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Post by flatandy on Sept 18, 2024 16:53:38 GMT
A friend I was at Manchester Uni went do her master's at Bristol, visited her once, only time I've ever been, gotta say it's a dump, though our building in MU backed into Moss Side so, nothing to brag about Bristol's ok. The city centre's a bit shite. It's mostly a new(ish) shopping centre. Soulless, even when you count the docks which is mostly new pubs and restaurants now where the local gather to fight at the weekend. Other bits like Clifton are much better. The docks have got much better since they took down the Colston statue.* * I haven't been to Bristol since the early 90s, but I'm sure this must be true |
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Post by flatandy on Sept 18, 2024 16:55:18 GMT
So we all agree that economists at Aston University are no less reliable - per se - than the economists at the Universities of Bristol, Manchester, Oxford or Cambridge
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Post by flatandy on Sept 18, 2024 16:56:50 GMT
Hey, I'm not the one claiming to be an Oxbridge toff and saying The Grace's in Latin. And we all also agree that Baloo has shown, with his abuse of apostrophes, that he can't be trusted as a repository of knowledge or judgement on any matter at all. |
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Post by wetkingcanute on Sept 18, 2024 17:03:42 GMT
anyway, who here among us played their school cricket on Agars Plough?
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voice
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Post by voice on Sept 18, 2024 17:06:01 GMT
Sadly the comp I went to in Bradford never got the invite, probably for the best.
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Post by perrykneeham on Sept 18, 2024 17:12:28 GMT
So we all agree that economists at Aston University are no less reliable - per se - than the economists at the Universities of Bristol, Manchester, Oxford or Cambridge I don't think that was ever in dispute but, had I wished to be led up the garden path by professional bullshitters, I would choose ones with a reputation for specialist, dedicated bullshitters, rather than a fashion college/opticians. |
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Post by perrykneeham on Sept 18, 2024 17:16:30 GMT
Bristol's ok. The city centre's a bit shite. It's mostly a new(ish) shopping centre. Soulless, even when you count the docks which is mostly new pubs and restaurants now where the local gather to fight at the weekend. Other bits like Clifton are much better. The docks have got much better since they took down the Colston statue.* * I haven't been to Bristol since the early 90s, but I'm sure this must be true I haven't been for a couple of years, but certainly the city centre is much smarter than it was when I used to visit in the 80s. Funnily enough I had a place to read English there, and my Dad civil engineering. We took our custom elsewhere. |
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mids
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Post by mids on Sept 18, 2024 17:48:21 GMT
Bristol's ok. The city centre's a bit shite. It's mostly a new(ish) shopping centre. Soulless, even when you count the docks which is mostly new pubs and restaurants now where the local gather to fight at the weekend. Other bits like Clifton are much better. The docks have got much better since they took down the Colston statue.* * I haven't been to Bristol since the early 90s, but I'm sure this must be true The statue wasn't all that near the docks. A couple of hundred yards away. Surprising really that a bunch of weedy, blue-haired lefties managed to shift it at all. |
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Post by flatandy on Sept 18, 2024 17:58:13 GMT
anyway, who here among us played their school cricket on Agars Plough? Agar's Plough definitely sounds like a euphemism Or something from ancient folklore: The soil was barren and the horses near death and nobody could get wheat to grow. But King Agar saw the suffering of his people and tilled the soil using his massive turgid member and from that ay forth there were seven years of healthy harvests. |
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Post by wetkingcanute on Sept 18, 2024 18:02:10 GMT
well done Andy- I didn't think any one would get it! (apart from Voice of course.)
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Post by happyhammerhead on Sept 18, 2024 18:53:31 GMT
I went to Oxford. Lovely day out. Coach trip with Saga? My carer took me on the train, I'll have you know! |
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voice
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Post by voice on Sept 18, 2024 18:56:55 GMT
Talking of uni's and who went where, by a weird coincidence I was talking to the daughter of one of my patients earlier, just chit chatting as I was doing some wound care, turns out she's an Iranian dissident who when she escaped Iran initially went to England where she finished her engineering PHD at Sheffield, but being unable to get a job in the UK as an engineer decided to study medicine, and she did the science part at Preston who has a link to the University of Arizona where she'll do her internship. She's here in West Van cos there is a large Iranian dissident population here and she goes back and forth to Arizona for placements
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Post by perrykneeham on Sept 18, 2024 19:04:53 GMT
Interesting. That all seems rather tortuous and odd, until you look at their actual circumstances. I was at school with quite a few Iranian "dissidents" who were, in fact, just the kids of higher-ups in the old regime. They all had Interesting stories and ended up in comfy jobs or as eternal students with seemingly endless resources.
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voice
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Post by voice on Sept 18, 2024 19:15:21 GMT
She's clearly not short of money. Few of them here are, and it's not that unusual to go into see some old fella who has pictures of him in uniform standing with the Shah
I suspect many here took a sh*t load of Iran's wealth when they fled the revolution
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voice
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Post by voice on Sept 18, 2024 19:19:25 GMT
Though she came later, she left Iran in 2010 when her husband got into bother with the regime, she says if they ever went back his life would be in danger.
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mids
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Post by mids on Sept 18, 2024 19:19:54 GMT
Good. The cash is better here than there.
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Post by flatandy on Sept 18, 2024 20:14:18 GMT
Yeah. The 1970s dissidents are often just the people who took the corrupt oil dollar in the last years of the Pahlevis. They often aren't actual real dissidents, any more than the Cubans in southern Florida are real anti-communists rather than people who want their corrupt casinos and cash back and are upset they're no longer running things.
A dissident who got out in 2010 is a slightly different barrel of fish.
That said, I know some lovely people who are the kids of families that got out in the 70s, so I shouldn't be too mean. It's just that they're not necessarily actual dissidents.
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Post by perrykneeham on Sept 18, 2024 20:22:29 GMT
Oh, they were almost all lovely lads. I think one of them had a sister in school with us too. Shahriar he was called. Works in The City these days. Most ended up in America - notably the Abdohs, who are writers, I think.
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moggyonspeed
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"Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat."
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Post by moggyonspeed on Sept 19, 2024 10:21:08 GMT
From The Goon Show (The Greenslade Story) :
Eccles: ... I'm wearing a Cambridge tie!
Greenslade: You? You were at Cambridge?
Eccles: Yeah!
Greenslade: What were you doing there?
Eccles: Buying a tie.
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mids
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Post by mids on Sept 29, 2024 13:07:01 GMT
Are we going to have to go over there and save them again? Just shows how thin the veneer of democracy is with the left. "The opening of a regional parliament doesn’t usually make for edge-of-the-seat politics. But in the German state of Thuringia, the first session of newly elected MPs descended into such unsavoury chaos that some commentators now fear for German democracy itself. A few weeks ago, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the Thuringian parliamentary election, making it the first significant far-right victory in Germany since the Nazis. All other political parties agreed to uphold their cordon sanitaire around the AfD, but the first parliamentary session on Thursday showed that the democratic system isn’t designed to isolate the election winner. What was supposed to happen is this: the oldest MP acts as honorary president of the new parliament until the actual president is elected. The strongest party nominates a candidate for parliamentary president. The honorary president then opens parliament, whose first act is to vote for or against the nominee to become president. Should this person not get a majority, other candidates can be nominated by other parties. Once the president is in place, parliament can start working. What actually happened is this: The oldest MP is an AfD man, the 73-year-old Jürgen Treutler. As the strongest party, the AfD nominated their MP Wiebke Muhsal for president. Instead of voting for or against her, the other parties wanted to make it their first parliamentary act to change procure so that they could name their own candidate, Thadäus König from the conservative CDU. But procedure can’t be changed until the honorary president opens parliament officially, which Treutler refused to do. The result was an undignified spectacle. Treutler was only supposed to say a few formal words but filibustered his way through the entire session instead of opening parliament. As he carried on talking, MPs from the other parties tried to interrupt him. As acting president, Treutler called them to order and had their microphones switched off. His opponents in turn started booing and shouting things like ‘What you’re doing amounts to a putsch!’ and ‘you’re damaging democracy!’ The session ended in complete chaos and the constitutional court was called to end the stalemate. The matter has now been resolved. The courts decided that a majority of MPs can change procedure even before a new president takes office. Parliament got back together on Saturday and elected the conservative candidate. A collective sigh of relief went through the press. ‘The chaos is over!’ announced Europe’s biggest tabloid Bild. But the conundrum behind the chaos is far from over. What happened on Thursday gave Germany a flavour of the bitter tug-of-war over parliamentary dominance that will follow recent AfD successes in the ballot box. In Thuringia, the far-right party now holds 32 out of 88 seats. In neighburing Saxony it’s 40 out of 120. In Brandenburg, the state that encircles Berlin, they hold 30 out of 88 seats. That may not be enough for the AfD to govern alone, but it is too much to ignore them, and they know it. In Germany’s federal system, the states hold a lot of power. Important areas like education, culture, policing and transport are largely devolved. Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg are now in a position where parties from the far-left to the centre-right will have to agree to pass laws around the AfD. Picture Jeremy Corbyn and Suella Braverman drafting a history curriculum together and you get an idea of how difficult this will be. German commentators fully appreciate the dilemma. But many see the solution not in thinking about what voters want and how this can best be achieved, but in banning the AfD as a political party. Since the debacle in the Thuringian parliamentary session on Thursday, many politicians and public figures have called for the election winner to be eliminated by the courts – all in the name of democracy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loudest calls for an AfD ban have come from the most aggrieved election losers. Georg Maier, a member of Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and interior minister of Thuringia under the last administration, argued on social media that the ‘incidents in the Thuringian parliament have shown that the AfD is acting against the parliamentary system in an aggressive, belligerent way. I think this this means that the preconditions for the process towards a party ban are fulfilled’. Maier’s party now only holds 6 seats in Thuringia and is trailing in third place in national polls after the AfD and the conservatives. An SPD drive towards banning the party that won the regional elections is unlikely to strengthen people’s trust in parliamentary democracy, a system whose peaceful transition of power hinges on the principle of losers’ consent. Given Germany’s Nazi past, which is still just about within living memory, it’s entirely understandable that people worry about the rise of a far-right party. But using the legal system and parliamentary procedure to circumvent the wishes of vast swathes of the electorate is not the way to strengthen the country’s post-war democracy." www.spectator.co.uk/article/banning-germanys-afd-wont-make-it-disappear/ |
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