UK Politics: National shortage of incompetence pads

[Werthead]

8 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Surprised to see the protests in London.  

It's mostly a solidarity thing. UK police-minority relations aren't exactly cosy (see the 2011 riots) but they're not remotely on the same level as what's happening in some parts of the United States.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

14 minutes ago, Werthead said:

It's mostly a solidarity thing. UK police-minority relations aren't exactly cosy (see the 2011 riots) but they're not remotely on the same level as what's happening in some parts of the United States.

I get that. The interview I saw on T.V. was awesome though. Wish I had the link. She was a 53 year old black woman talking about how nothing has changed in 40 years in England. Your problems are not so different from our own. 

[Soylent Brown]

45 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

So nobody did that?

Yes, they did. Try harder to not appear like a sock puppet.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I get that. The interview I saw on T.V. was awesome though. Wish I had the link. She was a 53 year old black woman talking about how nothing has changed in 40 years in England. Your problems are not so different from our own. 

I agree; although the sociological basis of racism in the USA and UK are very different, that's not much help if the end result is similar. I don't think the sense of inequality is as deep-rooted in the UK, but we do see incidents taking place on a semi-regular basis, and it's also hugely complicated by anti-Asian racism and Islamaphobia.

[DaveSumm]

7 hours ago, Soylent Brown said:

Yes, they did. Try harder to not appear like a sock puppet.

So “didn’t immediately fall in line against HoI” = “sock puppet”. Gotcha. Looks like we agree that, yes, some people voted for the retention of culture. 

[polishgenius]

The point was never that no-one said that the loss of British culture was a reason for voting Brexit. The point was that HoI tried to maintain that that was a legitimate and non-xenophobic reason for people voting Brexit while at the same time not being able to come up with a better reason for that concern than 'too many Poles came in'.

[Hereward]

9 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

 Your problems are not so different from our own. 

Well, apart from the per capita rate of killing of citizens by police is 57 times higher in your country. And my country isn’t on fire. And our political leader hasn’t threatened to shoot people.

[Ser Reptitious]

10 hours ago, Heartofice said:

You're getting confused with our long and pointless conversation over PM, where you gave hard and solid opinions on a book you'd clearly never read, but had googled a Guardian review.. so that's ok then. 

Why thank you for admitting that my opinions were pretty solid! 

Answer me this: is the central theme of the book about culture and a sense of belonging?

Spoiler

And don't pull a sea lion here. YOU have read the book after all, so YOU should certainly be able to answer that question.

 

[Heartofice]

20 minutes ago, Ser Reptitious said:

Why thank you for admitting that my opinions were pretty solid! 

Answer me this: is the central theme of the book about culture and a sense of belonging?

  Hide contents

And don't pull a sea lion here. YOU have read the book after all, so YOU should certainly be able to answer that question.

 

The central theme of the book is about how we are seeing a dividing line between different ‘tribes’ in the UK which don’t fit easily along left / right lines

The ‘’somewheres’ who have a very much location based sense of identity, who value stability and tradition.

There are the ‘anywheres’ who are often uni educated, who have much less attachment to a physical location and have a more internationalist open value set. 

One point of the book is really that the anywheres tend to dominate academia and media outlets as well as finance and government. Somewheres have been left behind for a number of different reasons.
 

Brexit was in some ways a clash of those two ways of thinking and those two groups talking past each other and not understanding the others point of view, often mischaracterising it.

Im not going to sum up the whole book, it was one of a number of suggested reading materials I gave you which you chose to ignore.

[Ser Reptitious]

8 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

The central theme of the book is about how we are seeing a dividing line between different ‘tribes’ in the UK which don’t fit easily along left / right lines

The ‘’somewheres’ who have a very much location based sense of identity, who value stability and tradition.

There are the ‘anywheres’ who are often uni educated, who have much less attachment to a physical location and have a more internationalist open value set. 

One point of the book is really that the anywheres tend to dominate academia and media outlets as well as finance and government. Somewheres have been left behind for a number of different reasons.
 

Brexit was in some ways a clash of those two ways of thinking and those two groups talking past each other and not understanding the others point of view, often mischaracterising it.

Im not going to sum up the whole book, it was one of a number of suggested reading materials I gave you which you chose to ignore.

Thank you for the answer. But let me clarify something for you: my strong opinions are on the underlying idea, not the book itself. 

If you think the book makes strong arguments, then having read it may help you defeat the presumably weaker arguments raised by someone who hasn't read it. But at the end of the day, the argument(s) will be won and lost on the strength/merits of evidence supplied in support of one's opinion, not on who has read what book.

There has been (and undoubtedly will be for years to come) a ton of literature on Brexit. Are you going to read all of it? Including everything published by Remainers? 

[Heartofice]

34 minutes ago, Ser Reptitious said:

Thank you for the answer. But let me clarify something for you: my strong opinions are on the underlying idea, not the book itself. 

If you think the book makes strong arguments, then having read it may help you defeat the presumably weaker arguments raised by someone who hasn't read it. But at the end of the day, the argument(s) will be won and lost on the strength/merits of evidence supplied in support of one's opinion, not on who has read what book.

There has been (and undoubtedly will be for years to come) a ton of literature on Brexit. Are you going to read all of it? Including everything published by Remainers? 

Well if you are going to critique a book, at least reading more than a Guardian headline about it is useful.

I think it’s a decent book and the categorisation kinda works on a broad level, but nobody fits 100% into those categories. Also I don’t think the book does a great job of discussing solutions other than better transport links etc. 
 

If you wanna go away and read it and come back and tell me why it’s wrong then fair enough. It’s not even a ‘Leaver’ book either, all it’s really doing is trying to explain the differences in opinion on this country, not saying who is right or wrong

[Ser Reptitious]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Well if you are going to critique a book, at least reading more than a Guardian headline about it is useful.

I think it’s a decent book and the categorisation kinda works on a broad level, but nobody fits 100% into those categories. Also I don’t think the book does a great job of discussing solutions other than better transport links etc. 
 

If you wanna go away and read it and come back and tell me why it’s wrong then fair enough. It’s not even a ‘Leaver’ book either, all it’s really doing is trying to explain the differences in opinion on this country, not saying who is right or wrong

As I said, I'm not interested in discussing the book. I'm interested in discussing ideas. If you think the book helps you strengthen your argument, then good for you.

At any rate, this whole discussion started way back when because I (along with a few other posters) wanted to know how Eastern Europeans have a detrimental effect on British culture (given that intra-EU migration is the only form of immigration that the UK couldn't already unilaterally control without Brexit). You brought up this book in the context of that discussion, but as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with answering that initial question. 

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, Ser Reptitious said:

As I said, I'm not interested in discussing the book. I'm interested in discussing ideas. If you think the book helps you strengthen your argument, then good for you.

At any rate, this whole discussion started way back when because I (along with a few other posters) wanted to know how Eastern Europeans have a detrimental effect on British culture (given that intra-EU migration is the only form of immigration that the UK couldn't already unilaterally control without Brexit). You brought up this book in the context of that discussion, but as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with answering that initial question. 

Why did you bring up the book then? 
 

What ideas are you trying to discuss?  If you don’t want to discuss the book then your not really showing that. 

[Ser Reptitious]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Why did you bring up the book then? 
 

What ideas are you trying to discuss?  If you don’t want to discuss the book then your not really showing that. 

I never brought it up the first time around, you did, both in the thread and in our PM discussions, so I gave my opinion on the subject to the extent that I saw any relevance to the overall debate. 

This time around? It was a tongue-in-cheek comment relating to how often you referenced that book in the thread (including PM) on previous occasions.

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, Ser Reptitious said:

This time around? It was a tongue-in-cheek comment relating to how often you referenced that book in the thread (including PM) on previous occasions.

I’m talking about in this thread obviously. 
This being a thread where you started also asking questions about the theme of the book. 
 

So excuse my confusion if I assumed you had some interest in it. But yeah it’s a bit strange you try to use a book you’ve never read, and have no concept of what it’s about as an angle of attack.. makes you look rather foolish IMO

[Ser Reptitious]

18 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

"Culture" Pebs, the answer you get is cultural preservation. 

See, no xenophobia at all. Problem solved. 

 

18 hours ago, Heartofice said:

When and by who?

 

9 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I’m talking about in this thread obviously. 
This being a thread where you started also asking questions about the theme of the book. 
 

So excuse my confusion if I assumed you had some interest in it. But yeah it’s a bit strange you try to use a book you’ve never read, and have no concept of what it’s about as an angle of attack.. makes you look rather foolish IMO

Re bolded: Oh believe me, you quoted/referenced it often enough in the thread and in our PM discussion that I definitely have a far better idea of what its underlying idea is than I really care to (hence the tongue-in-cheek comment that kicked this all off). I've never read the Bible cover to cover either, but I'm fairly confident I have a decent understanding of the underlying concept there as well. 

But good to know that whenever someone from now on mentions a book that you haven't read, I guess we can expect you to go away, buy it, read it, and only then come back to carry on with the discussion, right?

As for the "asking questions", it was about reiterating the point that the book's central theme is exactly the sort of vague culture/tradition/etc. stuff that the above quoted exchange between you and @Tywin et al. referenced. 

And I think we may not agree on much, but I have a feeling that we can both concur this conversation is getting pretty pointless... I made a cheeky remark, you were confused, we cleared it up. Let's call it a day.

[Heartofice]

I mean just for clarity I probably mentioned it once in a thread and then in a discussion with you to explain some ideas. So it’s hardly like I’m banging on about it! If we talked about it personally it’s mainly because you didn’t quite grasp what I was saying and so there was more to discuss. Not much has changed in that regard as demonstrated above so yeah, let’s leave it there.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Ser Reptitious said:

I've never read the Bible cover to cover either,

That's why Christians be cheating. Us Jews read the Torah cover to cover. Shocked me the first time I went to a church and they'd just skip many pages, of course always the bad shit. 

[Raja]

Matt Hancock being Matt Hancock and showing the way on how not to lead a public health crisis - pretty damning letter to Hancock here by the UK Statistics Authority regarding COVID 19 Testing & the numbers being put out

Quote

Statistics on testing perhaps serve two main purposes.

The first is to help us understand the epidemic, alongside the ONS survey, showing us how many people are infected, or not, and their relevant characteristics.

The second purpose is to help manage the test programme, to ensure there are enough tests, that they are carried out or sent where they are needed and that they are being used as effectively as possible. The data should tell the public how effectively the testing programme is being managed.

The way the data are analysed and presented currently gives them limited value for the first purpose. The aim seems to be to show the largest possible number of tests, even at the expense of understanding. It is also hard to believe the statistics work to support the testing programme itself. The statistics and analysis serve neither purpose well.

To mention just a few issues in relation to the data as currently presented:

• the headline total of tests adds together tests carried out with tests posted out. This distinction is too often elided during the presentation at the daily press conference, where the relevant figure may misleadingly be described simply as the number of tests carried out. There are no data on how many of the tests posted out are in fact then successfully completed. The slides used in the daily press conference do not show the date when the tests were carried out;
   
• the notes to the daily slides rightly say that some people may be tested more than once and it has been widely reported that swabs carried out simultaneously on a single patient are counted as multiple tests. But it is not clear from the published data how often that is the case. Figures for the overall number of people being tested have previously been published but are not available in the published time series;
   
• the top summary presents the number of positive results from diagnostic tests (pillars 1 and 2) alongside the total number of tests across all pillars. This presentation gives an artificially low impression of the proportion of tests returning a positive diagnosis;
   
• more generally the testing figures are presented in a way that is difficult to understand. Many of the key numbers make little sense without recourse to the technical notes which are themselves sometimes hard to follow. This includes the supporting spreadsheets, which, while welcome, make it difficult to extract even basic trends.

We already knew the bolded, obvs.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

22 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

That's why Christians be cheating. Us Jews read the Torah cover to cover. Shocked me the first time I went to a church and they'd just skip many pages, of course always the bad shit. 

Oh please, you admitted that you lot can't properly read Hebrew. So I go out on a limp here and say, you just use that huge Leerstelle in between the covers and interpret into it, whatever you want. I don't know for a fact, I just know it's true that Stephen Miller (or Jared for that matter) would give me a completely different summary.