Not one of the ‘columnists’ paid to write dull conformist space-fillers for Murdoch’s Times has had the (modest) wit to point out that the true successor to the throne is not Charles at all. It’s Francis of Bavaria, direct descendent of James I. Problem: he’s Catholic, so barred by the Act of Settlement, whose unspoken purpose is to ensure that all those lovely properties stolen from the Church by Henry VIII will never have to be returned by the aristocrats who inherit them today. Francis’s family was anti-Nazi so, incredibly, the lad actually spent years in concentration camps.
About the same time as our king, Edward VIII, was visiting Germany for another reason.
All a bit chancy, even arbitrary, isn’t it.
So what’s all that codswallop about “collective loyalty”?
I may be guilty of taking Marriott out of context - I've not read the whole thing, just the section quoted above - but the conflation of the "side hustle" with the supposed/imagined pressure to be "special" feels particularly unhelpful. When I went to university, it was actually in the rules of the institution that students weren't allowed to have part-time jobs, because they interfered with us being able to focus on our coursework. There was a grey area where working for money for a few hours a week in one of the college libraries was viewed as acceptable, but that was it. Of course, this was in the era of means-tested maintenance grants, and the state paid the course fees - a halcyon and byegone era, and one I remind myself every day to be thankful for having lived through and in. With some creative use of my first credit card, an interest-free student overdraft and the income from those library stints, I was able to enter the world of work without accruing any significant debt. Today's cohort aren't being forced into thinking they're special: they're being forced to work several jobs while in higher education just to try to emerge at the end of the course without amassing the kind of financial burden I didn't have to take on until I bought a house. Mannion looks like he's young enough not to have had the same opportunity I had: but even less reason, then, you'd imagine, for him to not realise that "side hustles" aren't things students dream up as a form of self-aggrandisement, but as a necessary device to help them make it to the end of their course without facing financial ruin. If there's pressure being placed on them to do more and be more, that's not coming from within; it's from a society that has apparently arrived at a position where it places such a low value on education that it thinks of it as some sort of luxury lifestyle choice which should be paid for by the children and young people who are experiencing it, rather than by the whole of that society, despite the benefits to us all of educating our younger people being abundantly, if not head-bangingly, obvious.
He’s 30 but he writes the arguments of a sclerotic and uninformed 80-year-old to cosplay as not the like the other youth for a Times audience of shobs, snides, and shits.
I wouldn’t want this to go to your head nor nuffing but you’re single-handedly (OK, props to Dr Kate) loosening the stranglehold that the MSM’s Wagner disinformation units have on the way we live now.
This morning’s guerilla raid on Sky News was, frankly, thrilling. No idea how long you can keep this up but it feels like a breach in the wall that is going to grow. Look after yourself, Mic. They won’t take it lying down. . .
(Late comment, but while I'm on a backreading spree): I write about the wild world of digital marketing for a living and it's absolutely astounding how people will cite statistics without bothering to check where they came from. And then you look up the source and it's from 2013, which is a solid 10 years out of date. Or they'll cite it in a way that just slightly distorts the meaning, and someone else cites it from *them* in a slightly distorted way, and so on and so forth until you're looking at a "stat" with no factual basis that completely fails to resemble the original. Another pet peeve is people citing publications as the sources for a stat or study when they just quoted it, leading to a rabbit hole of old and often broken links to find the original. But almost no-one bothers to do this type of fact-checking. I've made debunking spurious marketing stats a bit of a speciality but it feels like shouting into the void most of the time. People don't care as long as it sounds good and props up their argument nicely. [/End rant]
Actually, I forgot a point: earlier in the Covid pandemic, it emerged that a fundamental misunderstanding about how Covid was spread/could spread was based on a fact about "droplets" that no-one had bothered to check the evidence for. I wasn't remotely shocked. It seems even academic researchers are guilty of not checking what they're sourcing.
Not one of the ‘columnists’ paid to write dull conformist space-fillers for Murdoch’s Times has had the (modest) wit to point out that the true successor to the throne is not Charles at all. It’s Francis of Bavaria, direct descendent of James I. Problem: he’s Catholic, so barred by the Act of Settlement, whose unspoken purpose is to ensure that all those lovely properties stolen from the Church by Henry VIII will never have to be returned by the aristocrats who inherit them today. Francis’s family was anti-Nazi so, incredibly, the lad actually spent years in concentration camps.
About the same time as our king, Edward VIII, was visiting Germany for another reason.
All a bit chancy, even arbitrary, isn’t it.
So what’s all that codswallop about “collective loyalty”?
Bingo.
I may be guilty of taking Marriott out of context - I've not read the whole thing, just the section quoted above - but the conflation of the "side hustle" with the supposed/imagined pressure to be "special" feels particularly unhelpful. When I went to university, it was actually in the rules of the institution that students weren't allowed to have part-time jobs, because they interfered with us being able to focus on our coursework. There was a grey area where working for money for a few hours a week in one of the college libraries was viewed as acceptable, but that was it. Of course, this was in the era of means-tested maintenance grants, and the state paid the course fees - a halcyon and byegone era, and one I remind myself every day to be thankful for having lived through and in. With some creative use of my first credit card, an interest-free student overdraft and the income from those library stints, I was able to enter the world of work without accruing any significant debt. Today's cohort aren't being forced into thinking they're special: they're being forced to work several jobs while in higher education just to try to emerge at the end of the course without amassing the kind of financial burden I didn't have to take on until I bought a house. Mannion looks like he's young enough not to have had the same opportunity I had: but even less reason, then, you'd imagine, for him to not realise that "side hustles" aren't things students dream up as a form of self-aggrandisement, but as a necessary device to help them make it to the end of their course without facing financial ruin. If there's pressure being placed on them to do more and be more, that's not coming from within; it's from a society that has apparently arrived at a position where it places such a low value on education that it thinks of it as some sort of luxury lifestyle choice which should be paid for by the children and young people who are experiencing it, rather than by the whole of that society, despite the benefits to us all of educating our younger people being abundantly, if not head-bangingly, obvious.
He’s 30 but he writes the arguments of a sclerotic and uninformed 80-year-old to cosplay as not the like the other youth for a Times audience of shobs, snides, and shits.
I've never understood the "Bringing the Country Together" thing.
It’s a propaganda phrase that falls apart on inspection.
They all do it, Tory, Labour and I just want one interviewer to say 'But what does that actually mean?"
I wouldn’t want this to go to your head nor nuffing but you’re single-handedly (OK, props to Dr Kate) loosening the stranglehold that the MSM’s Wagner disinformation units have on the way we live now.
This morning’s guerilla raid on Sky News was, frankly, thrilling. No idea how long you can keep this up but it feels like a breach in the wall that is going to grow. Look after yourself, Mic. They won’t take it lying down. . .
❤️🙌🍺
(Late comment, but while I'm on a backreading spree): I write about the wild world of digital marketing for a living and it's absolutely astounding how people will cite statistics without bothering to check where they came from. And then you look up the source and it's from 2013, which is a solid 10 years out of date. Or they'll cite it in a way that just slightly distorts the meaning, and someone else cites it from *them* in a slightly distorted way, and so on and so forth until you're looking at a "stat" with no factual basis that completely fails to resemble the original. Another pet peeve is people citing publications as the sources for a stat or study when they just quoted it, leading to a rabbit hole of old and often broken links to find the original. But almost no-one bothers to do this type of fact-checking. I've made debunking spurious marketing stats a bit of a speciality but it feels like shouting into the void most of the time. People don't care as long as it sounds good and props up their argument nicely. [/End rant]
Actually, I forgot a point: earlier in the Covid pandemic, it emerged that a fundamental misunderstanding about how Covid was spread/could spread was based on a fact about "droplets" that no-one had bothered to check the evidence for. I wasn't remotely shocked. It seems even academic researchers are guilty of not checking what they're sourcing.
It is endemic!