KentVillan

I think whichever one is most convenient for the particular logical leap in the argument

Some hobbies are elite / middle class because they are so expensive… like polo or helicopters. We shouldn’t be funding those from taxpayer or lottery money. For stuff like opera or chess, where the barrier isn’t money, I think it’s kind of irrelevant which class groups are more interested in them on average, so long as you’re expanding access to *some* working class people. It’s demeaning to say to someone, you’re working class so your sports are boxing and football and darts.

Compare with the Leipzig handball vs Man City midweek… so much more obvious. Problem is our players didn’t protest like lunatics, and game isn’t televised so VAR is just a doss for the referee mafia

£970m works out at £18 per adult in the UK, for something that you aren’t obliged to play. I get your point that it works out as a net transfer of wealth from working class to middle class communities, but it’s relatively minor (compared with, say, VAT or vehicle tax), and it’s voluntary. Lottery funding also goes towards things like football pitches, community sports centres, food banks, etc. A state funded public broadcaster is a good idea IMO. That then has to be funded with tax or it becomes a commercial broadcaster. Whichever way that tax is structured, some people will pay for it who don’t watch it. Not sure there’s an obvious solution to the problem, other than to make the BBC as accessible / interesting / useful as possible to as wide a spectrum of society as possible. My guess is the vast majority of the population use the BBC for something several times a week. Polls routinely show that it’s one of the most trusted brands in the UK. That’s why the Tories in cahoots with the Murdoch media have devoted so much time to attacking it.

The thing is, a lot of the supposed indoctrination the BBC does, according to pricks is stuff like A woman commentating on football A black person presenting kid’s TV A radio show about a gay musician

makes my blood **** boil

“Tell me you … without telling me that you …” No, now you must die violently, shut up. Why do people say this, it makes my head explode

Yes but usually the debate around imperialism is talking about white rule in Africa, South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, the slave trade in the Americas, and so on. In each of those cases, atrocities were still happening well into the twentieth century. Clearly stuff like the Falklands or Gibraltar is much older and in those cases I agree with you, but they’re a sideshow really.

The problem is some of these grievances are really very recent and have ongoing effects. In the same way that most Jewish people aren’t just going to park the Holocaust now, lots of people descended from slaves or colonised countries aren’t just going to say ok, all good, let’s crack on. There’s a balance that has to be struck. I do agree that there’s an element of futility to obsessing over the past, but you can see why it continues to affect things. What I am uneasy with is this idea that all White Europeans are de facto imperialists who have enormous privilege and must atone for the sins of their ancestors, when clearly white European cultures also have class systems and poverty and exploitation which many white Europeans were also victims of. I imagine your average Polish, Romanian or Irish person would laugh at the concept that they have enjoyed master race privileges. The US-centric nature of this debate creates lots of stupid subplots that don’t make sense outside the US.

Tbh I’ve never understood why you can’t have a separate timekeeper besides the ref, who just pauses the clock every time the ball goes dead. Would completely get rid of time wasting on goal kicks, throw ins, free kicks, etc and would get rid of all the Fergie time bullshit as well. It’s the time outs, team changes, quarters, half time shows, etc that make US sport so stop-start. Just getting the clock right wouldn’t change football, besides making it fairer.

The problem is the pension allowance does create perverse incentives which are bad for the economy (doctors being one example, but they aren’t the only high earning professionals who do valuable work). Regardless of whether it’s doctors or software engineers or entrepreneurs or whatever, it doesn’t make sense to incentivise early retirement for people who would otherwise carry on working. The really scandalous thing with pensions is their treatment in inheritance tax - they’re completely protected from IHT, so that £1m or £2m pot just gets transferred in full to next of kin (ok yes they pay income tax on what they draw, but it’s still a ridiculously tax efficient way of inheriting versus property etc). I personally think it’s that entrenched inter generational wealth that makes society unfair vs one person earning a high salary & pension by being successful in their own career. It’s the high earners’ offspring who cause all the problems!

Apparently a lot of autistic people are extroverts and get frustrated with the misconception that they are introverts.

I kind of understand the thinking with Henderson. Besides the defence + Kane, it’s a young squad, and an older head in the training camp, who is seen as a natural leader, makes some sense. Problem is Henderson has been on the decline for a while and that’s surely only going to get worse. I thought he played pretty well in the WC but I can’t see him offering a lot in the Euros. But… it’s not as if there are loads of players coming through in that position who are kicking the door in. English football seems to be churning out tons of very good wingers / full backs / attacking mids, and then there’s a dearth of these “spine” players at CB / DM / CM / CF which used to be our strong suit. Once you get past Stones / Rice / Bellingham / Kane, the quality through the spine of the team falls off a cliff. The complete reverse of the Gerrard / Lampard generation, when we were stacked at CB and CM.

Yeah, Phillips has been out of form for two full seasons now I think? Only thing I'd say in Southgate's defence is it's not clear who the obvious pick is at DM after Rice. He must be hoping Phillips will get more game time next season and find some form before the Euros. The options are all mediocre or terrible... JWP, Skipp, Reed... it's a really weak position for us if Rice gets injured.

The problem position is centre back, and yet Southgate has picked only one player, Guehi, who he's going to learn anything new about. He's overloaded on full backs again for some reason. 5 full backs for 2 games!? Surely someone like Tomori needs to be in there?

To be fair, yes £2m is a shitload of money and not wanting to play world’s smallest violin here… But I think a lot of people will be surprised at the income you can get from what sounds like a gigantic pension pot. £1m will buy you a £35k annuity at 55, or about £50k if you wait until 68. Yes nothing to sniff at, especially if you’ve paid off a mortgage, but I imagine a lot of people think it means you’re living a luxury retirement rather than just a comfortable one. Also, you do pay income tax on the pension income. I’m not sure it’s the biggest crime in the world letting people build up big pension pots if they still get taxed on it when they draw the income.

An interesting thing about the economy is how it evolves over time to reward different skill sets. Imagine if you’re a current multi millionaire Silicon Valley tech bro - you’re being rewarded for a specific skillset relating to software development and so on. Now imagine same person was born 300 years ago - would they get very far? I’m not so sure. I think AI will have a similar impact. Some people will benefit from it, and on balance things will probably be better for most people. But it won’t be the *same* people who benefit or struggle. It will tilt the balance in favour of a different set of personal attributes. Exactly what those are, I don’t know.

Pilger is right about some stuff, and no doubt a brave man, but he’s a polemicist who lets his views and biases get in the way of objective analysis a lot of the time. I’m sceptical of someone who *always* finds fault with the US and UK, but rarely holds Russia to the same standards. Isn’t that just as bad as the inverse position, which he is so critical of? “Anti-imperialism” too often means anti-US / anti-NATO, and glosses over the fact that most regimes act in their elite’s self interest and are comfortable with military action when it suits their goals.

One thing I don’t get is how wide a range of different conditions it seems to cover. Like you have these profoundly autistic people who don’t really speak and it’s very much a severe mental disability. And then you have the “high functioning” autistic people who basically struggle a bit with social cues, tend to be quite obsessive about facts and so on, but live pretty normal lives. I feel like the latter category is a pop psychology diagnosis handed out routinely to about 90% of the male population (guilty) I just wonder how closely linked they are and what the science is. I am not clued up on this at all, so apologies if I have misrepresented anything. I think it’s good there is much more awareness and acceptance of neurodivergence and neurodivergent people, but I’m not sure the average person really understands it at all. It seems to have become a bit of an insult that can be thrown around very casually.

Waking Ned. Streaming for free on Prime. Did get good reviews at the time, but barely anyone has heard of it afaik, and it didn’t do much at the box office. Irish film, gentle farce comedy with lots of great actors… highly recommend.

The Piano on Channel 4 is really worth a watch.

Credit Suisse now in dire straits

My read is basically - if your argument for the legitimacy of (eg) Gibraltar’s status is a series of treaties signed in the 18th century, that’s more flawed than (eg) the territorial agreements made in Europe at the end of WWII (which still involved all kinds of questionable outcomes, but at least were negotiated in a *slightly* more principled way… yes still spoils of war to some extent, but I think higher ideals were at play.) FWIW, I think the subsequent referendums in Gibraltar in the 20th century carry sufficient legitimacy, so the point is moot, but just as an example linking back to what @Mandy Lifeboatswas saying. The point is the entire contemporary political order contains a lot of hangovers from times when agreements were not arrived at in a particular fair or reasonable way. Hence we still have these flashpoints like Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, and so on. That doesn’t mean there’s any sensible prospect of rewinding the clock, and you have to work with things as they are, but it’s worth acknowledging the historic grievances anyway. I’m in favour of the people who live in Gibraltar, the Falklands, Australia, New Zealand, Ukraine, etc being able to decide their status, but I understand why it divides opinion, and why Argentina, Spain, and even Russia would feel differently.

It’s a fair point, no? Treaties signed centuries ago were aristocratic horse trading. It’s not really until most countries became democracies in the 20th century and institutions like the UN developed that the global political order started to look more like something that people arrived at via rules, rights and so on.

Rewatching the Wire, although the peak of the whole thing is the Omar / Stringer shootout episode, it’s Season 2 on the docks that really stood out to me as being much better than I remembered and held up well on a second viewing. But they’re all great