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The Trump denial saga: 8 Republicans elected to the House last month backed move which would have co

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  • Leyen: the talks will go on. We will go the extra mile.

    Barnier: Oh fuck, I was hoping to get some xmas shopping done this week.
  • I never see things like this round my way :|
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    IanB2 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Some good news: what you have just experienced or are about to (if you are in the UK) is the earliest nightfall of the year. This doesn't make it the longest night because mornings keep getting worse till the end of the month, but mornings suck anyway.

    Wasn’t that yesterday?
    Yes, sorry, you are right, by 2 seconds. Even better!
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868
    IanB2 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Some good news: what you have just experienced or are about to (if you are in the UK) is the earliest nightfall of the year. This doesn't make it the longest night because mornings keep getting worse till the end of the month, but mornings suck anyway.

    Wasn’t that yesterday?
    Yep, it was yesterday. This evening we had two seconds more daylight than yesterday. Not that you’d see it given the weather.
  • FlannerFlanner Posts: 437
    IanB2 said:

    Rawnsley:

    At the election a year ago, he swore to voters that he could “absolutely guarantee that we’ll get a deal”. Failure to deliver will be a starkly personal defeat. He is the one who claimed that the chances of not getting an agreement were “vanishingly small”. He is the one who asserted: “There is no plan for no deal, because we are going to get a great deal.”

    And he is the one who said a no-deal Brexit “would be a failure of statecraft for which we would all be responsible”.

    As one former Conservative cabinet minister puts it: “Those promises are hung around his neck. He can paint no deal as defiance, but he can’t present it as a win.”

    Boris Johnson has a choice to make. He can strive to secure the thin deal available. That will steadily make Britain poorer than it would have been, but at least it avoids the calamity of a crash-out. Or he can whistle Rule Britannia as he drags his country into the abyss while trying to explain why he has inflicted a disaster on Britain that he swore could never happen. Whichever decision he makes, he will own it. All of it.

    Credit him with one thing: he was almost right in saying "in" or "out". A thin deal won't make Britain "steadily poorer": by being in an EFTA By Another Name, we'll be back where we were - without the stuff that really would have been bad for us.

    As an aside while living off his HIGNIFY appearances The Loser will be able to say "if Remain had won in 2016, you'd be in the Euro by now"

    And we would.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,713

    kle4 said:

    kle4 said:

    "Outdated attitudes" with zero censorship is perfectly reasonable. Let the snowflakes not watch it having been warned let everyone else watch it unfiltered and uncensored.

    I don't have a problem with the policy, 'outdated attitudes' just feels ill defined as a term.
    Would you feel comfortable filming this today?

    If no: it is outdated.
    For people being warned that might be movies made 5-10 years ago, and cover a wide remit of things. I feel like saying it's historical along with the warnings about depictions and language gives a better idea of what people can expect - probably that there's racist stuff in it, people in brownface etc - than just that its outdated, which you could put on a move from 10 years ago for having gay jokes. An outdated movie from 1990 and an outdated one from 1940 probably need very different expectation setting, so playing up the historical element, whilst leaving in that language and depictions may offend, just seems more effective. You cannot be specific for every film of course, but you might be in the mood for a big budget but problematic epic, or a rom com which is a bit unwoke, and emphasising the time is a good red flag.
    There are some old films which probably do need to come with some fairly strong warnings though: "Triumph of the Will" and "The Clansman" are both very important films historically, but the content...
    I managed to see Veit Harlan's 1940 version of Jud Süß in a museum in Potsdam a few years ago. I doubt it can be seen outside the rarefied atmosphere of a film museum.

    It seems that The Birth of the Nation (aka the Clansman) is available on DVD on amazon.

    Looking at the 5* reviews that read "Very historical picture, love it", you begin to wonder whether it should be.
    It is available on BFI player too, with this description:

    "The film was released to great commercial success, being one of the highest grossing films of the Silent era, and launching the career of star Lillian Gish, who would become known as 'The First Lady of American Cinema'. But in portraying the murderous bigots of the Ku Klux Klan as heroic underdogs, this racist propaganda tool is now widely considered the most controversial film of all time. Undeniably a cinematic spectacle, cited for D. W. Griffith’s daring techniques in creating the vocabulary of film, it is a touchstone of white supremacism, an enduring recruiting tool of the far right, and one of America’s most abhorrently racist cultural artefacts."
  • rkrkrkrkrkrk Posts: 8,298

    Clearly the Tories mucked up the pandemic again in the latter part of this year.

    I was talking about cases going out of control from July onwards and was laughed at by my peers. I was calling for a lockdown then and I was absolutely right.

    Indeed. By September it was patently obvious that the measures they were announcing were insufficient and would lead to national lockdown.

    Drakeford's errors are bizarre though. He had the courage and foresight to go firebreak earlier than other leaders. It seemed like he understood the virus. And now he has messed up all that good work.

    I struggle to think of a time when a policy was a) so obviously the right call based on the evidence b) overwhelmingly popular according to the polls... and yet was so resisted by politicians.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868
    edited December 2020
    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Some good news: what you have just experienced or are about to (if you are in the UK) is the earliest nightfall of the year. This doesn't make it the longest night because mornings keep getting worse till the end of the month, but mornings suck anyway.

    Wasn’t that yesterday?
    Yes, sorry, you are right, by 2 seconds. Even better!
    The explanation being that, because the earth is currently leaning away from the sun (viewed north side up), it takes that little bit longer to spin back round to the same orientation in relation to the sun as the day previously - so currently (and in summer) the ‘actual’ day is marginally longer than it is in spring and autumn, when the earth leans sideways to the sun.

    Whereas our clock uses a 24 hour day, which is actually the day length averaged out across the year.

    Hence the ‘actual’ day is in winter (and summer) slipping a few seconds later according to our clock each day. Meaning that the sunsets turn round on the clock now whereas the sunrises don’t turn round until two weeks’ time.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,410
    Flanner said:

    IanB2 said:

    Rawnsley:

    At the election a year ago, he swore to voters that he could “absolutely guarantee that we’ll get a deal”. Failure to deliver will be a starkly personal defeat. He is the one who claimed that the chances of not getting an agreement were “vanishingly small”. He is the one who asserted: “There is no plan for no deal, because we are going to get a great deal.”

    And he is the one who said a no-deal Brexit “would be a failure of statecraft for which we would all be responsible”.

    As one former Conservative cabinet minister puts it: “Those promises are hung around his neck. He can paint no deal as defiance, but he can’t present it as a win.”

    Boris Johnson has a choice to make. He can strive to secure the thin deal available. That will steadily make Britain poorer than it would have been, but at least it avoids the calamity of a crash-out. Or he can whistle Rule Britannia as he drags his country into the abyss while trying to explain why he has inflicted a disaster on Britain that he swore could never happen. Whichever decision he makes, he will own it. All of it.

    Credit him with one thing: he was almost right in saying "in" or "out". A thin deal won't make Britain "steadily poorer": by being in an EFTA By Another Name, we'll be back where we were - without the stuff that really would have been bad for us.

    As an aside while living off his HIGNIFY appearances The Loser will be able to say "if Remain had won in 2016, you'd be in the Euro by now"

    And we would.
    We would?
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,421
    edited December 2020

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
  • LadyGLadyG Posts: 2,221
    rkrkrk said:

    Clearly the Tories mucked up the pandemic again in the latter part of this year.

    I was talking about cases going out of control from July onwards and was laughed at by my peers. I was calling for a lockdown then and I was absolutely right.

    Indeed. By September it was patently obvious that the measures they were announcing were insufficient and would lead to national lockdown.

    Drakeford's errors are bizarre though. He had the courage and foresight to go firebreak earlier than other leaders. It seemed like he understood the virus. And now he has messed up all that good work.

    I struggle to think of a time when a policy was a) so obviously the right call based on the evidence b) overwhelmingly popular according to the polls... and yet was so resisted by politicians.
    Because lockdowns devastate economies. And ruined economies mean ruined lives. I don’t envy politicians who have to make the call.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 41,998
    edited December 2020
    IshmaelZ said:

    ydoethur said:

    Anyway, back to the Irish being enablers of the Holocaust.

    https://twitter.com/kelvmackenzie/status/1337864454403452928?s=20

    WTAF were the Irish meant to do to stop the Nazis? About the only meaningful way they could have made a difference was to allow the British to use Cork and Cobh harbours, which would have been a violation of neutrality. Not forgetting the British willingly gave up their rights in Queenstown et al harbours precisely to secure Irish neutrality!
    And which nation does he think was in the war to save 6m, or any other number of, Jews anyway?
    And right to the point, what a fucking rubbish job they made of it if that was a prime motivation.
  • rkrkrkrkrkrk Posts: 8,298

    O/T - This Sunday Times article should mean the end of Sunak's leadership ambitions if this story gets wider publicity.

    He's screwed up the pandemic worse than Mark Drakeford.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/48-hours-in-september-when-ministers-and-scientists-split-over-covid-lockdown-vg5xbpsfx

    Please explain.

    If we'd had the two week firebreak we would be in the position where Drakeford is now which is even worse.

    Thanks to taking the time to try the Tiers we found out that the original Tier system didn't work, took a 4 week lockdown that did and put in stricter Tiers as a result afterwards.

    So how is taking time to consider all the evidence as we did a bad thing?
    There's a graph in the paper that shows it wonderfully well.

    But here's two bits that stood out.

    As a result, more than 1.3 million extra infections are estimated to have spread across the country. We heard evidence that one intensive care ward in Manchester became so overwhelmed that patients were left to die without the life-saving care they needed......

    ..The next day in the Commons, Wednesday, October 14, Sunak hit back, accusing Labour of being “detached from reality” and being irresponsible for not acknowledging “the economic cost of a blunt national lockdown”. This was little more than two weeks before the government would perform a U-turn and announce a lockdown.
    Indeed, Sunak stands out as being particularly slow to recognize reality.

    Govt managed to invite 4 academics to present and managed to pick 3 opposed to lockdown!
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,713
    RobD said:

    What is the ultimate Brexit deadline, am I to assume it is the 31st December.

    Wouldn't be surprised if Johnson legislates on 30th December to change the Year Date back to 2019.
    I've always thought we should just write off this year entirely and go back to Jan 1 2020 at New Years.
    I really wouldn't want to turn this year into a Groundhog Day experience!
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited December 2020
    rkrkrk said:

    Clearly the Tories mucked up the pandemic again in the latter part of this year.

    I was talking about cases going out of control from July onwards and was laughed at by my peers. I was calling for a lockdown then and I was absolutely right.

    Indeed. By September it was patently obvious that the measures they were announcing were insufficient and would lead to national lockdown.

    Drakeford's errors are bizarre though. He had the courage and foresight to go firebreak earlier than other leaders. It seemed like he understood the virus. And now he has messed up all that good work.

    I struggle to think of a time when a policy was a) so obviously the right call based on the evidence b) overwhelmingly popular according to the polls... and yet was so resisted by politicians.
    But the purpose of lockdown is to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed. The NHS wasn't overwhelmed in the second wave.

    Could England have gone into lockdown sooner? Yes. Would that have been better? No, I don't see why.

    It was worth trying Tiers to see if they worked - and by doing so we came out of lockdown with different Tiers than when we went in which Drakeford's premature firebreak didn't do.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,934
    Foxy said:

    RobD said:

    What is the ultimate Brexit deadline, am I to assume it is the 31st December.

    Wouldn't be surprised if Johnson legislates on 30th December to change the Year Date back to 2019.
    I've always thought we should just write off this year entirely and go back to Jan 1 2020 at New Years.
    I really wouldn't want to turn this year into a Groundhog Day experience!
    But we'd all have our memories intact. Think about how much better we'd do a second time around.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 43,355
    LadyG said:

    DavidL said:

    LadyG said:

    Referring to DavidL’s comments earlier, about his family life (and my sympathies on all that) I echo his observation of a new Covid depression - as in mental depression. I’m witnessing it in a lot of friends, and yes it surely has a lot to do with stunted family life, limited social life, etc

    But I wonder if it is even more basic than that. Humans are tactile animals. We like to touch each other: to hug, shake hands, embrace, slap backs, high five, kiss and cuddle, make love. Normally we do this all day every day. Yet right now there is possibly less human-to-human touch going on than at any time in the history of the species.

    What is this doing to our brains? Not good things, I suspect. Some people may be going without the firm touch of another human from one month to the next.

    This is bound to cause depression. It may do worse things than that.

    Some of us don't get to make love every day but are still in need of human contact. I wasn't saying any of that for sympathy and I am sure that there are many on this board that have suffered more serious things. What I describe is life and worrying a lot about what that idiot in the White House is up to today does not form a big part of it. But I respect @kinabalu feels differently and that is a part of life too.

    On Covid I am now going to Edinburgh at least 1 night a week and having 2 days working in the library which is my equivalent of an office. I really need to meet and see people, to discuss my work, their work, the football, whatever. I take the view it is essential. I get much more work done and I improve my mental health. We are social creatures and we need social contact.

    At this time of the year there would normally be a lot of parties, going to pubs, meals out, shopping trips etc etc. Its a grim end to a grim year. Bring on the vaccines.
    Absolutely. And this is why I don’t buy the idea that Working From Home is the new paradigm. People want to get out and meet other people. They NEED to. So they will.

    And ditto, this has to be the worst build-up to Christmas ever. It’s like we’ve gone straight from late October to a never ending February. In a gulag.
    Bunch of wimps
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,376
    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    kle4 said:

    "Outdated attitudes" with zero censorship is perfectly reasonable. Let the snowflakes not watch it having been warned let everyone else watch it unfiltered and uncensored.

    I don't have a problem with the policy, 'outdated attitudes' just feels ill defined as a term.
    Would you feel comfortable filming this today?

    If no: it is outdated.
    For people being warned that might be movies made 5-10 years ago, and cover a wide remit of things. I feel like saying it's histo
    There are some old films which probably do need to come with some fairly strong warnings though: "Triumph of the Will" and "The Clansman" are both very important films historically, but the content...
    I managed to see Veit Harlan's 1940 version of Jud Süß in a museum in Potsdam a few years ago. I doubt it can be seen outside the rarefied atmosphere of a film museum.

    It seems that The Birth of the Nation (aka the Clansman) is available on DVD on amazon.

    Looking at the 5* reviews that read "Very historical picture, love it", you begin to wonder whether it should be.
    It is available on BFI player too, with this description:

    "The film was released to great commercial success, being one of the highest grossing films of the Silent era, and launching the career of star Lillian Gish, who would become known as 'The First Lady of American Cinema'. But in portraying the murderous bigots of the Ku Klux Klan as heroic underdogs, this racist propaganda tool is now widely considered the most controversial film of all time. Undeniably a cinematic spectacle, cited for D. W. Griffith’s daring techniques in creating the vocabulary of film, it is a touchstone of white supremacism, an enduring recruiting tool of the far right, and one of America’s most abhorrently racist cultural artefacts."
    It's probably the most offensive film I've ever watched. Gus (a white actor in blackface) foams at the mouth as he attempts to rape the white heroine, who preserves her honour by throwing herself off a cliff. Subsequently, the KKK string him up, and the caption says "Justice is Done."
  • IanB2 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Some good news: what you have just experienced or are about to (if you are in the UK) is the earliest nightfall of the year. This doesn't make it the longest night because mornings keep getting worse till the end of the month, but mornings suck anyway.

    Wasn’t that yesterday?
    Yes, sorry, you are right, by 2 seconds. Even better!
    The explanation being that, because the earth is currently leaning away from the sun (viewed north side up), it takes that little bit longer to spin back round to the same orientation in relation to the sun as the day previously - so currently (and in summer) the ‘actual’ day is marginally longer than it is in spring and autumn, when the earth leans sideways to the sun.

    Whereas our clock uses a 24 hour day, which is actually the day length averaged out across the year.

    Hence the ‘actual’ day is in winter (and summer) slipping a few seconds later according to our clock each day. Meaning that the sunsets turn round on the clock now whereas the sunrises don’t turn round until two weeks’ time.
    Up to a point, Lord Copper.
    The Earth's orbit is an ellipse and as we approach perihelion at the beginning of January we are speeding up, so we move further round the sun in 24 hours than the average.

    This is a fuller explanation:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time
  • Off topic (unless there's a political correctness gone mad context hidden in it), just finished episode 10 of the fifth series of The Bureau; what a series, what a finale!
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,376
    As an aside, I wonder how audiences would react today to a film like The Mercenaries, which depicts (quite accurately) black soldiers raping white women and men in 1960's Congo.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,697
    edited December 2020
    Flanner said:

    IanB2 said:

    Rawnsley:

    At the election a year ago, he swore to voters that he could “absolutely guarantee that we’ll get a deal”. Failure to deliver will be a starkly personal defeat. He is the one who claimed that the chances of not getting an agreement were “vanishingly small”. He is the one who asserted: “There is no plan for no deal, because we are going to get a great deal.”

    And he is the one who said a no-deal Brexit “would be a failure of statecraft for which we would all be responsible”.

    As one former Conservative cabinet minister puts it: “Those promises are hung around his neck. He can paint no deal as defiance, but he can’t present it as a win.”

    Boris Johnson has a choice to make. He can strive to secure the thin deal available. That will steadily make Britain poorer than it would have been, but at least it avoids the calamity of a crash-out. Or he can whistle Rule Britannia as he drags his country into the abyss while trying to explain why he has inflicted a disaster on Britain that he swore could never happen. Whichever decision he makes, he will own it. All of it.

    Credit him with one thing: he was almost right in saying "in" or "out". A thin deal won't make Britain "steadily poorer": by being in an EFTA By Another Name, we'll be back where we were - without the stuff that really would have been bad for us.

    As an aside while living off his HIGNIFY appearances The Loser will be able to say "if Remain had won in 2016, you'd be in the Euro by now"

    And we would.
    I'm all for counterfactuals but how you think a narrow win for Remain on a prospectus of never joining the Euro leads to us joining the Euro is beyond me. It was the win for Brexit that made closer integration further down the line more likely.
  • O/T - This Sunday Times article should mean the end of Sunak's leadership ambitions if this story gets wider publicity.

    He's screwed up the pandemic worse than Mark Drakeford.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/48-hours-in-september-when-ministers-and-scientists-split-over-covid-lockdown-vg5xbpsfx

    Please explain.

    If we'd had the two week firebreak we would be in the position where Drakeford is now which is even worse.

    Thanks to taking the time to try the Tiers we found out that the original Tier system didn't work, took a 4 week lockdown that did and put in stricter Tiers as a result afterwards.

    So how is taking time to consider all the evidence as we did a bad thing?
    There's a graph in the paper that shows it wonderfully well.

    But here's two bits that stood out.

    As a result, more than 1.3 million extra infections are estimated to have spread across the country. We heard evidence that one intensive care ward in Manchester became so overwhelmed that patients were left to die without the life-saving care they needed......

    ..The next day in the Commons, Wednesday, October 14, Sunak hit back, accusing Labour of being “detached from reality” and being irresponsible for not acknowledging “the economic cost of a blunt national lockdown”. This was little more than two weeks before the government would perform a U-turn and announce a lockdown.
    Does the graph show England doing worse than Wales? 🤔

    A blunt lockdown failed where it was tried.

    By taking time to test Tiers we surely have a better outcome now than if we had just gone for a 2 weeks firebreak then back to the status quo ante which is what the advice was and Wales tried.
  • tlg86 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see VAR missed a foul in the build up to the goal.

    #FUCKVAR

    Generally I am in favour VAR, but I did enjoy the Europa League group stage without.
    The problem is this. To begin with it was all about clear and obvious errors (except offsides, of course). The approach was to ask "can you see why the ref gave it/didn't give it?", and the answer was invariably yes despite the TV replay giving clear evidence that it was the wrong decision. Now we've gone in to re-refereeing mode and the problem is that when you do the right thing once you have to do the right thing every time. I can see why the VAR thought that Fulham should have had a penalty, but they should also have disallowed the Fulham goal for the shove on Salah.

    What it comes down to is that refereeing a football match is actually quite difficult. For years the referees organisation used to come out with stats about how good their refs/assistants are. But it was nonsense; there are lots of wrong decisions in any football match. And whereas I think DRS has made cricket better, I don't think the same can be said about VAR simply because even with TV replays it is often difficult to make a decision. It won't happen, but I think football would be better off to just ditch it (with the possible exception of serious foul play, for which I think VAR does, or at least should, work).
    The laws of soccer are very simple but they do not work unless you apply a large amount of common sense. VAR eliminates this concept. It only works at all because it is applied only in a few critical cases, but even then it struggles. Take the nonsense at West Ham yesterday when a penalty was retaken because the goalkeeper was a few centimetres off his line. If you are going to apply that level of precision to the whole game it probably becomes unplayable, and certainly unwatchable.

    DRS works well because it is referred to fairly infrequently and it doesn't take long to check. Most decisions are pretty clear cut, and those that aren't are dealt with by common sense. These usually involve 'umpire's call' which has a certain element of rough justice about it, which most can live with.

    Rugby puzzles me though. It's a far more complex game than soccer, and messy in many phases. It ought in theory to suffer the same problems as soccer and yet it works very well. I'm forced to conclude that those who operate it are just smarter.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868

    IanB2 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Some good news: what you have just experienced or are about to (if you are in the UK) is the earliest nightfall of the year. This doesn't make it the longest night because mornings keep getting worse till the end of the month, but mornings suck anyway.

    Wasn’t that yesterday?
    Yes, sorry, you are right, by 2 seconds. Even better!
    The explanation being that, because the earth is currently leaning away from the sun (viewed north side up), it takes that little bit longer to spin back round to the same orientation in relation to the sun as the day previously - so currently (and in summer) the ‘actual’ day is marginally longer than it is in spring and autumn, when the earth leans sideways to the sun.

    Whereas our clock uses a 24 hour day, which is actually the day length averaged out across the year.

    Hence the ‘actual’ day is in winter (and summer) slipping a few seconds later according to our clock each day. Meaning that the sunsets turn round on the clock now whereas the sunrises don’t turn round until two weeks’ time.
    Up to a point, Lord Copper.
    The Earth's orbit is an ellipse and as we approach perihelion at the beginning of January we are speeding up, so we move further round the sun in 24 hours than the average.

    This is a fuller explanation:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time
    And, as that article says, the elliptical orbit is the significantly smaller of the two effects (ignoring the minuscule, third, being the slowing of rotation). I was trying to keep things simple ;)
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,376
    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Political comedy is quite specific to its time and place. Since blunt racism of the type that's satirised in Blazing Saddles or Fawlty Towers is nowhere near as common as it once was, the joke is no longer so funny as it was at the time.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,421
    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Political comedy is quite specific to its time and place. Since blunt racism of the type that's satirised in Blazing Saddles or Fawlty Towers is nowhere near as common as it once was, the joke is no longer so funny as it was at the time.
    It’s a good job Brooks included the farting scene then.
  • IanB2 said:

    IanB2 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Some good news: what you have just experienced or are about to (if you are in the UK) is the earliest nightfall of the year. This doesn't make it the longest night because mornings keep getting worse till the end of the month, but mornings suck anyway.

    Wasn’t that yesterday?
    Yes, sorry, you are right, by 2 seconds. Even better!
    The explanation being that, because the earth is currently leaning away from the sun (viewed north side up), it takes that little bit longer to spin back round to the same orientation in relation to the sun as the day previously - so currently (and in summer) the ‘actual’ day is marginally longer than it is in spring and autumn, when the earth leans sideways to the sun.

    Whereas our clock uses a 24 hour day, which is actually the day length averaged out across the year.

    Hence the ‘actual’ day is in winter (and summer) slipping a few seconds later according to our clock each day. Meaning that the sunsets turn round on the clock now whereas the sunrises don’t turn round until two weeks’ time.
    Up to a point, Lord Copper.
    The Earth's orbit is an ellipse and as we approach perihelion at the beginning of January we are speeding up, so we move further round the sun in 24 hours than the average.

    This is a fuller explanation:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time
    And, as that article says, the elliptical orbit is the significantly smaller of the two effects (ignoring the minuscule, third, being the slowing of rotation). I was trying to keep things simple ;)
    Fair enough!
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 26,176

    tlg86 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see VAR missed a foul in the build up to the goal.

    #FUCKVAR

    Generally I am in favour VAR, but I did enjoy the Europa League group stage without.
    The problem is this. To begin with it was all about clear and obvious errors (except offsides, of course). The approach was to ask "can you see why the ref gave it/didn't give it?", and the answer was invariably yes despite the TV replay giving clear evidence that it was the wrong decision. Now we've gone in to re-refereeing mode and the problem is that when you do the right thing once you have to do the right thing every time. I can see why the VAR thought that Fulham should have had a penalty, but they should also have disallowed the Fulham goal for the shove on Salah.

    What it comes down to is that refereeing a football match is actually quite difficult. For years the referees organisation used to come out with stats about how good their refs/assistants are. But it was nonsense; there are lots of wrong decisions in any football match. And whereas I think DRS has made cricket better, I don't think the same can be said about VAR simply because even with TV replays it is often difficult to make a decision. It won't happen, but I think football would be better off to just ditch it (with the possible exception of serious foul play, for which I think VAR does, or at least should, work).
    The laws of soccer are very simple but they do not work unless you apply a large amount of common sense. VAR eliminates this concept. It only works at all because it is applied only in a few critical cases, but even then it struggles. Take the nonsense at West Ham yesterday when a penalty was retaken because the goalkeeper was a few centimetres off his line. If you are going to apply that level of precision to the whole game it probably becomes unplayable, and certainly unwatchable.

    DRS works well because it is referred to fairly infrequently and it doesn't take long to check. Most decisions are pretty clear cut, and those that aren't are dealt with by common sense. These usually involve 'umpire's call' which has a certain element of rough justice about it, which most can live with.

    Rugby puzzles me though. It's a far more complex game than soccer, and messy in many phases. It ought in theory to suffer the same problems as soccer and yet it works very well. I'm forced to conclude that those who operate it are just smarter.
    I like Daisy Christodoulou's thoughts on it:

    https://twitter.com/daisychristo/status/1223648167385796611
  • eekeek Posts: 28,398
    dixiedean said:

    Flanner said:

    IanB2 said:

    Rawnsley:

    At the election a year ago, he swore to voters that he could “absolutely guarantee that we’ll get a deal”. Failure to deliver will be a starkly personal defeat. He is the one who claimed that the chances of not getting an agreement were “vanishingly small”. He is the one who asserted: “There is no plan for no deal, because we are going to get a great deal.”

    And he is the one who said a no-deal Brexit “would be a failure of statecraft for which we would all be responsible”.

    As one former Conservative cabinet minister puts it: “Those promises are hung around his neck. He can paint no deal as defiance, but he can’t present it as a win.”

    Boris Johnson has a choice to make. He can strive to secure the thin deal available. That will steadily make Britain poorer than it would have been, but at least it avoids the calamity of a crash-out. Or he can whistle Rule Britannia as he drags his country into the abyss while trying to explain why he has inflicted a disaster on Britain that he swore could never happen. Whichever decision he makes, he will own it. All of it.

    Credit him with one thing: he was almost right in saying "in" or "out". A thin deal won't make Britain "steadily poorer": by being in an EFTA By Another Name, we'll be back where we were - without the stuff that really would have been bad for us.

    As an aside while living off his HIGNIFY appearances The Loser will be able to say "if Remain had won in 2016, you'd be in the Euro by now"

    And we would.
    We would?
    I would love to see any alternative history that has us using the Euro - Germany and Co would be doing everything they can to stop us bring a member
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,376
    ydoethur said:

    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Political comedy is quite specific to its time and place. Since blunt racism of the type that's satirised in Blazing Saddles or Fawlty Towers is nowhere near as common as it once was, the joke is no longer so funny as it was at the time.
    It’s a good job Brooks included the farting scene then.
    Farting is amusing in any era (eg the Miller's Tale, or Queen Elizabeth telling Lord Oxford "My Lord, we have quite forgot the fart."
  • tlg86 said:

    tlg86 said:

    Foxy said:

    I see VAR missed a foul in the build up to the goal.

    #FUCKVAR

    Generally I am in favour VAR, but I did enjoy the Europa League group stage without.
    The problem is this. To begin with it was all about clear and obvious errors (except offsides, of course). The approach was to ask "can you see why the ref gave it/didn't give it?", and the answer was invariably yes despite the TV replay giving clear evidence that it was the wrong decision. Now we've gone in to re-refereeing mode and the problem is that when you do the right thing once you have to do the right thing every time. I can see why the VAR thought that Fulham should have had a penalty, but they should also have disallowed the Fulham goal for the shove on Salah.

    What it comes down to is that refereeing a football match is actually quite difficult. For years the referees organisation used to come out with stats about how good their refs/assistants are. But it was nonsense; there are lots of wrong decisions in any football match. And whereas I think DRS has made cricket better, I don't think the same can be said about VAR simply because even with TV replays it is often difficult to make a decision. It won't happen, but I think football would be better off to just ditch it (with the possible exception of serious foul play, for which I think VAR does, or at least should, work).
    The laws of soccer are very simple but they do not work unless you apply a large amount of common sense. VAR eliminates this concept. It only works at all because it is applied only in a few critical cases, but even then it struggles. Take the nonsense at West Ham yesterday when a penalty was retaken because the goalkeeper was a few centimetres off his line. If you are going to apply that level of precision to the whole game it probably becomes unplayable, and certainly unwatchable.

    DRS works well because it is referred to fairly infrequently and it doesn't take long to check. Most decisions are pretty clear cut, and those that aren't are dealt with by common sense. These usually involve 'umpire's call' which has a certain element of rough justice about it, which most can live with.

    Rugby puzzles me though. It's a far more complex game than soccer, and messy in many phases. It ought in theory to suffer the same problems as soccer and yet it works very well. I'm forced to conclude that those who operate it are just smarter.
    I like Daisy Christodoulou's thoughts on it:

    https://twitter.com/daisychristo/status/1223648167385796611
    This line stood out to me:
    "This aspect of VAR reminds me of nothing so much as German Higher Biblical criticism."
  • Peter_the_PunterPeter_the_Punter Posts: 14,354
    edited December 2020
    @tlg86

    Don't know Daisy but sure wouldn't like to be sitting next to her at a football match.

    'Ontologically speaking, Peter.....' :(
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,421
    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Political comedy is quite specific to its time and place. Since blunt racism of the type that's satirised in Blazing Saddles or Fawlty Towers is nowhere near as common as it once was, the joke is no longer so funny as it was at the time.
    It’s a good job Brooks included the farting scene then.
    Farting is amusing in any era (eg the Miller's Tale, or Queen Elizabeth telling Lord Oxford "My Lord, we have quite forgot the fart."
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_the_Farter
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,697
    eek said:

    dixiedean said:

    Flanner said:

    IanB2 said:

    Rawnsley:

    At the election a year ago, he swore to voters that he could “absolutely guarantee that we’ll get a deal”. Failure to deliver will be a starkly personal defeat. He is the one who claimed that the chances of not getting an agreement were “vanishingly small”. He is the one who asserted: “There is no plan for no deal, because we are going to get a great deal.”

    And he is the one who said a no-deal Brexit “would be a failure of statecraft for which we would all be responsible”.

    As one former Conservative cabinet minister puts it: “Those promises are hung around his neck. He can paint no deal as defiance, but he can’t present it as a win.”

    Boris Johnson has a choice to make. He can strive to secure the thin deal available. That will steadily make Britain poorer than it would have been, but at least it avoids the calamity of a crash-out. Or he can whistle Rule Britannia as he drags his country into the abyss while trying to explain why he has inflicted a disaster on Britain that he swore could never happen. Whichever decision he makes, he will own it. All of it.

    Credit him with one thing: he was almost right in saying "in" or "out". A thin deal won't make Britain "steadily poorer": by being in an EFTA By Another Name, we'll be back where we were - without the stuff that really would have been bad for us.

    As an aside while living off his HIGNIFY appearances The Loser will be able to say "if Remain had won in 2016, you'd be in the Euro by now"

    And we would.
    We would?
    I would love to see any alternative history that has us using the Euro - Germany and Co would be doing everything they can to stop us bring a member
    If we'd not negotiated an opt out and joined in the first round, it's quite possible the ECB would be in London, and everyone would be complaining about a British-nominated EU.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,713
    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Political comedy is quite specific to its time and place. Since blunt racism of the type that's satirised in Blazing Saddles or Fawlty Towers is nowhere near as common as it once was, the joke is no longer so funny as it was at the time.
    It depends very much how the film is framed. Blazing Saddles counterpoints the Black Sheriff against racist townsfolk in support of an anti-racist agenda, so I think stands the test of time and remains funny.

    On the other hand, I rewatched A Taste of Honey recently, and the plot just seems banal now. A single teenage mother, pregnant from a casual fling with a black sailor, and living with a gay man just doesn't have the shock value that it did in the early Sixties.

    Films are more often illustrative of the attitudes of the time they are made than the times they depict. Gone With the Wind is a good example of this, with its Noble Lost Cause theme.
  • Anyway, good evening all: I have some lesson planning to do, but before that I am watching an episode of Time Team that has just been released onto their official channel:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW3UQEDQ0zQ
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    People should have been building up their stock pile over the year. Or still have tins left over from their previous Brexit stoxkpiles(s)
  • I don't know about Sky Movies, but I hear that Gardeners Question time needs such warnings due to all the racist terms common within the Horticulture world.
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 22,036
    Alistair said:

    People should have been building up their stock pile over the year. Or still have tins left over from their previous Brexit stoxkpiles(s)
    I still have 75% of my baked bean supply from the first lockdown.

    My porridge oats of choice come from Ireland, but I have a full packet to keep me going.

    Only 5 bars of Belgian chocolate though.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    Foxy said:

    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Political comedy is quite specific to its time and place. Since blunt racism of the type that's satirised in Blazing Saddles or Fawlty Towers is nowhere near as common as it once was, the joke is no longer so funny as it was at the time.
    It depends very much how the film is framed. Blazing Saddles counterpoints the Black Sheriff against racist townsfolk in support of an anti-racist agenda, so I think stands the test of time and remains funny.

    On the other hand, I rewatched A Taste of Honey recently, and the plot just seems banal now. A single teenage mother, pregnant from a casual fling with a black sailor, and living with a gay man just doesn't have the shock value that it did in the early Sixties.

    Films are more often illustrative of the attitudes of the time they are made than the times they depict. Gone With the Wind is a good example of this, with its Noble Lost Cause theme.
    Loss of shock value undermines more than just films. A lot of Wilde loses its point because the equivalent of Lord X with the unspeakably depraved secret would be married to his male butler these days. Ditto Breakfast at Tiffany's whose only point seems to me to be OMG she's a t*rt!! And drinks g*n!!!
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868

    Off topic (unless there's a political correctness gone mad context hidden in it), just finished episode 10 of the fifth series of The Bureau; what a series, what a finale!

    Yes, the Bureau was superb TV.

    The writer bravely handed over the last two episodes to a french film director, with free reign not only to direct but to decide the fate of the characters. The finale divided opinion in France, in a marmite way. I liked it, but I can understand how long term fans of the series might feel the opposite.

    There are rumours of a sixth season ‘postscript’, but if I were them I would quit while they are ahead, rather than make the typical American mistake of slogging on until people lose interest.
  • You know when we saw all those videos of sudden collapse due to covid... total Speculation in the article...

    Although the cause of Johnson's ailment was not immediately known, the coronavirus can lead to myocarditis, a viral infection of the heart muscle. At its most severe, myocarditis can lead to sudden cardiac arrest

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9046577/Florida-Gators-star-Keyontae-Johnson-critical-condition-collapsing-middle-game.html
  • rkrkrkrkrkrk Posts: 8,298



    Could England have gone into lockdown sooner? Yes. Would that have been better? No, I don't see why.

    It would have been better because
    a) fewer people would have died
    b) we would have less virus spreading now.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,601

    I don't know about Sky Movies, but I hear that Gardeners Question time needs such warnings due to all the racist terms common within the Horticulture world.

    Will BBC now have to pull Black Narcissus?

    (Oh, and a staggering catch by AJ Brown for a touchdown....)
  • @tlg86

    Don't know Daisy but sure wouldn't like to be sitting next to her at a football match.

    'Ontologically speaking, Peter.....' :(

    Isn't Daisy the woman who won University Challenge? I think I've got her book somewhere. Wants teachers to stop wasting everyone's time marking or something iirc.
  • YBarddCwscYBarddCwsc Posts: 7,172
    Foxy said:

    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Political comedy is quite specific to its time and place. Since blunt racism of the type that's satirised in Blazing Saddles or Fawlty Towers is nowhere near as common as it once was, the joke is no longer so funny as it was at the time.
    It depends very much how the film is framed. Blazing Saddles counterpoints the Black Sheriff against racist townsfolk in support of an anti-racist agenda, so I think stands the test of time and remains funny.

    On the other hand, I rewatched A Taste of Honey recently, and the plot just seems banal now. A single teenage mother, pregnant from a casual fling with a black sailor, and living with a gay man just doesn't have the shock value that it did in the early Sixties.

    The movie has the unutterably beautiful Rita Tushingham playing an unwanted child, a discarded lover -- she is just too implausible as an unloved human being.

    This was the last play I saw before lockdown in Feb 2020 at Trafalgar Studios, London.

    And Jo was fat and ugly, and her mother Helen was a repulsive bitch from hell. The play really worked.

    (Extra movie points -- which politician appeared as a child in Richardson's A Taste of Honey ?)
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 22,036
    Caroline Flint has gone completely grey over the past year.

    Either that or she was previously using a lot of hair dye.
  • ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Good point. You could change the dog's name to Rex and it wouldn't alter the film one bit. You couldn't mess around similarly with Pulp Fiction or Blazing Saddles without doing violence to the point or purpose of either.

    As for the twats who tried to rewrite Huckleberry Finn.....!
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 22,036
    Look North just played last night's weather forecast for today.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868

    eek said:

    dixiedean said:

    Flanner said:

    IanB2 said:

    Rawnsley:

    At the election a year ago, he swore to voters that he could “absolutely guarantee that we’ll get a deal”. Failure to deliver will be a starkly personal defeat. He is the one who claimed that the chances of not getting an agreement were “vanishingly small”. He is the one who asserted: “There is no plan for no deal, because we are going to get a great deal.”

    And he is the one who said a no-deal Brexit “would be a failure of statecraft for which we would all be responsible”.

    As one former Conservative cabinet minister puts it: “Those promises are hung around his neck. He can paint no deal as defiance, but he can’t present it as a win.”

    Boris Johnson has a choice to make. He can strive to secure the thin deal available. That will steadily make Britain poorer than it would have been, but at least it avoids the calamity of a crash-out. Or he can whistle Rule Britannia as he drags his country into the abyss while trying to explain why he has inflicted a disaster on Britain that he swore could never happen. Whichever decision he makes, he will own it. All of it.

    Credit him with one thing: he was almost right in saying "in" or "out". A thin deal won't make Britain "steadily poorer": by being in an EFTA By Another Name, we'll be back where we were - without the stuff that really would have been bad for us.

    As an aside while living off his HIGNIFY appearances The Loser will be able to say "if Remain had won in 2016, you'd be in the Euro by now"

    And we would.
    We would?
    I would love to see any alternative history that has us using the Euro - Germany and Co would be doing everything they can to stop us bring a member
    If we'd not negotiated an opt out and joined in the first round, it's quite possible the ECB would be in London, and everyone would be complaining about a British-nominated EU.
    Even better - we could have been a founder member, as only the Liberals advocated at the time - and shaped a community and then a union that wasn’t born around a French-German axis.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,934

    Look North just played last night's weather forecast for today.

    They are getting cocky with their forecasting abilities.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868

    Look North just played last night's weather forecast for today.

    This week is going to be like that, anyway
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868

    Caroline Flint has gone completely grey over the past year.

    Either that or she was previously using a lot of hair dye.

    Lockdown!
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,601

    Look North just played last night's weather forecast for today.

    "Winter's coming....."?
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,218
    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Political comedy is quite specific to its time and place. Since blunt racism of the type that's satirised in Blazing Saddles or Fawlty Towers is nowhere near as common as it once was, the joke is no longer so funny as it was at the time.
    It’s a good job Brooks included the farting scene then.
    Farting is amusing in any era (eg the Miller's Tale, or Queen Elizabeth telling Lord Oxford "My Lord, we have quite forgot the fart."
    I'd go further. It's almost impossible to fart in a way that is NOT amusing. I've certainly never managed it.

    But anyway - just wanted to offer apologies for being a dick with you on PT yesterday. Uncalled for.

    Cheers and beers.
  • IshmaelZ said:

    Foxy said:

    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Political comedy is quite specific to its time and place. Since blunt racism of the type that's satirised in Blazing Saddles or Fawlty Towers is nowhere near as common as it once was, the joke is no longer so funny as it was at the time.
    It depends very much how the film is framed. Blazing Saddles counterpoints the Black Sheriff against racist townsfolk in support of an anti-racist agenda, so I think stands the test of time and remains funny.

    On the other hand, I rewatched A Taste of Honey recently, and the plot just seems banal now. A single teenage mother, pregnant from a casual fling with a black sailor, and living with a gay man just doesn't have the shock value that it did in the early Sixties.

    Films are more often illustrative of the attitudes of the time they are made than the times they depict. Gone With the Wind is a good example of this, with its Noble Lost Cause theme.
    Loss of shock value undermines more than just films. A lot of Wilde loses its point because the equivalent of Lord X with the unspeakably depraved secret would be married to his male butler these days. Ditto Breakfast at Tiffany's whose only point seems to me to be OMG she's a t*rt!! And drinks g*n!!!
    If they cut the smoking scenes from The Graduate it would be over in five minutes.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,376
    kinabalu said:

    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Political comedy is quite specific to its time and place. Since blunt racism of the type that's satirised in Blazing Saddles or Fawlty Towers is nowhere near as common as it once was, the joke is no longer so funny as it was at the time.
    It’s a good job Brooks included the farting scene then.
    Farting is amusing in any era (eg the Miller's Tale, or Queen Elizabeth telling Lord Oxford "My Lord, we have quite forgot the fart."
    I'd go further. It's almost impossible to fart in a way that is NOT amusing. I've certainly never managed it.

    But anyway - just wanted to offer apologies for being a dick with you on PT yesterday. Uncalled for.

    Cheers and beers.
    Many thanks, and best wishes.
  • LadyG said:

    Referring to DavidL’s comments earlier, about his family life (and my sympathies on all that) I echo his observation of a new Covid depression - as in mental depression. I’m witnessing it in a lot of friends, and yes it surely has a lot to do with stunted family life, limited social life, etc

    But I wonder if it is even more basic than that. Humans are tactile animals. We like to touch each other: to hug, shake hands, embrace, slap backs, high five, kiss and cuddle, make love. Normally we do this all day every day. Yet right now there is possibly less human-to-human touch going on than at any time in the history of the species.

    What is this doing to our brains? Not good things, I suspect. Some people may be going without the firm touch of another human from one month to the next.

    This is bound to cause depression. It may do worse things than that.

    I realise that I am one of probably a small minority, but as a relative introvert I have found lockdown to be, on the whole, a positive experience. The reduction in social obligations has been very welcome, and the noise from the nearby pub which used to keep us awake at the weekend is no more. I'm happy with my own company most of the time, as is my partner, but we enjoy intimacy and closeness with one another.

    Having said that, I do have my limits, and I also look forward to going out for a proper meal again and being able to travel. And I'll be very pleased for our teenage children when the lockdown/tier system ends - it's been much tougher for them, but they've impressed me very much with the sacrifices they've made. They'll deserve a big party when things are normal again.
    I do have a great deal of sympathy and kinship for this comment. I too have found lockdown an extremely positive experience. Given that I work away for much of the year, living in lodgings or hotels, the ability to continue to work as I did but do it all from home has been wonderful. It allowed me to see wife and kids far more than usual and play a much bigger part in my sons education - the school has noted how much he has thrived with home schooling, not because of me but because he has previously found it hard to keep up and now has been able to work more at his own pace. Added to that was the ability to work in and observe my meadow on a daily basis and make real inroads into the conversion of land back to flower meadow. This was made all the better by @MarqueeMark introducing me to the wonders of moth recording. In particular I did love the first lock down where the lack of traffic massively reduced both noise and air pollution.

    My head does of course recognise that this is not good in the long term for the country but my heart definitely misses the peace of the first lockdown.
  • Sean_F said:

    kle4 said:

    "Outdated attitudes" with zero censorship is perfectly reasonable. Let the snowflakes not watch it having been warned let everyone else watch it unfiltered and uncensored.

    I don't have a problem with the policy, 'outdated attitudes' just feels ill defined as a term.
    Would you feel comfortable filming this today?

    If no: it is outdated.
    Who is 'you' in this scenario? I wouldn't film a dog called n****r, as that would feel gratuitously offensive, but I'd be quite comfortable to film characters that had a wide variety of views, including racist ones, as part of a story.
    Well precisely. So it is outdated. You can film things today set in the past knowing it is outdated when you film it. Because it accurately reflects the era.
    A slightly different example of this is the use of smoking in TV and films. There has been a long running campaign to remove smoking from films or TV programmes that can be seen by anyone under 16 in both the US and UK. The issue with this of course is that it creates a false image of the past - one that is sometimes jarring. It was notable that Mad Men strove for authenticity by having just about every single person in the series smoking (almost none of the actors actually smoked so they used herbal cigarettes to provide the effect). And it really did make the whole thing seem more authentic.

    At the other extreme - and something I think is completely unacceptable - companies are now editing old films and photos to remove images of people smoking. In the UK this has included censoring photos of both Churchill and IKB to remove cigars from their hands.
    I don't understand how difficult it is for some people not to appreciate that people in the past thought and acted differently, and people in the future will think and act differently.

    I was just reading a really great online article from Sean Gabb about films set in the ancient world, and just how many film makers get wrong the way people thought and acted. He cites among others, the scene in Spartacus where Crassus is trying to persuade a young slave to have sex with him - which is utterly absurd. If Crassus took a fancy to a young man, he'd tell him to go up to his bedroom, remove his clothes, and wait for him.
    Yep, read the same article. Sean and I are friends of many year's standing. In fact I posted his Christmas card yesterday :) We don't always agree on everything but I do value his views and the depth of his knowledge.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,126
    edited December 2020
    Hang on, the url is TheCorbynProject.com? Talk about priorities! Yes yes, parody, but we're all thinking it. Edit: Oh, it's not parody?
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868
    Buckingham Palace has refused to deny reports that the Queen is delaying the recording of her Christmas speech until after a decision on a Brexit deal is reached.

    The monarch usually films the annual address in early to mid December, but has reportedly pushed back the recording to next week due to uncertainty about the UK’s future relationship with the EU, after the deadline for a deal passed.
  • nichomarnichomar Posts: 7,483

    Alistair said:

    People should have been building up their stock pile over the year. Or still have tins left over from their previous Brexit stoxkpiles(s)
    I still have 75% of my baked bean supply from the first lockdown.

    My porridge oats of choice come from Ireland, but I have a full packet to keep me going.

    Only 5 bars of Belgian chocolate though.
    I wonder what British products I buy in Spain won’t get through? Roses, quality street?
  • kle4 said:

    "Outdated attitudes" with zero censorship is perfectly reasonable. Let the snowflakes not watch it having been warned let everyone else watch it unfiltered and uncensored.

    I don't have a problem with the policy, 'outdated attitudes' just feels ill defined as a term.
    Would you feel comfortable filming this today?

    If no: it is outdated.
    Who is 'you' in this scenario? I wouldn't film a dog called n****r, as that would feel gratuitously offensive, but I'd be quite comfortable to film characters that had a wide variety of views, including racist ones, as part of a story.
    Well precisely. So it is outdated. You can film things today set in the past knowing it is outdated when you film it. Because it accurately reflects the era.
    A slightly different example of this is the use of smoking in TV and films. There has been a long running campaign to remove smoking from films or TV programmes that can be seen by anyone under 16 in both the US and UK. The issue with this of course is that it creates a false image of the past - one that is sometimes jarring. It was notable that Mad Men strove for authenticity by having just about every single person in the series smoking (almost none of the actors actually smoked so they used herbal cigarettes to provide the effect). And it really did make the whole thing seem more authentic.

    At the other extreme - and something I think is completely unacceptable - companies are now editing old films and photos to remove images of people smoking. In the UK this has included censoring photos of both Churchill and IKB to remove cigars from their hands.
    I'm not quite as sure how bad it is to remove images of smoking: if the only reason they were smoking in the first place was due to product placement then I would certainly have no problem with it if (and I realise this is a big if) it could be done subtly.
    I am pretty sure that neither Churchill nor IKB were smoking because of product placement :)
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,381

    O/T - This Sunday Times article should mean the end of Sunak's leadership ambitions if this story gets wider publicity.

    He's screwed up the pandemic worse than Mark Drakeford.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/48-hours-in-september-when-ministers-and-scientists-split-over-covid-lockdown-vg5xbpsfx

    Please explain.

    If we'd had the two week firebreak we would be in the position where Drakeford is now which is even worse.

    Thanks to taking the time to try the Tiers we found out that the original Tier system didn't work, took a 4 week lockdown that did and put in stricter Tiers as a result afterwards.

    So how is taking time to consider all the evidence as we did a bad thing?
    There's a graph in the paper that shows it wonderfully well.

    But here's two bits that stood out.

    As a result, more than 1.3 million extra infections are estimated to have spread across the country. We heard evidence that one intensive care ward in Manchester became so overwhelmed that patients were left to die without the life-saving care they needed......

    ..The next day in the Commons, Wednesday, October 14, Sunak hit back, accusing Labour of being “detached from reality” and being irresponsible for not acknowledging “the economic cost of a blunt national lockdown”. This was little more than two weeks before the government would perform a U-turn and announce a lockdown.
    Does the graph show England doing worse than Wales? 🤔

    A blunt lockdown failed where it was tried.

    By taking time to test Tiers we surely have a better outcome now than if we had just gone for a 2 weeks firebreak then back to the status quo ante which is what the advice was and Wales tried.
    Fake news again! The Wales Lockdown worked in the short term, it only failed in the medium term because it was too short and the moment we exited it was party time.

    I reluctantly went hunter-gathering this afternoon to Waitrose in Cowbridge. Sunday afternoon, just before closing time, it'll be quiet I thought. Waitrose was rammed to the extent that trolley usage was like the dodgems. I got what was on my list and left.

    Drakeford might be clueless, but his citizens seem even dafter.

    I estimate that England is ten to fourteen days behind, so good luck.
  • rkrkrk said:



    Could England have gone into lockdown sooner? Yes. Would that have been better? No, I don't see why.

    It would have been better because
    a) fewer people would have died
    b) we would have less virus spreading now.
    Why?

    That didn't happen in Wales. More virus is circulating in Wales than England.

    There may have been less virus circulating on a particular date but without the knowledge of how Tiers do and don't work I don't see why we would have overall fared better if we had done just a firebreak then not going into anything harsher post firebreak. Wales didn't, despite the knowledge they were able to learn from England's experience.
  • IanB2 said:

    Buckingham Palace has refused to deny reports that the Queen is delaying the recording of her Christmas speech until after a decision on a Brexit deal is reached.

    The monarch usually films the annual address in early to mid December, but has reportedly pushed back the recording to next week due to uncertainty about the UK’s future relationship with the EU, after the deadline for a deal passed.

    She may be waiting to 2021 Christmas in that case
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,096
    edited December 2020

    O/T - This Sunday Times article should mean the end of Sunak's leadership ambitions if this story gets wider publicity.

    He's screwed up the pandemic worse than Mark Drakeford.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/48-hours-in-september-when-ministers-and-scientists-split-over-covid-lockdown-vg5xbpsfx

    Please explain.

    If we'd had the two week firebreak we would be in the position where Drakeford is now which is even worse.

    Thanks to taking the time to try the Tiers we found out that the original Tier system didn't work, took a 4 week lockdown that did and put in stricter Tiers as a result afterwards.

    So how is taking time to consider all the evidence as we did a bad thing?
    There's a graph in the paper that shows it wonderfully well.

    But here's two bits that stood out.

    As a result, more than 1.3 million extra infections are estimated to have spread across the country. We heard evidence that one intensive care ward in Manchester became so overwhelmed that patients were left to die without the life-saving care they needed......

    ..The next day in the Commons, Wednesday, October 14, Sunak hit back, accusing Labour of being “detached from reality” and being irresponsible for not acknowledging “the economic cost of a blunt national lockdown”. This was little more than two weeks before the government would perform a U-turn and announce a lockdown.
    Does the graph show England doing worse than Wales? 🤔

    A blunt lockdown failed where it was tried.

    By taking time to test Tiers we surely have a better outcome now than if we had just gone for a 2 weeks firebreak then back to the status quo ante which is what the advice was and Wales tried.
    Fake news again! The Wales Lockdown worked in the short term, it only failed in the medium term because it was too short and the moment we exited it was party time.

    I reluctantly went hunter-gathering this afternoon to Waitrose in Cowbridge. Sunday afternoon, just before closing time, it'll be quiet I thought. Waitrose was rammed to the extent that trolley usage was like the dodgems. I got what was on my list and left.

    Drakeford might be clueless, but his citizens seem even dafter.

    I estimate that England is ten to fourteen days behind, so good luck.
    You argument of it only failed because it was too short....it was the policy to be that short.

    Its like saying my diet worked in the short term when i didn't eat anything for 4 days and i went in the sauna for hours on end...a lot of the weight loss was water weight. Then i eat what i liked and weight shot up. You never really lost anywhere near what you thought and never tackled the core issues.

    Wales firebreak was sold in a similar manner to these crazy diets. Its easy, just do this for a couple of weeks and it will all be fixed.
  • O/T - This Sunday Times article should mean the end of Sunak's leadership ambitions if this story gets wider publicity.

    He's screwed up the pandemic worse than Mark Drakeford.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/48-hours-in-september-when-ministers-and-scientists-split-over-covid-lockdown-vg5xbpsfx

    Please explain.

    If we'd had the two week firebreak we would be in the position where Drakeford is now which is even worse.

    Thanks to taking the time to try the Tiers we found out that the original Tier system didn't work, took a 4 week lockdown that did and put in stricter Tiers as a result afterwards.

    So how is taking time to consider all the evidence as we did a bad thing?
    There's a graph in the paper that shows it wonderfully well.

    But here's two bits that stood out.

    As a result, more than 1.3 million extra infections are estimated to have spread across the country. We heard evidence that one intensive care ward in Manchester became so overwhelmed that patients were left to die without the life-saving care they needed......

    ..The next day in the Commons, Wednesday, October 14, Sunak hit back, accusing Labour of being “detached from reality” and being irresponsible for not acknowledging “the economic cost of a blunt national lockdown”. This was little more than two weeks before the government would perform a U-turn and announce a lockdown.
    Does the graph show England doing worse than Wales? 🤔

    A blunt lockdown failed where it was tried.

    By taking time to test Tiers we surely have a better outcome now than if we had just gone for a 2 weeks firebreak then back to the status quo ante which is what the advice was and Wales tried.
    Fake news again! The Wales Lockdown worked in the short term, it only failed in the medium term because it was too short and the moment we exited it was party time.

    I reluctantly went hunter-gathering this afternoon to Waitrose in Cowbridge. Sunday afternoon, just before closing time, it'll be quiet I thought. Waitrose was rammed to the extent that trolley usage was like the dodgems. I got what was on my list and left.

    Drakeford might be clueless, but his citizens seem even dafter.

    I estimate that England is ten to fourteen days behind, so good luck.
    Not all of us are dafter but when referencing Drakeford that is not a high bar !!!!!!
  • rkrkrkrkrkrk Posts: 8,298
    LadyG said:

    rkrkrk said:

    Clearly the Tories mucked up the pandemic again in the latter part of this year.

    I was talking about cases going out of control from July onwards and was laughed at by my peers. I was calling for a lockdown then and I was absolutely right.

    Indeed. By September it was patently obvious that the measures they were announcing were insufficient and would lead to national lockdown.

    Drakeford's errors are bizarre though. He had the courage and foresight to go firebreak earlier than other leaders. It seemed like he understood the virus. And now he has messed up all that good work.

    I struggle to think of a time when a policy was a) so obviously the right call based on the evidence b) overwhelmingly popular according to the polls... and yet was so resisted by politicians.
    Because lockdowns devastate economies. And ruined economies mean ruined lives. I don’t envy politicians who have to make the call.
    I really think this is wrong. The virus devastates economies.
    Lockdowns are good for the economy because they reduce the virus faster.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,315
    In these dark days I look for little shafts of light from Heaven, as Sir Archibald once put it.

    So I did enjoy @MaxPB describing his lock-in at a Hampstead pub with lots of working-class people and their discussion of Brexit. It was so wonderfully described it might have been a scene in a black and white film.

    Perhaps it will be one day.

    Also if he is bothered by inheriting property he does not, I believe, have to accept it. He can simply tell the executors of the estate that he does not wish to receive his share and it then gets disposed of as part of the residuary estate, I believe.

    Very wet, windy and cold here.

    Now back to work.
  • IanB2 said:

    Off topic (unless there's a political correctness gone mad context hidden in it), just finished episode 10 of the fifth series of The Bureau; what a series, what a finale!

    Yes, the Bureau was superb TV.

    The writer bravely handed over the last two episodes to a french film director, with free reign not only to direct but to decide the fate of the characters. The finale divided opinion in France, in a marmite way. I liked it, but I can understand how long term fans of the series might feel the opposite.

    There are rumours of a sixth season ‘postscript’, but if I were them I would quit while they are ahead, rather than make the typical American mistake of slogging on until people lose interest.
    What an shift the makers put in, quite moving to see how the actors aged with their characters over 5 years. One of the few slightly duff points was episodes where characters spoke English to each other, the dialogue seemed stilted; maybe that's just a realistic depiction of how many people communicate in a second language. The CIA characters also seemed clichéd, blustering yeehaw types. Thinking about it, a noticeable absence was largely no mention of Britain, a passing reference to Putin loving Brexit in the last series is all I can recall. Fascinating to see the middle east experience through the lens of an entirely different set of priorities.

    Agree about them quitting while they're ahead. Spiral starts it's last series in January, let's hope they've not watered the product too much.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,376

    Sean_F said:

    kle4 said:

    "Outdated attitudes" with zero censorship is perfectly reasonable. Let the snowflakes not watch it having been warned let everyone else watch it unfiltered and uncensored.

    I don't have a problem with the policy, 'outdated attitudes' just feels ill defined as a term.
    Would you feel comfortable filming this today?

    If no: it is outdated.
    Who is 'you' in this scenario? I wouldn't film a dog called n****r, as that would feel gratuitously offensive, but I'd be quite comfortable to film characters that had a wide variety of views, including racist ones, as part of a story.
    Well precisely. So it is outdated. You can film things today set in the past knowing it is outdated when you film it. Because it accurately reflects the era.
    A slightly different example of this is the use of smoking in TV and films. There has been a long running campthe UK this has included censoring photos of both Churchill and IKB to remove cigars from their hands.
    I don't understand how difficult it is for some people not to appreciate that people in the past thought and acted differently, and people in the future will think and act differently.

    I was just reading a really great online article from Sean Gabb about films set in the ancient world, and just how many film makers get wrong the way people thought and acted. He cites among others, the scene in Spartacus where Crassus is trying to persuade a young slave to have sex with him - which is utterly absurd. If Crassus took a fancy to a young man, he'd tell him to go up to his bedroom, remove his clothes, and wait for him.
    Yep, read the same article. Sean and I are friends of many year's standing. In fact I posted his Christmas card yesterday :) We don't always agree on everything but I do value his views and the depth of his knowledge.
    I'm not a friend, but I've met him from time to time, and always find his views thought-provoking, even if I totally disagree at times. As a classicist, I think he's first rate. The ancient world was an awful place in some ways, but at the same time, one of the tap roots of our entire culture. These people are simultaneously very familiar (you can get a lot of the jokes that Greeks and Romans made) yet so alien as well.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,697
    kle4 said:

    Hang on, the url is TheCorbynProject.com? Talk about priorities! Yes yes, parody, but we're all thinking it. Edit: Oh, it's not parody?
    The Corbyn Project sounds like the name of a 90s Eurodance act.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,381

    rkrkrk said:



    Could England have gone into lockdown sooner? Yes. Would that have been better? No, I don't see why.

    It would have been better because
    a) fewer people would have died
    b) we would have less virus spreading now.
    Why?

    That didn't happen in Wales. More virus is circulating in Wales than England.

    There may have been less virus circulating on a particular date but without the knowledge of how Tiers do and don't work I don't see why we would have overall fared better if we had done just a firebreak then not going into anything harsher post firebreak. Wales didn't, despite the knowledge they were able to learn from England's experience.
    Thank you doctor.

    Your final point is not wrong, there were not enough post lockdown precautions, but everything else in your post is pretty much nonsense.
  • YBarddCwscYBarddCwsc Posts: 7,172



    I reluctantly went hunter-gathering this afternoon to Waitrose in Cowbridge. Sunday afternoon, just before closing time, it'll be quiet I thought. Waitrose was rammed to the extent that trolley usage was like the dodgems. I got what was on my list and left.

    The Waitrose in Cowbridge was rammed. So you've met the Welsh middle class 😌

    Wales being Wales, I think the Waitrose in Cowbridge is my "local", as well.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868
    nichomar said:

    Alistair said:

    People should have been building up their stock pile over the year. Or still have tins left over from their previous Brexit stoxkpiles(s)
    I still have 75% of my baked bean supply from the first lockdown.

    My porridge oats of choice come from Ireland, but I have a full packet to keep me going.

    Only 5 bars of Belgian chocolate though.
    I wonder what British products I buy in Spain won’t get through? Roses, quality street?
    Some of your seafood, I’d bet.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,376

    rkrkrk said:



    Could England have gone into lockdown sooner? Yes. Would that have been better? No, I don't see why.

    It would have been better because
    a) fewer people would have died
    b) we would have less virus spreading now.
    Why?

    That didn't happen in Wales. More virus is circulating in Wales than England.

    There may have been less virus circulating on a particular date but without the knowledge of how Tiers do and don't work I don't see why we would have overall fared better if we had done just a firebreak then not going into anything harsher post firebreak. Wales didn't, despite the knowledge they were able to learn from England's experience.
    I think quite a lot of people predicted at the time, that a two week lockdown would do a lot of damage to businesses while doing the square root of nothing to halt the progress of the disease.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,601

    IanB2 said:

    Off topic (unless there's a political correctness gone mad context hidden in it), just finished episode 10 of the fifth series of The Bureau; what a series, what a finale!

    Yes, the Bureau was superb TV.

    The writer bravely handed over the last two episodes to a french film director, with free reign not only to direct but to decide the fate of the characters. The finale divided opinion in France, in a marmite way. I liked it, but I can understand how long term fans of the series might feel the opposite.

    There are rumours of a sixth season ‘postscript’, but if I were them I would quit while they are ahead, rather than make the typical American mistake of slogging on until people lose interest.
    What an shift the makers put in, quite moving to see how the actors aged with their characters over 5 years. One of the few slightly duff points was episodes where characters spoke English to each other, the dialogue seemed stilted; maybe that's just a realistic depiction of how many people communicate in a second language. The CIA characters also seemed clichéd, blustering yeehaw types. Thinking about it, a noticeable absence was largely no mention of Britain, a passing reference to Putin loving Brexit in the last series is all I can recall. Fascinating to see the middle east experience through the lens of an entirely different set of priorities.

    Agree about them quitting while they're ahead. Spiral starts it's last series in January, let's hope they've not watered the product too much.
    One of my spooky chums reckoned The Bureau the best (in terms of accurate) depiction of that world anyone has done to date.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,868
    edited December 2020

    O/T - This Sunday Times article should mean the end of Sunak's leadership ambitions if this story gets wider publicity.

    He's screwed up the pandemic worse than Mark Drakeford.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/48-hours-in-september-when-ministers-and-scientists-split-over-covid-lockdown-vg5xbpsfx

    Please explain.

    If we'd had the two week firebreak we would be in the position where Drakeford is now which is even worse.

    Thanks to taking the time to try the Tiers we found out that the original Tier system didn't work, took a 4 week lockdown that did and put in stricter Tiers as a result afterwards.

    So how is taking time to consider all the evidence as we did a bad thing?
    There's a graph in the paper that shows it wonderfully well.

    But here's two bits that stood out.

    As a result, more than 1.3 million extra infections are estimated to have spread across the country. We heard evidence that one intensive care ward in Manchester became so overwhelmed that patients were left to die without the life-saving care they needed......

    ..The next day in the Commons, Wednesday, October 14, Sunak hit back, accusing Labour of being “detached from reality” and being irresponsible for not acknowledging “the economic cost of a blunt national lockdown”. This was little more than two weeks before the government would perform a U-turn and announce a lockdown.
    Does the graph show England doing worse than Wales? 🤔

    A blunt lockdown failed where it was tried.

    By taking time to test Tiers we surely have a better outcome now than if we had just gone for a 2 weeks firebreak then back to the status quo ante which is what the advice was and Wales tried.
    Fake news again! The Wales Lockdown worked in the short term, it only failed in the medium term because it was too short and the moment we exited it was party time.

    I reluctantly went hunter-gathering this afternoon to Waitrose in Cowbridge. Sunday afternoon, just before closing time, it'll be quiet I thought. Waitrose was rammed to the extent that trolley usage was like the dodgems. I got what was on my list and left.

    Drakeford might be clueless, but his citizens seem even dafter.

    I estimate that England is ten to fourteen days behind, so good luck.
    You argument of it only failed because it was too short....it was the policy to be that short.

    Its like saying my diet worked in the short term when i didn't eat anything for 4 days and i went in the sauna for hours on end...a lot of the weight loss was water weight. Then i eat what i liked and weight shot up. You never really lost anywhere near what you thought and never tackled the core issues.

    Wales firebreak was sold in a similar manner to these crazy diets. Its easy, just do this for a couple of weeks and it will all be fixed.
    It’s often said that crash diets don’t work because the weight simply reappears the minute you drop the regime.

    The Welsh experience does tend to suggest the same with lockdowns. There’s no point in a short set of tight restrictions if, the minute they are lifted, everyone goes into party mode.

    Set the ship steady and keep a light touch on the tiller, seems a better way to go.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,410

    IanB2 said:

    Off topic (unless there's a political correctness gone mad context hidden in it), just finished episode 10 of the fifth series of The Bureau; what a series, what a finale!

    Yes, the Bureau was superb TV.

    The writer bravely handed over the last two episodes to a french film director, with free reign not only to direct but to decide the fate of the characters. The finale divided opinion in France, in a marmite way. I liked it, but I can understand how long term fans of the series might feel the opposite.

    There are rumours of a sixth season ‘postscript’, but if I were them I would quit while they are ahead, rather than make the typical American mistake of slogging on until people lose interest.
    What an shift the makers put in, quite moving to see how the actors aged with their characters over 5 years. One of the few slightly duff points was episodes where characters spoke English to each other, the dialogue seemed stilted; maybe that's just a realistic depiction of how many people communicate in a second language. The CIA characters also seemed clichéd, blustering yeehaw types. Thinking about it, a noticeable absence was largely no mention of Britain, a passing reference to Putin loving Brexit in the last series is all I can recall. Fascinating to see the middle east experience through the lens of an entirely different set of priorities.

    Agree about them quitting while they're ahead. Spiral starts it's last series in January, let's hope they've not watered the product too much.
    Spiral.
    8 series and 74 episodes over 15 years.
    Quality over quantity.
  • O/T - This Sunday Times article should mean the end of Sunak's leadership ambitions if this story gets wider publicity.

    He's screwed up the pandemic worse than Mark Drakeford.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/48-hours-in-september-when-ministers-and-scientists-split-over-covid-lockdown-vg5xbpsfx

    Please explain.

    If we'd had the two week firebreak we would be in the position where Drakeford is now which is even worse.

    Thanks to taking the time to try the Tiers we found out that the original Tier system didn't work, took a 4 week lockdown that did and put in stricter Tiers as a result afterwards.

    So how is taking time to consider all the evidence as we did a bad thing?
    There's a graph in the paper that shows it wonderfully well.

    But here's two bits that stood out.

    As a result, more than 1.3 million extra infections are estimated to have spread across the country. We heard evidence that one intensive care ward in Manchester became so overwhelmed that patients were left to die without the life-saving care they needed......

    ..The next day in the Commons, Wednesday, October 14, Sunak hit back, accusing Labour of being “detached from reality” and being irresponsible for not acknowledging “the economic cost of a blunt national lockdown”. This was little more than two weeks before the government would perform a U-turn and announce a lockdown.
    Does the graph show England doing worse than Wales? 🤔

    A blunt lockdown failed where it was tried.

    By taking time to test Tiers we surely have a better outcome now than if we had just gone for a 2 weeks firebreak then back to the status quo ante which is what the advice was and Wales tried.
    Fake news again! The Wales Lockdown worked in the short term, it only failed in the medium term because it was too short and the moment we exited it was party time.

    I reluctantly went hunter-gathering this afternoon to Waitrose in Cowbridge. Sunday afternoon, just before closing time, it'll be quiet I thought. Waitrose was rammed to the extent that trolley usage was like the dodgems. I got what was on my list and left.

    Drakeford might be clueless, but his citizens seem even dafter.

    I estimate that England is ten to fourteen days behind, so good luck.
    Short term is meaningless which was my precise point! Medium term is relevant.

    The fact they reverted from the firebreak back to the status quo ante restrictions was Drakeford's policy and Drakeford gave the attitude that the two weeks was sufficient so why not party afterwards?

    In contrast in England as they had tried the Tiers first post lockdown they knew NOT to go back into the original Tiers afterwards so the post lockdown Tiers were different to the pre lockdown Tiers.

    I see no reason why if we had followed the 2 week firebreak advice we wouldn't have followed Drakeford's path which seems worse than what has actually happened in the medium term.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,934
    IanB2 said:

    Buckingham Palace has refused to deny reports that the Queen is delaying the recording of her Christmas speech until after a decision on a Brexit deal is reached.

    The monarch usually films the annual address in early to mid December, but has reportedly pushed back the recording to next week due to uncertainty about the UK’s future relationship with the EU, after the deadline for a deal passed.

    Can you attach a link? Would make it a lot easier than having to copy/paste the quote to find it.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    edited December 2020
    Sean_F said:

    kle4 said:

    "Outdated attitudes" with zero censorship is perfectly reasonable. Let the snowflakes not watch it having been warned let everyone else watch it unfiltered and uncensored.

    I don't have a problem with the policy, 'outdated attitudes' just feels ill defined as a term.
    Would you feel comfortable filming this today?

    If no: it is outdated.
    Who is 'you' in this scenario? I wouldn't film a dog called n****r, as that would feel gratuitously offensive, but I'd be quite comfortable to film characters that had a wide variety of views, including racist ones, as part of a story.
    Well precisely. So it is outdated. You can film things today set in the past knowing it is outdated when you film it. Because it accurately reflects the era.
    A slightly different example of this is the use of smoking in TV and films. There has been a long running campaign to remove smoking from films or TV programmes that can be seen by anyone under 16 in both the US and UK. The issue with this of course is that it creates a false image of the past - one that is sometimes jarring. It was notable that Mad Men strove for authenticity by having just about every single person in the series smoking (almost none of the actors actually smoked so they used herbal cigarettes to provide the effect). And it really did make the whole thing seem more authentic.

    At the other extreme - and something I think is completely unacceptable - companies are now editing old films and photos to remove images of people smoking. In the UK this has included censoring photos of both Churchill and IKB to remove cigars from their hands.
    I don't understand how difficult it is for some people not to appreciate that people in the past thought and acted differently, and people in the future will think and act differently.

    I was just reading a really great online article from Sean Gabb about films set in the ancient world, and just how many film makers get wrong the way people thought and acted. He cites among others, the scene in Spartacus where Crassus is trying to persuade a young slave to have sex with him - which is utterly absurd. If Crassus took a fancy to a young man, he'd tell him to go up to his bedroom, remove his clothes, and wait for him.
    I can't begin to think what his source would be for that. Nothing springs to mind from, say, Aristophanes or Menander or Plautus or Petronius which gives us a steer either way about master/slave sex initiation techniques, and I am not sure where else to look. There's a lot of contemporary evidence to suggest that Epsteinian transactions are dressed up in a pretence of flirtation and seduction even when the reality is recognised all round as basic, choice-free sex trafficking. So where is Mr Gabb getting this stuff from?
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,381



    I reluctantly went hunter-gathering this afternoon to Waitrose in Cowbridge. Sunday afternoon, just before closing time, it'll be quiet I thought. Waitrose was rammed to the extent that trolley usage was like the dodgems. I got what was on my list and left.

    The Waitrose in Cowbridge was rammed. So you've met the Welsh middle class 😌

    Wales being Wales, I think the Waitrose in Cowbridge is my "local", as well.
    It's not only running the gauntlet of Covid that is damaging to one's health at Waitrose, it's the coronary when the bill is issued that is most dangerous. How can so few items be so expensive. I can fill s Transit van for a hundred quid in Lidl!
  • The Welsh lockdown itself worked, it just was relaxed too quickly which is the Welsh Government's fault.

    We should have had a UK wide lockdown from August onwards.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,934

    O/T - This Sunday Times article should mean the end of Sunak's leadership ambitions if this story gets wider publicity.

    He's screwed up the pandemic worse than Mark Drakeford.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/48-hours-in-september-when-ministers-and-scientists-split-over-covid-lockdown-vg5xbpsfx

    Please explain.

    If we'd had the two week firebreak we would be in the position where Drakeford is now which is even worse.

    Thanks to taking the time to try the Tiers we found out that the original Tier system didn't work, took a 4 week lockdown that did and put in stricter Tiers as a result afterwards.

    So how is taking time to consider all the evidence as we did a bad thing?
    There's a graph in the paper that shows it wonderfully well.

    But here's two bits that stood out.

    As a result, more than 1.3 million extra infections are estimated to have spread across the country. We heard evidence that one intensive care ward in Manchester became so overwhelmed that patients were left to die without the life-saving care they needed......

    ..The next day in the Commons, Wednesday, October 14, Sunak hit back, accusing Labour of being “detached from reality” and being irresponsible for not acknowledging “the economic cost of a blunt national lockdown”. This was little more than two weeks before the government would perform a U-turn and announce a lockdown.
    Does the graph show England doing worse than Wales? 🤔

    A blunt lockdown failed where it was tried.

    By taking time to test Tiers we surely have a better outcome now than if we had just gone for a 2 weeks firebreak then back to the status quo ante which is what the advice was and Wales tried.
    Fake news again! The Wales Lockdown worked in the short term, it only failed in the medium term because it was too short and the moment we exited it was party time.

    I reluctantly went hunter-gathering this afternoon to Waitrose in Cowbridge. Sunday afternoon, just before closing time, it'll be quiet I thought. Waitrose was rammed to the extent that trolley usage was like the dodgems. I got what was on my list and left.

    Drakeford might be clueless, but his citizens seem even dafter.

    I estimate that England is ten to fourteen days behind, so good luck.
    You could argue a one day lockdown would work using that logic.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    RobD said:

    IanB2 said:

    Buckingham Palace has refused to deny reports that the Queen is delaying the recording of her Christmas speech until after a decision on a Brexit deal is reached.

    The monarch usually films the annual address in early to mid December, but has reportedly pushed back the recording to next week due to uncertainty about the UK’s future relationship with the EU, after the deadline for a deal passed.

    Can you attach a link? Would make it a lot easier than having to copy/paste the quote to find it.
    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/13/queen-is-reportedly-delaying-recording-christmas-speech-due-to-brexit-uncertainty

    You just have to highlight and click "search google," no copy n pasting required.
  • rkrkrk said:



    Could England have gone into lockdown sooner? Yes. Would that have been better? No, I don't see why.

    It would have been better because
    a) fewer people would have died
    b) we would have less virus spreading now.
    Why?

    That didn't happen in Wales. More virus is circulating in Wales than England.

    There may have been less virus circulating on a particular date but without the knowledge of how Tiers do and don't work I don't see why we would have overall fared better if we had done just a firebreak then not going into anything harsher post firebreak. Wales didn't, despite the knowledge they were able to learn from England's experience.
    Thank you doctor.

    Your final point is not wrong, there were not enough post lockdown precautions, but everything else in your post is pretty much nonsense.
    Why?

    We knew to put harsher restrictions in post lockdown precisely because the original Tiers had been tried and failed. Drakeford didn't have that knowledge.

    We have two paths that have been followed. I see no evidence the firebreak policy has worked better do you?

    Seems the only way to criticise Sunak and Johnson is to pretend Wales and Drakeford and Labour and the Lib Dems following it don't exist.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,713

    Foxy said:

    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/AndrewJMullen/status/1338144390691360768

    Seems perfectly reasonable to me? Didn't we come to some agreement this was a good compromise.

    Not sure about the phrase 'outdated attitudes' as a descriptor since which particular attitudes are the outdated ones (presumably some of the attitudes in the film remain ok), so maybe just saying 'This historical film contains attitudes, language and cultural depictions which some may find offensive' or some other slightly more mealy mouthed sentence, but it's semantics at this point. People can still see it, and those who might get triggered have been warned off, no worries.

    Personally, have been reading some late 19th, early 20th century stuff lately, which can make for the awkward times with some terminology.
    I don't particularly support the 'outdated' word either, I'd swap it for something like 'historical' or 'contemporaneous'. But over all, provided the thing isn't censored I'm not too bothered.
    I still think i'd censor The Dam Busters though.
    I'm curious: would you censor a film like "Pulp Fiction" or "Blazing Saddles"? I can see the argument that the word in question is not required at all for the plot in "The Dam Busters" and in now understood to be much more offensive than it was then, whereas the offensive nature of the word is deliberately explored in the other two.

    On this topic one of my favourite books is "Three Men in a Boat" and in the original version the word is used, but in later editions he changed it when it was pointed out that the word was offensive.
    Blazing Saddles of course used censorship of the word in question for comic effect, when because of a loud bell clanging nobody could hear what old Buck was actually saying!
    Political comedy is quite specific to its time and place. Since blunt racism of the type that's satirised in Blazing Saddles or Fawlty Towers is nowhere near as common as it once was, the joke is no longer so funny as it was at the time.
    It depends very much how the film is framed. Blazing Saddles counterpoints the Black Sheriff against racist townsfolk in support of an anti-racist agenda, so I think stands the test of time and remains funny.

    On the other hand, I rewatched A Taste of Honey recently, and the plot just seems banal now. A single teenage mother, pregnant from a casual fling with a black sailor, and living with a gay man just doesn't have the shock value that it did in the early Sixties.

    The movie has the unutterably beautiful Rita Tushingham playing an unwanted child, a discarded lover -- she is just too implausible as an unloved human being.

    This was the last play I saw before lockdown in Feb 2020 at Trafalgar Studios, London.

    And Jo was fat and ugly, and her mother Helen was a repulsive bitch from hell. The play really worked.

    (Extra movie points -- which politician appeared as a child in Richardson's A Taste of Honey ?)
    Yes, I saw it in Leicester in Oct 2019. A good production, and still a good melodrama, but less scandalous than it was.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,934
    IshmaelZ said:

    RobD said:

    IanB2 said:

    Buckingham Palace has refused to deny reports that the Queen is delaying the recording of her Christmas speech until after a decision on a Brexit deal is reached.

    The monarch usually films the annual address in early to mid December, but has reportedly pushed back the recording to next week due to uncertainty about the UK’s future relationship with the EU, after the deadline for a deal passed.

    Can you attach a link? Would make it a lot easier than having to copy/paste the quote to find it.
    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/13/queen-is-reportedly-delaying-recording-christmas-speech-due-to-brexit-uncertainty

    You just have to highlight and click "search google," no copy n pasting required.
    Cheers. Common practice to attribute quotes I think.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 34,685



    I reluctantly went hunter-gathering this afternoon to Waitrose in Cowbridge. Sunday afternoon, just before closing time, it'll be quiet I thought. Waitrose was rammed to the extent that trolley usage was like the dodgems. I got what was on my list and left.

    The Waitrose in Cowbridge was rammed. So you've met the Welsh middle class 😌

    Wales being Wales, I think the Waitrose in Cowbridge is my "local", as well.
    It's not only running the gauntlet of Covid that is damaging to one's health at Waitrose, it's the coronary when the bill is issued that is most dangerous. How can so few items be so expensive. I can fill s Transit van for a hundred quid in Lidl!
    It's quality versus quantity.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,601
    IanB2 said:

    Buckingham Palace has refused to deny reports that the Queen is delaying the recording of her Christmas speech until after a decision on a Brexit deal is reached.

    The monarch usually films the annual address in early to mid December, but has reportedly pushed back the recording to next week due to uncertainty about the UK’s future relationship with the EU, after the deadline for a deal passed.

    She'll do it live from the White Cliffs of Dover, as a remake of the Tango ad......

    "Right here, right now....c'mon France...."

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC2dC42iMtQ
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,096
    edited December 2020
    BBC had a good graphic showing why Welsh lockdown was a failure. It never really squished down rates anywhere enough in some key areas

    Thus, even then going to tiers would fail, because as we know tiers really only try and hold back the water for so long. You have to start that from a really low rate to begin with to buy significant breathing space.

    We are seeing this in England, a month wasn't really long enough.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,364
    UK cases by specimen date

    image
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,364
    edited December 2020
    UK cases by specimen date and scaled to 100K population

    image
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,364
    UK local R

    image
  • Re: the current Trumpsky-GOP "We Wuz Robbed" myth, note that in King County, Washington (Seattle plus eastern & southern suburbs & exurbs) Republicans requested two separate, partial recounts of 2020 general results:

    In addition, there was also a mandatory hand recount in 5th Legislative District (entirely within suburban Eastside King County) in the race for WA State Senate, but this was between two Democrats, because no Republican filed and both Dems advanced from the August "Top Two" primary to the general election.

    > in Rose precinct (actually Rosé, one of a group of precinct named for wines) the Republican Precinct Committee Officer requested a hand recount of all ballots cast (= 446) for President, US House (WA CD01), Governor and Attorney General. Result of recount: zero changes in any votes across all four races, which were won handily (in this precinct and elsewhere) by Democrats.

    > in 5 precincts in WA 9th Congressional District for US Representative, the Republican candidate requested hand recount (= 2,994 total ballots) for US House. Result of recount: zero changes to votes counted for either candidate, writeins or under-votes (there were no over-votes).

    > in 182 precincts of WA Leg Dist 05 for state senate (=97,479 total ballots) the mandatory hand recount was required by state law, because the margin separating the two candidates in initial machine count was less than 1/4 of one percent AND also less than 150 votes; in this case, the margin between incumbent Democrat Mark Mullet and his Democratic challenger Ingrid Anderson was just 57 votes. Result of recount: about two dozen separate changes to votes were made (based on statewide "What is a Vote?" standards) with result that both candidates a few votes, but no change to the outcome.

    Further note the Rose precinct recount was observed by the Republican PCO who made the request along with two other GOPers. They told King Co Elections the purpose of the request was to verify the announced results. And the RPCO told the King Co Democratic observer at the recount that she was impressed by KCE's vote counting.

    There were no Republicans on hand for the CD09 requested hand recount OR the mandatory LD05 hand recount, but there were observers present for both state senate candidates, and our reaction was the same: impressed by the voting counting systems, election supervisors and workers here in King County, and convinced in the accuracy of the count, in these and other races.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,381

    O/T - This Sunday Times article should mean the end of Sunak's leadership ambitions if this story gets wider publicity.

    He's screwed up the pandemic worse than Mark Drakeford.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/48-hours-in-september-when-ministers-and-scientists-split-over-covid-lockdown-vg5xbpsfx

    Please explain.

    If we'd had the two week firebreak we would be in the position where Drakeford is now which is even worse.

    Thanks to taking the time to try the Tiers we found out that the original Tier system didn't work, took a 4 week lockdown that did and put in stricter Tiers as a result afterwards.

    So how is taking time to consider all the evidence as we did a bad thing?
    There's a graph in the paper that shows it wonderfully well.

    But here's two bits that stood out.

    As a result, more than 1.3 million extra infections are estimated to have spread across the country. We heard evidence that one intensive care ward in Manchester became so overwhelmed that patients were left to die without the life-saving care they needed......

    ..The next day in the Commons, Wednesday, October 14, Sunak hit back, accusing Labour of being “detached from reality” and being irresponsible for not acknowledging “the economic cost of a blunt national lockdown”. This was little more than two weeks before the government would perform a U-turn and announce a lockdown.
    Does the graph show England doing worse than Wales? 🤔

    A blunt lockdown failed where it was tried.

    By taking time to test Tiers we surely have a better outcome now than if we had just gone for a 2 weeks firebreak then back to the status quo ante which is what the advice was and Wales tried.
    Fake news again! The Wales Lockdown worked in the short term, it only failed in the medium term because it was too short and the moment we exited it was party time.

    I reluctantly went hunter-gathering this afternoon to Waitrose in Cowbridge. Sunday afternoon, just before closing time, it'll be quiet I thought. Waitrose was rammed to the extent that trolley usage was like the dodgems. I got what was on my list and left.

    Drakeford might be clueless, but his citizens seem even dafter.

    I estimate that England is ten to fourteen days behind, so good luck.
    Short term is meaningless which was my precise point! Medium term is relevant.

    The fact they reverted from the firebreak back to the status quo ante restrictions was Drakeford's policy and Drakeford gave the attitude that the two weeks was sufficient so why not party afterwards?

    In contrast in England as they had tried the Tiers first post lockdown they knew NOT to go back into the original Tiers afterwards so the post lockdown Tiers were different to the pre lockdown Tiers.

    I see no reason why if we had followed the 2 week firebreak advice we wouldn't have followed Drakeford's path which seems worse than what has actually happened in the medium term.
    I really don't want to defend Drakeford, significant errors were indeed made, but he did call the fire-break when it was politically unacceptable, particularly with Johnson saying at the time it was an unnecessary waste of time, only to call his own two weeks later. Whatever you do, don't hold Johnson up as the beacon of Covid best practice.. You may now be fine in the North West, however it is unfortunately a different story in South East and Eastern England.

    I think I need to go before your utter nonsense pisses me off any more than it already has.
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