Two African players from Viborg FF will not be able to travel for their Europa Conference League playoff against West Ham due to English entry rules for non-EU citizens after Brexit, the Danish club said on Wednesday.
Nigerian winger Ibrahim Said and Gambian forward Alassana Jatta will have to stay behind as the club could not secure visas for the two players before Thursday’s first leg at the London Stadium.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
And if the judges decide that slavery should be legal again ?
Would that be okay even if the elected representatives opposed it ?
No because no one is saying that the courts should have all the power either. My argument is with Robert's contention that these things MUST be decided by the electorate and that if they are then they are valid. It was just that thinking that led to the bloodiest war in US history.
We have checks and balances for this reason. Because if we do not then the only way this ends is with bloodshed and 'might is right'.
And who decides these checks and balances ?
Ultimately you come back to needing the population to accept the decision making process.
And for that to happen that requires them to have a say in how it happens.
Which is why we don't obsess about abortion in this country because it is decided by elected representatives.
You don't believe there is anything that stands above that principle? That if the majority in Britain decided to drive all the non-whites out of the country or kill them then we should accept it because that is what the majority want?
Surely the whole point of our system is to ensure that there are some standards which are fundamentally important and which no amount of mob rule can be allowed to overturn.
A mature democracy is one where there is a balance between the separate parts of the state to ensure no one part of it is overly powerful. The US has ceased to be a mature democracy - if it ever really was one.
And who decides upon these fundamentally important standards ?
We don't have to go much distance in either time or place to find ideas on fundamentally important standards very different to those we have here and now.
Likewise what we think of as fundamentally important standards might seem very wrong to people in the future.
Following discussions at work, it looks like we will going full WFH starting October until next Aprilish.
The energy cap doesn't apply to businesses, and well I suspect we won't be the only ones going full WFH.
Latest projections are we could pay each employee several thousands over the winter to WFH and it will still be cheaper than heating the office.
That's another blow to city centres and businesses who rely on commuters/workers.
The notion of mothballing corporate HQ buildings through the coming winter is growing apace especially for those who have little or no public facing activity.
Oddly enough, I'm to be convinced it will be bad as some are predicting but we do need to see some flexibility and sense from Government which I know is asking a lot of Liz Truss who will presumably be whipping us all into our offices (personally, so I'm led to believe).
With inflation now at 10%, the idea London tube, bus and train fares should rise 10% in January is completely unsupportable - Sadiq Khan has found a cause for which he's going to have a lot of support in the capital. To be honest, given TfL is effectively run and financed by the Government, they may as well freeze the fares ar 2022 levels to try and bring back some passengers,
I also think it will see the death knell for many more bank branches.
We have industry trackers, and footfall was falling well before the pandemic, and pretty much 99% of customers who go into branch can do it online/via the app.
Heating branches for the 1% was never viable, now you're breaking your fiduciary duty by keeping them open.
I have not been into an actual bank for 5 years but the people who still go there are self selected as the 10% who are too old and dim to set up telephone or online banking. Queuing behind them is testing.
Yeah, last time I was in a branch was when I had to deposit a cheque that was too large for the app.
I was stuck behind one old dear who withdrew £80 over the counter as she didn't like using cash machines.
And she was stuck in front of some old geezer who did not realise you can deposit even large cheques by machine.
It was a cheque from HMRC that don't scan in the app or fit in the machines.
The app has a limit. Machines do not. At least, that has been my experience over the past several years.
ONS needs to create an inflation stat that is focussed on the most basic essentials that someone on benefits needs to spend. Basic foodstuff, energy, basic clothes, toiletry and so on.
BBC news saying that these things are up 19 or 20% not the headline 10%
That's the point of the Vimes Boot Index that the ONS is indeed working on.
And the reason they are up so much is easy to grasp.
500g on basics value pasta has just as many fixed transportation costs as 500g of regular pasta or a 500g of speciality pasta. So if the 23p bag of pasts rises by 5pence due to fuel costs and the 85p bag of regular pasta rises 5 pence then the middle class shopper ahs seen their pasta cost rise 6% whilst the pverty level shopper has seen their costs rise 22%.
Indeed the middle class shopper also has the option of dropping down to the value range and slashing their food bills, the poverty level purchaser has the choice of dropping down to no food at all
Value basic lines are increasingly sold out as well.
Lots of Value basic lines were completely dropped over the last few years.
I believe Asda and Tesco have recently reintroduced them.
Two African players from Viborg FF will not be able to travel for their Europa Conference League playoff against West Ham due to English entry rules for non-EU citizens after Brexit, the Danish club said on Wednesday.
Nigerian winger Ibrahim Said and Gambian forward Alassana Jatta will have to stay behind as the club could not secure visas for the two players before Thursday’s first leg at the London Stadium.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
Two African players from Viborg FF will not be able to travel for their Europa Conference League playoff against West Ham due to English entry rules for non-EU citizens after Brexit, the Danish club said on Wednesday.
Nigerian winger Ibrahim Said and Gambian forward Alassana Jatta will have to stay behind as the club could not secure visas for the two players before Thursday’s first leg at the London Stadium.
Two African players from Viborg FF will not be able to travel for their Europa Conference League playoff against West Ham due to English entry rules for non-EU citizens after Brexit, the Danish club said on Wednesday.
Nigerian winger Ibrahim Said and Gambian forward Alassana Jatta will have to stay behind as the club could not secure visas for the two players before Thursday’s first leg at the London Stadium.
The article doesn't say what would have allowed them visa-free access before Brexit. Was a residents card for an EU country sufficient pre-brexit for tourism for a non-EU citizen of a nationality normally requiring a visa? Was it sufficient for playing in a professional football match? I don't think it was on either count. The Guardian does not choose to tell us...
ONS needs to create an inflation stat that is focussed on the most basic essentials that someone on benefits needs to spend. Basic foodstuff, energy, basic clothes, toiletry and so on.
BBC news saying that these things are up 19 or 20% not the headline 10%
That's the point of the Vimes Boot Index that the ONS is indeed working on.
And the reason they are up so much is easy to grasp.
500g on basics value pasta has just as many fixed transportation costs as 500g of regular pasta or a 500g of speciality pasta. So if the 23p bag of pasts rises by 5pence due to fuel costs and the 85p bag of regular pasta rises 5 pence then the middle class shopper ahs seen their pasta cost rise 6% whilst the pverty level shopper has seen their costs rise 22%.
Indeed the middle class shopper also has the option of dropping down to the value range and slashing their food bills, the poverty level purchaser has the choice of dropping down to no food at all
In more general terms people with money also have the opportunity to bulk buy when cheap offers are available and to shop around which the poor do not have.
The lack of opportunity and flexibility makes life more inherently risky.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
170 people turned up for the hustings tonight. Was at a Step 5 football game with over double that last night. Utterly pointless masturbation. It's like the Great Reform Act never happened.
Could it be that the upward effect of the gas price has a downward effect on the oil price? Inflation, less money to spend, recession more likely, interest rate rises. Oil is also the much bigger earner for the Russian economy. RCS or someone else will probably tell me I'm wrong but these high gas prices might actually work against Russia.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Malta’s GDP per capita (PPP) was just below the UK’s in 2019 and may well now have overtaken it, despite the place being as corrupt as fuck.
They have cleverly positioned themselves as the English speaking, sort-of-British yet-still-EU island in the Med, where you can park your money, no questions asked. Like a sunnier Ireland
Those of us on PB who predicted massive inflation down the tracks when the total, population-wide lockdowns started have been vindicated me thinks.
Who needs economists at leading global banks to analyse things when you have PB!!
Inflation is down to Putin.
Inflation means a continuously rising general price level. Putin's actions have caused a gas and oil shortage which has pushed up their price relative to other goods and services. Converting that into a continuing process for prices in general (including factor prices like the price of labour, i.e. wages) is down to the BoE and the government.
Can you suggest any good or service whose price is not affected by the price of diesel?
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
Could it be that the upward effect of the gas price has a downward effect on the oil price? Inflation, less money to spend, recession more likely, interest rate rises. Oil is also the much bigger earner for the Russian economy. RCS or someone else will probably tell me I'm wrong but these high gas prices might actually work against Russia.
Putin has fecked Ru whatever happens to energy price now.
No one in the West will rely on his supply every again.
He thinks he's a geopolitical strategic genius but he's not.
Could it be that the upward effect of the gas price has a downward effect on the oil price? Inflation, less money to spend, recession more likely, interest rate rises. Oil is also the much bigger earner for the Russian economy. RCS or someone else will probably tell me I'm wrong but these high gas prices might actually work against Russia.
No. Oil and gas are, to a certain degree, substitutes. When the price of gas rises some earlier gas usage is switched to oil, i.e. the demand for oil rises and pushes up its price.
170 people turned up for the hustings tonight. Was at a Step 5 football game with over double that last night. Utterly pointless masturbation. It's like the Great Reform Act never happened.
I've never read it, but did it ever set any rules about how the Commons decides who has its confidence? As far as I can see no choice is being taken away from us, we never had a choice who the partys decided to pick as their leaders or how they picked them. Sure, at GE time we at least know who the leader is, but there's be a great many switches outside that.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
And if the judges decide that slavery should be legal again ?
Would that be okay even if the elected representatives opposed it ?
No because no one is saying that the courts should have all the power either. My argument is with Robert's contention that these things MUST be decided by the electorate and that if they are then they are valid. It was just that thinking that led to the bloodiest war in US history.
We have checks and balances for this reason. Because if we do not then the only way this ends is with bloodshed and 'might is right'.
And who decides these checks and balances ?
Ultimately you come back to needing the population to accept the decision making process.
And for that to happen that requires them to have a say in how it happens.
Which is why we don't obsess about abortion in this country because it is decided by elected representatives.
You don't believe there is anything that stands above that principle? That if the majority in Britain decided to drive all the non-whites out of the country or kill them then we should accept it because that is what the majority want?
Surely the whole point of our system is to ensure that there are some standards which are fundamentally important and which no amount of mob rule can be allowed to overturn.
A mature democracy is one where there is a balance between the separate parts of the state to ensure no one part of it is overly powerful. The US has ceased to be a mature democracy - if it ever really was one.
And who decides upon these fundamentally important standards ?
We don't have to go much distance in either time or place to find ideas on fundamentally important standards very different to those we have here and now.
Likewise what we think of as fundamentally important standards might seem very wrong to people in the future.
Well the US set them out in a document a couple of hundred years ago and they seem pretty good.
But basically what you are saying is that there are no fundamental standards we should all adhere to and that might is right. So you would obviously not be complaining if someone came and burnt your house down to prove that point.
The end point of your thinking is civil war. It has happened before and will happen again if you give too much power to one branch of the state over another. As TSE pointed out earlier, the US is already fucked. They don't walk back from this. What matters is that we learn the lessons of their mistakes better than they have.
If there was a smidgeon of doubt, Rishi only interested in talking to one section of the NI population.
British isles? Or is that not correct?
Britain is one of the islands, Ireland the other (major) one, so you could as well say the Irish Isles as the British Isles.
But, anyway, the Good Friday Agreement allows everyone in Northern Ireland to identify as British, and it's pretty safe to assume that any members of the Conservative and Unionist Party will identify as British, though they may think of themselves as Irish as well.
The criticism is bizarre. How many Irish Republicans would you expect to find as members of the Tory party?
Britannia was the name the Romans originally gave to the whole of the British Isles including Ireland. Nor did the Romans ever refer to just the largest island as Britannia. They transferred the name to the specific province they ruled in the southern half of that largest island. It only came to refer to the largest island alone after the act of Union in 1707.
Geographically The British Isles are the whole archipelago including Ireland. But of course that derives from the fact that the British (as opposed to the Irish) wrote the rules and named stuff.
As an aside interestingly, names can of course change and quite quickly. The North Sea was usually known as The German Sea until the middle of the 18th Century. Perhaps in the future The British Isles will indeed be The Irish Isles. It does have a rather more poetic alliteration to it.
Better than Islands of the North Atlantic, which was apparently one suggestion.
I'd be happy with British-Irish Isles, though who knows what a Manxer would think of it.
Wiki tells me UK Law uses the subtly different 'British Islands' to include the bits that include the UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man. So if someone uses that one they are not including the Republic and are well set if someone gets huffy about the name.
Edit: Another suggestion was Anglo-Celtic Isles, which I guess might be more accurate than British?
The advantage of "Islands Of the North Atlantic" is that you can then use the initialism of IONA, which appeals, although may cause some confusion with the Island of Iona when used in speech.
The Atlantic Archipelago is another alternative that has been proposed, but I tend simply to use "Britain and Ireland".
Bloody terrible idea. North Atlantic goes all the way to the equator so that's everything from iceland to the canaries and cape verde, and west to bermuda.
The Atlantic is in general oceanographic terms normally split into three, South Atlantic, Tropical Atlantic and North Atlantic.
But anyway, I didn't say that IONA was a perfect option.
Isles of Britain and Ireland is the current term in some circles.
What crap.
British Isles DNE UK of Great Britain and NI North America DNE USA Europe DNE European Union
Cf also British, American, and possibly too, European.
I AM talking about the bits of isolated land not including Heligoland, the Canaries, and the Faeroes. Not the UK.
Me too. They’re called the British Isles.
You don't need much imagination to realise that would irk the Irish.
I don’t care. They can call it what they like. They’ve been the British Isles, or some variation of that term, since Roman Times.
There's not much point in using a name for a place that pisses off a large number of people who live in that place, and that they will only use with scare quotes at best.
Language changes and evolves and is contested, often for political reasons. The British Isles was used because of British dominance of the islands. Now that dominance is ended, so the name will go.
Actually from a numerical perspective, the number of Irish is quite small.
The geographic term British Isles seems to go back to Roman times, so your point about British dominance may not be correct.
They are still the British Isles on Wikipedia. The alternatives are weird euphemisms.
Quoting numerical perspectives is fraught with difficulty in this context. Before the Irish famine the 1841 census gave a population of Ireland of over 8 million, compared to a population of just over 18 and a half for England, Wales and Scotland.
That's an 1841 ratio of about 9:4 to compare with the modern ratio of about 9.3:1
Can you talk me through that?
Your 1841 figures give a ratio of about 2.3:1 Of UK today is 67 million next to 5 million for the Irish republic. So over 13:1
Your figures are correct for the UK to Republic of Ireland ratio, but I calculated a ratio for island of Britain to island of Ireland.
Ok but I think even those are off.
Population of island of Ireland is ~7 million.
Population of island of Britain is ~65 million.
7 * 9 = 63 7 * 3 = 21
Consequently modern ratio of the population of the two islands is ~ 9.3:1 which is >>> ~ 9:4 ratio in 1841, before the famine.
The population collapse in some Irish counties suggest they were either massively overpopulated before the potato famine or massively underpopulated now. Or a combination of both.
Has anywhere else in Europe experienced such a population reduction as rural Munster and Connaught have done:
If there was a smidgeon of doubt, Rishi only interested in talking to one section of the NI population.
British isles? Or is that not correct?
Britain is one of the islands, Ireland the other (major) one, so you could as well say the Irish Isles as the British Isles.
But, anyway, the Good Friday Agreement allows everyone in Northern Ireland to identify as British, and it's pretty safe to assume that any members of the Conservative and Unionist Party will identify as British, though they may think of themselves as Irish as well.
The criticism is bizarre. How many Irish Republicans would you expect to find as members of the Tory party?
Britannia was the name the Romans originally gave to the whole of the British Isles including Ireland. Nor did the Romans ever refer to just the largest island as Britannia. They transferred the name to the specific province they ruled in the southern half of that largest island. It only came to refer to the largest island alone after the act of Union in 1707.
Geographically The British Isles are the whole archipelago including Ireland. But of course that derives from the fact that the British (as opposed to the Irish) wrote the rules and named stuff.
As an aside interestingly, names can of course change and quite quickly. The North Sea was usually known as The German Sea until the middle of the 18th Century. Perhaps in the future The British Isles will indeed be The Irish Isles. It does have a rather more poetic alliteration to it.
Better than Islands of the North Atlantic, which was apparently one suggestion.
I'd be happy with British-Irish Isles, though who knows what a Manxer would think of it.
Wiki tells me UK Law uses the subtly different 'British Islands' to include the bits that include the UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man. So if someone uses that one they are not including the Republic and are well set if someone gets huffy about the name.
Edit: Another suggestion was Anglo-Celtic Isles, which I guess might be more accurate than British?
The advantage of "Islands Of the North Atlantic" is that you can then use the initialism of IONA, which appeals, although may cause some confusion with the Island of Iona when used in speech.
The Atlantic Archipelago is another alternative that has been proposed, but I tend simply to use "Britain and Ireland".
Bloody terrible idea. North Atlantic goes all the way to the equator so that's everything from iceland to the canaries and cape verde, and west to bermuda.
The Atlantic is in general oceanographic terms normally split into three, South Atlantic, Tropical Atlantic and North Atlantic.
But anyway, I didn't say that IONA was a perfect option.
Isles of Britain and Ireland is the current term in some circles.
What crap.
British Isles DNE UK of Great Britain and NI North America DNE USA Europe DNE European Union
Cf also British, American, and possibly too, European.
I AM talking about the bits of isolated land not including Heligoland, the Canaries, and the Faeroes. Not the UK.
Me too. They’re called the British Isles.
You don't need much imagination to realise that would irk the Irish.
I don’t care. They can call it what they like. They’ve been the British Isles, or some variation of that term, since Roman Times.
There's not much point in using a name for a place that pisses off a large number of people who live in that place, and that they will only use with scare quotes at best.
Language changes and evolves and is contested, often for political reasons. The British Isles was used because of British dominance of the islands. Now that dominance is ended, so the name will go.
Actually from a numerical perspective, the number of Irish is quite small.
The geographic term British Isles seems to go back to Roman times, so your point about British dominance may not be correct.
They are still the British Isles on Wikipedia. The alternatives are weird euphemisms.
Quoting numerical perspectives is fraught with difficulty in this context. Before the Irish famine the 1841 census gave a population of Ireland of over 8 million, compared to a population of just over 18 and a half for England, Wales and Scotland.
That's an 1841 ratio of about 9:4 to compare with the modern ratio of about 9.3:1
Can you talk me through that?
Your 1841 figures give a ratio of about 2.3:1 Of UK today is 67 million next to 5 million for the Irish republic. So over 13:1
Your figures are correct for the UK to Republic of Ireland ratio, but I calculated a ratio for island of Britain to island of Ireland.
Ok but I think even those are off.
Population of island of Ireland is ~7 million.
Population of island of Britain is ~65 million.
7 * 9 = 63 7 * 3 = 21
Consequently modern ratio of the population of the two islands is ~ 9.3:1 which is >>> ~ 9:4 ratio in 1841, before the famine.
The population collapse in some Irish counties suggest they were either massively overpopulated before the potato famine or massively underpopulated now. Or a combination of both.
Has anywhere else in Europe experienced such a population reduction as rural Munster and Connaught have done:
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
170 people turned up for the hustings tonight. Was at a Step 5 football game with over double that last night. Utterly pointless masturbation. It's like the Great Reform Act never happened.
I've never read it, but did it ever set any rules about how the Commons decides who has its confidence? As far as I can see no choice is being taken away from us, we never had a choice who the partys decided to pick as their leaders or how they picked them. Sure, at GE time we at least know who the leader is, but there's be a great many switches outside that.
Yes but. This was the basis why we should have a six week campaign. So everyone could see the candidates up close. And yet no one seems much interested at all. There were bigger crowds when I was watching Wigan A team in the 80's.
A school district in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, has ordered its librarians to remove an illustrated adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” from their shelves and digital libraries, along with the Bible and dozens of other books that were challenged by parents last year
Should make allies of some different groups to get outraged by this. The people behind it seem on the level
describing parents who would attend school board meetings alleging “conspiracies to take over our public schools,” wearing shirts reading “Alex Jones Was Right.”
This is what happens in a culture war. Both sides lost the plot.
170 people turned up for the hustings tonight. Was at a Step 5 football game with over double that last night. Utterly pointless masturbation. It's like the Great Reform Act never happened.
I've never read it, but did it ever set any rules about how the Commons decides who has its confidence? As far as I can see no choice is being taken away from us, we never had a choice who the partys decided to pick as their leaders or how they picked them. Sure, at GE time we at least know who the leader is, but there's be a great many switches outside that.
Yes but. This was the basis why we should have a six week campaign. So everyone could see the candidates up close. And yet no one seems much interested at all. There were bigger crowds when I was watching Wigan A team in the 80's.
We saw them up close. And they were very disappointing.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
And if the judges decide that slavery should be legal again ?
Would that be okay even if the elected representatives opposed it ?
No because no one is saying that the courts should have all the power either. My argument is with Robert's contention that these things MUST be decided by the electorate and that if they are then they are valid. It was just that thinking that led to the bloodiest war in US history.
We have checks and balances for this reason. Because if we do not then the only way this ends is with bloodshed and 'might is right'.
Agreed. And the principle of checks and balances between the legislature, executive and judiciary is of course precisely the basis on which the US Constitution was designed.
Ultimately, as the IS is demonstrating, you can’t legislate virtue.
Men are not made for constitutions. Constitutions are made for men.
The law is the summation of the current views of a society. The reason we don’t lynch gay people is not the laws against such disgusting behaviour. It is the fact that 99%+ of the country finds the idea abhorrent. The laws are there to deal with the extremely tiny minority of scumbags, and to codify the moral position of society.
Finding some magical Guardians who can sit on a cloud and be Perfect and Just isn’t going to work.
Those of us on PB who predicted massive inflation down the tracks when the total, population-wide lockdowns started have been vindicated me thinks.
Who needs economists at leading global banks to analyse things when you have PB!!
Inflation is down to Putin.
Inflation means a continuously rising general price level. Putin's actions have caused a gas and oil shortage which has pushed up their price relative to other goods and services. Converting that into a continuing process for prices in general (including factor prices like the price of labour, i.e. wages) is down to the BoE and the government.
Can you suggest any good or service whose price is not affected by the price of diesel?
It is rather old fashioned nowadays, but the kind of info you are after is to be found in input-output tables, where you will see that the price of practically anything is affected by the price of everyting else. But you are right, the oil price will have a pervasive influence on all other goods. However, the general price level is the price of money in terms of all goods and services. Inflation is the inverse of the growth in the price of money.
170 people turned up for the hustings tonight. Was at a Step 5 football game with over double that last night. Utterly pointless masturbation. It's like the Great Reform Act never happened.
I've never read it, but did it ever set any rules about how the Commons decides who has its confidence? As far as I can see no choice is being taken away from us, we never had a choice who the partys decided to pick as their leaders or how they picked them. Sure, at GE time we at least know who the leader is, but there's be a great many switches outside that.
Yes but. This was the basis why we should have a six week campaign. So everyone could see the candidates up close. And yet no one seems much interested at all. There were bigger crowds when I was watching Wigan A team in the 80's.
We saw them up close. And they were very disappointing.
Winter is coming.
The goalie took a straight forward catch. Then rolled around pretending to be hurt. Playing for time in the hope summat will turn up.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
That’s the version sold by Plato & The Academy. I F Stone was pretty good on untangling the issues…
M2 money supply rose from £2500000m at the start of 2020 to £3000000m today. In short, we printed 500000 million pounds in a couple of years and nobody thought there might be inflationary consequences to this.
If there was a smidgeon of doubt, Rishi only interested in talking to one section of the NI population.
British isles? Or is that not correct?
Britain is one of the islands, Ireland the other (major) one, so you could as well say the Irish Isles as the British Isles.
But, anyway, the Good Friday Agreement allows everyone in Northern Ireland to identify as British, and it's pretty safe to assume that any members of the Conservative and Unionist Party will identify as British, though they may think of themselves as Irish as well.
The criticism is bizarre. How many Irish Republicans would you expect to find as members of the Tory party?
Britannia was the name the Romans originally gave to the whole of the British Isles including Ireland. Nor did the Romans ever refer to just the largest island as Britannia. They transferred the name to the specific province they ruled in the southern half of that largest island. It only came to refer to the largest island alone after the act of Union in 1707.
Geographically The British Isles are the whole archipelago including Ireland. But of course that derives from the fact that the British (as opposed to the Irish) wrote the rules and named stuff.
As an aside interestingly, names can of course change and quite quickly. The North Sea was usually known as The German Sea until the middle of the 18th Century. Perhaps in the future The British Isles will indeed be The Irish Isles. It does have a rather more poetic alliteration to it.
Better than Islands of the North Atlantic, which was apparently one suggestion.
I'd be happy with British-Irish Isles, though who knows what a Manxer would think of it.
Wiki tells me UK Law uses the subtly different 'British Islands' to include the bits that include the UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man. So if someone uses that one they are not including the Republic and are well set if someone gets huffy about the name.
Edit: Another suggestion was Anglo-Celtic Isles, which I guess might be more accurate than British?
The advantage of "Islands Of the North Atlantic" is that you can then use the initialism of IONA, which appeals, although may cause some confusion with the Island of Iona when used in speech.
The Atlantic Archipelago is another alternative that has been proposed, but I tend simply to use "Britain and Ireland".
Bloody terrible idea. North Atlantic goes all the way to the equator so that's everything from iceland to the canaries and cape verde, and west to bermuda.
The Atlantic is in general oceanographic terms normally split into three, South Atlantic, Tropical Atlantic and North Atlantic.
But anyway, I didn't say that IONA was a perfect option.
Isles of Britain and Ireland is the current term in some circles.
What crap.
British Isles DNE UK of Great Britain and NI North America DNE USA Europe DNE European Union
Cf also British, American, and possibly too, European.
I AM talking about the bits of isolated land not including Heligoland, the Canaries, and the Faeroes. Not the UK.
Me too. They’re called the British Isles.
You don't need much imagination to realise that would irk the Irish.
I don’t care. They can call it what they like. They’ve been the British Isles, or some variation of that term, since Roman Times.
There's not much point in using a name for a place that pisses off a large number of people who live in that place, and that they will only use with scare quotes at best.
Language changes and evolves and is contested, often for political reasons. The British Isles was used because of British dominance of the islands. Now that dominance is ended, so the name will go.
Actually from a numerical perspective, the number of Irish is quite small.
The geographic term British Isles seems to go back to Roman times, so your point about British dominance may not be correct.
They are still the British Isles on Wikipedia. The alternatives are weird euphemisms.
Quoting numerical perspectives is fraught with difficulty in this context. Before the Irish famine the 1841 census gave a population of Ireland of over 8 million, compared to a population of just over 18 and a half for England, Wales and Scotland.
That's an 1841 ratio of about 9:4 to compare with the modern ratio of about 9.3:1
Can you talk me through that?
Your 1841 figures give a ratio of about 2.3:1 Of UK today is 67 million next to 5 million for the Irish republic. So over 13:1
Your figures are correct for the UK to Republic of Ireland ratio, but I calculated a ratio for island of Britain to island of Ireland.
Ok but I think even those are off.
Population of island of Ireland is ~7 million.
Population of island of Britain is ~65 million.
7 * 9 = 63 7 * 3 = 21
Consequently modern ratio of the population of the two islands is ~ 9.3:1 which is >>> ~ 9:4 ratio in 1841, before the famine.
The population collapse in some Irish counties suggest they were either massively overpopulated before the potato famine or massively underpopulated now. Or a combination of both.
Has anywhere else in Europe experienced such a population reduction as rural Munster and Connaught have done:
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
M2 money supply rose from £2500000m at the start of 2020 to £3000000m today. In short, we printed 500000 million pounds in a couple of years and nobody thought there might be inflationary consequences to this.
This all happened before Putin.
The US is far less exposed to a Russian-led energy crisis, but inflation is also high.
Common sense should tell us that today, inflation is mostly a Covid hangover, but tomorrow will have more to do with Ukraine.
For the UK, Brexit is in the mix as well, though to a lesser extent.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
M2 money supply rose from £2500000m at the start of 2020 to £3000000m today. In short, we printed 500000 million pounds in a couple of years and nobody thought there might be inflationary consequences to this.
This all happened before Putin.
This suggests an overall ultimate outcome of an extra 20% inflation over and above what would have been expected, this may well be not too far from the final outcome.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
And if the judges decide that slavery should be legal again ?
Would that be okay even if the elected representatives opposed it ?
No because no one is saying that the courts should have all the power either. My argument is with Robert's contention that these things MUST be decided by the electorate and that if they are then they are valid. It was just that thinking that led to the bloodiest war in US history.
We have checks and balances for this reason. Because if we do not then the only way this ends is with bloodshed and 'might is right'.
And who decides these checks and balances ?
Ultimately you come back to needing the population to accept the decision making process.
And for that to happen that requires them to have a say in how it happens.
Which is why we don't obsess about abortion in this country because it is decided by elected representatives.
You don't believe there is anything that stands above that principle? That if the majority in Britain decided to drive all the non-whites out of the country or kill them then we should accept it because that is what the majority want?
Surely the whole point of our system is to ensure that there are some standards which are fundamentally important and which no amount of mob rule can be allowed to overturn.
A mature democracy is one where there is a balance between the separate parts of the state to ensure no one part of it is overly powerful. The US has ceased to be a mature democracy - if it ever really was one.
And who decides upon these fundamentally important standards ?
We don't have to go much distance in either time or place to find ideas on fundamentally important standards very different to those we have here and now.
Likewise what we think of as fundamentally important standards might seem very wrong to people in the future.
Well the US set them out in a document a couple of hundred years ago and they seem pretty good.
But basically what you are saying is that there are no fundamental standards we should all adhere to and that might is right. So you would obviously not be complaining if someone came and burnt your house down to prove that point.
The end point of your thinking is civil war. It has happened before and will happen again if you give too much power to one branch of the state over another. As TSE pointed out earlier, the US is already fucked. They don't walk back from this. What matters is that we learn the lessons of their mistakes better than they have.
Well the US Supreme Court has just interpreted the US constitution to say that there is no fundamental constitutional right to abortion.
Is the Dobbs decision right or should Roe have been allowed to stand and was the Roe decision right originally or should the previous situation been allowed to stand ?
You'll find no shortage of differing opinions to those questions in the USA.
So once again we come to the issue of who decides on what these fundamental standards are.
Something which you seem unable to give an answer to - quite understandably because there isn't a perfect answer.
Instead you put up a silly 'might is right' strawman rather than allow that a general acceptance of the system is required and that the system has to be able to be modified as people's ideas evolve.
So for example homosexuality has been legalised in this country but for most of history the fundamental standard in this country was that it should be illegal. A fundamental standard which still applies in many other countries.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
That’s the version sold by Plato & The Academy. I F Stone was pretty good on untangling the issues…
Given that no one else has a version really - certainly no other of the named Thirty Tyrants is known to have studied under Socrates - I am not sure how it can be disputed. Besides, corrupting the young was only one of three charges. The others were effectively blasphemy or heresy and were the original grounds on which he was first accused.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
A psychotic autodidact racist Leaver speaks. Good ole democraceeee.
170 people turned up for the hustings tonight. Was at a Step 5 football game with over double that last night. Utterly pointless masturbation. It's like the Great Reform Act never happened.
I've never read it, but did it ever set any rules about how the Commons decides who has its confidence? As far as I can see no choice is being taken away from us, we never had a choice who the partys decided to pick as their leaders or how they picked them. Sure, at GE time we at least know who the leader is, but there's be a great many switches outside that.
Yes but. This was the basis why we should have a six week campaign. So everyone could see the candidates up close. And yet no one seems much interested at all. There were bigger crowds when I was watching Wigan A team in the 80's.
Good streaming figures?
The campaign did not need to be so long or have so many events, certainly. The views of and questioning of the two candidates would be more than extensive enough without visiting Unimportant-Upon-Thames in East NimbyShire or whatever.
M2 money supply rose from £2500000m at the start of 2020 to £3000000m today. In short, we printed 500000 million pounds in a couple of years and nobody thought there might be inflationary consequences to this.
This all happened before Putin.
This suggests an overall ultimate outcome of an extra 20% inflation over and above what would have been expected, this may well be not too far from the final outcome.
Putin was just the final twist of the knife frankly.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
And if the judges decide that slavery should be legal again ?
Would that be okay even if the elected representatives opposed it ?
No because no one is saying that the courts should have all the power either. My argument is with Robert's contention that these things MUST be decided by the electorate and that if they are then they are valid. It was just that thinking that led to the bloodiest war in US history.
We have checks and balances for this reason. Because if we do not then the only way this ends is with bloodshed and 'might is right'.
And who decides these checks and balances ?
Ultimately you come back to needing the population to accept the decision making process.
And for that to happen that requires them to have a say in how it happens.
Which is why we don't obsess about abortion in this country because it is decided by elected representatives.
You don't believe there is anything that stands above that principle? That if the majority in Britain decided to drive all the non-whites out of the country or kill them then we should accept it because that is what the majority want?
Surely the whole point of our system is to ensure that there are some standards which are fundamentally important and which no amount of mob rule can be allowed to overturn.
A mature democracy is one where there is a balance between the separate parts of the state to ensure no one part of it is overly powerful. The US has ceased to be a mature democracy - if it ever really was one.
And who decides upon these fundamentally important standards ?
We don't have to go much distance in either time or place to find ideas on fundamentally important standards very different to those we have here and now.
Likewise what we think of as fundamentally important standards might seem very wrong to people in the future.
Well the US set them out in a document a couple of hundred years ago and they seem pretty good.
But basically what you are saying is that there are no fundamental standards we should all adhere to and that might is right. So you would obviously not be complaining if someone came and burnt your house down to prove that point.
The end point of your thinking is civil war. It has happened before and will happen again if you give too much power to one branch of the state over another. As TSE pointed out earlier, the US is already fucked. They don't walk back from this. What matters is that we learn the lessons of their mistakes better than they have.
Well the US Supreme Court has just interpreted the US constitution to say that there is no fundamental constitutional right to abortion.
Is the Dobbs decision right or should Roe have been allowed to stand and was the Roe decision right originally or should the previous situation been allowed to stand ?
You'll find no shortage of differing opinions to those questions in the USA.
So once again we come to the issue of who decides on what these fundamental standards are.
Something which you seem unable to give an answer to - quite understandably because there isn't a perfect answer.
Instead you put up a silly 'might is right' strawman rather than allow that a general acceptance of the system is required and that the system has to be able to be modified as people's ideas evolve.
So for example homosexuality has been legalised in this country but for most of history the fundamental standard in this country was that it should be illegal. A fundamental standard which still applies in many other countries.
Slavery, killing Jews and torture were also acceptable in this country in the past. I like to think that we have moved on somewhat from those standards. It is no argument to say that we were barbaric in the past sop all standards are relative.
And the might is right argument is not a straw man. It is the inevitable result of what you propose and the route along which the US is currently travelling.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
A psychotic autodidact racist Leaver speaks. Good ole democraceeee.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
A psychotic autodidact racist Leaver speaks. Good ole democraceeee.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
A psychotic autodidact racist Leaver speaks. Good ole democraceeee.
That's out of order.
Ah its okay Richard. He is just sulking because everyone handed him his arse on here last night.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
And if the judges decide that slavery should be legal again ?
Would that be okay even if the elected representatives opposed it ?
No because no one is saying that the courts should have all the power either. My argument is with Robert's contention that these things MUST be decided by the electorate and that if they are then they are valid. It was just that thinking that led to the bloodiest war in US history.
We have checks and balances for this reason. Because if we do not then the only way this ends is with bloodshed and 'might is right'.
And who decides these checks and balances ?
Ultimately you come back to needing the population to accept the decision making process.
And for that to happen that requires them to have a say in how it happens.
Which is why we don't obsess about abortion in this country because it is decided by elected representatives.
You don't believe there is anything that stands above that principle? That if the majority in Britain decided to drive all the non-whites out of the country or kill them then we should accept it because that is what the majority want?
Surely the whole point of our system is to ensure that there are some standards which are fundamentally important and which no amount of mob rule can be allowed to overturn.
A mature democracy is one where there is a balance between the separate parts of the state to ensure no one part of it is overly powerful. The US has ceased to be a mature democracy - if it ever really was one.
And who decides upon these fundamentally important standards ?
We don't have to go much distance in either time or place to find ideas on fundamentally important standards very different to those we have here and now.
Likewise what we think of as fundamentally important standards might seem very wrong to people in the future.
Well the US set them out in a document a couple of hundred years ago and they seem pretty good.
But basically what you are saying is that there are no fundamental standards we should all adhere to and that might is right. So you would obviously not be complaining if someone came and burnt your house down to prove that point.
The end point of your thinking is civil war. It has happened before and will happen again if you give too much power to one branch of the state over another. As TSE pointed out earlier, the US is already fucked. They don't walk back from this. What matters is that we learn the lessons of their mistakes better than they have.
Well the US Supreme Court has just interpreted the US constitution to say that there is no fundamental constitutional right to abortion.
Is the Dobbs decision right or should Roe have been allowed to stand and was the Roe decision right originally or should the previous situation been allowed to stand ?
You'll find no shortage of differing opinions to those questions in the USA.
So once again we come to the issue of who decides on what these fundamental standards are.
Something which you seem unable to give an answer to - quite understandably because there isn't a perfect answer.
Instead you put up a silly 'might is right' strawman rather than allow that a general acceptance of the system is required and that the system has to be able to be modified as people's ideas evolve.
So for example homosexuality has been legalised in this country but for most of history the fundamental standard in this country was that it should be illegal. A fundamental standard which still applies in many other countries.
Slavery, killing Jews and torture were also acceptable in this country in the past. I like to think that we have moved on somewhat from those standards. It is no argument to say that we were barbaric in the past sop all standards are relative.
And the might is right argument is not a straw man. It is the inevitable result of what you propose and the route along which the US is currently travelling.
So should we have allowed slavery, killing Jews and torture to be fundamental rights ?
I prefer that we have evolved and that we do not allow them anymore.
As to the USA the threat of civil war comes from the risk of people not accepting election results.
Largely because they think it is their fundamental right not to do so.
So yet again we come down to who defines what these fundamental rights are.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
A psychotic autodidact racist Leaver speaks. Good ole democraceeee.
Ah the apologist for terrorism is back.
Mine is so much pithier than yours.
Yes. Terrorism meaning darkies is the most audible dogwhistle in the book. Mental illness is one of the many things I know more about than you do. You had an authentic online psychotic breakdown last night and I suggest you seek help, and never mind the skin colour of the psychiatrist. Cos it's about sovereignty innit, not about darkies.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
English is likely to be the dominant language of India, the next global superpower. I cannot see it being threatened for the next 50 years
Indeed it is quite possible it will blitzscale and become overwhelmingly dominant. A monopoly and a true lingua franca. I see these forces wherever and whenever I travel, especially further afield
eg I met this nice guy in Armenia who had spent 3 years learning Italian in Palermo - very expertly - but his English was really bad. I never said to him FFS why did you learn Italian, what a waste of time, you could have learned English, and you'd now be speaking the world language, but I could see the regret in his demeanour. Italian? A pleasant bauble. Nice to have
English? ESSENTIAL
He knew it, and I knew it. I believe his sheltered life in Armenia led him to a life-harming error. That won't happen often from now on. People know to learn English, across the world. Parents demand it
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Malta’s GDP per capita (PPP) was just below the UK’s in 2019 and may well now have overtaken it, despite the place being as corrupt as fuck.
They have cleverly positioned themselves as the English speaking, sort-of-British yet-still-EU island in the Med, where you can park your money, no questions asked. Like a sunnier Ireland
Also as they (and the Cypriots who have similar advantages) can vote here as they are Commonwealth citizens.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
A psychotic autodidact racist Leaver speaks. Good ole democraceeee.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
Six of one, half a dozen of another.
I regret not speaking another language but am too lazy to do so, but it's more fortune as opposed to arrogance that means we (presently) can get away with that more than speakers of most other languages. American cultural imperium had to be good for some things.
Should probably pick up Mandarin just to be safe though.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
A psychotic autodidact racist Leaver speaks. Good ole democraceeee.
Ah the apologist for terrorism is back.
Mine is so much pithier than yours.
Yes. Terrorism meaning darkies is the most audible dogwhistle in the book. Mental illness is one of the many things I know more about than you do. You had an authentic online psychotic breakdown last night and I suggest you seek help, and never mind the skin colour of the psychiatrist. Cos it's about sovereignty innit, not about darkies.
I personally don't know much about mental illness, but is it considered good and noble practice to diagnose people with it based on a single tetchy online discussion and then mock the person claimed to be so suffering for that suffering? Would the psychiatrist to be consulted with welcome that approach?
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
Six of one, half a dozen of another.
I regret not speaking another language but am too lazy to do so, but it's more fortune as opposed to arrogance that means we (presently) can get away with that more than speakers of most other languages. American cultural imperium had to be good for some things.
Should probably pick up Mandarin just to be safe though.
My prediction is that English will now remain the dominant global language - indeed it will only grow in dominance, as a default global standard - until it is replaced by truly automatic AI translation, and the Babelfish, and languages no longer matter
Even if America self-destructs in the looming Woke civil wars, and Britain sinks beneath the Brexit waves, all the forces point towards true linguistic hegemony. Quite something for a tiny language hatched in bits of East Anglia and eastern Kent by a few feral, fur-clad Jutish warriors 1500 years ago. What happened to Latin and Mandarin?
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
Six of one, half a dozen of another.
I regret not speaking another language but am too lazy to do so, but it's more fortune as opposed to arrogance that means we (presently) can get away with that more than speakers of most other languages. American cultural imperium had to be good for some things.
Should probably pick up Mandarin just to be safe though.
It's actually fucking infuriating. In Greece in the 1970s, if you wanted to stay alive you needed to speak Greek, because otherwise nobody knew what food and drink and accommodation you wanted. But that is the only context in which that has been the case for me. I've since been to some quite obscure bits of Africa and tried quite hard with bantu and swahili and amharic and tigrigna and all I get in response is people wanting to practice their perfect English.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
A psychotic autodidact racist Leaver speaks. Good ole democraceeee.
Ah the apologist for terrorism is back.
Mine is so much pithier than yours.
Yes. Terrorism meaning darkies is the most audible dogwhistle in the book. Mental illness is one of the many things I know more about than you do. You had an authentic online psychotic breakdown last night and I suggest you seek help, and never mind the skin colour of the psychiatrist. Cos it's about sovereignty innit, not about darkies.
I personally don't know much about mental illness, but is it considered good and noble practice to diagnose people with it based on a single tetchy online discussion and then mock the person claimed to be so suffering for that suffering? Would the psychiatrist to be consulted with welcome that approach?
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
English is likely to be the dominant language of India, the next global superpower. I cannot see it being threatened for the next 50 years
Indeed it is quite possible it will blitzscale and become overwhelmingly dominant. A monopoly and a true lingua franca. I see these forces wherever and whenever I travel, especially further afield
eg I met this nice guy in Armenia who had spent 3 years learning Italian in Palermo - very expertly - but his English was really bad. I never said to him FFS why did you learn Italian, what a waste of time, you could have learned English, and you'd now be speaking the world language, but I could see the regret in his demeanour. Italian? A pleasant bauble. Nice to have
English? ESSENTIAL
He knew it, and I knew it. I believe his sheltered life in Armenia led him to a life-harming error. That won't happen often from now on. People know to learn English, across the world. Parents demand it
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
My hypothesis:
Wolfe, Clive & Hawke and Watt, Darby & Arkwright have been more important for the English language than Shakespeare, Byron or Dickens.
Following discussions at work, it looks like we will going full WFH starting October until next Aprilish.
The energy cap doesn't apply to businesses, and well I suspect we won't be the only ones going full WFH.
Latest projections are we could pay each employee several thousands over the winter to WFH and it will still be cheaper than heating the office.
That's another blow to city centres and businesses who rely on commuters/workers.
WFH is a terrible idea in my opinion.
Do you work?
WFH is a great idea if you have a big enough house with a dedicated separate space, and a good support network of friends you see regularly.
If on the other hand you're crammed into a house share, living with parents, living in a tiny one bedroom flat, or you don't have much of a social life and you miss the cameraderie of after work drinks, etc, it's a terrible idea.
WFH works for some people. It doesn't work for others.
And for all the fuss about WFH how many jobs is it applicable to ?
Not many in health, education, manufacturing, construction, agriculture, retail, hospitality, transportation.
So ultimately people who do strongly want to WFH will be attracted to the minority of jobs where it is possible.
Actually probably a large number in all almost all those areas you mention. Yes front line staff still need to be there but many of the backroom staff can do their job just as well from home.
In the last 7 or 8 years I have ran drilling campaigns amounting to probably 30 wells for various companies. I have travelled to offices all over the UK, Europe and the Middle East. But I have never done it to actually do any work. Work gets done at home. Office visits are to see friends and colleagues, have a few face to face meetings and generally shoot the breeze. Whilst you need people on the rigs (and even there services such as directional drilling and well control are more often run from onshore now) the vast majority of people working for oil companies can do their jobs just as well - if not better - working from home. Shift work becomes massively easier for a start.
I'd be interested to know what proportion of workers are WFH by profession and sector.
A specialised case: in the campaigning charity sector, where most people are engaged in writing to supporters (updating them on legislation, urging them to lobby government etc.), nearly all the work can be done from home, and mostly this is allowed. I know one organisation where they still require people to come in two days a week, and I understand that it's proving a significant recruitment barrier. The attraction of living somewhere pretty but cheap (Nottinghamshire? Mid-Wales?) and working remotely completely overwhelms the attractions of working in the office.
The crucial fact is that they NEVER have to come to the office - that means they can choose to live hundreds of miles away. From Surrey, I work closely with people in Scotland, Wales, Italy, Portugal and Kenya. We meet up a couple of times a year. I think it's the future, regardless of the energy crisis. It has its snags, but one really gets used to it, and parents of young kids in particular often love it as they can actually see them on and off threoughout the day.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
English is likely to be the dominant language of India, the next global superpower. I cannot see it being threatened for the next 50 years
Indeed it is quite possible it will blitzscale and become overwhelmingly dominant. A monopoly and a true lingua franca. I see these forces wherever and whenever I travel, especially further afield
eg I met this nice guy in Armenia who had spent 3 years learning Italian in Palermo - very expertly - but his English was really bad. I never said to him FFS why did you learn Italian, what a waste of time, you could have learned English, and you'd now be speaking the world language, but I could see the regret in his demeanour. Italian? A pleasant bauble. Nice to have
English? ESSENTIAL
He knew it, and I knew it. I believe his sheltered life in Armenia led him to a life-harming error. That won't happen often from now on. People know to learn English, across the world. Parents demand it
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
My hypothesis:
Wolfe, Clive & Hawke and Watt, Darby & Arkwright have been more important for the English language than Shakespeare, Byron or Dickens.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
A psychotic autodidact racist Leaver speaks. Good ole democraceeee.
Ah the apologist for terrorism is back.
Mine is so much pithier than yours.
Yes. Terrorism meaning darkies is the most audible dogwhistle in the book. Mental illness is one of the many things I know more about than you do. You had an authentic online psychotic breakdown last night and I suggest you seek help, and never mind the skin colour of the psychiatrist. Cos it's about sovereignty innit, not about darkies.
Yet more rewriting of history. I would think you would have learnt your lesson after yesterday.
Terrorists meaning actual terrorists who killed people. No mention of skin colour.
People who you then said were culpable in their own deaths and the deaths of others.
No matter how much you try and twist it, it is all a matter of public record. There is no escaping the fact that you were indulging in victim blaming and lots of people on here called you out for it.
The rest of it is just your normal deluded drivel.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
Six of one, half a dozen of another.
I regret not speaking another language but am too lazy to do so, but it's more fortune as opposed to arrogance that means we (presently) can get away with that more than speakers of most other languages. American cultural imperium had to be good for some things.
Should probably pick up Mandarin just to be safe though.
It's actually fucking infuriating. In Greece in the 1970s, if you wanted to stay alive you needed to speak Greek, because otherwise nobody knew what food and drink and accommodation you wanted. But that is the only context in which that has been the case for me. I've since been to some quite obscure bits of Africa and tried quite hard with bantu and swahili and amharic and tigrigna and all I get in response is people wanting to practice their perfect English.
Sure I hear the romantic in you...
But isn't it nice that the world now has a true lingua franca, probably more than at any period before in the history of human beings actually speaking? As in: 200,000 years?
I think that's amazing and potentially a wonderful thing. And it does not mean the end of other languages. It means there will be one language that is shared, and many other languages
The good that will come out of that could be extraordinary. It means Peruvians lost in China might be understood. It means a Namibian hurt in Mexico might get help. It means people across the world can fall in love with one shared language. This is GOOD
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
English is likely to be the dominant language of India, the next global superpower. I cannot see it being threatened for the next 50 years
Indeed it is quite possible it will blitzscale and become overwhelmingly dominant. A monopoly and a true lingua franca. I see these forces wherever and whenever I travel, especially further afield
eg I met this nice guy in Armenia who had spent 3 years learning Italian in Palermo - very expertly - but his English was really bad. I never said to him FFS why did you learn Italian, what a waste of time, you could have learned English, and you'd now be speaking the world language, but I could see the regret in his demeanour. Italian? A pleasant bauble. Nice to have
English? ESSENTIAL
He knew it, and I knew it. I believe his sheltered life in Armenia led him to a life-harming error. That won't happen often from now on. People know to learn English, across the world. Parents demand it
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
My hypothesis:
Wolfe, Clive & Hawke and Watt, Darby & Arkwright have been more important for the English language than Shakespeare, Byron or Dickens.
Hollywood. By far.
Not true. Pop music culture at its most influential was often majorly British English: Beatles, Stones, etc. That spread English via music to many countries. Meanwhile India speaks English, and this will be a surpassingly important fact for the next generation. And that really is thanks to Clive etc
Our glorious English language hegemony is thanks to many things. Hollywood is just one (but it is important)
If there was a smidgeon of doubt, Rishi only interested in talking to one section of the NI population.
British isles? Or is that not correct?
Britain is one of the islands, Ireland the other (major) one, so you could as well say the Irish Isles as the British Isles.
But, anyway, the Good Friday Agreement allows everyone in Northern Ireland to identify as British, and it's pretty safe to assume that any members of the Conservative and Unionist Party will identify as British, though they may think of themselves as Irish as well.
The criticism is bizarre. How many Irish Republicans would you expect to find as members of the Tory party?
Britannia was the name the Romans originally gave to the whole of the British Isles including Ireland. Nor did the Romans ever refer to just the largest island as Britannia. They transferred the name to the specific province they ruled in the southern half of that largest island. It only came to refer to the largest island alone after the act of Union in 1707.
Geographically The British Isles are the whole archipelago including Ireland. But of course that derives from the fact that the British (as opposed to the Irish) wrote the rules and named stuff.
As an aside interestingly, names can of course change and quite quickly. The North Sea was usually known as The German Sea until the middle of the 18th Century. Perhaps in the future The British Isles will indeed be The Irish Isles. It does have a rather more poetic alliteration to it.
Better than Islands of the North Atlantic, which was apparently one suggestion.
I'd be happy with British-Irish Isles, though who knows what a Manxer would think of it.
Wiki tells me UK Law uses the subtly different 'British Islands' to include the bits that include the UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man. So if someone uses that one they are not including the Republic and are well set if someone gets huffy about the name.
Edit: Another suggestion was Anglo-Celtic Isles, which I guess might be more accurate than British?
The advantage of "Islands Of the North Atlantic" is that you can then use the initialism of IONA, which appeals, although may cause some confusion with the Island of Iona when used in speech.
The Atlantic Archipelago is another alternative that has been proposed, but I tend simply to use "Britain and Ireland".
Bloody terrible idea. North Atlantic goes all the way to the equator so that's everything from iceland to the canaries and cape verde, and west to bermuda.
The Atlantic is in general oceanographic terms normally split into three, South Atlantic, Tropical Atlantic and North Atlantic.
But anyway, I didn't say that IONA was a perfect option.
Isles of Britain and Ireland is the current term in some circles.
What crap.
British Isles DNE UK of Great Britain and NI North America DNE USA Europe DNE European Union
Cf also British, American, and possibly too, European.
I AM talking about the bits of isolated land not including Heligoland, the Canaries, and the Faeroes. Not the UK.
Me too. They’re called the British Isles.
You don't need much imagination to realise that would irk the Irish.
I don’t care. They can call it what they like. They’ve been the British Isles, or some variation of that term, since Roman Times.
There's not much point in using a name for a place that pisses off a large number of people who live in that place, and that they will only use with scare quotes at best.
Language changes and evolves and is contested, often for political reasons. The British Isles was used because of British dominance of the islands. Now that dominance is ended, so the name will go.
Actually from a numerical perspective, the number of Irish is quite small.
The geographic term British Isles seems to go back to Roman times, so your point about British dominance may not be correct.
They are still the British Isles on Wikipedia. The alternatives are weird euphemisms.
Quoting numerical perspectives is fraught with difficulty in this context. Before the Irish famine the 1841 census gave a population of Ireland of over 8 million, compared to a population of just over 18 and a half for England, Wales and Scotland.
That's an 1841 ratio of about 9:4 to compare with the modern ratio of about 9.3:1
Can you talk me through that?
Your 1841 figures give a ratio of about 2.3:1 Of UK today is 67 million next to 5 million for the Irish republic. So over 13:1
Your figures are correct for the UK to Republic of Ireland ratio, but I calculated a ratio for island of Britain to island of Ireland.
Ok but I think even those are off.
Population of island of Ireland is ~7 million.
Population of island of Britain is ~65 million.
7 * 9 = 63 7 * 3 = 21
Consequently modern ratio of the population of the two islands is ~ 9.3:1 which is >>> ~ 9:4 ratio in 1841, before the famine.
The population collapse in some Irish counties suggest they were either massively overpopulated before the potato famine or massively underpopulated now. Or a combination of both.
Has anywhere else in Europe experienced such a population reduction as rural Munster and Connaught have done:
I'm in Phoenix today, for the first time in six months or so, and the level of homelessness has gotten visibly worse. And this is not a city you want to be homeless in.
It's a city that is a victim of its own success. Property prices and rents have soared at the same time that people in low end jobs have struggled. Energy prices rising is probably only making things worse (not that the US has anywhere near the problems of the rest of the world).
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
Six of one, half a dozen of another.
I regret not speaking another language but am too lazy to do so, but it's more fortune as opposed to arrogance that means we (presently) can get away with that more than speakers of most other languages. American cultural imperium had to be good for some things.
Should probably pick up Mandarin just to be safe though.
It's actually fucking infuriating. In Greece in the 1970s, if you wanted to stay alive you needed to speak Greek, because otherwise nobody knew what food and drink and accommodation you wanted. But that is the only context in which that has been the case for me. I've since been to some quite obscure bits of Africa and tried quite hard with bantu and swahili and amharic and tigrigna and all I get in response is people wanting to practice their perfect English.
Sure I hear the romantic in you...
But isn't it nice that the world now has a true lingua franca, probably more than at any period before in the history of human beings actually speaking? As in: 200,000 years?
I think that's amazing and potentially a wonderful thing. And it does not mean the end of other languages. It means there will be one language that is shared, and many other languages
The good that will come out of that could be extraordinary. It means Peruvians lost in China might be understood. It means a Namibian hurt in Mexico might get help. It means people across the world can fall in love with one shared language. This is GOOD
What was the level of English speaking like the first time you visited Thailand?
The impacts of the Roe v Wade reversal by the SC depends on turnout. How much it drives evangelical turnout for the GOP in key states and key races v how much it drives female turnout for the Democrats
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
English is likely to be the dominant language of India, the next global superpower. I cannot see it being threatened for the next 50 years
Indeed it is quite possible it will blitzscale and become overwhelmingly dominant. A monopoly and a true lingua franca. I see these forces wherever and whenever I travel, especially further afield
eg I met this nice guy in Armenia who had spent 3 years learning Italian in Palermo - very expertly - but his English was really bad. I never said to him FFS why did you learn Italian, what a waste of time, you could have learned English, and you'd now be speaking the world language, but I could see the regret in his demeanour. Italian? A pleasant bauble. Nice to have
English? ESSENTIAL
He knew it, and I knew it. I believe his sheltered life in Armenia led him to a life-harming error. That won't happen often from now on. People know to learn English, across the world. Parents demand it
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
My hypothesis:
Wolfe, Clive & Hawke and Watt, Darby & Arkwright have been more important for the English language than Shakespeare, Byron or Dickens.
Hollywood. By far.
Not true. Pop music culture at its most influential was often majorly British English: Beatles, Stones, etc. That spread English via music to many countries. Meanwhile India speaks English, and this will be a surpassingly important fact for the next generation. And that really is thanks to Clive etc
Our glorious English language hegemony is thanks to many things. Hollywood is just one (but it is important)
I bet that most of the non-native English speakers you encounter speak with an American accent. btw Indian English is sometimes quaint - e.g. the Indian police chief who spoke of "nabbing the villains".
M2 money supply rose from £2500000m at the start of 2020 to £3000000m today. In short, we printed 500000 million pounds in a couple of years and nobody thought there might be inflationary consequences to this.
This all happened before Putin.
Yet Japan printed even more money, positively fuck tonnes of the stuff, and hasn't seen the same levels of inflation as the UK.
Japan has - it should be noted - benefited from buying cheap Russian gas, albeit they've still been hit by rising oil and other commodity prices.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
A psychotic autodidact racist Leaver speaks. Good ole democraceeee.
Ah the apologist for terrorism is back.
Mine is so much pithier than yours.
Yes. Terrorism meaning darkies is the most audible dogwhistle in the book. Mental illness is one of the many things I know more about than you do. You had an authentic online psychotic breakdown last night and I suggest you seek help, and never mind the skin colour of the psychiatrist. Cos it's about sovereignty innit, not about darkies.
Yet more rewriting of history. I would think you would have learnt your lesson after yesterday.
Terrorists meaning actual terrorists who killed people. No mention of skin colour.
People who you then said were culpable in their own deaths and the deaths of others.
No matter how much you try and twist it, it is all a matter of public record. There is no escaping the fact that you were indulging in victim blaming and lots of people on here called you out for it.
The rest of it is just your normal deluded drivel.
Sure. Your loathing of people cleverer than you was validated by the democratic murder of Socrates, and of people browner than you in 2016. You must feel very proud.
If there was a smidgeon of doubt, Rishi only interested in talking to one section of the NI population.
British isles? Or is that not correct?
Britain is one of the islands, Ireland the other (major) one, so you could as well say the Irish Isles as the British Isles.
But, anyway, the Good Friday Agreement allows everyone in Northern Ireland to identify as British, and it's pretty safe to assume that any members of the Conservative and Unionist Party will identify as British, though they may think of themselves as Irish as well.
The criticism is bizarre. How many Irish Republicans would you expect to find as members of the Tory party?
Britannia was the name the Romans originally gave to the whole of the British Isles including Ireland. Nor did the Romans ever refer to just the largest island as Britannia. They transferred the name to the specific province they ruled in the southern half of that largest island. It only came to refer to the largest island alone after the act of Union in 1707.
Geographically The British Isles are the whole archipelago including Ireland. But of course that derives from the fact that the British (as opposed to the Irish) wrote the rules and named stuff.
As an aside interestingly, names can of course change and quite quickly. The North Sea was usually known as The German Sea until the middle of the 18th Century. Perhaps in the future The British Isles will indeed be The Irish Isles. It does have a rather more poetic alliteration to it.
Better than Islands of the North Atlantic, which was apparently one suggestion.
I'd be happy with British-Irish Isles, though who knows what a Manxer would think of it.
Wiki tells me UK Law uses the subtly different 'British Islands' to include the bits that include the UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man. So if someone uses that one they are not including the Republic and are well set if someone gets huffy about the name.
Edit: Another suggestion was Anglo-Celtic Isles, which I guess might be more accurate than British?
The advantage of "Islands Of the North Atlantic" is that you can then use the initialism of IONA, which appeals, although may cause some confusion with the Island of Iona when used in speech.
The Atlantic Archipelago is another alternative that has been proposed, but I tend simply to use "Britain and Ireland".
Bloody terrible idea. North Atlantic goes all the way to the equator so that's everything from iceland to the canaries and cape verde, and west to bermuda.
The Atlantic is in general oceanographic terms normally split into three, South Atlantic, Tropical Atlantic and North Atlantic.
But anyway, I didn't say that IONA was a perfect option.
Isles of Britain and Ireland is the current term in some circles.
What crap.
British Isles DNE UK of Great Britain and NI North America DNE USA Europe DNE European Union
Cf also British, American, and possibly too, European.
I AM talking about the bits of isolated land not including Heligoland, the Canaries, and the Faeroes. Not the UK.
Me too. They’re called the British Isles.
You don't need much imagination to realise that would irk the Irish.
I don’t care. They can call it what they like. They’ve been the British Isles, or some variation of that term, since Roman Times.
There's not much point in using a name for a place that pisses off a large number of people who live in that place, and that they will only use with scare quotes at best.
Language changes and evolves and is contested, often for political reasons. The British Isles was used because of British dominance of the islands. Now that dominance is ended, so the name will go.
Actually from a numerical perspective, the number of Irish is quite small.
The geographic term British Isles seems to go back to Roman times, so your point about British dominance may not be correct.
They are still the British Isles on Wikipedia. The alternatives are weird euphemisms.
Quoting numerical perspectives is fraught with difficulty in this context. Before the Irish famine the 1841 census gave a population of Ireland of over 8 million, compared to a population of just over 18 and a half for England, Wales and Scotland.
That's an 1841 ratio of about 9:4 to compare with the modern ratio of about 9.3:1
Can you talk me through that?
Your 1841 figures give a ratio of about 2.3:1 Of UK today is 67 million next to 5 million for the Irish republic. So over 13:1
Your figures are correct for the UK to Republic of Ireland ratio, but I calculated a ratio for island of Britain to island of Ireland.
Ok but I think even those are off.
Population of island of Ireland is ~7 million.
Population of island of Britain is ~65 million.
7 * 9 = 63 7 * 3 = 21
Consequently modern ratio of the population of the two islands is ~ 9.3:1 which is >>> ~ 9:4 ratio in 1841, before the famine.
The population collapse in some Irish counties suggest they were either massively overpopulated before the potato famine or massively underpopulated now. Or a combination of both.
Has anywhere else in Europe experienced such a population reduction as rural Munster and Connaught have done:
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
Six of one, half a dozen of another.
I regret not speaking another language but am too lazy to do so, but it's more fortune as opposed to arrogance that means we (presently) can get away with that more than speakers of most other languages. American cultural imperium had to be good for some things.
Should probably pick up Mandarin just to be safe though.
It's actually fucking infuriating. In Greece in the 1970s, if you wanted to stay alive you needed to speak Greek, because otherwise nobody knew what food and drink and accommodation you wanted. But that is the only context in which that has been the case for me. I've since been to some quite obscure bits of Africa and tried quite hard with bantu and swahili and amharic and tigrigna and all I get in response is people wanting to practice their perfect English.
Sure I hear the romantic in you...
But isn't it nice that the world now has a true lingua franca, probably more than at any period before in the history of human beings actually speaking? As in: 200,000 years?
I think that's amazing and potentially a wonderful thing. And it does not mean the end of other languages. It means there will be one language that is shared, and many other languages
The good that will come out of that could be extraordinary. It means Peruvians lost in China might be understood. It means a Namibian hurt in Mexico might get help. It means people across the world can fall in love with one shared language. This is GOOD
What was the level of English speaking like the first time you visited Thailand?
I think the people @Leon conversed with were able to make themselves understood:
M2 money supply rose from £2500000m at the start of 2020 to £3000000m today. In short, we printed 500000 million pounds in a couple of years and nobody thought there might be inflationary consequences to this.
This all happened before Putin.
Yet Japan printed even more money, positively fuck tonnes of the stuff, and hasn't seen the same levels of inflation as the UK.
Japan has - it should be noted - benefited from buying cheap Russian gas, albeit they've still been hit by rising oil and other commodity prices.
Their inflation rate is 2%.
But it’s a deflationary economy at the best of times.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
English is likely to be the dominant language of India, the next global superpower. I cannot see it being threatened for the next 50 years
Indeed it is quite possible it will blitzscale and become overwhelmingly dominant. A monopoly and a true lingua franca. I see these forces wherever and whenever I travel, especially further afield
eg I met this nice guy in Armenia who had spent 3 years learning Italian in Palermo - very expertly - but his English was really bad. I never said to him FFS why did you learn Italian, what a waste of time, you could have learned English, and you'd now be speaking the world language, but I could see the regret in his demeanour. Italian? A pleasant bauble. Nice to have
English? ESSENTIAL
He knew it, and I knew it. I believe his sheltered life in Armenia led him to a life-harming error. That won't happen often from now on. People know to learn English, across the world. Parents demand it
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
My hypothesis:
Wolfe, Clive & Hawke and Watt, Darby & Arkwright have been more important for the English language than Shakespeare, Byron or Dickens.
Hollywood. By far.
Not true. Pop music culture at its most influential was often majorly British English: Beatles, Stones, etc. That spread English via music to many countries. Meanwhile India speaks English, and this will be a surpassingly important fact for the next generation. And that really is thanks to Clive etc
Our glorious English language hegemony is thanks to many things. Hollywood is just one (but it is important)
I bet that most of the non-native English speakers you encounter speak with an American accent. btw Indian English is sometimes quaint - e.g. the Indian police chief who spoke of "nabbing the villains".
Also, "mishap" for accident, as in 30 dead in traffic mishap.
M2 money supply rose from £2500000m at the start of 2020 to £3000000m today. In short, we printed 500000 million pounds in a couple of years and nobody thought there might be inflationary consequences to this.
This all happened before Putin.
Yet Japan printed even more money, positively fuck tonnes of the stuff, and hasn't seen the same levels of inflation as the UK.
Japan has - it should be noted - benefited from buying cheap Russian gas, albeit they've still been hit by rising oil and other commodity prices.
Their inflation rate is 2%.
But it’s a deflationary economy at the best of times.
Sure - but it tells you that money printing (on its own) is not the whole story.
I'm in Phoenix today, for the first time in six months or so, and the level of homelessness has gotten visibly worse. And this is not a city you want to be homeless in.
It's a city that is a victim of its own success. Property prices and rents have soared at the same time that people in low end jobs have struggled. Energy prices rising is probably only making things worse (not that the US has anywhere near the problems of the rest of the world).
Not good to be homeless in Phoenix in summer.
But better to be homeless in Phoenix in winter than homeless in Michigan in winter.
Do the homeless in the USA move much ?
That sounds like a 'do they eat cake' question but I've read On The Road recently.
If overturning RvW has the effect of properly returning the issue, as in the UK, from courts to electors this will be a massive gain.
Yes, that's very much my opinion.
And Kansas tells us that - in the vast majority of US states - abortion will continue to be legal and available. The exceptions will be in the Deep South and Utah,
It is, however, worth noting that the Republican Party has got itself into a bit of a pickle here. There are a couple of US States where legal abortion is popular, and yet Republican controlled legislatures have passed laws that broadly criminalise it. While RvW existed, this was of little import; it was virtue signaling to primary voters.
Now, though, those laws come into existence.
Voters, for what it's worth, tend to support restrictions on abortion. But very few of them support blanket bans.
The key question, really, is how much abortion matters.
And Kansas tells us the answer is quite a lot. Around 200,000 independents came out to vote in the Kansas ballot proposition, even though they couldn't vote in either party's primaries. Overall turnout was up close to 90% from the 2018 primaries.
That's a hell of a lot of people who cared enough to come out and vote.
Now, this doesn't mean that those people will vote Democrat. But they might well come out to overturn blanket abortion bans. And that probably means voting Democrat.
You've hit us before with your hot take that it's all a thoroughly good thing if the right of women to choose what happens to their own bodies is taken from them and handed to a bare majority in their own state. And if the only losers are a few thousand women, including victims of rape/incest, in Alabama or whatever then, y'know, state rights or something.
It's still a rotten take - as intellectually shallow as it is callous.
I apologize for being intellectually shallow.
But I believe process matters. And process means democratic buy in.
I'm sorry that abortion will be illegal in some states. It sucks for the women involved. But decisions about criminality should be made by voters.
And if those voters decide that slavery should be legal again? Or all homosexuals should be chemically castrated? Would you still hold to that claim?
Churchill's comment on democracy - "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is perfectly true but within its construction there is an explicit and valid criticism.
Democracy is flawed and like any other system created by man it needs constant supervision and challenge. That is why we have the other arms of Government. Because pure democracy killed Socrates. Because Hitler and Trump were both democratically elected and because there are some basic principles which are even more important than democracy.
I think you have drawn your line in the wrong place in the sand.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If abortion, or other contentious issues, are exclusively a matter for the courts, well, the appointment of judges then just becomes a matter of political partisanship, as we've seen.
The issue there is with making the appointment of judges a political matter rather than with the power they exercise.
If ultimate political power resides with the judges, then the judges are political.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
Actually no. That was the excuse. Socrates got done because he pissed everyone off by pointing out how stupid they all were. Of the Thirty Tyrants only Critias is known to have studied under Socrates, who was himself forbidden from teaching by the Thirty.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
A psychotic autodidact racist Leaver speaks. Good ole democraceeee.
Ah the apologist for terrorism is back.
Mine is so much pithier than yours.
Yes. Terrorism meaning darkies is the most audible dogwhistle in the book. Mental illness is one of the many things I know more about than you do. You had an authentic online psychotic breakdown last night and I suggest you seek help, and never mind the skin colour of the psychiatrist. Cos it's about sovereignty innit, not about darkies.
Yet more rewriting of history. I would think you would have learnt your lesson after yesterday.
Terrorists meaning actual terrorists who killed people. No mention of skin colour.
People who you then said were culpable in their own deaths and the deaths of others.
No matter how much you try and twist it, it is all a matter of public record. There is no escaping the fact that you were indulging in victim blaming and lots of people on here called you out for it.
The rest of it is just your normal deluded drivel.
Sure. Your loathing of people cleverer than you was validated by the democratic murder of Socrates, and of people browner than you in 2016. You must feel very proud.
I am sure I would if I could work out what the fuck you are on about.
Do you still think Rushdie had it coming?
Do you still think Bataclan and Manchester were all because of people writing nasty things in books?
Those are your positions set out on here last night. All the rest is just noise.
ONS needs to create an inflation stat that is focussed on the most basic essentials that someone on benefits needs to spend. Basic foodstuff, energy, basic clothes, toiletry and so on.
BBC news saying that these things are up 19 or 20% not the headline 10%
That's the point of the Vimes Boot Index that the ONS is indeed working on.
And the reason they are up so much is easy to grasp.
500g on basics value pasta has just as many fixed transportation costs as 500g of regular pasta or a 500g of speciality pasta. So if the 23p bag of pasts rises by 5pence due to fuel costs and the 85p bag of regular pasta rises 5 pence then the middle class shopper ahs seen their pasta cost rise 6% whilst the pverty level shopper has seen their costs rise 22%.
Indeed the middle class shopper also has the option of dropping down to the value range and slashing their food bills, the poverty level purchaser has the choice of dropping down to no food at all
Tesco have put a big sign up next to the self scanner handsets saying roughly Use these and you will know when you have run out of money vs being humiliated at the checkout till. Chilling.
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
Six of one, half a dozen of another.
I regret not speaking another language but am too lazy to do so, but it's more fortune as opposed to arrogance that means we (presently) can get away with that more than speakers of most other languages. American cultural imperium had to be good for some things.
Should probably pick up Mandarin just to be safe though.
It's actually fucking infuriating. In Greece in the 1970s, if you wanted to stay alive you needed to speak Greek, because otherwise nobody knew what food and drink and accommodation you wanted. But that is the only context in which that has been the case for me. I've since been to some quite obscure bits of Africa and tried quite hard with bantu and swahili and amharic and tigrigna and all I get in response is people wanting to practice their perfect English.
Sure I hear the romantic in you...
But isn't it nice that the world now has a true lingua franca, probably more than at any period before in the history of human beings actually speaking? As in: 200,000 years?
I think that's amazing and potentially a wonderful thing. And it does not mean the end of other languages. It means there will be one language that is shared, and many other languages
The good that will come out of that could be extraordinary. It means Peruvians lost in China might be understood. It means a Namibian hurt in Mexico might get help. It means people across the world can fall in love with one shared language. This is GOOD
What was the level of English speaking like the first time you visited Thailand?
Terrible. Now, really rather good
And this is the case across the world
@IshmaelZ, for example, is completely right about Greece. 30-40 years ago, in many parts of Greece, you really struggled to be understood outside central Athens or major tourist islands. Now, everyone under 35 speaks English. Often they are mildly insulted that you even doubt their skill in English, like you are asking "are you a virgin" or "do you have a mobile phone"? It is accepted as universal: they speak English
I wonder if, in the end, this is bad for English speakers. It makes us cognitively lazy, by comparison
It is quite revealing that my insistence on “British Isles” provokes some quite odd posting about genocide and the British aristocracy.
What's odd is thinking that British war crimes and genocide are somehow peripheral to the question of which exact places remained British and which didn't.
The Irish government recognises "the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland."
In effect a united Ireland would be a, but not the, British state.
I dream of a single nation of the islands, with a capital in Dublin, an equal respect for the traditional living languages of the islands, of which English is honoured but only as one of several, all of us learning two at least of the languages from reception class onwards, and all of us compromising by being in EFTA/EEA. And then I wake up.
Ugh. Dublin is an OK large-ish British city. About as noble as Liverpool, less impressive than Edinburgh or Glasgow, less important than Manc
London is THE world city. Let it be the capital of the NUK, the New United Kingdom of Britain, Ireland, the Caymans, Antarctica, the Falklands, Australia and the Moon
Heck, let's tell Malta we're accepting that 1956 referendum after all, with an independence take backsies.
What a stupid mistake we made. We'd now have our own chunk of the Med. DUH
Perhaps France had the right idea with their various overseas territories being counted as part of France proper after all.
I believe they did. Tho for them there was an overwhelming cultural imperative: tying territories to France kept them French - in language, especially - that the UK has never faced. Thanks to the might of the English language and the sheer extent of the British Empire -and the vigour of the USA - we were always assured the world would speak English, and so it is. The English speaking world dominates the west, and much of the rest
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
And the consequences. I can't get my head around Rwanda, but it does seem millions were macheted to death because la francophonie mon brave.
It explains almost all of De Gaulle's opposition to UK membership of the EEC, in the 1960s. I don't believe it was military-economic at all, really. Instead he correctly foresaw that if the UK joined the EEC, then eventually the sheer cultural force of the Anglophonie would mean the EEC went from being French speaking to being English speaking
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
Even worse French isn't even the second most important European language now.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
Six of one, half a dozen of another.
I regret not speaking another language but am too lazy to do so, but it's more fortune as opposed to arrogance that means we (presently) can get away with that more than speakers of most other languages. American cultural imperium had to be good for some things.
Should probably pick up Mandarin just to be safe though.
It's actually fucking infuriating. In Greece in the 1970s, if you wanted to stay alive you needed to speak Greek, because otherwise nobody knew what food and drink and accommodation you wanted. But that is the only context in which that has been the case for me. I've since been to some quite obscure bits of Africa and tried quite hard with bantu and swahili and amharic and tigrigna and all I get in response is people wanting to practice their perfect English.
Sure I hear the romantic in you...
But isn't it nice that the world now has a true lingua franca, probably more than at any period before in the history of human beings actually speaking? As in: 200,000 years?
I think that's amazing and potentially a wonderful thing. And it does not mean the end of other languages. It means there will be one language that is shared, and many other languages
The good that will come out of that could be extraordinary. It means Peruvians lost in China might be understood. It means a Namibian hurt in Mexico might get help. It means people across the world can fall in love with one shared language. This is GOOD
People don't fall in love with English; they use English, well, a sort of simplified international variant of English. English is the global language of work and commerce. People love and play in their own language.
The impacts of the Roe v Wade reversal by the SC depends on turnout. How much it drives evangelical turnout for the GOP in key states and key races v how much it drives female turnout for the Democrats
Too high a turnout in primaries of those wanting to ban abortion completely could be very bad for the GOP.
Comments
We don't have to go much distance in either time or place to find ideas on fundamentally important standards very different to those we have here and now.
Likewise what we think of as fundamentally important standards might seem very wrong to people in the future.
I believe Asda and Tesco have recently reintroduced them.
The lack of opportunity and flexibility makes life more inherently risky.
The depths of French paranoia about the decline of French language prestige are hard to overstate
Was at a Step 5 football game with over double that last night.
Utterly pointless masturbation.
It's like the Great Reform Act never happened.
Ukraine war: Thousands of Jews quit Russia amid fears of persecution
Hero.
This is exactly why, when an attempt was made to use equalities legislation to wrest control of pensions and benefits from Parliament, the U.K. Supreme Court said no. They are the arbiters of the law as passed by Parliament. Not the creators of law.
And Socrates got done for being the tutor of the men who formed an especially nasty and tyrannical government.
In a way it's exciting that we can't afford rubbish governments any more. Let's see what our Liz can do.
No one in the West will rely on his supply every again.
He thinks he's a geopolitical strategic genius but he's not.
But basically what you are saying is that there are no fundamental standards we should all adhere to and that might is right. So you would obviously not be complaining if someone came and burnt your house down to prove that point.
The end point of your thinking is civil war. It has happened before and will happen again if you give too much power to one branch of the state over another. As TSE pointed out earlier, the US is already fucked. They don't walk back from this. What matters is that we learn the lessons of their mistakes better than they have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_departments_by_population
and probably more over the last two centuries.
This is the most extreme case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creuse#Demographics
Perhaps the closest English equivalent is Richmondshire:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-61981623
This was the basis why we should have a six week campaign. So everyone could see the candidates up close. And yet no one seems much interested at all. There were bigger crowds when I was watching Wigan A team in the 80's.
And they were very disappointing.
Winter is coming.
Malta
The Seychelles
The Maldives
Sri Lanka!
Scotland (phew!)
Papua New Guinea
Menorca
Bahamas, possibly
New Hebrides
Why the fuck didn't we keep them? That would have been an impressive array of possessions
Men are not made for constitutions. Constitutions are made for men.
The law is the summation of the current views of a society. The reason we don’t lynch gay people is not the laws against such disgusting behaviour. It is the fact that 99%+ of the country finds the idea abhorrent. The laws are there to deal with the extremely tiny minority of scumbags, and to codify the moral position of society.
Finding some magical Guardians who can sit on a cloud and be Perfect and Just isn’t going to work.
GB News
@GBNEWS
·
9h
'Inflation, in my view, is driven by the fact that the world was locked down for two years and is yet to fully reboot.'
https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1559882209095458820
Playing for time in the hope summat will turn up.
Basically Socrates was executed because no one likes a smart arse.
You're full of shit Liam.
This all happened before Putin.
Common sense should tell us that today, inflation is mostly a Covid hangover, but tomorrow will have more to do with Ukraine.
For the UK, Brexit is in the mix as well, though to a lesser extent.
And he was right, that is what happened. Destroying the last chance of French being a supreme global language, And then we actually left, when the job was done? Sorry, my French friends, but you have to lol. As an English speaker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2022_Swedish_general_election#Vote_share
Is the Dobbs decision right or should Roe have been allowed to stand and was the Roe decision right originally or should the previous situation been allowed to stand ?
You'll find no shortage of differing opinions to those questions in the USA.
So once again we come to the issue of who decides on what these fundamental standards are.
Something which you seem unable to give an answer to - quite understandably because there isn't a perfect answer.
Instead you put up a silly 'might is right' strawman rather than allow that a general acceptance of the system is required and that the system has to be able to be modified as people's ideas evolve.
So for example homosexuality has been legalised in this country but for most of history the fundamental standard in this country was that it should be illegal. A fundamental standard which still applies in many other countries.
The campaign did not need to be so long or have so many events, certainly. The views of and questioning of the two candidates would be more than extensive enough without visiting Unimportant-Upon-Thames in East NimbyShire or whatever.
And the might is right argument is not a straw man. It is the inevitable result of what you propose and the route along which the US is currently travelling.
The USA allowing so much Hispanic immigration has given Spanish a boost.
Mine is so much pithier than yours.
I prefer that we have evolved and that we do not allow them anymore.
As to the USA the threat of civil war comes from the risk of people not accepting election results.
Largely because they think it is their fundamental right not to do so.
So yet again we come down to who defines what these fundamental rights are.
Indeed it is quite possible it will blitzscale and become overwhelmingly dominant. A monopoly and a true lingua franca. I see these forces wherever and whenever I travel, especially further afield
eg I met this nice guy in Armenia who had spent 3 years learning Italian in Palermo - very expertly - but his English was really bad. I never said to him FFS why did you learn Italian, what a waste of time, you could have learned English, and you'd now be speaking the world language, but I could see the regret in his demeanour. Italian? A pleasant bauble. Nice to have
English? ESSENTIAL
He knew it, and I knew it. I believe his sheltered life in Armenia led him to a life-harming error. That won't happen often from now on. People know to learn English, across the world. Parents demand it
Is this post-colonial arrogance? Who cares. It is a statement of fact. If you want to learn one foreign language, it is English. That's it
I regret not speaking another language but am too lazy to do so, but it's more fortune as opposed to arrogance that means we (presently) can get away with that more than speakers of most other languages. American cultural imperium had to be good for some things.
Should probably pick up Mandarin just to be safe though.
Even if America self-destructs in the looming Woke civil wars, and Britain sinks beneath the Brexit waves, all the forces point towards true linguistic hegemony. Quite something for a tiny language hatched in bits of East Anglia and eastern Kent by a few feral, fur-clad Jutish warriors 1500 years ago. What happened to Latin and Mandarin?
But so it is
Wolfe, Clive & Hawke and Watt, Darby & Arkwright have been more important for the English language than Shakespeare, Byron or Dickens.
The crucial fact is that they NEVER have to come to the office - that means they can choose to live hundreds of miles away. From Surrey, I work closely with people in Scotland, Wales, Italy, Portugal and Kenya. We meet up a couple of times a year. I think it's the future, regardless of the energy crisis. It has its snags, but one really gets used to it, and parents of young kids in particular often love it as they can actually see them on and off threoughout the day.
Terrorists meaning actual terrorists who killed people. No mention of skin colour.
People who you then said were culpable in their own deaths and the deaths of others.
No matter how much you try and twist it, it is all a matter of public record. There is no escaping the fact that you were indulging in victim blaming and lots of people on here called you out for it.
The rest of it is just your normal deluded drivel.
But isn't it nice that the world now has a true lingua franca, probably more than at any period before in the history of human beings actually speaking? As in: 200,000 years?
I think that's amazing and potentially a wonderful thing. And it does not mean the end of other languages. It means there will be one language that is shared, and many other languages
The good that will come out of that could be extraordinary. It means Peruvians lost in China might be understood. It means a Namibian hurt in Mexico might get help. It means people across the world can fall in love with one shared language. This is GOOD
Our glorious English language hegemony is thanks to many things. Hollywood is just one (but it is important)
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/senate
Parts of Japan are rapidly depopulating right now, as only the oldies are left.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tory-leadership-poll-liz-truss-32-points-ahead-of-rishi-sunak-2l2w7b3bb (£££)
1.07 Liz Truss 93%
13.5 Rishi Sunak 7%
Next Conservative leader
1.07 Liz Truss 93%
13.5 Rishi Sunak 7%
It's a city that is a victim of its own success. Property prices and rents have soared at the same time that people in low end jobs have struggled. Energy prices rising is probably only making things worse (not that the US has anywhere near the problems of the rest of the world).
btw Indian English is sometimes quaint - e.g. the Indian police chief who spoke of "nabbing the villains".
Japan has - it should be noted - benefited from buying cheap Russian gas, albeit they've still been hit by rising oil and other commodity prices.
Their inflation rate is 2%.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L6__oz2S8s
But better to be homeless in Phoenix in winter than homeless in Michigan in winter.
Do the homeless in the USA move much ?
That sounds like a 'do they eat cake' question but I've read On The Road recently.
Do you still think Rushdie had it coming?
Do you still think Bataclan and Manchester were all because of people writing nasty things in books?
Those are your positions set out on here last night. All the rest is just noise.
And this is the case across the world
@IshmaelZ, for example, is completely right about Greece. 30-40 years ago, in many parts of Greece, you really struggled to be understood outside central Athens or major tourist islands. Now, everyone under 35 speaks English. Often they are mildly insulted that you even doubt their skill in English, like you are asking "are you a virgin" or "do you have a mobile phone"? It is accepted as universal: they speak English
I wonder if, in the end, this is bad for English speakers. It makes us cognitively lazy, by comparison