Verbal

Can I have some questions too? And where are the picket pics??

And every single one of the people questioned were BBC employees on orders to give the 'correct' answers. With all the left-wing conspiracies floating above your head it's amazing you can make any sense at all.

Four Saints players in the top ten assists. Impressive.

So the thing that animates you the most is not the burning issues of today but whether you are or are not a Daily Mail reader? If I may say so, that's a typical DM response, V Dubya.

I think you should have some sharp words with trousers, who's clearly shirking. Just walked through a picket line (not on the way to work, I might add). Very pleasant experience - everyone chatty and happy at the turnout.

...cooked over a nice picket line fire. One out, all out, trousers! Well done, comrade!

Wrong again. Here's the BBC poll, for example, commissioned this week and showing strong support for the strike. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15910621 EDIT: Snap!

You're either having a nice day off, courtesy of the public sector, or you're seriously abusing your employer's trust spending so much time on here. Which is it?

Ah, the swivel-eyed right wing's poor grip of logic strikes (!) again. Of course one debatable case means you can generalise to an entire union movement...

Pics here please TLS.

Will the poster in desperate need of both please make an urgent appointment - writing in bold is a sign of serious decline.

Having a nice day off? You know who to thank.

There are perfectly good reasons for discounting pap's views. This is not one of them.

Thou art not far wrong.

I'm not so sure dune has the authority to dictate who should and should not contribute to a thread. And for reasons of context, perhaps this is a good thread on which to post happy picket pics.

As both an income and corporation tax payer, my only real issue with the public sector is the size of salaries of some at the top end. Demonising public sector workers is becoming a sport played to amuse the dumb and stupid.

I did wonder (giving you the benefit of the doubt), but then I just assumed you weren't breaking forum rules.

Are you really saying something so paranoid as that a book 'written by an author' [sic] and published by a well-known publisher is, ipso facto, not to be trusted? And what critical analysis or primary evidence? Your offhand impressions? As a scientist, Pinker no doubt falls into the category of a malign conspiracist for some (!). And I'm sure it's entirely credible that his mysterious, all-powerful publisher was issuing edicts to him on what had to be written... Good grief. Back to reality, please read the book at least - or if not, consult the various sites discussing it, which show the following: Pinker makes the case that a smarter, more educated world is becoming more peaceful in several statistically significant ways. His findings are based on peer-reviewed studies published by other academics using examinations of graveyards, surveys and historical records: — The number of people killed in battle — calculated per 100,000 population — has dropped by 1,000-fold over the centuries as civilizations evolved. Before there were organized countries, battles killed on average more than 500 out of every 100,000 people. In 19th century France, it was 70. In the 20th century with two world wars and a few genocides, it was 60. Now battlefield deaths are down to three-tenths of a person per 100,000. — The rate of genocide deaths per world population was 1,400 times higher in 1942 than in 2008. — There were fewer than 20 democracies in 1946. Now there are close to 100. Meanwhile, the number of authoritarian countries has dropped from a high of almost 90 in 1976 to about 25 now. And so on and on, all the way down to the decline in racist abuse and attacks.

This pessimism really isn't warranted. Society has not 'reverted to a form of tribalism'. What makes this woman's outburst shocking is that it's actually quite rare these days. Some serious work has been done recently on what you call the 'bigger picture'. The best of it, perhaps, is a book by the eminent Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, entitled The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. (And within violence, of course, he includes these kinds of outbursts and other signs of what you call 'tribalism'.) He says that historically we've never been so peaceful, and his statistics reveal dramatic reductions in war deaths, family violence, racism, rape, murder and all sorts of trouble. Pinker writes: “The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.” On the subject of books, how did you get on with The Looming Tower?

Where can I invoice you? I think you might want to look at a few histories of the current crisis to see where you've gone horribly wrong. I'd recommend Gillian Tett's 'Fool's Gold: How the Bold dream of a Small Tribe at JP Morgan Was corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe'. This traces the roots of the derivatives crisis which remains at the heart of everything going on now. And for a British perspective: Philip Augar's 'Chasing Alpha: How Reckless Growth and Unchecked Ambition Ruined the City's Golden Decade'. Then come back and say you can't blame the banks...

Are you capable of a reasoned argument to go with this? Or do you just need a little lie down?

As a rule of thumb in politics, it's as well to remember that the more certain you are, the more likely it is you're wrong. One of the uncomfortable truths for those who rail at the very idea of unions, or who merely object to their defence of existing terms and conditions of employment, is that without them Britain would be a low-wage economy (or even lower-wage), slipping into competition with Albania. In an age when the rich are becoming VASTLY richer - almost to the point of returning us to a Dickensian age - unions have never become more vital in the struggle to distribute a share of that economic growth over the last few decades Their actions may cause short term discomfort, but the consequences of those actions are that we - and by we I mean those who are not on seven-figure salaries at the taxpayer-sponging banks - are all better off. Look what's happened in the US, where unions are weaker. The US economy is three times as big as it was in the 1970s, but workers there have experienced a 40-year, real-terms income squeeze, while the top 1% have quadrupled their wealth. We can sink back into this if you want - but Britain would be a far, far worse place for it.

Badgers 1 trousers 0

I really do think you should try a bit harder than this. Retailing Tory Party official propaganda seems a bit too close to spamming.

So you need your facts dressed up in religious mumbo jumbo? Anyone seriously interested in plagues or anything else in Egypt is not going to start with something the Romans cooked up hundreds of years after the supposed event.