|
Camrath posted:Accents are weird. I was born and raised in North London to wealthy professional parents, and ended up sounding as posh as bloody royalty despite neither of them talking like that. Hell, I used to get bullied at the public school I attended for being ‘too posh’ This is almost exactly me. I grew up in leafy rural Hampshire, but both my (wealthy professional) parents are from suburban London (Mum from Norf, Dad from southwest) and have entirely unremarkable modern BBC newsreader-type accents. Mum's parents were both relocated East Enders with accents to match, while Dad's family seems to have been upper middle class for all of recorded history - his Dad looked and talked like Willie Rushton and his mum had one of those preposterously clear-cut Victorian RP accents. So I've somehow ended up with an accent straight out of a Pathe newsreel. When I was single-digit aged I had a proper Wessex/Hampshire Hog ('ampshoyer 'awwg) accent (presumably from spending time at nursery and primary school with local kids) but then it disappeared to be replaced by one from 1955. My Wessex burr ("it's a foin noight...") comes back if I'm drunk and my partner has noticed that I pick up a slight hint of it if we spend a few weeks with the family down in Devon and Cornwall.
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2022 15:40
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 11:29 |
|
|
Lord Ludikrous posted:To use heating as an example, there’s plenty of boomers smugly telling younger generations they can’t have the heating on all day anymore. I don’t know of any millennials/gen Z who run the heating all day, but guess who always has the heating on when I visit? The boomers. In those very replies there are some old pricks doing the whole "in my day we woke up to frost on the inside of the windows and wore three jumpers indoors" routine. Point the first: So what? It's not the 1960s any more and the point, surely, is that things should be better than they were in the past? Point the second: Loads of people died of flu, TB, pneumonia etc. or lived permanently with impaired lungs and ridden with allergies because they lived in damp, cold houses heated with coal fired or paraffin heaters. You didn't, but others did. This sort of cult of suffering and a perverse desire to make things worse to teach the soft youth a lesson, and the fact that some people and politicians are comfortable enough to say it explicitly, is really weird and seems to be a fairly modern development. It seemed to start off with Brexit, and how it's a good thing that you won't be able to travel abroad, buy grapefruits or afford ['luxury' that's not actually a luxury any more] so you'll live like my idealised 1960s childhood and if you're not happy you'll at least be grateful. Is this a sort of ideological immune response to living standards flatlining post-2008 and then going into reverse? Things can't get better, but let me tell you how it's actually good that they're going to get worse? Or is it just collective rose-tinted spectacles by that perpetual 50+ part of the population that always polls against the rest and are materially secure and divorced from economic and political reality?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2022 18:56
|
|
|
Jippa posted:There was a time when the "man on the street" might have thought this though. I was trying to place it. People have complained that the BBC is left wing in the sense of "pushing vaguely progressive/modern social views and satirising/criticising the cultural and political establishment" pretty much forever. Crusty old colonels from Berkshire said that the BBC airing Beyond The Fringe was unpatriotic and signs of sinister bolshevism at White City. People claimed that stuff like TW3 and Monty Python was destroying society and undermining British values, and The Wednesday Play (Cathy Come Home etc.) was left wing propaganda. The wider notion amongst the Conservatives and their voter base that the BBC was a hostile force (the whole 'Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation' thing) seemed to really take off in the 1980s, especially after the Falklands War. Thatcher was outraged that the Beeb wasn't willing to be a one-sided mouthpiece of the British state and provided air time to people who didn't support the war or its conduct. Then the Corporation kept letting people critical of the government and pointing out the bad things resulting from its policies talk on the air or do comedy/satire about them. Edit: Cat 
BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Mar 18, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2022 13:17
|
|
|
Noxville posted:“The BBC is left-wing” translates to “There are black and/or gay people on my TV and I don’t like it” "I'm not a racist, I just spend my evenings filling in a spreadsheet of the ethnicity and skin colour of everyone I see on TV and comparing it to ONS data. Did you know there are seven times more brown people on the BBC than there should be? It's Cultural Marxism gone mad, I tell you!"
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2022 13:55
|
|
|
OrthoTrot posted:Like, a lot of lines will have level crossings on, which you wouldn't build now because they just aren't as safe as bridges or tunnels. But let's say you want to reopen a station with a level crossing on it - the various regulations would now require the construction project to probably either drastically upgrade the crossing or close it entirely. Then there's the fact that antiquated signalling doesn't pass modern muster for all sorts of reasons. You mess with it and you're, rightly, required to bring it up to code. e.g, near me in Peterborough they've just spent four years and £200 million building a brand new 'dive under' junction to separate freight and passenger traffic, because the main freight path required the trains to cross all the tracks, up and down, on the ECML and thus caused nightmare capacity and pathing issues. The alternative was to reopen the March-Spalding section of the old GE&GN Joint Railway (originally built to bypass Peterborough to avoid causing congestion on the ECML...) to provide entirely different routes for passenger and freight traffic. As re-openings go it should be pretty simple: it only closed in the early 1980s, the formation is virtually intact throughout and the terrain is billiard-table flat. BUT because the terrain is so flat the original line had loads and loads of level crossings, which could not be reinstated. So instead of 'just' relaying the tracks, you'd have to put under- or overbridges in. Putting in overbridges in such flat countryside would require approach berms that would stand out for miles and cost a fortune, while the water table is so high (more accurately, the ground is so low...) that making underbridges would also be hugely costly. In the end the brand new junction with two miles of new line, the UK's first first curved box tunnel (500 feet long) and physically re-siting several miles of existing track was more cost-effective than reopening one that had already existed for 125 years.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2022 17:52
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Level crossings are a loving pain in the arse though. One of the worst things about redcar is that the rail line runs at grade through half the town, and even with its relatively light use it backs the traffic up a lot. I absolutely agree. There are some around here which can cause gridlock, or at least very long queues if you get seven or eight trains passing in quick succession. Including one still operated by a guy who has to walk across all five lines of the ECML to open and close the gates. Although I've often thought that could be quite a nice job when I've driven past - the crossing keeper has a cabin on one side and they've got a little garden with sunflowers, tomato plants and hanging baskets that they tend to between trains. Although, nice as it could be in this weather, it would be different setting out across the tracks on a desk winter night with the rain blowing horizontally into your face...
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2022 18:06
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:I want to visit Telford Town Park at some point (like probably during summer). The entire premise is that it was created as a space for the working class of the new towns in the West Midlands to just enjoy without being expected to be doing anything in particular, which is completely at odds with the attitudes before (but they should be working) and after (but how does it make money) and it keeps coming up at the top of the list of parks that were created with that mindset during the postwar social contract, so obviously a decent amount of thought went into it. We have Nene Park here in Peterborough which is like that. Designed as part of the grand development plan for the New Town as an all-purpose space - nature reserve, managed farm, public garden/plant nursery, fishing lake, woodlands, art trails, playing fields, boating lake, watersports, two steam railways, camping/glamping, performance spaces and loads of big open green space for informal/impromptu recreation. With the possible exception of the cathedral + close it's by far the best thing in the city and is one of the few aspects of the original New Town plan that hasn't been trampled on in the past 25 years.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2022 20:34
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Stirling is nicer, I quite liked stirling, as is pitlochry. It has a very nice dam and fish ladder. Oh and fort william seemed nice when I saw it very briefly. I haven't found Edinburgh to have that hostile feel to its architecture when I've been (although, thinking about it, a lot of the buildings are defensive in some way - they're either fortifications, warehouses to keep valuable stuff in or originally office/housing space built around courts in the middle of the block rather than outward to the street). It definitely has an MC Escher vibe, with the very vertical architecture, interlocking levels, bridges, stairs and the gridiron pattern in the New Town. I lived in Bristol for a few years so was used to cities where the 'ground' can suddenly vanish and you're now looking out over someone's rooftop. Other Scottish City opinions: I was very charmed by Dundee. Some nice Victorian buildings, a very pleasant botanical gardens and the Discovery museum, but by far and away one of the most spectacularly beautiful geographic settings for any city in the UK. The views over/up the Tay and the 270 degree backdrop of green mountains were amazing. Seems like there's loads of outdoorsy stuff to do nearby if you live there, too. I've been to Aberdeen twice. First time it was dark, grey and miserable weather. So was my mood and so was the city. The second time it was clear spring sunshine and the architecture was strikingly pretty. As well as the grey/silver sparkliness of the granite, it doesn't weather so even the Victorian buildings look pin sharp like they were built yesterday. It gives the place a weird uniformity of both appearance and age, like it's a movie set. That impression was heightened by it having a hugely impressive range of shops and services for such a small city - presumably all that oil money and large numbers of overseas visitors/workers (?) But coupled to the fact that all the buildings, be it an 1870s office or a 1990s bus station, seemed to be brand new it did make its character seem oddly inauthentic, like one of those fake cities they built for World's Fairs in the 1890s.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2022 00:02
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:I recall ronya writing a bit about how (white english) women of a certain age were often tories by default because theenglish.txt and the Conservatives weaponizing a kind of nice-and-proper village social affair infrastructure in a way that was more comparable to religion than mass movement politics. "My local council is strictly non-political - they're all Conservative." Michael Flanders, 1957 The same thing applied to young people, and why the Young Conservatives was the largest political youth organisation in the Western world in the 1960s. Most of the YCs activities were not expressly political, but it provided a 'respectable' way for the kids of suburban and rural middle class parents to socialise, travel and do community work. Of course it also subtly enforced Conservative norms and ideas as it did so, and primed many (but not all) of its members to be, if not Conservatives then conservatives, as adults. The YCs were always significantly more moderate/progressive than the party at large, but a load of neoliberal 'dry' arseholes came into the organisation in the early 80s, mostly to try and overtturn the YCs' anti-apartheid and full-employment stances. This caused factional disputes to break out which, combined with the divisive Thatcher-era policies, drove most of the normal people who just wanted the occasional dinner dance and coach trip away and the membership plummeted, so by the 1990s the YCs had become one of the most swivel-eyed bits of the Tory structure and began birthing all those weirdo 15-year olds with Lego minifig hairstyles who wear pinstripe suits to school.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2022 19:02
|
|
|
Comrade Fakename posted:A while ago there was someone in this thread who got upset because we called him a Tory just for frequenting his local Conservative Club. He said it was the only place to socialise in his area, but still, you're literally funding the Tory Party. My partner and her mum are both members of the local Con Club - my partner having good lefty opinions and her mum being of the "Always Labour, Never Tory Because I'm From Tyneside And Look What They Did To The Place...But I Made An Exception In 2019 To Get Brexit Done And To Stop Jerumbly Crowbin Nationalising The Genders" sort. It is literally one of the best casual social venues in this blighted, austerity-ruined city and the food is really good at low prices (probably heavily subsidised due to collective funding and choices made through a democratically elected committee...). I've been in there a few times but found it too weird trying to have a Sunday lunch in The Margaret Thatcher Suite with blue wallpaper and framed newspaper covers of Tory election victories. Since then they've actually been on a 'modernisation' drive, because they realised that the average age of the membership was something like 67 and there was a permanent In Memoriam notice in the foyer listing the members who'd shuffled off to the great free market in the sky that week. So they've taken down the blue wallpaper and the photos of Churchill and Reagan and renamed the main dining room 'The Grantham Suite' (nudge, nudge) and now the website 'About Us' section has a big paragraph explaining that it's not officially or financially connected to the Conservative Party in any way. And their facebook page occasionally does really awkward 'How Do You Do Fellow Kids?' posts trying to tempt the youth into the place with promises of cheap drink, pool tables, free parking and a Tuesday night disco. It's a rather interesting microcosm of how modern British conservatism has poisoned itself by making life so poo poo for anyone under the age of 45 that they don't have any time, money or inclination to have a pie and a pint in a small garden in a city centre, and certainly not in the company of a load of small business owners and parish councillors who have Views About Wokery.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2022 20:18
|
|
|
This is turning into a fun new game: Which Word In Jeremy Corbyn's Tweet Has Made People Unreasonably Angry Today? I clicked that all expecting it to be his call for a ceasefire, and loads of sensible centrist grownups insisting we give Ukraine all our Challenger 2s so they can drive to Moscow instead. But no.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2022 08:46
|
|
|
I'm going to combine a lot of the points raised on the last page into one big mopey whinge...so skip past if you don't want to read that. I've been feeling particularly morose and hopeless about the state of politics, the country, society and the world for the past week or so (above the usual post-2019 GE/Brexit background levels that I'm sure most in this thread will recognise), because a series of things, both in my own life and the wider world, have just emphasised what a needlessly lovely sort of place we're increasingly becoming. Last week my partner and I were all set to spend three days in Italy - our first trip abroad in 4 years (due to a combination of 'not having any money' and 'pandemic'). My partner got turned away at the gate because RyanAir interpreted the new post-Brexit passport validity requirements differently to our own takes off the .gov website (a dispute that is still rumbling on). So goodbye Venice, hello Lyme Regis - a place that cost four times as much to get to and to stay in for one night because of course it makes sense for it to be cheaper to fly halfway across Europe than travel 150 miles in your own country. And thank you Brexit for making little occasional delights like foreign travel that little bit more difficult and bureaucratic. Then, for some reason, the plans to privatise Channel 4 really upset me. Which is ridiculous - it's a tv channel that I have no association with. I think it's because it's so nakedly ideological. C4 doesn't cost the state anything - it is, by all accounts, a net contributor. It is a far better ratings and financial performer than the streaming services it supposedly has to be 'set free' to compete against and, in amongst all the harmless Naked Attraction fluff, still invests in some good investigative reporting, documentaries and some more risky film and comedy. This isn't some hangover from the 1940s ("why should the state own a removals company?") or some loss-making nationalised industrial relic for which you could at least make a consistent right-wing case for privatising. It's just a mix of "the state can't and shouldn't do anything, even if it's good", "let's flog the last of the British state's family silver to our mates" and "They were mean to us so they must be punished." Destructive, petty vandalism of the nation's cultural space. See also the whole P&O thing - the glorious free-enterprise Global Britain we all knew was coming. Summed up by a ferry called 'Spirit of Britain', wearing the house flag of one of the great names in maritime history...registered in Cyprus and owned by the government of a repressive oil emirate and crewed by a load of exploited global southerners on pathetic wages and with minimal training. You couldn't ask for a better encapsulation. Under a Conservative government that so readily bangs the patriotism drum and apparently so ardently values Britain's national heritage, we don't have a single ferry taking people to or from our shores with a Red Ensign. What a magnificent advert/warning to the rest of the world. Coming down to a more local level, this evening I went out to my car and found that instead of a third of a tank of diesel I had a fuel gauge hard against the bottom stop and a bright low-fuel warning light. So either my car has developed a fuel leak which leaves no visible trace on the car or the ground or someone's drained/siphoned my tank. My leafy Victorian suburban street in an East Midlands cathedral city is turning into Mad Max. And when I gingerly drove to the petrol station up the road to re-fill there was no diesel available, because of our robust and efficient supply chains. Not a failing (failed?) socio-economic system at all, no sir... I know this is all petty stuff. I'm not struggling to put food on the table or keep the lights on. I'm not having my identity or my medical rights threatened. I'm not being targeted by the hostile environment or the voter registration stuff. All my gripes come from relatively high up the Maslow hierarchy. But it loving sucks, so I can only have huge sympathy for anyone who's really being pummelled by the current situation. And the worst thing is I see no practical way of even beginning to make meaningful change. Sure, I could keep doing voluntary work to alleviate the effects but I've done that on-and-off for the decade I've lived here now and even then it felt like trying to patch up a leaky dam with wet sand. And I bet if I went back to the soup kitchen or the food bank now it would feel like that dam was about to over-top. But I see no organisations I could join or activities I could do that would make any actual difference. And it's very depressing.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2022 21:45
|
|
|
goddamnedtwisto posted:But that's ultimately what breaks you, and you definitely shouldn't deny yourself the recognition that it's doing so because other people have it worse, because that's *how* it breaks you. It's that drip drip drip of bad stuff, even minor inconveniences, and if you don't let yourself think "gently caress this poo poo, it pisses me off" it wears you down all the faster. Thanks for this twisto - same goes for everyone else who chimed in. It was a good cleanser to at least get it down and send it out onto the internet. The Perfect Element posted:Yeah the channel 4 thing upset me too, for the same reasons. Like, there's literally no reason to privatise it at all. We're just ruled over by spiteful cunts who hate the idea of people having nice things. And it's good to know it's not just me  It felt a bit weird to say to my partner "I'm feeling a bit blue today - the government's plans for Channel 4 really got to me!" sebzilla posted:2019 was awful and we all just went to bed iirc. Not surprised it was quieter than previous Big Election Nights. Yeah  Not that I was expecting it to go any other way, but once the exit poll dropped I just felt like I'd been punched in the gut and went straight to bed. Couldn't sleep and ended up watching the Praxiscast stream until about 3am. Horrible night, not helped by all the centrists and soft-lefties being so smugly happy about it and jerking off over Alan Johnson's rant the next day. I basically checked out of taking on anything political (including this thread) for a few weeks and came back here doing another big woe-post. forkboy84 posted:And yes, colour me in the crew of "I will never forgive Jeremy Corbyn for that sense of hope I had and can feel the absence of now in way I didn't at any other point in my life (re: politics, I have hope in other aspects of life)", even as I hate the media & the liberals even more. Absolutely. Especially the bolded bit - I'm in a good place in my life in general but in terms of politics I've basically resigned myself to things staying the way they are and trying to get myself and those closest to me through it as best I can. The absence of hope in that regard is very tangible to me. Guavanaut posted:If you have a Hilux or old diesel Merc you can use sunflower oil. But there isn't going to be any sunflower oil in a few weeks. My old Citroen will run straight on veg/sunflower oil without modification too. For those of you keeping notes, it seems I wasn't fuel-robbed - the fuel gauge decided to get stuck on 'empty' and as soon as I sloshed five litres of fuel into it it popped back up to where it should be. So that's one good outcome. Guavanaut posted:It's that time of year again... Ah yes, Christmas: famously the holiday where the word 'Christmas' is never mentioned or prominently portrayed in media and advertising for several months. Truly the Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2022 15:45
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:I made the mistake of seeing what one of those Traditional Brittan Our Culture Is Under Attack pages was wittering about earlier this week. Apparently steam trains are canceled and racist now because a museum in Wales added two lines of context to a plaque next to a replica locomotive discussing the role of steam power in ending chattel slavery. I did enjoy the quote from the representative of Save Our Statues which was, almost verbatim, "Well sure, if you go looking for connections you'll find that pretty much everything has a link to slavery of some kind!" That's really the point, pal. Of course in his view the looney Marxist left are the real racists for sowing division by pointing this out, and he thinks it's vital we learn from history by ignoring it.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2022 21:06
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:This is apparently what happened according to a non-testerical news source. When BLM was making waves (by dropping a statue in the Bristol harbour...) a couple of years ago the National Railway Museum announced it was going to do a similar audit/review of its collection and interpretation. Someone blundered into their twitter timeline to say "How can railways have anything to do with slavery when the slave trade was banned in 1807?" People patiently explained that slavery was still legal in the Empire for several years after the opening of both the Stockton & Darlington and the Liverpool & Manchester, that the L&M made its huge profits by carrying imported cotton (harvested by slaves in the American south) to Manchester, that the huge sums of money the British government paid the mercantile class to stop being slave owners provided a huge portion of the capital that went into the Railway Mania, plus all the more diffuse stuff about how the steam locomotive was a key tool in, and a literal driver of, colonialism. They weren't having it. Unless literal shackled and whipped slaves were used to build railways before one of the specific locos now held in the NRM ground them to paste under its wheels then it didn't count.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2022 22:13
|
|
|
Jeherrin posted:In taking this stance (which lines up with Priti's 'lock up the protestors' stance, nice on folks) they've decided that their political messaging is going to be firmly aimed at some sort of 'common sense / common working man / don't know anything about art but I know what I like / just trying to get by' parody of humanity that doesn't exist outside of an interior shot of an east-end pub in a Guy Ritchie movie. Exactly. The whole "ordinary people are struggling to get to work!" thing is frustratingly myopic. Perhaps things shouldn't be arranged so your finances or your employment are in peril if you once fail to show up at one specific time and place. Perhaps there should be alternative ways of people getting to work other than a load of cars all trying to flow down the same stretch of tarmac. Perhaps getting to and doing work shouldn't be such an all-consuming treadmill that people get fearful and angry when they can't do it. climate change and inequality are much bigger problems than some people being delayed at getting to work. Thing is, it does suck for the individual people who genuinely do get impacted by delays, but that's the fault of broader issues, not a few protestors. And protests have to be disruptive on at least some level to have any sort of effect. It's like New New Labour's thing of the purpose of schools being to Prepare Children for Work. Just bland, servile acceptance of the status quo rather than any questioning of why things are the way they are, if that makes sense and how they might be better.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2022 11:27
|
|
|
Isomermaid posted:It's because they believe that working class people are too stupid to understand that kind of nuance and can only be talked down and pandered to. It's insulting as hell and a big giveaway about where their sensibilities rest. Just to go back to this (good) point, because it reminded me of something: quote:You see, the great mass of workers only wants bread and circuses. Ideas are not accessible to them and we cannot hope to win them over. We attach ourselves to the fringe, the race of lords, which did not grow through a miserable doctrine and knows by the virtue of its own character that it is called to rule. K. Starmer or A. Hitler?  Is 'the fringe' Boris?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2022 16:55
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/NewStatesman/status/1513479962673786881?t=hE9cuhVtuQ3LvBgcb7ptfw&s=19 Reminds me of the 'I earn £100k a year and I am definitely not in the top one per cent of earners!' man on QT.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2022 18:36
|
|
|
WhatEvil posted:ACKSHUALLY it's not. Thank you Literally just spitballed the essential premise from memory. Should have remembered that it was to do with Corbyn's 'no tax rises for anyone on less than £80k' proposalEdit: I like that MEN headline where the man was 'heavily criticised'. Makes a change from all the usual clickbait Mekon-like 'QT 5% Man DESTROYED by Social Media Mob' stuff. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Apr 12, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2022 19:56
|
|
|
Mega Comrade posted:I can't help but feel this is gonna be u-turned and its all a way to distract from party gate. Nah, it'll be pushed on until either the Nationality & Borders Bill gets kyboshed or the whole Rwanda scheme gets snarled up in legal appeals, then it can be u-turned while blaming Activist Lawyers, Woke Elites, Jack Monroe and anyone else they want to target. CON (+12) And yes, I agree with those saying that trying to combat this with "think about the cost and practicalities!" rhetoric will just lead to more efficient concentration camps and no moral high ground to fight from. big scary monsters posted:Is the title drawing a comparison between middle managers and the supposed behaviour of wolves/lions/some other romanticised apex predator? If so you could already tell it was bullshit right there. "Leaders eat Last" is a basic principle hammered out in military officer training, the point being that you take care of your team's needs above your own because that's what your unit's effectiveness relies on. The guys' job is to do the task, your job is to enable them to do it. Don't eat until you've ensured everyone else will have a meal, don't go into your tent until everyone else's tents are sorted. Be the first awake and the last to go to sleep, that sort of thing. Of course it's a broad principle, not a strict rule and every cohort has a couple of cadets or subalterns who can be ineffective leaders with terrible interpersonal skills but will think they're the next Slim or Nelson because they make a show of literally eating last. And any book on leadership that includes Oorah Marines stuff or descriptions of warcrimes and doesn't use them as a lesson of how not to do it isn't worth reading.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2022 12:08
|
|
|
Mebh posted:Yeah I figured as much. Excellent. As well as "I can only relate to other people - especially Poor Bloody Infantry - through the medium of Hollywood movies" there's "While flying an aircraft carrying bombs, missiles and a chain gun capable of delivering 3900 rounds per minute, I visualise that I'm in an entirely different tactical situation with entirely different terms of engagement." A True Leader of Men. Actual modern military leadership training, especially at a 'junior management' level is really 'soft' and full of 'woke' stuff like letting subject-matter experts lead tasks even if they're of a lower rank than you, that people who actually respect you and feel invested in their work and task will perform better than drones just begrudgingly following bawled orders because they have to, challenging accepted notions, working collectively, a unit is only as strong as its weakest member, encouraging personal growth and skills development etc. - stuff that's really obvious to anyone with any empathy for or interest in people and effectively leading them, but which is often absent from people who write military-themed leadership guides aimed at civilian businesses and whose author bios start "After serving in the CCF and two years in the Blues & Royals under an Army Officer Internship, followed by a successful career at PriceWaterhouseCoopers..."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2022 13:14
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:Reflood the Fens imo. As a Fenland resident of 10 years this year, I find the whole history and geography of the place really interesting. The idea of the pre-draining Fens just fascinated me - a strange semi-independent region of England that's nominally owned by a bunch of aristocrats and bishops but largely left alone because it's mostly impassable malarial swamp, but dotted with 'island' cathedral cities in between shallow meres and reed beds, inland ports on the bigger river courses and wandering networks of rivers, dykes, drains and creeks with some semi-abandoned Roman and medieval canals. A weird semi-rural Venice. Acres of alluvial marsh which disappears under floodwater in the cold part of the year but is fine pastoral grazing in the warmer bits, with the fringes stringed with parishes which are very narrow but very very long, fanning out from the fens like the sectors of a dartboard, so each village has summer grazing and growing lands on the lower parts and permanent pasture on the higher bits. The draining is a really interesting tale of civil engineering, as well as a tragic tale of environmental destruction and proto-genocide for the profit of private corporations. plus all the Fen Tigers and Powte's Complaint stuff. It's a strange artificial and relatively modern landscape, like some bit of the American Midwest plonked into East Anglia with straight roads, lines of wonky telegraph poles, grain elevators and hamlets with oddly un-English names derived from the size of the nearest drain, the daughter of a Georgian draining engineer, the power of the local pumping engine or some long-vanished landscape feature now buried under black soil.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2022 00:00
|
|
|
thebardyspoon posted:Someone yesterday was talking about the Fens and the draining of them, anyone able to recommend a decent book about that? One of my friends partners was talking about it a few weeks ago and it was pretty interesting and something I'd somehow managed to get to 34 without ever really hearing about, reading the post about it reminded me that I'd quite like to learn more about it. That someone was me: The three books I've read on the subject are : The Fens: Discovering England's Ancient Depths by Francis Pryor (a name probably familiar to a fair few people itt - I seem to remember there being a staggering number of archaeologists among us...?) From Punt to Plow: A History of The Fens by Rex Sly, who has written a few other local/family histories of the region. The Draining of The Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics and State Building in Early Modern England by Eric Ash - dry (haha!) but very comprehensive and gets into the political and birth-pangs-of-capitalism side of it. Imperial Mud: The Fight for The Fens by James Boyce came out a couple of years ago and was very well received - it's been on my 'to buy' list. Concentrates on the Fen Tigers and other resistance movements. The Lost Fens: England's Greatest Ecological Disaster by Ian Rotherham is also on my reading list. The angle of that one is pretty self explanatory. goddamnedtwisto posted:They should do the American thing and just drive a lawnmower or other not-a-car that you can drive without a license. The French used to have the VSP (voiture sans permis - literally "car without license") which was basically a four-wheeled moped, limited to 30 mph and 300 kg, that filled the same niche too. I remember seeing this things when on holiday in southern France as a kid in the 1980s:  They were all driven by people who were some combination of [very old] [very poor vision] [very arthritic] [hard of hearing] [drunk] [technologically inept to the point where even a Citroen 2CV was too much for them] so they were a complete menace and the procedure if you saw one swerving its way along the road towards you, carrying its owner on the way back from a very well-lubricated pétanque match in the next village over was to get as far into the verge or hedge as possible until it had clattered past. In theory they could also be driven by young teenagers who weren't yet eligible for a car license but, in the bit of France we went to at least, the twist-and-go scooter had become the vehicle of choice (or occasionally those weird Solex bicycles with a tiny two-stroke engine driving the front tyre via a friction wheel). I never saw a VSP driven by anyone not old enough to personally remember the Liberation of Paris. Hilariously the main builder of VSPs was Ligier, which was also an F1 constructor at the time. Edit: Germany still has its 'L5E' license category, whereby you can have a FWD supermini converted to a strange quasi-three wheeler with the rear wheels moved close together at the back and the ECU reprogrammed to limit the power output to 20bhp and then you can drive it at 16. Once you've passed the full test you have the car 'de-converted'. https://www.carthrottle.com/post/bqrxygl/ BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Apr 17, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2022 21:35
|
|
|
forkboy84 posted:The SDP have always been shite, they were the wreckers who left Labour as punishment for having Michael Foot as leader. But the current SDP is a very different shade of shite from the pre-merger SDP, now it's Basically UKIP with the racism dial turned down a little Yeah, the original SDP was centre-left Euro-Christian Democrat sort of thing. The new SDP is basically the Johnson-era Conservatives but with slightly more commitment to Levelling Up. That Rod Liddle is a prominent figure in the current SDP should tell you all you need to know about it.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2022 12:51
|
|
|
Cats? Behold my Dad's pair of fearsome apex predators, glued to the counter top as they whinge until a human deins to open the food pouch. stev posted:I ascribe everything my guinea pigs do to sheer malice. Hateful beasts with no compassion or humanity behind their cold eyes. I ascribe everything my guinea pigs do to an apparent inability to conceive of anything more than three inches away from them or more than three seconds into the future, hence their ability to get lost in corners of their cage like a furry roomba.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2022 09:54
|
|
|
I've known a fair few of these people - who openly say they agree with everything the Conservatives say, do and think and consistently vote for them but get real7ly offended if they're described as Tories. A consistent thing is that, like Lampard, they believe that they're 'just normal'. It's like that "there are two genders: male and political, there are two races: white and political..." bit. These are people who think that politics only happens it you're a member of a party and go out campaigning or standing in elections, or go to the big brown building in London with the green seats and the tall clock. The people there (who I agree with) are Tories. I'm not even a Conservative, just an ordinary normal person who always votes for the Conservatives but doesn't do politics. I don't know who are funnier- the people who always vote Conservative but insist they're not Tories, or the people who always vote Conservative but insist that they're 'Labour at heart'. E: Bobby Deluxe posted:try to keep our distance a bit.' But no, apparently doing anything to limit the spread is fascism (despite the government doing actual fascism in their policing and refugee policies). Didn't you get the memo? Everything, from wearing masks to literary criticism', is fascism now. Except fascism, which is just 'common sense' BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Apr 23, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Apr 23, 2022 13:59
|
|
|
JeremoudCorbynejad posted:I'm in a safe labour seat (David Lammy) so I have the freedom to vote green without hand-wringing about it I'm in a Conservative safe seat, of the sort where the local MP was most concerned about losing to UKIP/BXP, so my vote for any left-of-centre party functionally makes zero difference. However I really don't want to contribute to any 'Sensible Sentrist Starmer Surge' or play into their 'who else are the lefties going to vote for?' strategy. And it seems that any Labour manifesto of 2024 is not going to chime with even my drippy soc-dem sort of leftism and will probably be actively hostile to it. The Labour Party has spent the last two years publicly telling me to gently caress off and I am quite happy to take them up on their offer. Locally it's a closer thing. My ward is safely Labour with LDs in second, the council overall tends to flip between weak Conservative control and no overall control. Last time I voted Green for the pleasure of making Keir Starmer sad and because the local candidate hit all the Blue Labour buttons. This time I'm willing to give Labour a vote locally if the candidate is a decent one. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Apr 24, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2022 13:41
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:The big one would be how terrible Yvette "tories are too soft on crime" Cooper would be as Home Secretary. I'm glad someone said this, because that was the first response I had too. Listen to the WDTATW episode where they look for 'The Worst Person In New Labour' (they decide it was Blunkett, btw) but it's just a catalogue of authoritarians, racists, classists, grifters and bigots whose pet policies are often indistinguishable from current Conservative ones. And then remember all the rhetoric about benefits cheats, 'illegals', single mothers, the disabled, the bizarre hostility to children and young people, all the means testing, capability assessments and workfare schemes, the strange boners for military intervention...and then see it all alive and well in the current Labour Party. Becoming politically aware in the late 1990s/early 2000s I never considered myself any sort of leftist, despite my instincts, for ages and ages because I loving hated New Labour and they were apparently the moderate, centre-left, so the actual left wing must be even worse... The state of things at the moment is the end result of 'not as bad as the Tories', triangulation and prioritising power over doing anything meaningful with it. New Labour did a lot of awful poo poo and did nothing to change the UK's Overton Window or the state of our national discourse - they eagerly dragged it further rightward to chase media approval and a phantom voting base. The good stuff that New Labour did either had good results in the short term but based on underlying lovely principles (spending on public services and infrastructure by hosing money at the private sector and marketising virtually everything), amounted to tinkering around the edges or relied entirely on the largesse of government. While the Attlee government set up a socio-economic system that lasted the next 30 years (30 years which mostly saw Conservative governments), much of New Labour's legacy evaporated instantly as soon as the Coalition's economic project started, meaning that 1997-2010 achieved...what? The right-wing ratchet, like any ratchet, is a machine of two parts. The Tories are the toothed wheel and a neolib Labour Party are the pawl - the pawl lifts, the wheel advances another tooth, the pawl drops in place. The direction of rotation is only in one direction and the pawl cannot actually stop it.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2022 15:16
|
|
|
Dabir posted:Which episode was that? Episode 129, from 01/10/2020 - Titled "Then there gathered the spirits of the dead, brides and unwed youths, old men worn out by labour." Guavanaut posted:Also they kinda buried the lede in Blunkett's not-Rwanda-but plan: I remember the same website which hosted the Daily Mail-O-Matic headline generator used to have the 'Blunk-e-tron' ('producing authoritarian rhetoric with a single click', iirc). It consisted of [target demographic] + [draconian punishment] + [second awful idea]. So you had gems like: "Give paroled prisoners an on-the-spot fine, and then fit them with electronic tags." "Arrest children, and then detain them indefinitely under the Terrorism Act" and one of the finishing statements, which seemed to be weighted to show up more often than not was "...and charge them for it". Which really seemed to be at the heart of so much that came out of New Labour home offices - not only doing awful thing to people for the worst reasons, but making them pay for the privilege. "Fit Muslims with electronic tags, and then send them to an offshore processing centre, and charge them for it" BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Apr 24, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2022 16:16
|
|
|
Comrade Fakename posted:If you guys don’t want to vote Labour, then perhaps you’ll be tempted by… a new centrist party?! Grrr...the sheer gall of anyone from the soft left/centre deciding their the home of 'hopeful politics' after what they've done over the past six years in just incredible. Let alone anyone who looks at Macron's France and think "hmm, yes, that's a political project that's got real legs...let's emulate that!".
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2022 16:39
|
|
|
Borrovan posted:Reminder that Ireland rejected the Lisbon Treaty (largely to to ignorant fears that the Eurocrats would impose gay marriage & abortion), so they had to go back & do the referendum again since it didn't get the right result the first time I know little of Irish politics, but my memory of the time is that the original Lisbon referendum in Ireland 'failed' over concerns about Ireland's tax structure (which had delivered the Celtic Tiger boom) and their neutrality stance as well as abortion/gay marriage. Guarantees in those areas led the second referendum passing the constitutional amendment - by a majority of a majority, iirc. It's amazing what can happen when a nation that isn't entirely high off its own exceptionalism engages with both its own population and the international body it is a full and equal member of. Didn't it emerge a while back that the EU actually offered some sort of meaningful change in response to Cameron's 'ultimatum' but he turned it down because he was sure that the referendum would swing Remain anyway? Or did make that up? I remember seeing TV news in Germany where they a) regularly covered the goings-on in Brussels and Strasbourg b) treated it like any other political talking shop. Contrast to the UK where the media only ever featured the European Parliament when Farage was being rude to other MEPs or when Barmy Brussels Bans Bendy Bananas.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2022 11:31
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:Telegraph mad about some extremely specific scenarios here What I think is really revealing about these made-up scenarios is that the case for the striving middle class kids being allowed a place at Cambridge rests entirely on what their parents did - their parents did all thr right things and ticked all the right boxes, so the kids should be a shoo-in for the right college at the right university. Perhaps Cambridge doesn't want some kids who needed years of tutoring to pass the 11-plus? Perhaps - horror of horrors - the single mum's kids were brighter and displayed more potential and the sort of drive and thinking that Oxbridge seeks, and which a lot of spoon-fed middle class kids with perfect grades actually really struggle with once they're there? People are always so revealing when they create hypotheticals. Like that column in the Telegraph about how 'they' were going to ban private cars and it would basically be like the Kyhmer Rouge or something. And it ended with "they want us all living in diverse, walkable urban centres where everything you need is within a 15 minute journey and you have no need to leave. That's the new vision of hell." Don't threaten me with a good time...
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2022 12:00
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:But as of I think yesterday, it started flying an irish flag with a clover in the middle. My instinct is to guess that they're not really BritNats, but have a flagpole because they like flying colourful bits of cloth and enough baseline patriotism/national identity that they fly a Union Jack by default. Perhaps they've got visitors over from Ireland, or they're a bit behind on celebrating St. Patrick's Day. There's a house near me with a flagpole that half the time flies a UJ, but the rest of the time flies virtually any flag that's vaguely relevant- Irish flag on St. Patrick's Day, English, Scottish and Welsh flags on appropriate saints' days, the Tricolor on Bastille Day, the Stars and Stripes on 4th July, the Red Flag on May Day etc. The rainbow/pride flag goes up there for a few days every few months, the Ukranian flag has made a lot of recent appearances, and sometimes there are (seemingly random) county flags, the Jolly Roger or the Smiley Face rave flag (before it was co-opted by anti-mask types). I think they just Really Like Flags.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2022 16:14
|
|
|
Yeah, had I not been following this thread for the years before - which provided both good coverage of Starmer's duplicity and general uselessness while he was in the shadow cabinet and a good dose of cynicism/realism about how a much real change a Sir, QC and DPP could be expected to deliver - I would probably have gone for Starmer in the leadership. Based solely on his pledges, his platform and his statements during the leadership campaign he came across as exactly the "still a leftist but not as scary" that a lot of people were looking for post-2019. And yes, I've also been surprised at how extensively and blatantly he's broken his pledges, reversed his previously stated positions and gleefully swung so far to the right. If you looked in past threads you'd find me predicting that at worst he'd be another Ed Miliband (sort of reluctant 'sad neoliberalism') or a genuinely empty weather vane who did whatever the loudest and strongest voices told him to do or whatever had the electoral advantage. But he's not even that, and he's not even good at the base game of politics and power.
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2022 11:41
|
|
|
Jedit posted:I don't know about that. I think Burnham is enough of a pragmatist to go for a few policies that appeal to the base, at least. I asked about Burnham ITT back when he was doing his whole 'king of the north' thing and shouting at the government about the COVID response and restrictions because I only remember his as an empty-suit technocrat from the back end of the Blair era...but he seemed to be saying (and trying to do) a lot of fairly decent things. The consensus of the responses was that he's probably much closer to how Starmer portrayed himself - soft left, but with at least something to back up the second word of that, and either pragmatic or unprincipled enough to have at least some good policies to try and woo the voters further out to the left. But the consensus was equally strong that he shouldn't be trusted and needs to actually demonstrate that he either has some lefty principles or is willing to play to those who do.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2022 16:33
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:The oldest I've seen recently is an Edward VII box in the side of a corner shop, but yeah there's plenty of random George ones around. Jaeluni Asjil posted:I've seen GR ones. Between the half a dozen or so villages in the district I grew up in there were VR, EviiR, GR, GviR and EiiR postboxes represented. There's a GR one just down the road from my current house. I had no idea that historic pillarboxes were so relatively unusual! E: That just piqued by interest as to if they ever made any postboxes with Edward VIII's cypher - Apparently they did. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 17:41 on May 12, 2022 |
|
#
¿
May 12, 2022 17:37
|
|
|
I'm 35 (born in 1986). 9/11 happened a few weeks before my 15th birthday. I think there's definitely something to the Gen-Y/Millennial definitions with regards to technology and how you experienced it when you were a kid. My family were rather mixed when it came to tech - my mum was a very early adopter of home computing and had an old green-text-screen Amstrad as far back as I can remember, and my sister and I learned how to play text adventure games and rubbish flight sims on DOS and Windows 3.1 when most of our peers didn't have PCs at home. But we weren't allowed games consoles and my parents were very against the idea of the kids having our own computers - there was 'the computer' which was for the family's use. We got dial-up FreeServe internet in the late 90s and I had MSN Messenger, but most of my computer use was at school. I don't feel that computers and The Internet really began to figure significantly in my life until I went to university in 2005 - certainly that was the period when my actual life and my 'online life' (previously confined to being an awful nerd writing Star Wars fiction and playing Red Alert, Age of Empires and Total Annihilation multiplayer with my friends from school) began to sort of merge. My partner is five years younger than me and sometimes it's really striking how very different her experience of technology and communication was when she was younger. She did almost all her work at secondary school on Word and Powerpoint, and most of the research was online. Until I was in sixth form we had to turn in everything handwritten (with fountain pens!) and most research was done either with books in the school library, online via Netscape Navigator or Lycos in the school computer room or at home on Encarta. Heck, for most of my time at school there was 'A Computer Room' while hers had at least one computer in every classroom. She never had to save work on a floppy disc. She always had a mobile phone when she was in secondary school, while I can regale her with  tales of the olden days when my friends and I would mutually agree on Friday where and when we were going to meet in town the following day, and I would just get the bus into Winchester with no way to contact anyone beyond having some coins for a phone. In my teens my parents bought my sister and me pre-paid BT Phonecards so we'd always be able to call someone if we were out - to my partner I might as well have been talking about putting pennies in the slot, pressing Button A and asking the operator to "please connect me to Portsmouth 4567". Plus, I was exactly the right age to graduate from university precisely as the world we'd been brought up to believe in throughout the 1990s went up in smoke in the credit crunch. Almost to the second, it felt like. "Work well, study hard, go to uni, get a degree - any degree - and a world of aspirational white-collar middle-class property-owning prosperity will be yours...here's your degree certificate...oh, and none of that will happen now. Soz." By the time my partner was in sixth form she and her cohort already knew that the world sucked, they were going to be underpaid and undervalued and would probably never own any sort of home and there was nothing they could realistically do about it.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2022 18:38
|
|
|
Ms Adequate posted:I think my favorite contradiction with it is that it's somehow supposed to save significant amounts of money despite adding in a whole new major expenditure, that of paying the shareholders. Like yeah I could buy the argument that competition drives costs down outside that (I would still argue that it comes with a load of other problems because many of those savings come from cutting safety corners, underpaying staff, etc.) but once you start paying out the massive amounts shareholders demand, as well as grossly inflated CEO packages and the like, then the savings are soon massively outweighed. Bringing those two thoughts together - I spent a lot of my childhood (not at all wasted, I promise) playing Railroad Tycoon II, which had - for the time - quite a sophisticated in-game model of capitalism with investors, shareholders, dividends, bonds, etc. etc. One of my perpetual frustration was that your virtual shareholders always wanted More Growth, All The Time. You could stitch together a perfectly sized, sustainable rail network monopolising the Midwest, carrying grain and cattle into Chicago and processed food and manufactured goods back out, with no effective competitors and a steady 5% dividend every year and if you just kept things ticking along like that your shareholders would eventually get angry and overthrow you - GAME OVER. So you'd always end up getting pushed into doing something stupid and unsustainable like building a transcontinental railroad over the Rockies or expanding into an area that an equally-powerful and rich competing company already had sewn up, ensuring that you would never be able to attract profitable traffic. When your grand new route to some backwater swamp on the west coat opened the share price would soar (Growth! Change! Potential! New Route Mileage! Shiny New Trains!) and then after a few years when it turned out to be a huge loss-making boondoggle and your railroad was now running at a loss, the stock price would crash and you'd get turned on by the shareholders - GAME OVER. Of course, as per the game's title, the way to win was to pay yourself a huge chairman's salary, invest that in competitors while doing nothing to hurt their own profitability, amass a vast personal fortune and take your own company private so you could enjoy a personal net worth of several billion dollars in 1890s money. You could also do shady poo poo like pay dividends from revenue and take out loans to service interest on existing loans. For a game that was mostly about playing with choo-choos, it was a remarkably accurate Gilded Age Capitalism Simulator.
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2022 11:16
|
|
|
It was the anniversary of the sinking of the Bismarck yesterday, so the White Ensign and the Kreigmarine ensign (and the silhouette + poppy flag) could be a really tone deaf attempt to symbolise that and/or commemorate those lost on both sides of the engagement. But I'm really not keen on giving anyone who puts WW2 German flags with literal swastikas on them up on the front of their house tye benefit if the doubt, so I'm going for either 'sly Nazi' or 'Fine People on Both Sides idiot'.
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2022 23:42
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 11:29 |
|
|
Jakabite posted:Am I missing something here? Why do people keep referring to the act of hanging a swastika flag on your house as 'sly'? Good point. It's definitely way more blatant than the 88/Celtic Cross/Runes/Lions + Union Jack stuff. I suppose it's 'sly' in the sense that you can predict that they're leaving themselves the deniability of "It's just symbolising the sinking of the Bismarck...you lot see Nazis everywhere [has a literal Nazi battle flag outside their house]". Of course the question would be why are they marking the sinking of the Bismarck, not the Battle of the Denmark Straight a few days before when Hood was lost with virtually all hands?  Although the modern British fascist often seem to the weird sort to proudly fly a White Ensign and Support The Troops and be obsessed with WW2 and British naval history while also wanting to fly a Kreigsmarine flag and supporting the ideology that Britain was fighting against.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2022 11:29
|
|