Brendan Rodgers posted:

There's a lot of these people, more than we think. It's why they project "virtue signalling" onto other people.

Barry Foster posted:

if it was a case of just pressing a button or giving the nod or something then yeah, probably


That's entirely correct, yeah. Using that particular phrase is one of the ultimate ways people can tell on themselves

EDIT


Nah, I definitely do think that it's a much smaller hardcore of people who would personally hurt or kill another person, if only because a lot of people might want to do it but be too cowardly to do it themselves

Guavanaut posted:

Hang the potholes

National service (which I definitely did) to make the youth fill in potholes!

goddamnedtwisto posted:

It is a bit strange that people are pulling out the demographics are destiny argument in reaction to the Tories making moves that skew the (voting) demographic even more acutely in their favour.

big scary monsters posted:

It's a shame that those people don't see that even from a purely selfish point of view things that are good for society are broadly good for them too. Even (or especially) the most Jeremy Clarkson type character has some pet peeves about society, whether that's potholes in the road, an out of proportion fear of burglary or mugging, or they just think that homeless people in the street make the place look untidy. Those are all things that are easily within our capability to reduce or entirely solve but for some reason nobody wants to support the policies that would actually do so (with the exceptions of more cops and bring back hanging, which don't work very well on the latter two issues and don't work at all on potholes).

Guavanaut posted:

Hang the potholes

National service (which I definitely did) to make the youth fill in potholes!

big scary monsters posted:

It's a shame that those people don't see that even from a purely selfish point of view things that are good for society are broadly good for them too. Even (or especially) the most Jeremy Clarkson type character has some pet peeves about society, whether that's potholes in the road, an out of proportion fear of burglary or mugging, or they just think that homeless people in the street make the place look untidy. Those are all things that are easily within our capability to reduce or entirely solve but for some reason nobody wants to support the policies that would actually do so (with the exceptions of more cops and bring back hanging, which don't work very well on the latter two issues and don't work at all on potholes).

feedmegin posted:

The literal Nazis are counterevidence, here. Check out the book Ordinary Men

Barry Foster posted:

My partner's dad is literally the '? ??' guy whenever she talks about poverty or racism or homeless people or whatever. It's like he short circuits. As far as he's concerned there's him, my partner and her sister, and my partner's mum, and if everyone else died tomorrow it'd be inconvenient but not sad.

Me included, I might add.

feedmegin posted:

The literal Nazis are counterevidence, here. Check out the book Ordinary Men

Barry Foster posted:

Think of the veterans of the Statues Offensive

Paul.Power posted:

Geez, even Mr. Birling got on well with Gerald (probably mostly because Gerald was richer than him though).

goddamnedtwisto posted:

This is one of those takes that's so wrong it's almost impossible to know where to begin. I mean we'll start just with a [citation needed] the size of the Sun because I can't see any way at all that this will make it *easier* for the precariat, or even just the nomadic graduate class, to vote.

The vast, vast majority of those without ID (and unable to obtain it without serious financial pain) are Labour voters and while a naive glance at the numbers would suggest that it wouldn't have a huge effect on seats at an election (because the majority of those Labour voters are in extremely safe Labour inner-city seats) it will have multidimensional effects down the line, none of which are good.

Barry Foster posted:

I remember reading somewhere that the majority of people are extraordinarily reluctant to kill, and that stuff like military training is designed to breakdown this basic reluctance.

I'm having trouble finding the study now though, and concede that I am probably wrong

Guavanaut posted:

Sounds like the beliefs popularized by 'On Killing' and 'Killology'.
http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo9/no2/16-engen-eng.asp

It's an optimistic view in a way, but almost certainly overhyped.

Where it becomes dangerous is when you assume that humans never ever want to kill and so you have to aggressively train that into soldiers or police officers just in case they need to. Then you end up with American cops being full of 'warrior cop' horseshit and not conflict deescalation skills.

radmonger posted:

That better describes the people who are currently unable to vote. There was a big statistical discussion on that a few monthly threads back,, and the take away message was that that number dwarfs the vote difference between the parties. it was partly activated in 2017, which is why Corbyn did unexpectedly well.

Providing those invisible people with IDs would enable them to vote, not as a one-off thing, but as a permanent enfranchisement. Which would radically change the scope of the possible. Perhaps for the worse, yes. But some chance is better than no chance.

The obvious analogy here is with the change in Labour leadership rules that led t o Corbyn getting the chance at 2017 in the first place.

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

"thought silos". (Did I just make up some management speak? Quick, I'll write a popular management book and create some courses and get rich.)

Guavanaut posted:

Sounds like the beliefs popularized by 'On Killing' and 'Killology'.
http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo9/no2/16-engen-eng.asp

It's an optimistic view in a way, but almost certainly overhyped.

Where it becomes dangerous is when you assume that humans never ever want to kill and so you have to aggressively train that into soldiers or police officers just in case they need to. Then you end up with American cops being full of 'warrior cop' horseshit and not conflict deescalation skills.

Wikipedia posted:

Some veterans and historians have cast doubt on Marshall's research methodology.[9] Professor Roger J. Spiller (Deputy Director of the Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College) argues in his 1988 article, "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire" (RUSI Journal, Winter 1988, pages 63–71), that Marshall had not actually conducted the research upon which he based his ratio-of-fire theory. "The 'systematic collection of data' appears to have been an invention."[10] This revelation has called into question the authenticity of some of Marshall's other books and has lent academic weight to doubts about his integrity that had been raised in military circles even decades earlier.[11]

Wikipedia posted:

As a result of Marshall's work, modern military training was modified to attempt to override this instinct, by:

using man-shaped targets instead of bullseye targets in marksmanship practice
practicing and drilling how soldiers would actually fight
dispersing responsibility for the killing throughout the group
displacing responsibility for the killing onto an authority figure, i.e., the commanding officer and the military hierarchy (see the Milgram experiment)

Comrade Fakename posted:

The Republican party is now an undeniably fascist organisation that is currently rallying around retroactive support for installing Trump as a dictator.

big scary monsters posted:

Thought silos are where I keep my nuclear hot takes ready for deployment.

On the rest of your post, pretty much. That's meant to be part of the deal of living in a functional society. For people who want to be some kind of self-sufficient libertarian übermensch beholden to no man then I guess there's nothing stopping them buying a dinghy and going seasteading.

big scary monsters posted:

A starting salary of £82k would put those senior doctors in the top 5% in the UK by income¹, so I can see why people might feel unsympathetic. But the income curve is so skewed at the top, so asymptotic, that I thought it might be illustrative to remind ourselves of how income is distributed in the UK and put doctors into perspective.

The top 10% of earners (income over ~£43k in 2015)² feel basically like normal folk and I imagine there are quite a few posting ITT. The top 1% (over ~£130k) are obviously raking it from the perspective of most of us, but the majority are also still workers in the sense that their money comes mainly from their employers. The fine folk of the top 1% pay about 30% of HMRC's income tax revenues, around the same portion as the 90-99% bracket . Even then you're "only" making a quarter of the top 0.1% (~£520k): the relative difference between someone on minimum wage and a senior doc. The richest 0.1% also control 10% of the country's wealth, so you know we're getting into serious capitalist territory here, basically nobody is getting this just as a pay cheque. Once you get onto the lofty heights of the top 0.01% (who are ~5500 people getting over £2.2m) income quadruples again and from their perspective the difference between £12k and £100k is basically nothing. It's hard to go up another order of magnitude to the richest 0.001%, because you're looking at individual people rather than statistics and they really don't like their finances being inspected. In any case it doesn't make much sense to talk about their income in the usual way because whether they gain £10m or lose £50m is basically reliant on random fluctuations of the market and in any case it doesn't much matter to them - to break the top 500 wealthiest (not the same as highest income but I can't find those numbers) UK people you have to have over £250m stashed away³.

All that is to say that sure, earning gently caress all and choosing between dinner and heat obviously feels very, very different to being a doc with a nice house in Zone 2 and a cottage in the Lakes. But the very top control so much wealth and take so much of the nation's productivity for themselves just for owning stuff that having a go at some guy who actually works for a living is pointless - to those on the top plane of income we all look like loving ants and they lend us about as much consideration. If some awful, awful catastrophe were to befall the top 0.1% basically no actual useful work would stop getting done - they'd all fit into the stands of a good sized football stadium like Anfield, remember, or onto the pitch in any standard sized grounds in the country. But we could all take a nice pay rise to console ourselves during the period of national mourning. I can't figure out exactly how much, but it seems like something on the order of another 25% of the total national salaries to divvy up as we choose. And since all that poo poo they own would still be around, like houses and factories and whatnot, I reckon we could find good use to put that stuff to as well. Much as it's frustrating reading about the out-of-touch opinions of the moderately well off in the lifestyle pages of the Guardian or among the Twitterati, it should be clear who the folk are to really have a go at.

_{1 Office of National Statistics: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax
2 All these numbers are from a 2019 Essex Uni Institute for Economic and Social Research study: https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/research/publications/working-papers/iser/2019-06.pdf, their numbers are derived from HMRC and ONS. Obviously it's a few years old, but then income inequailty has only increased since.
3 Times rich list, you can look it up yourself.}

Brendan Rodgers posted:

quote:

Marshall was employed by the US Army’s Historical Section, and his job as an army historian was the compilation of battlefield narratives. Systematically compiling and analyzing statistical data was not what the Historical Section was about, nor was it something for which Marshall had any interest or training. This makes Marshall’s statistics, at best, an estimation based upon personal observations. And with no surviving notes or documentation that would substantiate his claims, and no corroborating evidence from Marshall’s companions, there is only Marshall’s word that his claims regarding the ratio of fire were supported by the empirical evidence of his interviews.

Lord of the Llamas posted:

Never forget that some moron Randian businessman in the USA funded a trilogy of film adaptations of Atlas Shrugged each film with a successively smaller budget and worst critical reception.

e: a quick check on wikipedia reveals $35m went in to the budgets and $9m was made at the box office. Womp womp.

Lord of the Llamas posted:

Never forget that some moron Randian businessman in the USA funded a trilogy of film adaptations of Atlas Shrugged each film with a successively smaller budget and worst critical reception.

e: a quick check on wikipedia reveals $35m went in to the budgets and $9m was made at the box office. Womp womp.

jaete posted:

Sorry wait, what?

Algol Star posted:

I find it hilarious how now that younger generations are fully dependant on inheritance to maybe ever own a house there's been a noticeable uptick among people I know's elderly relatives suddenly deciding 'i can't take it with me' and that the only sensible thing to do is to spend all their money and enjoy their last years. Literally a generation that hoarded wealth to the point it broke the economy and then said gently caress it and spaffed it all away on leisure once their descendants were fully dependant.

jaete posted:

Sorry wait, what?

Brendan Rodgers posted:

Could be money laundering too.

radmonger posted:

That better describes the people who are currently unable to vote. There was a big statistical discussion on that a few monthly threads back,, and the take away message was that that number dwarfs the vote difference between the parties. it was partly activated in 2017, which is why Corbyn did unexpectedly well.

Providing those invisible people with IDs would enable them to vote, not as a one-off thing, but as a permanent enfranchisement. Which would radically change the scope of the possible. Perhaps for the worse, yes. But some chance is better than no chance.

The obvious analogy here is with the change in Labour leadership rules that led t o Corbyn getting the chance at 2017 in the first place.

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

And when that doesn't work out as expected - some place people tried living in a Randian community and it all went wrong - can't remember where - you end up on Welfare as did Ayn Rand.

jabby posted:

This is a good post and I want to acknowledge it, but I would add that nobody was asking anyone to feel "sympathetic" towards senior consultants. That's a complete straw man argument that was directed at me. The whole argument started with peanut accusing doctors of hijacking discussions about NHS pay to the detriment of our colleagues, and of being "well connected" and frequently "bought off" by the government. Then when I tried to refute that it took a rapid turn into nonsense about 200k salaries and retiring at 60 followed swiftly by accusing me of wanting more money.

It's a particularly nasty line of argument because whether tube drivers or doctors, Worker A is not responsible for Worker B being underpaid purely because they are paid better. And Union A is not responsible for Worker B being underpaid because they drew too much attention to Worker A. Its the whole basis of solidarity among labour.

And for what it's worth, the fact that doctors negotiate their pay seperately means we won't be included in the post-pandemic pay deal they eventually thrash out with the rest of the NHS staff. Our pay rises for the next few years are fixed, so there's no reason at all to think we are distracting focus from other, lower paid staff. And every doctor I've met thinks the 1% currently being proposed for our colleagues is ludicrous and should be much higher.

Guavanaut posted:

Sounds like the beliefs popularized by 'On Killing' and 'Killology'.
http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo9/no2/16-engen-eng.asp

It's an optimistic view in a way, but almost certainly overhyped.

Where it becomes dangerous is when you assume that humans never ever want to kill and so you have to aggressively train that into soldiers or police officers just in case they need to. Then you end up with American cops being full of 'warrior cop' horseshit and not conflict deescalation skills.