dsr-burnley

I don't think there is an "imperial theft" argument. There's no doubt that Elgin paid for the marbles, about £40,000 I believe (equivalent to £3.4m today). There is a question about whether the seller had the right to sell. The Parthenon was in good shape until the Ottoman government of Greece used it as a gunpowder store and it blew up. Of course, we also need to address the question of imperial slavery. The Parthenon was built by a major slave trading empire, which surely takes some of the moral high ground away from them.

I don't disagree, but the fall in value of one of the current EVs would be sharper IMO than the fall in value of a petrol car. And I think it will have to happen one way or another because the current EVs are not versatile enough to replace petrol cars for the foreseeable future. The DAB radio thing at present is a bit similar IMO. DAB radios were supposed to have replaced FM radios by now, but their limitations stopped them doing so. And now DAB is out of date and becoming obselete, to be replaced with DAB+, while FM is still going. I reckon cars will go the same way - the current generation of electric cars will be obselete, superseded by a new generation, while petrol cars are still in use.

I don't have an option for electric vehicles because I have nowhere to charge it and I'm not playing the "park it half an hour from home and collect it three hours later" game. But if I did have that option, the thing that would really put me off is not just the frightening price, but also the very real chance that a better version of electric vehicle - eg. solid state battery, 600 mile range and 10 minute charge, which I have seen mooted more than once - might come along and make my vehicle obselete and therefore worth very much less.

Almost? It was a dive, pure and simple. I know there is a school of thought that if you can touch the defender on the way down then it isn't a dive, but even so if someone flings himself to the floor voluntarily, it can't truthfully be said that the defender has tripped him. What I want to know is who tells the refs that they must only look at slow motion replays and never the full speed replay. Only a complete fool would think that you can learn nothing from watching it at normal speed - but refs, when called to the screen, never do. Someone is teaching them that they need to pretend to be (pretend? well, some of them must be quite bright) complete fools when reffing a game. Sack the PGMOL, the whole organisation. For the rest of this season and the next, let the referees do their reffing without VAR looking over one shouldser and the PGMOL looking over the other. It can't be less controversial, and it would make the game better.

I suspect not. I certainly don't think it would be a good idea to sack Kompany because we have built a squad designed for tippy-tappy and, however bad they are now, any attempt to play a different way would be worse. We've taken the lead in 6 out of 13 games so far, which isn't bad. we've lost the lead in all 6 (though we scored again for our solitary win). We have two problems - can't score, can't stop the others from scoring. Hmm. But if we could get a midfield enforcer and a goalscorer in January, we've still got a chance. And if we don't, Kompany is clearly the man for the Championship, and he's not going to be poached by a PL club in the near future.

The report doesn't ask the fundamental question about whether equality is a good thing per se. On average we are far richer now than we were in the seventies, and this includes the poorest as well as the richest. Part of this, of course, was that tax rates were so high that those rich people who could afford it, left the country. Few people (James Herriot) being an exception) were willing to pay 90%+ tax if they had a choice.

I'm encourage to know that the NHS can be fixed - fully fixed, presumably - at an increase of only £67 billion over 15 years. That's a 2% increase in budget. I wonder if those plans are fully costed?

I think it's a surprise to look back on the seventies as the glory days of equality and wealth. Just because we all had power cuts equally does not mean we were richer. As for child poverty doubling, that's only true if you have a weird definition of poverty (which the government does). Child relative poverty may have doubled, but children nowadays have far more than children then.

It's also good for PR. It seems that while Israel is still getting criticism (even from David Cameron) for unspecified potential breaches of international law, Hamas is getting credit for graciously allowing a few civilian human shields to return home. Instead of the "9 year old child returns home after 50 days" story, I think the slant perhaps ought to be "this organisation is so evil that they hold 9 year olds hostage".

0.3% of 672,000 is about 2,000 people. The actual number is estimated at about 27,000 this year so far, 45,000 last year.

You calling me a fascist defender? I didn't realise you were so vile. I put few people on ignore, but you're the first on here.

Coming from where I do, it's easy to get sick of posts of the type "I'm glad I'm not prejudiced like people in Burnley". Have you no sense of irony?

True, though of course we have to bear in mind that this is worldwide profit and the UK's share would be a much smaller number. Can HSBC and Santander be truly described as British anyway? Shareholders do get taxed on dividends, if they are based in the UK.

The report quoted above does end by saying there are no reported deaths.

Do they estimate how much of this is because of covid and the Ukraine war? They use pre-covid as the high point that they are measuring from.

I don't disagree. (Though in many cases death, eventually, comes as a blessing. But that's a bit of a technicality because part of the process of dying is the often-long slide to get there. The worst case scenario is when the pathway to death starts, or at least becomes so bad as to make death better than life.) The point about government is that they have to try and decide on the best case scenario for 67 million people, not just one. They have to decide what is best, taking gains and losses into account, what is the best for people in general. It is inevitable that as a result of their decisions, some people will die who would not have died if they had made a different decision.

It wasn't possible to do both, or even to do either. Old people were going to die no matter what we did, but there were things that we could do to reduce deaths. Younger people were going to suffer no matter what, but there were things we could do to mitigate that as well. The issue was how best to compromise to give each party (so to speak) the best outcome without unduly damaging the other. Old people, ironically, were the ones who suffered most from lockdown - especially the survivors among care homes. The effect on a person with dementia who was not allowed to see loved ones (except - perhaps - through a closed window) was bound to be awful. Even for the non-dementia old, the effect of being banned from seeing friends and relatives had a definite debilitating effect. All things the enquiry needs to consider, and politicians at the time should have been considering. The language they used in asking the questions may have been inappropriate (it was supposedly in private discussion, but they probably should have had an eye to future disclosure), but the questions needed to be asked.

But the moral compass needs to take account of the number of deaths caused by lockdown as well as the number of deaths saved. And even if the lockdown saves more than it costs, you need to take into account the quality of the lives saved. If you could save the lives of three old people with dementia at the cost of two young people with cancer, would you? Should you? One thing that medical care indisputably does, in cases of expensive or scarce resources eg, transplants, is to prioritise the lives of the young ahead of those of the old. Should it? Should it have done in this case? Big questions for the enquiry to answer. I hope they're going to try. As for the report by Cummings about what Sunak may have said, take that with a very large pinch of salt. Cummings is not a reliable witness, and even if we allow that he is telling the truth, in informal discussion he may have been hyperbolic for effect rather than strictly accurate. The questions about whether we let covid sufferers die in greater numbers because of the all-round impact on everyone, is one that had to be asked and thoroughly discussed. The object of "we won't let anyone die" was unattainable; they were (or should have been) pursuing the best possible result, not the impossible perfect result.

True. But on the other hand, if you have a virus that makes you feel wretched and ill, it makes no difference whether it's covid or something else - you wouldn't be going near vulnerable or sick people.

You need to have a very distorted viewpoint of what fascism is, to think Farage is one.

One more question. Why doesn't Hamas surrender? Their troops are hopelessly outmanned, their people are suffering, and this war will only end one way - sooner or later. I suppose they could be holding out for a "ceasefire", ie. the Israelis giving up their gains so far so they would have to start again? The only alternative is that they wish ill on their people in hopes that others will join the jihad. Perhaps as long as they hope to kill a million Jews, they would be happy to kill ten million Moslems to do it. Militiaristically, they should surrender to the United Nations and use the funds provided by the massive goodwill of populations around the world, to rebuild. I don't know how much the Arab states would provide?

Why is it taken for granted that the Palestinians can't be rehabilitated in the same way as the Germans were? There is no need to assume that they will be filled with venom and hatred for evermore. Germans weren't, though it did take a fairly repressive re-education programme and it was made illegal to support the Nazis. I suppose whether that could happen in Palestine, whether support for Hamas could be made illegal, is more doubtful. Hamas, unlike the Nazis, already have bases in other countries and has indoctrinated its people with religious fervour as well as general evil and hatred.

Yes, there is a school of thought that says we should have let Hitler do his worst and we should have negotiated for peace. Mostly that is on the basis of fear of losing than fear of killing Germans, but even so. If we had let Hitler continue his merry way, would that have been better (on balance) for the German people?

I keep seeing this stuff about "an open air prison". In what way was it a prison? Was it impossible for people in the Gaza Strip to leave, either to Israel (where I know many commuted daily) or to the rest of Palestine? (We'll leave Egypt out of it, because I gather they were more restrictive than Israel in letting them through.) I know that Israel put tough controls on the borders, Obviously it would have been much more convenient for Hamas to walk into Israel instead of having to paraglide in, when they wanted to attack their allegedly military targets of Jewish music festivals and kibbutzes. But in view of what we know about Hamas, can it really be said that Israel were unreasonable in not allowing an open border? Think of this. All the Israeli houses in the area had "safe rooms" - sadly not safe enough against a mass longer term assault; they were designed for safety against small scale quick in-and-out raids, not the sort of raids where hundreds of troops were able to take their time about burning them out. Who do you think these "safe rooms" were designed to keep them safe from? The so-called prisoners. People who live near UK prisons don't have safe rooms. Perhaps your prison wasn't as prison-ish as you might imply.

Has the BBC applied for any of their journalists to go in with the front line soldiers? That would be a good way to check whether the front line soldiers really are being fired on from their alleged targets.