I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
MesoAmerican cultures were ridiculously grisly, but that also makes them endlessly fascinating, in a macabre way
Whenever you think you have reached the depths of their depravity, they have the capacity to surprise on the downside. The Moche Culture of north Peru (circa 8th century AD) is particularly good at this. OMFG. They worshipped a tarantula God who demanded they sacrifice their own relatives, they gave the victims special drugs so the blood ran extra slow and the sacrifice took hours. During this process, the family would REDACTED REDACTED
Meanwhile the Aztecs could sacrifice thousands of people in a single day in their capital, Tenochtitlan
Here's a Guardian article denouncing the evil Spanish for destroying this marvellous culture, in particular it complains about
"massacres of some of our earliest thinkers such as the Aztec"
Plus most of them died from disease brought by the Spanish, not mass killing as they practiced themselves
It's a genuine moral puzzle. Did these civilisations deserve to survive?
In particular, the Aztecs were basically the Nazis of MesoAmerica. Extremely aggressive, militaristic, ethnocentric, bloodthirsty, autocratic at the top and servile at the bottom, and absolutely obsessed with death and blood. They were so nasty even the other gruesome, human-sacrificing Mexican cultures hated them (which is one reason the Aztec Empire fell so easily to Cortez, he got the Aztecs' local enemies on side)
And yet a unique and remarkable civilisation - for all its hideous flaws - was totally obliterated, and much was lost
Was this ultimately good, or bad? I can never quite decide.
A bit like the T-Rex they were brutal and bloody but somewhat awe inspiring and majestic too, however best left to history
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
In Paris that guy NDA is looking for his De Gaulle radio broadcast or Yeltsin on the tank moment. Whether he will actually find one or whether on the contrary he will make a complete and utter banana of himself remains unclear.
If it was the Lib Dems up 5, and Labour/Greens level then perhaps the Tories would have something to worry about.
There will be a limit to the number of seats the Lib Dems can campaign hard in.
It will be very interesting to see if the Greens can manage to become relevant enough to grab the third party spot from the libdems.
In theory, they are in an excellent position to do so, but so far they have made very little progress outside the Euro elections. (And we aren’t getting those any more.)
How much are Greens as a party prepared to do the ruthlessness needed to get a foothold under FPTP, then turn it into a platform? Pick (say) five seats where they have a chance and work them to death, then ten, then twenty... the sort of laserlike Focus that the various incarnations of the yellow team have managed for decades? Have they access to the resources to do that?
They have done that to an extent. They perhaps haven't managed to get activists to travel out of their local area to a target area as much as the Lib Dems have.
One thing that has worked against them is that Labour have been very effective against them making progress. The Greens did very well in Norwich for a while, for example, but Labour have Clive Lewis as the local MP now, one of the most pro-Green MPs in the PLP, and ideally suited to frustrate a Green advance in a target area.
Doesn't surprise me at all. There's a lot of feeble research applying machine learning algorithms to medical problems, which just involves sticking data into an existing black box and trying to make predictions without understanding any of the underlying mechanisms. Some of the weakest science out there, imo, and a waste of funding.
--AS
My PhD supervisor back in the day best described this kind of research is every so often somebody invents a new hammer, then far too many people in the academic community without really knowing how to use it properly or what jobs it is good for, instead they run around finding every possible DIY job to which they apply the solution of hit with big new shiny hammer.
That's exactly right. A few years ago it was support vector machines. Then it was "big data" (a meaningless phrase) and simple classifiers. Then "deep learning" (also pretty meaningless). I'm now seeing a lot of crappy papers about curriculum learning and other minor fudges relating to optimizing non-convex loss functions.
I review a lot of papers like the ones you describe, and try to find ways to reject them all. One of my pet peeves is that conferences and journals tend to accept such rubbish, and funders love it, yet it has almost no value. (I had no trouble restraining myself for applying for a grant by pasting "covid" and "machine learning" into some combination, even though it would likely have been funded.) Whereas truly fundamental novel research is too risky to get funding for.
Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.
The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall
If the green and LibDem vote deploys strategically, things would look better.
YouGov’s own map identifies nine of its chosen seats that would fall to Labour based on its polling, with LibDems gaining three and a further four that are too close to call.
Here's the list;
CON TO LAB: - Chingford & Woodford Green - Chipping Barent - Filton & Bradley Stoke - Hendon - Kensington & Chelsea - Milton Keynes N - Stroud - Truro & Falmouth - Wycombe
Considering the way that Lab and Lib Dem tore chunks out of each other in 2019, surely some tactical unwind is going to be expected? Take Batley + Spen, where it looks like there was just enough of a Lib to Lab shift for Kim Leadbetter to fend of the catty one. That can fairly easily lead to fewer Lib Dem votes and more seats- look at the history of the Alliance/Lib Dems in the 80's and 90's. What matters for the Lib Dems is getting votes in the right places, not national swing.
More generally, the efficiency of the anti-Conservative vote is at least as important as the size of the Conservative vote. May 2017 got a much higher percentage share of the vote than Cameron 2015, but fewer seats.
In 1997, the libdems did only fractionally better (percentage-wise) than in 2019, but got four-times the seats.
(Or, to put it another way, they got half the vote share of 1983 and more than twice the seats.)
This demonstrates (a) that the absolute level of Conservative vote is very important to them, and (b) tactical voting matters.
In 1997 the LDs polled 18% compared with just 12% in 2019.
16.8%.
So, yes I exaggerated slightly for effect, but worth remembering that was worse than in 1992, 1987, 1983 and both elections in 1974.
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
MesoAmerican cultures were ridiculously grisly, but that also makes them endlessly fascinating, in a macabre way
Whenever you think you have reached the depths of their depravity, they have the capacity to surprise on the downside. The Moche Culture of north Peru (circa 8th century AD) is particularly good at this. OMFG. They worshipped a tarantula God who demanded they sacrifice their own relatives, they gave the victims special drugs so the blood ran extra slow and the sacrifice took hours. During this process, the family would REDACTED REDACTED
Meanwhile the Aztecs could sacrifice thousands of people in a single day in their capital, Tenochtitlan
Here's a Guardian article denouncing the evil Spanish for destroying this marvellous culture, in particular it complains about
"massacres of some of our earliest thinkers such as the Aztec"
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
Cortes wasn’t that bad - most of the issues were in Cuba & then Pizarro was a disgrace in Peru. Cortes only massacred one town but most of the others came over to his side to besiege the capital
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Perhaps just a tad severe...
Chariot racing and horse archery are both ancient disciplines ripe for revival. In a previous thread I also invented elephant javelin, but the provision of the necessary animals could prove somewhat challenging. Horse javelin could still be fantastic though.
Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.
The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall
If the green and LibDem vote deploys strategically, things would look better.
YouGov’s own map identifies nine of its chosen seats that would fall to Labour based on its polling, with LibDems gaining three and a further four that are too close to call.
Here's the list;
CON TO LAB: - Chingford & Woodford Green - Chipping Barent - Filton & Bradley Stoke - Hendon - Kensington & Chelsea - Milton Keynes N - Stroud - Truro & Falmouth - Wycombe
Considering the way that Lab and Lib Dem tore chunks out of each other in 2019, surely some tactical unwind is going to be expected? Take Batley + Spen, where it looks like there was just enough of a Lib to Lab shift for Kim Leadbetter to fend of the catty one. That can fairly easily lead to fewer Lib Dem votes and more seats- look at the history of the Alliance/Lib Dems in the 80's and 90's. What matters for the Lib Dems is getting votes in the right places, not national swing.
More generally, the efficiency of the anti-Conservative vote is at least as important as the size of the Conservative vote. May 2017 got a much higher percentage share of the vote than Cameron 2015, but fewer seats.
2019 had the fear factor from Corbyn which must have repulsed a number of non - Conservative tactical voters from voting Labour.
Brexit has been a gift that has kept giving to Johnson, particularly in the Red/Blue wall, but surely there is a point where it becomes an old-hat, distant memory.
Prior thread very interesting (perhaps not the stuff about roads)
I too have made insane predictions way out of my area of competence - I know this might not come as a shock, but it was a bit of an epiphany for me, just this morning
eg Yesterday I confidently predicted that Team GB would do quite badly compared to reasonable expectations. I said we would finish behind Oz, Russia and maybe another European country. I said we might finish around 9th in the medal table, and get around 40-45 medals
This morning I considered my prediction, and I laughed at my own stupidity
Where was I getting my info with which to make these precise calls? Out of my ass, basically. It is all a hunch, an intimation. In fact it's not even a hunch, it's more like a spasm in reaction to early disappointments. There are people out there - on this site - who know far more about these Games, right down to individual athletes in more obscure sports, and their various chances. Their prophesies are 100 times more valuable than mine.
If my "prediction" turns out to be anywhere near correct it will be nearly pure luck and almost zero judgement.
My only defence is that I never bet on these hunches. I only ever bet after proper consideration and research. Which is probably why I bet very rarely
Very wise. I know relatively little about what's going on; however...
*The British team is currently sat on 28 medals *Boxing has produced a bronze, three more semi-finalists who now can't do any worse than bronze, and three more quarter-finalists *Sailing has also produced a bronze and British crews are competitive in six of the eight events that have yet to complete (two in first place, three in second and one in fourth the last time I looked) *The three-day eventers are doing well at the moment *The men's golfers are competitive and the women's haven't started yet *The individual apparatus finals in gymnastics haven't happened yet *Flatwater canoeing hasn't started yet (and I've not the foggiest whether there are any competitive Brits going in that event, but I'm pretty sure there were medallists last time) *The whole athletics programme has only just got started (and I know it doesn't look promising from the British POV, but there are a *lot* of events and the team might yet get something out of it) *AND track cycling has yet to get underway
In medal table terms I rate it as a competition for 5th with Australia, and 50 medals looks achievable. That'd be broadly comparable with Beijing, and a credible overall achievement IMHO.
Yes, I think that's a fair assessment. Down on Rio and London. Some soul searching for rowing team and probably the track cyclists as well.
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.
The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall
If the green and LibDem vote deploys strategically, things would look better.
YouGov’s own map identifies nine of its chosen seats that would fall to Labour based on its polling, with LibDems gaining three and a further four that are too close to call.
Here's the list;
CON TO LAB: - Chingford & Woodford Green - Chipping Barent - Filton & Bradley Stoke - Hendon - Kensington & Chelsea - Milton Keynes N - Stroud - Truro & Falmouth - Wycombe
Considering the way that Lab and Lib Dem tore chunks out of each other in 2019, surely some tactical unwind is going to be expected? Take Batley + Spen, where it looks like there was just enough of a Lib to Lab shift for Kim Leadbetter to fend of the catty one. That can fairly easily lead to fewer Lib Dem votes and more seats- look at the history of the Alliance/Lib Dems in the 80's and 90's. What matters for the Lib Dems is getting votes in the right places, not national swing.
More generally, the efficiency of the anti-Conservative vote is at least as important as the size of the Conservative vote. May 2017 got a much higher percentage share of the vote than Cameron 2015, but fewer seats.
In 1997, the libdems did only fractionally better (percentage-wise) than in 2019, but got four-times the seats.
(Or, to put it another way, they got half the vote share of 1983 and more than twice the seats.)
This demonstrates (a) that the absolute level of Conservative vote is very important to them, and (b) tactical voting matters.
In 1997 the LDs polled 18% compared with just 12% in 2019.
16.8%.
So, yes I exaggerated slightly for effect, but worth remembering that was worse than in 1992, 1987, 1983 and both elections in 1974.
Wilkipedia has the 1997 UK LD vote at 17.8% - equivalent to over 18% on a GB basis.
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Chariot racing!
Certainly has a claim given its antiquity, as at Olympia. (But let's not talk about pankration. It'll only get certain of us excited.)
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
The "Blue Wall" seats are wealthy Remainer Land, so it is to be expected that they are receptive to Sir Keir and Sir Ed in the way that "Red Wall" voters are repelled by them.They are probably the most anti Boris/Brexit/Jez types in the country
I am surprised the LD vote is down, esp after C&A.
I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.
We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.
My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.
I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.
Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.
It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.
I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?
Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...
Rachel Johnson (as in sister of ...) suggested rote learning of the classics was a soft route to Oxford.
So why would Tories want more competition for their children's life chances?
Tokenism. The Universities might dump the classics if it became obvious they are an upper middle class scam. You want a trickle of comp school entrants to point at and claim how inclusive it all is.
There is not much to dump, the only universities which still do pure Classics/Latin degrees are Oxford and Cambridge, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Exeter and Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol, KCL and UCL and Royal Holloway.
They are all pretty posh universities anyway
So?
If cutting the classics means an instant downwards improvement to the posho-meter reading , to help meet the targets mandated by government, they'll have to consider it very seriously.
It is dumbing down and would make barely any difference whatsoever, as they are tiny courses anyway.
We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care, we support selection on merit and high academic standards, hence Williamson is pushing Latin in state schools. So if they want to suck up to Williamson if anything universities will expand their classics courses and do state school outreach for them.
Plus not all classics students will be privately educated and Oxbridge are 60% state school now anyway
‘Leading Tory says they “do not care” about state schools’
You need to be more careful about your choice of words if you want to progress in politics
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Two things need to happen for the Conservatives to lose the next election:
1. Their vote needs to fall back towards (and maybe even drop below) 40% 2. Tactical voting needs to return.
My gut is that 2024 will see the Conservative vote share drop back to 42% (give or take), and there’s a modest increase in tactical voting, resulting in a 20 to 40 seat Cons majority.
That makes me remember being told in the 1970s that Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun was a terrific achievement because so many other tombs in the Valley of Kings had been emptied by "grave robbers". So what was he then?
Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.
The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall
If the green and LibDem vote deploys strategically, things would look better.
YouGov’s own map identifies nine of its chosen seats that would fall to Labour based on its polling, with LibDems gaining three and a further four that are too close to call.
Here's the list;
CON TO LAB: - Chingford & Woodford Green - Chipping Barent - Filton & Bradley Stoke - Hendon - Kensington & Chelsea - Milton Keynes N - Stroud - Truro & Falmouth - Wycombe
Considering the way that Lab and Lib Dem tore chunks out of each other in 2019, surely some tactical unwind is going to be expected? Take Batley + Spen, where it looks like there was just enough of a Lib to Lab shift for Kim Leadbetter to fend of the catty one. That can fairly easily lead to fewer Lib Dem votes and more seats- look at the history of the Alliance/Lib Dems in the 80's and 90's. What matters for the Lib Dems is getting votes in the right places, not national swing.
More generally, the efficiency of the anti-Conservative vote is at least as important as the size of the Conservative vote. May 2017 got a much higher percentage share of the vote than Cameron 2015, but fewer seats.
In 1997, the libdems did only fractionally better (percentage-wise) than in 2019, but got four-times the seats.
(Or, to put it another way, they got half the vote share of 1983 and more than twice the seats.)
This demonstrates (a) that the absolute level of Conservative vote is very important to them, and (b) tactical voting matters.
In 1997 the LDs polled 18% compared with just 12% in 2019.
16.8%.
So, yes I exaggerated slightly for effect, but worth remembering that was worse than in 1992, 1987, 1983 and both elections in 1974.
Wilkipedia has the 1997 UK LD vote at 17.8% - equivalent to over 18% on a GB basis.
No they don’t: that’s the 1992 total. Wikipedia’s layout can be confusing.
I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.
We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.
My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.
I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.
Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.
It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.
I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?
Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...
Rachel Johnson (as in sister of ...) suggested rote learning of the classics was a soft route to Oxford.
So why would Tories want more competition for their children's life chances?
Tokenism. The Universities might dump the classics if it became obvious they are an upper middle class scam. You want a trickle of comp school entrants to point at and claim how inclusive it all is.
There is not much to dump, the only universities which still do pure Classics/Latin degrees are Oxford and Cambridge, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Exeter and Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol, KCL and UCL and Royal Holloway.
They are all pretty posh universities anyway
So?
If cutting the classics means an instant downwards improvement to the posho-meter reading , to help meet the targets mandated by government, they'll have to consider it very seriously.
It is dumbing down and would make barely any difference whatsoever, as they are tiny courses anyway.
We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care, we support selection on merit and high academic standards, hence Williamson is pushing Latin in state schools. So if they want to suck up to Williamson if anything universities will expand their classics courses and do state school outreach for them.
Plus not all classics students will be privately educated and Oxbridge are 60% state school now anyway
‘Leading Tory says they “do not care” about state schools’
You need to be more careful about your choice of words if you want to progress in politics
Oh, I'm pretty certain a firm grounding in Classics will enable HYUFD to convince the good voters of Epping to vote for him at the next election!
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Two things need to happen for the Conservatives to lose the next election:
1. Their vote needs to fall back towards (and maybe even drop below) 40% 2. Tactical voting needs to return.
My gut is that 2024 will see the Conservative vote share drop back to 42% (give or take), and there’s a modest increase in tactical voting, resulting in a 20 to 40 seat Cons majority.
Maybe the Lab to Green votes will skew things a bit - it could make the Lab vote share down a fair bit but result in no seats changing hands, just smaller margin of victories
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Two things need to happen for the Conservatives to lose the next election:
1. Their vote needs to fall back towards (and maybe even drop below) 40% 2. Tactical voting needs to return.
My gut is that 2024 will see the Conservative vote share drop back to 42% (give or take), and there’s a modest increase in tactical voting, resulting in a 20 to 40 seat Cons majority.
Why are you so sure the Tory vote will remain above the circa 37% achieved by Cameron in 2010 and 2015?
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
MesoAmerican cultures were ridiculously grisly, but that also makes them endlessly fascinating, in a macabre way
Whenever you think you have reached the depths of their depravity, they have the capacity to surprise on the downside. The Moche Culture of north Peru (circa 8th century AD) is particularly good at this. OMFG. They worshipped a tarantula God who demanded they sacrifice their own relatives, they gave the victims special drugs so the blood ran extra slow and the sacrifice took hours. During this process, the family would REDACTED REDACTED
Meanwhile the Aztecs could sacrifice thousands of people in a single day in their capital, Tenochtitlan
Here's a Guardian article denouncing the evil Spanish for destroying this marvellous culture, in particular it complains about
"massacres of some of our earliest thinkers such as the Aztec"
Did you see the pictures of the preserved corpse of a sacrificed Inca girl? Haunting.
I did, and yes, very haunting
The Inca were comparatively humane compared to other MesoAmerican cultures, surprisingly. They did commit child sacrifice, but it was very rare (done for coronations and so on) and the children weren't killed in especially cruel ways, just left exposed on high mountaintops to die (and possibly drugged to dull the pain). The altitude explains the mummification
By contrast the cultures further north had a rain God, Tlaloc, who demanded that His thirst be slaked by the tears of human children. You can imagine what, say, the Aztecs did in response
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
The "Blue Wall" seats are wealthy Remainer Land, so it is to be expected that they are receptive to Sir Keir and Sir Ed in the way that "Red Wall" voters are repelled by them.They are probably the most anti Boris/Brexit/Jez types in the country
I am surprised the LD vote is down, esp after C&A.
I think Nick Palmer has this right: the existing results already include some tactical voting.
I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.
We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.
My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.
I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.
Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.
It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.
I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?
Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...
Rachel Johnson (as in sister of ...) suggested rote learning of the classics was a soft route to Oxford.
So why would Tories want more competition for their children's life chances?
Tokenism. The Universities might dump the classics if it became obvious they are an upper middle class scam. You want a trickle of comp school entrants to point at and claim how inclusive it all is.
There is not much to dump, the only universities which still do pure Classics/Latin degrees are Oxford and Cambridge, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Exeter and Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol, KCL and UCL and Royal Holloway.
They are all pretty posh universities anyway
So?
If cutting the classics means an instant downwards improvement to the posho-meter reading , to help meet the targets mandated by government, they'll have to consider it very seriously.
It is dumbing down and would make barely any difference whatsoever, as they are tiny courses anyway.
We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care, we support selection on merit and high academic standards, hence Williamson is pushing Latin in state schools. So if they want to suck up to Williamson if anything universities will expand their classics courses and do state school outreach for them.
Plus not all classics students will be privately educated and Oxbridge are 60% state school now anyway
‘Leading Tory says they “do not care” about state schools’
You need to be more careful about your choice of words if you want to progress in politics
I like HYUFD because tells it like it is and pulls no punches.
Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.
The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall
If the green and LibDem vote deploys strategically, things would look better.
YouGov’s own map identifies nine of its chosen seats that would fall to Labour based on its polling, with LibDems gaining three and a further four that are too close to call.
Here's the list;
CON TO LAB: - Chingford & Woodford Green - Chipping Barent - Filton & Bradley Stoke - Hendon - Kensington & Chelsea - Milton Keynes N - Stroud - Truro & Falmouth - Wycombe
Considering the way that Lab and Lib Dem tore chunks out of each other in 2019, surely some tactical unwind is going to be expected? Take Batley + Spen, where it looks like there was just enough of a Lib to Lab shift for Kim Leadbetter to fend of the catty one. That can fairly easily lead to fewer Lib Dem votes and more seats- look at the history of the Alliance/Lib Dems in the 80's and 90's. What matters for the Lib Dems is getting votes in the right places, not national swing.
More generally, the efficiency of the anti-Conservative vote is at least as important as the size of the Conservative vote. May 2017 got a much higher percentage share of the vote than Cameron 2015, but fewer seats.
In 1997, the libdems did only fractionally better (percentage-wise) than in 2019, but got four-times the seats.
(Or, to put it another way, they got half the vote share of 1983 and more than twice the seats.)
This demonstrates (a) that the absolute level of Conservative vote is very important to them, and (b) tactical voting matters.
In 1997 the LDs polled 18% compared with just 12% in 2019.
16.8%.
So, yes I exaggerated slightly for effect, but worth remembering that was worse than in 1992, 1987, 1983 and both elections in 1974.
Wilkipedia has the 1997 UK LD vote at 17.8% - equivalent to over 18% on a GB basis.
No they don’t: that’s the 1992 total. Wikipedia’s layout can be confusing.
Apologies - but 16.8 for the UK would be circa 17.5% for GB.
I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.
We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.
My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.
I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.
Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.
It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.
I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?
Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...
Rachel Johnson (as in sister of ...) suggested rote learning of the classics was a soft route to Oxford.
So why would Tories want more competition for their children's life chances?
Tokenism. The Universities might dump the classics if it became obvious they are an upper middle class scam. You want a trickle of comp school entrants to point at and claim how inclusive it all is.
There is not much to dump, the only universities which still do pure Classics/Latin degrees are Oxford and Cambridge, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Exeter and Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol, KCL and UCL and Royal Holloway.
They are all pretty posh universities anyway
So?
If cutting the classics means an instant downwards improvement to the posho-meter reading , to help meet the targets mandated by government, they'll have to consider it very seriously.
It is dumbing down and would make barely any difference whatsoever, as they are tiny courses anyway.
We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care, we support selection on merit and high academic standards, hence Williamson is pushing Latin in state schools. So if they want to suck up to Williamson if anything universities will expand their classics courses and do state school outreach for them.
Plus not all classics students will be privately educated and Oxbridge are 60% state school now anyway
‘Leading Tory says they “do not care” about state schools’
You need to be more careful about your choice of words if you want to progress in politics
Oh, I'm pretty certain a firm grounding in Classics will enable HYUFD to convince the good voters of Epping to vote for him at the next election!
I'm just wondering, what would M. Tullius Cicero have thought of the Millwall footie fan approach to persuading one's audience of one's views?
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Why did you choose the number 47.5?
Because only once in the last 10 elections have the Tories got 47.5% of the vote and lost. These are the seats with the highest Tory share without them winning in the last 10 elections:
1983 - Isle of Wight - 46.3% 1987 - Southport - 44.5% 1992 - North Devon - 45.7% 1997 - Wellingborough - 43.8% 2001 - Newbury - 43.5% 2005 - Westmorland and Lonsdale - 44.9% 2010 - Mid Dorset and North Poole - 44.5% 2015 - Wirral West - 44.2% 2017 - Newcastle-under-Lyme - 48.1% 2019 - Westmorland and Lonsdale - 45.3%
Compare 2019 with 1987:
Con share of the vote - 1987 - 2019 Under 37.5% - 4 - 1 37.5% to 42.5% - 25 - 7 42.5% to 47.5% - 78 - 40 Over 47.5% - 269 - 317
Total - 376 - 365
The Tories in 1987 were relying on winning far more seats due to split opposition votes.
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
Cortes wasn’t that bad - most of the issues were in Cuba & then Pizarro was a disgrace in Peru. Cortes only massacred one town but most of the others came over to his side to besiege the capital
Cortes was also facing a brutally violent enemy. Whenever the Aztecs captured a conquistador, they would take him to the top of the biggest pyramid (so the Spaniards outside the city walls could see) - tear out his living heart, roll the still pulsing body down the steps, then eat the corpse
I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.
We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.
My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.
I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.
Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.
It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.
I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?
Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...
Rachel Johnson (as in sister of ...) suggested rote learning of the classics was a soft route to Oxford.
So why would Tories want more competition for their children's life chances?
Tokenism. The Universities might dump the classics if it became obvious they are an upper middle class scam. You want a trickle of comp school entrants to point at and claim how inclusive it all is.
There is not much to dump, the only universities which still do pure Classics/Latin degrees are Oxford and Cambridge, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Exeter and Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol, KCL and UCL and Royal Holloway.
They are all pretty posh universities anyway
So?
If cutting the classics means an instant downwards improvement to the posho-meter reading , to help meet the targets mandated by government, they'll have to consider it very seriously.
It is dumbing down and would make barely any difference whatsoever, as they are tiny courses anyway.
We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care, we support selection on merit and high academic standards, hence Williamson is pushing Latin in state schools. So if they want to suck up to Williamson if anything universities will expand their classics courses and do state school outreach for them.
Plus not all classics students will be privately educated and Oxbridge are 60% state school now anyway
‘Leading Tory says they “do not care” about state schools’
You need to be more careful about your choice of words if you want to progress in politics
What an absurd distortion of what I said.
I did not once say 'I do not care about state schools', merely I want selection on merit. If anything I care more than Carnyx as like Williamson I want to spread Latin in our state schools and expand excellence in them (a few more grammars would help too).
If you would prefer to keep excellence and Latin confined to your alma mater of Eton and a few top public schools and a conveyor belt to Oxbridge and the top professions like law and medicine and banking that is your affair
Doesn't surprise me at all. There's a lot of feeble research applying machine learning algorithms to medical problems, which just involves sticking data into an existing black box and trying to make predictions without understanding any of the underlying mechanisms. Some of the weakest science out there, imo, and a waste of funding.
--AS
My PhD supervisor back in the day best described this kind of research is every so often somebody invents a new hammer, then far too many people in the academic community without really knowing how to use it properly or what jobs it is good for, instead they run around finding every possible DIY job to which they apply the solution of hit with big new shiny hammer.
That's exactly right. A few years ago it was support vector machines. Then it was "big data" (a meaningless phrase) and simple classifiers. Then "deep learning" (also pretty meaningless). I'm now seeing a lot of crappy papers about curriculum learning and other minor fudges relating to optimizing non-convex loss functions.
I review a lot of papers like the ones you describe, and try to find ways to reject them all. One of my pet peeves is that conferences and journals tend to accept such rubbish, and funders love it, yet it has almost no value. (I had no trouble restraining myself for applying for a grant by pasting "covid" and "machine learning" into some combination, even though it would likely have been funded.) Whereas truly fundamental novel research is too risky to get funding for.
--AS
Graph Neural Nets and Optimal Transport / Normalized Flows are the new buzz words I am seeing in the literature at the moment. Out with the GANs (because of mode collapse) in with the solve it by flowing a probability distribution.
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
MesoAmerican cultures were ridiculously grisly, but that also makes them endlessly fascinating, in a macabre way
Whenever you think you have reached the depths of their depravity, they have the capacity to surprise on the downside. The Moche Culture of north Peru (circa 8th century AD) is particularly good at this. OMFG. They worshipped a tarantula God who demanded they sacrifice their own relatives, they gave the victims special drugs so the blood ran extra slow and the sacrifice took hours. During this process, the family would REDACTED REDACTED
Meanwhile the Aztecs could sacrifice thousands of people in a single day in their capital, Tenochtitlan
Here's a Guardian article denouncing the evil Spanish for destroying this marvellous culture, in particular it complains about
"massacres of some of our earliest thinkers such as the Aztec"
I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.
We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.
My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.
I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.
Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.
It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.
I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?
Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...
Rachel Johnson (as in sister of ...) suggested rote learning of the classics was a soft route to Oxford.
So why would Tories want more competition for their children's life chances?
Tokenism. The Universities might dump the classics if it became obvious they are an upper middle class scam. You want a trickle of comp school entrants to point at and claim how inclusive it all is.
There is not much to dump, the only universities which still do pure Classics/Latin degrees are Oxford and Cambridge, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Exeter and Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol, KCL and UCL and Royal Holloway.
They are all pretty posh universities anyway
So?
If cutting the classics means an instant downwards improvement to the posho-meter reading , to help meet the targets mandated by government, they'll have to consider it very seriously.
It is dumbing down and would make barely any difference whatsoever, as they are tiny courses anyway.
We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care, we support selection on merit and high academic standards, hence Williamson is pushing Latin in state schools. So if they want to suck up to Williamson if anything universities will expand their classics courses and do state school outreach for them.
Plus not all classics students will be privately educated and Oxbridge are 60% state school now anyway
‘Leading Tory says they “do not care” about state schools’
You need to be more careful about your choice of words if you want to progress in politics
What an absurd distortion of what I said.
I did not once say 'I do not care about state schools' if anything I care more than Carnyx as like Williamson I want to spread Latin in our state schools and expand excellence in them (a few more grammars would help too).
If you would prefer to keep excellence and Latin confined to your alma mater of Eton that is your affair
What you wrote is precisely that you have set no state school target and that you don't care.
I recommend doing a Latin O level to see how language works. (I did. And Greek too.)
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
Cortes wasn’t that bad - most of the issues were in Cuba & then Pizarro was a disgrace in Peru. Cortes only massacred one town but most of the others came over to his side to besiege the capital
It doesn't make subsequent events 'ok', but it's always worth remembering how the Aztecs were regarded by neighbours and the conquered.
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Two things need to happen for the Conservatives to lose the next election:
1. Their vote needs to fall back towards (and maybe even drop below) 40% 2. Tactical voting needs to return.
My gut is that 2024 will see the Conservative vote share drop back to 42% (give or take), and there’s a modest increase in tactical voting, resulting in a 20 to 40 seat Cons majority.
I think the electoral geography is simply very favourable to the Tories at the moment.
They can lose lots of votes in the South, without it putting many seats at risk. Modest vote gains in the North (from the Brexit Party) potentially bring a larger number of Labour seats into contention. The boundary changes are likely to be beneficial.
We could easily see a result that outdoes 2001 - when Labour lost 2.5% vote share, but only 6 seats - and see the Tories lose vote share but gain net seats.
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
Cortes wasn’t that bad - most of the issues were in Cuba & then Pizarro was a disgrace in Peru. Cortes only massacred one town but most of the others came over to his side to besiege the capital
Cortes was also facing a brutally violent enemy. Whenever the Aztecs captured a conquistador, they would take him to the top of the biggest pyramid (so the Spaniards outside the city walls could see) - tear out his living heart, roll the still pulsing body down the steps, then eat the corpse
Same if we ever catch BJ on Sauchiehall St, with the exception of deep frying his heartless corpse.
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
MesoAmerican cultures were ridiculously grisly, but that also makes them endlessly fascinating, in a macabre way
Whenever you think you have reached the depths of their depravity, they have the capacity to surprise on the downside. The Moche Culture of north Peru (circa 8th century AD) is particularly good at this. OMFG. They worshipped a tarantula God who demanded they sacrifice their own relatives, they gave the victims special drugs so the blood ran extra slow and the sacrifice took hours. During this process, the family would REDACTED REDACTED
Meanwhile the Aztecs could sacrifice thousands of people in a single day in their capital, Tenochtitlan
Here's a Guardian article denouncing the evil Spanish for destroying this marvellous culture, in particular it complains about
"massacres of some of our earliest thinkers such as the Aztec"
Did you see the pictures of the preserved corpse of a sacrificed Inca girl? Haunting.
I did, and yes, very haunting
The Inca were comparatively humane compared to other MesoAmerican cultures, surprisingly. They did commit child sacrifice, but it was very rare (done for coronations and so on) and the children weren't killed in especially cruel ways, just left exposed on high mountaintops to die (and possibly drugged to dull the pain). The altitude explains the mummification
By contrast the cultures further north had a rain God, Tlaloc, who demanded that His thirst be slaked by the tears of human children. You can imagine what, say, the Aztecs did in response
Horrible Histories: Ain't Staying Alive To win at war, make crops grow more, to cure our kids when ill The sun to shine, this song to rhyme, more victims we must kill
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
Cortes wasn’t that bad - most of the issues were in Cuba & then Pizarro was a disgrace in Peru. Cortes only massacred one town but most of the others came over to his side to besiege the capital
Cortes was also facing a brutally violent enemy. Whenever the Aztecs captured a conquistador, they would take him to the top of the biggest pyramid (so the Spaniards outside the city walls could see) - tear out his living heart, roll the still pulsing body down the steps, then eat the corpse
Same if we ever catch BJ on Sauchiehall St, with the exception of deep frying his heartless corpse.
Now, now, you know the southron doesn't do Scots irony.
Here’s an interesting one: it appears that it’s impossible to permanently delete stuff, and the NYT is reporting the missing (v early) cv19 genetic samples have been found.
This will provide some crucial evidence to help us determine the source of the outbreak.
A final story about the Aztecs before I go to the gym
At the height of their imperial might the Aztecs conquered a nearby kingdom and captured the rival king's daughter, ie the princess.
As they were so triumphant the Aztecs decided to be magnanimous, and they invited the defeated king to a feast in Tenochtitlan, where he could be reunited with his kidnapped daughter
When the defeated king sat down he finally saw his daughter again, or, rather, he saw an Aztec priest capering about while wearing, as a suit, the carefully flayed skin of his ritually slaughtered child
The king was understandably anguished and outraged and left immediately.
My favourite bit is this: the Aztecs were mystified by the king's reaction. To them, being killed and flayed and having your skin worn by an Aztec priest was an honour. They thought the girl's Dad would be HAPPY
Here’s an interesting one: it appears that it’s impossible to permanently delete stuff, and the NYT is reporting the missing (v early) cv19 genetic samples have been found.
This will provide some crucial evidence to help us determine the source of the outbreak.
Here’s an interesting one: it appears that it’s impossible to permanently delete stuff, and the NYT is reporting the missing (v early) cv19 genetic samples have been found.
This will provide some crucial evidence to help us determine the source of the outbreak.
Is this the weirdo obsessive Bellingcat-esque group of covid internet detectives again? Who have been tracking down every strange China publication ever and data that the Chinese have been trying to delete from the internet?
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Two things need to happen for the Conservatives to lose the next election:
1. Their vote needs to fall back towards (and maybe even drop below) 40% 2. Tactical voting needs to return.
My gut is that 2024 will see the Conservative vote share drop back to 42% (give or take), and there’s a modest increase in tactical voting, resulting in a 20 to 40 seat Cons majority.
I think the electoral geography is simply very favourable to the Tories at the moment.
They can lose lots of votes in the South, without it putting many seats at risk. Modest vote gains in the North (from the Brexit Party) potentially bring a larger number of Labour seats into contention. The boundary changes are likely to be beneficial.
We could easily see a result that outdoes 2001 - when Labour lost 2.5% vote share, but only 6 seats - and see the Tories lose vote share but gain net seats.
Oh, that’s far from impossible. Indeed, the Conservatives gaining seats is probably no worse than a 25% shot.
But it isn’t my central scenario. I think it is more likely than not that the post COVID boom will be in retreat in 2024, and Starmer is a less divisive figure than Corbyn.
Here’s an interesting one: it appears that it’s impossible to permanently delete stuff, and the NYT is reporting the missing (v early) cv19 genetic samples have been found.
This will provide some crucial evidence to help us determine the source of the outbreak.
Linky please?
It’s in the NYT app, and I don’t know how to share it.
A final story about the Aztecs before I go to the gym
At the height of their imperial might the Aztecs conquered a nearby kingdom and captured the rival king's daughter, ie the princess.
As they were so triumphant the Aztecs decided to be magnanimous, and they invited the defeated king to a feast in Tenochtitlan, where he could be reunited with his kidnapped daughter
When the defeated king sat down he finally saw his daughter again, or, rather, he saw an Aztec priest capering about while wearing, as a suit, the carefully flayed skin of his ritually slaughtered child
The king was understandably anguished and outraged and left immediately.
My favourite bit is this: the Aztecs were mystified by the king's reaction. To them, being killed and flayed and having your skin worn by an Aztec priest was an honour. They thought the girl's Dad would be HAPPY
You sure this isn't a chapter you've just read in Game of Thrones?
Here’s an interesting one: it appears that it’s impossible to permanently delete stuff, and the NYT is reporting the missing (v early) cv19 genetic samples have been found.
This will provide some crucial evidence to help us determine the source of the outbreak.
Linky please?
It’s in the NYT app, and I don’t know how to share it.
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Two things need to happen for the Conservatives to lose the next election:
1. Their vote needs to fall back towards (and maybe even drop below) 40% 2. Tactical voting needs to return.
My gut is that 2024 will see the Conservative vote share drop back to 42% (give or take), and there’s a modest increase in tactical voting, resulting in a 20 to 40 seat Cons majority.
I think the electoral geography is simply very favourable to the Tories at the moment.
They can lose lots of votes in the South, without it putting many seats at risk. Modest vote gains in the North (from the Brexit Party) potentially bring a larger number of Labour seats into contention. The boundary changes are likely to be beneficial.
We could easily see a result that outdoes 2001 - when Labour lost 2.5% vote share, but only 6 seats - and see the Tories lose vote share but gain net seats.
Oh, that’s far from impossible. Indeed, the Conservatives gaining seats is probably no worse than a 25% shot.
But it isn’t my central scenario. I think it is more likely than not that the post COVID boom will be in retreat in 2024, and Starmer is a less divisive figure than Corbyn.
I reckon the Red Wall wanted Brexit and preferred Boris to Jezza, and the Blue Wall wanted Remain, but would rather have Leave+Boris than Remain+Jezza
I'd say the Red Wall are the same now, but dislike Sir Keir even more than they did Jezza, whereas the Blue Wall prefer Sir Keir to Boris.
So the Tories will do as well if not better in the Red Wall than they did in 2019, whilst losing seats in the Home Counties/Blue Wall
Doesn't surprise me at all. There's a lot of feeble research applying machine learning algorithms to medical problems, which just involves sticking data into an existing black box and trying to make predictions without understanding any of the underlying mechanisms. Some of the weakest science out there, imo, and a waste of funding.
--AS
My PhD supervisor back in the day best described this kind of research is every so often somebody invents a new hammer, then far too many people in the academic community without really knowing how to use it properly or what jobs it is good for, instead they run around finding every possible DIY job to which they apply the solution of hit with big new shiny hammer.
That's exactly right. A few years ago it was support vector machines. Then it was "big data" (a meaningless phrase) and simple classifiers. Then "deep learning" (also pretty meaningless). I'm now seeing a lot of crappy papers about curriculum learning and other minor fudges relating to optimizing non-convex loss functions.
I review a lot of papers like the ones you describe, and try to find ways to reject them all. One of my pet peeves is that conferences and journals tend to accept such rubbish, and funders love it, yet it has almost no value. (I had no trouble restraining myself for applying for a grant by pasting "covid" and "machine learning" into some combination, even though it would likely have been funded.) Whereas truly fundamental novel research is too risky to get funding for.
--AS
Fully agree. We see that in the third sector as well - finders want data before they will fund projects. But without funding how do you get data…?
But we’re not afraid of failure. So if there is a good CEO and team we’ll fund their idea. And if it doesn’t work we’ll move on to the next one
Meanwhile, for the 7th year in a row the number of drug deaths in Scotland rises to a European record per 100k of population to a quite staggering 1339 deaths. To put that into context in 2020 6,702 people died with Covid-19 on their death certificates. One brought the country to a halt with lockdowns, closed schools and shops, furlough, pretty much unlimited medical resources and the other....pretty much nothing.
This is catastrophe and, like Covid, it only touches the surface of the pain, misery and destroyed lives that the underlying condition caused. I am not trying to make a party political point about this: all parties by their cowardice and determination not to face reality have blood on their hands. The UK government has steadfastly refused to consider a review of the Misuse of Drugs Act, a 50 year old piece of legislation that has cost an unimaginable number of lives plus a significant proportion of our recorded crime, by far the biggest contributor to prison overcrowding and gang formation.
The Scottish Conservatives have introduced a bill which is designed to give a right to rehabilitation. I mean, WTF? How on earth is this not done now as a matter of course? The NHS turn their back on drug addicts consistently. They regard them as criminals, dishonest, prone to steal and all too often violent. They are not wrong but just maybe a lot of that is because they are treated, as criminals instead of people in need of help.
We need to decriminalise drugs, to provide safe places for people to inject or take their substance, to provide meaningful care rather than doling out methadone, to massively improve our psychiatric services, to look to resolve homelessness in the way we did during the early months of the lockdown and to ensure that the pain, misery and causes of drug use are addressed as well as the condition itself. Only then will this carnage stop.
Don't write off Lewis Hamilton in the SPoTY stakes.
It surely has to be between Peaty and Cavendish...Peaty interview after winning individual gold with the f bombs was emotional, last night his speech poolside was inspirational.
Total dominance in his event over 7 years, plus heaps of personality.
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Two things need to happen for the Conservatives to lose the next election:
1. Their vote needs to fall back towards (and maybe even drop below) 40% 2. Tactical voting needs to return.
My gut is that 2024 will see the Conservative vote share drop back to 42% (give or take), and there’s a modest increase in tactical voting, resulting in a 20 to 40 seat Cons majority.
I think the electoral geography is simply very favourable to the Tories at the moment.
They can lose lots of votes in the South, without it putting many seats at risk. Modest vote gains in the North (from the Brexit Party) potentially bring a larger number of Labour seats into contention. The boundary changes are likely to be beneficial.
We could easily see a result that outdoes 2001 - when Labour lost 2.5% vote share, but only 6 seats - and see the Tories lose vote share but gain net seats.
Oh, that’s far from impossible. Indeed, the Conservatives gaining seats is probably no worse than a 25% shot.
But it isn’t my central scenario. I think it is more likely than not that the post COVID boom will be in retreat in 2024, and Starmer is a less divisive figure than Corbyn.
They will go for an election early, rather than wait until 2024, because the post-Covid boom will be fading, and it will be easier to punt difficult decisions on the public finances into 2024, than into 2025. Autumn 2023 for after the new boundaries. Keir Starmer to give fewest in-person conference speeches as a Labour leader?
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
Cortes wasn’t that bad - most of the issues were in Cuba & then Pizarro was a disgrace in Peru. Cortes only massacred one town but most of the others came over to his side to besiege the capital
Cortes was also facing a brutally violent enemy. Whenever the Aztecs captured a conquistador, they would take him to the top of the biggest pyramid (so the Spaniards outside the city walls could see) - tear out his living heart, roll the still pulsing body down the steps, then eat the corpse
What surprised me (just finished a new history on the topic) was the small numbers Cortes had - 40 here, 30 over there, may be 14 horses
Don't write off Lewis Hamilton in the SPoTY stakes.
It surely has to be between Peaty and Cavendish?
Tom Daley. Especially if we don’t get any more Olympic heroes
Good point...his backstory plus the BBC will push the whole LGBTQ angle. Seems a lovely guy, well deserved medal (and still got the individual event to come), but Peaty is the GOAT , who is credited with driving the whole British swimming squad on to its best Olympics. Just as Cavendish is the GOAT of road cyle sprinting.
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Yes, seconded. Get that on the Red Button and I'd watch.
But look, "Woke" is yet again being mistreated here. This poor wretch of a word has been dragged so far from its core definition (see below) as to become almost valueless. It's become a linguistic piece of junk.
"To be not in denial that white supremacy racism and the patriarchy have played - and continue to play - a key and malign role in forging the world we live in."
The PB.com blogging community are an educated bunch, skilled in language, and so I think we should be able to distinguish ourselves from the herd and use this word properly.
Don't write off Lewis Hamilton in the SPoTY stakes.
It surely has to be between Peaty and Cavendish...Peaty interview with the f bombs was emotional, last night his speech poolside was inspirational.
Does it? The most deserving sportsperson doesn't always win. Peaty is probably the most deserving, but his wins were in the middle of the night, which is a disadvantage.
I think Tom Daley is rightly the favourite and Laura Kenny will have a decent chance if she can win a gold medal.
I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.
We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.
My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.
I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.
Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.
It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.
I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?
Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...
Rachel Johnson (as in sister of ...) suggested rote learning of the classics was a soft route to Oxford.
So why would Tories want more competition for their children's life chances?
Tokenism. The Universities might dump the classics if it became obvious they are an upper middle class scam. You want a trickle of comp school entrants to point at and claim how inclusive it all is.
There is not much to dump, the only universities which still do pure Classics/Latin degrees are Oxford and Cambridge, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Exeter and Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol, KCL and UCL and Royal Holloway.
They are all pretty posh universities anyway
So?
If cutting the classics means an instant downwards improvement to the posho-meter reading , to help meet the targets mandated by government, they'll have to consider it very seriously.
It is dumbing down and would make barely any difference whatsoever, as they are tiny courses anyway.
We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care, we support selection on merit and high academic standards, hence Williamson is pushing Latin in state schools. So if they want to suck up to Williamson if anything universities will expand their classics courses and do state school outreach for them.
Plus not all classics students will be privately educated and Oxbridge are 60% state school now anyway
‘Leading Tory says they “do not care” about state schools’
You need to be more careful about your choice of words if you want to progress in politics
What an absurd distortion of what I said.
I did not once say 'I do not care about state schools', merely I want selection on merit. If anything I care more than Carnyx as like Williamson I want to spread Latin in our state schools and expand excellence in them (a few more grammars would help too).
If you would prefer to keep excellence and Latin confined to your alma mater of Eton and a few top public schools and a conveyor belt to Oxbridge and the top professions like law and medicine and banking that is your affair
“ We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care”
“We Tories… have set no state school target, we … do not care”
Of course it’s absurd. But that’s a direct quote.
It’s meant as friendly advice, so don’t get upset.
Don't write off Lewis Hamilton in the SPoTY stakes.
It surely has to be between Peaty and Cavendish...Peaty interview with the f bombs was emotional, last night his speech poolside was inspirational.
Does it? The most deserving sportsperson doesn't always win. Peaty is probably the most deserving, but his wins were in the middle of the night, which is a disadvantage.
I think Tom Daley is rightly the favourite and Laura Kenny will have a decent chance if she can win a gold medal.
I think you might be right, definitely if he gets a medal in the individual.
Lewis is making it very, very clear that he is not playing nice anymore. He was far more interested in screwing up Verstappen's lap than going any faster himself. And he succeeded.
I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.
We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.
My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.
I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.
Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.
It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.
I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?
Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...
Rachel Johnson (as in sister of ...) suggested rote learning of the classics was a soft route to Oxford.
So why would Tories want more competition for their children's life chances?
Tokenism. The Universities might dump the classics if it became obvious they are an upper middle class scam. You want a trickle of comp school entrants to point at and claim how inclusive it all is.
There is not much to dump, the only universities which still do pure Classics/Latin degrees are Oxford and Cambridge, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Exeter and Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol, KCL and UCL and Royal Holloway.
They are all pretty posh universities anyway
So?
If cutting the classics means an instant downwards improvement to the posho-meter reading , to help meet the targets mandated by government, they'll have to consider it very seriously.
It is dumbing down and would make barely any difference whatsoever, as they are tiny courses anyway.
We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care, we support selection on merit and high academic standards, hence Williamson is pushing Latin in state schools. So if they want to suck up to Williamson if anything universities will expand their classics courses and do state school outreach for them.
Plus not all classics students will be privately educated and Oxbridge are 60% state school now anyway
‘Leading Tory says they “do not care” about state schools’
You need to be more careful about your choice of words if you want to progress in politics
What an absurd distortion of what I said.
I did not once say 'I do not care about state schools', merely I want selection on merit. If anything I care more than Carnyx as like Williamson I want to spread Latin in our state schools and expand excellence in them (a few more grammars would help too).
If you would prefer to keep excellence and Latin confined to your alma mater of Eton and a few top public schools and a conveyor belt to Oxbridge and the top professions like law and medicine and banking that is your affair
“ We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care”
“We Tories… have set no state school target, we … do not care”
Of course it’s absurd. But that’s a direct quote.
It’s meant as friendly advice, so don’t get upset.
To be fair to HYUFD, 'we do not care about state schools' is not the same as 'we do not care about a state school target'. Still not good optics, but they are very different statements
I reckon the Red Wall wanted Brexit and preferred Boris to Jezza, and the Blue Wall wanted Remain, but would rather have Leave+Boris than Remain+Jezza
I'd say the Red Wall are the same now, but dislike Sir Keir even more than they did Jezza, whereas the Blue Wall prefer Sir Keir to Boris.
So the Tories will do as well if not better in the Red Wall than they did in 2019, whilst losing seats in the Home Counties/Blue Wall
Red wall polling has shown a substantial shift to Labour, though I've not seen a recent one. In general it's unusual if a party slumps in one area and rises in another - people within each constituency are not always typical so the same shifts in marginaal preference show up. A lot depends on whether there was a chunky BXP/populist vote (as in both Hartlepool and B&S) - I suspect the Tories will do fine in those, but will lose most of the gains in the rest of the red wall.
4x100 mixed swimming relay and mixed triathalon relay were both great to watch.
Loved the format for both.
The swimming relay in particular. With the mixed sexes and the tactics it was fascinating.
Not sure why the triathlon had to be woman man woman man. Allowing the teams to send them off in any order would have added an extra layer of complexity and interest.
Oliver Johnson @BristOliver · 4h The key metric for me is admissions, and (touch wood) there's evidence of some kind of peak there ATM. I think autumn is harder to call, after last year, but for now I feel it might be healthy if we all spent less time looking at (and making!) graphs and more time outside.
4x100 mixed swimming relay and mixed triathalon relay were both great to watch.
Loved the format for both.
The swimming relay in particular. With the mixed sexes and the tactics it was fascinating.
Not sure why the triathlon had to be woman man woman man. Allowing the teams to send them off in any order would have added an extra layer of complexity and interest.
What about any order events, any order of competitors...total chaos :-)
I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.
We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.
My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.
I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.
Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.
It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.
I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?
Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...
Rachel Johnson (as in sister of ...) suggested rote learning of the classics was a soft route to Oxford.
So why would Tories want more competition for their children's life chances?
Tokenism. The Universities might dump the classics if it became obvious they are an upper middle class scam. You want a trickle of comp school entrants to point at and claim how inclusive it all is.
There is not much to dump, the only universities which still do pure Classics/Latin degrees are Oxford and Cambridge, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Exeter and Nottingham, Manchester, Bristol, KCL and UCL and Royal Holloway.
They are all pretty posh universities anyway
So?
If cutting the classics means an instant downwards improvement to the posho-meter reading , to help meet the targets mandated by government, they'll have to consider it very seriously.
It is dumbing down and would make barely any difference whatsoever, as they are tiny courses anyway.
We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care, we support selection on merit and high academic standards, hence Williamson is pushing Latin in state schools. So if they want to suck up to Williamson if anything universities will expand their classics courses and do state school outreach for them.
Plus not all classics students will be privately educated and Oxbridge are 60% state school now anyway
‘Leading Tory says they “do not care” about state schools’
You need to be more careful about your choice of words if you want to progress in politics
What an absurd distortion of what I said.
I did not once say 'I do not care about state schools', merely I want selection on merit. If anything I care more than Carnyx as like Williamson I want to spread Latin in our state schools and expand excellence in them (a few more grammars would help too).
If you would prefer to keep excellence and Latin confined to your alma mater of Eton and a few top public schools and a conveyor belt to Oxbridge and the top professions like law and medicine and banking that is your affair
“ We Tories are in power and in government and have set no state school target, we are not Labour and do not care”
“We Tories… have set no state school target, we … do not care”
Of course it’s absurd. But that’s a direct quote.
It’s meant as friendly advice, so don’t get upset.
To be fair to HYUFD, 'we do not care about state schools' is not the same as 'we do not care about a state school target'. Still not good optics, but they are very different statements
That's true, but the logical connection is
1. We don't care how many state school products go to Oxford etc. 2. So we don't care if exactly 0 per cent go to Oxford. 3.We also care so little about state schools that we can't be arsed to even pay attention to a crucial marker of their success.
Which invites the not very distant step in the reader's mind to
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Two things need to happen for the Conservatives to lose the next election:
1. Their vote needs to fall back towards (and maybe even drop below) 40% 2. Tactical voting needs to return.
My gut is that 2024 will see the Conservative vote share drop back to 42% (give or take), and there’s a modest increase in tactical voting, resulting in a 20 to 40 seat Cons majority.
I think the electoral geography is simply very favourable to the Tories at the moment.
They can lose lots of votes in the South, without it putting many seats at risk. Modest vote gains in the North (from the Brexit Party) potentially bring a larger number of Labour seats into contention. The boundary changes are likely to be beneficial.
We could easily see a result that outdoes 2001 - when Labour lost 2.5% vote share, but only 6 seats - and see the Tories lose vote share but gain net seats.
Oh, that’s far from impossible. Indeed, the Conservatives gaining seats is probably no worse than a 25% shot.
But it isn’t my central scenario. I think it is more likely than not that the post COVID boom will be in retreat in 2024, and Starmer is a less divisive figure than Corbyn.
I reckon the Red Wall wanted Brexit and preferred Boris to Jezza, and the Blue Wall wanted Remain, but would rather have Leave+Boris than Remain+Jezza
I'd say the Red Wall are the same now, but dislike Sir Keir even more than they did Jezza, whereas the Blue Wall prefer Sir Keir to Boris.
So the Tories will do as well if not better in the Red Wall than they did in 2019, whilst losing seats in the Home Counties/Blue Wall
I think that's spot on. I could easily see 4-5 seats with big Brexit votes in 2019 falling to Johnson, while the Conservatives lose a 10-25 seats in the South and the suburbs.
A final story about the Aztecs before I go to the gym
At the height of their imperial might the Aztecs conquered a nearby kingdom and captured the rival king's daughter, ie the princess.
As they were so triumphant the Aztecs decided to be magnanimous, and they invited the defeated king to a feast in Tenochtitlan, where he could be reunited with his kidnapped daughter
When the defeated king sat down he finally saw his daughter again, or, rather, he saw an Aztec priest capering about while wearing, as a suit, the carefully flayed skin of his ritually slaughtered child
The king was understandably anguished and outraged and left immediately.
My favourite bit is this: the Aztecs were mystified by the king's reaction. To them, being killed and flayed and having your skin worn by an Aztec priest was an honour. They thought the girl's Dad would be HAPPY
You sure this isn't a chapter you've just read in Game of Thrones?
Amazingly no. That’s what I ‘love’ about Mesoamerican cultures. The most insane stories are generally true
Historians get the same surprises. Eg For a long time the mad acts depicted, notoriously, on Moche pottery, were regarded as fantasies in ceramics
Here’s a couple of photos I took of some of the tamer Moche pots in the wonderful Larco museum in Lima. They used to hide these from the public as being too upsetting
Nowadays it is believed these depict real scenes of Moche life. They trained pumas to rape their women, and the posh Moche ritually disfigured themselves by cutting away their own lips, and so forth
It puts our own arguments about the cruel use of the wrong pronouns in a new perspective
I reckon the Red Wall wanted Brexit and preferred Boris to Jezza, and the Blue Wall wanted Remain, but would rather have Leave+Boris than Remain+Jezza
I'd say the Red Wall are the same now, but dislike Sir Keir even more than they did Jezza, whereas the Blue Wall prefer Sir Keir to Boris.
So the Tories will do as well if not better in the Red Wall than they did in 2019, whilst losing seats in the Home Counties/Blue Wall
Red wall polling has shown a substantial shift to Labour, though I've not seen a recent one. In general it's unusual if a party slumps in one area and rises in another - people within each constituency are not always typical so the same shifts in marginaal preference show up. A lot depends on whether there was a chunky BXP/populist vote (as in both Hartlepool and B&S) - I suspect the Tories will do fine in those, but will lose most of the gains in the rest of the red wall.
It could be heart over head but I'm inclined to take this view too. As a general point, I think Johnson will struggle to hold his rather awkward voting coalition together all the way through to the next election. A Lab majority looks a stretch but I'm moderately bullish about the Tories losing theirs. Much water, much bridge, of course.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 30m Does anybody have a clue what Labour’s position on vaccine passports actually is.
Nope. But I bet when the crunch comes Starmer will back Johnson in the division and save him once again. Pathetic.
When they were first mooted, Sir Keir came out saying they felt "unBritish" but didn't say he wouldn't support their use
Mr Flip Flop has a few more turns to go before he plums for backing Johnson.
Its quite a good strategy for Starmer to support the government though.
Relying on labour votes to force through such a highly contentious measure is serious poison pill to give your political enemies. It really could split the tories wide, wide open.
I wouldn't rule out a handful of MPs resigning the whip.
4x100 mixed swimming relay and mixed triathalon relay were both great to watch.
Loved the format for both.
The swimming relay in particular. With the mixed sexes and the tactics it was fascinating.
Looking at the world records (perhaps not the best way to do this, but let's go with them):
Stroke - Men - Women - Diff - W/M 100m freestyle - 46.9 - 51.7 - 4.8 - 110% 100m butterfly - 49.5 - 55.5 - 6.0 - 112% 100m backstroke - 51.9 - 57.5 - 5.6 - 111% 100m breaststroke - 56.9 - 64.1 - 7.2 - 113%
Putting men on butterfly and breaststroke seems the way to go, which is what GB did.
It seems to me that a woman on freestyle is a no-brainer, but you might want to go with a man on backstroke due to the disadvantage of the woman potentially having choppy water from men around her.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 30m Does anybody have a clue what Labour’s position on vaccine passports actually is.
Nope. But I bet when the crunch comes Starmer will back Johnson in the division and save him once again. Pathetic.
Not sure either Labour or the Tories quite know what their position on vaccine passports is, to be fair. Basically depends on whichever minister is being interviewed on any given day.
I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)
It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.
it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.
So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?
Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.
MesoAmerican cultures were ridiculously grisly, but that also makes them endlessly fascinating, in a macabre way
Whenever you think you have reached the depths of their depravity, they have the capacity to surprise on the downside. The Moche Culture of north Peru (circa 8th century AD) is particularly good at this. OMFG. They worshipped a tarantula God who demanded they sacrifice their own relatives, they gave the victims special drugs so the blood ran extra slow and the sacrifice took hours. During this process, the family would REDACTED REDACTED
Meanwhile the Aztecs could sacrifice thousands of people in a single day in their capital, Tenochtitlan
Here's a Guardian article denouncing the evil Spanish for destroying this marvellous culture, in particular it complains about
"massacres of some of our earliest thinkers such as the Aztec"
The Genesis Secret deals with this in some detail - eg The Swedish boiling scene.
Tlaloc's devotees would rip out the fingernails of children, and catch their tears in cups.
Xipe Totec translates as "Our Beloved Lord the Flayed One". His followers did what is says on the tin.
The people of Caanaan and Carthage had some charming practices as well. The most valuable sacrifice was that which was dearest. Hence, in times of trouble, you would burn your son and heir, or if you only had a daughter, you followed the example of Jephtha.
4x100 mixed swimming relay and mixed triathalon relay were both great to watch.
Loved the format for both.
The swimming relay in particular. With the mixed sexes and the tactics it was fascinating.
Not sure why the triathlon had to be woman man woman man. Allowing the teams to send them off in any order would have added an extra layer of complexity and interest.
Would it not be obvious to go man - man - woman - woman due to drafting in the cycling?
A final story about the Aztecs before I go to the gym
At the height of their imperial might the Aztecs conquered a nearby kingdom and captured the rival king's daughter, ie the princess.
As they were so triumphant the Aztecs decided to be magnanimous, and they invited the defeated king to a feast in Tenochtitlan, where he could be reunited with his kidnapped daughter
When the defeated king sat down he finally saw his daughter again, or, rather, he saw an Aztec priest capering about while wearing, as a suit, the carefully flayed skin of his ritually slaughtered child
The king was understandably anguished and outraged and left immediately.
My favourite bit is this: the Aztecs were mystified by the king's reaction. To them, being killed and flayed and having your skin worn by an Aztec priest was an honour. They thought the girl's Dad would be HAPPY
You sure this isn't a chapter you've just read in Game of Thrones?
Amazingly no. That’s what I ‘love’ about Mesoamerican cultures. The most insane stories are generally true
Historians get the same surprises. Eg For a long time the mad acts depicted, notoriously, on Moche pottery, were regarded as fantasies in ceramics
Here’s a couple of photos I took of some of the tamer Moche pots in the wonderful Larco museum in Lima. They used to hide these from the public as being too upsetting
It puts our own arguments about the cruel use of the wrong pronouns in a new perspective
That's a bizarre use of the cruel adverb and an even more bizarre argument.
Just because heathen ancestors committed cruel and gross acts doesn't mean they can be used to deprecate contemporary sensibilities.
4x100 mixed swimming relay and mixed triathalon relay were both great to watch.
Loved the format for both.
The swimming relay in particular. With the mixed sexes and the tactics it was fascinating.
Looking at the world records (perhaps not the best way to do this, but let's go with them):
Stroke - Men - Women - Diff - W/M 100m freestyle - 46.9 - 51.7 - 4.8 - 110% 100m butterfly - 49.5 - 55.5 - 6.0 - 112% 100m backstroke - 51.9 - 57.5 - 5.6 - 111% 100m breaststroke - 56.9 - 64.1 - 7.2 - 113%
Putting men on butterfly and breaststroke seems the way to go, which is what GB did.
It seems to me that a woman on freestyle is a no-brainer, but you might want to go with a man on backstroke due to the disadvantage of the woman potentially having choppy water from men around her.
Well when your breaststroker is Adam Peatty even more so. His leg was just incredible.
Don't write off Lewis Hamilton in the SPoTY stakes.
It surely has to be between Peaty and Cavendish...Peaty interview after winning individual gold with the f bombs was emotional, last night his speech poolside was inspirational.
Total dominance in his event over 7 years, plus heaps of personality.
Peaty's my bet - and I'm very happy with 18 - but I agree with the market that Tom Daley is fav.
Prior thread very interesting (perhaps not the stuff about roads)
I too have made insane predictions way out of my area of competence - I know this might not come as a shock, but it was a bit of an epiphany for me, just this morning
eg Yesterday I confidently predicted that Team GB would do quite badly compared to reasonable expectations. I said we would finish behind Oz, Russia and maybe another European country. I said we might finish around 9th in the medal table, and get around 40-45 medals
This morning I considered my prediction, and I laughed at my own stupidity
Where was I getting my info with which to make these precise calls? Out of my ass, basically. It is all a hunch, an intimation. In fact it's not even a hunch, it's more like a spasm in reaction to early disappointments. There are people out there - on this site - who know far more about these Games, right down to individual athletes in more obscure sports, and their various chances. Their prophesies are 100 times more valuable than mine.
If my "prediction" turns out to be anywhere near correct it will be nearly pure luck and almost zero judgement.
My only defence is that I never bet on these hunches. I only ever bet after proper consideration and research. Which is probably why I bet very rarely
Very wise. I know relatively little about what's going on; however...
*The British team is currently sat on 28 medals *Boxing has produced a bronze, three more semi-finalists who now can't do any worse than bronze, and three more quarter-finalists *Sailing has also produced a bronze and British crews are competitive in six of the eight events that have yet to complete (two in first place, three in second and one in fourth the last time I looked) *The three-day eventers are doing well at the moment *The men's golfers are competitive and the women's haven't started yet *The individual apparatus finals in gymnastics haven't happened yet *Flatwater canoeing hasn't started yet (and I've not the foggiest whether there are any competitive Brits going in that event, but I'm pretty sure there were medallists last time) *The whole athletics programme has only just got started (and I know it doesn't look promising from the British POV, but there are a *lot* of events and the team might yet get something out of it) *AND track cycling has yet to get underway
In medal table terms I rate it as a competition for 5th with Australia, and 50 medals looks achievable. That'd be broadly comparable with Beijing, and a credible overall achievement IMHO.
Yes, I think that's a fair assessment. Down on Rio and London. Some soul searching for rowing team and probably the track cyclists as well.
Liam Heath won 2 medals in 2016, and he's in the squad again.
Women's 800m looks like a solid chance, but I've not really got a grip on the rest of the athletics.
Some other sports with an outside chance are Freestyle BMX and women's Modern Pentathlon.
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Two things need to happen for the Conservatives to lose the next election:
1. Their vote needs to fall back towards (and maybe even drop below) 40% 2. Tactical voting needs to return.
My gut is that 2024 will see the Conservative vote share drop back to 42% (give or take), and there’s a modest increase in tactical voting, resulting in a 20 to 40 seat Cons majority.
I think the electoral geography is simply very favourable to the Tories at the moment.
They can lose lots of votes in the South, without it putting many seats at risk. Modest vote gains in the North (from the Brexit Party) potentially bring a larger number of Labour seats into contention. The boundary changes are likely to be beneficial.
We could easily see a result that outdoes 2001 - when Labour lost 2.5% vote share, but only 6 seats - and see the Tories lose vote share but gain net seats.
Oh, that’s far from impossible. Indeed, the Conservatives gaining seats is probably no worse than a 25% shot.
But it isn’t my central scenario. I think it is more likely than not that the post COVID boom will be in retreat in 2024, and Starmer is a less divisive figure than Corbyn.
I reckon the Red Wall wanted Brexit and preferred Boris to Jezza, and the Blue Wall wanted Remain, but would rather have Leave+Boris than Remain+Jezza
I'd say the Red Wall are the same now, but dislike Sir Keir even more than they did Jezza, whereas the Blue Wall prefer Sir Keir to Boris.
So the Tories will do as well if not better in the Red Wall than they did in 2019, whilst losing seats in the Home Counties/Blue Wall
I think that's spot on. I could easily see 4-5 seats with big Brexit votes in 2019 falling to Johnson, while the Conservatives lose a 10-25 seats in the South and the suburbs.
In real elections labour are getting battered though. Look at Bassetlaw and Basildon this week in the locals. Hammered by tories.
Its the lib dems that are landing the punches on the tories, not labour.
Worth remembering that the Tories won 47.5% or more of the vote in 317 seats in 2019. Tactical voting alone won't remove the Tories from power at the next election.
Two things need to happen for the Conservatives to lose the next election:
1. Their vote needs to fall back towards (and maybe even drop below) 40% 2. Tactical voting needs to return.
My gut is that 2024 will see the Conservative vote share drop back to 42% (give or take), and there’s a modest increase in tactical voting, resulting in a 20 to 40 seat Cons majority.
I think the electoral geography is simply very favourable to the Tories at the moment.
They can lose lots of votes in the South, without it putting many seats at risk. Modest vote gains in the North (from the Brexit Party) potentially bring a larger number of Labour seats into contention. The boundary changes are likely to be beneficial.
We could easily see a result that outdoes 2001 - when Labour lost 2.5% vote share, but only 6 seats - and see the Tories lose vote share but gain net seats.
Oh, that’s far from impossible. Indeed, the Conservatives gaining seats is probably no worse than a 25% shot.
But it isn’t my central scenario. I think it is more likely than not that the post COVID boom will be in retreat in 2024, and Starmer is a less divisive figure than Corbyn.
I reckon the Red Wall wanted Brexit and preferred Boris to Jezza, and the Blue Wall wanted Remain, but would rather have Leave+Boris than Remain+Jezza
I'd say the Red Wall are the same now, but dislike Sir Keir even more than they did Jezza, whereas the Blue Wall prefer Sir Keir to Boris.
So the Tories will do as well if not better in the Red Wall than they did in 2019, whilst losing seats in the Home Counties/Blue Wall
I'd say our 3/1 bet is back at fair value. Drifted to 5/1 (in my calcs) for a while.
A final story about the Aztecs before I go to the gym
At the height of their imperial might the Aztecs conquered a nearby kingdom and captured the rival king's daughter, ie the princess.
As they were so triumphant the Aztecs decided to be magnanimous, and they invited the defeated king to a feast in Tenochtitlan, where he could be reunited with his kidnapped daughter
When the defeated king sat down he finally saw his daughter again, or, rather, he saw an Aztec priest capering about while wearing, as a suit, the carefully flayed skin of his ritually slaughtered child
The king was understandably anguished and outraged and left immediately.
My favourite bit is this: the Aztecs were mystified by the king's reaction. To them, being killed and flayed and having your skin worn by an Aztec priest was an honour. They thought the girl's Dad would be HAPPY
You sure this isn't a chapter you've just read in Game of Thrones?
Amazingly no. That’s what I ‘love’ about Mesoamerican cultures. The most insane stories are generally true
Historians get the same surprises. Eg For a long time the mad acts depicted, notoriously, on Moche pottery, were regarded as fantasies in ceramics
Here’s a couple of photos I took of some of the tamer Moche pots in the wonderful Larco museum in Lima. They used to hide these from the public as being too upsetting
It puts our own arguments about the cruel use of the wrong pronouns in a new perspective
That's a bizarre use of the cruel adverb and an even more bizarre argument.
Just because heathen ancestors committed cruel and gross acts doesn't mean they can be used to deprecate contemporary sensibilities.
What I love is the Guardian critic's view is this a philosphical viewpoint that is valuable.
It’s appallingly covered here in the US; CNN has a story on Amanda Knox returning to Italy, but nothing on the French riots.
It never gets mentioned in our press.
The French are revolting. Its not news.
There always seems an air of breathless anticipation for a weekly occurrence. No riots in France this weekend might just be newsworthy.
The South Koreans used to be the world champions of massive riots - incredibly organised on both sides, enormous apparent violence, but surprisingly low casualties.
4x100 mixed swimming relay and mixed triathalon relay were both great to watch.
Loved the format for both.
The swimming relay in particular. With the mixed sexes and the tactics it was fascinating.
Looking at the world records (perhaps not the best way to do this, but let's go with them):
Stroke - Men - Women - Diff - W/M 100m freestyle - 46.9 - 51.7 - 4.8 - 110% 100m butterfly - 49.5 - 55.5 - 6.0 - 112% 100m backstroke - 51.9 - 57.5 - 5.6 - 111% 100m breaststroke - 56.9 - 64.1 - 7.2 - 113%
Putting men on butterfly and breaststroke seems the way to go, which is what GB did.
It seems to me that a woman on freestyle is a no-brainer, but you might want to go with a man on backstroke due to the disadvantage of the woman potentially having choppy water from men around her.
Well when your breaststroker is Adam Peatty even more so. His leg was just incredible.
Peatty was, of course, great but Britain did the damage on the fly. Watch what happens on the turn, we win it there.
A final story about the Aztecs before I go to the gym
At the height of their imperial might the Aztecs conquered a nearby kingdom and captured the rival king's daughter, ie the princess.
As they were so triumphant the Aztecs decided to be magnanimous, and they invited the defeated king to a feast in Tenochtitlan, where he could be reunited with his kidnapped daughter
When the defeated king sat down he finally saw his daughter again, or, rather, he saw an Aztec priest capering about while wearing, as a suit, the carefully flayed skin of his ritually slaughtered child
The king was understandably anguished and outraged and left immediately.
My favourite bit is this: the Aztecs were mystified by the king's reaction. To them, being killed and flayed and having your skin worn by an Aztec priest was an honour. They thought the girl's Dad would be HAPPY
You sure this isn't a chapter you've just read in Game of Thrones?
Amazingly no. That’s what I ‘love’ about Mesoamerican cultures. The most insane stories are generally true
Historians get the same surprises. Eg For a long time the mad acts depicted, notoriously, on Moche pottery, were regarded as fantasies in ceramics
Here’s a couple of photos I took of some of the tamer Moche pots in the wonderful Larco museum in Lima. They used to hide these from the public as being too upsetting
It puts our own arguments about the cruel use of the wrong pronouns in a new perspective
That's a bizarre use of the cruel adverb and an even more bizarre argument.
Just because heathen ancestors committed cruel and gross acts doesn't mean they can be used to deprecate contemporary sensibilities.
What I love is the Guardian critic's view is this a philosphical viewpoint that is valuable.
I'm trying to imagine the reaction of the Guardian to the suggestion that the philosophical viewpoint of General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer was of value.
Comments
One thing that has worked against them is that Labour have been very effective against them making progress. The Greens did very well in Norwich for a while, for example, but Labour have Clive Lewis as the local MP now, one of the most pro-Green MPs in the PLP, and ideally suited to frustrate a Green advance in a target area.
No riots in France this weekend might just be newsworthy.
I review a lot of papers like the ones you describe, and try to find ways to reject them all. One of my pet peeves is that conferences and journals tend to accept such rubbish, and funders love it, yet it has almost no value. (I had no trouble restraining myself for applying for a grant by pasting "covid" and "machine learning" into some combination, even though it would likely have been funded.) Whereas truly fundamental novel research is too risky to get funding for.
--AS
So, yes I exaggerated slightly for effect, but worth remembering that was worse than in 1992, 1987, 1983 and both elections in 1974.
Brexit has been a gift that has kept giving to Johnson, particularly in the Red/Blue wall, but surely there is a point where it becomes an old-hat, distant memory.
I am surprised the LD vote is down, esp after C&A.
You need to be more careful about your choice of words if you want to progress in politics
1. Their vote needs to fall back towards (and maybe even drop below) 40%
2. Tactical voting needs to return.
My gut is that 2024 will see the Conservative vote share drop back to 42% (give or take), and there’s a modest increase in tactical voting, resulting in a 20 to 40 seat Cons majority.
The Inca were comparatively humane compared to other MesoAmerican cultures, surprisingly. They did commit child sacrifice, but it was very rare (done for coronations and so on) and the children weren't killed in especially cruel ways, just left exposed on high mountaintops to die (and possibly drugged to dull the pain). The altitude explains the mummification
By contrast the cultures further north had a rain God, Tlaloc, who demanded that His thirst be slaked by the tears of human children. You can imagine what, say, the Aztecs did in response
1983 - Isle of Wight - 46.3%
1987 - Southport - 44.5%
1992 - North Devon - 45.7%
1997 - Wellingborough - 43.8%
2001 - Newbury - 43.5%
2005 - Westmorland and Lonsdale - 44.9%
2010 - Mid Dorset and North Poole - 44.5%
2015 - Wirral West - 44.2%
2017 - Newcastle-under-Lyme - 48.1%
2019 - Westmorland and Lonsdale - 45.3%
Compare 2019 with 1987:
Con share of the vote - 1987 - 2019
Under 37.5% - 4 - 1
37.5% to 42.5% - 25 - 7
42.5% to 47.5% - 78 - 40
Over 47.5% - 269 - 317
Total - 376 - 365
The Tories in 1987 were relying on winning far more seats due to split opposition votes.
I did not once say 'I do not care about state schools', merely I want selection on merit. If anything I care more than Carnyx as like Williamson I want to spread Latin in our state schools and expand excellence in them (a few more grammars would help too).
If you would prefer to keep excellence and Latin confined to your alma mater of Eton and a few top public schools and a conveyor belt to Oxbridge and the top professions like law and medicine and banking that is your affair
At the same time the French are lobbing bottles at the police in a super spreader event in Paris
I recommend doing a Latin O level to see how language works. (I did. And Greek too.)
They can lose lots of votes in the South, without it putting many seats at risk. Modest vote gains in the North (from the Brexit Party) potentially bring a larger number of Labour seats into contention. The boundary changes are likely to be beneficial.
We could easily see a result that outdoes 2001 - when Labour lost 2.5% vote share, but only 6 seats - and see the Tories lose vote share but gain net seats.
To win at war, make crops grow more, to cure our kids when ill
The sun to shine, this song to rhyme, more victims we must kill
Surprised they got away with the brownface.
This will provide some crucial evidence to help us determine the source of the outbreak.
At the height of their imperial might the Aztecs conquered a nearby kingdom and captured the rival king's daughter, ie the princess.
As they were so triumphant the Aztecs decided to be magnanimous, and they invited the defeated king to a feast in Tenochtitlan, where he could be reunited with his kidnapped daughter
When the defeated king sat down he finally saw his daughter again, or, rather, he saw an Aztec priest capering about while wearing, as a suit, the carefully flayed skin of his ritually slaughtered child
The king was understandably anguished and outraged and left immediately.
My favourite bit is this: the Aztecs were mystified by the king's reaction. To them, being killed and flayed and having your skin worn by an Aztec priest was an honour. They thought the girl's Dad would be HAPPY
BY HYUFD
But it isn’t my central scenario. I think it is more likely than not that the post COVID boom will be in retreat in 2024, and Starmer is a less divisive figure than Corbyn.
@DPJHodges
·
30m
Does anybody have a clue what Labour’s position on vaccine passports actually is.
Nope. But I bet when the crunch comes Starmer will back Johnson in the division and save him once again. Pathetic.
I'd say the Red Wall are the same now, but dislike Sir Keir even more than they did Jezza, whereas the Blue Wall prefer Sir Keir to Boris.
So the Tories will do as well if not better in the Red Wall than they did in 2019, whilst losing seats in the Home Counties/Blue Wall
But we’re not afraid of failure. So if there is a good CEO and team we’ll fund their idea. And if it doesn’t work we’ll move on to the next one
This is catastrophe and, like Covid, it only touches the surface of the pain, misery and destroyed lives that the underlying condition caused. I am not trying to make a party political point about this: all parties by their cowardice and determination not to face reality have blood on their hands. The UK government has steadfastly refused to consider a review of the Misuse of Drugs Act, a 50 year old piece of legislation that has cost an unimaginable number of lives plus a significant proportion of our recorded crime, by far the biggest contributor to prison overcrowding and gang formation.
The Scottish Conservatives have introduced a bill which is designed to give a right to rehabilitation. I mean, WTF? How on earth is this not done now as a matter of course? The NHS turn their back on drug addicts consistently. They regard them as criminals, dishonest, prone to steal and all too often violent. They are not wrong but just maybe a lot of that is because they are treated, as criminals instead of people in need of help.
We need to decriminalise drugs, to provide safe places for people to inject or take their substance, to provide meaningful care rather than doling out methadone, to massively improve our psychiatric services, to look to resolve homelessness in the way we did during the early months of the lockdown and to ensure that the pain, misery and causes of drug use are addressed as well as the condition itself. Only then will this carnage stop.
Total dominance in his event over 7 years, plus heaps of personality.
I approve.
But look, "Woke" is yet again being mistreated here. This poor wretch of a word has been dragged so far from its core definition (see below) as to become almost valueless. It's become a linguistic piece of junk.
"To be not in denial that white supremacy racism and the patriarchy have played - and continue to play - a key and malign role in forging the world we live in."
The PB.com blogging community are an educated bunch, skilled in language, and so I think we should be able to distinguish ourselves from the herd and use this word properly.
I think Tom Daley is rightly the favourite and Laura Kenny will have a decent chance if she can win a gold medal.
Loved the format for both.
“We Tories… have set no state school target, we … do not care”
Of course it’s absurd. But that’s a direct quote.
It’s meant as friendly advice, so don’t get upset.
Allowing the teams to send them off in any order would have added an extra layer of complexity and interest.
Oliver Johnson
@BristOliver
·
4h
The key metric for me is admissions, and (touch wood) there's evidence of some kind of peak there ATM. I think autumn is harder to call, after last year, but for now I feel it might be healthy if we all spent less time looking at (and making!) graphs and more time outside.
1. We don't care how many state school products go to Oxford etc.
2. So we don't care if exactly 0 per cent go to Oxford.
3.We also care so little about state schools that we can't be arsed to even pay attention to a crucial marker of their success.
Which invites the not very distant step in the reader's mind to
4. We don't care about state schools.
As indeed Charles evidently feels is the case.
Historians get the same surprises. Eg For a long time the mad acts depicted, notoriously, on Moche pottery, were regarded as fantasies in ceramics
Here’s a couple of photos I took of some of the tamer Moche pots in the wonderful Larco museum in Lima. They used to hide these from the public as being too upsetting
Nowadays it is believed these depict real scenes of Moche life. They trained pumas to rape their women, and the posh Moche ritually disfigured themselves by cutting away their own lips, and so forth
It puts our own arguments about the cruel use of the wrong pronouns in a new perspective
Relying on labour votes to force through such a highly contentious measure is serious poison pill to give your political enemies. It really could split the tories wide, wide open.
I wouldn't rule out a handful of MPs resigning the whip.
Stroke - Men - Women - Diff - W/M
100m freestyle - 46.9 - 51.7 - 4.8 - 110%
100m butterfly - 49.5 - 55.5 - 6.0 - 112%
100m backstroke - 51.9 - 57.5 - 5.6 - 111%
100m breaststroke - 56.9 - 64.1 - 7.2 - 113%
Putting men on butterfly and breaststroke seems the way to go, which is what GB did.
It seems to me that a woman on freestyle is a no-brainer, but you might want to go with a man on backstroke due to the disadvantage of the woman potentially having choppy water from men around her.
Tlaloc's devotees would rip out the fingernails of children, and catch their tears in cups.
Xipe Totec translates as "Our Beloved Lord the Flayed One". His followers did what is says on the tin.
The people of Caanaan and Carthage had some charming practices as well. The most valuable sacrifice was that which was dearest. Hence, in times of trouble, you would burn your son and heir, or if you only had a daughter, you followed the example of Jephtha.
Just because heathen ancestors committed cruel and gross acts doesn't mean they can be used to deprecate contemporary sensibilities.
Women's 800m looks like a solid chance, but I've not really got a grip on the rest of the athletics.
Some other sports with an outside chance are Freestyle BMX and women's Modern Pentathlon.
"Macron - resign!" This is in Aix-en-Provence in the south, population ~140K.
Its the lib dems that are landing the punches on the tories, not labour.
Why have they dropped out of the big leagues?