Good luck Harry The Owl

[BoreOfWhabylon]

Court case today.

twitter.com/WeAreFairCop

I also think a lot of what was taken as being left-wing in the past, is different from modern leftist discourse.

Same here. What passes for leftist thought is as subject to colonisation by not-leftist thought as the female sex is. Genderism is LARPing as left when actually it's an ultra-libertarian, hyper-capitalist ideology conferring more structural power on those already endowed with it.

Yes, LangCleg, and the fact that Labour hasn't noticed this has really freaked me out. How aware and how clever can they really be if they can't see this?

People may have already seen this, but I hadn't. It's the career resume of our favourite judge. Wow!

Julian grew up on a council estate in Manchester and attended the local comprehensive school. He studied mathematics at Oxford University; one of the first generation of his family to attend university. Julian initially intended to be a mathematician but was inspired to become a barrister after spending the summer of 1990 as a volunteer paralegal with death row prisoners in Oklahoma. Julian was called to the Bar in 1994 and was appointed as a Queen’s Counsel in 2011. He specialised in complex criminal law, extradition, human rights law, public law and media law. During his career Julian appeared in numerous significant cases including: the Pinochet extradition case; the Siôn Jenkins murder case; the Dewani 'honeymoon murder' extradition case; the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes; and the MPs' expenses prosecutions. He was also one of the counsel team that brought a number of constitutional appeals in the Privy Council which resulted in restrictions on the death penalty in the Caribbean. Julian has written a number of legal books and is the co-author of the extradition textbook ‘Nicholls, Montgomery and Knowles’. He was appointed as a Recorder in 2009 and as Deputy High Court judge in 2017.

Stop it Destinysdaughter! The saposexuals on here are excited enough as it is.

I can't remember which comedian said it but there's a quote about how the torygraph only really thinks of itself as being read by those in power - therefore it's a great way to find out what's really going on.

"Freedoms fought for in a dozen wars are stolen away with impossible ease"

This is the quote RuffleCrow:

PM Hacker: "Don't tell me about the press, I know exactly who reads the papers: The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is."
Sir Humphrey: "...Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?"
Bernard interjects: "Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Interest#Quote

I live in a part of London with a huge Victorian philanthropic heritage. Ragged schools, public libraries, new model housing, Bazelgette sewers, public parks, great teaching hospitals and so on. Octavia Hill et al were social reformers. They did and contributed, and effected real change, both physical and legal. I doubt they would feel any sympathy or comradeship with the current LibDems. Nor vice versa.

That's it @nauticant! Thanks

RuffleCrow reminds me of the scene in Yes, Prime Minister...

Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?

Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.

Snap! nauticant

Fast fingers having the Friday feeling!

I live in a part of London with a huge Victorian philanthropic heritage

I'm in small town Scotland and could say the same, and that zeitgeist lasted well into the 20th century.

Liberalism as it existed seems to have completely lost its way somewhere along the line.

I can hear the gnashing of teeth from Fatman and Bobbin.
[...]
Sorry, wrong thread

Aww, what! I completely assumed you were talking about Lolsuit and the deranged Doc!

Disappointed.

Thanks all for your posts and tweets. The wit and intellect here helps me think so much more around these subjects than I would otherwise. I thought I was reasonably clever until I visited FWR!
Ps can we use Fatman and Bobbin anyway?

I don't really feel much tribalism in terms of media any more. When I do it's more disappointment with how poor a job "my" papers are doing of covering important things rather than discomfort that other papers are doing a better one. The Guardian's Cologne article pretty much killed any residual loyalty I felt towards them, and now I'm willing to read news from pretty much any outlet, you just have to keep what their bias is in mind and filter through that.

FWIW I've always felt like The Times is the least biased of our major papers. It's still there sometimes, but it's not as front and center as it is with either The Guardian or The Telegraph. It doesn't surprise me that they started digging into what was going on with the gender stuff before the rest did, though I still give massive credit to Janice Turner for her persistence in the face of constant efforts to shut her down.

I also think a lot of what was taken as being left-wing in the past, is different from modern leftist discourse.

Yes. Last time I took one of those online political orientation tests it pegged me as an anarchist - very very left, very very anti authoritarian. Problem is, what now calls itself anarchism is authoritarian as hell, and I want absolutely nothing to do with it. Running around dressed up like a stormtrooper trying to scare people into being woke is going to achieve nothing other than a backlash and a political shift towards more authoritarianism.

The term "anarcho capitalism" is a sign of how thoroughly degraded the modern left's understanding of its own founding principles is.

Even seeing "anarcho capitalism" typed out makes me grind my teeth.

There's also luxury communism: the revolution will be merchandised!

Wankers.

Who knew that we'd escape the crushing weight of state backed religion and superstition into an enlightenment and the grounding of a material understanding of reality and freedom of thought, only to throw ourselves into a new ignorance where we believe we are whatever we are in our fancies and we take language and detach it from any real meaning.

yes, I expect people who used to throw around the acronym derived from 'westernised oriental gentleman' thought that was factual and inoffensive too

You learn something new every day! Yep, I had no idea. Put like that, it sounds almost complimentary!

Solidarity from a fellow backwater dweller! Queer theory has not arrived here yet but it's only a matter of time.

Another backwater dweller here. But I get the feeling that rural Ireland will remain resistant to queer theory.

There's also luxury communism: the revolution will be merchandised

Ha, yes. I know who you're talking about there.

Looking forward to the premium range of t-shirts with "this is what a communist looks like."

Floral - I fond it odd that you find it odd that the decline of religion has led to post-modernism and the end of absolute truth

Religion was what underpinned society's moral and factual certainties, as an agreed frame of reference. It wasn't afraid to state that eg killing people was wrong or Male and female were different. Clearly since religious certainties were problematic eg relations eg relating to homosexuality. However in throwing out religious certainties as a society we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater and also removed the moral and ontological ( is that the right word?) underpinning for accepted beliefs AND knowledge.

When you look at authoritarian societies in general, they've usually achieved this by removal of religion, or failing that capture of religion, because religion ie God is set above the whims of whichever dictator it is.

Which! That's got to be one of the weirdest readings of history I've seen. Religious societies (England post reformation eg, with priest holes and heresy trials, Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, Iran under the Ayatollahs, Pakistan with its trials for blasphemy) - these guys wrote the rule book on authoritarianism.

Though I suspect properly understood, a tendency to embrace authoritarian rule (as a source of comfort and stability and security) is a fairly common part of the human condition, with perhaps 50% of the population leaning this way. The form of political system it gets bolted onto - theocracy, monarchy, feudal, left wing, right wing, is a matter of contingent historical fact but the tendency to embrace it is sadly always there.

Robert Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians is very good on this.

Agreed. There are authoritarians at all points on the left/right spectrum. Those of us for whom authoritarianism makes us frustrated will often be most frustrated when it's coming from our own side because we, arguably rather naively, expect to be able to reason with them.

With this issue making for odd bedfellows I (lifelong atheist), given that I see genderism in its present form as a sort of religion, would love to see its adherents attempt to debate with a Jesuit. This is because I am sometimes not a very nice person.

(Does anyone doubt that the Jesuit would win? They don't tend to be very impressed with verbal opponents who throw their toys out of the pram and storm off in a huff.)