MeddleI think you are way out of line. You claim to have disdain for politicisation, yet that is precisely what you have brought to this thread. As a Scot I can safely say your personal prejudices are of minimal interest to anyone here.
All I am saying is that the Canadians do not deserve UK Government funding for their engine, as their little venture wasn’t exactly inclusive.
I can’t help remembering that Scotland had its own Lancaster for many years, but the museum closed and the aircraft sold off as low visitor numbers made the enterprise untenable.
Ironically it was a Canadian Lanc. Actually it is frustrating that I am just too young to have missed the Strathallan collection. I grew up ~ 10 miles way from the place. It doesn’t help that it was in the middle of nowhere, down some fairly terrible back roads. Also, from viewing images of it, it appears that the whole premise behind the museum was ‘fill a big shed with aircraft and the masses will come’, which is something of the same short sightedness I spoke of before.
The Canadian visit was a towering success, and was enjoyed by countless people. Maybe you should have made a bit more effort.
Enjoyed by countless English people. And, by your reckoning, I should have taken time off work and ponied up the cash to go down to the home counties to go to one of the villiage fetes the Lancs were turning up at.
MeddleI think there might be a ‘Primark argument’ in force with people that phone and drive. Everybody knows Primark goods are stitched together by children in the third world, but people still do it. You could probably sit all those offender drivers down in a test centre somewhere and get them to display remorse until the cows came home, but give them a few weeks and they would be back at it. Maybe this can be lumped in as a tragedy of the commons scenario. Using their logic, if it were just me that drove whilst having a phone conversation then all would be good, it is those other more feckless drivers that will have the accident.
The way I see it I’m an oddity because I turn my phone off at night. People live vicariously through their phones and we currently have a work place culture that makes you feel like you must be available at all times.
I’m thinking aloud here.
MeddleEvery cliche in the book.
MeddleIsn’t your last paragraph a little mealy mouthed considering the enormous pleasure they brought to hundreds of thousands all over the country.
Easy to say when you live in Kent.
I don’t think my last paragraph was mealy mouthed at all. An appearance of the two Lancs at a special event at East Fortune would have helped the Canadians pay off that Merlin bill a bit quicker for sure. To reduce their entire Scottish itinerary down to a couple of days is pretty insulting given their saturation of appearances over the home counties. I think the Welsh and the Cornish are every bit as entitled to the same opinion.
MeddlePrestwick – September
Highs:
The Catalina flying boat – a personal favorite of mine.
The Vulcan – got to hear it roar a couple of times, and amazing to see the thing in the air.
The atmosphere – it was great to see so many people young and old.
Lows:
An endlessly dull display from a lone Jet Provost, accompanied by an inaudible commentary that supposedly talked about the physics behind the display, as made interesting for children. A nice idea but executed terribly.
The gross politicisation of the opposing referendum party tents. The Better Together tent was down by the MOD and RAF tents whilst the Yes tent was parked in with the wee tents on the fringe (figuratively and literally).
No Lancs. Their one appearance north of the border was cut down to a couple of hours the next day. A little bit more contingency planning could have allowed a whole lot more people to see them, which might have helped defray the costs of that Merlin. If some people were able to see the Lancs three or four times with ease then it suggests that they spent far too much time darn sarf within a limited of the country. This doesn’t make economic sense, and for this reason I hope that the government has the common sense NOT to waste money on that Merlin as part of a project that was limited in scope by the stunted parochial little-englander attitude of too many within the warplane movement. As a Scot I can safely say it was our war too.
MeddleI’m not going to sign this.
MeddleI expect there will be some who claim it is their right to have the freedom to use their phone while driving…..
A somewhat hysterical post. I saw people getting their panties in a wad over ‘strawmen’ arguments last week. With this in mind, I’m assuming you are refering to my seat belt thread and therefore I can only conclude that this is a strawman argument you are presenting here. The notion that anybody would argue that it is their right to use their phone while driving is absurd, so you rightly ridicule it. The problem is that you are trying to use this obvious ridicule to discredit any argument made in the seat belt thread, which I see as a far less cut and dry issue. A few people over there seem to lack the critical faculties to get past the ‘but its common sense mate’ end of the argument spectrum, but I don’t see that as a reason to bitch about it tirelessly in unrelated threads.
Now, if driving without a seat belt somehow distracted the driver enough that they might kill a 3rd party then your argument would make some sense.
MeddleTo go off on a slight tangent, I saw an article last week about some ex druggy type who had taken to internet vigilantism. By posing as an early-teenage girl, he encouraged men to post indecent messages and then arranged to meet them. When these men would turn up, he and his junkie mates would film them and give the evidence to police. I think this is slightly dangerous, as it took the guy months to goad some of these guys into acting, and I wonder if these guys would have been much of a threat to young girls otherwise. Still, the ex scag-heads can claim they were ‘turning their lives around’, and the proles seem to love a good paedo witch hunt, presumably to take their minds off their own immorality for five minutes.
Brooks Newmark (I hate people who have two surnames for a name) spent his formative years in an all boys school, so probably isn’t that good at communicating with the fairer sex at the best of times.
MeddleTo use the slightly strange post formatting seen on this site:
Re #11
You will always have two apposing sides to any argument the problem comes with those who employ other means to make their own point more prominent than the other side.
A somewhat tautologous statement. By its very definition and argument has two opposing sides.
Re #10
I think the article has everything to do with the point I made. I mentioned ‘right whingers’, who I view as a different section of society from those with right wing views. The latter can argue a point well and the former get their jollies off on stupid puff pieces such as the one I linked to. Given the knee-jerk nature of the original post in this thread, I dare say it was written by a ‘whinger rather than a ‘winger.
When you post both the following statements…
“I’ve had enough of cow towing to the human rights of others.”
…and…
“I’ve had enough of my human rights being abused.”
then you cannot have it both ways.
All of this is overshadowed by “Ive had enough of our government sitting by and watching my country bow to these people.”
Which people? Just come out and say muslims, you coward.
MeddleThis sort of puff piece that gets rewritten and reposted every week.
MeddleThere I was thinking you slept with a copy of Atlas Shrugged under your pillow.
MeddleOf course, and for anyone with an ounce of intelligence that would be the case. But regrettably ‘sense’ isn’t as common as we would wish, so there had to be some coercion. But, at the same time a massive promotion campaign was run (featuring that nice Mr Savile). Both elements combined to contributed to the significant casualty reduction.
I’m going seat belt free in November out of respect for Uncle Jimmy’s victims. :highly_amused:
Here is the valid argument I see:
Laws should exist to protect society at large against the actions of individuals. Laws that exist to protect individuals from themselves, by shifting importance away from ‘don’t kill yourself’ to ‘don’t risk a fine’ don’t benefit society at large, and could be cynically interpreted as a simple means of drumming up funds for the police force. The way I see it, if I were to crash and kill myself, through nothing more than my own wreckless stupidity, then so be it.
MeddleThat all makes sense, to a degree. However I feel it moves the motivation to wear a belt away from common sense. I should feel compelled to wear a belt so that I don’t become a dark mark on the road when I crash, not because there is a law telling me to wear a belt. Surely you want an army of road users belting up in the morning because of the former, rather than the latter? Are you not at risk of kicking off a chain of laws that override common sense? How about a law that means you can get fined if you don’t tie your shoelaces? I tie my laces so that I don’t fall and break my nose….
Meddle“I’ve had enough of my human rights being abused.”
I thought right whingers hated human rights anyway, or is this part of the delusion that human rights only apply to guys with hooks for hands?
I always have to disagree with this one. The major perk of being the majority (in my case I’m a white, cis-gendered, heterosexual male) is that you have all the rights that minorities wish. I feel that marriage is an antiquated system and that my personal relationship with another individual is neither the business of the church or the state, but I can go marry my girlfriend next week! Gay marriage, as a concept, isn’t an erosion of my ‘straight rights’ in any way. Amusingly one of the biggest bible bashers in my parents’ church just got remarried an astonishing 18 months after his first wife died. Very outspoken wife number two is a divorcee from the American deep south. Seems some principles aren’t always set in stone…
To take a random pick of the pops here:
“I’ve had enough of seeing the sacrifices of our fore fathers being shipped down the river of political correctness.”
Utter ********. Was this thing written by a human or an automated headline generator set to ‘kneejerk’?
“I’ve had enough of my countries flag being removed from public building for fear of upsetting those that hate us.”
I guess you don’t live in Belfast. Flegs and kulture go hand in hand over in Norn Iron.
“I’ve had enough of internet sites being allowed to broadcast these atrocities.”
Whereas Stormfront and Vanguard News Network. Anyway I thought Theresa May was all for tighter internet control… and y’all hate her right?
MeddleI strongly disagree with these opinions. Wear a seat belt if you like, it might save you from injury or death but, why does it have to be compulsory ?
This is my issue here. I wear a seat belt every time I drive, and I would be an idiot if I didn’t. The Police can advise me to wear one, but I don’t understand why I can face prosecution if I don’t bother. I’m being punished for placing myself at risk.
I don’t wish to die in a road accident, so I will wear a belt every time. When I worked for the Royal Mail I saw many of the guys in the van not bother. The logic being that for every mail bag dropped off, the ‘clunk click’ would add up to a whole extra five minutes on shift. This issue arises because the RM pay you to work a shift, say 5:30 to 14:30. Therefore you are motivated to finish at 13:00, knowing full well that that extra 1hr 30 can be spent at home, or down the pub, whilst still on the company clock. Petty. However, the post men obviously didn’t consider it a risk, though in the days of sliding side doors one of the boys had toppled a van whilst turning too quickly, not been wearing a belt, and slid out and under the still toppling van to become a dark mark on the road and little more. Again, he was the only victim of his own crime here.
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