HaroldWilson
6mo ago
Pretty much any measure of inflation is coming down at the moment, and is approaching normal levels. And most importantly, wages are rising even faster.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
I don't think this is about race at all. Plenty of the other pictures which are examples of good photos show the mayor with exclusively white people. The point is that regular Londoners probably don't spend their weekends strolling along the most famous and photographed portions of the river. With the eye just behind them it looks like a stock photo or like tourists/day-trippers, not average Londoners going about their business. Now, overall they do say they want diversity, but that seems perfectly reasonable, and there is no reason to think that they therefore believe every single photo must contain someone not white. It's just that overall the Mayor should be photographed with a broad range of people; young and old, white, Asian and black, people in hard hats and people in suits etc. etc.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
people
Well, a person. I'm not being pedantic, one piece of evidence is always insufficient to demonstrate a broad trend, because that you can prove anything.
Could also point to other comments (eg SNP leadership)
Such as?
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
Before I respond with anything else is your genuine belief that the Chinese state does not restrict freedom of speech to any considerably greater degree than the British state?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
you can put me in that camp that we are an evolved species with deeply rooted programming on what leads us to a happy life. And homosexuality to me seems like a couple of your genes are off that may individually have benefits but combined turned your gay, but the vast majority of your genetic programming is still happier in traditional heterosexual relationships. As a society we have decided that a small bit of a person their sexuality should dominate the totality of that person.
This all sounds very Just So. I mean what can anyone who disagrees with this do except to say that what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence?
HaroldWilson
29d ago
The nice thing about sovereignty is that peoples get to define themselves
I don't see where this gets him. People do get to define themselves, and, say, Britons or Americans have decided to expand who is included amongst 'themselves'.
Anyway this is similarly amusing to the debates between the 9 different factions of Trotskyites which get played out in the pages of magazines with a combined readership of 8. The grandiosity of it all is utterly bizarre for a movement which is - thankfully - so powerless and marginal.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
When you are on your third PM since the last election there is a real question of democratic legitimacy for their current administration.
How so? He has the support of the MPs we all elected on the understanding that they could if they wished replace the PM with another.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns.
This is a fairly pointless comment. 'How come a newspaper is discussing the notion of evil when they disagree with my policy preferences?'. You could find someone to make such a comment whoever was discussing the issue; 'there's a certain sick irony to an article in the Mail discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the fuel duty price escalator', or something. You may well regard lockdowns as evil but I don't see the connection between your disagreeing with their position on that front and the discussion of the root of 'evil' generally.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
If that's the case I don't think the 'bullshit jobs' framework adds anything useful, because then it really just is a substitute for 'I don't agree with the policy goals the work being done aims toward'.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I don't think there's really much evidence for this one though. I haven't seen anything convincing demonstrating that such a correlation exists and is particularly significant. Especially when considering that obesity is correlated with R voting.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
While that may be some kind of motive for some activists in that specific area, in any broad sense I don't think it's really important considering the aforementioned point that there is a positive (though not necessarily huge) correlation between obesity and voting Republican. I mean, here are the ten most obese metropolitan areas in the US.
McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas: 38.8 percent
Binghamton, N.Y.: 37.6
Huntington-Ashland, W. Va., Ky., Ohio: 36.0
Rockford, Ill.: 35.5
Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas: 33.8
Charleston, W. Va.: 33.8
Lakeland-Winter Haven, Fla.: 33.5
Topeka, Kans.: 33.3
Kennewick-Pasco-Richland, Wash.: 33.2
Reading, Penn.: 32.7
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
What does?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
SS scam
This is silly, there will need to be some (moderate) increase in payroll taxes or means testing or (moderate) decrease in payments in the next decade or two to keep SS solvent in the long term, but it's nowhere near a 'scam'. Who is it scamming, it's working precisely as intended?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
teaching young women how to pick mates in teen years, teaching women to be homemakers which reduces total societal stress, banning degenerative media,
Can you show me a single instance of such reforms leading to a decrease in single motherhood? Aside from the merits of these goals, you are swimming against an irrepressible social and economic tide here.
publicly executing drug dealers
Well now you're just being silly. The overall body of research on capital punishment, though inconclusive, tends to lean in the direction that there is no deterrent effect. Moreover, considering how many drug dealers there are, the number of innocent people who would die under such as system would be rather large.
If the rate of anti-gay believers who become violent against gays is 1 in 60 million per year, or 1 in 6 million, I do not feel comfortable calling this anything but statistical noise. I do not believe his anti-gay beliefs (if they exist) are causal whatsoever.
Under this argument, you can't ascribe ideological influences to any terrorist act ever. Most fundamentalist Muslim aren't terrorists, so religious motives could not have been causal in Islamic terrorism? What a ridiculous argument.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
But women were also told they were allowed to do particle physics and philosophy and drive garbage trucks and become plumbers, but for some reason women didn't choose to do those things as often as men did.
This is fairly obviously a gross oversimplification. For starters, especially in the kind of blue-collar communities from which most garbage men and plumbers will come, those kinds of jobs are surely still very male-coded. Certainly, fewer people are telling women they can't be plumbers etc. but, ironically, it's a very urban elite perspective to suggest that we've wholly eliminated gendered employment expectations, so all discrepancies must now be genetic/natural/whatever. A survey from a few years ago by City and Guilds suggested that, in the UK, around 17% of surveyed students were encouraged by their school to consider apprenticeships, compared to 33% of men. It's also important to remember that these things reinforce themselves without any individual engaging in career stereotyping - if every plumber who ever comes to your house or truck driver you see go past is a man, then one can see how girls might be dissuaded from such career choices.
And affirmative action for racial minorities doesn't seem to have actually solved anything; in many cases, things were made worse, as universities and businesses hired token minorities who failed to succeed because they were not equipped to succeed in the first place
This needs some sourcing; the onset of quota-based affirmative action in the 1970s saw an explosion in the number of black Americans graduating, not just enrolling, so clearly most of them were sufficiently well equipped to deal with the universities into which they began to enrol in larger numbers.
Reparations won't stop bad things from happening in black communities,
Again, a baseless unsourced claim; there is evidence to suggest that more generous welfare provision does actually reduce crime;
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07418829800093741?needAccess=true
Look this pretty much goes for every claim you make. So many words and yet a total absence of any evidence to substantiate some fairly dramatic claims.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
Does it reflect as a good or a bad on the character of the jewish people who allegedly sold their fellow jews out to nazis
Badly of course, but principally because selling people out to send them to their deaths is wrong whether those to whom you are doing it are your ingroup or not. They are no worse (though both are still abhorrent of course) than French or Dutch gentile collaborators who assisted the prosecution of the Holocaust.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
Yeah but the point is that I don't think there's any genuine moral difference there, so it doesn't really make sense as a stick with which to beat Mexican society.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
How does that story in any way corroborate the 'groomer' narrative? Ok, there was one drag artist who took advantage of the potential for close access to children, but that could equally happen in all sorts of other scenarios (teachers, clergy, sports coaches etc.) and that is never considered grounds to smear the entire group with the tar of the 'groomer' label. And as for the library's failure to vet, seems like just ordinary laziness is the most likely explanation.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
When every single thing on the radio is, "but what about the women," or, "but what about the gays," or, "but what about the negros," or, "but what about the trannys," then yes, I'm going to consider it an axe to grind, and I can't unsee it anymore.
I just don't think this is fair representation of mainstream media. If we take the BBC, as just one example, surely the most mainstream of all mainstream media, and looks at the current headlines that just isn't true.
The current top stories on the UK home page are in order Sunak's fine, the nurse strikes, Zahawi's tax affairs, the new NZ PM, the compensation being set for a patient whose limbs were wrongly amputated, a feel-good puff piece about a man donating to his local pharmacy and Germany's tanks to Ukraine, or lack thereof. If you won't any article with a culture war article, there's only two out of the dozens on the front page, one of which is just a report about the Archbishop of Canterbury's commeaents on the recent gay marriage debate in the C of E, which is completely neutral and probably a worthy topic for coverage, and one about Andrew Tate. In the World section there are no pieces with a culture war angle, expect the Andrew Tate article which reappears here but not very prominently.
But fair enough, that's not American. NYT? The top article is about layoffs in tech, 2nd on military support to Ukraine (tanks), then others on Haiti, NZ, AI, David Crosby and George Santos. The only one of the main page that could be considered to have a culture war angle is the one on March for Life, but I don't think that's unreasonable.
The point of all this is if all you are hearing is about 'marginalised' groups that is probably what you're listening for.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
They're not analogous at all because what you put in your body, by and large, mostly affects you only. The finite nature of land is such that poor land use punishes everyone. And LVT doesn't stop anyone from using their land in the manner they chose, you just don't get to leech off the rest of the community, who are the reason your land is worth anything in the first place.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
People often make these snarky comments such as 'what if a white actor played MLK' but it's blindingly obvious that these are not apposite comparisons. Race is obviously integral to Roots, whereas it has no relevance at all to the Little Mermaid. The appropriate comparison would be if you cast a white actor to play a part that was in previous iterations black, but with regard to which race was irrelevant.
HaroldWilson
29d ago
without legislative authority
What is this even supposed to mean? Are you suggesting that the Civil Rights Act (and other related pieces of federal legislation) were unconstitutional?
it's the royal court who have decreed it, and the country then gets dragged along behind.
If the country was being simply 'dragged along' in matters of race and immigration, why did Hart-Celler poll so well (70% approval)?
If Americans got to choose, they would have chosen white
They did get to chose. It's called representative democracy. At any time they could - and can - elect a Congress with a white nationalist majority.
HaroldWilson
4mo ago
Well then even if 'into that shit' was a mild exaggeration, you're more or less agreeing with the sentiment that for Trump supporters his being guilty of insurrection is not something that would notably dissuade them from sticking with him.
Of which well over 200 were spent in chattel slavery, and the following century as a legal underclass.
I suspect it would be substantially easier to fit in than doing so in a school in rural Romania.
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