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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » It’s time to take a Biden landslide seriously

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  • BarnesianBarnesian Posts: 7,979
    TimT said:

    Barnesian said:

    TimT said:

    Barnesian said:
    Surely axiomatic, not tautological
    Based on axioms and logic. Tautology - "a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form". See Russells Principia Mathematica. (I know it was holed below the water line by Godel but the basic definitions still hold).
    So, are all axiomatic statements tautologies?
    Yes - they are basically foundation definitions. True by definition.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    On the question of a statements validity depending upon who wrote it, it depends upon both the statement and who wrote it. Some statements are objective but some are subjective.

    Take the rather simple statement "I am a woman" - if Cyclefree writes that then I believe it. If LadyG writes it I don't.

    Or if someone here posted medical advice - from most people I would take it with a pinch of salt but if it came from Foxy I'd take it more seriously.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,855
    isam said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education system, by the markets.

    That girl almost certainly goes, or went, to a liberal university where she studies - or studied - Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies and all the rest of the neo-Marxist identtitarian bullshit. That's why she can't debate, they are not taught to debate, they are taught the secular religious truth, and then told to go out and disseminate it. By shouting, if necessary.

    But who actually wants their child to receive an education like this, when we can now see what it does to young brains? This girl might have $50k of student debt to go with her ridiculous education, and she is basically unemployable.

    Parents will start turning away from this. Foreign parents will look at US Colleges and start thinking, Er, maybe not.

    Market forces may deconsrtruct Marxism. It is arguably already happening in Australia, where the universities are in crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    Rather embarrassingly, I studied Humanities at Brighton University as a 35 year old. In retrospect it was like an undercover mission into the wokiest of wokesville, a glimpse into the future at what Corbynism/BLM would be like. Teachers boycotting Tescos because it was Israeli, legitimising anti Israel sentiment at every opportunity, teaching Marxism as the truth, telling stories of evil Tories, quoting The Guardian as Gospel, refusing to believe a word that had been written in a right of centre paper...

    Not a million miles from 2015 Tory posters views on here in 2020!
    This implies you stuck out like a sore thumb. And yet I bet you didn't. So how can you explain that contradiction?
  • Peter_the_PunterPeter_the_Punter Posts: 13,227

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    I only ever call him an immigrant when I want to wind him up. But yes, you are right.

    He married an American girl to get a green card. They then divorced. You can imagine what his views are of foreigners doing something similar to get into the UK, but he doesn't see the irony, and he certainly doesn't like anyone trying to point it out.
    Ha ha, immigrants who hate immigrants are something special. You should tell him he is exhibiting a textbook case of white privilege, sounds like that might send is blood pressure northwards.
    He'd have an aneurism, but that wouldn't help me. He gives me invaluable insight into the mind of a Trump supporter without which my betting bank would be much lower than it is.

    Can you guess which UK soccer team he supports? You only get one go.
  • Barnesian said:

    Brilliant thread header from David Herdson, precisely what PB.com was originially designed for, i.e. POLITICAL BETTING and we are very fortunate to have his very sound advice.
    Unfortunately by the time i caught up with his main tip this morning, i.e. Trump to win between 101-150 Electoral College votes, the odds had shortened considerably from 6/1 to 4/1. As a result I opted for the lower risk "Less than 200 Electoral College votes", still on offer at 9/4 with SkyBet which looks like cracking value, where I staked £40 to win £90. I'll add this to my earlier bets on the Dems winning Wisconsin, then on offer at 1.85 with Betfair, but now a good deal shorter and starting to look like free money.

    I think 200-250 EC for Trump at 7/2 is better value.
    It's a handy "saver", I'll grant you that. Difficult to see Trump winning >250 EC Votes.
  • BarnesianBarnesian Posts: 7,979
    edited June 2020
    Barnesian said:

    TimT said:

    Barnesian said:

    TimT said:

    Barnesian said:
    Surely axiomatic, not tautological
    Based on axioms and logic. Tautology - "a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form". See Russells Principia Mathematica. (I know it was holed below the water line by Godel but the basic definitions still hold).
    So, are all axiomatic statements tautologies?
    Yes - they are basically foundation definitions. True by definition.
    EDIT: I'm not certain that is true. I'm making it up as I go along. I have a weakness of sounding to be an authority on lots of subjects and people believe me. Scary stuff!!
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited June 2020

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    Only Jonny Foreigner is a nasty immigrant. Plucky Brits are always noble Expats.
    Immigrants and expats are different words with different meanings.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,855
    nichomar said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education system, by the markets.

    That girl almost certainly goes, or went, to a liberal university where she studies - or studied - Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies and all the rest of the neo-Marxist identtitarian bullshit. That's why she can't debate, they are not taught to debate, they are taught the secular religious truth, and then told to go out and disseminate it. By shouting, if necessary.

    But who actually wants their child to receive an education like this, when we can now see what it does to young brains? This girl might have $50k of student debt to go with her ridiculous education, and she is basically unemployable.

    Parents will start turning away from this. Foreign parents will look at US Colleges and start thinking, Er, maybe not.

    Market forces may deconsrtruct Marxism. It is arguably already happening in Australia, where the universities are in crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    This well coordinated and often repeated theme about universities now peddling nothing but pure woke Marxism seems to go unchallenged. I don’t know if it’s true, my own children are at least 12 years out so can’t comment. My nieces and nephews give the impression life at university is focused on results and jobs not politics. Is there anyone out there, Who isn’t playing to an agenda, with an objective view?
    Your instincts serve you well. It is a reactionary trope.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    Barnesian said:

    TimT said:

    Barnesian said:

    TimT said:

    Barnesian said:
    Surely axiomatic, not tautological
    Based on axioms and logic. Tautology - "a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form". See Russells Principia Mathematica. (I know it was holed below the water line by Godel but the basic definitions still hold).
    So, are all axiomatic statements tautologies?
    Yes - they are basically foundation definitions. True by definition.
    Guess I need to expand my understanding of tautology.

    "1. a phrase or expression in which the same thing is said twice in different words. plural noun: tautologies
    "2. LOGIC a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form."

    I had previously only understood the first definition.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,944
    Woke universities. Did Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man lecture in vain?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Man

  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,916

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    I only ever call him an immigrant when I want to wind him up. But yes, you are right.

    He married an American girl to get a green card. They then divorced. You can imagine what his views are of foreigners doing something similar to get into the UK, but he doesn't see the irony, and he certainly doesn't like anyone trying to point it out.
    Ha ha, immigrants who hate immigrants are something special. You should tell him he is exhibiting a textbook case of white privilege, sounds like that might send is blood pressure northwards.
    He'd have an aneurism, but that wouldn't help me. He gives me invaluable insight into the mind of a Trump supporter without which my betting bank would be much lower than it is.

    Can you guess which UK soccer team he supports? You only get one go.
    Hmm I am getting a Chelsea vibe.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670

    LadyG said:

    nichomar said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education system, by the markets.

    That girl almost certainly goes, or went, to a liberal university where she studies - or studied - Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies and all the rest of the neo-Marxist identtitarian bullshit. That's why she can't debate, they are not taught to debate, they are taught the secular religious truth, and then told to go out and disseminate it. By shouting, if necessary.

    But who actually wants their child to receive an education like this, when we can now see what it does to young brains? This girl might have $50k of student debt to go with her ridiculous education, and she is basically unemployable.

    Parents will start turning away from this. Foreign parents will look at US Colleges and start thinking, Er, maybe not.

    Market forces may deconsrtruct Marxism. It is arguably already happening in Australia, where the universities are in crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    This well coordinated and often repeated theme about universities now peddling nothing but pure woke Marxism seems to go unchallenged. I don’t know if it’s true, my own children are at least 12 years out so can’t comment. My nieces and nephews give the impression life at university is focused on results and jobs not politics. Is there anyone out there, Who isn’t playing to an agenda, with an objective view?
    I studied a social science at university 15-25 years ago and it's total bollocks.
    Er, that was 15-25 years ago

    Also: you did a ten year degree???
    I have three degrees and worked for a few years in between the second and third.
    I don't think universities have changed so much in the meantime.
    The right is attacking universities because they've figured out that the more educated people are the less likely they are to be taken in by their bollocks.
    It's amusing seeing letters to the papers from right wingers attacking universities from the 1960's that are completely indistinguishable from the complaints these days.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,774

    Woke universities. Did Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man lecture in vain?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Man

    That's a great book (as, indeed, is Doctor Criminale), and a reminder that things really don't change as much as we think they do.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,855
    LadyG said:

    Actually, this whole passage from 1984 is superbly prescient.

    Orewell is describing Shouty Woman in the video below


    "He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word."

    "Just once Winston caught a phrase-’complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’- jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quackquack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front-it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure INGSOC"

    http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/NineteenEightyFour/part1sec5.html

    Oh that IS original and thought provoking - a bit of Orwell.
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 24,968

    Alistair said:

    Andy_JS said:
    How much BrainForce did he need to work that one out?
    I think its an Orwell reference.
    Though I think Turgenev had his own 2+2=4 quote.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,677

    malcolmg said:

    The union is dead, only a case of when independence comes, if you look at the numbers it is only pensioners and English born people who are under 50% for Independence. Support will continue to rise and with any luck if SNP can grow a pair they will make next year's election an independence vote.

    At the risk of stating the obvious, if Scotland is going to get away in the near future then three hurdles have to be cleared:

    1. First, and most straightforward, the SNP have to win outright next year on a commitment to holding a second referendum, or at least be able to assemble another pro-independence majority with the Greens. That seems likely.

    2. Sturgeon then needs to successfully demand that Johnson sign a section 30 order allowing the Scottish Parliament to legislate for the second referendum. That's where things get a great deal more complicated.

    If Johnson is serious about saving the Union then he'd arguably be mad not to: whereas it is certain that many Scottish voters don't want Indyref2 (or at least not yet,) and possible that an outright majority don't want it, it is one thing for them to say that and another thing entirely for Boris Johnson to tell them and their new Parliament that it is not allowed. Saying no could put the second referendum off in the short term but further weaken support for the Union in the long term.

    On the other hand, if Johnson's main concern is not to go down in history as the Prime Minister who lost Scotland then such calculations won't matter to him. He can stonewall, using the "once in a generation" argument as his defence, with a reasonable chance that the issue will erupt and spew lava all over some future UK administration instead. Thus, even an SNP victory next year doesn't make a second referendum in this Parliament a foregone conclusion. Absent the consent of Westminster, the Scottish Parliament can't attempt to go ahead and legislate for one anyway: it lacks the authority and such an Act would therefore be struck down in Scotland's own courts.

    3. If Johnson does permit Indyref2 then the Yes campaign still has to win this time, and that's not going to be so smart and easy. There aren't enough convinced pro-independence electors to turn the vote into a victory procession. The Scottish Government will therefore need to persuade a majority of the electorate that they have a workable plan to deal with Scotland's budget deficit, for what currency the country will use, and that the negative consequences of the dissolution of the Union - notably the end of a seamless single market between Scotland and the rest of the UK - are more than compensated for by the benefits of full sovereignty and the new opportunities and levers of power that this will deliver to the Scottish people. If the middling, transactional voters who are willing to jump either way aren't convinced, then they will stick to nurse and the Union will win out with room to spare just like it did last time.

    I think that you're probably right in that independence is a matter of "when" rather than "if" - the supporters of independence only require one decisive victory over the Unionists at some point in the future to make it happen - but it doesn't necessarily follow that "when" won't be a long time coming.
    You are looking at it from a false Westminster bubble view. If it is made an election on independence then Johnson and any other Tory will not be able to break International law , if people want to self govern they cannot be held prisoner nowadays. On the budget you have no idea what Scotland's finances are like , only your myopic view of what Westminster parrot and last but not least we are already over the 50% mark and rising every poll.
    Just look at Covid , UK borrow 125B , say Scotland pay for 10B yet give Scotland 3.6B, some economics and typical of how they calculate the finances. We will be out debt free or very asset rich in owning 10% of everything England has, not going to be too bad a deal, England will opt for debt free as per every other country that got out from under the yoke of England.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    MrEd said:

    rcs1000 said:

    stodge said:

    rcs1000 said:

    On topic, @HYUFD posted a very interesting poll the other day asking people about how they felt about supporting Trump, and if they worried about what their friends and neighbours thought about this. It showed that only about a third of voters would be happy if people knew they supported Trump.

    This is suggestive, perhaps very suggestive, of there being "a shy Trump syndrome".

    However, against this, one normally sees with "unpopular" opinions a big difference between on-line and phone surveys. People might not want to tell nice Maureen on the phone that they support President Trump, but they are usually much less reticent telling the truth to an unjudging computer.

    Unfortunately for the President there is no meaningful gap between phone and on-line polls. Plus, very few US polls actually use live humans: they tend to use either on-line panels or automated voice response.

    This doesn't mean there aren't shy Trump voters. And in Los Angeles, for example, I wouldn't be surprised if there were rather a lot. (I know lots of people who identify as Republican voters here... but none who have nice things to say about Trump. Though I bet at least some of them will go Trump at the beginning of November.)

    There's also the risk, identified by @MrEd, that the Democrats are not enthused, with weak House Special Election results held up as evidence. This is not a bad point. And certainly, I think in general it's better to have people voting for you, and not against your opponent. But I would also caution about reading too much into elections with turnouts of sub 30%, that are effectively 'dead rubbers' in that the composition of the House won't change meaningfully, when there is a pandemic, and with only half a year until the next national elections.

    It's all right, Robert, I've snipped your ramblings.

    I think anyone looking at any US poll has to look at the crosstabs in detail. The NYT/Siena College Poll gave Biden a 50-36 lead over Trump and had Biden 16 points ahead in the Midwest.

    However, White votes (61%) and Republican voters (26%) look seriously under-sampled so that one's for the bin. The PBS-Marist poll I quoted earlier had much more realistic crosstabs and illustrated just hoe much Biden still has to do in the Midwest and South though he is piling up votes in the NE and West where he doesn't need them in EC terms.

    I've not found the crosstabs for the Hill-Harris-X poll and until they are published, I'm sceptical of that and of course these polls also have large margins of error (anything up to 3.5 points).
    I find it mildly amusing that some of the worst polling for Trump comes from Fox and some of the best from PBS.

    Marist has some of the best numbers for Trump (44%), but a similar lead to other pollsters (eight points). If Marist is correct, and he can pull back two to three points from Biden, then he's in with a good shot.

    But I'm sceptical. Firstly because I think CV-19 is going to be a massive issue. The "power of positive thinking" has no effect on the virus. And things are getting worse in America. Secondly, have you looked at the details of President Trump's unfavourable numbers? There has been a significant shift away from "somewhat unfavourable" to "very unfavourable". This is one of those things that I think is really important, and has been missed. Some polls now have over 50% of voters have "very unfavourable" views of President Trump, up from 30-35%.
    As you said Robert, it is mildly amusing with which pollsters Trump does best with / not. I tend to take the view that what is more interesting is the trend in polls from the same pollster as - unless there has been a change to their methodology - it creates a more stable timeline even if there are flaws in the underlying numbers. That's why it doesn't feel like Trump's position isn't necessarily getting worse - Biden's lead with CBS and YouGov is stable at +8 and the lead in the Hill for Biden more than halved.
    Fox News Biden Leads Since April

    0, +8, +12

    I suppose the curve is flattening there.
  • BarnesianBarnesian Posts: 7,979
    edited June 2020

    Barnesian said:

    TimT said:

    Barnesian said:
    Surely axiomatic, not tautological
    Based on axioms and logic. Tautology - "a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form". See Russells Principia Mathematica. (I know it was holed below the water line by Godel but the basic definitions still hold).
    'True by necessity' is what you've still to prove. Pull that off and you'll be up there with Plato and Kant as one of the greatest philosophers mankind has ever produced.
    2+2=4 isn't true by necessity but by virtue of the axiomatic definition of the functions "+" and "=", the successor function and the definition of the meaning of the symbols "2" and "4". Necessity doesn't come into it.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,594

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    Only Jonny Foreigner is a nasty immigrant. Plucky Brits are always noble Expats.
    Immigrants and expats are different words with different meanings.
    Bad and good? In that order.
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556
    edited June 2020
    Alistair said:

    LadyG said:

    nichomar said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education system, by the markets.

    That girl almost certainly goes, or went, to a liberal university where she studies - or studied - Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies and all the rest of the neo-Marxist identtitarian bullshit. That's why she can't debate, they are not taught to debate, they are taught the secular religious truth, and then told to go out and disseminate it. By shouting, if necessary.

    But who actually wants their child to receive an education like this, when we can now see what it does to young brains? This girl might have $50k of student debt to go with her ridiculous education, and she is basically unemployable.

    Parents will start turning away from this. Foreign parents will look at US Colleges and start thinking, Er, maybe not.

    Market forces may deconsrtruct Marxism. It is arguably already happening in Australia, where the universities are in crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    This well coordinated and often repeated theme about universities now peddling nothing but pure woke Marxism seems to go unchallenged. I don’t know if it’s true, my own children are at least 12 years out so can’t comment. My nieces and nephews give the impression life at university is focused on results and jobs not politics. Is there anyone out there, Who isn’t playing to an agenda, with an objective view?
    I studied a social science at university 15-25 years ago and it's total bollocks.
    Er, that was 15-25 years ago

    Also: you did a ten year degree???
    I have three degrees and worked for a few years in between the second and third.
    I don't think universities have changed so much in the meantime.
    The right is attacking universities because they've figured out that the more educated people are the less likely they are to be taken in by their bollocks.
    It's amusing seeing letters to the papers from right wingers attacking universities from the 1960's that are completely indistinguishable from the complaints these days.
    If nothing ever changes in universities, why is Rhodes (probably) being taken down now, having survived the '60s and subsequent decades with ease? Clearly we've moved left of where the 'progressive' radicals of the time were.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    MrEd said:

    rcs1000 said:

    stodge said:

    rcs1000 said:

    On topic, @HYUFD posted a very interesting poll the other day asking people about how they felt about supporting Trump, and if they worried about what their friends and neighbours thought about this. It showed that only about a third of voters would be happy if people knew they supported Trump.

    This is suggestive, perhaps very suggestive, of there being "a shy Trump syndrome".

    However, against this, one normally sees with "unpopular" opinions a big difference between on-line and phone surveys. People might not want to tell nice Maureen on the phone that they support President Trump, but they are usually much less reticent telling the truth to an unjudging computer.

    Unfortunately for the President there is no meaningful gap between phone and on-line polls. Plus, very few US polls actually use live humans: they tend to use either on-line panels or automated voice response.

    This doesn't mean there aren't shy Trump voters. And in Los Angeles, for example, I wouldn't be surprised if there were rather a lot. (I know lots of people who identify as Republican voters here... but none who have nice things to say about Trump. Though I bet at least some of them will go Trump at the beginning of November.)

    There's also the risk, identified by @MrEd, that the Democrats are not enthused, with weak House Special Election results held up as evidence. This is not a bad point. And certainly, I think in general it's better to have people voting for you, and not against your opponent. But I would also caution about reading too much into elections with turnouts of sub 30%, that are effectively 'dead rubbers' in that the composition of the House won't change meaningfully, when there is a pandemic, and with only half a year until the next national elections.

    It's all right, Robert, I've snipped your ramblings.

    I think anyone looking at any US poll has to look at the crosstabs in detail. The NYT/Siena College Poll gave Biden a 50-36 lead over Trump and had Biden 16 points ahead in the Midwest.

    However, White votes (61%) and Republican voters (26%) look seriously under-sampled so that one's for the bin. The PBS-Marist poll I quoted earlier had much more realistic crosstabs and illustrated just hoe much Biden still has to do in the Midwest and South though he is piling up votes in the NE and West where he doesn't need them in EC terms.

    I've not found the crosstabs for the Hill-Harris-X poll and until they are published, I'm sceptical of that and of course these polls also have large margins of error (anything up to 3.5 points).
    I find it mildly amusing that some of the worst polling for Trump comes from Fox and some of the best from PBS.

    Marist has some of the best numbers for Trump (44%), but a similar lead to other pollsters (eight points). If Marist is correct, and he can pull back two to three points from Biden, then he's in with a good shot.

    But I'm sceptical. Firstly because I think CV-19 is going to be a massive issue. The "power of positive thinking" has no effect on the virus. And things are getting worse in America. Secondly, have you looked at the details of President Trump's unfavourable numbers? There has been a significant shift away from "somewhat unfavourable" to "very unfavourable". This is one of those things that I think is really important, and has been missed. Some polls now have over 50% of voters have "very unfavourable" views of President Trump, up from 30-35%.
    As you said Robert, it is mildly amusing with which pollsters Trump does best with / not. I tend to take the view that what is more interesting is the trend in polls from the same pollster as - unless there has been a change to their methodology - it creates a more stable timeline even if there are flaws in the underlying numbers. That's why it doesn't feel like Trump's position isn't necessarily getting worse - Biden's lead with CBS and YouGov is stable at +8 and the lead in the Hill for Biden more than halved.
    YouGov polling since April. Stable rise


  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,594

    Alistair said:

    LadyG said:

    nichomar said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education system, by the markets.

    That girl almost certainly goes, or went, to a liberal university where she studies - or studied - Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies and all the rest of the neo-Marxist identtitarian bullshit. That's why she can't debate, they are not taught to debate, they are taught the secular religious truth, and then told to go out and disseminate it. By shouting, if necessary.

    But who actually wants their child to receive an education like this, when we can now see what it does to young brains? This girl might have $50k of student debt to go with her ridiculous education, and she is basically unemployable.

    Parents will start turning away from this. Foreign parents will look at US Colleges and start thinking, Er, maybe not.

    Market forces may deconsrtruct Marxism. It is arguably already happening in Australia, where the universities are in crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    This well coordinated and often repeated theme about universities now peddling nothing but pure woke Marxism seems to go unchallenged. I don’t know if it’s true, my own children are at least 12 years out so can’t comment. My nieces and nephews give the impression life at university is focused on results and jobs not politics. Is there anyone out there, Who isn’t playing to an agenda, with an objective view?
    I studied a social science at university 15-25 years ago and it's total bollocks.
    Er, that was 15-25 years ago

    Also: you did a ten year degree???
    I have three degrees and worked for a few years in between the second and third.
    I don't think universities have changed so much in the meantime.
    The right is attacking universities because they've figured out that the more educated people are the less likely they are to be taken in by their bollocks.
    It's amusing seeing letters to the papers from right wingers attacking universities from the 1960's that are completely indistinguishable from the complaints these days.
    If nothing ever changes in universities, why is Rhodes (probably) being taken down now, having survived the '60s and subsequent decades with ease? Clearly we've moved left of where the 'progressive' radicals of the time were.
    It's not necessarily left and right. Perhaps we have just become more enlightened.
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 24,968

    Today's Covid figures from the DHSC:

    Deaths: 100
    Cases: 890
    Tests: 155,359

    New cases are down about 25% on the week.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,855
    isam said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Andy_JS said:

    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    EHRC results should be out quite soon, Starmer has a lot of good will IMHO if he sacks the people that deserve it

    I hope sack means "remove the whip" not "remove from Shadow Cabinet".
    When will Johnson be sacking Jenrick and removing the Whip from him?
    When he engages in a sustained campaign of antisemitism so awful it draws the ire of the EHRC perhaps?
    The Tory Party has a massive Islamophobia problem as you well know.

    Your views as usual are inconsistent, we know if a Labour MP had been found to be doing what Jenrick has done, you'd be calling for them to lose the Whip.
    I know no such thing. Any racists should be expelled from the party.

    Criticising Islam, critising the niqab, criticisng misogyny, criticising homophobia is not racism. Any more than criticising paedophile priests is racist. Consistency is not racist.
    It can be. Indirect discrimination is when a policy is consistently applied to everyone but particularly affects a group of people because of their protected characteristic. This type of discrimination can sometimes be justified if a policy is “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”. This legitimate aim can be something like maintaining a company image or protecting health and safety. Insisting that fruit pickers (as opposed to teachers) speak perfect English, for example, is consistent, but racist as it is a policy that has no legitimate aim - there is no need for fruit pickers to have much more than a basic grasp of English, if that. While criticising homophobia and misogyny in all cases is clearly a legitimate aim, I fail to see how blanket criticism of the niqab is always justified and therefore and not racist.

    BTW indirect discrimination also means that provisions impacting Muslims disproportionately impact people of South Asian and Middle Eastern decent, so can be racist as well as islamophobic. Similarly discrimination against Catholics in the UK has often been coded discrimination against Irish people.
    The niqab is a misogynistic garment designed to subjugate women and separate them from men so how is it racist to criticise it?

    No race demands people wear it.
    No religion demands people wear it.

    It is cultural subjugation and I see nothing racist in condemning misogyny.
    Lots of white men on here today chiming in. Maybe we should ask someone who actually wears one about it?

    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/i-wear-the-niqab-let-me-speak-on-my-own-behalf-8824243.html

    A statement's validity does not depend on the type of person making it.
    Depends. It can do.
    And so the Enlightenment dies in four words...
    Hardly. It's simply obvious that there are instances where the weight of a person's opinion on something is impacted by who they are (or are not).

    Think back to the other day and that video showing the white woman berating the black police officer for being part of a racist organization.

    Cue many many comments on here on about how naff that was - none of which (as I recall) triggered you to intervene and support the woman in the name of the Enlightenment.
    I doubt black men are forced into the US Police Force the way many women are into religious garb though. I would buy US black policeman's agency over Burqa & Niqab wearing Muslim women's in a highly unlikely hypothetical spread match bet
    OK. But you get my general point.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    rcs1000 said:

    Woke universities. Did Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man lecture in vain?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Man

    That's a great book (as, indeed, is Doctor Criminale), and a reminder that things really don't change as much as we think they do.
    The Leopard springs to mind. Great book, good film.
  • Peter_the_PunterPeter_the_Punter Posts: 13,227

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    I only ever call him an immigrant when I want to wind him up. But yes, you are right.

    He married an American girl to get a green card. They then divorced. You can imagine what his views are of foreigners doing something similar to get into the UK, but he doesn't see the irony, and he certainly doesn't like anyone trying to point it out.
    Ha ha, immigrants who hate immigrants are something special. You should tell him he is exhibiting a textbook case of white privilege, sounds like that might send is blood pressure northwards.
    He'd have an aneurism, but that wouldn't help me. He gives me invaluable insight into the mind of a Trump supporter without which my betting bank would be much lower than it is.

    Can you guess which UK soccer team he supports? You only get one go.
    Hmm I am getting a Chelsea vibe.
    Way too genteel.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT3UqO7Y6oo

    He claims to have been an ICF founder member. I reckon if I studied that video long enough I could spot him.
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 24,968

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    Only Jonny Foreigner is a nasty immigrant. Plucky Brits are always noble Expats.
    Immigrants and expats are different words with different meanings.
    Bad and good? In that order.
    Immigrants move to colder countries with more jobs.

    Expats move to sunnier countries with cheaper wine.

    :wink:
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,235
    edited June 2020
    Barnesian said:

    Barnesian said:

    TimT said:

    Barnesian said:
    Surely axiomatic, not tautological
    Based on axioms and logic. Tautology - "a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form". See Russells Principia Mathematica. (I know it was holed below the water line by Godel but the basic definitions still hold).
    'True by necessity' is what you've still to prove. Pull that off and you'll be up there with Plato and Kant as one of the greatest philosophers mankind has ever produced.
    2+2=4 isn't true by necessity but by virtue of the axiomatic definition of the functions "+" and "=", the successor function and the definition of the meaning of the symbols "2" and "4". Necessity doesn't come into it.
    Therein lies the problem: the concept of 'succession' is itself acting like a function. You need to drill down to the root function and define its workings in purely logical terms.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    edited June 2020
    TimT said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Woke universities. Did Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man lecture in vain?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Man

    That's a great book (as, indeed, is Doctor Criminale), and a reminder that things really don't change as much as we think they do.
    The Leopard springs to mind. Great book, good film.
    Orwell had some good comments on the similar characters of his age, and their effect on progressive politics.
  • Worrying increase in the number of Sunday declared Covid-19 deaths in the UK, but hardly surprising in view of all the gallivanting around in evidence over the past couple of weeks. Indeed it would be very surprising if we don't see further increases over the near term.
  • OllyTOllyT Posts: 4,911

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    I only ever call him an immigrant when I want to wind him up. But yes, you are right.

    He married an American girl to get a green card. They then divorced. You can imagine what his views are of foreigners doing something similar to get into the UK, but he doesn't see the irony, and he certainly doesn't like anyone trying to point it out.
    Ha ha, immigrants who hate immigrants are something special. You should tell him he is exhibiting a textbook case of white privilege, sounds like that might send is blood pressure northwards.
    He'd have an aneurism, but that wouldn't help me. He gives me invaluable insight into the mind of a Trump supporter without which my betting bank would be much lower than it is.

    Can you guess which UK soccer team he supports? You only get one go.
    chelsea?
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556

    Alistair said:

    LadyG said:

    nichomar said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education system, by the markets.

    That girl almost certainly goes, or went, to a liberal university where she studies - or studied - Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies and all the rest of the neo-Marxist identtitarian bullshit. That's why she can't debate, they are not taught to debate, they are taught the secular religious truth, and then told to go out and disseminate it. By shouting, if necessary.

    But who actually wants their child to receive an education like this, when we can now see what it does to young brains? This girl might have $50k of student debt to go with her ridiculous education, and she is basically unemployable.

    Parents will start turning away from this. Foreign parents will look at US Colleges and start thinking, Er, maybe not.

    Market forces may deconsrtruct Marxism. It is arguably already happening in Australia, where the universities are in crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    This well coordinated and often repeated theme about universities now peddling nothing but pure woke Marxism seems to go unchallenged. I don’t know if it’s true, my own children are at least 12 years out so can’t comment. My nieces and nephews give the impression life at university is focused on results and jobs not politics. Is there anyone out there, Who isn’t playing to an agenda, with an objective view?
    I studied a social science at university 15-25 years ago and it's total bollocks.
    Er, that was 15-25 years ago

    Also: you did a ten year degree???
    I have three degrees and worked for a few years in between the second and third.
    I don't think universities have changed so much in the meantime.
    The right is attacking universities because they've figured out that the more educated people are the less likely they are to be taken in by their bollocks.
    It's amusing seeing letters to the papers from right wingers attacking universities from the 1960's that are completely indistinguishable from the complaints these days.
    If nothing ever changes in universities, why is Rhodes (probably) being taken down now, having survived the '60s and subsequent decades with ease? Clearly we've moved left of where the 'progressive' radicals of the time were.
    It's not necessarily left and right. Perhaps we have just become more enlightened.
    Or perhaps we just think we are, having merely become more arrogant and solipsistic.
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 24,968
    kinabalu said:

    LadyG said:

    Actually, this whole passage from 1984 is superbly prescient.

    Orewell is describing Shouty Woman in the video below


    "He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word."

    "Just once Winston caught a phrase-’complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’- jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quackquack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front-it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure INGSOC"

    http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/NineteenEightyFour/part1sec5.html

    Oh that IS original and thought provoking - a bit of Orwell.
    How about a bit of Turgenev:

    "So ... you were convinced of all this and decided not to do anything serious yourselves."
    "And decided not to do anything serious," Bazarov repeated grimly. ...
    "But to confine yourselves to abuse?"
    "To confine ourselves to abuse."
    "And that is called nihilism?"
    "And that is called nihilism," Bazarov repeated again, this time with marked insolence.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers_and_Sons_(novel)

    Rather captures the SJW mentality.
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,405

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    Only Jonny Foreigner is a nasty immigrant. Plucky Brits are always noble Expats.
    Immigrants and expats are different words with different meanings.
    I totally agree. It is just a pity that they are not used correctly.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    LadyG said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Woke universities. Did Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man lecture in vain?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Man

    That's a great book (as, indeed, is Doctor Criminale), and a reminder that things really don't change as much as we think they do.
    No, they really do change. Bradbury identified academic cultural Marxism early on (quite brilliantly, it's a wonderful novel), but look where he finds it: in the sociology department. That's where Howard Kirk teaches.

    Since then cultural Marxism has advanced into geography, anthropology, English lit, history, psychology, all the humanities. And now it is invading the sciences, in the name of "decolonising"


    https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/18820


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/black-lives-matter-oxford-will-decolonise-degrees-c7dkhbtnd
    Sean catching the zeitgeist

    https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/cultural-marxism-catching
  • BarnesianBarnesian Posts: 7,979
    Latest data
    Not good for London. What happened about 12 days ago that triggered this?


  • isamisam Posts: 40,731
    edited June 2020
    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education system, by the markets.

    That girl almost certainly goes, or went, to a liberal university where she studies - or studied - Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies and all the rest of the neo-Marxist identtitarian bullshit. That's why she can't debate, they are not taught to debate, they are taught the secular religious truth, and then told to go out and disseminate it. By shouting, if necessary.

    But who actually wants their child to receive an education like this, when we can now see what it does to young brains? This girl might have $50k of student debt to go with her ridiculous education, and she is basically unemployable.

    Parents will start turning away from this. Foreign parents will look at US Colleges and start thinking, Er, maybe not.

    Market forces may deconsrtruct Marxism. It is arguably already happening in Australia, where the universities are in crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    Rather embarrassingly, I studied Humanities at Brighton University as a 35 year old. In retrospect it was like an undercover mission into the wokiest of wokesville, a glimpse into the future at what Corbynism/BLM would be like. Teachers boycotting Tescos because it was Israeli, legitimising anti Israel sentiment at every opportunity, teaching Marxism as the truth, telling stories of evil Tories, quoting The Guardian as Gospel, refusing to believe a word that had been written in a right of centre paper...

    Not a million miles from 2015 Tory posters views on here in 2020!
    This implies you stuck out like a sore thumb. And yet I bet you didn't. So how can you explain that contradiction?
    I did stick out like a sore thumb, so there's no contradiction to explain
  • TheWhiteRabbitTheWhiteRabbit Posts: 12,387

    Worrying increase in the number of Sunday declared Covid-19 deaths in the UK, but hardly surprising in view of all the gallivanting around in evidence over the past couple of weeks. Indeed it would be very surprising if we don't see further increases over the near term.

    I think once you discount backdating it's less than last week actually.
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 24,968
    edited June 2020

    Worrying increase in the number of Sunday declared Covid-19 deaths in the UK, but hardly surprising in view of all the gallivanting around in evidence over the past couple of weeks. Indeed it would be very surprising if we don't see further increases over the near term.

    The reported deaths for the past seven days are:

    100, 186, 149, 154, 171, 15, 43 - a total of 818

    and for the seven days before that:

    128, 173, 135, 184, 233, 38, 36 - a total of 927.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_Kingdom#Statistics

    And given by how the number of new infections continues to fall it seems very unlikely that new deaths would increase for a few weeks at least.
  • BarnesianBarnesian Posts: 7,979

    Barnesian said:

    Barnesian said:

    TimT said:

    Barnesian said:
    Surely axiomatic, not tautological
    Based on axioms and logic. Tautology - "a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form". See Russells Principia Mathematica. (I know it was holed below the water line by Godel but the basic definitions still hold).
    'True by necessity' is what you've still to prove. Pull that off and you'll be up there with Plato and Kant as one of the greatest philosophers mankind has ever produced.
    2+2=4 isn't true by necessity but by virtue of the axiomatic definition of the functions "+" and "=", the successor function and the definition of the meaning of the symbols "2" and "4". Necessity doesn't come into it.
    Therein lies the problem: the concept of 'succession' is itself acting like a function. You need to drill down to the root function and define its workings in purely logical terms.
    Correct. Succession is a function.
  • RandallFlaggRandallFlagg Posts: 1,151
    malcolmg said:



    You are looking at it from a false Westminster bubble view. If it is made an election on independence then Johnson and any other Tory will not be able to break International law , if people want to self govern they cannot be held prisoner nowadays.

    If this were true, then why haven't the international community forced Spain to grant a constitutionally legal Catalan indyref?
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited June 2020
    Alistair said:

    LadyG said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Woke universities. Did Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man lecture in vain?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Man

    That's a great book (as, indeed, is Doctor Criminale), and a reminder that things really don't change as much as we think they do.
    No, they really do change. Bradbury identified academic cultural Marxism early on (quite brilliantly, it's a wonderful novel), but look where he finds it: in the sociology department. That's where Howard Kirk teaches.

    Since then cultural Marxism has advanced into geography, anthropology, English lit, history, psychology, all the humanities. And now it is invading the sciences, in the name of "decolonising"


    https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/18820


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/black-lives-matter-oxford-will-decolonise-degrees-c7dkhbtnd
    Sean catching the zeitgeist

    https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/cultural-marxism-catching
    Bradbury identified the influence of the "cultural turn" in Marxist thinking during the 1960s and 70s, and so the influence of critical theory.

    "Cultural Marxism"as a thing, and as it exists as a bogeyman for the modern righ and far -right, is something quite different, though. This is essentially a cross between anti-semitic conspiracist thinking, and an inaccurate and increasingly common colloquial understanding of the term, which assumes it must mean a kind of whitewash-levelling and equalising of all culture as politics and classes were to have been before it.

    There are a number of flaws in critical theory, but the modern and generally paranoid construction of "cultural marxism" is no less so.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,855
    edited June 2020
    LadyG said:

    kinabalu said:

    LadyG said:

    Actually, this whole passage from 1984 is superbly prescient.

    Orewell is describing Shouty Woman in the video below


    "He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word."

    "Just once Winston caught a phrase-’complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’- jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quackquack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front-it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure INGSOC"

    http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/NineteenEightyFour/part1sec5.html

    Oh that IS original and thought provoking - a bit of Orwell.
    You talk duckspeak. Though you do it with more flare than most
    Not to shun a compliment but I do feel this one is unmerited. I have never knowingly or unknowingly been in the same room - the same building even - as "critical race theory" or the like. If any of that stuff just happens to co-incide with my perceptions then good news (for it) because I have got there independently. Which I think lends weight and credence.
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,265



    Immigrants and expats are different words with different meanings.

    Yes, that's an interesting point which people on both sides of the immigration debate should keep in mind. I knew many expats in Switzerland, people who came for the experience and the well-paid jobs but had little interest in local culture. (I thought they were missing out on a great experience but that's by the by.) The equivalent is a Polish builder who comes over for a few years, sends money home, and always intends to go back.

    Some genuinely decide (from the start or later) to settle, and then became real immigrants. Swiss reservations about migrants mostly related to these - they were always relaxed about seasonal workers turning up and helping out with agriculture and tourism, and foreign experts were fine too, but a change in the permanent population was seen as a non-trivial issue. In Britain, by contrast, resentment mostly arises towards the temporary workers - "they're taking our jobs", "they don't even try to mix". People who make it clear they want to settle gradually become part of the landscape.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    edited June 2020
    Barnesian said:

    Latest data
    Not good for London. What happened about 12 days ago that triggered this?


    The number of cases in London in very low, though bouncing around

    Recent data -

    image

    Full series -

    image
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,677
    LadyG said:

    On the question of a statements validity depending upon who wrote it, it depends upon both the statement and who wrote it. Some statements are objective but some are subjective.

    Take the rather simple statement "I am a woman" - if Cyclefree writes that then I believe it. If LadyG writes it I don't.

    Or if someone here posted medical advice - from most people I would take it with a pinch of salt but if it came from Foxy I'd take it more seriously.

    I am defiantly non-binary, and have been since the age of 3, so I am not offended by your remarks
    WTF is non-binary
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,677

    malcolmg said:



    You are looking at it from a false Westminster bubble view. If it is made an election on independence then Johnson and any other Tory will not be able to break International law , if people want to self govern they cannot be held prisoner nowadays.

    If this were true, then why haven't the international community forced Spain to grant a constitutionally legal Catalan indyref?
    You half wit , they have a written constitution and they have never been recognised as an independent country, they do not have a union treaty. We are not some region of Englandshire.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,774
    Barnesian said:

    Barnesian said:

    Barnesian said:

    TimT said:

    Barnesian said:
    Surely axiomatic, not tautological
    Based on axioms and logic. Tautology - "a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form". See Russells Principia Mathematica. (I know it was holed below the water line by Godel but the basic definitions still hold).
    'True by necessity' is what you've still to prove. Pull that off and you'll be up there with Plato and Kant as one of the greatest philosophers mankind has ever produced.
    2+2=4 isn't true by necessity but by virtue of the axiomatic definition of the functions "+" and "=", the successor function and the definition of the meaning of the symbols "2" and "4". Necessity doesn't come into it.
    Therein lies the problem: the concept of 'succession' is itself acting like a function. You need to drill down to the root function and define its workings in purely logical terms.
    Correct. Succession is a function.
    I thought it was an -excellent- TV series.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,677

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    Only Jonny Foreigner is a nasty immigrant. Plucky Brits are always noble Expats.
    Immigrants and expats are different words with different meanings.
    Bad and good? In that order.
    Immigrants move to colder countries with more jobs.

    Expats move to sunnier countries with cheaper wine.

    :wink:
    Expat is an emigrant from one country and an immigrant to another, no matter how you try to fancy it up or how many blue passports they have..
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 3,911
    malcolmg said:

    LadyG said:

    On the question of a statements validity depending upon who wrote it, it depends upon both the statement and who wrote it. Some statements are objective but some are subjective.

    Take the rather simple statement "I am a woman" - if Cyclefree writes that then I believe it. If LadyG writes it I don't.

    Or if someone here posted medical advice - from most people I would take it with a pinch of salt but if it came from Foxy I'd take it more seriously.

    I am defiantly non-binary, and have been since the age of 3, so I am not offended by your remarks
    WTF is non-binary
    Decimal. As in, there's at least ten of him now...
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,855
    edited June 2020
    isam said:

    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education system, by the markets.

    That girl almost certainly goes, or went, to a liberal university where she studies - or studied - Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies and all the rest of the neo-Marxist identtitarian bullshit. That's why she can't debate, they are not taught to debate, they are taught the secular religious truth, and then told to go out and disseminate it. By shouting, if necessary.

    But who actually wants their child to receive an education like this, when we can now see what it does to young brains? This girl might have $50k of student debt to go with her ridiculous education, and she is basically unemployable.

    Parents will start turning away from this. Foreign parents will look at US Colleges and start thinking, Er, maybe not.

    Market forces may deconsrtruct Marxism. It is arguably already happening in Australia, where the universities are in crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    Rather embarrassingly, I studied Humanities at Brighton University as a 35 year old. In retrospect it was like an undercover mission into the wokiest of wokesville, a glimpse into the future at what Corbynism/BLM would be like. Teachers boycotting Tescos because it was Israeli, legitimising anti Israel sentiment at every opportunity, teaching Marxism as the truth, telling stories of evil Tories, quoting The Guardian as Gospel, refusing to believe a word that had been written in a right of centre paper...

    Not a million miles from 2015 Tory posters views on here in 2020!
    This implies you stuck out like a sore thumb. And yet I bet you didn't. So how can you explain that contradiction?
    I did stick out like a sore thumb, so there's no contradiction to explain
    Ah OK, fair enough. No, there isn't a contradiction there then.

    But there's another oddity. On this account you would be (quite literally) the only person in history to have been turned into a UKIP voter by a surfeit of education.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    malcolmg said:

    You are looking at it from a false Westminster bubble view. If it is made an election on independence then Johnson and any other Tory will not be able to break International law , if people want to self govern they cannot be held prisoner nowadays. On the budget you have no idea what Scotland's finances are like , only your myopic view of what Westminster parrot and last but not least we are already over the 50% mark and rising every poll.
    Just look at Covid , UK borrow 125B , say Scotland pay for 10B yet give Scotland 3.6B, some economics and typical of how they calculate the finances. We will be out debt free or very asset rich in owning 10% of everything England has, not going to be too bad a deal, England will opt for debt free as per every other country that got out from under the yoke of England.

    Oh, I think I get what you mean - you're suggesting that the SNP should simply campaign on the policy of skipping a second referendum and moving immediately to independence by a vote of the Scottish Parliament?

    That won't work. Scotland's not a colony. Scotland and England voluntarily dissolved themselves as sovereign entities when they passed the Acts of Union. In a strictly legal sense Scotland therefore has about as much right to break away from Britain solely of its own volition as does, for example, the city of Swansea or the Isle of Wight.

    We don't have a federal constitution (not that this would necessarily help: both US states and German lander, to give two prominent examples, have no right of secession,) and therefore the current Scottish Parliament only exists at the pleasure of the UK Parliament. I'm not saying that to be provocative (I am not a Unionist, and I have no interest in "doing Scotland down,") but as a simple statement of legal fact. The Scottish Parliament couldn't just make a UDI even if it wanted to. Indeed, if it were that easy then it almost certainly would've done so by now, as it has had a pro-independence majority since 2011. Again, any such attempt would be struck down in Scotland's own courts.

    Unless the UK Government decides it's no longer worth maintaining the Union, and simply decides to let Scotland go, then what you're suggesting would necessitate a revolution, as eventually happened in Ireland. That could only happen with such overwhelming support from the Scottish people that dissenting voices within the Scottish population could be safely ignored. 45%, 50% or 55% backing doesn't cut it. I would venture to suggest that such a level of support doesn't exist so a revolution cannot be successful. Thus Scotland will have to get there within the existing framework. I don't doubt that's frustrating because it might take a while, but such is life.
  • BarnesianBarnesian Posts: 7,979
    edited June 2020

    Barnesian said:

    Latest data
    Not good for London. What happened about 12 days ago that triggered this?


    The number of cases in London in very low, though bouncing around

    Pillar 1 data -

    image

    Full series -

    image
    I discount the last 4 days data as it will always be amended upwards.

    In London, reported cases 9-15th June are 119. 16- 22nd June are 131.
    131/119=1.10

    I use a seven day moving average a) to remove the weekend effect and b) more importantly to allow an average seven day incubation period between initial infection and becoming infective.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,855
    Change of Twitter photo for Owen Jones. New one looks strong. Gets a tick from me.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,677
    edited June 2020
    LadyG said:

    malcolmg said:

    malcolmg said:



    You are looking at it from a false Westminster bubble view. If it is made an election on independence then Johnson and any other Tory will not be able to break International law , if people want to self govern they cannot be held prisoner nowadays.

    If this were true, then why haven't the international community forced Spain to grant a constitutionally legal Catalan indyref?
    You half wit , they have a written constitution and they have never been recognised as an independent country, they do not have a union treaty. We are not some region of Englandshire.
    Are you actually trying to say Catalonia has never been independent? That will come as a surprise to the Principality of Catalonia

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Catalonia
    a gazillion years ago maybe, if you split hairs and go back to counting every little principality as a "country" but not in any real modern sense. In any event it bares no relation to the Scottish situation or the union treaty. ANY moron that tries to conflate the two is an absolute dummy or a unionist or both.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    LadyG said:

    kinabalu said:

    LadyG said:

    kinabalu said:

    LadyG said:

    Actually, this whole passage from 1984 is superbly prescient.

    Orewell is describing Shouty Woman in the video below


    "He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word."

    "Just once Winston caught a phrase-’complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’- jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quackquack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front-it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure INGSOC"

    http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/NineteenEightyFour/part1sec5.html

    Oh that IS original and thought provoking - a bit of Orwell.
    You talk duckspeak. Though you do it with more flare than most
    Not to shun a compliment but I do feel this one is unmerited. I have never knowingly or unknowingly been in the same room - the same building even - as "critical race theory" or the like. If any of that stuff just happens to co-incide with my perceptions then good news (for it) because I have got there independently. Which I think lends weight and credence.
    Extremely unlikely.

    Because it is impossible to avoid Critical Theory these days. In Bradbury's time it was restricted to the Sociology Departments of new universities, now it is ubiquitous. So unless you have lived your life without ever reading leftish newspapers, watching TV current affairs, going to anywhere in London with nice houses, entering Waitrose or WholeFoods, eating an ethnically sourced custard apple, you will have encountered it in some form and it will have entered your brain by osmosis.
    Sitting in the Sociology Dept. common room is bizarre for a scientist.
    malcolmg said:

    LadyG said:

    On the question of a statements validity depending upon who wrote it, it depends upon both the statement and who wrote it. Some statements are objective but some are subjective.

    Take the rather simple statement "I am a woman" - if Cyclefree writes that then I believe it. If LadyG writes it I don't.

    Or if someone here posted medical advice - from most people I would take it with a pinch of salt but if it came from Foxy I'd take it more seriously.

    I am defiantly non-binary, and have been since the age of 3, so I am not offended by your remarks
    WTF is non-binary
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_numeral_system
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625



    Immigrants and expats are different words with different meanings.

    Yes, that's an interesting point which people on both sides of the immigration debate should keep in mind. I knew many expats in Switzerland, people who came for the experience and the well-paid jobs but had little interest in local culture. (I thought they were missing out on a great experience but that's by the by.) The equivalent is a Polish builder who comes over for a few years, sends money home, and always intends to go back.

    Some genuinely decide (from the start or later) to settle, and then became real immigrants. Swiss reservations about migrants mostly related to these - they were always relaxed about seasonal workers turning up and helping out with agriculture and tourism, and foreign experts were fine too, but a change in the permanent population was seen as a non-trivial issue. In Britain, by contrast, resentment mostly arises towards the temporary workers - "they're taking our jobs", "they don't even try to mix". People who make it clear they want to settle gradually become part of the landscape.
    Where do you stand on things like Denmark enforcing the speaking of Danish?
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,594
    LadyG said:

    Alistair said:

    LadyG said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Woke universities. Did Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man lecture in vain?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Man

    That's a great book (as, indeed, is Doctor Criminale), and a reminder that things really don't change as much as we think they do.
    No, they really do change. Bradbury identified academic cultural Marxism early on (quite brilliantly, it's a wonderful novel), but look where he finds it: in the sociology department. That's where Howard Kirk teaches.

    Since then cultural Marxism has advanced into geography, anthropology, English lit, history, psychology, all the humanities. And now it is invading the sciences, in the name of "decolonising"


    https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/18820


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/black-lives-matter-oxford-will-decolonise-degrees-c7dkhbtnd
    Sean catching the zeitgeist

    https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/cultural-marxism-catching
    I know not of this "Sean", but I do know the SPLC, which you herein cite

    That's the same organisation which has been recently roiled with sackings, resiginations, protests, because of alleged corruption, sexism, and, yes, racism.

    https://nonprofitquarterly.org/splc-in-turmoil-as-problems-festered-where-was-its-board/
    You would like him. You share similarly aggressive writing styles.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,916
    kyf_100 said:

    malcolmg said:

    LadyG said:

    On the question of a statements validity depending upon who wrote it, it depends upon both the statement and who wrote it. Some statements are objective but some are subjective.

    Take the rather simple statement "I am a woman" - if Cyclefree writes that then I believe it. If LadyG writes it I don't.

    Or if someone here posted medical advice - from most people I would take it with a pinch of salt but if it came from Foxy I'd take it more seriously.

    I am defiantly non-binary, and have been since the age of 3, so I am not offended by your remarks
    WTF is non-binary
    Decimal. As in, there's at least ten of him now...
    I like to think that they are wearing a dress when posting under their current guise.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905

    Barnesian said:

    Latest data
    Not good for London. What happened about 12 days ago that triggered this?


    The number of cases in London in very low, though bouncing around

    Recent data -

    image

    Full series -

    image
    And when the total number of cases is low, R will tend to average around 1.0 but can pitch and roll around like a ship on a storm-tossed sea, and the fluctuations become more violent as the number continues to decrease. As per the recent outbreak in Germany, where R went up to somewhere near 3 and then crashed back down to below 1 again in a day. QED.
  • BarnesianBarnesian Posts: 7,979

    Barnesian said:

    Latest data
    Not good for London. What happened about 12 days ago that triggered this?


    The number of cases in London in very low, though bouncing around

    Recent data -

    image

    Full series -

    image
    And when the total number of cases is low, R will tend to average around 1.0 but can pitch and roll around like a ship on a storm-tossed sea, and the fluctuations become more violent as the number continues to decrease. As per the recent outbreak in Germany, where R went up to somewhere near 3 and then crashed back down to below 1 again in a day. QED.
    In London total number of cases is not that low yet. In time it will be hopefully.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,855
    edited June 2020

    kinabalu said:

    LadyG said:

    Actually, this whole passage from 1984 is superbly prescient.

    Orewell is describing Shouty Woman in the video below


    "He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word."

    "Just once Winston caught a phrase-’complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’- jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quackquack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front-it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure INGSOC"

    http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/NineteenEightyFour/part1sec5.html

    Oh that IS original and thought provoking - a bit of Orwell.
    How about a bit of Turgenev:

    "So ... you were convinced of all this and decided not to do anything serious yourselves."
    "And decided not to do anything serious," Bazarov repeated grimly. ...
    "But to confine yourselves to abuse?"
    "To confine ourselves to abuse."
    "And that is called nihilism?"
    "And that is called nihilism," Bazarov repeated again, this time with marked insolence.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers_and_Sons_(novel)

    Rather captures the SJW mentality.
    Except it doesn't. What it captures is keyboard warriordom. Of which there is loads on the "anti-woke" right.

    See here - depending on who's around and what time of day it is.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    Only Jonny Foreigner is a nasty immigrant. Plucky Brits are always noble Expats.
    Immigrants and expats are different words with different meanings.
    Bad and good? In that order.
    No.

    It's like the difference between borrow and lend, give or take, north or south. They are opposites.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    edited June 2020
    On COVID case data. To inform the debate.... I went to https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ and got this -

    This is for confirmed cases in England, just selecting the data for today

    image

  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,677
    kyf_100 said:

    malcolmg said:

    LadyG said:

    On the question of a statements validity depending upon who wrote it, it depends upon both the statement and who wrote it. Some statements are objective but some are subjective.

    Take the rather simple statement "I am a woman" - if Cyclefree writes that then I believe it. If LadyG writes it I don't.

    Or if someone here posted medical advice - from most people I would take it with a pinch of salt but if it came from Foxy I'd take it more seriously.

    I am defiantly non-binary, and have been since the age of 3, so I am not offended by your remarks
    WTF is non-binary
    Decimal. As in, there's at least ten of him now...
    :D:D
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    LadyG said:

    malcolmg said:

    You are looking at it from a false Westminster bubble view. If it is made an election on independence then Johnson and any other Tory will not be able to break International law , if people want to self govern they cannot be held prisoner nowadays. On the budget you have no idea what Scotland's finances are like , only your myopic view of what Westminster parrot and last but not least we are already over the 50% mark and rising every poll.
    Just look at Covid , UK borrow 125B , say Scotland pay for 10B yet give Scotland 3.6B, some economics and typical of how they calculate the finances. We will be out debt free or very asset rich in owning 10% of everything England has, not going to be too bad a deal, England will opt for debt free as per every other country that got out from under the yoke of England.

    Oh, I think I get what you mean - you're suggesting that the SNP should simply campaign on the policy of skipping a second referendum and moving immediately to independence by a vote of the Scottish Parliament?

    That won't work. Scotland's not a colony. Scotland and England voluntarily dissolved themselves as sovereign entities when they passed the Acts of Union. In a strictly legal sense Scotland therefore has about as much right to break away from Britain solely of its own volition as does, for example, the city of Swansea or the Isle of Wight.

    We don't have a federal constitution (not that this would necessarily help: both US states and German lander, to give two prominent examples, have no right of secession,) and therefore the current Scottish Parliament only exists at the pleasure of the UK Parliament. I'm not saying that to be provocative (I am not a Unionist, and I have no interest in "doing Scotland down,") but as a simple statement of legal fact. The Scottish Parliament couldn't just make a UDI even if it wanted to. Indeed, if it were that easy then it almost certainly would've done so by now, as it has had a pro-independence majority since 2011. Again, any such attempt would be struck down in Scotland's own courts.

    Unless the UK Government decides it's no longer worth maintaining the Union, and simply decides to let Scotland go, then what you're suggesting would necessitate a revolution, as eventually happened in Ireland. That could only happen with such overwhelming support from the Scottish people that dissenting voices within the Scottish population could be safely ignored. 45%, 50% or 55% backing doesn't cut it. I would venture to suggest that such a level of support doesn't exist so a revolution cannot be successful. Thus Scotland will have to get there within the existing framework. I don't doubt that's frustrating because it might take a while, but such is life.
    What's more, Sturgeon knows all this. Which is why she is not caving in to the mad demands for a UDI.

    The one way to scotch any hopes for indy is to have a botched, illegal referendum. It will be boycotted by Unionists so it will not have moral force, it will also end up mired in the courts for years, where it would lose, thus tarnishing the cause of indy for a generation.

    The SNP just have to be patient, they will get a second bite of the cherry at some point, and they could well win. Like you, I don't think it will happen before the second half of the 2020s.
    I'm with you until the last sentence. I think the power to hold another referendum could be devolved after the next Scottish Parliament election (assuming it returns another pro-independence majority, which I think likely,) but that would be a matter for Boris Johnson and I wouldn't like to bet which way he'll decide to jump.
  • isamisam Posts: 40,731
    edited June 2020



    Immigrants and expats are different words with different meanings.

    Yes, that's an interesting point which people on both sides of the immigration debate should keep in mind. I knew many expats in Switzerland, people who came for the experience and the well-paid jobs but had little interest in local culture. (I thought they were missing out on a great experience but that's by the by.) The equivalent is a Polish builder who comes over for a few years, sends money home, and always intends to go back.

    Some genuinely decide (from the start or later) to settle, and then became real immigrants. Swiss reservations about migrants mostly related to these - they were always relaxed about seasonal workers turning up and helping out with agriculture and tourism, and foreign experts were fine too, but a change in the permanent population was seen as a non-trivial issue. In Britain, by contrast, resentment mostly arises towards the temporary workers - "they're taking our jobs", "they don't even try to mix". People who make it clear they want to settle gradually become part of the landscape.
    What do people from other countries call those who leave to live abroad? Is it the same as they call those who come from abroad to live there?
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,235
    Alistair said:

    LadyG said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Woke universities. Did Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man lecture in vain?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Man

    That's a great book (as, indeed, is Doctor Criminale), and a reminder that things really don't change as much as we think they do.
    No, they really do change. Bradbury identified academic cultural Marxism early on (quite brilliantly, it's a wonderful novel), but look where he finds it: in the sociology department. That's where Howard Kirk teaches.

    Since then cultural Marxism has advanced into geography, anthropology, English lit, history, psychology, all the humanities. And now it is invading the sciences, in the name of "decolonising"


    https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/18820


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/black-lives-matter-oxford-will-decolonise-degrees-c7dkhbtnd
    Sean catching the zeitgeist

    https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/cultural-marxism-catching
    Interesting. That article mentions long-dead people (the Rev. Falwell etc.), yet you'd be forgiven for thinking that the pronouncements cited were made yesterday, not two decades ago.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Mr. Malmesbury, if accurate, then either regional or full lockdowns may very well be necessary to prevent this snowballing.

    Any idea on the geographical spread?
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,774
    edited June 2020
    LadyG said:

    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education systen crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    Rather embarrassingly, I studied Humanities at Brighton University as a 35 year old. In retrospect it was like an undercover mission into the wokiest of wokesville, a glimpse into the future at what Corbynism/BLM would be like. Teachers boycotting Tescos because it was Israeli, legitimising anti Israel sentiment at every opportunity, teaching Marxism as the truth, telling stories of evil Tories, quoting The Guardian as Gospel, refusing to believe a word that had been written in a right of centre paper...

    Not a million miles from 2015 Tory posters views on here in 2020!
    This implies you stuck out like a sore thumb. And yet I bet you didn't. So how can you explain that contradiction?
    I did stick out like a sore thumb, so there's no contradiction to explain
    Ah OK, fair enough. No, there isn't a contradiction there then.

    But there's another oddity. On this account you would be (quite literally) the only person in history to have been turned into a UKIP voter by a surfeit of education.
    Not true. I know several.

    Extreme Woke education DOES have this effect on some people. It makes them very anti-Woke. I've seen it with my own eyes.

    Not many go the whole hog and become UKIPpers (tho a few do), quite a lot are turned into Conservatives
    I see a lot of graduates, albeit mostly in the job interview process. And I've done this for twenty odd years now.

    I have noticed certain changes. And I've asked people about some of the things in Universities.

    Now, maybe it's because I only see economics, finance, business, science, engineering, computing and philosophy students (and not sociology and critical race theory), but I've not actually noticed much (if anything) in the way of wokeness. Sure, people are broadly left of centre, and sure the Brits are mostly pro-EU, but most seem otherwise fairly normal.

    The only area where there seems to have been a massive change in attitudes in terms of gay rights. Everyone who's twenty years old has a dozen gay friends, while I probably knew just two or three openly gay people at University.

    Perhaps I'm being over optimistic. But when I was at University, by far the loudest most vocal group was Socialist Worker. I'd get a dozen leaflets to events, mostly anti-American and anti-Zionist and anti-Conservative (not a lot of positive thinking going on really...). Any wall of posters was dominated by Socialist Worker. But like Twitter is was representative of... well... only a very small minority of students.

    Now, I'm not actually at University. And I probably only see the 65% of students who want well paid jobs in finance, and not the 35% who'd rather not bathe and would instead rail against injustice they don't understand. But I'm struggling to see the world as having changed as much as you think.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    malcolmg said:

    kyf_100 said:

    malcolmg said:

    LadyG said:

    On the question of a statements validity depending upon who wrote it, it depends upon both the statement and who wrote it. Some statements are objective but some are subjective.

    Take the rather simple statement "I am a woman" - if Cyclefree writes that then I believe it. If LadyG writes it I don't.

    Or if someone here posted medical advice - from most people I would take it with a pinch of salt but if it came from Foxy I'd take it more seriously.

    I am defiantly non-binary, and have been since the age of 3, so I am not offended by your remarks
    WTF is non-binary
    Decimal. As in, there's at least ten of him now...
    :D:D
    Hmmm.... not decimal......

    https://www.quora.com/What-would-a-base-infinity-number-system-look-like-and-what-would-100-mean-in-that-system
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,094
    LadyG said:

    On the question of a statements validity depending upon who wrote it, it depends upon both the statement and who wrote it. Some statements are objective but some are subjective.

    Take the rather simple statement "I am a woman" - if Cyclefree writes that then I believe it. If LadyG writes it I don't.

    Or if someone here posted medical advice - from most people I would take it with a pinch of salt but if it came from Foxy I'd take it more seriously.

    I am defiantly non-binary, and have been since the age of 3, so I am not offended by your remarks
    After the number of likes Nick got for calling out your racism yesterday, I am surprised that you haven't already jumped to a new account. This one was rumbled before you had made even ten posts.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905

    On COVID case data. To inform the debate.... I went to https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ and got this -

    This is for confirmed cases in England, just selecting the data for today

    image

    Which just goes to show how remarkably inefficient the data gathering apparatus of the health service actually is. That chart would appear to suggest that it's not just deaths that happened months ago that they're only just getting round to adding to the statistics (today's NHS England death count includes a fatality from April 21st.) Some of those positive tests date all the way back to March.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,677

    malcolmg said:

    You are looking at it from a false Westminster bubble view. If it is made an election on independence then Johnson and any other Tory will not be able to break International law , if people want to self govern they cannot be held prisoner nowadays. On the budget you have no idea what Scotland's finances are like , only your myopic view of what Westminster parrot and last but not least we are already over the 50% mark and rising every poll.
    Just look at Covid , UK borrow 125B , say Scotland pay for 10B yet give Scotland 3.6B, some economics and typical of how they calculate the finances. We will be out debt free or very asset rich in owning 10% of everything England has, not going to be too bad a deal, England will opt for debt free as per every other country that got out from under the yoke of England.

    Oh, I think I get what you mean - you're suggesting that the SNP should simply campaign on the policy of skipping a second referendum and moving immediately to independence by a vote of the Scottish Parliament?

    That won't work. Scotland's not a colony. Scotland and England voluntarily dissolved themselves as sovereign entities when they passed the Acts of Union. In a strictly legal sense Scotland therefore has about as much right to break away from Britain solely of its own volition as does, for example, the city of Swansea or the Isle of Wight.

    We don't have a federal constitution (not that this would necessarily help: both US states and German lander, to give two prominent examples, have no right of secession,) and therefore the current Scottish Parliament only exists at the pleasure of the UK Parliament. I'm not saying that to be provocative (I am not a Unionist, and I have no interest in "doing Scotland down,") but as a simple statement of legal fact. The Scottish Parliament couldn't just make a UDI even if it wanted to. Indeed, if it were that easy then it almost certainly would've done so by now, as it has had a pro-independence majority since 2011. Again, any such attempt would be struck down in Scotland's own courts.

    Unless the UK Government decides it's no longer worth maintaining the Union, and simply decides to let Scotland go, then what you're suggesting would necessitate a revolution, as eventually happened in Ireland. That could only happen with such overwhelming support from the Scottish people that dissenting voices within the Scottish population could be safely ignored. 45%, 50% or 55% backing doesn't cut it. I would venture to suggest that such a level of support doesn't exist so a revolution cannot be successful. Thus Scotland will have to get there within the existing framework. I don't doubt that's frustrating because it might take a while, but such is life.
    The treaty of Union is just that , supposedly freely signed and can just as easily be dissolved. It is exactly the same as the EU treaty which UK did not need any permission to leave. Under international law if the people vote on a mandate for independence and England says no it will be in breach of International law and will have no chance not to agree at very worst to another referendum, personally I think as per previously agreed by Westminster that if a majority vote on an independence vote in an election then it is valid and will win in international courts. We will see soon enough.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,774

    malcolmg said:

    kyf_100 said:

    malcolmg said:

    LadyG said:

    On the question of a statements validity depending upon who wrote it, it depends upon both the statement and who wrote it. Some statements are objective but some are subjective.

    Take the rather simple statement "I am a woman" - if Cyclefree writes that then I believe it. If LadyG writes it I don't.

    Or if someone here posted medical advice - from most people I would take it with a pinch of salt but if it came from Foxy I'd take it more seriously.

    I am defiantly non-binary, and have been since the age of 3, so I am not offended by your remarks
    WTF is non-binary
    Decimal. As in, there's at least ten of him now...
    :D:D
    Hmmm.... not decimal......

    https://www.quora.com/What-would-a-base-infinity-number-system-look-like-and-what-would-100-mean-in-that-system
    I always wondered if you could create a number system based around prime numbers. So the "columns" would be 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. Could you create a set of rules that would allow you to count and do calculations in a meaningful way.

    But then I usually remember I have a business to run and employees to traumatise.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    Mr. Malmesbury, if accurate, then either regional or full lockdowns may very well be necessary to prevent this snowballing.

    Any idea on the geographical spread?

    ?

    The point I was making is that the data is heavily concentrated on back dating.

    Previously I was pointing out that trying to work out R etc from really small numbers is an interesting errand - 20 vs 10 is a 100% INCREASE!! PANIC!!!
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,855
    LadyG said:

    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education systen crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    Rather embarrassingly, I studied Humanities at Brighton University as a 35 year old. In retrospect it was like an undercover mission into the wokiest of wokesville, a glimpse into the future at what Corbynism/BLM would be like. Teachers boycotting Tescos because it was Israeli, legitimising anti Israel sentiment at every opportunity, teaching Marxism as the truth, telling stories of evil Tories, quoting The Guardian as Gospel, refusing to believe a word that had been written in a right of centre paper...

    Not a million miles from 2015 Tory posters views on here in 2020!
    This implies you stuck out like a sore thumb. And yet I bet you didn't. So how can you explain that contradiction?
    I did stick out like a sore thumb, so there's no contradiction to explain
    Ah OK, fair enough. No, there isn't a contradiction there then.

    But there's another oddity. On this account you would be (quite literally) the only person in history to have been turned into a UKIP voter by a surfeit of education.
    Not true. I know several.

    Extreme Woke education DOES have this effect on some people. It makes them very anti-Woke. I've seen it with my own eyes.

    Not many go the whole hog and become UKIPpers (tho a few do), quite a lot are turned into Conservatives
    The stats tell a different story. Young people and especially graduates view the Conservatives like a bucket of cold sick and the trend away from Con amongst this demographic continued at GE19. One of the few bright spots for Labour.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    IanB2 said:

    LadyG said:

    On the question of a statements validity depending upon who wrote it, it depends upon both the statement and who wrote it. Some statements are objective but some are subjective.

    Take the rather simple statement "I am a woman" - if Cyclefree writes that then I believe it. If LadyG writes it I don't.

    Or if someone here posted medical advice - from most people I would take it with a pinch of salt but if it came from Foxy I'd take it more seriously.

    I am defiantly non-binary, and have been since the age of 3, so I am not offended by your remarks
    After the number of likes Nick got for calling out your racism yesterday, I am surprised that you haven't already jumped to a new account. This one was rumbled before you had made even ten posts.
    Next one won't come until the inevitable banning of this one.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    On the subject of cases - the latest England case data, regional -

    image
    image
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 24,968
    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    LadyG said:

    Actually, this whole passage from 1984 is superbly prescient.

    Orewell is describing Shouty Woman in the video below


    "He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word."

    "Just once Winston caught a phrase-’complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’- jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quackquack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front-it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure INGSOC"

    http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/NineteenEightyFour/part1sec5.html

    Oh that IS original and thought provoking - a bit of Orwell.
    How about a bit of Turgenev:

    "So ... you were convinced of all this and decided not to do anything serious yourselves."
    "And decided not to do anything serious," Bazarov repeated grimly. ...
    "But to confine yourselves to abuse?"
    "To confine ourselves to abuse."
    "And that is called nihilism?"
    "And that is called nihilism," Bazarov repeated again, this time with marked insolence.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers_and_Sons_(novel)

    Rather captures the SJW mentality.
    Except it doesn't. What it captures is keyboard warriordom. Of which there is loads on the "anti-woke" right.

    See here - depending on who's around and what time of day it is.
    It captures very well those who posture about slavery in central London but wont go and protest at the Mauretanian embassy.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,677
    LadyG said:

    malcolmg said:

    You are looking at it from a false Westminster bubble view. If it is made an election on independence then Johnson and any other Tory will not be able to break International law , if people want to self govern they cannot be held prisoner nowadays. On the budget you have no idea what Scotland's finances are like , only your myopic view of what Westminster parrot and last but not least we are already over the 50% mark and rising every poll.
    Just look at Covid , UK borrow 125B , say Scotland pay for 10B yet give Scotland 3.6B, some economics and typical of how they calculate the finances. We will be out debt free or very asset rich in owning 10% of everything England has, not going to be too bad a deal, England will opt for debt free as per every other country that got out from under the yoke of England.

    Oh, I think I get what you mean - you're suggesting that the SNP should simply campaign on the policy of skipping a second referendum and moving immediately to independence by a vote of the Scottish Parliament?

    That won't work. Scotland's not a colony. Scotland and England voluntarily dissolved themselves as sovereign entities when they passed the Acts of Union. In a strictly legal sense Scotland therefore has about as much right to break away from Britain solely of its own volition as does, for example, the city of Swansea or the Isle of Wight.

    We don't have a federal constitution (not that this would necessarily help: both US states and German lander, to give two prominent examples, have no right of secession,) and therefore the current Scottish Parliament only exists at the pleasure of the UK Parliament. I'm not saying that to be provocative (I am not a Unionist, and I have no interest in "doing Scotland down,") but as a simple statement of legal fact. The Scottish Parliament couldn't just make a UDI even if it wanted to. Indeed, if it were that easy then it almost certainly would've done so by now, as it has had a pro-independence majority since 2011. Again, any such attempt would be struck down in Scotland's own courts.

    Unless the UK Government decides it's no longer worth maintaining the Union, and simply decides to let Scotland go, then what you're suggesting would necessitate a revolution, as eventually happened in Ireland. That could only happen with such overwhelming support from the Scottish people that dissenting voices within the Scottish population could be safely ignored. 45%, 50% or 55% backing doesn't cut it. I would venture to suggest that such a level of support doesn't exist so a revolution cannot be successful. Thus Scotland will have to get there within the existing framework. I don't doubt that's frustrating because it might take a while, but such is life.
    What's more, Sturgeon knows all this. Which is why she is not caving in to the mad demands for a UDI.

    The one way to scotch any hopes for indy is to have a botched, illegal referendum. It will be boycotted by Unionists so it will not have moral force, it will also end up mired in the courts for years, where it would lose, thus tarnishing the cause of indy for a generation.

    The SNP just have to be patient, they will get a second bite of the cherry at some point, and they could well win. Like you, I don't think it will happen before the second half of the 2020s.
    What is this illegal referendum, they can hold a vote any time they like it is under their remit. If passed it will prove yet again the mandate they have and will make it very difficult for England to keep Scotland under their jackboot, terrified as they are. Tories are determined to make England pariah's with their dictatorship.
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,235
    rcs1000 said:

    LadyG said:

    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education systen crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    Rather embarrassingly, I studied Humanities at Brighton University as a 35 year old. In retrospect it was like an undercover mission into the wokiest of wokesville, a glimpse into the future at what Corbynism/BLM would be like. Teachers boycotting Tescos because it was Israeli, legitimising anti Israel sentiment at every opportunity, teaching Marxism as the truth, telling stories of evil Tories, quoting The Guardian as Gospel, refusing to believe a word that had been written in a right of centre paper...

    Not a million miles from 2015 Tory posters views on here in 2020!
    This implies you stuck out like a sore thumb. And yet I bet you didn't. So how can you explain that contradiction?
    I did stick out like a sore thumb, so there's no contradiction to explain
    Ah OK, fair enough. No, there isn't a contradiction there then.

    But there's another oddity. On this account you would be (quite literally) the only person in history to have been turned into a UKIP voter by a surfeit of education.
    Not true. I know several.

    Extreme Woke education DOES have this effect on some people. It makes them very anti-Woke. I've seen it with my own eyes.

    Not many go the whole hog and become UKIPpers (tho a few do), quite a lot are turned into Conservatives
    I see a lot of graduates, albeit mostly in the job interview process. And I've done this for twenty odd years now.

    I have noticed certain changes. And I've asked people about some of the things in Universities.

    Now, maybe it's because I only see economics, finance, business, science, engineering, computing and philosophy students (and not sociology and critical race theory), but I've not actually noticed much (if anything) in the way of wokeness. Sure, people are broadly left of centre, and sure the Brits are mostly pro-EU, but most seem otherwise fairly normal.

    The only area where there seems to have been a massive change in attitudes in terms of gay rights. Everyone who's twenty years old has a dozen gay friends, while I probably knew just two or three openly gay people at University.

    Perhaps I'm being over optimistic. But when I was at University, by far the loudest most vocal group was Socialist Worker. I'd get a dozen leaflets to events, mostly anti-American and anti-Zionist and anti-Conservative (not a lot of positive thinking going on really...). Any wall of posters was dominated by Socialist Worker. But like Twitter is was representative of... well... only a very small minority of students.

    Now, I'm not actually at University. And I probably only see the 65% of students who want well paid jobs in finance, and not the 35% who'd rather not bathe and would instead rail against injustice they don't understand. But I'm struggling to see the world as having changed as much as you think.
    The wokeiest recent graduates I've encountered was in 1994.
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 24,968

    On COVID case data. To inform the debate.... I went to https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ and got this -

    This is for confirmed cases in England, just selecting the data for today

    image

    That's a long tail of cases.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    Worrying increase in the number of Sunday declared Covid-19 deaths in the UK, but hardly surprising in view of all the gallivanting around in evidence over the past couple of weeks. Indeed it would be very surprising if we don't see further increases over the near term.

    It's Saturday today!
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,286
    "US animated comedy series The Simpsons will no longer use white actors for the voices of characters from other ethnic backgrounds, the show's producers say."

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-53201667
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,855
    LadyG said:

    kinabalu said:

    LadyG said:

    kinabalu said:

    LadyG said:

    Actually, this whole passage from 1984 is superbly prescient.

    Orewell is describing Shouty Woman in the video below


    "He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word."

    "Just once Winston caught a phrase-’complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’- jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quackquack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front-it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure INGSOC"

    http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/NineteenEightyFour/part1sec5.html

    Oh that IS original and thought provoking - a bit of Orwell.
    You talk duckspeak. Though you do it with more flare than most
    Not to shun a compliment but I do feel this one is unmerited. I have never knowingly or unknowingly been in the same room - the same building even - as "critical race theory" or the like. If any of that stuff just happens to co-incide with my perceptions then good news (for it) because I have got there independently. Which I think lends weight and credence.
    Extremely unlikely.

    Because it is impossible to avoid Critical Theory these days. In Bradbury's time it was restricted to the Sociology Departments of new universities, now it is ubiquitous. So unless you have lived your life without ever reading leftish newspapers, watching TV current affairs, going to anywhere in London with nice houses, entering Waitrose or WholeFoods, eating an ethnically sourced custard apple, you will have encountered it in some form and it will have entered your brain by osmosis.
    I wonder how far Critical Race Theory has yet to spread in everyday life to become as endemic as Racism?

    A long way? Or a VERY long way?
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,408

    rcs1000 said:

    LadyG said:

    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education systen crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    Rather embarrassingly, I studied Humanities at Brighton University as a 35 year old. In retrospect it was like an undercover mission into the wokiest of wokesville, a glimpse into the future at what Corbynism/BLM would be like. Teachers boycotting Tescos because it was Israeli, legitimising anti Israel sentiment at every opportunity, teaching Marxism as the truth, telling stories of evil Tories, quoting The Guardian as Gospel, refusing to believe a word that had been written in a right of centre paper...

    Not a million miles from 2015 Tory posters views on here in 2020!
    This implies you stuck out like a sore thumb. And yet I bet you didn't. So how can you explain that contradiction?
    I did stick out like a sore thumb, so there's no contradiction to explain
    Ah OK, fair enough. No, there isn't a contradiction there then.

    But there's another oddity. On this account you would be (quite literally) the only person in history to have been turned into a UKIP voter by a surfeit of education.
    Not true. I know several.

    Extreme Woke education DOES have this effect on some people. It makes them very anti-Woke. I've seen it with my own eyes.

    Not many go the whole hog and become UKIPpers (tho a few do), quite a lot are turned into Conservatives
    I see a lot of graduates, albeit mostly in the job interview process. And I've done this for twenty odd years now.

    I have noticed certain changes. And I've asked people about some of the things in Universities.

    Now, maybe it's because I only see economics, finance, business, science, engineering, computing and philosophy students (and not sociology and critical race theory), but I've not actually noticed much (if anything) in the way of wokeness. Sure, people are broadly left of centre, and sure the Brits are mostly pro-EU, but most seem otherwise fairly normal.

    The only area where there seems to have been a massive change in attitudes in terms of gay rights. Everyone who's twenty years old has a dozen gay friends, while I probably knew just two or three openly gay people at University.

    Perhaps I'm being over optimistic. But when I was at University, by far the loudest most vocal group was Socialist Worker. I'd get a dozen leaflets to events, mostly anti-American and anti-Zionist and anti-Conservative (not a lot of positive thinking going on really...). Any wall of posters was dominated by Socialist Worker. But like Twitter is was representative of... well... only a very small minority of students.

    Now, I'm not actually at University. And I probably only see the 65% of students who want well paid jobs in finance, and not the 35% who'd rather not bathe and would instead rail against injustice they don't understand. But I'm struggling to see the world as having changed as much as you think.
    The wokeiest recent graduates I've encountered was in 1994.
    Some are ahead of their times.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,594

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    Only Jonny Foreigner is a nasty immigrant. Plucky Brits are always noble Expats.
    Immigrants and expats are different words with different meanings.
    Bad and good? In that order.
    No.

    It's like the difference between borrow and lend, give or take, north or south. They are opposites.
    Isn't good and bad an opposite?

    Not that I can see immigrants and expats as diametrically opposed notions anyway.
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 14,093
    rcs1000 said:


    Now, maybe it's because I only see economics, finance, business, science, engineering, computing and philosophy students (and not sociology and critical race theory), but I've not actually noticed much (if anything) in the way of wokeness. Sure, people are broadly left of centre, and sure the Brits are mostly pro-EU, but most seem otherwise fairly normal.

    The only area where there seems to have been a massive change in attitudes in terms of gay rights. Everyone who's twenty years old has a dozen gay friends, while I probably knew just two or three openly gay people at University.

    And that difference- knowing people who are X at a personal level- explains a lot. It's much harder to be thoughtlessly disparaging about a group of people when some of them are in your circle of acquaintance.

    So in the monochrome Oxford of the 1960s, something like the Rhodes statue was much less of an issue than it is now. The abstract principle was there, but there was only a handful of people who had personal reason to be made uncomfortable by the statue. That isn't the case now.

    Some political correctness / woke is cultural theory taken to an absurd degree. But quite a lot of it is good manners.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    Barnesian said:

    Barnesian said:

    Latest data
    Not good for London. What happened about 12 days ago that triggered this?


    The number of cases in London in very low, though bouncing around

    Recent data -

    image

    Full series -

    image
    And when the total number of cases is low, R will tend to average around 1.0 but can pitch and roll around like a ship on a storm-tossed sea, and the fluctuations become more violent as the number continues to decrease. As per the recent outbreak in Germany, where R went up to somewhere near 3 and then crashed back down to below 1 again in a day. QED.
    In London total number of cases is not that low yet. In time it will be hopefully.
    Those pillar 1 stats posted by @Malmesbury appear to show a recent mean of around 15-20 cases a day for a city of close-on nine million people. That seems pretty low to me. And in any event that R number's only one opinion. If I'm remembering correctly from the most recent release of data on the subject, SAGE has stated the estimated R values for all regions of the UK to be in ranges with upper limits equal to or, in most cases, below 1.0
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,677

    rcs1000 said:

    LadyG said:

    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    kinabalu said:

    isam said:

    LadyG said:

    Looking again at Shouty Woman berating Dignified Man by the Emancipation Statue, I wonder if one of the side-effects of the Frenzy will be a reordering of the US education systen crisis and the government is defunding Humanities in favour of STEM

    Rather embarrassingly, I studied Humanities at Brighton University as a 35 year old. In retrospect it was like an undercover mission into the wokiest of wokesville, a glimpse into the future at what Corbynism/BLM would be like. Teachers boycotting Tescos because it was Israeli, legitimising anti Israel sentiment at every opportunity, teaching Marxism as the truth, telling stories of evil Tories, quoting The Guardian as Gospel, refusing to believe a word that had been written in a right of centre paper...

    Not a million miles from 2015 Tory posters views on here in 2020!
    This implies you stuck out like a sore thumb. And yet I bet you didn't. So how can you explain that contradiction?
    I did stick out like a sore thumb, so there's no contradiction to explain
    Ah OK, fair enough. No, there isn't a contradiction there then.

    But there's another oddity. On this account you would be (quite literally) the only person in history to have been turned into a UKIP voter by a surfeit of education.
    Not true. I know several.

    Extreme Woke education DOES have this effect on some people. It makes them very anti-Woke. I've seen it with my own eyes.

    Not many go the whole hog and become UKIPpers (tho a few do), quite a lot are turned into Conservatives
    I see a lot of graduates, albeit mostly in the job interview process. And I've done this for twenty odd years now.

    I have noticed certain changes. And I've asked people about some of the things in Universities.

    Now, maybe it's because I only see economics, finance, business, science, engineering, computing and philosophy students (and not sociology and critical race theory), but I've not actually noticed much (if anything) in the way of wokeness. Sure, people are broadly left of centre, and sure the Brits are mostly pro-EU, but most seem otherwise fairly normal.

    The only area where there seems to have been a massive change in attitudes in terms of gay rights. Everyone who's twenty years old has a dozen gay friends, while I probably knew just two or three openly gay people at University.

    Perhaps I'm being over optimistic. But when I was at University, by far the loudest most vocal group was Socialist Worker. I'd get a dozen leaflets to events, mostly anti-American and anti-Zionist and anti-Conservative (not a lot of positive thinking going on really...). Any wall of posters was dominated by Socialist Worker. But like Twitter is was representative of... well... only a very small minority of students.

    Now, I'm not actually at University. And I probably only see the 65% of students who want well paid jobs in finance, and not the 35% who'd rather not bathe and would instead rail against injustice they don't understand. But I'm struggling to see the world as having changed as much as you think.
    The wokeiest recent graduates I've encountered was in 1994.
    It is getting very woke on here, we have the thought police already looking to ban people and trying to censor their posting. Any moderating is for the owner , everyone else should get on with their own business and promote their own opinions by not trying to ram them down others throats.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited June 2020

    TimT said:

    "Given Trump’s championing of early re-opening, it should not be a hard task for the Democrats to pin blame on him for both the additional deaths and the job losses and bankruptcies that will follow a new round of restrictions"

    Great header David. One thing I'd add to the quote above is that the cities in those swing states experiencing bad COVID figures right now are frustrated by GOP governors who are preventing them - at Trump's behest - from re-imposing lockdowns that meet local conditions. This, I think, not only reinforces the anti-Trump sentiment in cities and, importantly, their suburbs, but also will encourage across the slate anti-GOP voting. Expect this to seriously impact not just the presidential vote, but also the Senate and House votes in those states. And this sentiment of 'vote the bums out' across the slate will, I think, lead to a higher differential turnout against the GOP.

    Maybe that is just my wishful thinking, but what I am picking up is a seething anger everywhere except the Trump base, and even there people are finding it ever harder to justify Trump. At some point, I think that dam will burst too.

    My favorite and most useful Trump-supporting friend is an English Expat who will vote for the man come what may. It's very revealing however how he justifies this. His main themes currently are statues and the Seattle communists. Never mentions the virus, the economy, or international affairs of any kind.

    You can tell the pickings are thin.
    Surely if he can vote he is an immigrant not an expat.
    Only Jonny Foreigner is a nasty immigrant. Plucky Brits are always noble Expats.
    Immigrants and expats are different words with different meanings.
    Bad and good? In that order.
    No.

    It's like the difference between borrow and lend, give or take, north or south. They are opposites.
    Isn't good and bad an opposite?

    Not that I can see immigrants and expats as diametrically opposed notions anyway.
    Good and bad are opposites but I didn't like your connotation that I was implying such judgements for either.

    They are diametrically opposed though. What is an expat? What is an immigrant? Do you know the difference?
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,777

    On COVID case data. To inform the debate.... I went to https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ and got this -

    This is for confirmed cases in England, just selecting the data for today

    image

    Which just goes to sho
    w how remarkably inefficient the data gathering apparatus of the health service actually is. That chart would appear to suggest that it's not just deaths that happened months ago that they're only just getting round to adding to the statistics (today's NHS England death count includes a fatality from April 21st.) Some of those positive tests date all the way back to March.

    And this is why the decline in infection and deaths looks so slow compared to other countries. We seem to find new backlog every day padding out the relatively low current figures. What is clear is that our peaks were even higher than we thought. What is not clear is whether the tail of the disease is really as protracted as it appears. The story in the Dundee Courier today is of the last Covid ICU patient in our major hospital being discharged. It appears that Covid has pretty much been eradicated in Tayside.

  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    edited June 2020

    Barnesian said:

    Barnesian said:

    Latest data
    Not good for London. What happened about 12 days ago that triggered this?


    The number of cases in London in very low, though bouncing around

    Recent data -

    image

    Full series -

    image
    And when the total number of cases is low, R will tend to average around 1.0 but can pitch and roll around like a ship on a storm-tossed sea, and the fluctuations become more violent as the number continues to decrease. As per the recent outbreak in Germany, where R went up to somewhere near 3 and then crashed back down to below 1 again in a day. QED.
    In London total number of cases is not that low yet. In time it will be hopefully.
    Those pillar 1 stats posted by @Malmesbury appear to show a recent mean of around 15-20 cases a day for a city of close-on nine million people. That seems pretty low to me. And in any event that R number's only one opinion. If I'm remembering correctly from the most recent release of data on the subject, SAGE has stated the estimated R values for all regions of the UK to be in ranges with upper limits equal to or, in most cases, below 1.0
    Because of reporting issue, using the reported daily numbers is all over the place. Even when you use Pillar 1 and resolve to specimen date, the noise at these levels dominates. The trend is your friend etc.

    Data from: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/downloads/csv/coronavirus-cases_latest.csv
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,677
    Andy_JS said:

    "US animated comedy series The Simpsons will no longer use white actors for the voices of characters from other ethnic backgrounds, the show's producers say."

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-53201667

    That will change the world for sure.
  • brokenwheelbrokenwheel Posts: 3,352
    Andy_JS said:

    "US animated comedy series The Simpsons will no longer use white actors for the voices of characters from other ethnic backgrounds, the show's producers say."

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-53201667

    Star Trek is ******. Good luck finding any Klingon actors.
  • FloaterFloater Posts: 14,195
    ;This guy can be quite interesting on COVID

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8-6ql1iTsY

    In this episode uploaded earlier today he talks about:

    Canadian care home mistakes (they have had to call the military in).

    The mess that is the USA

    And his rage at Liverpool fans "some sporting event" :-)

  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    edited June 2020

    Mr. Malmesbury, if accurate, then either regional or full lockdowns may very well be necessary to prevent this snowballing.

    Any idea on the geographical spread?

    I don't think it shows a spike, rather it is the date that the specimen was taken for positives reported today,
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,855

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    LadyG said:

    Actually, this whole passage from 1984 is superbly prescient.

    Orewell is describing Shouty Woman in the video below


    "He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word."

    "Just once Winston caught a phrase-’complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’- jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quackquack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought- criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front-it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure INGSOC"

    http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/NineteenEightyFour/part1sec5.html

    Oh that IS original and thought provoking - a bit of Orwell.
    How about a bit of Turgenev:

    "So ... you were convinced of all this and decided not to do anything serious yourselves."
    "And decided not to do anything serious," Bazarov repeated grimly. ...
    "But to confine yourselves to abuse?"
    "To confine ourselves to abuse."
    "And that is called nihilism?"
    "And that is called nihilism," Bazarov repeated again, this time with marked insolence.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers_and_Sons_(novel)

    Rather captures the SJW mentality.
    Except it doesn't. What it captures is keyboard warriordom. Of which there is loads on the "anti-woke" right.

    See here - depending on who's around and what time of day it is.
    It captures very well those who posture about slavery in central London but wont go and protest at the Mauretanian embassy.
    No it doesn't. Not especially. You're projecting.
This discussion has been closed.