"Centrist Dad" Adam Boulton has just said on the Sky News Paper Review that it "may not be such a bad thing for the planet" if the birth rate in the UK is only 1.4 children per woman.
Because, of course, the largest population increases are taking place in the UK and Europe, and not in Africa/Asia.
The global population is becoming increasingly African, as that is where the highest birthrate is
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
And income tax was established to finance war with France.
Are you really arguing that the original purpose of a tax is the only legitimate use for funds raised?
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
And income tax was established to finance war with France.
Are you really arguing that the original purpose of a tax is the only legitimate use for funds raised?
War with France sounds like a far better use of my taxes than most of the rubbish it gets spent on. I vote we start the immediate construction of hundreds of giant trebuchet to stand on the cliffs of Dover and hurl things like pigs bladders filled with offal at Callas. That would leave me with a warm glow inside after writing every tax cheque!
"Centrist Dad" Adam Boulton has just said on the Sky News Paper Review that it "may not be such a bad thing for the planet" if the birth rate in the UK is only 1.4 children per woman.
Because, of course, the largest population increases are taking place in the UK and Europe, and not in Africa/Asia.
The global population is becoming increasingly African, as that is where the highest birthrate is
I was using sarcasm in my comment to try to make a point. Always a bit difficult to get across in writing.
O/t but Mrs C had, today, a text purporting to be from an official body to do with car-parking to the effect that she had a large number of unresolved parking tickets and if she didn't pay up the authorities would be after her. And indeed, her license...... note the spelling ..... would be in danger.
How many official British organisations spell licence that way?
So the text has been deleted.
As more and more companies and scammers use ChatGPT, I think it will harder and harder to tell as it will happily pump out the word license.
There used to be a theory that scams contained deliberate giveaways in order to ensnare only the most gullible who would go through the whole process to hand over the cash. This is where later stages involved the scammers putting in time effort rather than just pressing send on the initial message.
Nigel Farage and the Reform Party’s Taliban Tax means sending hundreds of millions of taxpayers' money to an oppressive regime that British soldiers fought and died to defeat.
Should have fought harder as they whipped our asses.
It was the US Biden administration's decision to withdraw that handed it back to the Taliban, without that withdrawal western troops would still be there now and no need for us to take migrants at risk from the Taliban who had helped western forces
The US Biden administration ineptly following through on a process negotiated by the previous US Trump administration?
"Tonight there is a very large attack on the Russian Novokuybyshevsk oil refinery with a capacity of 7.9 million tons per year, Samara region of Russia.
According to eyewitnesses, at least dozens of drones hit the refinery. The entire territory of the Novokuybyshevsk refinery is shrouded in smoke and fire after the attack."
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
And income tax was established to finance war with France.
Are you really arguing that the original purpose of a tax is the only legitimate use for funds raised?
War with France sounds like a far better use of my taxes than most of the rubbish it gets spent on. I vote we start the immediate construction of hundreds of giant trebuchet to stand on the cliffs of Dover and hurl things like pigs bladders filled with offal at Callas. That would leave me with a warm glow inside after writing every tax cheque!
Also a possible way to repatriate small boat people, if a little kinetic for modern tastes.
Dr. Susan Monarez, who was sworn in as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on July 31, is being ousted, according to three sources familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were not authorized to share the information.
Her departure leaves the agency leaderless at a perilous time. Morale, which was already low after deep staff cuts this spring, plummeted after a gunman opened fire on the agency’s main campus in Atlanta on August 8, pocking the buildings with hundreds of bullet holes and killing DeKalb County police officer David Rose.
"Tonight there is a very large attack on the Russian Novokuybyshevsk oil refinery with a capacity of 7.9 million tons per year, Samara region of Russia.
According to eyewitnesses, at least dozens of drones hit the refinery. The entire territory of the Novokuybyshevsk refinery is shrouded in smoke and fire after the attack."
MPs will be shocked. Keir Starmer will arrange for it to be shown in schools. For the rest of the population, this is old news but no doubt compelling viewing with an all-star cast.
DAE think David Tennant looks a lot like Peter Capaldi?
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
I'm just reading a little about President Hoover (in The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter) and it includes this amazing detail about his work with the Commission for Relief in Belgium during WWI:
"For four years.. Hoover's commission fed ten million people. The task was accomplished with astonishing efficiency, and when the commission's accounts were tallied at the close of operations its overhead was found to be only three eighths of one per cent of total expenditures.."
Sounds like he was spectacularly ill-suited to be President though. I don't know why I find it so surprising that he should have been successful at many things prior to becoming President, but I am.
There are still streets and squares in little Belgian towns named after him.
I visited his childhood home and museum when I was travelling through Iowa last year. Given his extraordinarily humble beginnings, his is a remarkable story, and he did well, both for himself and others, in various roles across the world during his early years. The lucky break came from his involvement with a British mining company out in Australia, as I recall, where he made his name making a lot of money for the company, including by doing down the wages and conditions of its immigrant workers. He seems to have been a steady, reliable sort rather than some sort of genius, and the flip side of being down to earth was that his world view was straightforward, almost simplistic, and inflexible, and so he proved precisely the wrong sort of person to preside over the financial crisis of the depression. There isn’t a lot of compassion in his work either with the mining company or as president, making that spell organising the postwar food relief all the more remarkable. I guess he just liked and had a talent for organising stuff?
I'm just reading a little about President Hoover (in The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter) and it includes this amazing detail about his work with the Commission for Relief in Belgium during WWI:
"For four years.. Hoover's commission fed ten million people. The task was accomplished with astonishing efficiency, and when the commission's accounts were tallied at the close of operations its overhead was found to be only three eighths of one per cent of total expenditures.."
Sounds like he was spectacularly ill-suited to be President though. I don't know why I find it so surprising that he should have been successful at many things prior to becoming President, but I am.
There are still streets and squares in little Belgian towns named after him.
He did the same for Bolshevik Russia after the war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Famine_Relief_Act ..At its peak, the ARA employed 300 Americans, more than 120,000 Russians and fed 10.5 million people daily. Its Russian operations were headed by Col. William N. Haskell. The Medical Division of the ARA functioned from November 1921 to June 1923 and helped overcome the typhus epidemic then ravaging Russia. The ARA's famine relief operations ran in parallel with much smaller Mennonite, Jewish and Quaker famine relief operations in Russia.
The ARA's operations in Russia were shut down on June 15, 1923, after it was discovered that Russia under Lenin had renewed the export of grain...
Collectivisation continued, of course, and subsequently millions starved.
That was the Civil War and War Communism. The Collectivisation disaster was in 1931-32 and the drive to force collectivise farming didn’t begin until 1928.
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
And income tax was established to finance war with France.
Are you really arguing that the original purpose of a tax is the only legitimate use for funds raised?
War with France sounds like a far better use of my taxes than most of the rubbish it gets spent on. I vote we start the immediate construction of hundreds of giant trebuchet to stand on the cliffs of Dover and hurl things like pigs bladders filled with offal at Callas. That would leave me with a warm glow inside after writing every tax cheque!
You may not like her high-pitched wailing, but that seems over the top, especially given she’s been dead for quite some years now.
"Centrist Dad" Adam Boulton has just said on the Sky News Paper Review that it "may not be such a bad thing for the planet" if the birth rate in the UK is only 1.4 children per woman.
Because, of course, the largest population increases are taking place in the UK and Europe, and not in Africa/Asia.
For the planet what matters isn't the size of the population, but rather the size of the carbon footprint. The carbon footprint of the average African is less than one tenth of the average Briton.
Mostly the decline in fertility is by choice, hence being a worldwide phenomenon. It presents many societal challenges, not least the need for emigration, and high taxes to cover a worsening dependency ratio, but is a good thing for the planet.
I'm just reading a little about President Hoover (in The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter) and it includes this amazing detail about his work with the Commission for Relief in Belgium during WWI:
"For four years.. Hoover's commission fed ten million people. The task was accomplished with astonishing efficiency, and when the commission's accounts were tallied at the close of operations its overhead was found to be only three eighths of one per cent of total expenditures.."
Sounds like he was spectacularly ill-suited to be President though. I don't know why I find it so surprising that he should have been successful at many things prior to becoming President, but I am.
There are still streets and squares in little Belgian towns named after him.
I visited his childhood home and museum when I was travelling through Iowa last year. Given his extraordinarily humble beginnings, his is a remarkable story, and he did well, both for himself and others, in various roles across the world during his early years. The lucky break came from his involvement with a British mining company out in Australia, as I recall, where he made his name making a lot of money for the company, including by doing down the wages and conditions of its immigrant workers. He seems to have been a steady, reliable sort rather than some sort of genius, and the flip side of being down to earth was that his world view was straightforward, almost simplistic, and inflexible, and so he proved precisely the wrong sort of person to preside over the financial crisis of the depression. There isn’t a lot of compassion in his work either with the mining company or as president, making that spell organising the postwar food relief all the more remarkable. I guess he just liked and had a talent for organising stuff?
He did, but I think you slightly misunderstand his mindset. He tended to categorise particular spheres according to the outcome desired. So in the sphere of business, the object was to make money. In the sphere of government, the object was to prevent anarchy, and nothing more. In the sphere of charity, that was where you looked for compassion.
He therefore thought charities should deal with the Depression, not the government.
It is worth noting that the only payment he took for organising the Hoover meals post WW2 was $50 for writing a newspaper article, which he donated to a school in Baghdad. He also paid rather a lot of his own expenses, which is one reason why overheads were so low.
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
Perhaps liable for deportation. To be kept in captivity for six months beforehand?
Stellar cast for ITV"s new drama "The Hack". I'll look forward to reading absolutely nothing about it in most of the UK press.
Indeed, but seems a bit of a crap topic. I mean it's ages old and people have moved on. A real water cooler drama would be the booming bangs, but it'll take a brave broadcaster.
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
Unfortunately, yes. The mandate is given to a person, not to a policy or programme. And once in office, the only real check/balance is the fear of not getting elected next time.
The consequence of this is that those who elect leaders should be a lot more careful about who they elect than they often are. And that care needs to be less about the manifesto (pretty irrelevant really) and more about the character of the candidate.
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
Perhaps liable for deportation. To be kept in captivity for six months beforehand?
No.
Her detention ended when she withdrew her asylum application and self-deported.
There’s lots of people who believe that detaining asylum seekers is reasonable given the risk of absconding. It’s at the discretion of the system whether to grant bail (they did for her mother and another sibling).
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
Perhaps liable for deportation. To be kept in captivity for six months beforehand?
No.
Her detention ended when she withdrew her asylum application and self-deported.
There’s lots of people who believe that detaining asylum seekers is reasonable given the risk of absconding. It’s at the discretion of the system whether to grant bail (they did for her mother and another sibling).
“Self deport or we will imprison you indefinitely” isn’t exactly justice. It’s extortion.
I'm just reading a little about President Hoover (in The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter) and it includes this amazing detail about his work with the Commission for Relief in Belgium during WWI:
"For four years.. Hoover's commission fed ten million people. The task was accomplished with astonishing efficiency, and when the commission's accounts were tallied at the close of operations its overhead was found to be only three eighths of one per cent of total expenditures.."
Sounds like he was spectacularly ill-suited to be President though. I don't know why I find it so surprising that he should have been successful at many things prior to becoming President, but I am.
There are still streets and squares in little Belgian towns named after him.
I visited his childhood home and museum when I was travelling through Iowa last year. Given his extraordinarily humble beginnings, his is a remarkable story, and he did well, both for himself and others, in various roles across the world during his early years. The lucky break came from his involvement with a British mining company out in Australia, as I recall, where he made his name making a lot of money for the company, including by doing down the wages and conditions of its immigrant workers. He seems to have been a steady, reliable sort rather than some sort of genius, and the flip side of being down to earth was that his world view was straightforward, almost simplistic, and inflexible, and so he proved precisely the wrong sort of person to preside over the financial crisis of the depression. There isn’t a lot of compassion in his work either with the mining company or as president, making that spell organising the postwar food relief all the more remarkable. I guess he just liked and had a talent for organising stuff?
I often think saying things like "Hoover's Commission fed ten million people" is a bit like saying "The Board of NHS England treated 1.1 million COVID cases during the pandemic". Sure having effective leadership is crucial but history and the passage of time tends to assign a lot more importance to the few memorable people at the top. In this case the historical process is helped along by the Hoover being a massive publicity hog.
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
Perhaps liable for deportation. To be kept in captivity for six months beforehand?
No.
Her detention ended when she withdrew her asylum application and self-deported.
There’s lots of people who believe that detaining asylum seekers is reasonable given the risk of absconding. It’s at the discretion of the system whether to grant bail (they did for her mother and another sibling).
A lot of people believe lots of things are 'reasonable'. Often because those things will never affect them.
I'm just reading a little about President Hoover (in The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter) and it includes this amazing detail about his work with the Commission for Relief in Belgium during WWI:
"For four years.. Hoover's commission fed ten million people. The task was accomplished with astonishing efficiency, and when the commission's accounts were tallied at the close of operations its overhead was found to be only three eighths of one per cent of total expenditures.."
Sounds like he was spectacularly ill-suited to be President though. I don't know why I find it so surprising that he should have been successful at many things prior to becoming President, but I am.
There are still streets and squares in little Belgian towns named after him.
I visited his childhood home and museum when I was travelling through Iowa last year. Given his extraordinarily humble beginnings, his is a remarkable story, and he did well, both for himself and others, in various roles across the world during his early years. The lucky break came from his involvement with a British mining company out in Australia, as I recall, where he made his name making a lot of money for the company, including by doing down the wages and conditions of its immigrant workers. He seems to have been a steady, reliable sort rather than some sort of genius, and the flip side of being down to earth was that his world view was straightforward, almost simplistic, and inflexible, and so he proved precisely the wrong sort of person to preside over the financial crisis of the depression. There isn’t a lot of compassion in his work either with the mining company or as president, making that spell organising the postwar food relief all the more remarkable. I guess he just liked and had a talent for organising stuff?
He did, but I think you slightly misunderstand his mindset. He tended to categorise particular spheres according to the outcome desired. So in the sphere of business, the object was to make money. In the sphere of government, the object was to prevent anarchy, and nothing more. In the sphere of charity, that was where you looked for compassion.
He therefore thought charities should deal with the Depression, not the government.
.
A model case of simplistic and inflexible thinking ISTM?
I'm just reading a little about President Hoover (in The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter) and it includes this amazing detail about his work with the Commission for Relief in Belgium during WWI:
"For four years.. Hoover's commission fed ten million people. The task was accomplished with astonishing efficiency, and when the commission's accounts were tallied at the close of operations its overhead was found to be only three eighths of one per cent of total expenditures.."
Sounds like he was spectacularly ill-suited to be President though. I don't know why I find it so surprising that he should have been successful at many things prior to becoming President, but I am.
There are still streets and squares in little Belgian towns named after him.
I visited his childhood home and museum when I was travelling through Iowa last year. Given his extraordinarily humble beginnings, his is a remarkable story, and he did well, both for himself and others, in various roles across the world during his early years. The lucky break came from his involvement with a British mining company out in Australia, as I recall, where he made his name making a lot of money for the company, including by doing down the wages and conditions of its immigrant workers. He seems to have been a steady, reliable sort rather than some sort of genius, and the flip side of being down to earth was that his world view was straightforward, almost simplistic, and inflexible, and so he proved precisely the wrong sort of person to preside over the financial crisis of the depression. There isn’t a lot of compassion in his work either with the mining company or as president, making that spell organising the postwar food relief all the more remarkable. I guess he just liked and had a talent for organising stuff?
He did, but I think you slightly misunderstand his mindset. He tended to categorise particular spheres according to the outcome desired. So in the sphere of business, the object was to make money. In the sphere of government, the object was to prevent anarchy, and nothing more. In the sphere of charity, that was where you looked for compassion.
He therefore thought charities should deal with the Depression, not the government.
.
A model case of simplistic and inflexible thinking ISTM?
Yes.
I've always found the story of why he disliked Eisenhower amusing. Hoover was a keen fisherman and one day when staying with Eisenhower he was invited to go fishing with him. Eisenhower had his own private pool, and had planned the trip carefully. For three days, the fish hadn't been fed, and they were biting the bait like nobody's business as a result.
Hoover was disgusted. He thought it was cheating. One biographer drily commented he was 'a fundamentalist in fishing, as in all things.'
So he endorsed Eisenhower in 1952, but never worked with him.
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
Perhaps liable for deportation. To be kept in captivity for six months beforehand?
No.
Her detention ended when she withdrew her asylum application and self-deported.
There’s lots of people who believe that detaining asylum seekers is reasonable given the risk of absconding. It’s at the discretion of the system whether to grant bail (they did for her mother and another sibling).
A lot of people believe lots of things are 'reasonable'. Often because those things will never affect them.
This strikes me as being very unreasonable.
That's because it isn't reasonable, especially in a country that, for a long time, has implicitly agreed to overlook undocumented immigration as long as said immigrants keep their noses clean.
There may be more to come out about this story, but right now it's an impossible stretch to describe this woman as "the worst of the worst", as Trump put it.
But the worst of the worst know how to hide and use weapons. Much easier to pounce on the relatively harmless.
See this, from those wet lefties... the Cato Institute.
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
I have no real idea how the rental market works. But my nice neighbour is having to move out after her landlord - who has for sure paid off the mortgage on the place - put up the rent by £170/month. Neighbour has lived there for getting on fifteen years. It makes me terribly sad.
That’s awful . You’d think the landlord might appreciate a good tenant whose been there for such a long time.
Especially for £170 a month, by the time he gets it all sorted out and new tenant in it will take 6 -12 months to make up losing rent during switching etc.
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
Perhaps liable for deportation. To be kept in captivity for six months beforehand?
No.
Her detention ended when she withdrew her asylum application and self-deported.
There’s lots of people who believe that detaining asylum seekers is reasonable given the risk of absconding. It’s at the discretion of the system whether to grant bail (they did for her mother and another sibling).
“Self deport or we will imprison you indefinitely” isn’t exactly justice. It’s extortion.
It was self-deport or we will detain you while your asylum application is reviewed.
This is something I have changed my mind on to a certain extent; in the past I’d agree that using non white actors in British period pieces was ‘PC gone max’, but now I think it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the chance to be cast in one. A multi racial school doing a play about the 1966 World Cup Final would cast all kids as players, even though all 22 on the pitch were white, and a production of Shakespeare with an entirely non white cast would be just as legitimate as any other.
Where it does seem provocative is casting title characters; you can’t have a white Mandela or black Henry VIII, although I’d probably be more ok with the latter
BBC series ‘King and Conqueror’ branded ‘woke’ and ‘historically inaccurate’ for featuring black actors playing Anglo-Saxons.
The series portrays the historical Battle of Hastings in 1066 between William, Duke of Normandy and King Harold Godwinson of England.
If you can have actors as black Anglo Saxons you can have an actor as a white Mandela
A nicely thoughtful post there by @isam. I need to watch this as it is the 2nd one of yours I have liked today.
I disagree with you @HYUFD on Nelson Mandela and agree with @isam. Mandela being black is rather fundamental to the whole point of the story. Normans and Anglo Saxons being white is not. OK they clearly weren't black. They also have the wrong haircuts*, and speak the wrong language for the time, but we overlook that. We can overlook (with difficulty I grant you as it is obvious) black Anglo Saxons. It is a bit more difficult to overlook a white Mandela.
* A review I read said it was confusing flipping between the Norman and the Anglo Saxon locations and would have been a lot easy if they had the correct and different haircuts for the time.
It is called acting, if you can act well you should be able to convince in the part regardless of skin colour.
Otherwise if you demand historical figures are represented by actors of the same skin colour that has to apply across the board
I agree on this but it should apply equally. You don’t need to be gay to play a gay person or have killed people and put them under the patio to play Fred West, yet the trans loon lobby, of course, dunked on casting of non ‘trans’ actors in trans roles even getting a Scarlett Johansson show pulled as she backed out due to the furore from the perma-offended brigade. There was also Eddie Redmaye in that film, the Danish Girl IIRC, who got a load of flak for being in it.
I'm half and half here. I think that having had the actual experience makes a big difference, as does challenging the perceptions and assumptions of an audience around skin colour. Though an actor's skill is to understand and portray.
I would struggle to work my way into the head of someone around something as simple as tobacco addiction, for example. Or being an out gay professional footballer - aiui in the UK game we still only have one, following on from Justin Fashanu in 1990. Fashanu hanged himself in a garage in Shoreditch after he was accused of sexual assault.
With all due respect you’re not a professional actor. They immerse themselves in their roles. They inhabit the character and the role.
What you seem to imply would simply narrow the available cast. RTD selected actors on their merit for Queer as Folk, and it works fine.
I think it’s nonsensical to say only a trans actor can play a trans role or only,a straight actor can play a straight role.
It is literally the entire point of acting, to play a role that is not your own.
Sheldon: You can't be Professor Proton. You're not a scientist. Wil Wheaton: Well, I was never on a starship, but pretending I was bought me this house. And if I'd pretended a little longer, it would have a swimming pool
Isn’t it a conversation Sir John Gielgud had with Dustin Hoffman? “ it’s called acting dear boy”
But you can't act yourself a different colour.
I believe in complete freedom for casting. If someone wants to create a quasi-historical drama that uses a cast of all different ethnic backgrounds, good for them. I probably won't watch it because it snaps me out of the historical era and setting.
As an aside, poorly written dialogue has the same effect - if a period drama uses modern language in a way that fails to seem like a plausible approximation of language of that era, again I'll be pulled out of the drama and it won't be entertaining to me. I don't actually want the middle English of Chaucer, but I don't want something that sounds like it was written using ChatGPT either.
Where Isam's comment is absurd is to say that it is 'completely wrong' to create a historically accurate drama that uses a cast that could plausibly belong to the time and space in which the drama is set. That's an unwelcome and frankly fairly shocking encroachment on artistic freedom.
I don't understand your last paragraph. What did I say that was absurd?
You said it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the right to be cast in a period drama.
I don't know. I can see your point actually; it's not long ago I would have railed against what I am now saying is completely ok, so maybe I am coming to a middle ground by way of holding one opinion then the other! But period pieces are pretty much the directors version of the past rather than documentaries, so I think we can suspend belief a little
Exactly - the director's vision. That vision not to be dictated by a perverse sense of enforcing equal outcomes, which is completely counter to artistic freedom in this case.
People should be allowed to make the drama they want to make - period.
Nick Robinson interviewing Ed Dave’s brought up the idea that immigrants should get the temporary right to work “so we don’t need to house them in hotels” etc.
Where exactly will they live even if they have the right to work? They will need to build a deposit, pay rent, find somewhere to live, need references. They will be competing with existing low paid people for somewhere to live so just causes a different problem if solving one at all in the first place.
Dr. Susan Monarez, who was sworn in as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on July 31, is being ousted, according to three sources familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were not authorized to share the information.
Her departure leaves the agency leaderless at a perilous time. Morale, which was already low after deep staff cuts this spring, plummeted after a gunman opened fire on the agency’s main campus in Atlanta on August 8, pocking the buildings with hundreds of bullet holes and killing DeKalb County police officer David Rose.
Nick Robinson interviewing Ed Dave’s brought up the idea that immigrants should get the temporary right to work “so we don’t need to house them in hotels” etc.
Where exactly will they live even if they have the right to work? They will need to build a deposit, pay rent, find somewhere to live, need references. They will be competing with existing low paid people for somewhere to live so just causes a different problem if solving one at all in the first place.
The hotels are a symptom of the wider problem. So of course the political class and media are going after the symptom rather than the actual underlying cause.
Nick Robinson interviewing Ed Dave’s brought up the idea that immigrants should get the temporary right to work “so we don’t need to house them in hotels” etc.
Where exactly will they live even if they have the right to work? They will need to build a deposit, pay rent, find somewhere to live, need references. They will be competing with existing low paid people for somewhere to live so just causes a different problem if solving one at all in the first place.
They'll be doing something useful. And they won't stand out like a provocative sore thumb.
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
Perhaps liable for deportation. To be kept in captivity for six months beforehand?
No.
Her detention ended when she withdrew her asylum application and self-deported.
There’s lots of people who believe that detaining asylum seekers is reasonable given the risk of absconding. It’s at the discretion of the system whether to grant bail (they did for her mother and another sibling).
“Self deport or we will imprison you indefinitely” isn’t exactly justice. It’s extortion.
It was self-deport or we will detain you while your asylum application is reviewed.
That’s not extortion
Yes it is because the whole point is seemingly to encourage people to self deport. That isn’t justice. Justice should be swift.
I'm just reading a little about President Hoover (in The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter) and it includes this amazing detail about his work with the Commission for Relief in Belgium during WWI:
"For four years.. Hoover's commission fed ten million people. The task was accomplished with astonishing efficiency, and when the commission's accounts were tallied at the close of operations its overhead was found to be only three eighths of one per cent of total expenditures.."
Sounds like he was spectacularly ill-suited to be President though. I don't know why I find it so surprising that he should have been successful at many things prior to becoming President, but I am.
There are still streets and squares in little Belgian towns named after him.
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
the clowns have no clue
I just want to know who is allowing these utterly insane ideas (which scream of stupidity, lack of thought and desperation) to be "leaked" from the treasury..
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
Perhaps liable for deportation. To be kept in captivity for six months beforehand?
No.
Her detention ended when she withdrew her asylum application and self-deported.
There’s lots of people who believe that detaining asylum seekers is reasonable given the risk of absconding. It’s at the discretion of the system whether to grant bail (they did for her mother and another sibling).
“Self deport or we will imprison you indefinitely” isn’t exactly justice. It’s extortion.
It's very much Trump's playbook though - I want X and will make the other option so bad that eventually you will choose X..
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
the clowns have no clue
I just want to know who is allowing these utterly insane ideas (which scream of stupidity, lack of thought and desperation) to be "leaked" from the treasury..
they ought to get the people who thought them up out the door pronto.
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
And income tax was established to finance war with France.
Are you really arguing that the original purpose of a tax is the only legitimate use for funds raised?
War with France sounds like a far better use of my taxes than most of the rubbish it gets spent on. I vote we start the immediate construction of hundreds of giant trebuchet to stand on the cliffs of Dover and hurl things like pigs bladders filled with offal at Callas. That would leave me with a warm glow inside after writing every tax cheque!
Can we delay until Saturday please. I am staying in Calais on Friday.
This is something I have changed my mind on to a certain extent; in the past I’d agree that using non white actors in British period pieces was ‘PC gone max’, but now I think it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the chance to be cast in one. A multi racial school doing a play about the 1966 World Cup Final would cast all kids as players, even though all 22 on the pitch were white, and a production of Shakespeare with an entirely non white cast would be just as legitimate as any other.
Where it does seem provocative is casting title characters; you can’t have a white Mandela or black Henry VIII, although I’d probably be more ok with the latter
BBC series ‘King and Conqueror’ branded ‘woke’ and ‘historically inaccurate’ for featuring black actors playing Anglo-Saxons.
The series portrays the historical Battle of Hastings in 1066 between William, Duke of Normandy and King Harold Godwinson of England.
If you can have actors as black Anglo Saxons you can have an actor as a white Mandela
A nicely thoughtful post there by @isam. I need to watch this as it is the 2nd one of yours I have liked today.
I disagree with you @HYUFD on Nelson Mandela and agree with @isam. Mandela being black is rather fundamental to the whole point of the story. Normans and Anglo Saxons being white is not. OK they clearly weren't black. They also have the wrong haircuts*, and speak the wrong language for the time, but we overlook that. We can overlook (with difficulty I grant you as it is obvious) black Anglo Saxons. It is a bit more difficult to overlook a white Mandela.
* A review I read said it was confusing flipping between the Norman and the Anglo Saxon locations and would have been a lot easy if they had the correct and different haircuts for the time.
It is called acting, if you can act well you should be able to convince in the part regardless of skin colour.
Otherwise if you demand historical figures are represented by actors of the same skin colour that has to apply across the board
I agree on this but it should apply equally. You don’t need to be gay to play a gay person or have killed people and put them under the patio to play Fred West, yet the trans loon lobby, of course, dunked on casting of non ‘trans’ actors in trans roles even getting a Scarlett Johansson show pulled as she backed out due to the furore from the perma-offended brigade. There was also Eddie Redmaye in that film, the Danish Girl IIRC, who got a load of flak for being in it.
I'm half and half here. I think that having had the actual experience makes a big difference, as does challenging the perceptions and assumptions of an audience around skin colour. Though an actor's skill is to understand and portray.
I would struggle to work my way into the head of someone around something as simple as tobacco addiction, for example. Or being an out gay professional footballer - aiui in the UK game we still only have one, following on from Justin Fashanu in 1990. Fashanu hanged himself in a garage in Shoreditch after he was accused of sexual assault.
With all due respect you’re not a professional actor. They immerse themselves in their roles. They inhabit the character and the role.
What you seem to imply would simply narrow the available cast. RTD selected actors on their merit for Queer as Folk, and it works fine.
I think it’s nonsensical to say only a trans actor can play a trans role or only,a straight actor can play a straight role.
It is literally the entire point of acting, to play a role that is not your own.
Sheldon: You can't be Professor Proton. You're not a scientist. Wil Wheaton: Well, I was never on a starship, but pretending I was bought me this house. And if I'd pretended a little longer, it would have a swimming pool
Isn’t it a conversation Sir John Gielgud had with Dustin Hoffman? “ it’s called acting dear boy”
But you can't act yourself a different colour.
I believe in complete freedom for casting. If someone wants to create a quasi-historical drama that uses a cast of all different ethnic backgrounds, good for them. I probably won't watch it because it snaps me out of the historical era and setting.
As an aside, poorly written dialogue has the same effect - if a period drama uses modern language in a way that fails to seem like a plausible approximation of language of that era, again I'll be pulled out of the drama and it won't be entertaining to me. I don't actually want the middle English of Chaucer, but I don't want something that sounds like it was written using ChatGPT either.
Where Isam's comment is absurd is to say that it is 'completely wrong' to create a historically accurate drama that uses a cast that could plausibly belong to the time and space in which the drama is set. That's an unwelcome and frankly fairly shocking encroachment on artistic freedom.
I don't understand your last paragraph. What did I say that was absurd?
You said it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the right to be cast in a period drama.
I don't know. I can see your point actually; it's not long ago I would have railed against what I am now saying is completely ok, so maybe I am coming to a middle ground by way of holding one opinion then the other! But period pieces are pretty much the directors version of the past rather than documentaries, so I think we can suspend belief a little
Exactly - the director's vision. That vision not to be dictated by a perverse sense of enforcing equal outcomes, which is completely counter to artistic freedom in this case.
People should be allowed to make the drama they want to make - period.
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
And income tax was established to finance war with France.
Are you really arguing that the original purpose of a tax is the only legitimate use for funds raised?
War with France sounds like a far better use of my taxes than most of the rubbish it gets spent on. I vote we start the immediate construction of hundreds of giant trebuchet to stand on the cliffs of Dover and hurl things like pigs bladders filled with offal at Callas. That would leave me with a warm glow inside after writing every tax cheque!
Can we delay until Saturday please. I am staying in Calais on Friday.
Why? plenty of nice places close by to stay so why on earth Calais?
1/Our client was notified tonight by White House staff in the personnel office that she was fired. As a presidential appointee, senate confirmed officer, only the president himself can fire her.
2/For this reason, we reject notification Dr. Monarez has received as legally deficient and she remains as CDC Director. We have notified the White House Counsel of our position."
This is something I have changed my mind on to a certain extent; in the past I’d agree that using non white actors in British period pieces was ‘PC gone max’, but now I think it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the chance to be cast in one. A multi racial school doing a play about the 1966 World Cup Final would cast all kids as players, even though all 22 on the pitch were white, and a production of Shakespeare with an entirely non white cast would be just as legitimate as any other.
Where it does seem provocative is casting title characters; you can’t have a white Mandela or black Henry VIII, although I’d probably be more ok with the latter
BBC series ‘King and Conqueror’ branded ‘woke’ and ‘historically inaccurate’ for featuring black actors playing Anglo-Saxons.
The series portrays the historical Battle of Hastings in 1066 between William, Duke of Normandy and King Harold Godwinson of England.
If you can have actors as black Anglo Saxons you can have an actor as a white Mandela
A nicely thoughtful post there by @isam. I need to watch this as it is the 2nd one of yours I have liked today.
I disagree with you @HYUFD on Nelson Mandela and agree with @isam. Mandela being black is rather fundamental to the whole point of the story. Normans and Anglo Saxons being white is not. OK they clearly weren't black. They also have the wrong haircuts*, and speak the wrong language for the time, but we overlook that. We can overlook (with difficulty I grant you as it is obvious) black Anglo Saxons. It is a bit more difficult to overlook a white Mandela.
* A review I read said it was confusing flipping between the Norman and the Anglo Saxon locations and would have been a lot easy if they had the correct and different haircuts for the time.
It is called acting, if you can act well you should be able to convince in the part regardless of skin colour.
Otherwise if you demand historical figures are represented by actors of the same skin colour that has to apply across the board
I agree on this but it should apply equally. You don’t need to be gay to play a gay person or have killed people and put them under the patio to play Fred West, yet the trans loon lobby, of course, dunked on casting of non ‘trans’ actors in trans roles even getting a Scarlett Johansson show pulled as she backed out due to the furore from the perma-offended brigade. There was also Eddie Redmaye in that film, the Danish Girl IIRC, who got a load of flak for being in it.
I'm half and half here. I think that having had the actual experience makes a big difference, as does challenging the perceptions and assumptions of an audience around skin colour. Though an actor's skill is to understand and portray.
I would struggle to work my way into the head of someone around something as simple as tobacco addiction, for example. Or being an out gay professional footballer - aiui in the UK game we still only have one, following on from Justin Fashanu in 1990. Fashanu hanged himself in a garage in Shoreditch after he was accused of sexual assault.
With all due respect you’re not a professional actor. They immerse themselves in their roles. They inhabit the character and the role.
What you seem to imply would simply narrow the available cast. RTD selected actors on their merit for Queer as Folk, and it works fine.
I think it’s nonsensical to say only a trans actor can play a trans role or only,a straight actor can play a straight role.
It is literally the entire point of acting, to play a role that is not your own.
Sheldon: You can't be Professor Proton. You're not a scientist. Wil Wheaton: Well, I was never on a starship, but pretending I was bought me this house. And if I'd pretended a little longer, it would have a swimming pool
Isn’t it a conversation Sir John Gielgud had with Dustin Hoffman? “ it’s called acting dear boy”
But you can't act yourself a different colour.
I believe in complete freedom for casting. If someone wants to create a quasi-historical drama that uses a cast of all different ethnic backgrounds, good for them. I probably won't watch it because it snaps me out of the historical era and setting.
As an aside, poorly written dialogue has the same effect - if a period drama uses modern language in a way that fails to seem like a plausible approximation of language of that era, again I'll be pulled out of the drama and it won't be entertaining to me. I don't actually want the middle English of Chaucer, but I don't want something that sounds like it was written using ChatGPT either.
Where Isam's comment is absurd is to say that it is 'completely wrong' to create a historically accurate drama that uses a cast that could plausibly belong to the time and space in which the drama is set. That's an unwelcome and frankly fairly shocking encroachment on artistic freedom.
I don't understand your last paragraph. What did I say that was absurd?
You said it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the right to be cast in a period drama.
I don't know. I can see your point actually; it's not long ago I would have railed against what I am now saying is completely ok, so maybe I am coming to a middle ground by way of holding one opinion then the other! But period pieces are pretty much the directors version of the past rather than documentaries, so I think we can suspend belief a little
Exactly - the director's vision. That vision not to be dictated by a perverse sense of enforcing equal outcomes, which is completely counter to artistic freedom in this case.
People should be allowed to make the drama they want to make - period.
With who they want acting. Period.
Hang on. @Luckyguy1983 using a rank Americanism in a post?
The tectonic plates are shifting. This has to end. Full stop.
An 18-minute penalty shootout to bin us out against League Two Grimsby Town.
I know the club is broken at a fundamental level. But whatever problems we have - and they are endless - the answer is not Ruben Amorim.
It literally doesn't matter who the manager is at Man Utd for at least the next five years. No manager can fix the club. It can't be fixed until the Glazers are gone.
My movers were a pair of Liverpool fans, and the most cutting things they said to me were, "sorry for your troubles," and, "can understand turning to cricket when your football is so bad."
Awkward echoes of the national (perhaps global?) political scene. We can boo the manager, we can condemn their lack of inspirational leadership, we can sack them. But as long as the owners insist on extracting more than they put in, there are limits on what any manager can do.
The other parallel is the emphasis on the short term. The Glazers haven't been shy about spending big money on transfers and player wages - the short term things to buy off the supporters - but the long-term foundations of the club have been neglected to crumble away.
I'm just reading a little about President Hoover (in The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter) and it includes this amazing detail about his work with the Commission for Relief in Belgium during WWI:
"For four years.. Hoover's commission fed ten million people. The task was accomplished with astonishing efficiency, and when the commission's accounts were tallied at the close of operations its overhead was found to be only three eighths of one per cent of total expenditures.."
Sounds like he was spectacularly ill-suited to be President though. I don't know why I find it so surprising that he should have been successful at many things prior to becoming President, but I am.
There are still streets and squares in little Belgian towns named after him.
He did the same for Bolshevik Russia after the war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Famine_Relief_Act ..At its peak, the ARA employed 300 Americans, more than 120,000 Russians and fed 10.5 million people daily. Its Russian operations were headed by Col. William N. Haskell. The Medical Division of the ARA functioned from November 1921 to June 1923 and helped overcome the typhus epidemic then ravaging Russia. The ARA's famine relief operations ran in parallel with much smaller Mennonite, Jewish and Quaker famine relief operations in Russia.
The ARA's operations in Russia were shut down on June 15, 1923, after it was discovered that Russia under Lenin had renewed the export of grain...
Collectivisation continued, of course, and subsequently millions starved.
That was the Civil War and War Communism. The Collectivisation disaster was in 1931-32 and the drive to force collectivise farming didn’t begin until 1928.
Was not collectivisation always envisaged, though ? They ignored any lessons that might have been learned from the failure of War Communism, and from the large rebound in agricultural production with a return to a semi-market system under the NEP.
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
And income tax was established to finance war with France.
Are you really arguing that the original purpose of a tax is the only legitimate use for funds raised?
War with France sounds like a far better use of my taxes than most of the rubbish it gets spent on. I vote we start the immediate construction of hundreds of giant trebuchet to stand on the cliffs of Dover and hurl things like pigs bladders filled with offal at Callas. That would leave me with a warm glow inside after writing every tax cheque!
Can we delay until Saturday please. I am staying in Calais on Friday.
Nick Robinson interviewing Ed Dave’s brought up the idea that immigrants should get the temporary right to work “so we don’t need to house them in hotels” etc.
Where exactly will they live even if they have the right to work? They will need to build a deposit, pay rent, find somewhere to live, need references. They will be competing with existing low paid people for somewhere to live so just causes a different problem if solving one at all in the first place.
I'm just reading a little about President Hoover (in The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter) and it includes this amazing detail about his work with the Commission for Relief in Belgium during WWI:
"For four years.. Hoover's commission fed ten million people. The task was accomplished with astonishing efficiency, and when the commission's accounts were tallied at the close of operations its overhead was found to be only three eighths of one per cent of total expenditures.."
Sounds like he was spectacularly ill-suited to be President though. I don't know why I find it so surprising that he should have been successful at many things prior to becoming President, but I am.
There are still streets and squares in little Belgian towns named after him.
He did the same for Bolshevik Russia after the war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Famine_Relief_Act ..At its peak, the ARA employed 300 Americans, more than 120,000 Russians and fed 10.5 million people daily. Its Russian operations were headed by Col. William N. Haskell. The Medical Division of the ARA functioned from November 1921 to June 1923 and helped overcome the typhus epidemic then ravaging Russia. The ARA's famine relief operations ran in parallel with much smaller Mennonite, Jewish and Quaker famine relief operations in Russia.
The ARA's operations in Russia were shut down on June 15, 1923, after it was discovered that Russia under Lenin had renewed the export of grain...
Collectivisation continued, of course, and subsequently millions starved.
That was the Civil War and War Communism. The Collectivisation disaster was in 1931-32 and the drive to force collectivise farming didn’t begin until 1928.
Was not collectivisation always envisaged, though ? They ignored any lessons that might have been learned from the failure of War Communism, and from the large rebound in agricultural production with a return to a semi-market system under the NEP.
No. In fact, Lenin had seized power on the premise of 'all land to the peasants.'
The collective farms as they emerged were much more Stalin's idea and designed as much as any other reason to control a peasantry he believed (wrongly) had been trying to undermine the regime.
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
the clowns have no clue
I just want to know who is allowing these utterly insane ideas (which scream of stupidity, lack of thought and desperation) to be "leaked" from the treasury..
Unfortunately, we also have to allow for the possibility that they "leaked from the Treasury" in the dreams of journalists force-fed on cheese by their editors.
We expect it from the more shameful end of the Street Of Shame, but the pollution has gone a long way up the Fleet now.
This is something I have changed my mind on to a certain extent; in the past I’d agree that using non white actors in British period pieces was ‘PC gone max’, but now I think it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the chance to be cast in one. A multi racial school doing a play about the 1966 World Cup Final would cast all kids as players, even though all 22 on the pitch were white, and a production of Shakespeare with an entirely non white cast would be just as legitimate as any other.
Where it does seem provocative is casting title characters; you can’t have a white Mandela or black Henry VIII, although I’d probably be more ok with the latter
BBC series ‘King and Conqueror’ branded ‘woke’ and ‘historically inaccurate’ for featuring black actors playing Anglo-Saxons.
The series portrays the historical Battle of Hastings in 1066 between William, Duke of Normandy and King Harold Godwinson of England.
If you can have actors as black Anglo Saxons you can have an actor as a white Mandela
A nicely thoughtful post there by @isam. I need to watch this as it is the 2nd one of yours I have liked today.
I disagree with you @HYUFD on Nelson Mandela and agree with @isam. Mandela being black is rather fundamental to the whole point of the story. Normans and Anglo Saxons being white is not. OK they clearly weren't black. They also have the wrong haircuts*, and speak the wrong language for the time, but we overlook that. We can overlook (with difficulty I grant you as it is obvious) black Anglo Saxons. It is a bit more difficult to overlook a white Mandela.
* A review I read said it was confusing flipping between the Norman and the Anglo Saxon locations and would have been a lot easy if they had the correct and different haircuts for the time.
It is called acting, if you can act well you should be able to convince in the part regardless of skin colour.
Otherwise if you demand historical figures are represented by actors of the same skin colour that has to apply across the board
I agree on this but it should apply equally. You don’t need to be gay to play a gay person or have killed people and put them under the patio to play Fred West, yet the trans loon lobby, of course, dunked on casting of non ‘trans’ actors in trans roles even getting a Scarlett Johansson show pulled as she backed out due to the furore from the perma-offended brigade. There was also Eddie Redmaye in that film, the Danish Girl IIRC, who got a load of flak for being in it.
I'm half and half here. I think that having had the actual experience makes a big difference, as does challenging the perceptions and assumptions of an audience around skin colour. Though an actor's skill is to understand and portray.
I would struggle to work my way into the head of someone around something as simple as tobacco addiction, for example. Or being an out gay professional footballer - aiui in the UK game we still only have one, following on from Justin Fashanu in 1990. Fashanu hanged himself in a garage in Shoreditch after he was accused of sexual assault.
With all due respect you’re not a professional actor. They immerse themselves in their roles. They inhabit the character and the role.
What you seem to imply would simply narrow the available cast. RTD selected actors on their merit for Queer as Folk, and it works fine.
I think it’s nonsensical to say only a trans actor can play a trans role or only,a straight actor can play a straight role.
It is literally the entire point of acting, to play a role that is not your own.
Sheldon: You can't be Professor Proton. You're not a scientist. Wil Wheaton: Well, I was never on a starship, but pretending I was bought me this house. And if I'd pretended a little longer, it would have a swimming pool
Isn’t it a conversation Sir John Gielgud had with Dustin Hoffman? “ it’s called acting dear boy”
But you can't act yourself a different colour.
I believe in complete freedom for casting. If someone wants to create a quasi-historical drama that uses a cast of all different ethnic backgrounds, good for them. I probably won't watch it because it snaps me out of the historical era and setting.
As an aside, poorly written dialogue has the same effect - if a period drama uses modern language in a way that fails to seem like a plausible approximation of language of that era, again I'll be pulled out of the drama and it won't be entertaining to me. I don't actually want the middle English of Chaucer, but I don't want something that sounds like it was written using ChatGPT either.
Where Isam's comment is absurd is to say that it is 'completely wrong' to create a historically accurate drama that uses a cast that could plausibly belong to the time and space in which the drama is set. That's an unwelcome and frankly fairly shocking encroachment on artistic freedom.
I don't understand your last paragraph. What did I say that was absurd?
You said it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the right to be cast in a period drama.
I don't know. I can see your point actually; it's not long ago I would have railed against what I am now saying is completely ok, so maybe I am coming to a middle ground by way of holding one opinion then the other! But period pieces are pretty much the directors version of the past rather than documentaries, so I think we can suspend belief a little
Exactly - the director's vision. That vision not to be dictated by a perverse sense of enforcing equal outcomes, which is completely counter to artistic freedom in this case.
People should be allowed to make the drama they want to make - period.
With who they want acting. Period.
Absolutely. As I've said, I'm totally pro whatever style of casting the director and producers want. It's entertainment and if there's a market for it, fill your boots. What I am against is an attitude that it would be 'totally wrong' not to give a black actor 'the chance' to play a white character (and vice versa). It is an effective quota system, because one cannot audition these actors then decide not to cast them. That would effectively preclude adaptations of Austen, Conan Doyle and Dickens (yes I am aware that there are some instances of black people living in Britain at that time) that evoke their eras without suspension of disbelief. It would be censorship.
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
the clowns have no clue
I just want to know who is allowing these utterly insane ideas (which scream of stupidity, lack of thought and desperation) to be "leaked" from the treasury..
Unfortunately, we also have to allow for the possibility that they "leaked from the Treasury" in the dreams of journalists force-fed on cheese by their editors.
We expect it from the more shameful end of the Street Of Shame, but the pollution has gone a long way up the Fleet now.
The Fleet became an open and de facto sewer before it was covered up and made into a real one.
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
"The worst of the worst" - a direct quote - is whom he was elected to deport. As he's constantly repeated, before and after his election.
This is something I have changed my mind on to a certain extent; in the past I’d agree that using non white actors in British period pieces was ‘PC gone max’, but now I think it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the chance to be cast in one. A multi racial school doing a play about the 1966 World Cup Final would cast all kids as players, even though all 22 on the pitch were white, and a production of Shakespeare with an entirely non white cast would be just as legitimate as any other.
Where it does seem provocative is casting title characters; you can’t have a white Mandela or black Henry VIII, although I’d probably be more ok with the latter
BBC series ‘King and Conqueror’ branded ‘woke’ and ‘historically inaccurate’ for featuring black actors playing Anglo-Saxons.
The series portrays the historical Battle of Hastings in 1066 between William, Duke of Normandy and King Harold Godwinson of England.
If you can have actors as black Anglo Saxons you can have an actor as a white Mandela
A nicely thoughtful post there by @isam. I need to watch this as it is the 2nd one of yours I have liked today.
I disagree with you @HYUFD on Nelson Mandela and agree with @isam. Mandela being black is rather fundamental to the whole point of the story. Normans and Anglo Saxons being white is not. OK they clearly weren't black. They also have the wrong haircuts*, and speak the wrong language for the time, but we overlook that. We can overlook (with difficulty I grant you as it is obvious) black Anglo Saxons. It is a bit more difficult to overlook a white Mandela.
* A review I read said it was confusing flipping between the Norman and the Anglo Saxon locations and would have been a lot easy if they had the correct and different haircuts for the time.
It is called acting, if you can act well you should be able to convince in the part regardless of skin colour.
Otherwise if you demand historical figures are represented by actors of the same skin colour that has to apply across the board
I agree on this but it should apply equally. You don’t need to be gay to play a gay person or have killed people and put them under the patio to play Fred West, yet the trans loon lobby, of course, dunked on casting of non ‘trans’ actors in trans roles even getting a Scarlett Johansson show pulled as she backed out due to the furore from the perma-offended brigade. There was also Eddie Redmaye in that film, the Danish Girl IIRC, who got a load of flak for being in it.
I'm half and half here. I think that having had the actual experience makes a big difference, as does challenging the perceptions and assumptions of an audience around skin colour. Though an actor's skill is to understand and portray.
I would struggle to work my way into the head of someone around something as simple as tobacco addiction, for example. Or being an out gay professional footballer - aiui in the UK game we still only have one, following on from Justin Fashanu in 1990. Fashanu hanged himself in a garage in Shoreditch after he was accused of sexual assault.
With all due respect you’re not a professional actor. They immerse themselves in their roles. They inhabit the character and the role.
What you seem to imply would simply narrow the available cast. RTD selected actors on their merit for Queer as Folk, and it works fine.
I think it’s nonsensical to say only a trans actor can play a trans role or only,a straight actor can play a straight role.
It is literally the entire point of acting, to play a role that is not your own.
Sheldon: You can't be Professor Proton. You're not a scientist. Wil Wheaton: Well, I was never on a starship, but pretending I was bought me this house. And if I'd pretended a little longer, it would have a swimming pool
Isn’t it a conversation Sir John Gielgud had with Dustin Hoffman? “ it’s called acting dear boy”
But you can't act yourself a different colour.
I believe in complete freedom for casting. If someone wants to create a quasi-historical drama that uses a cast of all different ethnic backgrounds, good for them. I probably won't watch it because it snaps me out of the historical era and setting.
As an aside, poorly written dialogue has the same effect - if a period drama uses modern language in a way that fails to seem like a plausible approximation of language of that era, again I'll be pulled out of the drama and it won't be entertaining to me. I don't actually want the middle English of Chaucer, but I don't want something that sounds like it was written using ChatGPT either.
Where Isam's comment is absurd is to say that it is 'completely wrong' to create a historically accurate drama that uses a cast that could plausibly belong to the time and space in which the drama is set. That's an unwelcome and frankly fairly shocking encroachment on artistic freedom.
I don't understand your last paragraph. What did I say that was absurd?
You said it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the right to be cast in a period drama.
I don't know. I can see your point actually; it's not long ago I would have railed against what I am now saying is completely ok, so maybe I am coming to a middle ground by way of holding one opinion then the other! But period pieces are pretty much the directors version of the past rather than documentaries, so I think we can suspend belief a little
Exactly - the director's vision. That vision not to be dictated by a perverse sense of enforcing equal outcomes, which is completely counter to artistic freedom in this case.
People should be allowed to make the drama they want to make - period.
With who they want acting. Period.
Hang on. @Luckyguy1983 using a rank Americanism in a post?
The tectonic plates are shifting. This has to end. Full stop.
This is something I have changed my mind on to a certain extent; in the past I’d agree that using non white actors in British period pieces was ‘PC gone max’, but now I think it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the chance to be cast in one. A multi racial school doing a play about the 1966 World Cup Final would cast all kids as players, even though all 22 on the pitch were white, and a production of Shakespeare with an entirely non white cast would be just as legitimate as any other.
Where it does seem provocative is casting title characters; you can’t have a white Mandela or black Henry VIII, although I’d probably be more ok with the latter
BBC series ‘King and Conqueror’ branded ‘woke’ and ‘historically inaccurate’ for featuring black actors playing Anglo-Saxons.
The series portrays the historical Battle of Hastings in 1066 between William, Duke of Normandy and King Harold Godwinson of England.
If you can have actors as black Anglo Saxons you can have an actor as a white Mandela
A nicely thoughtful post there by @isam. I need to watch this as it is the 2nd one of yours I have liked today.
I disagree with you @HYUFD on Nelson Mandela and agree with @isam. Mandela being black is rather fundamental to the whole point of the story. Normans and Anglo Saxons being white is not. OK they clearly weren't black. They also have the wrong haircuts*, and speak the wrong language for the time, but we overlook that. We can overlook (with difficulty I grant you as it is obvious) black Anglo Saxons. It is a bit more difficult to overlook a white Mandela.
* A review I read said it was confusing flipping between the Norman and the Anglo Saxon locations and would have been a lot easy if they had the correct and different haircuts for the time.
It is called acting, if you can act well you should be able to convince in the part regardless of skin colour.
Otherwise if you demand historical figures are represented by actors of the same skin colour that has to apply across the board
I agree on this but it should apply equally. You don’t need to be gay to play a gay person or have killed people and put them under the patio to play Fred West, yet the trans loon lobby, of course, dunked on casting of non ‘trans’ actors in trans roles even getting a Scarlett Johansson show pulled as she backed out due to the furore from the perma-offended brigade. There was also Eddie Redmaye in that film, the Danish Girl IIRC, who got a load of flak for being in it.
I'm half and half here. I think that having had the actual experience makes a big difference, as does challenging the perceptions and assumptions of an audience around skin colour. Though an actor's skill is to understand and portray.
I would struggle to work my way into the head of someone around something as simple as tobacco addiction, for example. Or being an out gay professional footballer - aiui in the UK game we still only have one, following on from Justin Fashanu in 1990. Fashanu hanged himself in a garage in Shoreditch after he was accused of sexual assault.
With all due respect you’re not a professional actor. They immerse themselves in their roles. They inhabit the character and the role.
What you seem to imply would simply narrow the available cast. RTD selected actors on their merit for Queer as Folk, and it works fine.
I think it’s nonsensical to say only a trans actor can play a trans role or only,a straight actor can play a straight role.
It is literally the entire point of acting, to play a role that is not your own.
Sheldon: You can't be Professor Proton. You're not a scientist. Wil Wheaton: Well, I was never on a starship, but pretending I was bought me this house. And if I'd pretended a little longer, it would have a swimming pool
Isn’t it a conversation Sir John Gielgud had with Dustin Hoffman? “ it’s called acting dear boy”
But you can't act yourself a different colour.
I believe in complete freedom for casting. If someone wants to create a quasi-historical drama that uses a cast of all different ethnic backgrounds, good for them. I probably won't watch it because it snaps me out of the historical era and setting.
As an aside, poorly written dialogue has the same effect - if a period drama uses modern language in a way that fails to seem like a plausible approximation of language of that era, again I'll be pulled out of the drama and it won't be entertaining to me. I don't actually want the middle English of Chaucer, but I don't want something that sounds like it was written using ChatGPT either.
Where Isam's comment is absurd is to say that it is 'completely wrong' to create a historically accurate drama that uses a cast that could plausibly belong to the time and space in which the drama is set. That's an unwelcome and frankly fairly shocking encroachment on artistic freedom.
I don't understand your last paragraph. What did I say that was absurd?
You said it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the right to be cast in a period drama.
I don't know. I can see your point actually; it's not long ago I would have railed against what I am now saying is completely ok, so maybe I am coming to a middle ground by way of holding one opinion then the other! But period pieces are pretty much the directors version of the past rather than documentaries, so I think we can suspend belief a little
Exactly - the director's vision. That vision not to be dictated by a perverse sense of enforcing equal outcomes, which is completely counter to artistic freedom in this case.
People should be allowed to make the drama they want to make - period.
With who they want acting. Period.
Hang on. @Luckyguy1983 using a rank Americanism in a post?
The tectonic plates are shifting. This has to end. Full stop.
It was a subtle play on period drama. Not my best work.
I'm just reading a little about President Hoover (in The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter) and it includes this amazing detail about his work with the Commission for Relief in Belgium during WWI:
"For four years.. Hoover's commission fed ten million people. The task was accomplished with astonishing efficiency, and when the commission's accounts were tallied at the close of operations its overhead was found to be only three eighths of one per cent of total expenditures.."
Sounds like he was spectacularly ill-suited to be President though. I don't know why I find it so surprising that he should have been successful at many things prior to becoming President, but I am.
There are still streets and squares in little Belgian towns named after him.
I visited his childhood home and museum when I was travelling through Iowa last year. Given his extraordinarily humble beginnings, his is a remarkable story, and he did well, both for himself and others, in various roles across the world during his early years. The lucky break came from his involvement with a British mining company out in Australia, as I recall, where he made his name making a lot of money for the company, including by doing down the wages and conditions of its immigrant workers. He seems to have been a steady, reliable sort rather than some sort of genius, and the flip side of being down to earth was that his world view was straightforward, almost simplistic, and inflexible, and so he proved precisely the wrong sort of person to preside over the financial crisis of the depression. There isn’t a lot of compassion in his work either with the mining company or as president, making that spell organising the postwar food relief all the more remarkable. I guess he just liked and had a talent for organising stuff?
I often think saying things like "Hoover's Commission fed ten million people" is a bit like saying "The Board of NHS England treated 1.1 million COVID cases during the pandemic". Sure having effective leadership is crucial but history and the passage of time tends to assign a lot more importance to the few memorable people at the top. In this case the historical process is helped along by the Hoover being a massive publicity hog.
I don't know. Why is it that some organisations (Man Utd?) are incredibly badly performing and others (Man City?) are very highly performing?
I think a lot does follow from the quality of its leadership.
For the umpteenth time, the rent you can charge for your property is a function of the supply and demand for rental properties, not the underlying costs to you. Otherwise, outright owners would be charging next to nothing in rent.
This will restrict supply of rental properties somewhat as they become uneconomical for some landlords. By the same token, that means there will be more people not renting as more houses come on the market to buy, so demand for rental properties will fall too. The net effect on rents is difficult to work out as it depends on elasticities etc etc, but it's not impossible that rents actually fall as a result.
Charging NICs on everything is a roundabout way of merging NICs and Income Tax. I approve, though it will certainly harm my finances.
Some want to rent eg if they work on contracts and move around the country a lot, are students etc and if there are fewer homes to rent there will be more demand from them for the homes still available to rent, pushing up rents overall.
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
the clowns have no clue
I just want to know who is allowing these utterly insane ideas (which scream of stupidity, lack of thought and desperation) to be "leaked" from the treasury..
They're playing a dangerous game - normally the plan is to leak out these plans both to 'test' public reaction and spot any PR blind spots, and so that when the actual plans are revealed, people think they're not so bad.
But there are lot of people out here actively wanting the government to be more decisive in terms of raising and deploying funds, and this time around they seriously risk raising hopes only to dash them with yet more timid mediocrity when the budget finally arrives.
This is something I have changed my mind on to a certain extent; in the past I’d agree that using non white actors in British period pieces was ‘PC gone max’, but now I think it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the chance to be cast in one. A multi racial school doing a play about the 1966 World Cup Final would cast all kids as players, even though all 22 on the pitch were white, and a production of Shakespeare with an entirely non white cast would be just as legitimate as any other.
Where it does seem provocative is casting title characters; you can’t have a white Mandela or black Henry VIII, although I’d probably be more ok with the latter
BBC series ‘King and Conqueror’ branded ‘woke’ and ‘historically inaccurate’ for featuring black actors playing Anglo-Saxons.
The series portrays the historical Battle of Hastings in 1066 between William, Duke of Normandy and King Harold Godwinson of England.
If you can have actors as black Anglo Saxons you can have an actor as a white Mandela
A nicely thoughtful post there by @isam. I need to watch this as it is the 2nd one of yours I have liked today.
I disagree with you @HYUFD on Nelson Mandela and agree with @isam. Mandela being black is rather fundamental to the whole point of the story. Normans and Anglo Saxons being white is not. OK they clearly weren't black. They also have the wrong haircuts*, and speak the wrong language for the time, but we overlook that. We can overlook (with difficulty I grant you as it is obvious) black Anglo Saxons. It is a bit more difficult to overlook a white Mandela.
* A review I read said it was confusing flipping between the Norman and the Anglo Saxon locations and would have been a lot easy if they had the correct and different haircuts for the time.
It is called acting, if you can act well you should be able to convince in the part regardless of skin colour.
Otherwise if you demand historical figures are represented by actors of the same skin colour that has to apply across the board
I agree on this but it should apply equally. You don’t need to be gay to play a gay person or have killed people and put them under the patio to play Fred West, yet the trans loon lobby, of course, dunked on casting of non ‘trans’ actors in trans roles even getting a Scarlett Johansson show pulled as she backed out due to the furore from the perma-offended brigade. There was also Eddie Redmaye in that film, the Danish Girl IIRC, who got a load of flak for being in it.
I'm half and half here. I think that having had the actual experience makes a big difference, as does challenging the perceptions and assumptions of an audience around skin colour. Though an actor's skill is to understand and portray.
I would struggle to work my way into the head of someone around something as simple as tobacco addiction, for example. Or being an out gay professional footballer - aiui in the UK game we still only have one, following on from Justin Fashanu in 1990. Fashanu hanged himself in a garage in Shoreditch after he was accused of sexual assault.
With all due respect you’re not a professional actor. They immerse themselves in their roles. They inhabit the character and the role.
What you seem to imply would simply narrow the available cast. RTD selected actors on their merit for Queer as Folk, and it works fine.
I think it’s nonsensical to say only a trans actor can play a trans role or only,a straight actor can play a straight role.
It is literally the entire point of acting, to play a role that is not your own.
Sheldon: You can't be Professor Proton. You're not a scientist. Wil Wheaton: Well, I was never on a starship, but pretending I was bought me this house. And if I'd pretended a little longer, it would have a swimming pool
Isn’t it a conversation Sir John Gielgud had with Dustin Hoffman? “ it’s called acting dear boy”
But you can't act yourself a different colour.
I believe in complete freedom for casting. If someone wants to create a quasi-historical drama that uses a cast of all different ethnic backgrounds, good for them. I probably won't watch it because it snaps me out of the historical era and setting.
As an aside, poorly written dialogue has the same effect - if a period drama uses modern language in a way that fails to seem like a plausible approximation of language of that era, again I'll be pulled out of the drama and it won't be entertaining to me. I don't actually want the middle English of Chaucer, but I don't want something that sounds like it was written using ChatGPT either.
Where Isam's comment is absurd is to say that it is 'completely wrong' to create a historically accurate drama that uses a cast that could plausibly belong to the time and space in which the drama is set. That's an unwelcome and frankly fairly shocking encroachment on artistic freedom.
I don't understand your last paragraph. What did I say that was absurd?
You said it would be completely wrong to deny a black actor the right to be cast in a period drama.
I don't know. I can see your point actually; it's not long ago I would have railed against what I am now saying is completely ok, so maybe I am coming to a middle ground by way of holding one opinion then the other! But period pieces are pretty much the directors version of the past rather than documentaries, so I think we can suspend belief a little
Exactly - the director's vision. That vision not to be dictated by a perverse sense of enforcing equal outcomes, which is completely counter to artistic freedom in this case.
People should be allowed to make the drama they want to make - period.
With who they want acting. Period.
Absolutely. As I've said, I'm totally pro whatever style of casting the director and producers want. It's entertainment and if there's a market for it, fill your boots. What I am against is an attitude that it would be 'totally wrong' not to give a black actor 'the chance' to play a white character (and vice versa). It is an effective quota system, because one cannot audition these actors then decide not to cast them. That would effectively preclude adaptations of Austen, Conan Doyle and Dickens (yes I am aware that there are some instances of black people living in Britain at that time) that evoke their eras without suspension of disbelief. It would be censorship.
Surely that makes no sense? You can give an actor 'the chance' to play any character via the auditioning process - not everyone who auditions gets the role, obviously.
They'd be pretty stupid to stand against Reform UK because all it'll do is split the populist/right vote. The only exception to that is Lowe's seat in Great Yarmouth.
Habib has just done an interview with Andrew Gold. He didn't say much on Robinson, sticking to his view that the Attorney General should not have intervened in a civil case. Much more about Farage who he dismissed as self interested and controlling Reform as his own personal fiefdom. As for tactical voting remember we are still four years away from the election.
In other news the Russian economy looks more and more strained thanks to the Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries. Hopefully the Flamingo cruise missiles will help to starve the bear further. My biggest concern is that Trump will try and sabotage it to help Putin.
Ukraine should play Trump at his own game. "We will stop hitting Russian refineries in 14 days."
And in 14 days time?
"We will stop hitting Russian refineries in 14 days."
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358 So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
If she had no right to be in the US then she’s liable for deportation. It’s a political decision whether to show clemency or not, but the US elected a president determined not to.
Perhaps liable for deportation. To be kept in captivity for six months beforehand?
No.
Her detention ended when she withdrew her asylum application and self-deported.
There’s lots of people who believe that detaining asylum seekers is reasonable given the risk of absconding. It’s at the discretion of the system whether to grant bail (they did for her mother and another sibling).
“Self deport or we will imprison you indefinitely” isn’t exactly justice. It’s extortion.
It was self-deport or we will detain you while your asylum application is reviewed.
That’s not extortion
Yes it is because the whole point is seemingly to encourage people to self deport. That isn’t justice. Justice should be swift.
It should. But to go from judicial inefficiency (and we are one to talk!) to a malign motive suggests you have a preformed view of the situation.
The reality is that the US doesn’t recognise the right to asylum in the way that we do. Arguably we should take a more self-interested view as a country than we currently do. The probability of her claim being granted under the current administration was minimal (nb: I don’t know the specific facts of this case).
That doesn’t make it extortion though: it’s just increasing the opportunity cost of fighting her claim (the whole US legal system is like this - plea bargaining is a disgrace).
They'd be pretty stupid to stand against Reform UK because all it'll do is split the populist/right vote. The only exception to that is Lowe's seat in Great Yarmouth.
Habib has just done an interview with Andrew Gold. He didn't say much on Robinson, sticking to his view that the Attorney General should not have intervened in a civil case. Much more about Farage who he dismissed as self interested and controlling Reform as his own personal fiefdom. As for tactical voting remember we are still four years away from the election.
In other news the Russian economy looks more and more strained thanks to the Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries. Hopefully the Flamingo cruise missiles will help to starve the bear further. My biggest concern is that Trump will try and sabotage it to help Putin.
FPT: When did the Attorney General intervene in a Civil Case?
I'm not spending a hour listening to him, but Habib's claim is that Lord Hermer "effectively put Tommy Robinson in jail." How did that happen? https://youtu.be/lBjXimDjoYE?t=720
Comments
The policy would of course be ludicrous, National Insurance was set up to fund National Insurance, some healthcare, contributory unemployment benefits etc not to be some class war tool for useless Labour governments.
The report also says sellers of higher value homes will be hit with CGT when they sell, which would have the reverse effect of reducing the number of homes available to buy at that level
Are you really arguing that the original purpose of a tax is the only legitimate use for funds raised?
According to eyewitnesses, at least dozens of drones hit the refinery. The entire territory of the Novokuybyshevsk refinery is shrouded in smoke and fire after the attack."
https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1960907589169897869
Steve Rosenberg's 2 to 5-minute reviews of the Russian papers are published daily on his YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@BBCSteveR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AShPTasA7eI
MPs will be shocked. Keir Starmer will arrange for it to be shown in schools. For the rest of the population, this is old news but no doubt compelling viewing with an all-star cast.
DAE think David Tennant looks a lot like Peter Capaldi?
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/aug/27/amorim-sorry-for-manchester-united-fans-and-questions-players-desire
Some ‘thing’ or someone?
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1960694652828299358
So this woman is brought to the US when she's eight years old, becomes a scholarship university student to become a nurse... and is then seized by ICE, and kept in harsh captivity for six months - which wouldn't happen to most actual criminals.
Why do this? Who was she hurting
Mostly the decline in fertility is by choice, hence being a worldwide phenomenon. It presents many societal challenges, not least the need for emigration, and high taxes to cover a worsening dependency ratio, but is a good thing for the planet.
He therefore thought charities should deal with the Depression, not the government.
It is worth noting that the only payment he took for organising the Hoover meals post WW2 was $50 for writing a newspaper article, which he donated to a school in Baghdad. He also paid rather a lot of his own expenses, which is one reason why overheads were so low.
No.
https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/people/corby-reform-councillor-resigns-over-serious-racism-allegations-5289085
The consequence of this is that those who elect leaders should be a lot more careful about who they elect than they often are. And that care needs to be less about the manifesto (pretty irrelevant really) and more about the character of the candidate.
There’s lots of people who believe that detaining asylum seekers is reasonable given the risk of absconding. It’s at the discretion of the system whether to grant bail (they did for her mother and another sibling).
This strikes me as being very unreasonable.
I've always found the story of why he disliked Eisenhower amusing. Hoover was a keen fisherman and one day when staying with Eisenhower he was invited to go fishing with him. Eisenhower had his own private pool, and had planned the trip carefully. For three days, the fish hadn't been fed, and they were biting the bait like nobody's business as a result.
Hoover was disgusted. He thought it was cheating. One biographer drily commented he was 'a fundamentalist in fishing, as in all things.'
So he endorsed Eisenhower in 1952, but never worked with him.
There may be more to come out about this story, but right now it's an impossible stretch to describe this woman as "the worst of the worst", as Trump put it.
But the worst of the worst know how to hide and use weapons. Much easier to pounce on the relatively harmless.
See this, from those wet lefties... the Cato Institute.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/trump-says-ice-arresting-worst-worst-new-data-shows-thats-not-true
That’s not extortion
People should be allowed to make the drama they want to make - period.
Where exactly will they live even if they have the right to work? They will need to build a deposit, pay rent, find somewhere to live, need references. They will be competing with existing low paid people for somewhere to live so just causes a different problem if solving one at all in the first place.
And they won't stand out like a provocative sore thumb.
1/Our client was notified tonight by White House staff in the personnel office that she was fired. As a presidential appointee, senate confirmed officer, only the president himself can fire her.
2/For this reason, we reject notification Dr. Monarez has received as legally deficient and she remains as CDC Director. We have notified the White House Counsel of our position."
https://x.com/MarkSZaidEsq/status/1960914720137076768
The tectonic plates are shifting. This has to end. Full stop.
They ignored any lessons that might have been learned from the failure of War Communism, and from the large rebound in agricultural production with a return to a semi-market system under the NEP.
The collective farms as they emerged were much more Stalin's idea and designed as much as any other reason to control a peasantry he believed (wrongly) had been trying to undermine the regime.
We expect it from the more shameful end of the Street Of Shame, but the pollution has gone a long way up the Fleet now.
Appropriate.
NEW THREAD
I think a lot does follow from the quality of its leadership.
But there are lot of people out here actively wanting the government to be more decisive in terms of raising and deploying funds, and this time around they seriously risk raising hopes only to dash them with yet more timid mediocrity when the budget finally arrives.
And in 14 days time?
"We will stop hitting Russian refineries in 14 days."
The reality is that the US doesn’t recognise the right to asylum in the way that we do. Arguably we should take a more self-interested view as a country than we currently do. The probability of her claim being granted under the current administration was minimal (nb: I don’t know the specific facts of this case).
That doesn’t make it extortion though: it’s just increasing the opportunity cost of fighting her claim (the whole US legal system is like this - plea bargaining is a disgrace).
I'm not spending a hour listening to him, but Habib's claim is that Lord Hermer "effectively put Tommy Robinson in jail." How did that happen?
https://youtu.be/lBjXimDjoYE?t=720