Not The Politics Thread.

[danny.]

1 hour ago, ealingfox said:

 

Having previously lived in Utrecht this seems an odd comparison. You mean in terms of regeneration programme or transport infrastructure? Or something else?

Similar population in the greater urban area, both have waterways, both have an industrial history.

 

The streets in the old town in Utrecht are peaceful and the architecture is amazing. There are hardly any homeless people. There is a great cycling network.

 

Birmingham mainly feels like a dump and I never feel safe there, Grand Central is a big improvement but still feels crowded and dirty and with a relatively expensive and poor transport system - which is probably still better and more affordable than most of the UK.

[danny.]

38 minutes ago, Cardiff_Fox said:

Can’t think of many countries or many work meetings where you invite your wife 

You don't normally drink wine whilst working either

[Dahnsouff]

2 hours ago, Izzy said:

I watched a great YouTube interview with Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand recently. Peterson was talking about right v left in politics and the strengths/weaknesses of both sides and ideologies.

 

It made me think about the whole system and why we can't just take the best ideas/talent from both sides, and work together to do what's best for the country.

 

I guess it will never happen and you'll never please al the people all the time, but as a country we seem pretty shit at collaborating because one side or the other must be 'in power'

Who decides which are the best ideas?

[Fox in the North]

Where is that damn meme that someone put up about John the Hat a couple of weeks ago? Someone help me out please!

[danny.]

8 minutes ago, Dahnsouff said:

Who decides which are the best ideas?

Voters should. A better system of politics would be to vote on manifesto pledges rather than personalities. Of course, with FPTP in this country most people are simply voting for i.e. Corbyn or Boris. It's also a lot easier for the media to attack people over policies, see: Ed Miliband eating a sandwich.

Edited 20 December 2021 by danny.

[weller54]

3 hours ago, Jon the Hat said:

It’s absolutely contradictory to instructions if you assume they should have been working from home.  They were running the country though, so that never applied to them, whether you like it or not.

Running the Country?😂😂😂....

into the ground perhaps!!

[Dahnsouff]

1 minute ago, danny. said:

Voters should. A better system of politics would be to vote on manifesto pledges rather than personalities. Of course, with FPTP in this country most people have the choice of i.e. Corbyn or Boris. It's also a lot easier for the media to attack people over policies, see: Ed Miliband eating a sandwich.

So we have a smörgåsbord of policies from across our local political spectrum, voters vote for which policies to adopt  and a coalition to bring them to fruition?

[danny.]

Just now, Dahnsouff said:

So we have a smörgåsbord of policies from across our local political spectrum, voters vote for which policies to adopt  and a coalition to bring them to fruition?

Sounds better to me than the shitshow we have at the moment. Obviously implementation would be far from straightforward, and there would have to be an alignment between the coalition members and those policies, to ensure they could/would want to implement them. There would also have to be some kind of holistic review and constrains to ensure the policies were compatible and achievable.

[Scotch]

Wrong thread

Edited 20 December 2021 by Scotch

[Dahnsouff]

1 minute ago, danny. said:

Sounds better to me than the shitshow we have at the moment. Obviously implementation would be far from straightforward, and there would have to be an alignment between the coalition members and those policies, to ensure they could/would want to implement them. There would also have to be some kind of holistic review and constrains to ensure the policies were compatible and achievable.

My fear for this approach would be the hideous levels of bureaucracy, the amount of horse trading involved, and also living within what would be tantamount to a never ending  referendum would be extremely tiring too. You also imply some arbiter in your holistic review, but by who? The Lords?  

[BKLFox]

If someone can photoshop that trough up against the wall to be full of ice and bottles of wine and beer flowing out the top it might raise an eyebrow, but as it is it hardly gets my back up.

These people run the country and therefore can’t wfh all the time, they are in for a meeting I assume, they are socially distanced outside in the fresh air and not all squished into Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, surely that’s better? 

Unless the next slide shows Boris at the front of a conga line weaving it’s way down the patio steps and around the lawn but it probably doesn’t.

 

I await the replies where I’ll be made out to be a person that would allow Boris to 5hit on my pillow and forgive him but I’m not 1 of those & far from it, I’m 1 of those people that looks at things rationally, doesn’t blow mole hills into mountains and picks fights worth picking which this photo hardly is for me.

[Scotch]

21 minutes ago, Fox in the North said:

Where is that damn meme that someone put up about John the Hat a couple of weeks ago? Someone help me out please!

Edited 20 December 2021 by Scotch
Not my meme, credit goes to Ealingfox I'm sure it is.

[danny.]

4 minutes ago, Dahnsouff said:

My fear for this approach would be the hideous levels of bureaucracy, the amount of horse trading involved, and also living within what would be tantamount to a never ending  referendum would be extremely tiring too. You also imply some arbiter in your holistic review, but by who? The Lords?  

Yea it’s never going to work with humans is it 😅

 

I’d just settle for modern PR then. 

[Voll Blau]

11 minutes ago, BKLFox said:

If someone can photoshop that trough up against the wall to be full of ice and bottles of wine and beer flowing out the top it might raise an eyebrow, but as it is it hardly gets my back up.

These people run the country and therefore can’t wfh all the time, they are in for a meeting I assume, they are socially distanced outside in the fresh air and not all squished into Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, surely that’s better? 

Unless the next slide shows Boris at the front of a conga line weaving it’s way down the patio steps and around the lawn but it probably doesn’t.

 

I await the replies where I’ll be made out to be a person that would allow Boris to 5hit on my pillow and forgive him but I’m not 1 of those & far from it, I’m 1 of those people that looks at things rationally, doesn’t blow mole hills into mountains and picks fights worth picking which this photo hardly is for me.

- They're clearly not 2m apart there.

- There's very little apparatus knocking about to suggest this is a work meeting, but if it is then why is a non-employee (the PM's wife) present at the meeting?

- If it's a social event, they're breaking rules Hancock set out that day on meeting one other person from outside your household and being 2m apart at the same time.

 

It's all very well being rational, but rationally speaking there is no other "workplace" in the country that would have been allowed to do something like this at the time without the Fuzz rocking up to break it up. "Work meeting was it, sir? With cheeseboards and wine? A likely excuse, off to the nick with you..."

 

It feels like people have forgotten (or tried to forget, for which I don't blame them at all) exactly what the prevailing mood was like for much of 2020. This was a time when friends were being prosecuted for having walks in the country because it was deemed they'd travelled too far outside their local area to do so. It's all well and good saying with hindsight it didn't matter, but there were loads of us desperate to see loved ones at the time and many of us never got that chance again - let alone wanting to sit in a garden, with work colleagues or otherwise, to try and enjoy an evening that resembled some kind of normal social gathering.

[Carl the Llama]

Imagine if any other party was found to apparently be drinking alcohol while performing important meetings with no note taking apparatus.  Just

 

[Dahnsouff]

1 minute ago, Carl the Llama said:

Imagine if any other party was found to apparently be drinking alcohol while performing important meetings with no note taking apparatus.  Just

 

Can only assume you don’t get to go to many director’s shindigs then. 

[urban.spaceman]

1 minute ago, Carl the Llama said:

Imagine if any other party was found to apparently be drinking alcohol while performing important meetings with no note taking apparatus.  Just

 

Not quite the same context but still:

 

[BKLFox]

2 minutes ago, Carl the Llama said:

Imagine if any other party was found to apparently be drinking alcohol while performing important meetings with no note taking apparatus.  Just

 

Thing is the average joes meeting you and me sat with our boss is different to say our bosses bosses boss meetings, I imagine at a boardroom meeting with Sir Alan Sugar there could well be wine present, we move in different circles.

[Strokes]

Who guzzles wine and then makes decisions that affect the whole country? It’s almost worse if this is an official meeting.

[Zear0]

7 minutes ago, urban.spaceman said:

Not quite the same context but still:

 

Didn't the guy next to her win Bake Off?

[FoxesDeb]

57 minutes ago, danny. said:

You don't normally drink wine whilst working either

You do since working from home started 

[yorkie1999]

I'm interested to know who's leaking these photos and videos? Must have been someone who's been sacked within the last 12 months.

[Voll Blau]

5 minutes ago, yorkie1999 said:

I'm interested to know who's leaking these photos and videos? Must have been someone who's been sacked within the last 12 months.

I saw someone speculate that that's the view from the upstairs balcony of 11 Downing Street...

[BKLFox]

7 minutes ago, Voll Blau said:

- They're clearly not 2m apart there.

- There's very little apparatus knocking about to suggest this is a work meeting, but if it is then why is a non-employee (the PM's wife) present at the meeting?

- If it's a social event, they're breaking rules Hancock set out that day on meeting one other person from outside your household and being 2m apart at the same time.

 

It's all very well being rational, but rationally speaking there is no other "workplace" in the country that would have been allowed to do something like this at the time without the Fuzz rocking up to break it up. "Work meeting was it, sir? With cheeseboards and wine? A likely excuse, off to the nick with you..."

 

It feels like people have forgotten (or tried to forget, for which I don't blame them at all) exactly what the prevailing mood was like for much of 2020. This was a time when friends were being prosecuted for having walks in the country because it was deemed they'd travelled too far outside their local area to do so. It's all well and good saying with hindsight it didn't matter, but there were loads of us desperate to see loved ones at the time and many of us never got that chance again - let alone wanting to sit in a garden, with work colleagues or otherwise, to try and enjoy an evening that resembled some kind of normal social gathering.

Do you imagine that every government building around the world had all their staff wfh or equipped with a 2m sticks to ensure as they walked through the corridors they didn’t fall foul to what they have told the rest of us to do? 
There is a big difference between the average joe and governments running countries, & not a 1 rule for them type scenario, of course there are going to be jobs where you can’t self distance, all the emergency services for a start you not whinging at our ICU nurses on here for not self isolating from each other or coppers in patrol cars etc

I think most people just look at their own personal situations and sacrifices & assume that’s it it’s the same for everyone else both on work and home front as like for like and yes we expect them to toe the line at home down the shops and getting to work, but then once at work they have to be able to work they are running the country after all.

[Voll Blau]

2 minutes ago, BKLFox said:

Do you imagine that every government building around the world had all their staff wfh or equipped with a 2m sticks to ensure as they walked through the corridors they didn’t fall foul to what they have told the rest of us to do? 
There is a big difference between the average joe and governments running countries, & not a 1 rule for them type scenario, of course there are going to be jobs where you can’t self distance, all the emergency services for a start you not whinging at our ICU nurses on here for not self isolating from each other or coppers in patrol cars etc

I think most people just look at their own personal situations and sacrifices & assume that’s it it’s the same for everyone else both on work and home front as like for like and yes we expect them to toe the line at home down the shops and getting to work, but then once at work they have to be able to work they are running the country after all.

Nope, sorry. Not buying that at all. You can't just claim people are letting their own emotional experiences rule their feelings on this (which, by the way, they've every right to do given the gravity of what they went through) when cold, hard logic also dictates that there was no way the scenes in this photo were justifiable in either a legal or moral sense, whether you deem what you see in the photo to be a work meeting or a social gathering.

 

Comparing what's going on there to ICU nurses brushing past each other in Covid wards doesn't seem a very rational argument to me.