mormont

I think the Space Babies episode was a typical Davies episode elevated by excellent performances. Ncuti Gatwa has exactly the right energy for this, able to carry the story along with pure charisma, whether upbeat or more serious. Very much a family episode and a good starter episode. Devil's Chord was also elevated by a terrific performance from Jinkx Monsoon but it has the problem all TV about how incredible and powerful music is, which is that at some point you have to put some actual music in them, and that causes issues because actually, what creates that power is deeply specific as much as it is universal. And so we get an episode where every artist and musical style featured is exactly what a middle-aged white British man would consider to be significant and no other music gets a look-in. This is an episode about music with a black lead character, and not one black musician (or genre!) is even mentioned. The Beatles had lots of black influences! (I have some views about the notion of The Beatles as being these nonpareil musical geniuses anyway, but it makes sense to use them as such.) ETA - I do wish they'd cast people who looked even vaguely like The Beatles, by the way. Similarly, the original musical numbers were pretty pedestrian, for me, and failed to evoke what the story needed. But there's a lot of good stuff in the episode despite that: the scene where the Doctor talks about Susan, the Maestro's motivation, the scene where the Doctor uses the sonic to nullify sound. Overall it's both better and worse than Space Babies, I think.

Apart from the obvious gain of any defection, which is the ability to say 'even your own side know you're going to lose' and get national press coverage for multiple days of her saying how terrible the government is: in this specific case, it's actually about Elphicke being a hard liner. Because as hard line as she is, she still thinks the Rwanda plan is stupid, and that Labour's plans are better. So this provides a bunch of ammunition against the measure Sunak has staked practically his whole election pitch on. I wouldn't have done it, because I think the costs are too high, but what Starmer gains by it is pretty obvious.

Politically, it's hard to refuse a defector, particularly in the run up to an election, but with Natalie Elphicke, I'd have been strongly tempted.

Ormond - interesting question. What you describe is becoming more common in folks my age or below, in the middle classes particularly, such that if I met a University lecturer with a double-barreled name (male or female) I probably wouldn't assume it was a class thing. But if I met an MP, I would. To some extent (and you'd know this, of course) it depends what the names actually are. There are some names that are stereotypically upper class - If I meeting a Granville-Beaumont or a Bowes-Lyon I'm going to think of that differently than a Wilson-Jones.

The Tories have nothing left but to smash that 'trans panic' button* over and over in the hope that it somehow saves some seats. *OK, and the 'immigrant panic' button.

One of my contemporaries at uni was a Tory who stood for the local elections: Rupert Garton-Jones. But he was standing in an area where the double-barreled surname would, let's say, have been a disadvantage (and being called Rupert wouldn't do him any favours either). So his posters dropped the forename and the hyphen, reading Vote Garton JONES Nice try. Didn't work.

I don't really see the need to get personal, tbqh, particularly when the accusation of being 'patronising' comes in response to me defending my understanding of the subject at hand against a repeated out of hand dismissal. That experience is absolutely relevant when we're discussing political activity among people of that exact age group. (Many of whom, by the way, are involved in local council politics at the same time. My officers regularly meet with local councillors, MSPs, MPs, etc. and we give evidence to local council committees and Scottish government consultations - I've written a lot of these with my officers.) I'm genuinely glad to hear you've taken the initiative you describe. I hope those young folk have a champion who will stand up for them, and I hope it's you: but you'll understand, that's hard to fit with the things you've said about young people in this thread. Part of that might be performative? But even in the post above, I think you're limiting what young people bring to the table. 'Life experience' doesn't necessarily give people any special ability to implement policy.

Language, sure. But the bigger issue, IMO, is the weird obsession many modern societies (Western society, but all across the globe too) have with gender and sex as being absolutely fundamental to identity, and the division and segregation of the sexes and genders in all sorts of contexts where it's largely unnecessary. Tackle that, and a lot of these issues simply solve themselves.

I'm willing to bet your experience of both politics and student politics is very, very limited and not recent. So yeah, they're similar. In fact they're very similar to council politics, and both of those are regarded as very good training grounds for things like being an MP. I'm not sure why you're so invested in me being wrong about an area I've been working in for two and a half decades and you've never worked in, to my knowledge. But let's leave it at this: 18 year olds are allowed to stand and voters are allowed to pick them.

Probably. But the sort of 18 year old who wants to sit on a local council is the sort I encounter, not the sort BFG encounters. That said, in an ideal world, we'd see 18-25 year olds from all sorts of backgrounds standing for election. It's never going to happen, but it would be a good thing if it did.

Naive is the one thing I am not, when it comes to 18 year olds and politics. I've run student elections for almost all my adult life. My student officers walk into committees full of middle aged professionals: lecturers, lawyers, accountants, doctors. And they make their case, and often as not, they do a better job of it than those professionals. They improve the university. They have the ability and the desire to effect meaningful change in their community - not just the student community, but the wider community. Not to be too sappy, but it's actually inspiring. Do some of them fuck it up? Sure. But on the whole, I rate my student officers higher than my local councillors. And that's not naivete, that's the voice of experience.

Adults. 18 year olds are adults. There's no better example of what I'm talking about than the reflexive infantilisation of 18 year olds by people who would not have stood for the same attitude when they were 18. Also, do I not recall approving remarks from you about Mhairi Black, who was all of 20 when she was elected? Do the two years really make that much of a difference?

[rant] If I were 18, I'd be furious. Incandescent. People our age have fucked up the environment, fucked up the economy, fucked up the political system, wrecked the future of 18 year olds and refused to do anything about it, and do we apologise? Do we hell. No, we prefer to lecture 18 year olds about how stupid they are, how they do gender wrong, they do politics wrong, they do protest wrong, they shouldn't be allowed to decide whether to smoke, they shouldn't be allowed to stand for election, they're too censorious (we say as we criticise them for everything they say or think), they're dumbasses who apparently we should physically abuse? You know who needs to get over themselves? Us. We're a catastrophe of a generation. We treat 18 year olds far worse than they treat us. We should be banned from standing for office. Look at the politicians from our generation. Is that what 'life experience' provides? What 'life experience' does Rishi Sunak have? I would 100% rather vote for a random 18 year old than anyone on the Tory front bench, and much of the Labour front bench. 18 year olds couldn't possibly do a worse job than us.

This is possibly the wildest thing in the thread. I don't know a single person in the UK who would say that.

I doubt it, for one. Many 18 year olds I know are as capable and mature as folks twice or three times their age. Can we just stop bashing young folks for a bit?

No, not really. The point about fiction is that it isn't history: that's why it's Toranaga and not Tokugawa, so Clavell could tell a story, as a modern author, for a modern audience, without being bound by the history. We tell such stories, even if they are based on history - heck, even if they are history - for modern purposes: to make comparisons to modern society and reflect and learn from those. Trying to think like a historical Japanese noble might be instructive for a modern reader as a thought exercise, but it's not the moral standard a modern reader should adopt.

The point is that we shouldn't have to show ID at all. Voting is a fundamental right, and no evidence exists of fraud by impersonation except as a 'black swan' event. Requiring ID distorts the results by several orders of magnitude more than not requiring it does.

I think that's due to all the racism he did, though. The idea that we, modern people, should adopt the standards of historical people, standards we don't share, to make moral judgements is pretty weird to me, particularly in fiction. Toranaga never existed. 'His time' was never! He's a character invented by a modern Western writer for modern Western audiences. Modern Western standards are surely the appropriate ones to apply.

The Cass review said nothing about this topic. The common thread here isn't the Cass review: it's the toxic and relentless anti-trans prejudice that has created pressure on public services for trans folks.

We see Toranaga risk the lives of everyone in the party leaving Osaka, then leave Buntaro behind to die. His relationship with his son, who is desperate to impress him, is at best harsh and unforgiving, and his reaction to Nagakado's death is to use it to his advantage - his grief is exaggerated for this purpose. We're told he basically manipulated Mariko's father into his death. He orders Fuji, still grieving the loss of her husband and child, to become a consort to a strange foreigner. He watches his most loyal retainer commit suicide as a ploy. He ordered a loyal samurai to live as a peasant for years. He persecutes the villagers brutally for sabotaging the ship when he knows they didn't do it. And this is just the stuff that comes to mind.

Yabushige's death is a favourite moment for me, just for the way Asano plays it: no ritual, just an almost casual thrust in the gut. It's so perfect a note for him to end on. All the obsession with death, only to finish his own life with as undramatic and unceremonious a moment as you could imagine. I did read Toronaga as a ruthless manipulator almost from the start - the information is, after all, presented to us to show this. In a way, it's Hiroyuki Sanada's fault: he's just too darn sympathetic. ETA - this is also why I liked Gin so much, and why she's important. Gin sees right through Toranaga.

Well, not in height. And whether she in practice had any other advantage would depend on many other factors, some of which (but not all of which) are influenced by sex at birth. But the point is that regardless of which of them have the advantage, it's always the trans woman and never the cis woman who would be banned. So the ban is ban for being trans per se.

In many cases, it is, though: it's specifically trans athletes that are banned. The exclusion is solely for those who have additional height, etc. because they are trans, and not for cis women who also happen to have that physiological advantage. (Indeed, those women are likely to be celebrated and sought after.) That makes it a ban because they are trans per se: the supposed advantage is an ostensible reason, which is not to say that it's necessarily a cynical pretence, but it is to say that it isn't the actual criterion on which those athletes are being excluded. As others have pointed out, a trans basketball player who is 5' tall would be banned in many places despite having no advantage. As for the rest of the thread, I think the posts here show what I was saying is true - we all have strong feelings about this, that go beyond what you'd expect for the scale of the actual issue. That's also a pretty good reason to reflect before posting: we want a civil discussion, and that's harder to have when emotions are high.

One could: I think I was pretty clear that this is not directed at any one view, but the discussion in general. I have strong feelings about these issues because I have trans friends, work with young trans adults, and have strong views about the rights of young adults in general to control their own lives and take their own decisions. At the same time, I grew up in and live in the same society as everyone else: until I was an adult, trans folks were the butt of playground jokes and nothing else, gender roles were firmly defined and straying from them got mockery at best and made you a target for physical bullying more often than not, and not conforming to your gender assigned at birth was portrayed as inextricably linked to sexual perversion. These were prejudices literally beaten into me at times, and I've had to work to counter them - they still exist in me, at some level. If that's not the culture you grew up in, then I'm glad. A lot of the young adults I work with grew up questioning that culture, and I'm happy for them. But those people generally lack the same genetic advantages that are being considered unfair when they arise as a result of being trans women.

That's not really what I'm saying: what I'm saying is that it's a best naive to pretend that our views on the former are not influenced by our views on the latter (which are in turn a product of wider issues we have as a society with gender, sex, sexual attraction, presentation, and so on). Any discussion of inclusion of trans athletes that doesn't reckon with those factors is incomplete.