HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't think the two are apposite. His comments - which I think were kind of silly but basically harmless, I mean it was one line in some guys short video, who really cares - just mean that he is particularly happy to see gay students doing well personally because of the change that represents from his personal experience. I don't know in what context such a line of thinking could emerge in the case of whites.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
That's hardly fair. Being just slightly charitable, what they mean by 'favourite students' fairly clearly does not imply any genuine preferential treatment or discrimination in respect of grades, discipline and so forth.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
a young man described by his father to The Intercept as;
I mean does his increased susceptibility to the FBI agent's advances surely not also imply increased susceptibility to real terrorists? In which case it's better than he be arrested in this way than find his way to a real recruiter an go on to be a real terrorist.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Everyone has geography
Well obviously but it is not all created equal. See fertility of the soil, temperateness or otherwise of the climate, and in recent centuries the big one, coal.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Geography and historical happenstance.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Well one can easily think of an analogous case. Let's say you're a school teacher and you refuse to call a step-mother a 'mother' without qualifier, and that she got upset because of that. It would seem that any decent person would not refuse to use the word 'mother' to describe them even though there is no 'consensual agreement' there.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Except it isn't messy. Russia invaded a sovereign nation without provocation - indeed they were the ones already being provocative with their support of separatists. If foreign support isn't justified now then when is it?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
If the politics were good I think there would be a move towards carbon taxation as a primary tool to fight emissions among left and centre-left (perhaps also centre-right) legislators but unfortunately they are bad so we're reduced to this kind of ad hoc policy.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Clearly the person living in a $4m home making $600k a year isn’t actually rich, look at how the real rich people live, they have yachts and fly private and stay in $15,000 / night hotel rooms.
True, but having said that this kind of thinking happens all the way down society and is not a preserve of the upper middle class. You see this a lot in Britain about schools; lower-middle class or upper-working class people who went to good state schools (Liz Truss is a prime example iirc) will pretend that because they didn't go to a private school (around 7% of students) they are actually salt-of-the-earth working class men and women who grew up in a Ken Loach film. As much as the phrase has become a joke, lots of people really do get a bit touchy about 'checking their privilege'.
So I wouldn't single out the top 1% or 10% for particular scrutiny, I'd say it extends right down to the top 50/60%.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
To that end black emancipation was never achieved off the back of a popular majority. It was always the elites pushing the envelope and imposing their delusions on the lower classes
Is this really in reference to slavery? If so, black emancipation won a fairly resounding seal of approval in 1864 and 1868.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Also it's typically only women that care about womens competition, if that.
This is changing quite fast. While obviously women disproportionately care, and men still care about men's sport much more, in Britain at least both women's cricket and football are becoming increasingly mainstream society wide, and with tennis it's been the case for some time.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
much lower absolute level of achievement
Only in the same meaningless and trivial sense that a disabled swimmer in the most severe category winning a paralympic gold is a 'lower level of absolute achievement' than an ordinarily abled person swimming faster than that person in a club meet. Obviously you do have to 'adjust for baseline level'.
Or if you like, a blind man climbing K2 is surely a 'higher level of achievement' than a sighted person doing so slightly faster.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Is this meant to be any kind of statement about the legitimacy of Ukrainian or Russian government there? If so how? A 'significant chunk' of those in Ulster wanted to leave and backed their words with force of arms, hardly makes British rule illegitimate or not worth fighting to preserve.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
he fought the fight he believed in, he finished his race, and to the best of my knowledge he kept the faith
So, presumably, did many Islamic State fighters. I don't think it makes them worthy of respect if their fight was conducted abhorrently and directed towards awful ends.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Extremism must surely be defined in relation to the political mainstream, and wanting a massive reduction in immigration partly on grounds of 'demography' is really quite far outside that mainstream.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
e.g. Germany
In fairness rather than PR/FPTP surely the most obvious factor here is that Germany was not hit anywhere near as hard by 1970s inflation as the rest of the West; after all, without the Winter of Discontent Callaghan probably struggles on as Prime Minister, and while yes he was reforming somewhat too, he hardly would have carried through a Thatcherite programme.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Benefits to the entire are and indeed to the nation, not just to one small section of the community. And as other who have pointed out, it's only time-rich pensioners with nothing better to do who have the time to turn up to such things and so their influence is outsized. The problem is that planning has implications for the entire region or nation, so deciding everything at the local level means that considerations of those benefits gets lost. One project won't decrease rents much in a partiuclar neighbourhood, but if everyone takes that attitude then nothing ever gets built and we are where we are today with thirteen years of stagnant productivity growth. Something's got to give.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
If that is true, one suspects that her IQ is lower than 90.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I think the point is that federal issues are more tractable. If most restrictions were at the central level, and politician X wants to build more houses, he can quietly abolish some of the more onerous ones, and there you go, national housing stock will increase. With restrictions at the local level, that kind of action will never be co-ordinated nationwide.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The principle at first glance seems 'sane' but something has clearly got to change in Britain, we simply cannot go on like this. In practice, 'community decision making' means 'elderly home-owner decision making' which in turn in practice means 'sorry you can't open a restaurant because Doris might have to queue in traffic for two minutes to go to bridge'. If these committees were composed of people who dispassionately analyse the costs and benefits it would be fine, but they by and large are not.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
watching Clarkson's Farm recently was heart breaking. Literally everything that man attempted to do on his own property was subject to government approval. And at some point, the government decided it just didn't like him anymore, and said no to everything he attempted no matter how insignificant.
This is true, but I should like to say that this is because of a surfeit of local control, not central control. It wasn't because of some faceless bureaucracy that he was thwarted, it was the people who lived amongst him that stopped him, wielding of course tools granted them by central government, but nonetheless it was local NIMBYs who got up and stopped him, not some civil servant dispatched from Whitehall. Indeed, if we are going to start building again in Britain, power must move closer to the centre, not further from it.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Quantitative claims require quantitative evidence. You can't prove or disprove a proposed societal trend just by listing lots of examples, as you say.
As Lord Kelvin once said, 'if you cannot measure it your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind'.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Sure but he was rearrested and jailed again only a few years ago.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Well look at it this way, could you find a single case in Britain comparable to that of Qin Yongmin?
Sympathy strikes are industrial actions which don't directly concern the wages, conditions etc. of a particular striking union, so let's say the railwaymen go out in protest at a wage reduction, and then the miners go out too despite not having any demands of their own, in sympathy and in an effort to force the government's hand. The latter is similar but over action not based on any specific wage dispute at all, unions going out over some government policy they don't like which doesn't really impact their wages etc.; both used to happen in Britain a bit until Thatcher banned it.
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