buctootim

Depends on the course. For most science degrees that's largely true but for subjects like economics, politics, law, planning, English, almost any kind of research and even architecture its more about learning critical thinking so that you are able to able to interpret conflicting data, ideas and theories and make a reasoned judgement about the way forward.

Exactly. And if you don’t have books about the reality and consequences of both how does the new generation realise it’s probably not a good idea to do it again

The whole point of a university is to expose students to new and challenging ideas and views. That’s the only way you can truly form your own view of the world rather than what you absorbed from your parents or peer group. If you take that away and only offer an approved selection you aren’t fundamentally different from authoritarian states

I use mine for the pole vault

This guy who is a UN war crimes investigator thinks Amnesty failed to understand the law.

Exactly. Remain voted for keeping the French onside and dealing with the issue there. 5 small boat refugees in 2016 and 30,000 in 2021. Hm. I wonder what could have changed.

Nope you were repeating the MAGA sleepy senile Joe trope. Either you knew you were, in which case people can draw relevant conclusions. Or you didnt know in which case the conclusions are worse. Or you are lying. None are good looks

Should have changed to furlongs then the whole country could be confused as opposed to just anyone under 50.

In your post your tried to portray Biden telling people interrupting a speech to be quiet with a senile grandad wandering off confused - which is deliberate misrepresentation (or gullible useful idiot, I'll accept either). But what is being misrepresented in the Putin pic?

Resignation letter from Victor Orban's advisor. I've never heard off him before but he has a way of makingh a point. PM Viktor Orbán's long-time adviser, Zsuzsa Hegedüs resigns, telling his boss in a letter that "I don't know how you didn't notice that you were turning your earlier anti-migrant and anti-Europeanism into a pure Nazi speech worthy of Goebbels".

Thats true - but average hourly wages show a similar pattern. In Ireland the 2021 average was 27.33 euros ph (c£22 ph at current rates). In the UK it was £13.57

And on a per capita purchasing power basis (PPP) basis. We are behind all of our Northern European peer group (Germany, France, Austria, Norway etc) and only one place above Malta. Fun fact. In the 13 years (1997-2010) Labour were in power, real median incomes rose 30%. In the 12 years the Tories have been in control they havent changed, been totally flat.

Things to do when a war isnt exciting enough

Partly agree. Individuals caricaturing politicians based on their own humour or thoughts is healthy. But this whole sleepy senile Joe thing is a very deliberate very organised campaign which is then picked up by useful idiots

It’s part of a consistent campaign of disinformation by the Trumpists to portray him as senile so that they can bring back somebody who tried to overthrow democracy in the US. And you go along with it and find it funnny . I’m not surprised

FT article from 2008 about the Russian invasion of Georgia. Replace Georgia with Ukraine and Sarkozy woith Macron and every word remains true today. Its show how much absolute clear warning the West had and how we tried really really hard to pretend we hadnt heard. Putin maps the boundaries of greater Russia Philip Stephens AUGUST 28 2008 We need to get this straight. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has invaded a neighbour, annexed territory and put in place a partial military occupation. It seeks to overthrow the president of Georgia and to overturn the global geopolitical order. It has repudiated its signature on a ceasefire negotiated by France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and disowned its frequent affirmations of Georgia’s territorial integrity. Most importantly: all of this is our fault. The “our” in this context, of course, refers to the US and the more headstrong of its European allies such as Britain. If only Washington had been nicer to the Russians after the fall of the Berlin Wall. If only the west had not humiliated Moscow after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Surely we can see now what a provocation it was to allow the former vassal states of the Soviet empire to exercise their democratic choice to join the community of nations? And what of permitting them to shelter under Nato’s security umbrella and to seek prosperity for their peoples in the European Union? Nothing, surely, could have been more calculated to squander the post-cold-war peace. Such is the cracked record played over and over again by the Russian prime minister and recited now by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s notional president. Sadly, it also finds echoes among those in Europe who prefer appeasing Mr Putin to upholding the freedoms of their neighbours. This Russian claim to victimhood is as vacuous as it is dishonest. Mr Putin has said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the great geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Now he wants to subjugate his country’s neighbours in the cause of a greater Russia. The aim is to turn back the clock: to extend his country’s borders to create the greater Russia sought by the leaders of the abortive coup against Boris Yeltsin in 1991. The west must not collude with Mr Putin’s falsified version of history. There is no doubt that Russians feel they suffered great hurt and indignity during the 1990s. They did. But it is a misreading of events to blame the US, the west, the EU or Nato. The blindingly obvious point is that humiliation was inevitable and unavoidable. Until the collapse of communism the world belonged to Washington and Moscow. Suddenly almost everything was lost to Russia. The political and economic system that had once aspired to global domination was reduced to dust. Open a history book. Humiliation is what happens when nations lose their empires. Ask the British. Half a century after Suez, part of the British psyche still laments this retreat from the world. You could say the same about the French. The implosion of the Soviet Union could not stir anything but a sense of shame among Russians. But ah, you hear Mr Putin’s apologists say, the west fed Russian paranoia. For half a century central and eastern Europe had been signed over to Moscow. Now the west’s institutions rolled like tanks up to Russia’s borders. The problem is that this account does not fit the facts. George H.W. Bush was anything but triumphalist in his response to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, the then US president faced sharp criticism from many Americans for refusing to dance on communism’s grave. It is true Bill Clinton’s presidency began with some rhetorical flourishes about spreading democracy. And the US administration did press hard for the expansion of Nato, in part because the EU dragged its feet about opening its doors. Some doubted the wisdom of the Nato policy. George Kennan, the author of the cold war doctrine of containment, was among those arguing against Mr Clinton. But then, the revered Mr Kennan was not infallible. He had, after all, opposed the creation of the alliance. Doubtless there were moments when the US, and Europe for that matter, could have been more tactful. The disciples of free markets dispatched to Moscow by the International Monetary Fund probably bear some blame for the catastrophic melt-down of Russia’s economy. But no, the historical record does not show a deliberate or concerted effort by the US or anyone else to mock or multiply Russia’s misfortunes. When Mr Putin talks about humiliation, he means something else. Washington’s crime was to assume that the Yalta agreement had fallen along with the Berlin Wall, and that the peoples and nations of the erstwhile Soviet empire should thus be free to make their own choices. In the Kremlin’s mindset, showing due respect for Russia would have meant allowing it to continue to hold sway over its near-abroad. The most that the citizens of Ukraine and the Baltic states should have expected was the ersatz independence now bestowed on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and the rest should have been locked out of western institutions. Mr Putin has reopened the issue that seemed to have been settled in 1991 when Yeltsin saw off the tanks at the doors of the Russian White House. Yeltsin decided that the borders of the Russian Federation should follow those of the Soviet republics. That left the Crimea as part of Ukraine, Ossetia and Abkhazia as part of Georgia. Mr Putin’s doctrine is calculated to reclaim Moscow’s sovereignty over ethnic Russians in neighbouring states. This is a greater Russia by another means. The doctrine overturns one of the central geopolitical assumptions of the past two decades: that, for all its hurt pride, Russia saw its role as a powerful player within a post-cold-war geopolitical order. Mr Medvedev, speaking with his master’s voice, now repudiates the laws and institutions of that order. For all the occasional bluster about a new authoritarian axis between Moscow and Beijing, the contrast that has most struck me in recent weeks has been between China and Russia. Beijing saw the Olympics as a celebration of China’s return as a great power. China has by no means signed up to the norms and assumptions of liberal democracy; it has still to decide whether it wants to be a free rider or a stakeholder in the international system. But it has concluded that its future lies with integration into a stable world order. Moscow’s invasion of Georgia and its public scorn at the likely international response speaks to an entirely different mindset: a retreat from integration and a preference for force over rules. Russia’s neighbours are told they can be vassals or enemies. Mr Medvedev boasts Russia is ready for another cold war. I struggle to see what Russia will gain. It is friendless. Governments and foreign investors alike now know that Moscow’s word is worthless. The price of aggression will be pariah status. Mr Putin, of course, will blame the west. philip.stephens@ft.com

Why? It's clear he heard the intrusive chiming music during his wifes speech and went off to deal with it. The vast majority of the carp he posts up is just misrepresenting situations, not genuine gaffes.

he Tories have always borrowed more than Labour, and always repaid less: they are the party of big deficit spending Posted on June 24 2021 It is often suggested that Labour is profligate and the Tories are the naturally ‘safe pair of hands’ when it comes to running the economy. The Tories, it is presumed, do not borrow as much as Labour. This is a hypothesis I have tested before. I thought it time to update to the end of the 2020/21 financial year. The analysis that follows is based on government borrowing as reported by the House of Commons Library and other data supplied by the Office for Budget Responsibility.It covers years since 1946, which is the entire post-war period. The government in office was decided by who was at the end of a financial year. I then calculated the total net borrowing in Labour and Conservative years and averaged them by the number of years in office. All figures are stated billions of pounds in all the tables that follow and in this case are in original values i.e. in the prices of the periods when they actually occurred: The Conservatives borrowed more, not just absolutely (which is unsurprising as they had more years in office), but on average. This, though, is a bit unfair: the value of money changes over time. So I restated all borrowing in 2021 prices to eliminate the bias this gives rise to. This resulted in the following table: In current prices the Conservatives still borrowed more (much more) overall, and on average, by a long way. So then I speculated that this may be distorted by events since 2008. That is what the Conservatives would claim, after all: they would say that they have spent eleven years clearing up Labour's mess. So I took those years out of account and looked at the first 62 years of the sample. I did this in 2021 prices to ensure I was applying a level playing field by eliminating inflation from consideration: The Conservatives still borrowed more, after all, although it was a close run thing. Then I speculated that this might be because Labour are good Keynesians: maybe they repaid national debt more often than the Conservatives. Or, to put it another way, they actually repaired the roof when the sun was shining. This is the data in terms of number of years: Labour do walk the talk: they repay national debt much more often in absolute and percentage terms than the Conservatives. In fact, one in four Labour years saw debt repaid. That was true in less than one in ten Conservative years. But maybe the Conservatives repaid more. I checked that. This is the data in both original and current prices: Labour not only repaid more often, it turns out: it also repaid much more in total and on average during each year when repayment was made. So what do we learn? Two essential things, I suggest. First, Labour borrows less than the Conservatives. The data shows that. And second, Labour has always repaid debt more often than the Conservatives and has always repaid more debt, on average. The trend does not vary however you do the data. I have tried time lagging it for example: it makes no difference. Or, to put it another way, the Conservatives are the party of high UK borrowing and low debt repayment contrary to all popular belief. For those interested, this is the overall summary table: the pattern in the right-hand column is really quite surprising: The pattern is very apparent. But so too is something else, and that is that no government since 1945 has really known how to cut spending enough to ever really cut the national debt. National debt repayments amount to about 4% of total borrowing in this period. That is completely insignificant and appropriate: the economy needs the money that the government injects into it by deficit spending to function. However, there are increasing noises being made about austerity and the need to 'repay the debt', even though it is very apparent that politicians have no clue how to do this, and have no track record in doing so. Why are they in that case claiming the need to do something that has never happened, and likely never will? What is this wholly unnecessary distraction about? And why do we need to suffer austerity in the forlorn hope that debt might be repaid when it is apparent that not doing so has not caused harm, but the attempt to make repayment has? Surely it is time for some politicians to call this out and say the claim that debt repayment is a priority is simply wrong, because the evidence shows that to be the case. Data sources The basic data on borrowing came from the House of Commons Library. This data is updated over time: figures will differ from earlier versions of this blog. All other data comes from the Office for Budget Responsibility using the May 2021 data set. https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-have-always-borrowed-more-than-labour-and-always-repaid-less-they-are-the-party-of-big-deficit-spending/

Wouldn't say he was a great - but I think he could and should have been,. Really talented actor who should have been in more films and tv.

Haven't seen anything definitive. This comes closest https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/52513 My guess would be that while most expats voted remain in places like France, Germany and Italy there were pockets in places like Benidorm who were Brexity

Whippersnapper

Turns out I can't embed either!

Yep it was bizarre. Seems like they really did buy into the Unicorn carp that if we left we'd keep all benefits but have none of the obligations

No one thinks they are going to invade Germany, this is all about 'regaining historical 'Russian' lands' but if they are allowed to win in Ukraine and merge with Belarus they will get incrementally stronger and more ambitious. If we let them take Ukraine why wouldnt they take the Baltic states and Moldova and another chunk of Finland?