When are we cancelling the vikings for being all rapey and pillagey?
@Vikinghistory \ 🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Isn't this partly because IQ is a pretty crude measure?
Levels of both income and wealth are almost certainly linked to things such as "work ethic" and "deferred gratification" which aren't directly connected to intelligence, and are presumably partially learnt behaviours, and partially inherited.
Sure, there are lots of problems with IQ as a measure, and whatever IQ measures, it clearly isn’t everything that matters.
Levels of both income and wealth are also clearly linked to things such as “inherited wealth”, “going to private school” and “your parents knowing people”… and indeed also “luck”.
People are desperate to find a reason to justify inequality to escape any feeling that they ought to find a way to do something about it.
When are we cancelling the vikings for being all rapey and pillagey?
@Vikinghistory \ 🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
When are we cancelling the vikings for being all rapey and pillagey?
@Vikinghistory \ 🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
When are we cancelling the vikings for being all rapey and pillagey?
@Vikinghistory \ 🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
Someone was gasing on about the TNT equivalence of battery storage systems.
Well, the average petrol station has on its premises the equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon’ worth of TNT - as measured in the raw energy equivalence.
But that's different! Petrol isn't dangerous because, ugh... reasons.
There is a certain point to this - with batteries people are remarkably relaxed about installing boxes containing an awful lot of energy inside their houses. If you installed replacing a tank containing an equivalent quantity of petrol into someone's loft/utility room or similar, everyone would think you'd gone insane.
I'll install a big battery for the house I'm buying (we should live there long enough to make it worthwhile) but it installed externally or in an outbuilding, not in the main house.
I think the difference in attitude is mostly because batteries only really fail in one way - catching fire, and there are plenty of fire risks in the average home. We're pretty comfortable with that in general.
Petrol is much more complex. Yes, a petrol tank can catch fire but it can also poison you with fumes or leak and silently become a boom waiting to happen. I store petrol outside, but I have multiple large Li-ion and Li-Po batteries inside.
It will almost certainly be safer for a house to have battery storage than a supply of gas, but we've lived with and accepted the risks of gas supply for many decades, while batteries are new, and so it's easier to scare people about them.
When are we cancelling the vikings for being all rapey and pillagey?
@Vikinghistory \ 🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
I hadn't realised that in addition to being a racist and, at best, incredibly insensitive about victims of gun massacres, Lowe is also an anti-vaxxer moron, but to a degree these things do seem to go together - everythingism, right wing edition.
This slip of the tongue on one murder vs one mass shooting seems less significant than Lowe describing himself as a “pureblood” because he refused the Covid vaccine.
He went on to say horse de-wormer Ivermectin was “just as effective” as the vaccine.
It's llke he exists purely to make people realise that Farage is not as bad by comparison.
That said, anyone who describes Ivermectin as “horse de-wormer”, rather than an invention that earned the Nobel Prize in Medicine and has likely saved millions of lives, is probably best ignored.
I know nothing about Ivermectin (though oddly I was once accused here of having been an Ivermectin fan during Covid), but it wouldn't be the first medicine that originally had another quite different application, and that feels like a rather heavy-handed way to imply crankiness.
I am also not sure we can say too much for the effectiveness of the covid vaccines. Everyone knows people who have had it (yes, I know it's not supposed to make you immune) and had it badly, despite being boosted up to the nines. We can say they'd have had it even worse, but that is largely a question of faith.
It's not a question of faith, it's a question of statistics. We can see the numbers who are hospitalised or die, and compare with the numbers for the same before the vaccines.
The comparison is pretty compelling in favour of the vaccines.
Sure, but as the pandemic progressed, those numbers would have fallen naturally, even without any form of medical intervention - this happens in all epidemics. And with different methods (not ivermectin) in another universe, they might have fallen faster. They might not have. Perhaps the vaccines were the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps they were not. We can't really know.
Says the person who this very afternoon was lauding the notion of drawing conclusions from facts rather than just starting with a conclusion you happen to like or rejecting one you don't.
Chutzpah or what. You should get into populist right wing politics.
Oh, hang on.
You can't really accuse me of drawing a conclusion when I've been at pains to suggest we cannot draw one.
You are rejecting a conclusion that is proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the evidence.
Why you would do that is a mystery. I don't know the reason and you obviously can't tell me.
Some people find scientific truth scary, and feel it dis-empowers them.
Staging a performance of the story The Cold Equations, as a play at university was fascinating in this respect.
Hm. This is the first time I've come across that story. But I'd say the critiques are bollocks. Space travel.is arse-clenchingly expensive and you don't carry any weight you don't need to. Adding extra contingency just in case some irresponsiboe idiot creeps aboard would cost millions. Those millions could be spent on keeping people alive. NICE has a formula for working out the monetary value of a human life. She knew it wasn't allowed but she did it anyway, guessing incorrectly that the sanction would be small. The high sanction is a way of making these space flights viable because you wouldn't expect anyone to be so idiotic to use it.
To start with, interstellar flight doesn’t exist yet. So we have no way to talk about the limits of the technology. So complaining about the parameters of the problem is to miss the point.
We can take a moral problem in a future society and discuss it, though.
The critiques of the story often sound like desperate attempt to deny that the problem could ever be a valid issue. To avoid the point of the story - reality doesn’t care what you want. Which is distressing to many people.
I don't deny some such situation might occur; just saying this is a particularly crass scenario, on its own terms.
And I'd say that accounts for as much of the reaction you dislike, as any denial of "reality".
I hadn't realised that in addition to being a racist and, at best, incredibly insensitive about victims of gun massacres, Lowe is also an anti-vaxxer moron, but to a degree these things do seem to go together - everythingism, right wing edition.
This slip of the tongue on one murder vs one mass shooting seems less significant than Lowe describing himself as a “pureblood” because he refused the Covid vaccine.
He went on to say horse de-wormer Ivermectin was “just as effective” as the vaccine.
It's llke he exists purely to make people realise that Farage is not as bad by comparison.
That said, anyone who describes Ivermectin as “horse de-wormer”, rather than an invention that earned the Nobel Prize in Medicine and has likely saved millions of lives, is probably best ignored.
I know nothing about Ivermectin (though oddly I was once accused here of having been an Ivermectin fan during Covid), but it wouldn't be the first medicine that originally had another quite different application, and that feels like a rather heavy-handed way to imply crankiness.
I am also not sure we can say too much for the effectiveness of the covid vaccines. Everyone knows people who have had it (yes, I know it's not supposed to make you immune) and had it badly, despite being boosted up to the nines. We can say they'd have had it even worse, but that is largely a question of faith.
The COVID vaccines crushed the death rates to nothing, as they did with serious illness & hospitalisation.
This is extremely clear, both from the medical trials and the data from actual usage.
The side effects of the vaccines have also been tracked, in detailed, published data and are in line with other vaccinations.
So away with your “question of faith” stuff.
I have not said anything about side effects.
Regarding the efficacy of vaccines, the studies there are based on modelling non-existent counterfactuals. We had the vaccines. We cannot know with any certainty what would have happened in a world where we didn't.
No. There were a large number of randomised controlled trials of the vaccines, which are the gold standard for demonstrating a causal relationship.
Although it’s hardly surprising that someone who denies climate change doesn’t understand science!
It was a significantly compressed timeline though compared to normal vaccine approval. For obvious reasons. So longer term effects were clearly not able to be understood at the time.
Still aren’t. We’re living through an extended trial.
Still needs must.
One of the main reasons for the compressed timeline was because the UK authorities made the decision to enbed themselvs in the labs to monitir development rather than following the normal course which is to wait for the developer to complete initial tests and they be sent allgthe data for review. It dramatically cut the approval time by removing all the 'dead; time that is normally involved in such a process.
Yes, I’m well aware thanks. I used to work in Biopharma supply of cleanroom consumables for vaccine production and worked with all of the main vaccine providers bar one.
The bigger issue was availability of parts and constrained supply. Especially after warp Drive.
There are also compressed timelines anyway for emergencies like this.
Still doesn’t change the point the long term effects are not known yet. I was happy to have the jab.
Pretty much every drug is approved after just a couple of years of testing, so that is going to be true of essentially pharmaceutical.
What we do know, and the evidence keeps growing every week, is that all causes mortality is much lower for people who got jabbed, than those who didn't.
This seems to be because viruses turn out to do much more underlying damage than people realised.
So, for example, people who have the flu vaccine have lower rates of dementia, not because the vaccine is protective against dementia directly, but because flu causes damage that sometimes later leads to dementia.
When are we cancelling the vikings for being all rapey and pillagey?
@Vikinghistory \ 🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
When are we cancelling the vikings for being all rapey and pillagey?
@Vikinghistory \ 🇳🇴🏴Norway vs England tonight. English fans will spend 90 minutes shouting in a language full of our words.
The Angles who gave England its name sailed from the Jutland peninsula, right next door to us. Four centuries later, Norse settlers crossed the same sea and took the north and east of England.
The evidence never left. They, them and their are Old Norse words. So are sky, egg, knife and anger. Window comes from vindauga, wind-eye.
And more than 600 English place names end in -by. Grimsby. Derby. Whitby. By is still the Norwegian word for town.
🔺 EXCLUSIVE: The convicted fraudster George Cottrell had access to Nigel Farage’s emails, and covered party costs without the Electoral Commission knowing
Is that good or bad ? It might imply Norway can play us like a tune...
It was like half court basketball. The half line camera man had the easiest job ever - I had to check I hadn’t missed half my tv screen as it was constantly in the Norway half. Thing is, we know Haaland can score from nothing so all the possession and territory in the world is useless without scoring.
There is no evidence we know of so far that Widdecombe was killed because of her politics. This is play-acting, using Widdecombe’s death to try to distract from the party’s problems.
I hadn't realised that in addition to being a racist and, at best, incredibly insensitive about victims of gun massacres, Lowe is also an anti-vaxxer moron, but to a degree these things do seem to go together - everythingism, right wing edition.
This slip of the tongue on one murder vs one mass shooting seems less significant than Lowe describing himself as a “pureblood” because he refused the Covid vaccine.
He went on to say horse de-wormer Ivermectin was “just as effective” as the vaccine.
It's llke he exists purely to make people realise that Farage is not as bad by comparison.
That said, anyone who describes Ivermectin as “horse de-wormer”, rather than an invention that earned the Nobel Prize in Medicine and has likely saved millions of lives, is probably best ignored.
I know nothing about Ivermectin (though oddly I was once accused here of having been an Ivermectin fan during Covid), but it wouldn't be the first medicine that originally had another quite different application, and that feels like a rather heavy-handed way to imply crankiness.
I am also not sure we can say too much for the effectiveness of the covid vaccines. Everyone knows people who have had it (yes, I know it's not supposed to make you immune) and had it badly, despite being boosted up to the nines. We can say they'd have had it even worse, but that is largely a question of faith.
It's not a question of faith, it's a question of statistics. We can see the numbers who are hospitalised or die, and compare with the numbers for the same before the vaccines.
The comparison is pretty compelling in favour of the vaccines.
Sure, but as the pandemic progressed, those numbers would have fallen naturally, even without any form of medical intervention - this happens in all epidemics. And with different methods (not ivermectin) in another universe, they might have fallen faster. They might not have. Perhaps the vaccines were the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps they were not. We can't really know.
Says the person who this very afternoon was lauding the notion of drawing conclusions from facts rather than just starting with a conclusion you happen to like or rejecting one you don't.
Chutzpah or what. You should get into populist right wing politics.
Oh, hang on.
You can't really accuse me of drawing a conclusion when I've been at pains to suggest we cannot draw one.
You are rejecting a conclusion that is proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the evidence.
Why you would do that is a mystery. I don't know the reason and you obviously can't tell me.
Some people find scientific truth scary, and feel it dis-empowers them.
Staging a performance of the story The Cold Equations, as a play at university was fascinating in this respect.
Hm. This is the first time I've come across that story. But I'd say the critiques are bollocks. Space travel.is arse-clenchingly expensive and you don't carry any weight you don't need to. Adding extra contingency just in case some irresponsiboe idiot creeps aboard would cost millions. Those millions could be spent on keeping people alive. NICE has a formula for working out the monetary value of a human life. She knew it wasn't allowed but she did it anyway, guessing incorrectly that the sanction would be small. The high sanction is a way of making these space flights viable because you wouldn't expect anyone to be so idiotic to use it.
To start with, interstellar flight doesn’t exist yet. So we have no way to talk about the limits of the technology. So complaining about the parameters of the problem is to miss the point.
We can take a moral problem in a future society and discuss it, though.
The critiques of the story often sound like desperate attempt to deny that the problem could ever be a valid issue. To avoid the point of the story - reality doesn’t care what you want. Which is distressing to many people.
I don't deny some such situation might occur; just saying this is a particularly crass scenario, on its own terms.
And I'd say that accounts for as much of the reaction you dislike, as any denial of "reality".
The reaction to the play was that the ending was “difficult”, “upsetting”, “heartless” and “should be changed”.
None of those involved were critiquing the underlying scenario. Just that they found the ending profoundly wrong.
What I found of note was that some of those were people who were all about the experimental and unorthodox in theatre.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Isn't this partly because IQ is a pretty crude measure?
Levels of both income and wealth are almost certainly linked to things such as "work ethic" and "deferred gratification" which aren't directly connected to intelligence, and are presumably partially learnt behaviours, and partially inherited.
Sure, there are lots of problems with IQ as a measure, and whatever IQ measures, it clearly isn’t everything that matters.
Levels of both income and wealth are also clearly linked to things such as “inherited wealth”, “going to private school” and “your parents knowing people”… and indeed also “luck”.
People are desperate to find a reason to justify inequality to escape any feeling that they ought to find a way to do something about it.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Isn't this partly because IQ is a pretty crude measure?
Levels of both income and wealth are almost certainly linked to things such as "work ethic" and "deferred gratification" which aren't directly connected to intelligence, and are presumably partially learnt behaviours, and partially inherited.
Sure, there are lots of problems with IQ as a measure, and whatever IQ measures, it clearly isn’t everything that matters.
Levels of both income and wealth are also clearly linked to things such as “inherited wealth”, “going to private school” and “your parents knowing people”… and indeed also “luck”.
People are desperate to find a reason to justify inequality to escape any feeling that they ought to find a way to do something about it.
By which you mean socialism of course
There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there are many different imaginings of what socialism involves, and I am open to people coming up with new ideas to solve old problems.
One of the things I ultimately found most disappointing about Corbyn was that he was rigidly attached to ideas and policies from the 70s, as though nobody had had a good new idea since.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Isn't this partly because IQ is a pretty crude measure?
Levels of both income and wealth are almost certainly linked to things such as "work ethic" and "deferred gratification" which aren't directly connected to intelligence, and are presumably partially learnt behaviours, and partially inherited.
Sure, there are lots of problems with IQ as a measure, and whatever IQ measures, it clearly isn’t everything that matters.
Levels of both income and wealth are also clearly linked to things such as “inherited wealth”, “going to private school” and “your parents knowing people”… and indeed also “luck”.
People are desperate to find a reason to justify inequality to escape any feeling that they ought to find a way to do something about it.
By which you mean socialism of course
There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there are many different imaginings of what socialism involves, and I am open to people coming up with new ideas to solve old problems.
One of the things I ultimately found most disappointing about Corbyn was that he was rigidly attached to ideas and policies from the 70s, as though nobody had had a good new idea since.
Yes but at the end of the day you want some form of the same old socialism or social democracy ie same old tax the rich and wealthy, property owners and high earners and businesses more and redistribute via more public spending and welfare and some nationalisations. So not miles off what Corbyn wanted anyway
The Telegraph are reporting that Burnham will scrap Lammy's proposed changes to Jury trials. These fundamental changes to our constitutional and legal arrangements matter far more to me than temporary changes to taxation policies and, if Burnham is planning on dropping them then I take that as a very encouraging sign.
The Telegraph are reporting that Burnham will scrap Lammy's proposed changes to Jury trials. These fundamental changes to our constitutional and legal arrangements matter far more to me than temporary changes to taxation policies and, if Burnham is planning on dropping them then I take that as a very encouraging sign.
Suggests that Lammy won't be keeping his job then.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Isn't this partly because IQ is a pretty crude measure?
Levels of both income and wealth are almost certainly linked to things such as "work ethic" and "deferred gratification" which aren't directly connected to intelligence, and are presumably partially learnt behaviours, and partially inherited.
Sure, there are lots of problems with IQ as a measure, and whatever IQ measures, it clearly isn’t everything that matters.
Levels of both income and wealth are also clearly linked to things such as “inherited wealth”, “going to private school” and “your parents knowing people”… and indeed also “luck”.
People are desperate to find a reason to justify inequality to escape any feeling that they ought to find a way to do something about it.
By which you mean socialism of course
There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there are many different imaginings of what socialism involves, and I am open to people coming up with new ideas to solve old problems.
One of the things I ultimately found most disappointing about Corbyn was that he was rigidly attached to ideas and policies from the 70s, as though nobody had had a good new idea since.
Yes but at the end of the day you want some form of the same old socialism or social democracy ie same old tax the rich and wealthy, property owners and high earners and businesses more and redistribute via more public spending and welfare and some nationalisations. So not miles off what Corbyn wanted anyway
I mean, yes, I'm on the left, but, I don't think that's really a fair reflection of my politics.
For example, I would much prefer that the structure of the economy is changed so that lower-paid people are paid more, and then those people wouldn't be reliant on handouts from government, which can easily be taken away, as we saw with tax credits that were given by Brown and taken away by Osborne.
Edit: I also think I've bored on a lot about how I think a government could make people feel richer, even without increasing their income by a single penny, if they tracked the ways in which various companies are to efficient at extracting cash from people - e.g. leasehold, car finance, automatic increases in utility bills, etc.
I feel that you do me a disservice by just lazily assigning to me a set of policies that you see as a definition of socialism, instead of having a more interesting discussion of what my personal views are. If you were less keen to pigeonhole me so that you could dismiss me, we might surprise ourselves and find points of agreement.
The Telegraph are reporting that Burnham will scrap Lammy's proposed changes to Jury trials. These fundamental changes to our constitutional and legal arrangements matter far more to me than temporary changes to taxation policies and, if Burnham is planning on dropping them then I take that as a very encouraging sign.
Suggests that Lammy won't be keeping his job then.
Getting him out of Cabinet will very welcome. He just isn't good enough for government.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Isn't this partly because IQ is a pretty crude measure?
Levels of both income and wealth are almost certainly linked to things such as "work ethic" and "deferred gratification" which aren't directly connected to intelligence, and are presumably partially learnt behaviours, and partially inherited.
Sure, there are lots of problems with IQ as a measure, and whatever IQ measures, it clearly isn’t everything that matters.
Levels of both income and wealth are also clearly linked to things such as “inherited wealth”, “going to private school” and “your parents knowing people”… and indeed also “luck”.
People are desperate to find a reason to justify inequality to escape any feeling that they ought to find a way to do something about it.
By which you mean socialism of course
There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there are many different imaginings of what socialism involves, and I am open to people coming up with new ideas to solve old problems.
One of the things I ultimately found most disappointing about Corbyn was that he was rigidly attached to ideas and policies from the 70s, as though nobody had had a good new idea since.
Yes but at the end of the day you want some form of the same old socialism or social democracy ie same old tax the rich and wealthy, property owners and high earners and businesses more and redistribute via more public spending and welfare and some nationalisations. So not miles off what Corbyn wanted anyway
I mean, yes, I'm on the left, but, I don't think that's really a fair reflection of my politics.
For example, I would much prefer that the structure of the economy is changed so that lower-paid people are paid more, and then those people wouldn't be reliant on handouts from government, which can easily be taken away, as we saw with tax credits that were given by Brown and taken away by Osborne.
I feel that you do me a disservice by just lazily assigning to me a set of policies that you see as a definition of socialism, instead of having a more interesting discussion of what my personal views are. If you were less keen to pigeonhole me so that you could dismiss me, we might surprise ourselves and find points of agreement.
In the early 90s, we had no national minimum wage, and 3 pounds an hour was common. However, you could afford a modest house on a low wage job. The real value of that wage was higher than today's much celebrated (and constantly rising) minimum wage. Lefties should join the dots, and stop seal-clapping each time the Government makes it harder for British businesses supposedly on behalf of low earners.
The Telegraph are reporting that Burnham will scrap Lammy's proposed changes to Jury trials. These fundamental changes to our constitutional and legal arrangements matter far more to me than temporary changes to taxation policies and, if Burnham is planning on dropping them then I take that as a very encouraging sign.
It will be interesting to see whether there are any new policies to help speed up the court system, and/or increase its capacity, so that it can catch up.
The Telegraph are reporting that Burnham will scrap Lammy's proposed changes to Jury trials. These fundamental changes to our constitutional and legal arrangements matter far more to me than temporary changes to taxation policies and, if Burnham is planning on dropping them then I take that as a very encouraging sign.
Suggests that Lammy won't be keeping his job then.
Lammy's very flexible (or, if you prefer, shameless). He could keep his job and finesse it.
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Isn't this partly because IQ is a pretty crude measure?
Levels of both income and wealth are almost certainly linked to things such as "work ethic" and "deferred gratification" which aren't directly connected to intelligence, and are presumably partially learnt behaviours, and partially inherited.
Sure, there are lots of problems with IQ as a measure, and whatever IQ measures, it clearly isn’t everything that matters.
Levels of both income and wealth are also clearly linked to things such as “inherited wealth”, “going to private school” and “your parents knowing people”… and indeed also “luck”.
People are desperate to find a reason to justify inequality to escape any feeling that they ought to find a way to do something about it.
By which you mean socialism of course
There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there are many different imaginings of what socialism involves, and I am open to people coming up with new ideas to solve old problems.
One of the things I ultimately found most disappointing about Corbyn was that he was rigidly attached to ideas and policies from the 70s, as though nobody had had a good new idea since.
Yes but at the end of the day you want some form of the same old socialism or social democracy ie same old tax the rich and wealthy, property owners and high earners and businesses more and redistribute via more public spending and welfare and some nationalisations. So not miles off what Corbyn wanted anyway
I mean, yes, I'm on the left, but, I don't think that's really a fair reflection of my politics.
For example, I would much prefer that the structure of the economy is changed so that lower-paid people are paid more, and then those people wouldn't be reliant on handouts from government, which can easily be taken away, as we saw with tax credits that were given by Brown and taken away by Osborne.
Edit: I also think I've bored on a lot about how I think a government could make people feel richer, even without increasing their income by a single penny, if they tracked the ways in which various companies are to efficient at extracting cash from people - e.g. leasehold, car finance, automatic increases in utility bills, etc.
I feel that you do me a disservice by just lazily assigning to me a set of policies that you see as a definition of socialism, instead of having a more interesting discussion of what my personal views are. If you were less keen to pigeonhole me so that you could dismiss me, we might surprise ourselves and find points of agreement.
',,,so that lower-paid people are paid more.' The UK minimum wage is already amongst the highest in the OECD and double that in the USA and that is making it harder for small businesses especially to afford to hire more workers
Does Socialism boil down to: "If one person is poor, everyone should be poor"?
No. "If nine people are poor and one person is wealthy, ten people could be comfortably off."
They want 99 people to be poor and one weathly, and they want to be that 1%.
Or, at best, "it's better that everyone loses as long as the rich lose most than everyone gaining if the rich gain most".
Here's a challenge for the PB righties. Come up with a non-caricatured summary of left-wing politics on the basis of an assumption of good faith among lefties.
I think I made a pretty good attempt of describing the essence of Tory ideology the other day, without restoring to caricature. Can any of you do the same?
Every person deserves to enjoy a dignified, broadly equal standard of living, with those who are more able or driven paying more to support those who are less able to contribute. Each person is a blank slate and as such should not benefit from their parents' wealth accumulation or other advantages conferred by linage.
Feels pretty close.
The first sentence is a decent attempt, but it makes the second redundant.
I'd say the second is essential - a key part of modern left wing thought is the fungibility of humans - a 10th generation 60km from Mogadishu subsistence farmer is there because they never got the opportunity or support of someone who went to Eton and then did good, so that entirely explains their differences, rather than acknowledging that actually in a lot of cases, while there is a large amount of intergeneration variability, IQ is extremely heritable. That's why there's so much bleating about private school overrepresentation - if people used their common sense to see that humans are not a blank slate private school overrepresentation makes absolutely perfect sense.
Estimates of the heritability of IQ are about 50%, which I wouldn’t call “extremely”. IQ has a correlation with income of about 0.3-0.4, so it explains about 10-15% of variation in income. The correlation between IQ and wealth is even lower, about 0.16, so it explains about 3% of the variation in wealth.
The fact IQ only explains about 3% of the variation in wealth, doesn’t that make you more sympathetic to socialist views? Our current system isn’t rewarding ability or merit!
Isn't this partly because IQ is a pretty crude measure?
Levels of both income and wealth are almost certainly linked to things such as "work ethic" and "deferred gratification" which aren't directly connected to intelligence, and are presumably partially learnt behaviours, and partially inherited.
Sure, there are lots of problems with IQ as a measure, and whatever IQ measures, it clearly isn’t everything that matters.
Levels of both income and wealth are also clearly linked to things such as “inherited wealth”, “going to private school” and “your parents knowing people”… and indeed also “luck”.
People are desperate to find a reason to justify inequality to escape any feeling that they ought to find a way to do something about it.
By which you mean socialism of course
There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there are many different imaginings of what socialism involves, and I am open to people coming up with new ideas to solve old problems.
One of the things I ultimately found most disappointing about Corbyn was that he was rigidly attached to ideas and policies from the 70s, as though nobody had had a good new idea since.
Yes but at the end of the day you want some form of the same old socialism or social democracy ie same old tax the rich and wealthy, property owners and high earners and businesses more and redistribute via more public spending and welfare and some nationalisations. So not miles off what Corbyn wanted anyway
I mean, yes, I'm on the left, but, I don't think that's really a fair reflection of my politics.
For example, I would much prefer that the structure of the economy is changed so that lower-paid people are paid more, and then those people wouldn't be reliant on handouts from government, which can easily be taken away, as we saw with tax credits that were given by Brown and taken away by Osborne.
I feel that you do me a disservice by just lazily assigning to me a set of policies that you see as a definition of socialism, instead of having a more interesting discussion of what my personal views are. If you were less keen to pigeonhole me so that you could dismiss me, we might surprise ourselves and find points of agreement.
In the early 90s, we had no national minimum wage, and 3 pounds an hour was common. However, you could afford a modest house on a low wage job. The real value of that wage was higher than today's much celebrated (and constantly rising) minimum wage. Lefties should join the dots, and stop seal-clapping each time the Government makes it harder for British businesses supposedly on behalf of low earners.
I don't think anyone has ever blamed the minimum wage for high house prices before. Bravo.
But, yes, if housing was a lot cheaper then people would be more prosperous on the same income. That's something this socialist has been advocating for a very long time, and it doesn't require taxation to pay out higher welfare as people who caricature my politics claim I'm in favour of.
Comments
Well, it was a good run I suppose.
And I'd say that accounts for as much of the reaction you dislike, as any denial of "reality".
So, for example, people who have the flu vaccine have lower rates of dementia, not because the vaccine is protective against dementia directly, but because flu causes damage that sometimes later leads to dementia.
It might imply Norway can play us like a tune...
EDIT: Illegal, but with maximum punishment only a fine.
Richard Tice accuses police and parliamentary authorities of failing to protect MPs"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/07/11/reform-security-parliament-ann-widdecombe-murder
Won't do that again.
None of those involved were critiquing the underlying scenario. Just that they found the ending profoundly wrong.
What I found of note was that some of those were people who were all about the experimental and unorthodox in theatre.
One of the things I ultimately found most disappointing about Corbyn was that he was rigidly attached to ideas and policies from the 70s, as though nobody had had a good new idea since.
For example, I would much prefer that the structure of the economy is changed so that lower-paid people are paid more, and then those people wouldn't be reliant on handouts from government, which can easily be taken away, as we saw with tax credits that were given by Brown and taken away by Osborne.
Edit: I also think I've bored on a lot about how I think a government could make people feel richer, even without increasing their income by a single penny, if they tracked the ways in which various companies are to efficient at extracting cash from people - e.g. leasehold, car finance, automatic increases in utility bills, etc.
I feel that you do me a disservice by just lazily assigning to me a set of policies that you see as a definition of socialism, instead of having a more interesting discussion of what my personal views are. If you were less keen to pigeonhole me so that you could dismiss me, we might surprise ourselves and find points of agreement.
But, yes, if housing was a lot cheaper then people would be more prosperous on the same income. That's something this socialist has been advocating for a very long time, and it doesn't require taxation to pay out higher welfare as people who caricature my politics claim I'm in favour of.