Anyone got the Clarkson meme handy?

I consider this a companion piece to https://feddit.uk/post/37420973

Maybe it’s my luck with what branches I’m near. Pret seems to have gone from moderately pricy but with a decent range, to limited and unreasonably expensive.

I think the author comes to the same conclusion as you, but then rules it out because Labour themselves seem unwilling to do it.

Reece Shearsmith and Sanjeev Bhaskar are pretty much UK comedy royalty. Looking forward to Sanjeev in particular, as I think he’s gonna really throw himself at it.

‘Hold my beer’ I believe

Yeah but these are often accompanied by us flying all of our military aircraft over London. I think the analogy holds, even if ours is a bit eccentric.

I’m not American (but we do get a lot of US Pol foisted on us), so forgive me if I’m missing something… I thought the US democratic party was basically everyone more left wing than Joe Manchin. There are ‘third parties’, but in general the broad church argument applies… Anyway aren’t USians able to actually pick the candidates that stand for those parties? So wouldn’t you use the generals to vote ‘against’ Republicans, but then use the primaries process to vote for the shape of D you wanted? Here that’s not an option, the party puts up candidates. But you have the ability to pressure the candidates even after they are elected. Might be a long shot, but is inherently less fatalistic than just giving up, or even (as seems disturbingly popular these days) calling for some form of civil war.

You’ve worded it best.

My version of the take is; The world will be on average easier if more people are pleasant to each other. You can’t make everyone join in, but you can make the world better on average, which surely is good enough?

I’m not a ‘we won’t be friends’ person. But I do think this is a really poor response. Who you work for is one of the biggest ethical decisions you make. You take years of training and skills and you use them for 40+ hours a week to… Well, support the actions of an industry that brings misery to millions of people.

Getting a job is hard, but it’s not impossible. And you’re choosing avoiding that discomfort over making life worse for people. You may be but a tiny cog in a giant machine, but if that cog has to turn you’re part of the problem.

I know this is gonna come off as aggressive. I have no beef with you personally, and you are but one of hundreds of millions of people shrugging and working in destructive of unethical enterprises. But that shrugging is the system. Collectively the system doesn’t work without you all dedicating half your waking life to it.

I do wish you the best, but hope you’ll eventually do the hard thing. Because it’s the right thing.

What was the Sheriff of Nottingham doing in St Albans?

I think a lot of people in this thread are overstating the suspicion of outsiders. International trade has existed for thousands of years. There was even limited tourism in the middle ages. It would be rare to encounter people that you couldn’t communicate with, but I don’t think you’d be automatically sacrificed.

I’m in London, so would fare better than most as they would definitely be familiar with outsiders. That said people in many of the old European cities would likely be able to blag their way to local universities. Oxford definitely already existed 650 years ago so I’d start by heading there.

I think all scholarly writing was in Latin at the time, so I’d need somebody to translate, but (with luck) I could move maths on a couple of hundred years. I reckon I could get basic electricity going too. Obviously the more you said upfront the more suspicious people would be, but if you drip-fed knowledge over a few years, trying to let the steps rest upon each other you could probably share a lot of what we know today.

Isn’t that a ‘necessary but not sufficient’ condition though? I’m thinking principally of the struggles in Zimbabwe here.

It’s been 15 years and I’m still not sure if MMT is an accurate description of Economics, a persuasive analogy, or convincing bunkum.

This isn’t a comment in support of the actions described, but a comment about unintended consequences…

If you reclassify putting stickers on a car as domestic terrorism, you’re somewhat removing the disincentive for some in doing an actual terrorism.

I love how memes (in the Dawkinsian sense) work. Lots of people have enjoyed this, but I can imagine this being quoted as the original is lost to the sands of time.

Young people everywhere thinking that Aquaman was someone who just bought failing assets from everyone.

I know this is a joke thread, but I think this is a great example of a poorly designed survey question that charitable people would say ‘generates discussion’. I would say it enables confirmation bias and just creates animosity amongst people looking for reasons to dislike an imaginary other.

My instinct when I first saw reporting of this was, yeah I probably could. But that’s because I read the question as me being able to play until I won a point. If I even won one, even by a double fault, I win. When I said as much on social media people jumped on me. But here’s the thing, I think theres like a 99.8% chance that the world’s best Female tennis player wins any given point against me. I’m just expecting one shanked return from 500 efforts.

Then uproar. Because it’s only because she’s a woman. Except… Well there isn’t an equivalent question for Novak Djokovic! So people are jumping to conclude reasoning, and YouGov is formenting that by reporting on a shoddy question with no control to give us a benchmark. For the record I think on average I’d have to wait longer to win a point against the worlds best male tennis player, because they serve so much faster, but I don’t think I’d be waiting forever.

So people read the question and assume both that the question refers to a one point shoot out, and they already think the greater portion of men are misogynists. Well then that’s the explanation! It cannot be an ambiguous question interpreted differently!

And I’m not denying that for some people the worst explanation is unfortunately the correct one. But I do have an issue with people dismissing or ignoring fairly rational objections to the survey or interpretations of it because of their pre-existing biases.

Not true either, someone has linked the survey question above 12% of men said yes, 3% of women

I’ve just gone and copied the wording from the link…

Do you think if you were playing your very best tennis, you could win a point off Serena Williams?

I’m not sure this is fair. I don’t think this is in lieu of such a conversation, but about some ideas on how to pitch the conversation. If you don’t have any friends in similar circumstances, it’s worth finding out what other people do.

That said, the range of suggestions here is so broad that I’m not sure it’s going to help!