thinks it's worth doing a video about Easter eggs at Tesco in January and tweeting it out. Mind you, what do I know, given that it's had 2.7M views.
The “this isn’t about woke” posts by various people are very naive. This is a culture war post by Berry aimed at winding up people who get wound up by modern life.
Easter Eggs on New Years Day / It’s not Traditional/ Not like the good old days / I blame the permissive society
Blimey, you had a long time to try and wriggle out of that, or fess up that you’d mixed up the ‘Not Easter’ Eggs ‘woke’ issue with this one.
Why would people who are regarded as ‘woke’ be championing the right of Supermarkets to sell Easter Eggs in early January? It doesn’t seem that it should matter either way. You just seem to be writing your own pet hates into it having got the wrong end of the stick, like someone else did with the EU lightbulbs the other day
The Mirror ran an article moaning about it in mid December & The BBC here quote the Royal Society for Public Health complaining about the practice of early egg sales… so it’s hardly a right wing, culture war, anti woke thing at all
It does get difficult when noone has the slightest idea what 'woke' means. Even people who go on about it all the time have completely different examples to offer. Electric cars are 'woke' to many folk but the Blessed Elon wouldn't agree. Frankly if someone on the right fringe of politics decides they don't like Easter eggs in January then that phenomenon automatically becomes woke. To them at least.
Meanwhile the rest of us, in the real world, haven't got a clue what they are blathering on about.
Woke can be a bit nebulous but in my head ‘changing something that has been long accepted in order to avoid offending someone else (who isn’t actually offended by said thing)’. For instance the use of Winterval rather than Christmas, so as not to offend non Christians.
Sometimes the changes are sensible yet still derided as woke. See Batter rather than Batsmen (mainly for womens cricket, but will surely bleed back into mens too).
I suspect that most people actually do have a sense for what woke means, and the idea that it cannot be easily defined is not really fair. Define pornography?
Woke is obviously hard to define, like 'centre right' or 'liberal'. It's abstract. I would tentatively suggest that it identifies a particular group, who have similarities and overlaps with others.
These are 9 suggested identifying characteristics of woke, none unique:
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference A group think mindset A puritanlike withdrawal from the unwoke or worldly A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty Absolute assurance A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so Moral absolutism Sanctions for non compliance An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
So that settles it then. Goalkeepers playing short to the centre back is definitely woke.
As if they didn't have to create a special rule to prevent back passes in the olden days, banning the goal keeper from picking up the ball, and leading to the rise of the ball playing sweeper-keeper.
Very much the style of play at Leicester now. Mads Hermansen was a great signing. Still makes me nervous to see defenders passing between themselves and the goalie to invite pressure and to suck the opposition out of position.
We read more about Leicester and East Ham on this forum than all the other places in the world put together
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
There is a lot of this about. Be careful with steroids on undiagnosed conditions.
Thanks. Yeah. Read up on scabies (not everyone will). Pretty sure it isn't that. Was rather taken aback by the pharmacist just giving me it without even a look, mind.
Sounds like what I have, a mild form of eczema, in which case there appears to be no cure, but Eumovate alleviates it. Use it sparingly though, as Foxy suggests.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
I hear this kind of story all the time these days. Mates, relatives, ex-colleagues, online etc etc
So I consider myself incredibly blessed that - so far - I can ring my named doctor and get an appointment (telephone first but sees you if it is physical/spot etc etc) within a week. If urgent - phone at 8am and someone from practice will deal with that day.
That's great. Assuming you're not at work, or travelling to work for an 8:30 start at 8am.
Part 2 of the Bates/Post Office drama was on tonight.
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar: - the refusal to listen - the lies and cover ups - the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation - the refusal to accept responsibility - the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all: - The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second? - An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible...... It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
What you also see in those other cases is how those responsible for harm done to others got away with it, were not made accountable, suffered no adverse consequences.
It feels as if this is more of the same: the powerful abusing the powerless because they can, because they know they are untouchable, because even if disciplinary or criminal proceedings are brought, those PO prosecutors, investigators and lawyers, external lawyers and Fujitsu employees will benefit from the protections and rights and compliance with the rules and a fair trial which Post Office prosecutors denied the subpostmasters.
Will those who did wrong be held to account this time?
Hard to say, but I expect they will not.
What do you think of the idea of a television series on a matter which is currently the subject of a lengthy Inquiry, as a result of which there may be prosecutions? Does the series not damage the chances of success for any such prosecution?
I am thinking particularly of the case of Paula Vennells, who must surely be a prime candidate for a charge of perverting the course of justice. Can she not now simply claim that it would be impossible for her to receive a fair trial?
She didn’t seem to worry about whether the sub-postmasters received a fair trial.
No, but two wrongs don't make a right.
More to the point though, I want to see her behind bars, and I don't want her getting off under any pretext whatever.
PS, on a betting post, have just switched from October to massively invested on a May election. Can’t believe that a March budget would happen otherwise
It will be November.
No way is Sunak giving up that last six months in Downing Street.
Nobody knows, but I suspect it will be November. PMs tend to go too late rather than too soon.
PS, on a betting post, have just switched from October to massively invested on a May election. Can’t believe that a March budget would happen otherwise
It will be November.
No way is Sunak giving up that last six months in Downing Street.
Why would he want those last six months in Downing Street?
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
I hear this kind of story all the time these days. Mates, relatives, ex-colleagues, online etc etc
So I consider myself incredibly blessed that - so far - I can ring my named doctor and get an appointment (telephone first but sees you if it is physical/spot etc etc) within a week. If urgent - phone at 8am and someone from practice will deal with that day.
That's great. Assuming you're not at work, or travelling to work for an 8:30 start at 8am.
Indeed.
But it’s not great even if you aren’t.
The NHS Ring At Exactly 8am Or Get Fucked booking ‘system’ is utterly moronic.
Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump “I’m entitled to total immunity”
The corrupt former president wants immunity because it was his “duty” to try to overturn the results of the election he clearly lost. Good luck with that in court.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
I hear this kind of story all the time these days. Mates, relatives, ex-colleagues, online etc etc
So I consider myself incredibly blessed that - so far - I can ring my named doctor and get an appointment (telephone first but sees you if it is physical/spot etc etc) within a week. If urgent - phone at 8am and someone from practice will deal with that day.
That's great. Assuming you're not at work, or travelling to work for an 8:30 start at 8am.
Indeed.
But it’s not great even if you aren’t.
The NHS Ring At Exactly 8am Or Get Fucked booking ‘system’ is utterly moronic.
It really is that simple.
All the more when there are surgeries around the country using alternative - and far, far better systems.
I can contact my surgery 24/7 through the 'Ask My GP' web portal. I can set out my concerns, upload photos etc and they have a GP review the whole lot in the morning and triage for the various needs - those who need a telephone consult, those who need the nurse, those who need the pharmacy and those who actually need to see a GP. Unfailingly with that system if they decide I need to see a GP then I get an appointment the same day. And if they don't think I need to actually go the the Surgery I have never had a reply later than 10am that morning explaining what I need to do instead.
The system works. I have no idea why more Surgeries don't use it.
OT. Glad to see that Israel seem to be adopting the system I suggested (I don't claim it was because of me of course) of targeted assassination against senior Hamas officials.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
There is a lot of this about. Be careful with steroids on undiagnosed conditions.
Thanks. Yeah. Read up on scabies (not everyone will). Pretty sure it isn't that. Was rather taken aback by the pharmacist just giving me it without even a look, mind.
Sounds like what I have, a mild form of eczema, in which case there appears to be no cure, but Eumovate alleviates it. Use it sparingly though, as Foxy suggests.
I’ve been told by sufferers that simple barrier ointments like Sudocrem or Vaseline can help as a palliative. And obviously don’t have that sort of restriction.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
I hear this kind of story all the time these days. Mates, relatives, ex-colleagues, online etc etc
So I consider myself incredibly blessed that - so far - I can ring my named doctor and get an appointment (telephone first but sees you if it is physical/spot etc etc) within a week. If urgent - phone at 8am and someone from practice will deal with that day.
That's great. Assuming you're not at work, or travelling to work for an 8:30 start at 8am.
Indeed.
But it’s not great even if you aren’t.
The NHS Ring At Exactly 8am Or Get Fucked booking ‘system’ is utterly moronic.
It really is that simple.
All the more when there are surgeries around the country using alternative - and far, far better systems.
I can contact my surgery 24/7 through the 'Ask My GP' web portal. I can set out my concerns, upload photos etc and they have a GP review the whole lot in the morning and triage for the various needs - those who need a telephone consult, those who need the nurse, those who need the pharmacy and those who actually need to see a GP. Unfailingly with that system if they decide I need to see a GP then I get an appointment the same day. And if they don't think I need to actually go the the Surgery I have never had a reply later than 10am that morning explaining what I need to do instead.
The system works. I have no idea why more Surgeries don't use it.
Who knows? I asked the receptionist this very question recently and she said: “I don’t know but that’s the system, lots of people don’t like it.”
Got some novelty shards of metal by my bedside now. And some board-game style plastic paper shoved inside my phone case.
What do I do next?
Am I winning?
Doesn’t feel like it.
Don't worry. If it bothers you that much you can take it into any shop and exchange it for goods of your choice. Or you could even find someone in need on the street and give it to them. I am sure they will be able to put it to good use.
Got some novelty shards of metal by my bedside now. And some board-game style plastic paper shoved inside my phone case.
What do I do next?
Am I winning?
Doesn’t feel like it.
Don't worry. If it bothers you that much you can take it into any shop and exchange it for goods of your choice. Or you could even find someone in need on the street and give it to them. I am sure they will be able to put it to good use.
I tried that and the lady behind the bar said: “oh, someone else trying to get rid of Christmas cash. We can’t get rid of the stuff ourselves!”.
She gave a couple of pints and handed me the weird metal shards.
I’m now worried I might lose them.
Do you know anyone who will exchange them for proper money?
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
There is a lot of this about. Be careful with steroids on undiagnosed conditions.
Thanks. Yeah. Read up on scabies (not everyone will). Pretty sure it isn't that. Was rather taken aback by the pharmacist just giving me it without even a look, mind.
Rat Scabies was, of course, the drummer with The Damned.
I saw him many years later, being the drummer for Donovan.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
There is a lot of this about. Be careful with steroids on undiagnosed conditions.
Thanks. Yeah. Read up on scabies (not everyone will). Pretty sure it isn't that. Was rather taken aback by the pharmacist just giving me it without even a look, mind.
Rat Scabies was, of course, the drummer with The Damned.
I saw him many years later, being the drummer for Donovan.
Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump “I’m entitled to total immunity”
The corrupt former president wants immunity because it was his “duty” to try to overturn the results of the election he clearly lost. Good luck with that in court.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
There is a lot of this about. Be careful with steroids on undiagnosed conditions.
Thanks. Yeah. Read up on scabies (not everyone will). Pretty sure it isn't that. Was rather taken aback by the pharmacist just giving me it without even a look, mind.
Sounds like what I have, a mild form of eczema, in which case there appears to be no cure, but Eumovate alleviates it. Use it sparingly though, as Foxy suggests.
I’ve been told by sufferers that simple barrier ointments like Sudocrem or Vaseline can help as a palliative. And obviously don’t have that sort of restriction.
Yes, I've used both with reasoble results, but when the itching is bad a small amount of Eumovate works best for me.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
If it's any cheaper - 'Moo Goo' is worth a shot. I have mild eczema/psoriasis (not 100% as it's never been explained to me) and it's helped a lot.
And despite me having had a prescription for Hydrocortisone since age about 14 the GP always gives me grief if I ask for a repeat prescription even if I eek out a tiny, tiny tube for 2-3 years... because I know the GP will give me grief about it even if I'm scratching my face off.
Hydrocortisone is - of course - non-prescription in the US.
Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump “I’m entitled to total immunity”
The corrupt former president wants immunity because it was his “duty” to try to overturn the results of the election he clearly lost. Good luck with that in court.
Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump “I’m entitled to total immunity”
The corrupt former president wants immunity because it was his “duty” to try to overturn the results of the election he clearly lost. Good luck with that in court.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
If it's any cheaper - 'Moo Goo' is worth a shot. I have mild eczema/psoriasis (not 100% as it's never been explained to me) and it's helped a lot.
And despite me having had a prescription for Hydrocortisone since age about 14 the GP always gives me grief if I ask for a repeat prescription even if I eek out a tiny, tiny tube for 2-3 years... because I know the GP will give me grief about it even if I'm scratching my face off.
Hydrocortisone is - of course - non-prescription in the US.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private. Millions have minor ailments which are debilitating, but can't afford to.
Good morning to you both I have emailed you via email a proposed article on the definition of fascism. It has had all the personal data removed. It is submitted to you on the condition that you do not breach my anonymity: please accept that or return it unpublished. I hope that you look kindly upon it. Regards, @viewcode
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
If it's any cheaper - 'Moo Goo' is worth a shot. I have mild eczema/psoriasis (not 100% as it's never been explained to me) and it's helped a lot.
And despite me having had a prescription for Hydrocortisone since age about 14 the GP always gives me grief if I ask for a repeat prescription even if I eek out a tiny, tiny tube for 2-3 years... because I know the GP will give me grief about it even if I'm scratching my face off.
Hydrocortisone is - of course - non-prescription in the US.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
If it's any cheaper - 'Moo Goo' is worth a shot. I have mild eczema/psoriasis (not 100% as it's never been explained to me) and it's helped a lot.
And despite me having had a prescription for Hydrocortisone since age about 14 the GP always gives me grief if I ask for a repeat prescription even if I eek out a tiny, tiny tube for 2-3 years... because I know the GP will give me grief about it even if I'm scratching my face off.
Hydrocortisone is - of course - non-prescription in the US.
So. I've got itchy skin. Had it for a couple of months. Went to see GP. Change washing powder, take anti-hystimines, etc. All reasonable. Did so. Got worse. Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent. Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream. GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone. Is it any wonder productivity is so poor? Am going to go private.
If it's any cheaper - 'Moo Goo' is worth a shot. I have mild eczema/psoriasis (not 100% as it's never been explained to me) and it's helped a lot.
And despite me having had a prescription for Hydrocortisone since age about 14 the GP always gives me grief if I ask for a repeat prescription even if I eek out a tiny, tiny tube for 2-3 years... because I know the GP will give me grief about it even if I'm scratching my face off.
Hydrocortisone is - of course - non-prescription in the US.
As is antibiotics
Antibiotics are prescription in the US.
But not in Mexico.
Sorry, antibiotic cream (eg Neosporin), not tablets.
Comments
Let's take diversity training as an example. People objecting to it aren't going to say, we don't need diversity, I'm cool with the place being run by and for privately educated white middle-aged men. But equally they are not going to say, this is tokenistic, let's have training with a lot more rigour. So it's easier, and intellectually lazier to dismiss the idea and the people bought into it as "woke"
Most of the unreadable.
"The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided.
Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” Senator Ted Cruz has said. “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,” said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle."
From a good article on CRT here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/opponents-critical-race-theory-are-arguing-themselves/619391/?gift=Q2xxhS27Csx4yHsp7QhJgQih5_5ylKrJA8WpyUKi-Xs&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
https://x.com/hugogye/status/1742310316484997409?s=46
Edit: Scrub that. Rick's Newton-le-Willows.
Disdain for difference, apart from specially designated difference
A group think mindset
A puritanlike withdrawal from the non-alt-right or worldly
A lack of the negative capability to hold, treasure and value uncertainty
Absolute assurance
A single issue mindset, accompanied by a denial that this is so
Moral absolutism
Sanctions for non compliance
An intense hatred of the liberal and enlightenment project.
The situation is poor. We need to cut carbon output and research new technologies and and and... No one approach will be enough.
https://www.sportinglife.com/darts/news/counting-on-the-refs/182898
Great novel of the early 21st century - The Woke and the Wack
I am surprised they haven't rotted from the damp.
",,,but the moment has been prepared for"
(hates self intensely)
Game's gone mad
https://x.com/andygilder/status/1742301934101372963?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
In episode 1, there is a scene in which Alan Bates' wife tells him she has a job.
"Teaching?" he replies.
"No. Cleaning houses."
They need the money to make ends meet.
He gives her a look - of love, gratitude & a hint of humiliation at what they've been reduced to and then - quietly but with determination - he says:
"I'll get those bastards."
It is a wonderful piece of writing and sublime subtle acting, especially by Toby Jones. And it captures both the humiliation inflicted on innocent people by the powerful and the former's determination not to be ground down. It is about the subpostmasters. But like all good drama, including that based on real life, it shows something universal.
Those sentiments have been echoed before. And will, I am sorry to say, be repeated in the future. Because abuse of power is hard to eradicate. This has happened so many times before. This story is not an appalling one off. It is the latest of a series of scandals going back nearly 70 years.
In some important ways, the misbehaviours exhibited by the Post Office are similar to those exhibited by the Coal Board in the Aberfan tragedy, by the police in Hillsborough, by the government in the blood contamination scandal and in many others.
I have written about these here - https://www.cyclefree.co.uk/the-price-of-indifference/.
The substance may be different but the misbehaviours by the powerful are so very similar:
- the refusal to listen
- the lies and cover ups
- the stingy callous approach to apologies and compensation
- the refusal to accept responsibility
- the avoidance of accountability.
There are 2 behaviours above all:
- The arrogance of indispensability.
It is this which leads to the abuse of power behind the actions taken. It is enabled by those who allow such organisations to behave as if they are unchallengeable. As if they are "Too Big To Fail" or "Too Important To Fail"
And the second?
- An indifference to ordinary people, to the human consequences of misbehaviour, to the impact on others.
Permit me to quote a part of my article. It explains so much about the PO's & government's obduracy about putting this right.
"It feels like indifference to those on the receiving end. But perhaps its impulse is less the effect on the victims but more a desire to save face by those responsible......
It harms an institution’s self-image and, often, of senior people within it. “We got it wrong.” is hard to say. If “we get it wrong” what sort of a “we” are we, really?"Avoiding the shame of having to admit that your actions or inactions have been responsible for the suffering of others is what drives this defensiveness and indifference."
You see this in the evidence given by PO witnesses & their lawyers in the Williams Inquiry.
https://x.com/samwhyte/status/1742312314152595704?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
It feels as if this is more of the same: the powerful abusing the powerless because they can, because they know they are untouchable, because even if disciplinary or criminal proceedings are brought, those PO prosecutors, investigators and lawyers, external lawyers and Fujitsu employees will benefit from the protections and rights and compliance with the rules and a fair trial which Post Office prosecutors denied the subpostmasters.
Will those who did wrong be held to account this time?
(Indeed, one of the fascinating things - particularly in the UK - is how much we are all suffer from biases around accents. If a person sounds like you, they probably have a life experience like you, and is therefore more trustworthy. Conmen know this well.)
When did the LibDems adopt pidgin as their medium for press releases?
Also, more likelihood of a ricocheting dart coming off the board and killing a player. Or a spectator.
What's not to love?
What do you think of the idea of a television series on a matter which is currently the subject of a lengthy Inquiry, as a result of which there may be prosecutions? Does the series not damage the chances of success for any such prosecution?
I am thinking particularly of the case of Paula Vennells, who must surely be a prime candidate for a charge of perverting the course of justice. Can she not now simply claim that it would be impossible for her to receive a fair trial?
https://twitter.com/TonyRoddUK/status/1742225371326529797
https://twitter.com/Mr_Dave_Haslam/status/1742190919263179062
Yet we have interest rates at 5.25%.
By end of year we will be discussing deflation.
And, yes, the people responsible should be prosecuted to the hilt.
Or is the book now cancelled?
It is so well done.
Chesterton would have been pleased. They are everymen.
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2012/03/05/snow-albedo/
s
Why not just revert to that?
Glad you enjoyed the programme. Personally I found it a bit soapy, but then I have read the book, and believe me the TV version tones the awfulness of the scandal down a bit. Nevertheless it should help to publicise it, which will be a good thing.
I just hope it doesn't jeopardise any prosecutions.
Luke Littler 106.2.
Whilst it's quite rightly such a huge sports story, Humphries' performances have gone under the radar.
May be value betting against the kid?
In some ways this is the tale of the current Tory party. Which as even someone mildly to the left, makes me quite sad.
The world moves on.
S
Republicans against Trump
@RpsAgainstTrump
“I’m entitled to total immunity”
The corrupt former president wants immunity because it was his “duty” to try to overturn the results of the election he clearly lost. Good luck with that in court.
https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1742217373187285295
"I was guarding the nation from a totally rigged election"
And yet he will be president by end of this year.
Shakespeare - a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/02/michael-cohen-cant-hold-trump-liable-for-retaliatory-imprisonment-appeals-court-says-00133525
Michael Cohen can’t hold his former boss, former President Donald Trump, liable because he was jailed for what he claimed was retaliation for writing a tell-all memoir, an appeals court said Tuesday.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said in an order that it would not revive a lawsuit that a lower-court judge had tossed out because the law did not seem to provide a damages remedy for most claims that someone was jailed in retaliation for their criticisms of a president…
* Buying/Selling "supplements"
It's a big deal on the alt-right world. I suspect because you can buy a tonne of them for 1p and sell them on for £12 for 10 - unregulated.
But I may be being cynical about alt-right twitter.
The former is basically anything the dug in right take against. There's an overlap with the old 'PC gone mad' but it's even more ludicrous because it gets applied to anything. And because everything from Creme Eggs to trains, and more importantly some basic values that are shared pretty widely, gets called 'woke' it damages the right.
The GB News wing of the Tory party has talked itself up a blind alley of idiocy whereby any legitimate points are drowned out by genuinely crackers stuff. It would likely view Genghis Khan as suspiciously 'woke' because he used a decimal system.
Yet the more important argument is on the liberal and left side of politics itself. Where the fiercest arguments often are. Notably on gender and race.
In the former case you have a significant number of left-wing feminists (and some gay campaigners) profoundly at odds with LGBTQ+ activists. In the latter there's been significant pushback against perceived overreach of a political and academic approach that sees race and injustice in general through a prism of identity and oppression - and shuts down dissenting views by defining disagreement itself as oppressive of and in itself.
Plus, recently with discussions on antisemitism how it copes with prejudice that doesn't fit its framework and can lead people to absurd, dangerous conclusions that are racist themselves.
Understanding and defining a more narrow definition is important in understanding why those debates and disagreements are occurring among those who were formerly allies. Which is a much more interesting and worthwhile debate. But one large parts of the right seem to be incapable of having as they would rather moan about the modern world and stuff they dislike.
...
Oh, hang on...
Burning at night. No sleep. Phoned 111. Go back to GP, or NHS walk-in asap. Went to walk -in. Wouldn't see me. Not urgent.
Went to pharmacy. Wouldn't look. Just sold me steroid cream.
GP offered me a phone appointment sometime next Tuesday when I'll be at work and won't be able to answer the phone.
Is it any wonder productivity is so poor?
Am going to go private.
Millions have minor ailments which are debilitating, but can't afford to.
@memorialdevice
·
1h
How long before Conservative HQ put out a badly designed graphic claiming the success of Luke Littler is down to their massive grassroots sports investment and Sunak has always been a keen dartist?
So I consider myself incredibly blessed that - so far - I can ring my named doctor and get an appointment (telephone first but sees you if it is physical/spot etc etc) within a week. If urgent - phone at 8am and someone from practice will deal with that day.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/01/doctors-report-nightmare-surge-in-scabies-across-uk?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
It will be November.
No way is Sunak giving up that last six months in Downing Street.
Emergency rooms not required to perform life-saving abortions, federal appeals court rules
The Biden administration reminded hospitals of their obligation to perform life-saving abortions under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Texas sued, arguing it was an overstep that mandated abortions.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/02/texas-abortion-fifth-circuit/
And despite me having had a prescription for Hydrocortisone since age about 14 the GP always gives me grief if I ask for a repeat prescription even if I eek out a tiny, tiny tube for 2-3 years... because I know the GP will give me grief about it even if I'm scratching my face off.
Yeah. Read up on scabies (not everyone will). Pretty sure it isn't that. Was rather taken aback by the pharmacist just giving me it without even a look, mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4Nee5vfJ34
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWLtvnQRuQw
More to the point though, I want to see her behind bars, and I don't want her getting off under any pretext whatever.
But it’s not great even if you aren’t.
The NHS Ring At Exactly 8am Or Get Fucked booking ‘system’ is utterly moronic.
It really is that simple.
I can contact my surgery 24/7 through the 'Ask My GP' web portal. I can set out my concerns, upload photos etc and they have a GP review the whole lot in the morning and triage for the various needs - those who need a telephone consult, those who need the nurse, those who need the pharmacy and those who actually need to see a GP. Unfailingly with that system if they decide I need to see a GP then I get an appointment the same day. And if they don't think I need to actually go the the Surgery I have never had a reply later than 10am that morning explaining what I need to do instead.
The system works. I have no idea why more Surgeries don't use it.
HAVE
CASH
Got some novelty shards of metal by my bedside now. And some board-game style plastic paper shoved inside my phone case.
What do I do next?
Am I winning?
Doesn’t feel like it.
Would have to be a very large phone case.
https://twitter.com/TheTNHoller/status/1741321626384318729
She gave a couple of pints and handed me the weird metal shards.
I’m now worried I might lose them.
Do you know anyone who will exchange them for proper money?
I saw him many years later, being the drummer for Donovan.
Good luck.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pinewoods-Bite-Stings-Relief-Cream/dp/B08575WFRH/
From: @viewcode
Good morning to you both
I have emailed you via email a proposed article on the definition of fascism. It has had all the personal data removed. It is submitted to you on the condition that you do not breach my anonymity: please accept that or return it unpublished. I hope that you look kindly upon it.
Regards, @viewcode
But not in Mexico.