HaroldWilson
11mo ago
So long as we are an empire, an emperor is inevitable.
On what time scale? For all the talk of the disenfranchised working classes, materially they have never had it so good. Liberal democracy brings home the bacon at the moment, why wouldn't it 100 years from now?
Also, if this is meant as a general statement then I don't think there's much evidence for it. Where was Britain's emperor? Of course the British empire did wither away but even as the empire grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries that was, if anything, accompanied by greater democratic participation, more process and bureaucracy and no consistent or continuous increase in public unrest and instability.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
That is a simply intolerable solution which would destroy the reputation of the United States, even if you don't mind killing thousands of migrants, and what is more it would be enormously dangerous for the surrounding border populations of both nations.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat
I don't think your views on crime, though I personally wouldn't subscribe to all of them, are at all in tension with social democracy, indeed if one considers policing to be a public service which it surely is, then ample police funding is surely the 'more' social democratic perspective. Hence why in Britain, where policing has not been caught up in culture wars as it has in the US, even Corbyn attacked the Tories for cutting police funding.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Because most of the literature points in the direction that a high chance of being caught and effective is by far the most important factor in determining deterrence rather than severity of punishment. Criminals are not paragons of rationality, breaking out their calculator to work out the expected returns before committing the offence. Quick and reliable punishment creates a much stronger link between offence and punishment in the mind than the occasional criminal being caught and spending years in the slammer. Which it to say that you cannot simply assume that in practice deterrence is sentence length x chance of conviction.
I'm pre-registering a very optimistic prediction. If it was meant to really be act of war/do damage, why was the attack telegraphed in advance? Also, per Fars, only targets identified by government sources so far are bases in the Golan Heights and one in the Negev desert. This matches the pattern of the symbolic post-Soleimani response - remember when people start talking about ballistic missiles that those were used then too. Am I wish-casting? Yes, probably, but I do genuinely think this is probably not going to be disastrous.
Edit: just seen this tweet from the Iranian mission to the UN saying that 'the matter can be deemed concluded'. Thank god, though the danger not passed if some of the missiles/drones do get through and do some real damage.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Now what was that verse by somebody or other?
Well, two can play at that game.
Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?"
A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide. The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort - that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of the home, to help shape the future
It's easy to portray a working life as drab and meaningless, but one can equally do so for the non-working mother. FWIW I think both are oversimple and overgeneralised.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
We have survived most of history without them
Well sort of, but not very well. Peel didn't create the Metropolitan Police just because he felt like it, law and order in the early 19th century and before was a disaster, precisely because so much of the burden was placed on private citizens to bring cases etc. and they weren't very good at it. Violent crime in inner London dropped by as much as 40% on the introduction of the Met, with smaller reductions for property crime.
We also survived most of history without modern medicine.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
The PM is a party man the public did not vote for
Welcome to the Westminster system. The public did not vote for him, but they voted in the MPs that chose him as leader. A slight degree of removal but every action he wants to take (at least in the realm of primary legislation) must be voted upon by the people's elected representatives and those representatives could remove him and his government at any time should they wish to.
people are routinely arrested for disagreeing with government ideology.
Like with @Lizzardspawn before I respond to this I'll ask you a question; is it your genuine belief that the Chinese state does not restrict freedom of speech to any considerably greater degree than the British state?
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Surely whatever you think about the UK, any plausible faults are on a completely different plane to those of the Chinese state, especially if the complaints you're levying are the aforementioned ones about affirmative action or whatever. Most importantly of all of course is the total absence of any genuine democracy or appreciable freedom of the press in China. Certainly to the extent that assisting China militarily because you were hacked off at a diversity initiative is indefensible.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
I think most people would look at that picture and be surprised to be told that these people are committing a genocide
Would they? Especially given that SS members were presumably self-selected to be ideologically committed Nazis, it doesn't seem at all implausible that many were sufficiently untroubled by genocide as to partake in jollity in their spare time. After all, depending on when these photos were taken, they might also not look like people staring down the barrel of total defeat in the war.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
A first generation American, Vivek was born to industrious immigrants who came to this land with nothing and went on to become a geriatric psychiatrist and engineer / patent attorney, respectively
Vivek seems to say this a lot but it's a bit stolen valour, he shouldn't get to trade off his parents' achievements. He had a sufficiently privileged upbringing to go to a private high school, so the whole 'American Dream' thing won't wash for him. But I guess 'I went to a private school from which 99% of students go to college, which has a $100 million dollar endowment and which has won a federal award for its excellence' doesn't sound good on the debate stage.
He's an impressive guy anyway, so why bullshit like this?
HaroldWilson
9mo ago
The bureaucrats nearly always win
FWIW, I don't think this necessarily gives a completely accurate impression of the show; especially as the series go on, Hacker gets his way quite a lot; just off the top of my head, he gets one over Humphrey on defending St George's island, the national database, moving soldiers to the North, Humphrey testifying about the bugging in one of the last episodes, the phone tapping petition (in the death list episode), over that bureaucracy/waste/select committee thing, the Buranda speech/oil loan, and moreover in many episodes they are working to the same ends. The Channel Tunnel, the threatened abolition of the department etc.
So, at some points in the series, it almost approaches an even contest. And iirc, Humphrey and other senior civil servants do now and again admit that if a minister, or maybe just the Prime Minister, is really dead set on something they often can't stop it. Plus, Hacker seems to be a less competent minister than the average
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Might I gently suggest that in case of a nuclear war the finer points of hate speech laws and college campus environments may no longer be a particularly urgent concern.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
No-one is disputing this. I think the point is rather that, if you dropped 30 Romanians or Finns into this school, they would probably self-segregate together as well, at least as strongly as the American students of different races.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
The people forming these views are factually upper class, -ish, but they're jealous of those who have it even better and want to tear them down.
I think almost the opposite tends to be more true; middle-class guilt is much more powerful than middle-class jealousy. Hence why, though people like Disraeli and Sadler fancied that the aristocracy were better guardians of the poor, it was the barrister Lloyd George and the thoroughly bourgeois Attlee who created the foundations of the modern welfare state. This is really why Oliver disguises himself as poor; because the latent Methodism present in every middle-class Briton tells him that his (unearned) station is actually shameful, and the only acceptable circumstance in which to accept aristocratic largesse is poverty.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
refuses to name the player responsible for the death, Matt Petgrave
This is what you would expect, no? There is no public interest from the journalist's perspective in further broadcasting the name - it would be grossly wrong of them to make any insinuation of deliberateness before there is any evidence of such, and if it is indeed just an accident, as I would imagine is overwhelmingly likely, then no point putting him in the story anyway - to be honest he's not even really a public figure. The only results on google for him except about the recent accident are some official league stats pages and a club bio. No more than you'd get for a decent amateur club cricketer. The number of Britons who know his name without knowing him personally would be a rounding error to 0, I imagine. In that light, putting his name in the national press under these circumstances seems unfair.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
time and money to get far from trade routes,
Time sure, but money? Surely it's cheaper to go to less touristed places almost by definition, as the further off the tourist path you go the less demand there is.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights
Why are they mutually exclusive? I don't have strong views on your proposed explanation, but we have plenty of disaffected people in Britain yet manage to keep our mass shootings down to single figures per decade.
HaroldWilson
28d ago
as close to a landslide for Trump as possible for tribal America.
Which is not a landslide at all. Trump's cap is at best 322, realistically 312 (MN the difference), hardly above Biden's 2020 result. To go any higher he'd have to start pulling some pretty preposterous states out of the bag. In any case, Trump's polling margin even in true swing states is low single digits, the economy has 6 months to get even better and Trump still has his trials to contend with. It's way, way too early to predict a 'landslide'. A week is a long time in politics, six months is an eternity.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
I think it would help to lose weight to improve your odds
The obvious difference here is that almost everyone already knows this, probably including the person you're talking to, which is not the case in the bottle-cap or shark-infested waters examples. Indeed, the latter two aren't actually unsolicited advice, they are unsolicited unknown information which is very different.
There is almost no-one for whom 'lose weight' will be novel and actioned advice.
HaroldWilson
4mo ago
In Britain there's a popular-ish show called 'Eat Well for Less', with Greg Wallace, in which for a week a family who thinks they need to reduce their food bill has all their groceries replaced with new ones with all the branding removed so they don't know what they're getting. Invariably none of them can tell the difference when their branded products are replaced with the cheapo own-brand 'value' range, despite them all usually insisting beforehand that they'll be able to tell. Most amusing though is when they insist they don't like the replacement, only to find out they've been double bluffed and it was in fact the same brand as they have always been eating/drinking, and they look like morons. The vast majority of people who genuinely think they can tell a difference have definitely just been sucked in by marketing, which I suspect applies to most of the people in this thread insisting 'no, Heinz ketchup really is different to all the others!'.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
At least it can be said that the people didn't oppose with sufficient zeal to bother meting out any electoral consequences. 'The people chose it' is maybe a slight exaggeration but 'the people chose not to stop it' is basically right. And fwiw Hart-Celler polled pretty well.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
The democrats can’t plausibly reclaim that particular political mantle after the prominence of Defund The Police, and there are enough true cop-haters along the Democrat activist base that you’d never get message discipline on the issue.
I mean Biden managed to neutralise it well enough last time, and he has distanced himself pretty clearly from that side of the party. If he felt so inclined, with no real primary challenge this time, he could start leaning into the 'I am the Democratic party' sort of thing even more, stress his opposition to radical measures throughout his career. Perhaps the crime bill thing even becomes a plus! In any case it's not as if the President has that much power over matters of law and order, so what is even Trump's positive case here? There's just not much he can credibly propose.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
FWIW, having picked 1964 at random it seems like only one of the ten top-grossing films that year could be classed as 'original', otherwise we have two Bonds, two pink panther films and the others based on books, musicals etc.
I think the resolution here is that sex simply has a greater range of possible 'significance' than most activities - which is to say that I don't think there a reason one could not argue that some consensual 'transactional' sex is not vastly different to a game of tennis, where in other contexts (be that positive or negative) it can carry greater meaning. A potential analogy here is alcohol consumption - my going to the pub carries almost no significance, but if an employer forced a Muslim employee to drink that would clearly be unacceptable in a manner far more serious than compulsory tennis - we all accept that in different contexts the activity can carry different weight.
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