ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

I found all the exams talk in the summer infuriating, as i'm sure people will remember, because both sides were equally confident they were correct and both were working from a position of near-absolute ignorance.

But again, they're ignorant though no particular fault of their own.

Twitter and opinion-focused journalism have led to a position where you need to have A Take on everything.

Polling and spying on people's social media doesn't you give a very rich picture of a human mind, sure governments can propagandise and successfully get them to parrot any old soundbite, lefty sheeples can be propagandised by twitter. But remember even thick as fuck people have a device in their skull which is still more complex than the biggest computer in the world and can harbour all sorts of contradictory dualities. They might vote for people they despise, they might RT black lives matter posts while being racist as fuck, they might say Boris is knocking it out of the park when they know he's an incompetent liar, they might parrot degenerate soundbites straight from a CCHQ bot without any conviction and still have a much more complex understanding of things. Fuck knows what I'm driving at here, I'll stop before it becomes a really shit longpost! But perhaps sometimes technocratic-led democracies are so complacent about how much lying they can get away with the dumb as fuck electorate, they don't realise the long term damage they are doing.

England & Wales have a different education system than Scotland and NI, and always have, just for reference.

Wales is mostly devolved now too.

Same curriculum and exams though? Mind you, the Scottish education system is in the crapper these days too. That old cliche about "The benefits of a Scottish education" no longer applies, although you might hear someone like Andrew Neil still trotting it out.

That is an old school Scottish superiority thing: that the English don't even bother educating the working classes whereas everyone gets educated in Scotland, and at a higher level.

i was going to mention in relation to gyac’s post robert louis stevenson’s surprise at the poor education of the english shepherd in relation to his protestant educated bible reading counterpart.

Same curriculum and exams though?

England, Wales and NI qualifications are all broadly similar but Wales and England have been separate for a few years. They're regulated by Qualifications Wales, rather than OFQUAL, and for example, kept A-G grading (rather than 1-9) for GCSEs.

i’m probably not going to put this correctly, but we seem to be discussing in this thread much of the exact same stuff katherine was being “well actually’d” about in the apolitical covid thread, except without the condescension

that was partly what prompted it tbh tracer.

tho as i say it’s been something which has been insistent this year more generally.

If you get talking to anyone Irish in a bar, they will know all about you in 20 minutes. What I still find wonderful is that the Irish have a great vocabulary. They come out with words you don’t expect. I don’t want to sound condescending, but you don’t expect to hear a road sweeper use a word like ‘recidivist’, which has happened to me in a bar.

I did used to know an Irish guy, in a pub I used to drink in, who would try to shoehorn the word 'egregious' into every conversation.

which in itself is... ah nm

ah good fizzles - i suspected it was too much of a coincidence! i mean as groundhog-dayish as k’s particular bugbear about being judged can feel, it’s exactly (if i’m understanding correctly) what we’re talking about here, but told from the position of a frazzled participant and victim of the issues, with an understandably frazzled reaction and logic - but no less real or potentially illuminating

Lol

Tracer idk if thats fair tbh but i also dk if theres any value in the way its being done in that thread (from any side, tbc) nor in bringing the issues with that thread into the delve in this thread

If you get me

Lol was xp to egregious/follow up, etc

yes, i got that impression too. it’s ok/understandable to be frazzled, and it doesn’t really help for people to say “why don’t you get this? it’s obvious/simple.”

but it feels like there’s another text in that conversation that made me feel it was probably best not to post these thoughts there.

i would also point out that the 1992 fall single Don’t Take The Pizza, b-side Xmas with Simon, contains a line which prob sums up this caboodle as much as anything else:

Your brain cracks each day from information anxiety

and yes xpost to darragh.

I move to propose a fizzles hierarchy of certainty cf maslow/need but with a base of the contexts/items in/of which a given person can be certain and the rising and narrowing subsequent levels

I think that the modern person is being asked- cf that other thread some may set that as 'demanded'- to live within a certainty pyramid with many, many floors of many different levels of complexity, and at present its like a flu-dream of overspilling manageability

The things that slip to contribute to such a mass phenomenon and the things that slip during same are *waves, again, at everything*

And look i hate to do it because its not ever as true as you fear on times where the quote comes up but the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity is not a statement of inevitability but it is a very very fine nailing of a very specific sinking feeling in such circumstances

xref to rudyard kiplings 'if', by which i literally mean the opening if in that poem, and its a lot for any sentient body to bear at all

yes i've been trying to explore the implication of the fact that
(i) i instantly also leapt towards maximum suspicion at the "high-speed strain" story, as just too convenient (also i encountered it via a retweeted pesto post lol) and spent at least a little time guardedly defending this in a conversation, before retreating to
(ii) a "boy-cried-wolf" analysis that doesn't lay claim to knowing where in the boy's story we actually are

(i mean it feels like the wolf is HERE but this is a problem with metaphors for approaching danger. canary-in-a-mine also begins to bug out as a figure once you find you're multipying canaries to indicate mounting levels of of peril… )

my late uncle Jimmy was definitely one verbose Irish fellow, big words, Wordsworth quotes, he could mix it with pseudo-intellectuals or drug-dealing guttersnipes. He was a maths teacher but did a prison sentence in the early 70's for drug dealing!

Its hard to find a defensive bastion that lauds its own uncertainty as a rallying base rock xp

ah jaysus are ye doing the certainty bit in here now

i’m probably not going to put this correctly, but we seem to be discussing in this thread much of the exact same stuff katherine was being “well actually’d” about in the apolitical covid thread, except without the condescension

one of the problems with the strain is that there are multiple finely grained ways not to trust it:

• it’s not true, they’re just using it to explain rising caseloads due to failure of gov control and justify the need to reverse ferret on christmas
• it’s true and has been for a while, but they thought they’d get away with it
• it’s true but new variant isn’t actually that harmful, and has been overegged (see 1)
• it’s true but irrelevant, you’re just giving a name to a line that was rising rapidly anyway, using it as the lede is misleading
• it’s true, they couldn’t have acted sooner, but fundamentally unlocking doe christmas was always a bad idea, and they’ve retrospectively realised they fucked it.
• it’s true and it would have been fine we’re it not for that pesky variant.
• it’s true and the new variant was designed and bred in porton down to distract from brexit

And look i hate to do it because its not ever as true as you fear on times where the quote comes up but the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity is not a statement of inevitability but it is a very very fine nailing of a very specific sinking feeling in such circumstances

Reminds me of Lou Reed trying to show off in front of his audience by quoting those lines on his "Take No Prisoners" album and getting it the wrong way round, which he then left on the album because it was funny.

xposts to mark s

ah jaysus are ye doing the certainty bit in here now

― plax (ico), Tuesday, 22 December 2020 12:43 (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Chrisht and tis

completely missed that shari-vari did the nudge bit upthread on a response to the question of masks, but yes otm.

import sincerity in music and it's a #onethread wrap foax

Keep that filth out of this thread thx

going to wheel this round england 2021 yelling “BRING OUR YOUR DEAD”

brb just going to wheel this round the UK for 2021. https://t.co/Ia4yXkkPXV

— neck or nothing (@tomwtn) December 22, 2020

fucked it.

import sincerity in music and it's a #onethread wrap foax

DON'T TRY IT

singularity of thread as a unifying goal and yet string theory has been discredited

my tweets are funny in in dimensions 4-8 and actually good and clever in dimensions 9-11

mark s did 9-11, thought it was good and clever

“Dubdobdee” is the onomatopoeic sound of jet fuel melting steel beams

Oh fuuuu-

the string theory crew is only here to make the scientologists look good, but you've got to hand to them they are funny as fuck!

Breaking: EU Commission recommends countries drop all UK travel bans, including on freight.

It looks like they have concluded that Johnson may have been exaggerating the threat posed by the English mutation. https://t.co/wOe8GFUgr8

— Dave Keating (@DaveKeating) December 22, 2020

Commission: “Until the end of December, free movement rules still apply to the UK. This means that Member States should not in principle refuse the entry of persons travelling from the UK.”

In other words, EU countries legally cannot ban entry to Brits until 1 January.

— Dave Keating (@DaveKeating) December 22, 2020

Can we ban them?

Bojo being completely taken by surprise that his "mutant virus is v v serious so I had no choice to cancel xmas no honest" cop-out lead to complete isolation: Good.

EU basically calling him out on this red herring: Also good.

Eamon Ryan confirms Ireland is dissenting from the European Commission advice which is to relax any travel restrictions https://t.co/vaUp2xwOwO

— Gavan Reilly (@gavreilly) December 22, 2020

We cannot do that under EU tyranny iirc