Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
I’ve had grief so intense it led me to the brink of suicide
Lasted about six months overall and it was monstrous. Not quite the same as clinical depression (which I also get, but MUCH more mildly) but the same desire to end it all
One of the remarkable things is that when you are that mentally low it is actually physically painful
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
I hate cats. They shit on my lawn. Have previously posted it back to cat owners as they seem to have lost it.
That's what I mean. I'm on at 5.5, but there's no volume.
I got a bit higher than that but only for a tiny amount. Where are all those punters who think the election is a toss up? C'mon, take my money!
Ohio is firmly in the Trump column in a toss up election. Won by Trump by 8% in 2020.
But (apparently) his people are worried about Ohio on the basis of their private polling. A sub-50% finding (aparently) brings it into toss-up territory.
I will not be surprised to see Ohio tied or better for Harris after the Convention.
Why his advisors are so worried is because there is no positive narrative coming out of the Trump campaign. No policies are being brought forward. Just Trump's paranoia that his showman schtick is failing. He is now reduced to being the centre of attention only because he is coming out with frankly risible nonsense about how many people want to turn up to see him versus Harris-Walz or even MLK Jnr. Whilst we can see the level of enthusiasm for Harris and Walz's "tour of joy" around the swing states, we just have to take Trump's word for the continuing love for him because there are no empirical ways of measuring it.
two cycles in a row pols have badly underestimated Trump in Ohio. It looks close then on the day it isn't. And two cycles in a row it's PVI has swung bigly to Trump (even if the margin was the same). It has a lot of wwc small towns that no longer vote dems. That won't change this election. In fact Dems still have room to fall in the small towns. ANd whilst GOP have room to fall in the suburbs they matter less in Ohio then e.g in WI where the WOW counties make up a huge chunk of the GOP vote.
I find the rush to bet on Harris very mystifying.
For betting purposes - and this should be obvious on a betting forum but many posters seem to be unaware of it - public information is useless. Everyone can see Harris going up in the polls. That is reflected in the pricing. People with more money, more data, and faster data feeds than you are betting into the market.
Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense.
Betting on centrist candidates is a very, very bad strategy in recent electoral history. They either under-perform polls or meet expectations at best.
"....Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense...."
I bet on Harris because I wanted to find out if the automated betting machines in the shops would allow that and if I could use them. If, after some research I will pretend is thorough, I think she will win, I will bet on her in the belief that she will win and I can profit thereby
Not everybody does value betting.
It's not exactly complicated. The odds are around evens, and I think she'll win.
"betting on centrist candidate is a very bad strategy in recent history" is more of a rhetorical point than a convincing argument.
Harris isn't a centrist candidate, she ran to the liberal left of Biden and Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Haley was a centrist candidate this year, neither Trump nor Harris are centrists
That's rubbish. Just because she ran slightly to the left of another centrist doesn't mean she isn't also a centrist.
She isn't, she is the most liberal left candidate the Democrats have nominated since Dukakis and Mondale and with Wurz it is the most left of centre Democratic ticket since McGovern and Shriver in 1972 (Dukakis at least had centrist Texan southerner Bentsen as his running mate and Mondale was more new Deal Democrat than radical left and Ferraro was more centrist than Wurz).
Harris is more centrist than Sanders and AOC, that is it
That's what I mean. I'm on at 5.5, but there's no volume.
I got a bit higher than that but only for a tiny amount. Where are all those punters who think the election is a toss up? C'mon, take my money!
Ohio is firmly in the Trump column in a toss up election. Won by Trump by 8% in 2020.
But (apparently) his people are worried about Ohio on the basis of their private polling. A sub-50% finding (aparently) brings it into toss-up territory.
I will not be surprised to see Ohio tied or better for Harris after the Convention.
Why his advisors are so worried is because there is no positive narrative coming out of the Trump campaign. No policies are being brought forward. Just Trump's paranoia that his showman schtick is failing. He is now reduced to being the centre of attention only because he is coming out with frankly risible nonsense about how many people want to turn up to see him versus Harris-Walz or even MLK Jnr. Whilst we can see the level of enthusiasm for Harris and Walz's "tour of joy" around the swing states, we just have to take Trump's word for the continuing love for him because there are no empirical ways of measuring it.
two cycles in a row pols have badly underestimated Trump in Ohio. It looks close then on the day it isn't. And two cycles in a row it's PVI has swung bigly to Trump (even if the margin was the same). It has a lot of wwc small towns that no longer vote dems. That won't change this election. In fact Dems still have room to fall in the small towns. ANd whilst GOP have room to fall in the suburbs they matter less in Ohio then e.g in WI where the WOW counties make up a huge chunk of the GOP vote.
I find the rush to bet on Harris very mystifying.
For betting purposes - and this should be obvious on a betting forum but many posters seem to be unaware of it - public information is useless. Everyone can see Harris going up in the polls. That is reflected in the pricing. People with more money, more data, and faster data feeds than you are betting into the market.
Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense.
Betting on centrist candidates is a very, very bad strategy in recent electoral history. They either under-perform polls or meet expectations at best.
"....Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense...."
I bet on Harris because I wanted to find out if the automated betting machines in the shops would allow that and if I could use them. If, after some research I will pretend is thorough, I think she will win, I will bet on her in the belief that she will win and I can profit thereby
Not everybody does value betting.
It's not exactly complicated. The odds are around evens, and I think she'll win.
"betting on centrist candidate is a very bad strategy in recent history" is more of a rhetorical point than a convincing argument.
Harris isn't a centrist candidate, she ran to the liberal left of Biden and Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Haley was a centrist candidate this year, neither Trump nor Harris are centrists
That's rubbish. Just because she ran slightly to the left of another centrist doesn't mean she isn't also a centrist.
She isn't, she is the most liberal left candidate the Democrats have nominated since Dukakis and Mondale and with Wurz it is the most left of centre Democratic ticket since McGovern and Shriver in 1972 (Dukakis at least had centrist Texan southerner Bentsen as his running mate and Mondale was more new Deal Democrat than radical left and Ferraro was more centrist than Wurz).
Harris is more centrist than Sanders and AOC, that is it
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
It's not enslaved. It comes and goes at will.
If it comes and goes at will then you have no idea if it is killing wild animals. It almost certainly is
You’re a self deluded hypocrite of the first water. But then you are a Hampstead lefty so I don’t know why I’m surprised
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
also the separation of the kittens and puppies from their parents is cruel.
I come from a pet owning family. I’ve loved animals in my time
But then I took the pet pill and realised how awful it is: once you step away and examine it objectively. We enslave these creatures for our entertainment, and they wreck the natural environment. It’s not popular to say this, no big political party will avow it - yet - but one day we will look back on pet ownership with horror and perplexity
I do still get my buzz out of animals. I adopt stray animals on my travels. Usually hard up quirky street cats, or occasionally dogs. I had one when I “lived” in Tbilisi for a month. A stray cat. We adopted each other, I let him eat my scraps, he kept less pleasant animals away, we sunbathed on my tiny balcony together
He was cool
What do u think is worse keeping cats and dogs for pets or eating them as some Asian countries do?
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
also the separation of the kittens and puppies from their parents is cruel.
I come from a pet owning family. I’ve loved animals in my time
But then I took the pet pill and realised how awful it is: once you step away and examine it objectively. We enslave these creatures for our entertainment, and they wreck the natural environment. It’s not popular to say this, no big political party will avow it - yet - but one day we will look back on pet ownership with horror and perplexity
I do still get my buzz out of animals. I adopt stray animals on my travels. Usually hard up quirky street cats, or occasionally dogs. I had one when I “lived” in Tbilisi for a month. A stray cat. We adopted each other, I let him eat my scraps, he kept less pleasant animals away, we sunbathed on my tiny balcony together
He was cool
What do u think is worse keeping cats and dogs for pets or eating them as some Asian countries do?
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
I’ve had grief so intense it led me to the brink of suicide
Lasted about six months overall and it was monstrous. Not quite the same as clinical depression (which I also get, but MUCH more mildly) but the same desire to end it all
One of the remarkable things is that when you are that mentally low it is actually physically painful
People when they are fed up will say they are depressed. I would guess the two are in no way comparable.
With mental conditions there is often no physical external symptom one can use to gauge your condition. You cannot escape yourself either.
I think of the line from a Pink Floyd track "there's someone in my head and its not me".
My sister suffered from depression and told me to watch a youtube video about a black dog. Most enlightening.
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
I’ve experienced quite a few suicides
Most came as a terrible and annihilating shock
One girl I knew hung herself and her mother discovered the body first. How do you ever get over that? You probably don’t
It’s one good argument against suicide - the way it destroys everyone around you
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
That's what I mean. I'm on at 5.5, but there's no volume.
I got a bit higher than that but only for a tiny amount. Where are all those punters who think the election is a toss up? C'mon, take my money!
Ohio is firmly in the Trump column in a toss up election. Won by Trump by 8% in 2020.
But (apparently) his people are worried about Ohio on the basis of their private polling. A sub-50% finding (aparently) brings it into toss-up territory.
I will not be surprised to see Ohio tied or better for Harris after the Convention.
Why his advisors are so worried is because there is no positive narrative coming out of the Trump campaign. No policies are being brought forward. Just Trump's paranoia that his showman schtick is failing. He is now reduced to being the centre of attention only because he is coming out with frankly risible nonsense about how many people want to turn up to see him versus Harris-Walz or even MLK Jnr. Whilst we can see the level of enthusiasm for Harris and Walz's "tour of joy" around the swing states, we just have to take Trump's word for the continuing love for him because there are no empirical ways of measuring it.
two cycles in a row pols have badly underestimated Trump in Ohio. It looks close then on the day it isn't. And two cycles in a row it's PVI has swung bigly to Trump (even if the margin was the same). It has a lot of wwc small towns that no longer vote dems. That won't change this election. In fact Dems still have room to fall in the small towns. ANd whilst GOP have room to fall in the suburbs they matter less in Ohio then e.g in WI where the WOW counties make up a huge chunk of the GOP vote.
I find the rush to bet on Harris very mystifying.
For betting purposes - and this should be obvious on a betting forum but many posters seem to be unaware of it - public information is useless. Everyone can see Harris going up in the polls. That is reflected in the pricing. People with more money, more data, and faster data feeds than you are betting into the market.
Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense.
Betting on centrist candidates is a very, very bad strategy in recent electoral history. They either under-perform polls or meet expectations at best.
"....Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense...."
I bet on Harris because I wanted to find out if the automated betting machines in the shops would allow that and if I could use them. If, after some research I will pretend is thorough, I think she will win, I will bet on her in the belief that she will win and I can profit thereby
Not everybody does value betting.
It's not exactly complicated. The odds are around evens, and I think she'll win.
"betting on centrist candidate is a very bad strategy in recent history" is more of a rhetorical point than a convincing argument.
Harris isn't a centrist candidate, she ran to the liberal left of Biden and Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Haley was a centrist candidate this year, neither Trump nor Harris are centrists
Haley is a fairly right wing conservative.
In US terms she would be centrist
No, in US terms she's a fairly right wing conservative. Just not a loon.
See also Rishi "Centrist" Sunak.
Besides, what matters in a two-horse race is not whether a candidate is actually centrist so much as whether they are closer to the centre than the other one.
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
I’ve experienced quite a few suicides
Most came as a terrible and annihilating shock
One girl I knew hung herself and her mother discovered the body first. How do you ever get over that? You probably don’t
It’s one good argument against suicide - the way it destroys everyone around you
That is terrible and I cannot imagine how her poor Mother ever gets over it.
I've only experienced the one personally.
Also professionally a work colleague I used to deal with based in Holland also took his own life. He walked in front of a moving train in Apeldoorn. Again no indication anything was wrong. He was perfectly normal when he left for work. Did all the mundane things. Took his lunch. Headed off. By 10AM he was dead. Again no one had any inkling. His family were devastated. If he had had a terminal illness, as happened to me with my Dad, you get some time to make peace with it and accept it. In this case it is the reverse.
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
I’ve experienced quite a few suicides
No comment...
One of the suicides was a guy from my hometown I went inter-railing with in my late teens. We had a total blast - four of us roaming all around europe for a month, ending up in Greece
I got to know him pretty well and he seemed absolutely solid. Funny, charming, clever. Had a bit of a boring job with some gas company but had serious ambitions to move on
Two months later we heard that he’d gassed himself in his car. It was hard to believe. There was no obvious sign at all
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
I’ve experienced quite a few suicides
Most came as a terrible and annihilating shock
One girl I knew hung herself and her mother discovered the body first. How do you ever get over that? You probably don’t
It’s one good argument against suicide - the way it destroys everyone around you
That is terrible and I cannot imagine how her poor Mother ever gets over it.
I've only experienced the one personally.
Also professionally a work colleague I used to deal with based in Holland also took his own life. He walked in front of a moving train in Apeldoorn. Again no indication anything was wrong. He was perfectly normal when he left for work. Did all the mundane things. Took his lunch. Headed off. By 10AM he was dead. Again no one had any inkling. His family were devastated. If he had had a terminal illness, as happened to me with my Dad, you get some time to make peace with it and accept it. In this case it is the reverse.
Yes it’s horrific. And of course everyone around the suicide is stricken with guilt. Did I contribute? Should I have seen something? Could I have stopped it?
The least you can do is leave a note exonerating everyone and explaining why you’re doing it
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
I’ve experienced quite a few suicides
No comment...
One of the suicides was a guy from my hometown I went inter-railing with in my late teens. We had a total blast - four of us roaming all around europe for a month, ending up in Greece
I got to know him pretty well and he seemed absolutely solid. Funny, charming, clever. Had a bit of a boring job with some gas company but had serious ambitions to move on
Two months later we heard that he’d gassed himself in his car. It was hard to believe. There was no obvious sign at all
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
That's what I mean. I'm on at 5.5, but there's no volume.
I got a bit higher than that but only for a tiny amount. Where are all those punters who think the election is a toss up? C'mon, take my money!
Ohio is firmly in the Trump column in a toss up election. Won by Trump by 8% in 2020.
But (apparently) his people are worried about Ohio on the basis of their private polling. A sub-50% finding (aparently) brings it into toss-up territory.
I will not be surprised to see Ohio tied or better for Harris after the Convention.
Why his advisors are so worried is because there is no positive narrative coming out of the Trump campaign. No policies are being brought forward. Just Trump's paranoia that his showman schtick is failing. He is now reduced to being the centre of attention only because he is coming out with frankly risible nonsense about how many people want to turn up to see him versus Harris-Walz or even MLK Jnr. Whilst we can see the level of enthusiasm for Harris and Walz's "tour of joy" around the swing states, we just have to take Trump's word for the continuing love for him because there are no empirical ways of measuring it.
two cycles in a row pols have badly underestimated Trump in Ohio. It looks close then on the day it isn't. And two cycles in a row it's PVI has swung bigly to Trump (even if the margin was the same). It has a lot of wwc small towns that no longer vote dems. That won't change this election. In fact Dems still have room to fall in the small towns. ANd whilst GOP have room to fall in the suburbs they matter less in Ohio then e.g in WI where the WOW counties make up a huge chunk of the GOP vote.
I find the rush to bet on Harris very mystifying.
For betting purposes - and this should be obvious on a betting forum but many posters seem to be unaware of it - public information is useless. Everyone can see Harris going up in the polls. That is reflected in the pricing. People with more money, more data, and faster data feeds than you are betting into the market.
Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense.
Betting on centrist candidates is a very, very bad strategy in recent electoral history. They either under-perform polls or meet expectations at best.
"....Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense...."
I bet on Harris because I wanted to find out if the automated betting machines in the shops would allow that and if I could use them. If, after some research I will pretend is thorough, I think she will win, I will bet on her in the belief that she will win and I can profit thereby
Not everybody does value betting.
It's not exactly complicated. The odds are around evens, and I think she'll win.
"betting on centrist candidate is a very bad strategy in recent history" is more of a rhetorical point than a convincing argument.
Harris isn't a centrist candidate, she ran to the liberal left of Biden and Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Haley was a centrist candidate this year, neither Trump nor Harris are centrists
Haley is a fairly right wing conservative.
In US terms she would be centrist
No, in US terms she's a fairly right wing conservative. Just not a loon.
See also Rishi "Centrist" Sunak.
Besides, what matters in a two-horse race is not whether a candidate is actually centrist so much as whether they are closer to the centre than the other one.
I'm not sure even that's true in current US terms.
Industrial policy, for example, is currently more a discussion over what's effective and pragmatic, than it is a debate over the 'free market'. There's a perception that the US needs to rebuild its manufacturing sector - even Trump's somewhat weird plans for tariffs are an acknowledgment of that.
Abortion is very much seen as a left v right debate - but current GOP policy is net negative for the party.
In those particular contexts, 'centrist' doesn't really mean all that much.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Well one just has to weigh up the pleasure one gets from one's cat against those sorts of factors. It's a similar calc to many other things in life - eg if you like meat and then someone tells you about this & that to do with animal welfare and the environment.
But, no, I couldn't be replacing my cat with a hamster or a goldfish. Esp not the latter. You can't bond with a fish. Bad memories there too. I had a goldfish as a kid, won it at a fair, and it died within 48 hours.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
My cat has 3 legs, arthritis, a heart murmur and hardly ever goes out, I think the local bird population is safe.
Otoh he detests other cats and if he was a sentient super villain would exterminate them all in an irregular heat beat. Perhaps he’s a bird lover..
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
I’ve experienced quite a few suicides
No comment...
One of the suicides was a guy from my hometown I went inter-railing with in my late teens. We had a total blast - four of us roaming all around europe for a month, ending up in Greece
I got to know him pretty well and he seemed absolutely solid. Funny, charming, clever. Had a bit of a boring job with some gas company but had serious ambitions to move on
Two months later we heard that he’d gassed himself in his car. It was hard to believe. There was no obvious sign at all
Makes me sad even now
That's very sad
"There was no obvious sign at all"
That's a huge problem, particularly with male suicide. Men don't share. They don't talk etc.
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
I’ve experienced quite a few suicides
No comment...
One of the suicides was a guy from my hometown I went inter-railing with in my late teens. We had a total blast - four of us roaming all around europe for a month, ending up in Greece
I got to know him pretty well and he seemed absolutely solid. Funny, charming, clever. Had a bit of a boring job with some gas company but had serious ambitions to move on
Two months later we heard that he’d gassed himself in his car. It was hard to believe. There was no obvious sign at all
Makes me sad even now
I think ydoethurs comment was a reference to your regular phoenixing...
It's been a long time since we had an election going into summer and it seems all the polling organisations are having a rethink following their big "miss" on the Labour vote share. I saw something about a BPC meeting in September which I imagine some on here will be attending in one capacity or another.
Even in "normal" years there's a paucity of polling in August.
There will be polling on the Conservative leadership election when anyone can be bothered to a) do the polling or b) care who the new Tory leader is going to be.
As far as recent events are concerned, I suspect it'll be analogous to the 2000 fuel crisis which had, albeit momentarily, the Conservatives under Hague in front but when life returned to what passed for normal so did the Labour leads.
After the 2015 election there was VI polling (conducted, release date isn't given) the very next day. After the 2017 GE there was polling conducted within 2 days. After 2019, there does seem to have been a longer gap, the election took place on 12 December and polling was conducted 8-10 January. A gap of nearly a month, partly accounted for by the Christmas holidays. We are now well past a month, with no holidays, and polling has been conducted, with pollsters having released their polls on other topics, and said that they are 'working on their methodology', which implies to me that a VI question must be being asked, or they would have no raw data to work on.
It is fairly shocking that we have no VI polling at a time when the Government has dealt with a political crisis. It is also extremely convenient for the Government's 'isn't Keir wonderful?' narrative if VI polling is actually showing his Government is as popular as a bowl of sick, which I strongly suspect is the case.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
It's been a long time since we had an election going into summer and it seems all the polling organisations are having a rethink following their big "miss" on the Labour vote share. I saw something about a BPC meeting in September which I imagine some on here will be attending in one capacity or another.
Even in "normal" years there's a paucity of polling in August.
There will be polling on the Conservative leadership election when anyone can be bothered to a) do the polling or b) care who the new Tory leader is going to be.
As far as recent events are concerned, I suspect it'll be analogous to the 2000 fuel crisis which had, albeit momentarily, the Conservatives under Hague in front but when life returned to what passed for normal so did the Labour leads.
After the 2015 election there was VI polling (conducted, release date isn't given) the very next day. After the 2017 GE there was polling conducted within 2 days. After 2019, there does seem to have been a longer gap, the election took place on 12 December and polling was conducted 8-10 January. A gap of nearly a month, partly accounted for by the Christmas holidays. We are now well past a month, with no holidays, and polling has been conducted, with pollsters having released their polls on other topics, and said that they are 'working on their methodology', which implies to me that a VI question must be being asked, or they would have no raw data to work on.
It is fairly shocking that we have no VI polling at a time when the Government has dealt with a political crisis. It is also extremely convenient for the Government's 'isn't Keir wonderful?' narrative if VI polling is actually showing his Government is as popular as a bowl of sick, which I strongly suspect is the case.
I don’t believe it’s some conspiracy, however. And I’m not entirely averse to a good conspiracy
Perhaps it’s just a sense of - why bother; save money
Today's riot court cases include Lee James - he was wearing knuckle dusters at a protest in Southampton - this is the mitigation from Saturday..
She said James had picked up the knuckle duster at a property he had previously worked on, and left it in his van, from where he had picked it up and then put it on before the protest.
“He put it on his fingers and couldn’t get it off,” Ms Brownlow told the court.
Knuckledusters are banned from even private ownership in the same way as things like disguised knives.
In Olympic Events, he's for the High Jump if found guilty.
"A pro-foxhunting group says it has prepared a legal case to try to prove that hunters are an ethnic minority whose hunts should be protected under equality laws.
"Ed Swales, the chair of Hunting Kind, claims he has been advised by a leading human rights lawyer that hunters unequivocally qualify for legal protection under the UK Equality Act 2010."
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
I’ve experienced quite a few suicides
Most came as a terrible and annihilating shock
One girl I knew hung herself and her mother discovered the body first. How do you ever get over that? You probably don’t
It’s one good argument against suicide - the way it destroys everyone around you
I believe the phrase is that suicide doesn't end the pain, it just transfers it to those around you.
I lost someone I was very close to, and while I don't blame them for choosing that path, I don't believe I'll ever truly get over the loss. For a very long time, the best part of my day was the first fuzzy 30 seconds between sleep and wakefulness, before I remembered that person was dead. No longer in my life. Gone. Erased. Everything in my day after those first 30 seconds was just pain. Searing pain. I briefly considered ending it all myself, but I realised I couldn't inflict that kind of pain on those around me.
After much longer has passed, I've come to view the loss of that person as an amputation or a kneecap shot off in some foreign war. Yes, the *immediate* pain goes away, and you may even learn to walk again. But there will always be some kind of dull, low-level ache that never really goes away, something that comes into sharp focus when something reminds you of them, or when you're caught without something to occupy your mind, like a crossword puzzle, an argument on PB, or a strong drink. And suddenly you realise that the pain is still there, you've just grown numb to it over time.
I agree with Taz's sentiment, that you never know what someone is going through. A smile or a kind word might be enough to keep someone going for another day.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Why does it matter if cats kill birds?
Some of us quite like birds. Flying around. Doing bird things. Wild and pretty and singing in the garden or hunting in the moors
And it makes us quite angry that 50 million birds are killed - in the UK alone - just because social inepts need a “pet”
It's been a long time since we had an election going into summer and it seems all the polling organisations are having a rethink following their big "miss" on the Labour vote share. I saw something about a BPC meeting in September which I imagine some on here will be attending in one capacity or another.
Even in "normal" years there's a paucity of polling in August.
There will be polling on the Conservative leadership election when anyone can be bothered to a) do the polling or b) care who the new Tory leader is going to be.
As far as recent events are concerned, I suspect it'll be analogous to the 2000 fuel crisis which had, albeit momentarily, the Conservatives under Hague in front but when life returned to what passed for normal so did the Labour leads.
After the 2015 election there was VI polling (conducted, release date isn't given) the very next day. After the 2017 GE there was polling conducted within 2 days. After 2019, there does seem to have been a longer gap, the election took place on 12 December and polling was conducted 8-10 January. A gap of nearly a month, partly accounted for by the Christmas holidays. We are now well past a month, with no holidays, and polling has been conducted, with pollsters having released their polls on other topics, and said that they are 'working on their methodology', which implies to me that a VI question must be being asked, or they would have no raw data to work on.
It is fairly shocking that we have no VI polling at a time when the Government has dealt with a political crisis. It is also extremely convenient for the Government's 'isn't Keir wonderful?' narrative if VI polling is actually showing his Government is as popular as a bowl of sick, which I strongly suspect is the case.
It’s August. Everyone’s on holiday, including the media who fund polling and most of the politicians.
We’ll see more polling once everyone gets back, Parliament is sitting, and Conference season is around the corner.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
It's not enslaved. It comes and goes at will.
You, however, seem to have walked into a trap
I'm just chatting, is all.
About my cat.
He bites occasionally btw. It's not all sweetness and light.
.."We are not ashamed of talking about it," said his eldest daughter Kitty, 22. "There is nothing to hide and it is not a stigma. We were trying to help him get better before and trying to protect him, which is why we said nothing. "This is the time now to share the news, however horrible it is. We've wanted to be able to talk and share and we'd now like to raise awareness, too."..
I did make that speculation at the time. Suicide
Awful news. Retired pro cricketers have a suicide rate way above the normal, and no one has quite explained it
It's a melancholy subject, but there's no hard statistical evidence for an excess of cricketer suicides. It's just as likely to be relative less under-reporting of the phenomenon for professional cricketers.
It's a comparatively small population - and there are no reliable figures for (eg) Indian cricketers.
Male Suicide is actually one of Lee Anderson's focuses that he mentions fairly constantly, and raises money for.
.."We are not ashamed of talking about it," said his eldest daughter Kitty, 22. "There is nothing to hide and it is not a stigma. We were trying to help him get better before and trying to protect him, which is why we said nothing. "This is the time now to share the news, however horrible it is. We've wanted to be able to talk and share and we'd now like to raise awareness, too."..
I did make that speculation at the time. Suicide
Awful news. Retired pro cricketers have a suicide rate way above the normal, and no one has quite explained it
It's a melancholy subject, but there's no hard statistical evidence for an excess of cricketer suicides. It's just as likely to be relative less under-reporting of the phenomenon for professional cricketers.
It's a comparatively small population - and there are no reliable figures for (eg) Indian cricketers.
Male Suicide is actually one of Lee Anderson's focuses that he mentions fairly constantly, and raises money for.
Good for him. I don't have much time for him, but very few people are all bad.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
It's not enslaved. It comes and goes at will.
If it comes and goes at will then you have no idea if it is killing wild animals. It almost certainly is
You’re a self deluded hypocrite of the first water. But then you are a Hampstead lefty so I don’t know why I’m surprised
Ah but I do know because if it kills something it brings it back as a trophy to show me. Very sweet.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
My cat has 3 legs, arthritis, a heart murmur and hardly ever goes out, I think the local bird population is safe.
Otoh he detests other cats and if he was a sentient super villain would exterminate them all in an irregular heat beat. Perhaps he’s a bird lover..
But cannot not see the cruelty of allowing your cat to live........ I think is what Leon might say.
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
It's been a long time since we had an election going into summer and it seems all the polling organisations are having a rethink following their big "miss" on the Labour vote share. I saw something about a BPC meeting in September which I imagine some on here will be attending in one capacity or another.
Even in "normal" years there's a paucity of polling in August.
There will be polling on the Conservative leadership election when anyone can be bothered to a) do the polling or b) care who the new Tory leader is going to be.
As far as recent events are concerned, I suspect it'll be analogous to the 2000 fuel crisis which had, albeit momentarily, the Conservatives under Hague in front but when life returned to what passed for normal so did the Labour leads.
After the 2015 election there was VI polling (conducted, release date isn't given) the very next day. After the 2017 GE there was polling conducted within 2 days. After 2019, there does seem to have been a longer gap, the election took place on 12 December and polling was conducted 8-10 January. A gap of nearly a month, partly accounted for by the Christmas holidays. We are now well past a month, with no holidays, and polling has been conducted, with pollsters having released their polls on other topics, and said that they are 'working on their methodology', which implies to me that a VI question must be being asked, or they would have no raw data to work on.
It is fairly shocking that we have no VI polling at a time when the Government has dealt with a political crisis. It is also extremely convenient for the Government's 'isn't Keir wonderful?' narrative if VI polling is actually showing his Government is as popular as a bowl of sick, which I strongly suspect is the case.
I don’t believe it’s some conspiracy, however. And I’m not entirely averse to a good conspiracy
Perhaps it’s just a sense of - why bother; save money
We can't know. But polls do influence the news. Very little point in breathless newsreels and headlines about the spontaneous anti-racism protests facing down the fascists and SKS being feted as the hammer of the rioters, if actually the Government has dropped ten points behind the Tories and Reform are surging.
I am not alleging a conspiracy either - I have zero evidence for one, but I would definitely say there's very much a hand in glove feeling between Labour and the organs of the state which doesn't feel impartial or healthy.
At any rate, the drought will be over at some point, and then we'll see.
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
I’ve experienced quite a few suicides
Most came as a terrible and annihilating shock
One girl I knew hung herself and her mother discovered the body first. How do you ever get over that? You probably don’t
It’s one good argument against suicide - the way it destroys everyone around you
I believe the phrase is that suicide doesn't end the pain, it just transfers it to those around you.
I lost someone I was very close to, and while I don't blame them for choosing that path, I don't believe I'll ever truly get over the loss. For a very long time, the best part of my day was the first fuzzy 30 seconds between sleep and wakefulness, before I remembered that person was dead. No longer in my life. Gone. Erased. Everything in my day after those first 30 seconds was just pain. Searing pain. I briefly considered ending it all myself, but I realised I couldn't inflict that kind of pain on those around me.
After much longer has passed, I've come to view the loss of that person as an amputation or a kneecap shot off in some foreign war. Yes, the *immediate* pain goes away, and you may even learn to walk again. But there will always be some kind of dull, low-level ache that never really goes away, something that comes into sharp focus when something reminds you of them, or when you're caught without something to occupy your mind, like a crossword puzzle, an argument on PB, or a strong drink. And suddenly you realise that the pain is still there, you've just grown numb to it over time.
I agree with Taz's sentiment, that you never know what someone is going through. A smile or a kind word might be enough to keep someone going for another day.
That’s tough. And your experience sounds incredibly similar to mine
Mine was a divorce forced on us both - even while still passionately in love - because she wanted kids and I didn’t. We were obliged to split and the pain was 1000 times worse than I expected, she was my best friend and my soulmate and we’d spent the past four years in blissful company, 24/7. She was the funniest person I’d ever met. And the sexiest
The only way to do it was to do it brutally. She walked out the door and I didn’t see her for two years. I’ve only briefly seen her twice since (it’s still too painful for both of us, I think)
Everyone kept saying “ah it’s only a broken heart it’s not like she died” but it absolutely WAS like a death. And I was haunted by her ghost - photos and voicemails
I’m over it now - I’m rarely sad about it. I now give thanks that I had such an amazing and intense relationship. Many don’t
But my god those six months of grief. I actually howled with anguish. And, every morning, just like you, I’d have 30 seconds of blissful ignorance then the crushing reality would return, squatting on my chest
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
I’ve experienced quite a few suicides
Most came as a terrible and annihilating shock
One girl I knew hung herself and her mother discovered the body first. How do you ever get over that? You probably don’t
It’s one good argument against suicide - the way it destroys everyone around you
I have a friend who’s flatmate & friend hung himself, he discovered the body. 25 years later the same thing happened with his business partner. Luckily David is a resilient character, I imagine these events would be quite dangerous if one was also inclined to depression.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
There are more than 30 million sheep in the UK, and 14 million are killed each year for human consumption by their farmer, a fraction of the way through their natural life. https://viva.org.uk/animals/number-animals-killed/
So, if you are right that 15,000 sheep a year are killed by dogs, that's still just 0.1% of all of the sheep deaths in the UK instigated by farmers themselves. It's hardly going to bring the sheep farming economy down is it? So get some perspective before you advocate blanket solutions applied universally to all.
I had agreed with you initially when you said "it becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally" but then you went on to advocate exactly that, by implying that you advocate a universal ban on dogs off lead in public areas such as parks.
The problem is that the term "dogs" is all encompassing, yet it's used universally in this context even though there's far more variety to dogs than there is to people. I have a 12 year old retired guide dog who plods daily around our local park off lead, properly under control, yet the blanket term "dog" puts him in the same bracket as a potentially dangerous attack dog. How would you appreciate it as a man if all men were banned from visiting their local park without some sort of restrictive condition such as under licence, simply because some perverted men are a danger to young children and because unlike dogs it's difficult to readily identify those men who could be a problem apart from those who aren't? Universal labelling and universal solutions are not the answer.
.."We are not ashamed of talking about it," said his eldest daughter Kitty, 22. "There is nothing to hide and it is not a stigma. We were trying to help him get better before and trying to protect him, which is why we said nothing. "This is the time now to share the news, however horrible it is. We've wanted to be able to talk and share and we'd now like to raise awareness, too."..
I did make that speculation at the time. Suicide
Awful news. Retired pro cricketers have a suicide rate way above the normal, and no one has quite explained it
It's a melancholy subject, but there's no hard statistical evidence for an excess of cricketer suicides. It's just as likely to be relative less under-reporting of the phenomenon for professional cricketers.
It's a comparatively small population - and there are no reliable figures for (eg) Indian cricketers.
Male Suicide is actually one of Lee Anderson's focuses that he mentions fairly constantly, and raises money for.
Good for him. I don't have much time for him, but very few people are all bad.
Compare and contrast your response with that of Dura_Ace. A decent human being showing empathy and understanding of how complex life is, as compared to a troll.
I have no more liking for Anderson than either of you but I do hope most decent people would have your response as opposed to the one before you.
.."We are not ashamed of talking about it," said his eldest daughter Kitty, 22. "There is nothing to hide and it is not a stigma. We were trying to help him get better before and trying to protect him, which is why we said nothing. "This is the time now to share the news, however horrible it is. We've wanted to be able to talk and share and we'd now like to raise awareness, too."..
I did make that speculation at the time. Suicide
Awful news. Retired pro cricketers have a suicide rate way above the normal, and no one has quite explained it
It's a melancholy subject, but there's no hard statistical evidence for an excess of cricketer suicides. It's just as likely to be relative less under-reporting of the phenomenon for professional cricketers.
It's a comparatively small population - and there are no reliable figures for (eg) Indian cricketers.
Male Suicide is actually one of Lee Anderson's focuses that he mentions fairly constantly, and raises money for.
Good for him. I don't have much time for him, but very few people are all bad.
I can think of a couple of high profile candidates.
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
That's true. Also true that the person being obnoxious might be struggling.
Digital chat can be great but there are real dangers.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
My cat has 3 legs, arthritis, a heart murmur and hardly ever goes out, I think the local bird population is safe.
Otoh he detests other cats and if he was a sentient super villain would exterminate them all in an irregular heat beat. Perhaps he’s a bird lover..
Sounds like he needs to be Larry's Deputy for the House of Lords .
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
I think there's an inherent contradiction between him passionately wanting to influence politics, but also wanting to be seen as an impartial recorder of politics. You can't really be both. If it can be managed, he should stand for Reform at the next GE - he'd be an asset to them, give them a bit more intellectual heft.
Today's riot court cases include Lee James - he was wearing knuckle dusters at a protest in Southampton - this is the mitigation from Saturday..
She said James had picked up the knuckle duster at a property he had previously worked on, and left it in his van, from where he had picked it up and then put it on before the protest.
“He put it on his fingers and couldn’t get it off,” Ms Brownlow told the court.
Knuckledusters are banned from even private ownership in the same way as things like disguised knives.
In Olympic Events, he's for the High Jump if found guilty.
Interesting. I didn't know knuckle-dusters were illegal.
Today's riot court cases include Lee James - he was wearing knuckle dusters at a protest in Southampton - this is the mitigation from Saturday..
She said James had picked up the knuckle duster at a property he had previously worked on, and left it in his van, from where he had picked it up and then put it on before the protest.
“He put it on his fingers and couldn’t get it off,” Ms Brownlow told the court.
Knuckledusters are banned from even private ownership in the same way as things like disguised knives.
In Olympic Events, he's for the High Jump if found guilty.
Interesting. I didn't know knuckle-dusters were illegal.
Only since 2019 - when the Offensive Weapons Act was updated to include possession as well as use...
.."We are not ashamed of talking about it," said his eldest daughter Kitty, 22. "There is nothing to hide and it is not a stigma. We were trying to help him get better before and trying to protect him, which is why we said nothing. "This is the time now to share the news, however horrible it is. We've wanted to be able to talk and share and we'd now like to raise awareness, too."..
I did make that speculation at the time. Suicide
Awful news. Retired pro cricketers have a suicide rate way above the normal, and no one has quite explained it
It's a melancholy subject, but there's no hard statistical evidence for an excess of cricketer suicides. It's just as likely to be relative less under-reporting of the phenomenon for professional cricketers.
It's a comparatively small population - and there are no reliable figures for (eg) Indian cricketers.
Male Suicide is actually one of Lee Anderson's focuses that he mentions fairly constantly, and raises money for.
Given the way people in the public eye are 'unpersoned' and have their career irrecoverably destroyed, even after paying the legal penalty, it's surprising suicide isn't more common. Not everyone has the resilience of John Profumo.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
@leon. It is not new science. The information has been around for years. I make the point because you are very harsh on people who don't know things eg Roger the other day, yet this is an old issue that has been around for many years that you have just discovered and are treating as a revelation. We aren't calling you all sorts of names because you have only just become aware of it. Worth bearing in mind.
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
He is both right and wrong. He is right that the UK Govt is increasingly authoritarian and the clamping down on "legal but harmful" is a genuine phenomenon. But he misses that this is part of a global trend where governments, after thirty years of unrestricted communication by the masses, have worked out how to clamp down on it and are doing so. He also has lost his sense of proportion: the UK is not North Korea.
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
I think there's an inherent contradiction between him passionately wanting to influence politics, but also wanting to be seen as an impartial recorder of politics. You can't really be both. If it can be managed, he should stand for Reform at the next GE - he'd be an asset to them, give them a bit more intellectual heft.
Yes. He absolutely should go into politics. An eloquently honest right winger with brains - disliked by many but admired by others. And he seems quite resilient - which he will need to be
I note his substack has 47k subscribers. If they are all paying then he has a very large private income and I can see why he doesn’t give a hoot about his academic career. He’s far beyond that
Today's riot court cases include Lee James - he was wearing knuckle dusters at a protest in Southampton - this is the mitigation from Saturday..
She said James had picked up the knuckle duster at a property he had previously worked on, and left it in his van, from where he had picked it up and then put it on before the protest.
“He put it on his fingers and couldn’t get it off,” Ms Brownlow told the court.
Knuckledusters are banned from even private ownership in the same way as things like disguised knives.
In Olympic Events, he's for the High Jump if found guilty.
Interesting. I didn't know knuckle-dusters were illegal.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
@leon. It is not new science. The information has been around for years. I make the point because you are very harsh on people who don't know things eg Roger the other day, yet this is an old issue that has been around for many years that you have just discovered and are treating as a revelation. We aren't calling you all sorts of names because you have only just become aware of it. Worth bearing in mind.
No. The science on vet medicines destroying insect life and rivers IS new
That's what I mean. I'm on at 5.5, but there's no volume.
I got a bit higher than that but only for a tiny amount. Where are all those punters who think the election is a toss up? C'mon, take my money!
Ohio is firmly in the Trump column in a toss up election. Won by Trump by 8% in 2020.
But (apparently) his people are worried about Ohio on the basis of their private polling. A sub-50% finding (aparently) brings it into toss-up territory.
I will not be surprised to see Ohio tied or better for Harris after the Convention.
Why his advisors are so worried is because there is no positive narrative coming out of the Trump campaign. No policies are being brought forward. Just Trump's paranoia that his showman schtick is failing. He is now reduced to being the centre of attention only because he is coming out with frankly risible nonsense about how many people want to turn up to see him versus Harris-Walz or even MLK Jnr. Whilst we can see the level of enthusiasm for Harris and Walz's "tour of joy" around the swing states, we just have to take Trump's word for the continuing love for him because there are no empirical ways of measuring it.
two cycles in a row pols have badly underestimated Trump in Ohio. It looks close then on the day it isn't. And two cycles in a row it's PVI has swung bigly to Trump (even if the margin was the same). It has a lot of wwc small towns that no longer vote dems. That won't change this election. In fact Dems still have room to fall in the small towns. ANd whilst GOP have room to fall in the suburbs they matter less in Ohio then e.g in WI where the WOW counties make up a huge chunk of the GOP vote.
I find the rush to bet on Harris very mystifying.
For betting purposes - and this should be obvious on a betting forum but many posters seem to be unaware of it - public information is useless. Everyone can see Harris going up in the polls. That is reflected in the pricing. People with more money, more data, and faster data feeds than you are betting into the market.
Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense.
Betting on centrist candidates is a very, very bad strategy in recent electoral history. They either under-perform polls or meet expectations at best.
"....Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense...."
I bet on Harris because I wanted to find out if the automated betting machines in the shops would allow that and if I could use them. If, after some research I will pretend is thorough, I think she will win, I will bet on her in the belief that she will win and I can profit thereby
Not everybody does value betting.
It's not exactly complicated. The odds are around evens, and I think she'll win.
"betting on centrist candidate is a very bad strategy in recent history" is more of a rhetorical point than a convincing argument.
Harris isn't a centrist candidate, she ran to the liberal left of Biden and Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Haley was a centrist candidate this year, neither Trump nor Harris are centrists
Haley is a fairly right wing conservative.
In US terms she would be centrist
No, in US terms she's a fairly right wing conservative. Just not a loon.
See also Rishi "Centrist" Sunak.
Besides, what matters in a two-horse race is not whether a candidate is actually centrist so much as whether they are closer to the centre than the other one.
That is normally true, if Harris was up against Haley it would likely be a GOP landslide but against Trump and Vance Harris and Walz have a much better chance.
Though even a less centrist candidate can occasionally beat a more centrist candidate if the economy is poor and/or the incumbent seen as weak eg when Obama beat McCain in 2008 or Reagan beat Carter in 1980 or Thatcher beat Callaghan in 1979 here
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
No that is not shutting down free speech., But what is being suggested by the Government is. Don't let your dislike of the messenger blind you to the message. In this specific instance Goodwin is right.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
@leon. It is not new science. The information has been around for years. I make the point because you are very harsh on people who don't know things eg Roger the other day, yet this is an old issue that has been around for many years that you have just discovered and are treating as a revelation. We aren't calling you all sorts of names because you have only just become aware of it. Worth bearing in mind.
If it is not new science, it is new public awareness.
Bees are especially sensitive to the tick medicines. I went on a moth-trapping session last year and the landowner really went off on oen about how dog-owners were demolishing our wildlife.
I suppose on the bright side, when all wildlife is dead, we won't need tick medicines...
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
I think there's an inherent contradiction between him passionately wanting to influence politics, but also wanting to be seen as an impartial recorder of politics. You can't really be both. If it can be managed, he should stand for Reform at the next GE - he'd be an asset to them, give them a bit more intellectual heft.
That's what I mean. I'm on at 5.5, but there's no volume.
I got a bit higher than that but only for a tiny amount. Where are all those punters who think the election is a toss up? C'mon, take my money!
Ohio is firmly in the Trump column in a toss up election. Won by Trump by 8% in 2020.
But (apparently) his people are worried about Ohio on the basis of their private polling. A sub-50% finding (aparently) brings it into toss-up territory.
I will not be surprised to see Ohio tied or better for Harris after the Convention.
Why his advisors are so worried is because there is no positive narrative coming out of the Trump campaign. No policies are being brought forward. Just Trump's paranoia that his showman schtick is failing. He is now reduced to being the centre of attention only because he is coming out with frankly risible nonsense about how many people want to turn up to see him versus Harris-Walz or even MLK Jnr. Whilst we can see the level of enthusiasm for Harris and Walz's "tour of joy" around the swing states, we just have to take Trump's word for the continuing love for him because there are no empirical ways of measuring it.
two cycles in a row pols have badly underestimated Trump in Ohio. It looks close then on the day it isn't. And two cycles in a row it's PVI has swung bigly to Trump (even if the margin was the same). It has a lot of wwc small towns that no longer vote dems. That won't change this election. In fact Dems still have room to fall in the small towns. ANd whilst GOP have room to fall in the suburbs they matter less in Ohio then e.g in WI where the WOW counties make up a huge chunk of the GOP vote.
I find the rush to bet on Harris very mystifying.
For betting purposes - and this should be obvious on a betting forum but many posters seem to be unaware of it - public information is useless. Everyone can see Harris going up in the polls. That is reflected in the pricing. People with more money, more data, and faster data feeds than you are betting into the market.
Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense.
Betting on centrist candidates is a very, very bad strategy in recent electoral history. They either under-perform polls or meet expectations at best.
"....Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense...."
I bet on Harris because I wanted to find out if the automated betting machines in the shops would allow that and if I could use them. If, after some research I will pretend is thorough, I think she will win, I will bet on her in the belief that she will win and I can profit thereby
Not everybody does value betting.
It's not exactly complicated. The odds are around evens, and I think she'll win.
"betting on centrist candidate is a very bad strategy in recent history" is more of a rhetorical point than a convincing argument.
Harris isn't a centrist candidate, she ran to the liberal left of Biden and Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Haley was a centrist candidate this year, neither Trump nor Harris are centrists
Haley is a fairly right wing conservative.
In US terms she would be centrist
No, in US terms she's a fairly right wing conservative. Just not a loon.
See also Rishi "Centrist" Sunak.
Besides, what matters in a two-horse race is not whether a candidate is actually centrist so much as whether they are closer to the centre than the other one.
That is true, if Harris was up against Haley it would likely be a GOP landslide but against Trump and Vance Harris and Walz have a much better chance.
Though even a less centrist candidate can occasionally beat a more centrist candidate if the economy is poor and/or the incumbent seen as weak eg when Obama beat McCain in 2012 or Reagan beat Carter in 1980 or Thatcher beat Callaghan in 1979 here
Wait a minute, just before Biden dropped out you were absolutely certain that if Harris became the Democratic candidate then Trump was guaranteed the biggest landslide since Reagan in 1984. Have you changed your mind?
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
@leon. It is not new science. The information has been around for years. I make the point because you are very harsh on people who don't know things eg Roger the other day, yet this is an old issue that has been around for many years that you have just discovered and are treating as a revelation. We aren't calling you all sorts of names because you have only just become aware of it. Worth bearing in mind.
If it is not new science, it is new public awareness.
Bees are especially sensitive to the tick medicines. I went on a moth-trapping session last year and the landowner really went off on oen about how dog-owners were demolishing our wildlife.
I suppose on the bright side, when all wildlife is dead, we won't need tick medicines...
The awareness needs to be spread to the pet owners themselves. As we see on here they are all in denial. It’s always “MY cat doesn’t do any of this”
So who exactly is killing 50 million birds a year?
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
My cat would totally destroy Britain's birdlife and foul your waterways. I'm not sure what the exact mechanism is as he never leaves my house in Japan but he might be working for Thames Water remotely.
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
No that is not shutting down free speech., But what is being suggested by the Government is. Don't let your dislike of the messenger blind you to the message. In this specific instance Goodwin is right.
Having read the article he seems to be happy to highlight what the problem is but he doesn't suggest any actual solutions.
And that's the problem - how do you fix the issue.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Why does it matter if cats kill birds?
If cats were wild creatures and they killed the birds to feed themselves, then it wouldn't matter. If the cats killed so many birds that they ran out of food, then the number of cats would decrease, and the relative population's would reach a stable equilibrium.
But cats as domestic pets are subsidised hunters. However many birds they kill they will never go hungry. And so there is the potential for them to predate birds to extinction. This would have serious knock-on effects for the insects, slugs, etc, that the birds would no longer be eating, or the wild predator birds like sparrowhawks who would no longer have any prey.
After farming, keeping cats as pets is possibly the second most destructive thing that humans do to wildlife. And agriculture is a bit more important.
I have read that cats are crepuscular hunters, and if you can keep them inside around dawn and dusk, then you greatly reduce their hunting. But I'm not convinced. It sounds like a comforting self-deception. A bit like those people who think they are doing their bit to combat global warming by recycling plastic.
That's what I mean. I'm on at 5.5, but there's no volume.
I got a bit higher than that but only for a tiny amount. Where are all those punters who think the election is a toss up? C'mon, take my money!
Ohio is firmly in the Trump column in a toss up election. Won by Trump by 8% in 2020.
But (apparently) his people are worried about Ohio on the basis of their private polling. A sub-50% finding (aparently) brings it into toss-up territory.
I will not be surprised to see Ohio tied or better for Harris after the Convention.
Why his advisors are so worried is because there is no positive narrative coming out of the Trump campaign. No policies are being brought forward. Just Trump's paranoia that his showman schtick is failing. He is now reduced to being the centre of attention only because he is coming out with frankly risible nonsense about how many people want to turn up to see him versus Harris-Walz or even MLK Jnr. Whilst we can see the level of enthusiasm for Harris and Walz's "tour of joy" around the swing states, we just have to take Trump's word for the continuing love for him because there are no empirical ways of measuring it.
two cycles in a row pols have badly underestimated Trump in Ohio. It looks close then on the day it isn't. And two cycles in a row it's PVI has swung bigly to Trump (even if the margin was the same). It has a lot of wwc small towns that no longer vote dems. That won't change this election. In fact Dems still have room to fall in the small towns. ANd whilst GOP have room to fall in the suburbs they matter less in Ohio then e.g in WI where the WOW counties make up a huge chunk of the GOP vote.
I find the rush to bet on Harris very mystifying.
For betting purposes - and this should be obvious on a betting forum but many posters seem to be unaware of it - public information is useless. Everyone can see Harris going up in the polls. That is reflected in the pricing. People with more money, more data, and faster data feeds than you are betting into the market.
Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense.
Betting on centrist candidates is a very, very bad strategy in recent electoral history. They either under-perform polls or meet expectations at best.
"....Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense...."
I bet on Harris because I wanted to find out if the automated betting machines in the shops would allow that and if I could use them. If, after some research I will pretend is thorough, I think she will win, I will bet on her in the belief that she will win and I can profit thereby
Not everybody does value betting.
It's not exactly complicated. The odds are around evens, and I think she'll win.
"betting on centrist candidate is a very bad strategy in recent history" is more of a rhetorical point than a convincing argument.
Harris isn't a centrist candidate, she ran to the liberal left of Biden and Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Haley was a centrist candidate this year, neither Trump nor Harris are centrists
Haley is a fairly right wing conservative.
In US terms she would be centrist
No, in US terms she's a fairly right wing conservative. Just not a loon.
See also Rishi "Centrist" Sunak.
Besides, what matters in a two-horse race is not whether a candidate is actually centrist so much as whether they are closer to the centre than the other one.
That is normally true, if Harris was up against Haley it would likely be a GOP landslide but against Trump and Vance Harris and Walz have a much better chance.
Though even a less centrist candidate can occasionally beat a more centrist candidate if the economy is poor and/or the incumbent seen as weak eg when Obama beat McCain in 2008 or Reagan beat Carter in 1980 or Thatcher beat Callaghan in 1979 here
It also surely depends on what the centrist agenda is. The 'centrist' agenda these days cannot be objectively described as moderate, comforting, conservative, or easy - something that voters gravitate toward. In most particulars, it will positively repel voters, hence the attempt to ensure that all parties will offer the same policies with minor presentational differences. The electoral rewards lie in departing from the centrist consensus.
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
No that is not shutting down free speech., But what is being suggested by the Government is. Don't let your dislike of the messenger blind you to the message. In this specific instance Goodwin is right.
One reason Goodwin is annoying (there are several) is because he quite often says annoyingly correct but upsetting things, which people would rather not hear
Today's riot court cases include Lee James - he was wearing knuckle dusters at a protest in Southampton - this is the mitigation from Saturday..
She said James had picked up the knuckle duster at a property he had previously worked on, and left it in his van, from where he had picked it up and then put it on before the protest.
“He put it on his fingers and couldn’t get it off,” Ms Brownlow told the court.
Knuckledusters are banned from even private ownership in the same way as things like disguised knives.
In Olympic Events, he's for the High Jump if found guilty.
Interesting. I didn't know knuckle-dusters were illegal.
It's seen as an offensive weapon with no other purpose, so no reason to possess. Exceptions (or defences) may be eg an antique or a film prop.
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
He is both right and wrong. He is right that the UK Govt is increasingly authoritarian and the clamping down on "legal but harmful" is a genuine phenomenon. But he misses that this is part of a global trend where governments, after thirty years of unrestricted communication by the masses, have worked out how to clamp down on it and are doing so. He also has lost his sense of proportion: the UK is not North Korea.
Perhaps modern societies are so disjointed and diverse that only authoritarian governments can hold them together? And when authoritarianism fails the solution is to ratchet it up some more. Sooner or later Hate Speech has to be replaced by Thought Crime. QE1 said 'I would not open windows into men's souls', though her torturers did exactly that, routinely. How can a society function when the Government doesn't know what people think because it has banned them from saying so?
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
@leon. It is not new science. The information has been around for years. I make the point because you are very harsh on people who don't know things eg Roger the other day, yet this is an old issue that has been around for many years that you have just discovered and are treating as a revelation. We aren't calling you all sorts of names because you have only just become aware of it. Worth bearing in mind.
If it is not new science, it is new public awareness.
Bees are especially sensitive to the tick medicines. I went on a moth-trapping session last year and the landowner really went off on oen about how dog-owners were demolishing our wildlife.
I suppose on the bright side, when all wildlife is dead, we won't need tick medicines...
Not even sure that is true. A Google search comes up with a 4 year old Guardian article straight away. I have certainly read umpteen articles over the years.
The point being however @Leon shouldn't be so harsh when people don't know things. As I said the other day - I apologise for not knowing everything, which seems to be an unacceptable admission for a PBer.
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
But here he is raising, in a round about way with melodramatic language (nonsense about the elite for example", an important point. Who gets to decide what is legal but harmful ? Who decides that ?
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
No that is not shutting down free speech., But what is being suggested by the Government is. Don't let your dislike of the messenger blind you to the message. In this specific instance Goodwin is right.
One reason Goodwin is annoying (there are several) is because he quite often says annoyingly correct but upsetting things, which people would rather not hear
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
My cat would totally destroy Britain's birdlife and foul your waterways. I'm not sure what the exact mechanism is as he never leaves my house in Japan but he might be working for Thames Water remotely.
My favourite author (Murakami) is Japanese and there's a cat motif (sometimes peripheral sometimes central) in many of his novels.
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
No that is not shutting down free speech., But what is being suggested by the Government is. Don't let your dislike of the messenger blind you to the message. In this specific instance Goodwin is right.
Having read the article he seems to be happy to highlight what the problem is but he doesn't suggest any actual solutions.
And that's the problem - how do you fix the issue.
I thought Goodwin’s go-to solution was to halt immigration and let the ‘indigenous’ British/English population flourish?
Someone on here (Ishmael, I think) once posted that he'd had both stage 4 cancer and clinical depression and it was no contest which was the bigger ordeal - the depression.
You'd think, given that, he'd be slightly more pleasant and less obnoxious to people he disagreed with when here then.
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
I’ve experienced quite a few suicides
Most came as a terrible and annihilating shock
One girl I knew hung herself and her mother discovered the body first. How do you ever get over that? You probably don’t
It’s one good argument against suicide - the way it destroys everyone around you
I have a friend who’s flatmate & friend hung himself, he discovered the body. 25 years later the same thing happened with his business partner. Luckily David is a resilient character, I imagine these events would be quite dangerous if one was also inclined to depression.
Btw is it hung or hanged himself?
People are hanged but portraits are hung. A person who is "well-hung" has a large penis, not dangling from a rope.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
@leon. It is not new science. The information has been around for years. I make the point because you are very harsh on people who don't know things eg Roger the other day, yet this is an old issue that has been around for many years that you have just discovered and are treating as a revelation. We aren't calling you all sorts of names because you have only just become aware of it. Worth bearing in mind.
No. The science on vet medicines destroying insect life and rivers IS new
Honestly @leon. Do a quick Google search and you will see how ridiculous that statement is. I have known about it for years.
Guardian November 2020 has an article for instance.
That's what I mean. I'm on at 5.5, but there's no volume.
I got a bit higher than that but only for a tiny amount. Where are all those punters who think the election is a toss up? C'mon, take my money!
Ohio is firmly in the Trump column in a toss up election. Won by Trump by 8% in 2020.
But (apparently) his people are worried about Ohio on the basis of their private polling. A sub-50% finding (aparently) brings it into toss-up territory.
I will not be surprised to see Ohio tied or better for Harris after the Convention.
Why his advisors are so worried is because there is no positive narrative coming out of the Trump campaign. No policies are being brought forward. Just Trump's paranoia that his showman schtick is failing. He is now reduced to being the centre of attention only because he is coming out with frankly risible nonsense about how many people want to turn up to see him versus Harris-Walz or even MLK Jnr. Whilst we can see the level of enthusiasm for Harris and Walz's "tour of joy" around the swing states, we just have to take Trump's word for the continuing love for him because there are no empirical ways of measuring it.
two cycles in a row pols have badly underestimated Trump in Ohio. It looks close then on the day it isn't. And two cycles in a row it's PVI has swung bigly to Trump (even if the margin was the same). It has a lot of wwc small towns that no longer vote dems. That won't change this election. In fact Dems still have room to fall in the small towns. ANd whilst GOP have room to fall in the suburbs they matter less in Ohio then e.g in WI where the WOW counties make up a huge chunk of the GOP vote.
I find the rush to bet on Harris very mystifying.
For betting purposes - and this should be obvious on a betting forum but many posters seem to be unaware of it - public information is useless. Everyone can see Harris going up in the polls. That is reflected in the pricing. People with more money, more data, and faster data feeds than you are betting into the market.
Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense.
Betting on centrist candidates is a very, very bad strategy in recent electoral history. They either under-perform polls or meet expectations at best.
"....Either you think the polls are essentially correct-in which case you have no bet because the line is efficient. Or you think they are wrong in which case a bet on Trump is correct. There is no scenario where a bet on Harris makes sense...."
I bet on Harris because I wanted to find out if the automated betting machines in the shops would allow that and if I could use them. If, after some research I will pretend is thorough, I think she will win, I will bet on her in the belief that she will win and I can profit thereby
Not everybody does value betting.
It's not exactly complicated. The odds are around evens, and I think she'll win.
"betting on centrist candidate is a very bad strategy in recent history" is more of a rhetorical point than a convincing argument.
Harris isn't a centrist candidate, she ran to the liberal left of Biden and Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Haley was a centrist candidate this year, neither Trump nor Harris are centrists
Haley is a fairly right wing conservative.
In US terms she would be centrist
No, in US terms she's a fairly right wing conservative. Just not a loon.
See also Rishi "Centrist" Sunak.
Besides, what matters in a two-horse race is not whether a candidate is actually centrist so much as whether they are closer to the centre than the other one.
That is true, if Harris was up against Haley it would likely be a GOP landslide but against Trump and Vance Harris and Walz have a much better chance.
Though even a less centrist candidate can occasionally beat a more centrist candidate if the economy is poor and/or the incumbent seen as weak eg when Obama beat McCain in 2012 or Reagan beat Carter in 1980 or Thatcher beat Callaghan in 1979 here
Wait a minute, just before Biden dropped out you were absolutely certain that if Harris became the Democratic candidate then Trump was guaranteed the biggest landslide since Reagan in 1984. Have you changed your mind?
Not just HYUFD, but the Democrats. An obvious dementia sufferer was considered preferable until the strategy became untenable.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
There are more than 30 million sheep in the UK, and 14 million are killed each year for human consumption by their farmer, a fraction of the way through their natural life. https://viva.org.uk/animals/number-animals-killed/
So, if you are right that 15,000 sheep a year are killed by dogs, that's still just 0.1% of all of the sheep deaths in the UK instigated by farmers themselves. It's hardly going to bring the sheep farming economy down is it? So get some perspective before you advocate blanket solutions applied universally to all.
I had agreed with you initially when you said "it becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally" but then you went on to advocate exactly that, by implying that you advocate a universal ban on dogs off lead in public areas such as parks.
The problem is that the term "dogs" is all encompassing, yet it's used universally in this context even though there's far more variety to dogs than there is to people. I have a 12 year old retired guide dog who plods daily around our local park off lead, properly under control, yet the blanket term "dog" puts him in the same bracket as a potentially dangerous attack dog. How would you appreciate it as a man if all men were banned from visiting their local park without some sort of restrictive condition such as under licence, simply because some perverted men are a danger to young children and because unlike dogs it's difficult to readily identify those men who could be a problem apart from those who aren't? Universal labelling and universal solutions are not the answer.
The legal term is - I think - "under close control".
I wouldn't advocate for a particular universal measure, but I do think a conversation is needed.
My particular is invisible extendy-leads, that give the illusion of control, but often prevent it.
Today's riot court cases include Lee James - he was wearing knuckle dusters at a protest in Southampton - this is the mitigation from Saturday..
She said James had picked up the knuckle duster at a property he had previously worked on, and left it in his van, from where he had picked it up and then put it on before the protest.
“He put it on his fingers and couldn’t get it off,” Ms Brownlow told the court.
Knuckledusters are banned from even private ownership in the same way as things like disguised knives.
In Olympic Events, he's for the High Jump if found guilty.
I’m reminded of a story about a chap who claimed that he just happened to be sitting on a stolen motorcycle, outside a jewellers.
Some random bloke he had never seen before, runs out, jumps on the back of the bike. And shouted “go, go”
So our hero dies the obvious - takes off at maximum speed.
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
There's something about Matt Goodwin that has - over time - become increasingly annoying. Is me choosing not to follow him on Twitter any more, me shutting down free speech? Or is it me simply deciding that I can't be arsed to hear from him any more?
No that is not shutting down free speech., But what is being suggested by the Government is. Don't let your dislike of the messenger blind you to the message. In this specific instance Goodwin is right.
Having read the article he seems to be happy to highlight what the problem is but he doesn't suggest any actual solutions.
And that's the problem - how do you fix the issue.
I don't know. But what I do know is you don't do it by telling people they are not allowed to think or talk about these things.
I also know that there is a bit of opportiunism going on here. We already have laws in place to stop incitement - indeed some of those have been used this week. What the Government seems to be suggesting now is that we move on from tackling things that are illegal to clamping down on things we don't like. There should be no place in legislation for preventing 'legal but harmful'. If it is harmful enough that you want it to be illegal then make it illegal and suffer the consequences of yet more bad law.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
@leon. It is not new science. The information has been around for years. I make the point because you are very harsh on people who don't know things eg Roger the other day, yet this is an old issue that has been around for many years that you have just discovered and are treating as a revelation. We aren't calling you all sorts of names because you have only just become aware of it. Worth bearing in mind.
If it is not new science, it is new public awareness.
Bees are especially sensitive to the tick medicines. I went on a moth-trapping session last year and the landowner really went off on oen about how dog-owners were demolishing our wildlife.
I suppose on the bright side, when all wildlife is dead, we won't need tick medicines...
Not even sure that is true. A Google search comes up with a 4 year old Guardian article straight away. I have certainly read umpteen articles over the years.
The point being however @Leon shouldn't be so harsh when people don't know things. As I said the other day - I apologise for not knowing everything, which seems to be an unacceptable admission for a PBer.
It was on episode 11 of this year’s Springwatch, broadcast in June, which I watched on iPlayer last night
They went and did their own experiments on a river and proved - fairly conclusively - that these tick medicines devastate rivers and riverine insect life
Chris Packham called it “new science”. If it’s new to him - an absolute nature science geek - then it’s new to 99.99% of people. I suggest it is indeed new
For the first time ever he looked quite guilty about owning dogs (he’s a famous dog lover)
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
My cat would totally destroy Britain's birdlife and foul your waterways. I'm not sure what the exact mechanism is as he never leaves my house in Japan but he might be working for Thames Water remotely.
You obviously haven’t been kept in the loop about the remote operated mechsuits that all cats posses.
You think he is playfully sleep chasing mice. In fact he’s Jaeger piloting.
Today's riot court cases include Lee James - he was wearing knuckle dusters at a protest in Southampton - this is the mitigation from Saturday..
She said James had picked up the knuckle duster at a property he had previously worked on, and left it in his van, from where he had picked it up and then put it on before the protest.
“He put it on his fingers and couldn’t get it off,” Ms Brownlow told the court.
Knuckledusters are banned from even private ownership in the same way as things like disguised knives.
In Olympic Events, he's for the High Jump if found guilty.
Interesting. I didn't know knuckle-dusters were illegal.
I am sure that there will be cases around possession at home, perhaps mainly as an add-on charge when discovered during a search for something else such as drugs.
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
@leon. It is not new science. The information has been around for years. I make the point because you are very harsh on people who don't know things eg Roger the other day, yet this is an old issue that has been around for many years that you have just discovered and are treating as a revelation. We aren't calling you all sorts of names because you have only just become aware of it. Worth bearing in mind.
If it is not new science, it is new public awareness.
Bees are especially sensitive to the tick medicines. I went on a moth-trapping session last year and the landowner really went off on oen about how dog-owners were demolishing our wildlife.
I suppose on the bright side, when all wildlife is dead, we won't need tick medicines...
Not even sure that is true. A Google search comes up with a 4 year old Guardian article straight away. I have certainly read umpteen articles over the years.
The point being however @Leon shouldn't be so harsh when people don't know things. As I said the other day - I apologise for not knowing everything, which seems to be an unacceptable admission for a PBer.
You are the exception. I would sggest that 90% of pet owners who have tick meds for their pet (which, admittedly, might not be most Bully XL owners) would be appalled at the loss of bee - unaware they are making a big contribution to that through their pet.
All cats BY LAW should be required to be fitted with a bell when they are outdoors.
Preferably something modelled on Big Ben.
(BTW, cats are one factor in the decline of birds, but flying into glass probably does as much damage.)
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
@leon. It is not new science. The information has been around for years. I make the point because you are very harsh on people who don't know things eg Roger the other day, yet this is an old issue that has been around for many years that you have just discovered and are treating as a revelation. We aren't calling you all sorts of names because you have only just become aware of it. Worth bearing in mind.
No. The science on vet medicines destroying insect life and rivers IS new
Honestly @leon. Do a quick Google search and you will see how ridiculous that statement is. I have known about it for years.
Guardian November 2020 has an article for instance.
See my latest comment. New science on this subject has been published
Genuinely think there is a potential anti pet movement out there waiting to coalesce. Particularly since the pandemic, pets have encroached on what were human only spaces.
We have dog friendly cafes and restaurants. Near me there is a normal swimming pool with a dog friendly day.
But the English love their pets. Perhaps more than they love their children.
I'm not a dog person, and I see nothing wrong with those. It becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally - like the movement to vegetarian options in work restaurants, which is fine until suddenly a day is implemented which BANS non-vegetarian options.
That's where Brighton Greens got it wrong a decade ago, when the Councillors tried to ban bacon butties for bin men.
I think one area we need to look at is dogs off leads in public environments, which is one of those things that causes real problems despite "close control" being a legal requirement. "He's only being friendly" is what some dog owners always reliably say immediately before their hound bites you.
I think one trigger will be in the needed debate about countryside access, and within that the many thousands of livestock killed by "pet" dogs every year. 15,000 or so sheep a year, for example, are killed by dog owners with their dogs (I use that form as the agency and responsibility is with the owner).
Exactly. Dog attacks and bites are not rare.
Just because he's "friendly" to the owner doesn't mean that he's not a threat to anyone else.
Dogs are animals and should be on leads by default.
Cats are animals, should they be on leads too?
Just get rid of your pet cat. It is destroying Britain’s birdlife and fouling our waterways. Pet ownership is quite incredibly selfish, malign, and wanky
My cat is not destroying Britain's birdlife or fouling our waterways. It's a delightful creature.
It's also better at assessing probabilities than you are.
I'm sure it is. I had cats, and they were delightful too, sort of. But no longer. They kill millions of birds every year and, effectively, make huge areas of otherwise suitable habitat, unavailable to ground-nesting birds.
Dogs are not much better. Roving hounds, off the lead, deter birds from breeding. In fact their very presence, even on a lead, has a serious impact.
If you need a pet, buy a hamster. Or a goldfish.
Yes. Exactly
Every cat owner convinces themselves that “their” cat is different. It’s absurd
LOOK AT THE STATS
And last night on springwatch (on catch up) they reported new science that says veterinary treatments for cats and dogs (for ticks etc) which are leaching into the water system are killing billions of insects, and crashing the entire UK ecosystem
How can this possibly be justifiable merely because some selfish dorks want an enslaved animal in the house because it’s “delightful”
Ugh
@leon. It is not new science. The information has been around for years. I make the point because you are very harsh on people who don't know things eg Roger the other day, yet this is an old issue that has been around for many years that you have just discovered and are treating as a revelation. We aren't calling you all sorts of names because you have only just become aware of it. Worth bearing in mind.
If it is not new science, it is new public awareness.
Bees are especially sensitive to the tick medicines. I went on a moth-trapping session last year and the landowner really went off on oen about how dog-owners were demolishing our wildlife.
I suppose on the bright side, when all wildlife is dead, we won't need tick medicines...
Not even sure that is true. A Google search comes up with a 4 year old Guardian article straight away. I have certainly read umpteen articles over the years.
The point being however @Leon shouldn't be so harsh when people don't know things. As I said the other day - I apologise for not knowing everything, which seems to be an unacceptable admission for a PBer.
You are the exception. I would sggest that 90% of pet owners who have tick meds for their pet (which, admittedly, might not be most Bully XL owners) would be appalled at the loss of bee - unaware they are making a big contribution to that through their pet.
All cats BY LAW should be required to be fitted with a bell when they are outdoors.
Preferably something modelled on Big Ben.
(BTW, cats are one factor in the decline of birds, but flying into glass probably does as much damage.)
Not sure bells do that much - cats move very stealthily when hunting.
There you go @leon. There are literally hundreds of articles I could have posted on it. 2 of the 3 posted are 4 years old. There is a research paper that has research dating back 8 years.
Just because you have discovered something it doesn't mean others haven't been aware of it before. Worth remembering when you scoff at the rest of us for not knowing something.
A fairly interesting video about the impact of the size of Fire Trucks on the size of streets in the USA.
That's not one I had thought about particularly, but it seems the Fire Depts sometimes oppose road diets and traffic calming, including roundabouts, so they can drive across town faster in their fire trucks which are substantially larger than used in Europe and Asia.
An interesting tension with preventing casualties by better road design which would reduce the need for said Fire Trucks, which in the USA also do many medical calls, to be haring around at all.
Comments
The polling article for election n+1 answers your question for election n
So this article tells you that the 2019 election was on 12 Dec 2019 and the next VI poll was on 8–10 Jan 2020 by BMG for the Independent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2024_United_Kingdom_general_election#2020
Lasted about six months overall and it was
monstrous. Not quite the same as clinical depression (which I also get, but MUCH more mildly) but the same desire to end it all
One of the remarkable things is that when you are that mentally low it is actually physically painful
Harris is more centrist than Sanders and AOC, that is it
Sounds like a commie.
You’re a self deluded hypocrite of the first water. But then you are a Hampstead lefty so I don’t know why I’m surprised
I had a friend who took his own life. Outwardly happy and normal. None of us knew of his demons and he never shared them. We would not have had an inkling. We were stunned when he did it.
It is always worth remembering when people are shitty or snarky at someone online that there is a human being on the other end of it. You don't know what they are experiencing in their life and for many discussing with like minded people online is a release from the day to day.
With mental conditions there is often no physical external symptom one can use to gauge your condition. You cannot escape yourself either.
I think of the line from a Pink Floyd track "there's someone in my head and its not me".
My sister suffered from depression and told me to watch a youtube video about a black dog. Most enlightening.
Most came as a terrible and annihilating shock
One girl I knew hung herself and her mother discovered the body first. How do you ever get over that? You probably don’t
It’s one good argument against suicide - the way it destroys everyone around you
Besides, what matters in a two-horse race is not whether a candidate is actually centrist so much as whether they are closer to the centre than the other one.
"Matt Goodwin
@GoodwinMJ
"What we are about to witness in the UK is a concerted clampdown on "legal but harmful" speech, opinions the elite don't like, political parties like Reform, & media like GB News & X. Sorry, but no. This is Britain. Not North Korea. We must resist"."
https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1822931951969251402
Obnoxious Israeli mouthpiece on sky at the moment. How come Israelis can use the term genocide yet no one else can?
I've only experienced the one personally.
Also professionally a work colleague I used to deal with based in Holland also took his own life. He walked in front of a moving train in Apeldoorn. Again no indication anything was wrong. He was perfectly normal when he left for work. Did all the mundane things. Took his lunch. Headed off. By 10AM he was dead. Again no one had any inkling. His family were devastated. If he had had a terminal illness, as happened to me with my Dad, you get some time to make peace with it and accept it. In this case it is the reverse.
I got to know him pretty well and he seemed absolutely solid. Funny, charming, clever. Had a bit of a boring job with some gas company but had serious ambitions to move on
Two months later we heard that he’d gassed himself in his car. It was hard to believe. There was no obvious sign at all
Makes me sad even now
The least you can do is leave a note exonerating everyone and explaining why you’re doing it
Industrial policy, for example, is currently more a discussion over what's effective and pragmatic, than it is a debate over the 'free market'. There's a perception that the US needs to rebuild its manufacturing sector - even Trump's somewhat weird plans for tariffs are an acknowledgment of that.
Abortion is very much seen as a left v right debate - but current GOP policy is net negative for the party.
In those particular contexts, 'centrist' doesn't really mean all that much.
But, no, I couldn't be replacing my cat with a hamster or a goldfish. Esp not the latter. You can't bond with a fish. Bad memories there too. I had a goldfish as a kid, won it at a fair, and it died within 48 hours.
Otoh he detests other cats and if he was a sentient super villain would exterminate them all in an irregular heat beat. Perhaps he’s a bird lover..
That's a huge problem, particularly with male suicide. Men don't share. They don't talk etc.
Bottled up for years.
And then...
It is fairly shocking that we have no VI polling at a time when the Government has dealt with a political crisis. It is also extremely convenient for the Government's 'isn't Keir wonderful?' narrative if VI polling is actually showing his Government is as popular as a bowl of sick, which I strongly suspect is the case.
Perhaps it’s just a sense of - why bother; save money
In Olympic Events, he's for the High Jump if found guilty.
I lost someone I was very close to, and while I don't blame them for choosing that path, I don't believe I'll ever truly get over the loss. For a very long time, the best part of my day was the first fuzzy 30 seconds between sleep and wakefulness, before I remembered that person was dead. No longer in my life. Gone. Erased. Everything in my day after those first 30 seconds was just pain. Searing pain. I briefly considered ending it all myself, but I realised I couldn't inflict that kind of pain on those around me.
After much longer has passed, I've come to view the loss of that person as an amputation or a kneecap shot off in some foreign war. Yes, the *immediate* pain goes away, and you may even learn to walk again. But there will always be some kind of dull, low-level ache that never really goes away, something that comes into sharp focus when something reminds you of them, or when you're caught without something to occupy your mind, like a crossword puzzle, an argument on PB, or a strong drink. And suddenly you realise that the pain is still there, you've just grown numb to it over time.
I agree with Taz's sentiment, that you never know what someone is going through. A smile or a kind word might be enough to keep someone going for another day.
And it makes us quite angry that 50 million birds are killed - in the UK alone - just because social inepts need a “pet”
We’ll see more polling once everyone gets back, Parliament is sitting, and Conference season is around the corner.
About my cat.
He bites occasionally btw. It's not all sweetness and light.
I don't have much time for him, but very few people are all bad.
He got a little mouse the other day.
I am not alleging a conspiracy either - I have zero evidence for one, but I would definitely say there's very much a hand in glove feeling between Labour and the organs of the state which doesn't feel impartial or healthy.
At any rate, the drought will be over at some point, and then we'll see.
Mine was a divorce forced on us both - even while still passionately in love - because she wanted kids and I didn’t. We were obliged to split and the pain was 1000 times worse than I expected, she was my best friend and my soulmate and we’d spent the past four years in blissful company, 24/7. She was the funniest person I’d ever met. And the sexiest
The only way to do it was to do it brutally. She walked out the door and I didn’t see her for two years. I’ve only briefly seen her twice since (it’s still too painful for both of us, I think)
Everyone kept saying “ah it’s only a broken heart it’s not like she died” but it absolutely WAS like a death. And I was haunted by her ghost - photos and voicemails
I’m over it now - I’m rarely sad about it. I now give thanks that I had such an amazing and intense relationship. Many don’t
But my god those six months of grief. I actually howled with anguish. And, every morning, just like you, I’d have 30 seconds of blissful ignorance then the crushing reality would return, squatting on my chest
Luckily David is a resilient character, I imagine these events would be quite dangerous if one was also inclined to depression.
Btw is it hung or hanged himself?
https://viva.org.uk/animals/number-animals-killed/
So, if you are right that 15,000 sheep a year are killed by dogs, that's still just 0.1% of all of the sheep deaths in the UK instigated by farmers themselves. It's hardly going to bring the sheep farming economy down is it? So get some perspective before you advocate blanket solutions applied universally to all.
I had agreed with you initially when you said "it becomes a problem when the thing is enforced universally" but then you went on to advocate exactly that, by implying that you advocate a universal ban on dogs off lead in public areas such as parks.
The problem is that the term "dogs" is all encompassing, yet it's used universally in this context even though there's far more variety to dogs than there is to people. I have a 12 year old retired guide dog who plods daily around our local park off lead, properly under control, yet the blanket term "dog" puts him in the same bracket as a potentially dangerous attack dog. How would you appreciate it as a man if all men were banned from visiting their local park without some sort of restrictive condition such as under licence, simply because some perverted men are a danger to young children and because unlike dogs it's difficult to readily identify those men who could be a problem apart from those who aren't? Universal labelling and universal solutions are not the answer.
I have no more liking for Anderson than either of you but I do hope most decent people would have your response as opposed to the one before you.
Digital chat can be great but there are real dangers.
I note his substack has 47k subscribers. If they are all paying then he has a very large private income and I can see why he doesn’t give a hoot about his academic career. He’s far beyond that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offensive_Weapons_Act_2019
Previously, it was the manufacturing or supply:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_Act_1988#Section_141_–_Prohibition_of_offensive_weapons
Though even a less centrist candidate can occasionally beat a more centrist candidate if the economy is poor and/or the incumbent seen as weak eg when Obama beat McCain in 2008 or Reagan beat Carter in 1980 or Thatcher beat Callaghan in 1979 here
Bees are especially sensitive to the tick medicines. I went on a moth-trapping session last year and the landowner really went off on oen about how dog-owners were demolishing our wildlife.
I suppose on the bright side, when all wildlife is dead, we won't need tick medicines...
So who exactly is killing 50 million birds a year?
Just as every killer dog is a “big softy at home”
And that's the problem - how do you fix the issue.
But cats as domestic pets are subsidised hunters. However many birds they kill they will never go hungry. And so there is the potential for them to predate birds to extinction. This would have serious knock-on effects for the insects, slugs, etc, that the birds would no longer be eating, or the wild predator birds like sparrowhawks who would no longer have any prey.
After farming, keeping cats as pets is possibly the second most destructive thing that humans do to wildlife. And agriculture is a bit more important.
I have read that cats are crepuscular hunters, and if you can keep them inside around dawn and dusk, then you greatly reduce their hunting. But I'm not convinced. It sounds like a comforting self-deception. A bit like those people who think they are doing their bit to combat global warming by recycling plastic.
He is also a tad conceited and petulant
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1988/2019/schedule/paragraph/1/made?view=plain
That area of law is a bit of a rat's nest.
The point being however @Leon shouldn't be so harsh when people don't know things. As I said the other day - I apologise for not knowing everything, which seems to be an unacceptable admission for a PBer.
https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg5xn92p4po
Will there be a campaign for her to be named? And riots in the streets?
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1480,00.html
Guardian November 2020 has an article for instance.
I wouldn't advocate for a particular universal measure, but I do think a conversation is needed.
My particular is invisible extendy-leads, that give the illusion of control, but often prevent it.
Some random bloke he had never seen before, runs out, jumps on the back of the bike. And shouted “go, go”
So our hero dies the obvious - takes off at maximum speed.
I also know that there is a bit of opportiunism going on here. We already have laws in place to stop incitement - indeed some of those have been used this week. What the Government seems to be suggesting now is that we move on from tackling things that are illegal to clamping down on things we don't like. There should be no place in legislation for preventing 'legal but harmful'. If it is harmful enough that you want it to be illegal then make it illegal and suffer the consequences of yet more bad law.
https://www.salon.com/2024/08/09/donald-isnt-fun-anymore-how-kamala-harris-stole-the-show--and-extinguished-his-flame/
I guess people have got used to the death panels.
They went and did their own experiments on a river and proved - fairly conclusively - that these tick medicines devastate rivers and riverine insect life
Chris Packham called it “new science”. If it’s new to him - an absolute nature science geek - then it’s new to 99.99% of people. I suggest it is indeed new
For the first time ever he looked quite guilty about owning dogs (he’s a famous dog lover)
You think he is playfully sleep chasing mice. In fact he’s Jaeger piloting.
Example:
https://www.staffordshire.police.uk/news/staffordshire/news/2023/july-2023/man-jailed-after-being-caught-with-knuckle-duster/
I am sure that there will be cases around possession at home, perhaps mainly as an add-on charge when discovered during a search for something else such as drugs.
All cats BY LAW should be required to be fitted with a bell when they are outdoors.
Preferably something modelled on Big Ben.
(BTW, cats are one factor in the decline of birds, but flying into glass probably does as much damage.)
Here’s an example
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/01/vets-pesticide-flea-treatments-river-pollution-pet-owners-toxic-insecticides-hands
It’s probably this paper from early 2024 which led to the spring watch report
🇺🇸 Who do American voters trust more on the following issues: (7 August)
Harris | Trump
Abortion: 51% | 33%
Election integrity: 46% | 35%
Healthcare: 47% | 36%
Ukraine: 38% | 41%
Defense: 37% | 45%
Inflation: 42% | 45%
Immigration: 38% | 47%
https://x.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1822961227158458622
There you go @leon. There are literally hundreds of articles I could have posted on it. 2 of the 3 posted are 4 years old. There is a research paper that has research dating back 8 years.
Just because you have discovered something it doesn't mean others haven't been aware of it before. Worth remembering when you scoff at the rest of us for not knowing something.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/17/pet-flea-treatments-poisoning-rivers-across-england-scientists-find
https://theriverstrust.org/about-us/news/flea-mergency-pet-treatments-taking-a-bite-out-of-the-health-of-englands-rivers
https://www.buglife.org.uk/news/new-research-reveals-widespread-contamination-of-english-rivers-with-potent-pesticides-commonly-used-as-flea-treatments-for-pets/
That's not one I had thought about particularly, but it seems the Fire Depts sometimes oppose road diets and traffic calming, including roundabouts, so they can drive across town faster in their fire trucks which are substantially larger than used in Europe and Asia.
An interesting tension with preventing casualties by better road design which would reduce the need for said Fire Trucks, which in the USA also do many medical calls, to be haring around at all.
It gets slightly polemical in the second half.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2dHFC31VtQ