My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Probably. But Oppenheimer’s story is nonetheless a very interesting one.
I read - and enjoyed - the book very much. But if you want to go beyond Oppenheimer's role, then I would highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Rhodes. Which also won the Pullitzer.
Leo Szilard is a particularly interesting character - for instance, he spent years working with Einstein on a refrigerator.
Scientists so hard up they couldn't afford a table to work on?
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
Also, is there such a thing as a global majority when it comes to ethnicity? Even the Han Chinese, the largest ethnicity, isn't a majority.
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
What is a "global majority" in any case? It could mean people who are not black.
It's a euphemism for not white.
Yes - it is a 'culture war' provocation. The trick is that you react against the term and in doing so reveal yourself as a white supremacist/racist.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Easy to said than done. Why didn't all the victims from Rotherham do that. Or the Harvy Weinstein victims. Or the Epstein etc. Most of it came out via the newspapers. And countless other stories.
Also, this particular story, there is a difference between illegality and immortality. There is one claim in the Sun report that mucky pictures were sent when 17, now I don't think a lot of people know that's illegal, as you can actually legally have sex with them.....also again its a bit of a grey area if your kid has set up an OnlyFans and doing it that way (when again supposed to be over 18).
The central claim by the mother seems to be more about the presenters money being an enabler for their kids drug habit. Its far from clear from the reports if that was direct, as in they knew this was the case, or if I said previously the BBC presenter joined their OnlyFans and was paying for uniques and the mother is angry that all that money is allowing their kid to get smacked off their tits every day.
One other factor which played at least a part in some cases (and in some rape and domestic abuse cases) is the "victim" withdraws charges or does not cooperate in the first place.
What tickles me is the way so many people have been assuming the claims in the Sun were gospel truth, against the weight of so much precedent.
Sun often wrong BBC stars often bad eggs
Hard for the uninformed to know what to believe.
Well both do have a tad of form. I mean only last year, the BBC had to admit they managed to be totally unaware of the alleged behaviour another DJ of 20 year BBC career, who anybody at university in the late 90s / early 2000s knew had a terrible reputation when they visited.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
And some people are evidently still very reluctant to let go of it!
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Easy to said than done. Why didn't all the victims from Rotherham do that. Or the Harvy Weinstein victims. Or the Epstein etc. Most of it came out via the newspapers. And countless other stories.
Also, this particular story, there is a difference between illegality and immortality. There is one claim in the Sun report that mucky pictures were sent when 17, now I don't think a lot of people know that's illegal, as you can actually legally have sex with them.....also again its a bit of a grey area if your kid has set up an OnlyFans and doing it that way (when again supposed to be over 18).
The central claim by the mother seems to be more about the presenters money being an enabler for their kids drug habit. Its far from clear from the reports if that was direct, as in they knew this was the case, or if I said previously the BBC presenter joined their OnlyFans and was paying for uniques and the mother is angry that all that money is allowing their kid to get smacked off their tits every day.
One other factor which played at least a part in some cases (and in some rape and domestic abuse cases) is the "victim" withdraws charges or does not cooperate in the first place.
What tickles me is the way so many people have been assuming the claims in the Sun were gospel truth, against the weight of so much precedent.
The fact that the Sun poses as some kind of moral arbiter in matters such as these, a "newspaper" that used to carry pictures of topless teenage girls on its third page, is already pretty funny.
It is the same paper which ran a countdown to when Charlotte Church would turn 16.
It didn't, though. Widely believed to have happened, but didn't happen.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Easy to said than done. Why didn't all the victims from Rotherham do that. Or the Harvy Weinstein victims. Or the Epstein etc. Most of it came out via the newspapers. And countless other stories.
Also, this particular story, there is a difference between illegality and immortality. There is one claim in the Sun report that mucky pictures were sent when 17, now I don't think a lot of people know that's illegal, as you can actually legally have sex with them.....also again its a bit of a grey area if your kid has set up an OnlyFans and doing it that way (when again supposed to be over 18).
The central claim by the mother seems to be more about the presenters money being an enabler for their kids drug habit. Its far from clear from the reports if that was direct, as in they knew this was the case, or if I said previously the BBC presenter joined their OnlyFans and was paying for uniques and the mother is angry that all that money is allowing their kid to get smacked off their tits every day.
One other factor which played at least a part in some cases (and in some rape and domestic abuse cases) is the "victim" withdraws charges or does not cooperate in the first place.
What tickles me is the way so many people have been assuming the claims in the Sun were gospel truth, against the weight of so much precedent.
The fact that the Sun poses as some kind of moral arbiter in matters such as these, a "newspaper" that used to carry pictures of topless teenage girls on its third page, is already pretty funny.
It is the same paper which ran a countdown to when Charlotte Church would turn 16.
It didn't, though. Widely believed to have happened, but didn't happen.
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
The natural end point of that logic is for the demographics in Britain to exactly match the global average.
Which would actually make us remarkably Asian, and largely Chinese and Indian at that.
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Probably. But Oppenheimer’s story is nonetheless a very interesting one.
I read - and enjoyed - the book very much. But if you want to go beyond Oppenheimer's role, then I would highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Rhodes. Which also won the Pullitzer.
Leo Szilard is a particularly interesting character - for instance, he spent years working with Einstein on a refrigerator.
Scientists so hard up they couldn't afford a table to work on?
Well, Szilard's first nuclear reactor (the first in the world) was built under a football stand ...
(though by saying it was Szilard's reactor, I'm committing the sin I mentioned below of not crediting Fermi, Weil and others ... )
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Easy to said than done. Why didn't all the victims from Rotherham do that. Or the Harvy Weinstein victims. Or the Epstein etc. Most of it came out via the newspapers. And countless other stories.
Also, this particular story, there is a difference between illegality and immortality. There is one claim in the Sun report that mucky pictures were sent when 17, now I don't think a lot of people know that's illegal, as you can actually legally have sex with them.....also again its a bit of a grey area if your kid has set up an OnlyFans and doing it that way (when again supposed to be over 18).
The central claim by the mother seems to be more about the presenters money being an enabler for their kids drug habit. Its far from clear from the reports if that was direct, as in they knew this was the case, or if I said previously the BBC presenter joined their OnlyFans and was paying for uniques and the mother is angry that all that money is allowing their kid to get smacked off their tits every day.
One other factor which played at least a part in some cases (and in some rape and domestic abuse cases) is the "victim" withdraws charges or does not cooperate in the first place.
What tickles me is the way so many people have been assuming the claims in the Sun were gospel truth, against the weight of so much precedent.
The fact that the Sun poses as some kind of moral arbiter in matters such as these, a "newspaper" that used to carry pictures of topless teenage girls on its third page, is already pretty funny.
As I understand it, though legal at the time, owning a copy of a Sun page 3 girl aged 16 or 17 is now a criminal offence.
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
The natural end point of that logic is for the demographics in Britain to exactly match the global average.
Which would actually make us remarkably Asian, and largely Chinese and Indian at that.
Well, there's something like 7 million people in Hong Kong, if all of them move the the UK we're making progress.
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
The natural end point of that logic is for the demographics in Britain to exactly match the global average.
Which would actually make us remarkably Asian, and largely Chinese and Indian at that.
What was missed in a lot of the outrage of the supreme court decision about US admissions was that the fact of the case were that an ethnic minority were the ones being deliberately targeted and marginalised. It wasn't about the white majority, they are already under-represented at elite US colleges, it was that Americans of Asian descent are being "too successful" in the eyes of admissions and thus were being proactively discriminated against to ensure the bar was higher for them to get in.
Instead the ruling was spun by much of the media as solely about it being anti-minority.....
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
The natural end point of that logic is for the demographics in Britain to exactly match the global average.
Which would actually make us remarkably Asian, and largely Chinese and Indian at that.
Well, there's something like 7 million people in Hong Kong, if all of them move the the UK we're making progress.
Presumably Asia would in turn need to become more white, so many British born could in turn move to India and China
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Easy to said than done. Why didn't all the victims from Rotherham do that. Or the Harvy Weinstein victims. Or the Epstein etc. Most of it came out via the newspapers. And countless other stories.
Also, this particular story, there is a difference between illegality and immortality. There is one claim in the Sun report that mucky pictures were sent when 17, now I don't think a lot of people know that's illegal, as you can actually legally have sex with them.....also again its a bit of a grey area if your kid has set up an OnlyFans and doing it that way (when again supposed to be over 18).
The central claim by the mother seems to be more about the presenters money being an enabler for their kids drug habit. Its far from clear from the reports if that was direct, as in they knew this was the case, or if I said previously the BBC presenter joined their OnlyFans and was paying for uniques and the mother is angry that all that money is allowing their kid to get smacked off their tits every day.
One other factor which played at least a part in some cases (and in some rape and domestic abuse cases) is the "victim" withdraws charges or does not cooperate in the first place.
What tickles me is the way so many people have been assuming the claims in the Sun were gospel truth, against the weight of so much precedent.
The fact that the Sun poses as some kind of moral arbiter in matters such as these, a "newspaper" that used to carry pictures of topless teenage girls on its third page, is already pretty funny.
It is the same paper which ran a countdown to when Charlotte Church would turn 16.
It is the same paper that made Samantha Fox a star.
Changing subject - i read something on Twitter saying that Boris has not handed over his Whatsapp phone by todays deadline. Has anyone else seen this or can confirm or otherwise??
Defying a High Court order could have 'interesting' consequences....
No level of tactical voting will give the party on 9% more seats than the party on 28%.
2019 General Election:
SNP 3.9%, 48 seats Lib Dems 11.6%, 11 seats
That's an extreme example, sure. But FPTP puts a huge premium on how concentrated your vote is in certain seats. (See also the way that a smallish fall in SNP vote share utterly kippers them in seats.)
Last week we had polls showing a Labour majority of over 400 or near as damnit with the Tories on 50 seats.
If that happens the Tories could finish fourth in seats behind the SNP and Lib Dems due to tactical voting.
Question for veterans of '97...
Labour definitely won seats they had no hope of nabbing, such as Enfield Southgate. The national swing was just too huge.
Did the same apply to the Lib Dems? Did their wins go beyond the ones that they hoped to win itn a brilliant year and had been working to death?
The Lib Dems had already built up strength in Devon and Cornwall, the Highlands of Scotland, and SW London, and did very well in those areas. I don't think there really were many surprises. The Lib Dems did well in areas of long-standing local government strength (apart from St. Albans and Watford).
The IOW was a bit of a surprise, as the LibDem vote went down, but the Tories put up a hopeless candidate (who later regained the seat and went on to become a hopeless MP) and their vote fell by significantly more. Despite being a ‘tactical voting’ election, it was the very modest Labour vote that went up. Sheffield Hallam was a surprise in that the swing to the LDs - the largest of that election - was beyond expectations.
Changing subject - i read something on Twitter saying that Boris has not handed over his Whatsapp phone by todays deadline. Has anyone else seen this or can confirm or otherwise??
Defying a High Court order could have 'interesting' consequences....
I thought it was Sunak who didn't want the messages coming out? And that Boris was dropping them to set off a timebomb?
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
The natural end point of that logic is for the demographics in Britain to exactly match the global average.
Which would actually make us remarkably Asian, and largely Chinese and Indian at that.
What was missed in a lot of the outrage of the supreme court decision about US admissions was that the fact of the case were that an ethnic minority were the ones being deliberately targeted and marginalised. It wasn't about the white majority, they are already under-represented at elite US colleges, it was that Americans of Asian descent are being "too successful".
Instead the ruling was spun solely about it being anti-minority.....
IIRC during all that there was reference to an old canadian article around asian descent students at university. The title of the article had been revised over time, but the url was apparently still the same, including the end section stating 'too asian'.
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
Synod today was also debating pushing more 'Global Majority candidates' through if not enough were elected at the next Synod elections.
Not a million miles from Westminster council, now controlled by Labour of course. In some respects the Church of England leadership is more the Labour Party at prayer than the Tory Party at prayer now
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Turing really was a genius. The trouble with that film, apart from compressing what was really a code-breaking factory with thousands of people on site and many others around the world into half a dozen idiots squabbling in a hut, was not understanding its subject matter so that Turing's flash of inspiration at the end about how to use the bombes was in actual fact the reason he'd designed them in the beginning.
In one of the documentaries, the presenter (not that one!) asks the renowned statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at Bletchley Park, if they'd known Turing was gay. He replied it was lucky security never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war.
That documentary was rubbish, then. The effort did not rely solely on Turing; and besides, there was lots of other vital work going on at BP aside from the Enigma stuff.
Bill Tutte probably did more to end the war quickly than Turing, with his work on the Lorenz cipher. But no-one's ever heard of him.
They were a load of geniuses all working to shorten the war. They all deserve equal credit IMO; where one had intellectual failings and gaps, others covered them.
If the Sun have lied / been hoodwinked, does this mean we have the prospect of Victoria Newton in a few year becoming the next Piers Morgan, megaphone bore, constant twitter battler and champion of free speech.....
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
Synod today was also debating pushing more 'Global Majority candidates' through if not enough were elected at the next Synod elections.
Not a million miles from Westminster council, now controlled by Labour of course. In some respects the Church of England leadership is more the Labour Party at prayer than the Tory Party at prayer now
You’re a bit late with this particular piece of outrage -
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Easy to said than done. Why didn't all the victims from Rotherham do that. Or the Harvy Weinstein victims. Or the Epstein etc. Most of it came out via the newspapers. And countless other stories.
Also, this particular story, there is a difference between illegality and immortality. There is one claim in the Sun report that mucky pictures were sent when 17, now I don't think a lot of people know that's illegal, as you can actually legally have sex with them.....also again its a bit of a grey area if your kid has set up an OnlyFans and doing it that way (when again supposed to be over 18).
The central claim by the mother seems to be more about the presenters money being an enabler for their kids drug habit. Its far from clear from the reports if that was direct, as in they knew this was the case, or if I said previously the BBC presenter joined their OnlyFans and was paying for uniques and the mother is angry that all that money is allowing their kid to get smacked off their tits every day.
One other factor which played at least a part in some cases (and in some rape and domestic abuse cases) is the "victim" withdraws charges or does not cooperate in the first place.
What tickles me is the way so many people have been assuming the claims in the Sun were gospel truth, against the weight of so much precedent.
The fact that the Sun poses as some kind of moral arbiter in matters such as these, a "newspaper" that used to carry pictures of topless teenage girls on its third page, is already pretty funny.
As I understand it, though legal at the time, owning a copy of a Sun page 3 girl aged 16 or 17 is now a criminal offence.
As a thought experiment, if the Sun published a topless picture of a model on her 16th birthday, how old was she when the picture was taken?
Changing subject - i read something on Twitter saying that Boris has not handed over his Whatsapp phone by todays deadline. Has anyone else seen this or can confirm or otherwise??
Defying a High Court order could have 'interesting' consequences....
I thought it was Sunak who didn't want the messages coming out? And that Boris was dropping them to set off a timebomb?
It would be very on brand for Boris to loudly state that he is happy to do something, and cooperate partially, but not following through as fulsomely as he implied.
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
The natural end point of that logic is for the demographics in Britain to exactly match the global average.
Which would actually make us remarkably Asian, and largely Chinese and Indian at that.
What was missed in a lot of the outrage of the supreme court decision about US admissions was that the fact of the case were that an ethnic minority were the ones being deliberately targeted and marginalised. It wasn't about the white majority, they are already under-represented at elite US colleges, it was that Americans of Asian descent are being "too successful" in the eyes of admissions and thus were being proactively discriminated against to ensure the bar was higher for them to get in.
Instead the ruling was spun by much of the media as solely about it being anti-minority.....
Not only are East Asians now over represented at elite universities, they also earn more.
Chinese ethnicity workers now earn the most in the UK, followed by British Indians then mixed race.
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
The natural end point of that logic is for the demographics in Britain to exactly match the global average.
Which would actually make us remarkably Asian, and largely Chinese and Indian at that.
I think this came about because they wanted to change from BAME, which is a term that can't be used any more, and settled on 'global majority'. But in doing so have arrived at a term that is highly provocative, incoherant and will ultimately just add fuel to the next Trump/Brexit style revolt.
Europe is being swallowed up by the right. Only Brexit Britain stands alone against the tide."
Not sure that's entirely true. Many of these "right" parties aren't of the right at all - they are strongly interventionist and pro-State - the bulk of their hostility is towards cultural opponents and outsiders as well as most supra-national institutions.
They are nationalist, socialist and populist saying all the things they think the people want to hear. The problem comes when they are in power and forced to live up to their rhetoric.
But you are talking from a perspective of economic right and left - which of course is not really what the NS is referring to. Certainly National Rally in France, AfD in Germany, The Swedish Democrats and Brothers of Italy are not in any way socially 'liberal' in the way we would understand it or in the way I would suggest most British parties - even the Conservatives - would be regarded.
It is also worth pointing out that (without tempting Godwin as I am not making a comparison to the parties I have already mentioned) the Nazis were also strongly interventionist and pro-state so that is hardly a criteria for liberal democratic ideology.
As a subscriber to The Athletic this is an interesting move.
The New York Times said on Monday that it would disband its sports department and rely on coverage of teams and games from its website The Athletic, both online and in print.
Joe Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, and Monica Drake, a deputy managing editor, announced the change to the newsroom as “an evolution in how we cover sports.”
“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” the editors wrote in an email to The Times’s newsroom on Monday morning. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”
The shuttering of the sports desk, which has more than 35 reporters and editors, is a major shift for The Times. The department’s coverage of games, athletes and team owners, and its Sports of The Times column in particular, were once a pillar of American sports journalism.
The section covered the major moments and personalities of the last century of American sports, including Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball and the deadly effects of concussions in the National Football League.
The move represents a further integration into the newsroom of The Athletic, which The Times bought in January 2022 for $550 million, adding a publication that had some 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams. It publishes about 150 articles each day.
$550 million....bloody hell...I mean its good, but I didn't realise they spent that much on it. It was burning cash like crazy when they bought it and subscription model based on $1 / month, where you threatened to cancel, then they offer it to you again.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
That's a plausible hypothesis, FU, but they also hired a top firm of lawyers. That doesn't quite pass the smell test as regards humble folk, frustrated by the Beeb's inertia.
I've had a 17 yo son go off the rails, and we had a man to man conversation in the pub at which a few basic principles were sorted out. Happily, it all got better but if it hadn't my attitude would have been 'you're seventeen now, on your own head be it'. I cannot imagine however making it anyone else's business.
Where it is reported the mother is represented by a top law firm? They probably are, especially now, but I presume the Sun would do that.
The young person is, but also remember its claimed the BBC presenter has been in contact with them on a number of occasions over the past few days.
The mother is unlikely to have been the instigator of this affair, as in thinking one day that she could make a lot of stuff up about a well-known man on the TV and tell the Sun.
The injunction against the BBC in the WFZ case is interim only. Now that the presenter story has appeared, the BBC may not be so keen on saying how terrible it is that a quarter of the companies in WFZ's sector have received allegations of sexual harassment or violence against women but the sector has no policies or procedures for handling them. The obvious response would be that's the pot calling the kettle black. Perhaps they'll throw in the towel and not say anything about WFZ now.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Easy to said than done. Why didn't all the victims from Rotherham do that. Or the Harvy Weinstein victims. Or the Epstein etc. Most of it came out via the newspapers. And countless other stories.
Also, this particular story, there is a difference between illegality and immortality. There is one claim in the Sun report that mucky pictures were sent when 17, now I don't think a lot of people know that's illegal, as you can actually legally have sex with them.....also again its a bit of a grey area if your kid has set up an OnlyFans and doing it that way (when again supposed to be over 18).
The central claim by the mother seems to be more about the presenters money being an enabler for their kids drug habit. Its far from clear from the reports if that was direct, as in they knew this was the case, or if I said previously the BBC presenter joined their OnlyFans and was paying for uniques and the mother is angry that all that money is allowing their kid to get smacked off their tits every day.
One other factor which played at least a part in some cases (and in some rape and domestic abuse cases) is the "victim" withdraws charges or does not cooperate in the first place.
What tickles me is the way so many people have been assuming the claims in the Sun were gospel truth, against the weight of so much precedent.
The general assumption these days is guilty until proven innocent and sometimes even in spite of being proven innocent.
Why are we obliged to frame our beliefs in accordance with the arbitrary rules relating to English criminal law? They may affect what we can say here or elsewhere but why should they govern what we think? You don't understand the rules anyway. Google Gary Dobson for someone who turned out to be guilty despite being "proven innocent" and a good thing too.
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Turing really was a genius. The trouble with that film, apart from compressing what was really a code-breaking factory with thousands of people on site and many others around the world into half a dozen idiots squabbling in a hut, was not understanding its subject matter so that Turing's flash of inspiration at the end about how to use the bombes was in actual fact the reason he'd designed them in the beginning.
In one of the documentaries, the presenter (not that one!) asks the renowned statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at Bletchley Park, if they'd known Turing was gay. He replied it was lucky security never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war.
That documentary was rubbish, then. The effort did not rely solely on Turing; and besides, there was lots of other vital work going on at BP aside from the Enigma stuff.
Bill Tutte probably did more to end the war quickly than Turing, with his work on the Lorenz cipher. But no-one's ever heard of him.
They were a load of geniuses all working to shorten the war. They all deserve equal credit IMO; where one had intellectual failings and gaps, others covered them.
No-one said it was just Turing. I've just said there were thousands of people there. Nonetheless, it seems to be agreed by the BP boffins that Turing was the numero uno clever clogs.
Horizon did a documentary on Bill Tutte, and recently there was a book about his contribution by Jerry Roberts who'd been a German linguist at Bletchley Park. He is not that unknown any more. Tommy Flowers' former home in Poplar has a blue plaque.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
The natural end point of that logic is for the demographics in Britain to exactly match the global average.
Which would actually make us remarkably Asian, and largely Chinese and Indian at that.
I think this came about because they wanted to change from BAME, which is a term that can't be used any more, and settled on 'global majority'. But in doing so have arrived at a term that is highly provocative, incoherant and will ultimately just add fuel to the next Trump/Brexit style revolt.
As you say, it's a culture war provocation because the logic of the position is simultaneously called a conspiracy theory.
$550 million....bloody hell...I didn't realise they spent that much on it. It was burning cash like crazy when they bought it.
Have to admit, I don't understand how The Athletic makes money in the UK.
I think I've been paying £1/£1.99 a month for it since 2019.
Given how tech and media start ups have operated in the past, why do you assume it does make money? Outlets seem able to get enough capital together to go a very long time before anyone worries about how they will make money.
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Turing really was a genius. The trouble with that film, apart from compressing what was really a code-breaking factory with thousands of people on site and many others around the world into half a dozen idiots squabbling in a hut, was not understanding its subject matter so that Turing's flash of inspiration at the end about how to use the bombes was in actual fact the reason he'd designed them in the beginning.
In one of the documentaries, the presenter (not that one!) asks the renowned statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at Bletchley Park, if they'd known Turing was gay. He replied it was lucky security never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war.
That documentary was rubbish, then. The effort did not rely solely on Turing; and besides, there was lots of other vital work going on at BP aside from the Enigma stuff.
Bill Tutte probably did more to end the war quickly than Turing, with his work on the Lorenz cipher. But no-one's ever heard of him.
They were a load of geniuses all working to shorten the war. They all deserve equal credit IMO; where one had intellectual failings and gaps, others covered them.
No-one said it was just Turing. I've just said there were thousands of people there. Nonetheless, it seems to be agreed by the BP boffins that Turing was the numero uno clever clogs.
Horizon did a documentary on Bill Tutte, and recently there was a book about his contribution by Jerry Roberts who'd been a German linguist at Bletchley Park. He is not that unknown any more. Tommy Flowers' former home in Poplar has a blue plaque.
I mentioned the Roberts book on here a year or so ago. It's brilliant.
"Nonetheless, it seems to be agreed by the BP boffins that Turing was the numero uno clever clogs."
I have significant issues with that statement. Secrecy at BP was such that it is unlikely anyone aside from the *very* top bods had visibility of what everyone was working on. What you're likely seeing is post-war (and particularly post-1980s) familiarity.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
If it's false then someone presumably committed libel. How on earth are the BBC supposed to form an opinion on how likely it is to be true or not unless they investigate it?
Europe is being swallowed up by the right. Only Brexit Britain stands alone against the tide."
Not sure that's entirely true. Many of these "right" parties aren't of the right at all - they are strongly interventionist and pro-State - the bulk of their hostility is towards cultural opponents and outsiders as well as most supra-national institutions.
They are nationalist, socialist and populist saying all the things they think the people want to hear. The problem comes when they are in power and forced to live up to their rhetoric.
But you are talking from a perspective of economic right and left - which of course is not really what the NS is referring to. Certainly National Rally in France, AfD in Germany, The Swedish Democrats and Brothers of Italy are not in any way socially 'liberal' in the way we would understand it or in the way I would suggest most British parties - even the Conservatives - would be regarded.
It is also worth pointing out that (without tempting Godwin as I am not making a comparison to the parties I have already mentioned) the Nazis were also strongly interventionist and pro-state so that is hardly a criteria for liberal democratic ideology.
Fair point and of course I was thinking primarily economically.
To be fair, I'm not sure "left and "right" work in the social arena as well. There is, I think, a strong hint of social conservatism within Labour - I don't recall the likes of Straw and Blunkett as being particularly liberal Home Secretaries. It's that social conservatism which was once so prevalent in the Red Wall and probably kept seats Labour for longer then the economic argument.
I think FN, AfD and Sweden Democrats speak less to social conservatism than to social tradition - it's part of the nationalist schtick - a part of national identity is tradition and especially cultural tradition. It's another piece of the appeal - cultural and national individuality against the conformity of globalisation.
Liberalism is seen as part of globalisation because it welcomes other influences into culture. I'd argue national and cultural identity evolves as different influences come into a country or society. It's that evolution which the populists seek to demonise.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
As I said earlier, it was noteworthy how coy the Sun was being, and that while everyone took the story to be that the 17-year-old was sending nude pictures to the BBC star, when you read it carefully, the Sun never quite said that. Right from the beginning, the impression was that the Sun was not confident it could stand up the whole story.
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Probably. But Oppenheimer’s story is nonetheless a very interesting one.
I read - and enjoyed - the book very much. But if you want to go beyond Oppenheimer's role, then I would highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Rhodes. Which also won the Pullitzer.
Leo Szilard is a particularly interesting character - for instance, he spent years working with Einstein on a refrigerator. He also penned the Einstein–Szilárd letter, which directly led to the Manhattan project.
Like Bletchley Park, it's really hard to single out one genius in the Manhattan Project over all the others. Doing so tends to debase the others; without whom the projects would not have succeeded.
It feels like I'm breaking some awful convention to say that Turing was just one noteworthy genius of many at BP; but it's true, and that should not take anything away from his achievements. And from what I've read about him, I'd suggest he'd agree with me. He might even disapprove of all the attention given him.
Oppenheimer is a fascinating character, though. He was an incredible polymath who could understand all the work being done by people more specialist than him, and a fabulous organizer and manager. There aren't many people who could have stepped in and managed the project as well as he did.
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
What is a "global majority" in any case? It could mean people who are not black.
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
The natural end point of that logic is for the demographics in Britain to exactly match the global average.
Which would actually make us remarkably Asian, and largely Chinese and Indian at that.
I think this came about because they wanted to change from BAME, which is a term that can't be used any more, and settled on 'global majority'. But in doing so have arrived at a term that is highly provocative, incoherant and will ultimately just add fuel to the next Trump/Brexit style revolt.
As you say, it's a culture war provocation because the logic of the position is simultaneously called a conspiracy theory.
Interestingly, I'm being interviewed for a job in a public sector organisation tomorrow, and I happen to know the other candidate is a black woman. Happily, I'm fairly happy in my current role.
32% for Sunak still higher than most of the current Tory voteshares though
Never change, HYUFD, never change. The world would lose a unique voice.
Getting more unique by the week, if the polls are to be believed.
Things are either unique, or they are not. They cannot be somewhat unique.
#pedanticbetting.com
Could you explain that more simply, using less words?
Just like you can't be more dead, you can't be more unique.
Unique is often preceded by 'totally' for some reason.
But there are degrees of uniqueness. Say I have a fourpack of tinned beer. Each tin is unique but only by virtue of being one second younger or older and 3 inches further north or south than the closest thing to it. You are different from the human being who most closely resembles you in a million more ways than a tin of beer. You are more unique.
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Probably. But Oppenheimer’s story is nonetheless a very interesting one.
I read - and enjoyed - the book very much. But if you want to go beyond Oppenheimer's role, then I would highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Rhodes. Which also won the Pullitzer.
Leo Szilard is a particularly interesting character - for instance, he spent years working with Einstein on a refrigerator. He also penned the Einstein–Szilárd letter, which directly led to the Manhattan project.
Like Bletchley Park, it's really hard to single out one genius in the Manhattan Project over all the others. Doing so tends to debase the others; without whom the projects would not have succeeded.
It feels like I'm breaking some awful convention to say that Turing was just one noteworthy genius of many at BP; but it's true, and that should not take anything away from his achievements. And from what I've read about him, I'd suggest he'd agree with me. He might even disapprove of all the attention given him.
Oppenheimer is a fascinating character, though. He was an incredible polymath who could understand all the work being done by people more specialist than him, and a fabulous organizer and manager. There aren't many people who could have stepped in and managed the project as well as he did.
Being intellectually brilliant and also a terrific manager of people and resources must be very rare indeed, rarer than 'merely' being a polymath.
32% for Sunak still higher than most of the current Tory voteshares though
Never change, HYUFD, never change. The world would lose a unique voice.
Getting more unique by the week, if the polls are to be believed.
Things are either unique, or they are not. They cannot be somewhat unique.
#pedanticbetting.com
Could you explain that more simply, using less words?
Just like you can't be more dead, you can't be more unique.
Unique is often preceded by 'totally' for some reason.
But there are degrees of uniqueness. Say I have a fourpack of tinned beer. Each tin is unique but only by virtue of being one second younger or older and 3 inches further north or south than the closest thing to it. You are different from the human being who most closely resembles you in a million more ways than a tin of beer. You are more unique.
Brilliant. I'm going to use that. But surely you mean a gradation rather than degrees. Degrees imply discrete bands.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
If it's false then someone presumably committed libel. How on earth are the BBC supposed to form an opinion on how likely it is to be true or not unless they investigate it?
The BBC assessed the case correctly, as it seems to have turned out. Whether the assertion is true or false is all important. Leon and others didn't get themselves banned on here because of the BBC's HR processes, however inadequate they might be. The story wasn't about that.
I just read this in a job advert for Westminster Council.
"The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a global majority background and, while the role is open to all applicants, we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background, you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments."
I just wondered if this is really consistent with the Equality Act. Can it be used in such a way that gives an automatic preference to give a job to anyone who is part of a self declared 'Global Majority'?
It does seem peculiarly worded, even ignoring that Global Majority is a pretty odd term in the first place (especially as the wikipedia definition claims it is an alterantive to 'racislised' terms, when the whole thing is racialised).
I wonder if they would be disappointed if the wrong sort of Global Majority applied, and not enough visible diversity were achieved.
What is a "global majority" in any case? It could mean people who are not black.
Men?
Heterosexuals. Cismen. Ciswomen. Have they thought this through?
Had a lovely day shopping in Surrey. I do miss it up here. Devon is all very tranquil but I've missed the pizzazz.
Anyway, I gather this story is a load of cock-and-bull?
Jeez I despair at the bloody stupid state of this world. The lives ruined by hate-filled rubbish on social media.
p.s. Any chance everyone working at The Sun might be sent to jail? We can but hope. I wonder if @Cyclefree can do an article on this without mentioning the word 'trans'.
32% for Sunak still higher than most of the current Tory voteshares though
Never change, HYUFD, never change. The world would lose a unique voice.
Getting more unique by the week, if the polls are to be believed.
Things are either unique, or they are not. They cannot be somewhat unique.
#pedanticbetting.com
Could you explain that more simply, using less words?
Just like you can't be more dead, you can't be more unique.
Unique is often preceded by 'totally' for some reason.
But there are degrees of uniqueness. Say I have a fourpack of tinned beer. Each tin is unique but only by virtue of being one second younger or older and 3 inches further north or south than the closest thing to it. You are different from the human being who most closely resembles you in a million more ways than a tin of beer. You are more unique.
Brilliant. I'm going to use that. But surely you mean a gradation rather than degrees. Degrees imply discrete bands.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
If it's false then someone presumably committed libel. How on earth are the BBC supposed to form an opinion on how likely it is to be true or not unless they investigate it?
The BBC assessed the case correctly, as it seems to have turned out. Whether the assertion is true or false is all important. Leon and others didn't get themselves banned on here because of the BBC's HR processes, however inadequate they might be. The story wasn't about that.
The BBC received the allegations, didn't do much about them, and then when they read something in the Sun a few days later they suspended the guy. Now it turns out that the youngster denies anything inappropriate or unlawful took place. The BBC presumably only heard about that denial today.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
If it's false then someone presumably committed libel. How on earth are the BBC supposed to form an opinion on how likely it is to be true or not unless they investigate it?
The BBC assessed the case correctly, as it seems to have turned out. Whether the assertion is true or false is all important. Leon and others didn't get themselves banned on here because of the BBC's HR processes, however inadequate they might be. The story wasn't about that.
The BBC received the allegations, didn't do much about them, and then when they read something in the Sun a few days later they suspended the guy. Now it turns out that the youngster denies anything inappropriate or unlawful took place. The BBC presumably only heard about that denial today.
So much rubbish has clearly been spouted on this case that I don't think we should add to it by acting as prosecution, jury, and judge over the BBC.
You don't have the facts of this. Not many people do. But the lawyer acting for the young person has represented that person by saying it's all a load of rubbish.
QED, I'd have thought.
But a massive learning lesson for the kind of people who chase every single piece of online tittle-tattle they can snort up.
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Turing really was a genius. The trouble with that film, apart from compressing what was really a code-breaking factory with thousands of people on site and many others around the world into half a dozen idiots squabbling in a hut, was not understanding its subject matter so that Turing's flash of inspiration at the end about how to use the bombes was in actual fact the reason he'd designed them in the beginning.
In one of the documentaries, the presenter (not that one!) asks the renowned statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at Bletchley Park, if they'd known Turing was gay. He replied it was lucky security never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war.
That documentary was rubbish, then. The effort did not rely solely on Turing; and besides, there was lots of other vital work going on at BP aside from the Enigma stuff.
Bill Tutte probably did more to end the war quickly than Turing, with his work on the Lorenz cipher. But no-one's ever heard of him.
They were a load of geniuses all working to shorten the war. They all deserve equal credit IMO; where one had intellectual failings and gaps, others covered them.
No-one said it was just Turing. I've just said there were thousands of people there. Nonetheless, it seems to be agreed by the BP boffins that Turing was the numero uno clever clogs.
Horizon did a documentary on Bill Tutte, and recently there was a book about his contribution by Jerry Roberts who'd been a German linguist at Bletchley Park. He is not that unknown any more. Tommy Flowers' former home in Poplar has a blue plaque.
I mentioned the Roberts book on here a year or so ago. It's brilliant.
"Nonetheless, it seems to be agreed by the BP boffins that Turing was the numero uno clever clogs."
I have significant issues with that statement. Secrecy at BP was such that it is unlikely anyone aside from the *very* top bods had visibility of what everyone was working on. What you're likely seeing is post-war (and particularly post-1980s) familiarity.
Yes but that is when the people who'd worked at Bletchley Park were still alive and could be interviewed. As one of them said in another documentary, when very clever people suggest something, you often ask yourself, "why didn't I think of that?". You never thought that with Alan Turing.
Remember Turing had already established his reputation as one of the world's leading mathematicians before the war, with his work on computability and the Turing machine. He was not just another smart guy recruited by chance. It was Turing's automation of various processes that meant Bletchley Park could keep up with the flow of thousands of messages a day coming in from the Y-stations (listening posts around the world). It was this that turned the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic that meant Britain was not blockaded and starved out of the war.
If there is a problem with the Bletchley Park story, it is not the prominence of Turing, it is that by definition, it ignores and overshadows the brilliant work being done in other areas, from radar, jet engines, the rapid development of weaponry of all types. Have you read Budiansky's book Blackett's War, about what might now be called operational research and the U-boat menace and featuring several scientists who had won or would win Nobel prizes? Irritatingly, it is not available on kindle.
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Probably. But Oppenheimer’s story is nonetheless a very interesting one.
I read - and enjoyed - the book very much. But if you want to go beyond Oppenheimer's role, then I would highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Rhodes. Which also won the Pullitzer.
Leo Szilard is a particularly interesting character - for instance, he spent years working with Einstein on a refrigerator. He also penned the Einstein–Szilárd letter, which directly led to the Manhattan project.
Like Bletchley Park, it's really hard to single out one genius in the Manhattan Project over all the others. Doing so tends to debase the others; without whom the projects would not have succeeded.
It feels like I'm breaking some awful convention to say that Turing was just one noteworthy genius of many at BP; but it's true, and that should not take anything away from his achievements. And from what I've read about him, I'd suggest he'd agree with me. He might even disapprove of all the attention given him.
Oppenheimer is a fascinating character, though. He was an incredible polymath who could understand all the work being done by people more specialist than him, and a fabulous organizer and manager. There aren't many people who could have stepped in and managed the project as well as he did.
Groves might both agree and disagree with you on that.
32% for Sunak still higher than most of the current Tory voteshares though
Never change, HYUFD, never change. The world would lose a unique voice.
Getting more unique by the week, if the polls are to be believed.
Things are either unique, or they are not. They cannot be somewhat unique.
#pedanticbetting.com
Could you explain that more simply, using less words?
Just like you can't be more dead, you can't be more unique.
Unique is often preceded by 'totally' for some reason.
But there are degrees of uniqueness. Say I have a fourpack of tinned beer. Each tin is unique but only by virtue of being one second younger or older and 3 inches further north or south than the closest thing to it. You are different from the human being who most closely resembles you in a million more ways than a tin of beer. You are more unique.
Yes I'm totally unique in that sense. Certainly compared to some can of lager.
Had a lovely day shopping in Surrey. I do miss it up here. Devon is all very tranquil but I've missed the pizzazz.
Anyway, I gather this story is a load of cock-and-bull?
Jeez I despair at the bloody stupid state of this world. The lives ruined by hate-filled rubbish on social media.
p.s. Any chance everyone working at The Sun might be sent to jail? We can but hope. I wonder if @Cyclefree can do an article on this without mentioning the word 'trans'.
The juxtaposition of your final paragraph and your ps....
If indeed this is Cock-and-Bull, as now seems almost certain, then it will surely rank high in the all-time list of media gullibility and stupidity?
The Hitler Diaries is a particular favourite of mine. But lives weren't so damaged in the process. The Sun appear to have made the most spectacular arses of themselves.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
If it's false then someone presumably committed libel. How on earth are the BBC supposed to form an opinion on how likely it is to be true or not unless they investigate it?
The BBC assessed the case correctly, as it seems to have turned out. Whether the assertion is true or false is all important. Leon and others didn't get themselves banned on here because of the BBC's HR processes, however inadequate they might be. The story wasn't about that.
The BBC received the allegations, didn't do much about them, and then when they read something in the Sun a few days later they suspended the guy. Now it turns out that the youngster denies anything inappropriate or unlawful took place. The BBC presumably only heard about that denial today.
So much rubbish has clearly been spouted on this case that I don't think we should add to it by acting as prosecution, jury, and judge over the BBC.
You don't have the facts of this. Not many people do. But the lawyer acting for the young person has represented that person by saying it's all a load of rubbish.
QED, I'd have thought.
But a massive learning lesson for the kind of people who chase every single piece of online tittle-tattle they can snort up.
It's worth repeated that the BBC has stated that the complaint made in May was of a different nature from the report in the Sun. As no one has a clue what story the mother told the BBC in May, it is rather stupid for anyone to try to sit in judgment on the BBC's response to it!
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
If it's false then someone presumably committed libel. How on earth are the BBC supposed to form an opinion on how likely it is to be true or not unless they investigate it?
The BBC assessed the case correctly, as it seems to have turned out. Whether the assertion is true or false is all important. Leon and others didn't get themselves banned on here because of the BBC's HR processes, however inadequate they might be. The story wasn't about that.
The BBC received the allegations, didn't do much about them, and then when they read something in the Sun a few days later they suspended the guy. Now it turns out that the youngster denies anything inappropriate or unlawful took place. The BBC presumably only heard about that denial today.
So much rubbish has clearly been spouted on this case that I don't think we should add to it by acting as prosecution, jury, and judge over the BBC.
You don't have the facts of this. Not many people do. But the lawyer acting for the young person has represented that person by saying it's all a load of rubbish.
QED, I'd have thought.
But a massive learning lesson for the kind of people who chase every single piece of online tittle-tattle they can snort up.
Yours is an intensely silly post. You're already acting as judge, jury, and prosecution to declare an acquittal.
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Probably. But Oppenheimer’s story is nonetheless a very interesting one.
I read - and enjoyed - the book very much. But if you want to go beyond Oppenheimer's role, then I would highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Rhodes. Which also won the Pullitzer.
Leo Szilard is a particularly interesting character - for instance, he spent years working with Einstein on a refrigerator. He also penned the Einstein–Szilárd letter, which directly led to the Manhattan project.
Like Bletchley Park, it's really hard to single out one genius in the Manhattan Project over all the others. Doing so tends to debase the others; without whom the projects would not have succeeded.
It feels like I'm breaking some awful convention to say that Turing was just one noteworthy genius of many at BP; but it's true, and that should not take anything away from his achievements. And from what I've read about him, I'd suggest he'd agree with me. He might even disapprove of all the attention given him.
Oppenheimer is a fascinating character, though. He was an incredible polymath who could understand all the work being done by people more specialist than him, and a fabulous organizer and manager. There aren't many people who could have stepped in and managed the project as well as he did.
Groves might both agree and disagree with you on that.
Groves thought that Oppenheimer was indispensable for managing the scientists.
For managing the overall project quite a few people thought Groves, if not indispensable, got it done faster than em anyone else could.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
If it's false then someone presumably committed libel. How on earth are the BBC supposed to form an opinion on how likely it is to be true or not unless they investigate it?
The BBC assessed the case correctly, as it seems to have turned out. Whether the assertion is true or false is all important. Leon and others didn't get themselves banned on here because of the BBC's HR processes, however inadequate they might be. The story wasn't about that.
The BBC received the allegations, didn't do much about them, and then when they read something in the Sun a few days later they suspended the guy. Now it turns out that the youngster denies anything inappropriate or unlawful took place. The BBC presumably only heard about that denial today.
So much rubbish has clearly been spouted on this case that I don't think we should add to it by acting as prosecution, jury, and judge over the BBC.
You don't have the facts of this. Not many people do. But the lawyer acting for the young person has represented that person by saying it's all a load of rubbish.
QED, I'd have thought.
But a massive learning lesson for the kind of people who chase every single piece of online tittle-tattle they can snort up.
Yours is an intensely silly post. You're already acting as judge, jury, and prosecution to declare an acquittal.
Also, QED means diametrically the opposite of what he thinks it means.
If indeed this is Cock-and-Bull, as now seems almost certain, then it will surely rank high in the all-time list of media gullibility and stupidity?
The Hitler Diaries is a particular favourite of mine. But lives weren't so damaged in the process. The Sun appear to have made the most spectacular arses of themselves.
Parents of the teenager still sticking to their story.
'The parents of a youngster at the centre of the BBC presenter scandal tonight told how they had spoken out to protect their child.
Had a lovely day shopping in Surrey. I do miss it up here. Devon is all very tranquil but I've missed the pizzazz.
Anyway, I gather this story is a load of cock-and-bull?
Jeez I despair at the bloody stupid state of this world. The lives ruined by hate-filled rubbish on social media.
p.s. Any chance everyone working at The Sun might be sent to jail? We can but hope. I wonder if @Cyclefree can do an article on this without mentioning the word 'trans'.
The juxtaposition of your final paragraph and your ps....
I just think it would be lovely to have the benefit of @Cyclefree's excellent legal mind without it slipping and sliding inexorably into something about trans, like all paths to Old Man Willow.
If indeed this is Cock-and-Bull, as now seems almost certain, then it will surely rank high in the all-time list of media gullibility and stupidity?
The Hitler Diaries is a particular favourite of mine. But lives weren't so damaged in the process. The Sun appear to have made the most spectacular arses of themselves.
Maybe, just maybe, the people believing the story from the person's lawyer (presumably paid for by BBC star) are the gullible, stupid ones?
We know nothing at this stage except what the Sun and the lawyer have said
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
If it's false then someone presumably committed libel. How on earth are the BBC supposed to form an opinion on how likely it is to be true or not unless they investigate it?
The BBC assessed the case correctly, as it seems to have turned out. Whether the assertion is true or false is all important. Leon and others didn't get themselves banned on here because of the BBC's HR processes, however inadequate they might be. The story wasn't about that.
The BBC received the allegations, didn't do much about them, and then when they read something in the Sun a few days later they suspended the guy. Now it turns out that the youngster denies anything inappropriate or unlawful took place. The BBC presumably only heard about that denial today.
So much rubbish has clearly been spouted on this case that I don't think we should add to it by acting as prosecution, jury, and judge over the BBC.
You don't have the facts of this. Not many people do. But the lawyer acting for the young person has represented that person by saying it's all a load of rubbish.
QED, I'd have thought.
But a massive learning lesson for the kind of people who chase every single piece of online tittle-tattle they can snort up.
Yours is an intensely silly post. You're already acting as judge, jury, and prosecution to declare an acquittal.
Also, QED means diametrically the opposite of what he thinks it means.
It doesn't in fact. QED, quod erat demonstrandum. I used it because it's quite hard to dispute the lawyer representing the actual alleged victim.
Unless of course you know the person better, the law better, and are better able to represent them?
And it's she. Which if you'd been around here less than a nappy rash you'd know. Unless of course you just assume all people you debate with online are male? Either way, back off sunshine.
In hindsight, the idea that the dilletante, lazy Hitler would take time out to right a diary is absurd. It goes against everything we know of him, in contrast to say Goebbels, who was hardworking and left his diaries for posterity.
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Turing really was a genius. The trouble with that film, apart from compressing what was really a code-breaking factory with thousands of people on site and many others around the world into half a dozen idiots squabbling in a hut, was not understanding its subject matter so that Turing's flash of inspiration at the end about how to use the bombes was in actual fact the reason he'd designed them in the beginning.
In one of the documentaries, the presenter (not that one!) asks the renowned statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at Bletchley Park, if they'd known Turing was gay. He replied it was lucky security never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war.
That documentary was rubbish, then. The effort did not rely solely on Turing; and besides, there was lots of other vital work going on at BP aside from the Enigma stuff.
Bill Tutte probably did more to end the war quickly than Turing, with his work on the Lorenz cipher. But no-one's ever heard of him.
They were a load of geniuses all working to shorten the war. They all deserve equal credit IMO; where one had intellectual failings and gaps, others covered them.
No-one said it was just Turing. I've just said there were thousands of people there. Nonetheless, it seems to be agreed by the BP boffins that Turing was the numero uno clever clogs.
Horizon did a documentary on Bill Tutte, and recently there was a book about his contribution by Jerry Roberts who'd been a German linguist at Bletchley Park. He is not that unknown any more. Tommy Flowers' former home in Poplar has a blue plaque.
I mentioned the Roberts book on here a year or so ago. It's brilliant.
"Nonetheless, it seems to be agreed by the BP boffins that Turing was the numero uno clever clogs."
I have significant issues with that statement. Secrecy at BP was such that it is unlikely anyone aside from the *very* top bods had visibility of what everyone was working on. What you're likely seeing is post-war (and particularly post-1980s) familiarity.
Yes but that is when the people who'd worked at Bletchley Park were still alive and could be interviewed. As one of them said in another documentary, when very clever people suggest something, you often ask yourself, "why didn't I think of that?". You never thought that with Alan Turing.
Remember Turing had already established his reputation as one of the world's leading mathematicians before the war, with his work on computability and the Turing machine. He was not just another smart guy recruited by chance. It was Turing's automation of various processes that meant Bletchley Park could keep up with the flow of thousands of messages a day coming in from the Y-stations (listening posts around the world). It was this that turned the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic that meant Britain was not blockaded and starved out of the war.
If there is a problem with the Bletchley Park story, it is not the prominence of Turing, it is that by definition, it ignores and overshadows the brilliant work being done in other areas, from radar, jet engines, the rapid development of weaponry of all types. Have you read Budiansky's book Blackett's War, about what might now be called operational research and the U-boat menace and featuring several scientists who had won or would win Nobel prizes? Irritatingly, it is not available on kindle.
The war museum in Liverpool is fascinating on the U-boat war & the simulations done to work out what tactics might work to defend against the U-boats & the weapons that the Germans developed for them as the war progressed. Recommended if you’re ever in the area.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
If it's false then someone presumably committed libel. How on earth are the BBC supposed to form an opinion on how likely it is to be true or not unless they investigate it?
The BBC assessed the case correctly, as it seems to have turned out. Whether the assertion is true or false is all important. Leon and others didn't get themselves banned on here because of the BBC's HR processes, however inadequate they might be. The story wasn't about that.
The BBC received the allegations, didn't do much about them, and then when they read something in the Sun a few days later they suspended the guy. Now it turns out that the youngster denies anything inappropriate or unlawful took place. The BBC presumably only heard about that denial today.
So much rubbish has clearly been spouted on this case that I don't think we should add to it by acting as prosecution, jury, and judge over the BBC.
You don't have the facts of this. Not many people do. But the lawyer acting for the young person has represented that person by saying it's all a load of rubbish.
QED, I'd have thought.
But a massive learning lesson for the kind of people who chase every single piece of online tittle-tattle they can snort up.
Yours is an intensely silly post. You're already acting as judge, jury, and prosecution to declare an acquittal.
Also, QED means diametrically the opposite of what he thinks it means.
It doesn't in fact. QED, quod erat demonstrandum. I used it because it's quite hard to dispute the lawyer representing the actual alleged victim.
Unless of course you know the person better, the law better, and are better able to represent them?
And it's she. Which if you'd been around here less than a nappy rash you'd know. Unless of course you just assume all people you debate with online are male? Either way, back off sunshine.
Do you take a lot of caffeine before posting? Or any similar plant based stimulant?
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Probably. But Oppenheimer’s story is nonetheless a very interesting one.
I read - and enjoyed - the book very much. But if you want to go beyond Oppenheimer's role, then I would highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Rhodes. Which also won the Pullitzer.
Leo Szilard is a particularly interesting character - for instance, he spent years working with Einstein on a refrigerator. He also penned the Einstein–Szilárd letter, which directly led to the Manhattan project.
Like Bletchley Park, it's really hard to single out one genius in the Manhattan Project over all the others. Doing so tends to debase the others; without whom the projects would not have succeeded.
It feels like I'm breaking some awful convention to say that Turing was just one noteworthy genius of many at BP; but it's true, and that should not take anything away from his achievements. And from what I've read about him, I'd suggest he'd agree with me. He might even disapprove of all the attention given him.
Oppenheimer is a fascinating character, though. He was an incredible polymath who could understand all the work being done by people more specialist than him, and a fabulous organizer and manager. There aren't many people who could have stepped in and managed the project as well as he did.
Groves might both agree and disagree with you on that.
Groves thought that Oppenheimer was indispensable for managing the scientists.
For managing the overall project quite a few people thought Groves, if not indispensable, got it done faster than em anyone else could.
Reminds me that I need to reread Critical Assembly by Hoddeson et al. On the technical rather than theoretical physics side of Los Alamos.
If indeed this is Cock-and-Bull, as now seems almost certain, then it will surely rank high in the all-time list of media gullibility and stupidity?
The Hitler Diaries is a particular favourite of mine. But lives weren't so damaged in the process. The Sun appear to have made the most spectacular arses of themselves.
Parents of the teenager still sticking to their story.
'The parents of a youngster at the centre of the BBC presenter scandal tonight told how they had spoken out to protect their child.
If indeed this is Cock-and-Bull, as now seems almost certain, then it will surely rank high in the all-time list of media gullibility and stupidity?
The Hitler Diaries is a particular favourite of mine. But lives weren't so damaged in the process. The Sun appear to have made the most spectacular arses of themselves.
Parents of the teenager still sticking to their story.
'The parents of a youngster at the centre of the BBC presenter scandal tonight told how they had spoken out to protect their child.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Easy to said than done. Why didn't all the victims from Rotherham do that. Or the Harvy Weinstein victims. Or the Epstein etc. Most of it came out via the newspapers. And countless other stories.
Also, this particular story, there is a difference between illegality and immortality. There is one claim in the Sun report that mucky pictures were sent when 17, now I don't think a lot of people know that's illegal, as you can actually legally have sex with them.....also again its a bit of a grey area if your kid has set up an OnlyFans and doing it that way (when again supposed to be over 18).
The central claim by the mother seems to be more about the presenters money being an enabler for their kids drug habit. Its far from clear from the reports if that was direct, as in they knew this was the case, or if I said previously the BBC presenter joined their OnlyFans and was paying for uniques and the mother is angry that all that money is allowing their kid to get smacked off their tits every day.
One other factor which played at least a part in some cases (and in some rape and domestic abuse cases) is the "victim" withdraws charges or does not cooperate in the first place.
What tickles me is the way so many people have been assuming the claims in the Sun were gospel truth, against the weight of so much precedent.
The general assumption these days is guilty until proven innocent and sometimes even in spite of being proven innocent.
Why are we obliged to frame our beliefs in accordance with the arbitrary rules relating to English criminal law? They may affect what we can say here or elsewhere but why should they govern what we think? You don't understand the rules anyway. Google Gary Dobson for someone who turned out to be guilty despite being "proven innocent" and a good thing too.
We aren't so obliged. You are confusing differing categories. Our beliefs as such are entirely free and unfettered. As a belief is neither more nor less than mental assent this is self evident, and is as true in North Korea as it is here.
Different from beliefs are words uttered in public, in which there are some limitations in law, and many more limitations by the reputational damage which uttering certain beliefs might occasion. (That the earth is flat, that the holocaust didn't occur, that Trump is a good chap and so on).
Different still are the formal procedures arising from the need for justice. No-one can stop me believing that anyone called Keith must be guilty of any charge levelled at him without evidence. But it seems to me good that our procedures do their best to ensure that all Keiths are not condemned out of hand by the understandable prevalence of this belief, though in the end it can't be guaranteed.
As to the relation between belief and what is actually the case, well, knowledge is usually defined as justified true belief. How you know when you have it is a discussion making little progress since Plato first thought it up, and it remains lively. For a hilarious and bravura recent development (1963), Google 'The Gettier problem'.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Does it matter all that much whether or not the parents are nice people, or acting out of the purest of motives? They're not running a major national broadcaster, so their character is something of a second order question.
The reason the BBC is coming in for a lot of flak is that (and I don't think the BBC are denying this) allegations of a very serious nature were made to them and weeks passed without a robust and prompt assessment of credibility including bringing the celeb in and saying "look, we need chapter and verse right now about how you know this young person, if you do, and exactly what happened - and if a single aspect of your story doesn't check out, you're finished". The potentially criminal aspects should also have been escalated to the Police - lots of organisations have run into trouble treating alleged offences (particularly of a sexual nature) as an employment rather than criminal matter.
Now even if it turns out that the allegation is flat out untrue (it seems unlikely the young person was a stranger to the celeb, but maybe the story wasn't as the parents describe) there are serious questions over BBC handling of it - that isn't a functional system for dealing with serious allegations about top people.
Maybe. But the BBC failing to "investigate" a false and potentially libelous claim against one of its staff members isn't much of an accusation.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
If it's false then someone presumably committed libel. How on earth are the BBC supposed to form an opinion on how likely it is to be true or not unless they investigate it?
The BBC assessed the case correctly, as it seems to have turned out. Whether the assertion is true or false is all important. Leon and others didn't get themselves banned on here because of the BBC's HR processes, however inadequate they might be. The story wasn't about that.
The BBC received the allegations, didn't do much about them, and then when they read something in the Sun a few days later they suspended the guy. Now it turns out that the youngster denies anything inappropriate or unlawful took place. The BBC presumably only heard about that denial today.
So much rubbish has clearly been spouted on this case that I don't think we should add to it by acting as prosecution, jury, and judge over the BBC.
You don't have the facts of this. Not many people do. But the lawyer acting for the young person has represented that person by saying it's all a load of rubbish.
QED, I'd have thought.
But a massive learning lesson for the kind of people who chase every single piece of online tittle-tattle they can snort up.
Yours is an intensely silly post. You're already acting as judge, jury, and prosecution to declare an acquittal.
Also, QED means diametrically the opposite of what he thinks it means.
It doesn't in fact. QED, quod erat demonstrandum. I used it because it's quite hard to dispute the lawyer representing the actual alleged victim.
Unless of course you know the person better, the law better, and are better able to represent them?
And it's she. Which if you'd been around here less than a nappy rash you'd know. Unless of course you just assume all people you debate with online are male? Either way, back off sunshine.
Grooming victims are often in denial that anything wrong has been done to them. See also Stockholm Syndrome etc for other parallels too.
Withholding judgment is the rational thing to do and let justice take its course. You seem eager to rush to judgment, which is no more rational than those rushing to say someone definitely did something wrong.
If indeed this is Cock-and-Bull, as now seems almost certain, then it will surely rank high in the all-time list of media gullibility and stupidity?
The Hitler Diaries is a particular favourite of mine. But lives weren't so damaged in the process. The Sun appear to have made the most spectacular arses of themselves.
Parents of the teenager still sticking to their story.
'The parents of a youngster at the centre of the BBC presenter scandal tonight told how they had spoken out to protect their child.
If indeed this is Cock-and-Bull, as now seems almost certain, then it will surely rank high in the all-time list of media gullibility and stupidity?
The Hitler Diaries is a particular favourite of mine. But lives weren't so damaged in the process. The Sun appear to have made the most spectacular arses of themselves.
Parents of the teenager still sticking to their story.
'The parents of a youngster at the centre of the BBC presenter scandal tonight told how they had spoken out to protect their child.
Note that even in that Sun link, although they more than once talk of payment for sordid images since the boy was 17, they never quite say that the first such exchange happened while the boy was 17.
In hindsight, the idea that the dilletante, lazy Hitler would take time out to right a diary is absurd. It goes against everything we know of him, in contrast to say Goebbels, who was hardworking and left his diaries for posterity.
If indeed this is Cock-and-Bull, as now seems almost certain, then it will surely rank high in the all-time list of media gullibility and stupidity?
The Hitler Diaries is a particular favourite of mine. But lives weren't so damaged in the process. The Sun appear to have made the most spectacular arses of themselves.
Parents of the teenager still sticking to their story.
'The parents of a youngster at the centre of the BBC presenter scandal tonight told how they had spoken out to protect their child.
Note that even in that Sun link, although they more than once talk of payment for sordid images since the boy was 17, they never quite say that the first such exchange happened while the boy was 17.
Its very carefully worded...
"The unnamed top BBC star is off air while allegations he paid the teenager for sexual pictures are investigated. Sleazy messages are alleged to have started in 2020, when the youngster was 17."
HOWEVER....that doesn't mean sexually explicit images at 17, which is where we go from moral issues to legal issues.
I wonder if the Sun thought that the presenter would have been forced to say something by now and would never get into the weeds of the exact timing of the first nude.
My fear for 'Oppenheimer' is that it puts the accomplishments of many geniuses onto the shoulders of one man; in the same way the hideous 'Imitation Game' did with Turing.
IMV it'd be more interesting to tell the story of Teller (again, after Dr Strangelove), or Leo Szilard. Or the whole group of foreigners who escaped fascism to create nuclear physics, reactors and bombs as we know them. And to chuck in some Tube Alloys for blighty as well...
Or the competition between German and US scientists, and all that entailed (though it turned out the Germans had pretty much given up on their nuke efforts).
Turing really was a genius. The trouble with that film, apart from compressing what was really a code-breaking factory with thousands of people on site and many others around the world into half a dozen idiots squabbling in a hut, was not understanding its subject matter so that Turing's flash of inspiration at the end about how to use the bombes was in actual fact the reason he'd designed them in the beginning.
In one of the documentaries, the presenter (not that one!) asks the renowned statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at Bletchley Park, if they'd known Turing was gay. He replied it was lucky security never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war.
That documentary was rubbish, then. The effort did not rely solely on Turing; and besides, there was lots of other vital work going on at BP aside from the Enigma stuff.
Bill Tutte probably did more to end the war quickly than Turing, with his work on the Lorenz cipher. But no-one's ever heard of him.
They were a load of geniuses all working to shorten the war. They all deserve equal credit IMO; where one had intellectual failings and gaps, others covered them.
No-one said it was just Turing. I've just said there were thousands of people there. Nonetheless, it seems to be agreed by the BP boffins that Turing was the numero uno clever clogs.
Horizon did a documentary on Bill Tutte, and recently there was a book about his contribution by Jerry Roberts who'd been a German linguist at Bletchley Park. He is not that unknown any more. Tommy Flowers' former home in Poplar has a blue plaque.
I mentioned the Roberts book on here a year or so ago. It's brilliant.
"Nonetheless, it seems to be agreed by the BP boffins that Turing was the numero uno clever clogs."
I have significant issues with that statement. Secrecy at BP was such that it is unlikely anyone aside from the *very* top bods had visibility of what everyone was working on. What you're likely seeing is post-war (and particularly post-1980s) familiarity.
Yes but that is when the people who'd worked at Bletchley Park were still alive and could be interviewed. As one of them said in another documentary, when very clever people suggest something, you often ask yourself, "why didn't I think of that?". You never thought that with Alan Turing.
Remember Turing had already established his reputation as one of the world's leading mathematicians before the war, with his work on computability and the Turing machine. He was not just another smart guy recruited by chance. It was Turing's automation of various processes that meant Bletchley Park could keep up with the flow of thousands of messages a day coming in from the Y-stations (listening posts around the world). It was this that turned the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic that meant Britain was not blockaded and starved out of the war.
If there is a problem with the Bletchley Park story, it is not the prominence of Turing, it is that by definition, it ignores and overshadows the brilliant work being done in other areas, from radar, jet engines, the rapid development of weaponry of all types. Have you read Budiansky's book Blackett's War, about what might now be called operational research and the U-boat menace and featuring several scientists who had won or would win Nobel prizes? Irritatingly, it is not available on kindle.
The war museum in Liverpool is fascinating on the U-boat war & the simulations done to work out what tactics might work to defend against the U-boats & the weapons that the Germans developed for them as the war progressed. Recommended if you’re ever in the area.
There used to be an actual U-boat at Birkenhead on the other side of the water. Alas it closed in 2020 but mighe be reopened in due course. Looks in pretty grim internal condition from the photo - presumably not as good as the Chicago one. But this one was from a shipwreck ISTR.
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Easy to said than done. Why didn't all the victims from Rotherham do that. Or the Harvy Weinstein victims. Or the Epstein etc. Most of it came out via the newspapers. And countless other stories.
Also, this particular story, there is a difference between illegality and immortality. There is one claim in the Sun report that mucky pictures were sent when 17, now I don't think a lot of people know that's illegal, as you can actually legally have sex with them.....also again its a bit of a grey area if your kid has set up an OnlyFans and doing it that way (when again supposed to be over 18).
The central claim by the mother seems to be more about the presenters money being an enabler for their kids drug habit. Its far from clear from the reports if that was direct, as in they knew this was the case, or if I said previously the BBC presenter joined their OnlyFans and was paying for uniques and the mother is angry that all that money is allowing their kid to get smacked off their tits every day.
One other factor which played at least a part in some cases (and in some rape and domestic abuse cases) is the "victim" withdraws charges or does not cooperate in the first place.
What tickles me is the way so many people have been assuming the claims in the Sun were gospel truth, against the weight of so much precedent.
The fact that the Sun poses as some kind of moral arbiter in matters such as these, a "newspaper" that used to carry pictures of topless teenage girls on its third page, is already pretty funny.
It is the same paper which ran a countdown to when Charlotte Church would turn 16.
It didn't, though. Widely believed to have happened, but didn't happen.
If indeed this is Cock-and-Bull, as now seems almost certain, then it will surely rank high in the all-time list of media gullibility and stupidity?
The Hitler Diaries is a particular favourite of mine. But lives weren't so damaged in the process. The Sun appear to have made the most spectacular arses of themselves.
Parents of the teenager still sticking to their story.
'The parents of a youngster at the centre of the BBC presenter scandal tonight told how they had spoken out to protect their child.
Note that even in that Sun link, although they more than once talk of payment for sordid images since the boy was 17, they never quite say that the first such exchange happened while the boy was 17.
Its very carefully worded...
"The unnamed top BBC star is off air while allegations he paid the teenager for sexual pictures are investigated. Sleazy messages are alleged to have started in 2020, when the youngster was 17."
What is the legal status of this mother in the case? The person involved is an adult now.
Seekers after truth seldom find their way to the Sun.
How about mother finds son with a stash of coke and son comes out with a cock and bull story?
Hopefully Carter Ruck hasn't forgotten how to charge and the Sun goes the way of it's stablemate the NOTW.
Exactly what I thought, Roger.
As a concerned parent, would you really want to deal with the issue by going to any newspaper, never mind the currant bun.
The story is they did go direct to the BBC 7 weeks ago and it was decided no further action was required.
Now the Sun could have been taken for a ride. But without being funny, lets say you aren't that bright or connected, your kid has gone off the rails, for whatever reason you believe this presenter has done wrong and you make an unclear rambling report to somebody at the BBC, and they "file" it.
You or I would more than likely know the right sort of people, who know people, who know people, to take this to task. It isn't exactly unheard of that less worldlywise people have in the past have phoned the tip lines at newspapers out of desperation that somebody listens about a wrong been done.
For instance, nobody listened to the victims of Rotherham grooming gangs for ages, I believe they ended telling unsavoury people from which it got to Nick Griffin shouting about it. Not exactly the person you want fighting your cause. It was the one bloke in the Times who finally followed up on it and he was smeared as racist after the first article.
If you were concerned about your son's abuse don't you think the police might have been a more appropriate first port of call? I don't think anyone however stupid sees the Sun as a place to get justice.
A cash machine perhaps....
Easy to said than done. Why didn't all the victims from Rotherham do that. Or the Harvy Weinstein victims. Or the Epstein etc. Most of it came out via the newspapers. And countless other stories.
Also, this particular story, there is a difference between illegality and immortality. There is one claim in the Sun report that mucky pictures were sent when 17, now I don't think a lot of people know that's illegal, as you can actually legally have sex with them.....also again its a bit of a grey area if your kid has set up an OnlyFans and doing it that way (when again supposed to be over 18).
The central claim by the mother seems to be more about the presenters money being an enabler for their kids drug habit. Its far from clear from the reports if that was direct, as in they knew this was the case, or if I said previously the BBC presenter joined their OnlyFans and was paying for uniques and the mother is angry that all that money is allowing their kid to get smacked off their tits every day.
One other factor which played at least a part in some cases (and in some rape and domestic abuse cases) is the "victim" withdraws charges or does not cooperate in the first place.
What tickles me is the way so many people have been assuming the claims in the Sun were gospel truth, against the weight of so much precedent.
The general assumption these days is guilty until proven innocent and sometimes even in spite of being proven innocent.
Why are we obliged to frame our beliefs in accordance with the arbitrary rules relating to English criminal law? They may affect what we can say here or elsewhere but why should they govern what we think? You don't understand the rules anyway. Google Gary Dobson for someone who turned out to be guilty despite being "proven innocent" and a good thing too.
We aren't so obliged. You are confusing differing categories. Our beliefs as such are entirely free and unfettered. As a belief is neither more nor less than mental assent this is self evident, and is as true in North Korea as it is here.
Different from beliefs are words uttered in public, in which there are some limitations in law, and many more limitations by the reputational damage which uttering certain beliefs might occasion. (That the earth is flat, that the holocaust didn't occur, that Trump is a good chap and so on).
Different still are the formal procedures arising from the need for justice. No-one can stop me believing that anyone called Keith must be guilty of any charge levelled at him without evidence. But it seems to me good that our procedures do their best to ensure that all Keiths are not condemned out of hand by the understandable prevalence of this belief, though in the end it can't be guaranteed.
As to the relation between belief and what is actually the case, well, knowledge is usually defined as justified true belief. How you know when you have it is a discussion making little progress since Plato first thought it up, and it remains lively. For a hilarious and bravura recent development (1963), Google 'The Gettier problem'.
Sure. I have read the Theaetetus. I can even spell it without looking it up. It just pisses me off, this Innocent until proven guilty stuff. It is bollocks as a statement of the law and bollocks on steroids when dressed up as a principle of epistemology.
Comments
Of course not.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/guardian-journalist-accused-of-recklessly-disclosing-password-2347842.html
Which would actually make us remarkably Asian, and largely Chinese and Indian at that.
(though by saying it was Szilard's reactor, I'm committing the sin I mentioned below of not crediting Fermi, Weil and others ... )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1
Instead the ruling was spun by much of the media as solely about it being anti-minority.....
Defying a High Court order could have 'interesting' consequences....
Not a million miles from Westminster council, now controlled by Labour of course. In some respects the Church of England leadership is more the Labour Party at prayer than the Tory Party at prayer now
Bill Tutte probably did more to end the war quickly than Turing, with his work on the Lorenz cipher. But no-one's ever heard of him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte
Or Tommy Flowers' very different contribution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers
They were a load of geniuses all working to shorten the war. They all deserve equal credit IMO; where one had intellectual failings and gaps, others covered them.
https://archive.ph/UCQ82
Chinese ethnicity workers now earn the most in the UK, followed by British Indians then mixed race.
White British are now only the 4th highest earners in the UK on average
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48919813
It is also worth pointing out that (without tempting Godwin as I am not making a comparison to the parties I have already mentioned) the Nazis were also strongly interventionist and pro-state so that is hardly a criteria for liberal democratic ideology.
The New York Times said on Monday that it would disband its sports department and rely on coverage of teams and games from its website The Athletic, both online and in print.
Joe Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, and Monica Drake, a deputy managing editor, announced the change to the newsroom as “an evolution in how we cover sports.”
“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” the editors wrote in an email to The Times’s newsroom on Monday morning. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”
The shuttering of the sports desk, which has more than 35 reporters and editors, is a major shift for The Times. The department’s coverage of games, athletes and team owners, and its Sports of The Times column in particular, were once a pillar of American sports journalism.
The section covered the major moments and personalities of the last century of American sports, including Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball and the deadly effects of concussions in the National Football League.
The move represents a further integration into the newsroom of The Athletic, which The Times bought in January 2022 for $550 million, adding a publication that had some 400 journalists covering more than 200 professional sports teams. It publishes about 150 articles each day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/business/media/the-new-york-times-sports-department.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The injunction against the BBC in the WFZ case is interim only. Now that the presenter story has appeared, the BBC may not be so keen on saying how terrible it is that a quarter of the companies in WFZ's sector have received allegations of sexual harassment or violence against women but the sector has no policies or procedures for handling them. The obvious response would be that's the pot calling the kettle black. Perhaps they'll throw in the towel and not say anything about WFZ now.
https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/bbc-stopped-naming-man-accused-sex-offences-high-court/
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/KB/2023/1618.html
You don't understand the rules anyway. Google Gary Dobson for someone who turned out to be guilty despite being "proven innocent" and a good thing too.
I think I've been paying £1/£1.99 a month for it since 2019.
Horizon did a documentary on Bill Tutte, and recently there was a book about his contribution by Jerry Roberts who'd been a German linguist at Bletchley Park. He is not that unknown any more. Tommy Flowers' former home in Poplar has a blue plaque.
If that's what it turns out to be. Noteworthy the Sun doesn't tonight stand by any of the allegations the mother made, and which the newspaper repeated.
How many years did it take Twitter to make money?
"Nonetheless, it seems to be agreed by the BP boffins that Turing was the numero uno clever clogs."
I have significant issues with that statement. Secrecy at BP was such that it is unlikely anyone aside from the *very* top bods had visibility of what everyone was working on. What you're likely seeing is post-war (and particularly post-1980s) familiarity.
To be fair, I'm not sure "left and "right" work in the social arena as well. There is, I think, a strong hint of social conservatism within Labour - I don't recall the likes of Straw and Blunkett as being particularly liberal Home Secretaries. It's that social conservatism which was once so prevalent in the Red Wall and probably kept seats Labour for longer then the economic argument.
I think FN, AfD and Sweden Democrats speak less to social conservatism than to social tradition - it's part of the nationalist schtick - a part of national identity is tradition and especially cultural tradition. It's another piece of the appeal - cultural and national individuality against the conformity of globalisation.
Liberalism is seen as part of globalisation because it welcomes other influences into culture. I'd argue national and cultural identity evolves as different influences come into a country or society. It's that evolution which the populists seek to demonise.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66160319
"Turkey's President Erdogan agrees to support Sweden's bid to join Nato, the alliance's chief Jens Stoltenberg says"
Happily, I'm fairly happy in my current role.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/09/paul-keating-labels-nato-chief-a-supreme-fool-and-an-accident-on-its-way-to-happen
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-10/anthony-albanese-calls-jens-stoltenberg-a-friend-of-australia/102583698
Anyway, I gather this story is a load of cock-and-bull?
Jeez I despair at the bloody stupid state of this world. The lives ruined by hate-filled rubbish on social media.
p.s. Any chance everyone working at The Sun might be sent to jail? We can but hope. I wonder if @Cyclefree can do an article on this without mentioning the word 'trans'.
You don't have the facts of this. Not many people do. But the lawyer acting for the young person has represented that person by saying it's all a load of rubbish.
QED, I'd have thought.
But a massive learning lesson for the kind of people who chase every single piece of online tittle-tattle they can snort up.
Remember Turing had already established his reputation as one of the world's leading mathematicians before the war, with his work on computability and the Turing machine. He was not just another smart guy recruited by chance. It was Turing's automation of various processes that meant Bletchley Park could keep up with the flow of thousands of messages a day coming in from the Y-stations (listening posts around the world). It was this that turned the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic that meant Britain was not blockaded and starved out of the war.
If there is a problem with the Bletchley Park story, it is not the prominence of Turing, it is that by definition, it ignores and overshadows the brilliant work being done in other areas, from radar, jet engines, the rapid development of weaponry of all types. Have you read Budiansky's book Blackett's War, about what might now be called operational research and the U-boat menace and featuring several scientists who had won or would win Nobel prizes? Irritatingly, it is not available on kindle.
Any prospects that we could lose The S*n in the same way? That would be marvelous.
I can only imagine where they go now:
Was: BBC STAR SEX SHAME - BEEB AT FAULT
Now: BBC STAR EXONERATED - BEEB TO BLAME
This was never about the alleged victim. This is the right-whinge having it's usual pile on to the woke leftie Beeb.
The Hitler Diaries is a particular favourite of mine. But lives weren't so damaged in the process. The Sun appear to have made the most spectacular arses of themselves.
Another of his enemies throwing themself on the ceremonial spike without him having to do very much.
What favour did he do for that genie?
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hitler-Diaries
A spectacular hoax.
For managing the overall project quite a few people thought Groves, if not indispensable, got it done faster than em anyone else could.
'The parents of a youngster at the centre of the BBC presenter scandal tonight told how they had spoken out to protect their child.
They stood by their allegation that the top BBC star paid their child thousands, in return for sex pictures.'
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/23011193/parents-bbc-presenter-scandal-child-stand-by/
We know nothing at this stage except what the Sun and the lawyer have said
But you're almost certain
Unless of course you know the person better, the law better, and are better able to represent them?
And it's she. Which if you'd been around here less than a nappy rash you'd know. Unless of course you just assume all people you debate with online are male? Either way, back off sunshine.
In hindsight, the idea that the dilletante, lazy Hitler would take time out to right a diary is absurd. It goes against everything we know of him, in contrast to say Goebbels, who was hardworking and left his diaries for posterity.
Let it be a salutary lesson to you not to hoover up any and every line of online tittle tattle.
Chapeau to @MikeSmithson and @TSE for showing admirable gravitas.
Speak soon.
xx
Clearly more to this story than the Sun was letting on.
Different from beliefs are words uttered in public, in which there are some limitations in law, and many more limitations by the reputational damage which uttering certain beliefs might occasion. (That the earth is flat, that the holocaust didn't occur, that Trump is a good chap and so on).
Different still are the formal procedures arising from the need for justice. No-one can stop me believing that anyone called Keith must be guilty of any charge levelled at him without evidence. But it seems to me good that our procedures do their best to ensure that all Keiths are not condemned out of hand by the understandable prevalence of this belief, though in the end it can't be guaranteed.
As to the relation between belief and what is actually the case, well, knowledge is usually defined as justified true belief. How you know when you have it is a discussion making little progress since Plato first thought it up, and it remains lively. For a hilarious and bravura recent development (1963), Google 'The Gettier problem'.
Withholding judgment is the rational thing to do and let justice take its course. You seem eager to rush to judgment, which is no more rational than those rushing to say someone definitely did something wrong.
"The unnamed top BBC star is off air while allegations he paid the teenager for sexual pictures are investigated. Sleazy messages are alleged to have started in 2020, when the youngster was 17."
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22984178/who-bbc-presenter-everything-know-accused-teen-sex-pictures/
HOWEVER....that doesn't mean sexually explicit images at 17, which is where we go from moral issues to legal issues.
I wonder if the Sun thought that the presenter would have been forced to say something by now and would never get into the weeds of the exact timing of the first nude.
https://www.wirralglobe.co.uk/news/23339249.chance-see-plans-new-u-boat-attraction-woodside/