Rum Doings Episode 227: What Do You Do If You Get Swallowed By An Elephant?
by John Walker on Oct.28, 2016, under Rum Doings
In our 227th ever Rum Doings, our topic is, with the end of the Great British Bake Off, what is left for Brexit Britain?
We discuss the magical futuristic technology of voice activated personal assistants, the peculiar national forgetting of what the Liberal Democrats did six years ago, and six year old antisemitism. We mourn the loss of Jack Chick, ponder the age of immigrants, and bitch about Plusnet.
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[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/227_rumdoings.mp3]
October 29th, 2016 on 09:47
Hmm so I would not like to defend Lib Dems and I would definitely not vote for them after the betrayal of everything they stood for in the coalition.
But you could argue that maybe with the new leader and having to pick themselves up after the drubbing. They could be a different, better Lib Dems
October 30th, 2016 on 12:12
I think John is being a little disingenuous when he says 2010 was a special year for the Lib Dems (they actually lost seats in the end). They nearly got a third of the vote in 1983 as well, and that didn’t amount to anything in terms of seats. The LD’s require a disproportionately large swing just to become the second-largest party, and that’s as true as it is now as it was in 2010 as it was in ’83. If you want to affect who’s in the government, the Lib Dems have generally never been the people to vote for.
Re Nick’s climate change celebration: if this were the case, shouldn’t we be seeing more or less stable global temperatures, as human activity cancels out the cooling effect of the glacial transition? I’m not an expert in any sense, but that seems like what the pattern ought to be for Nick’s argument to hold.
October 30th, 2016 on 22:18
I distinctly remember John stating a few months ago that with Labour in disarray and the Tories likely to become unpopular, that he hopes the lib dems find some morals and represent the disaffected center-left voters. It’s slightly confusing that he’s now a little miffed that this is exactly what they are trying to do (albeit in their own, unique ‘style’). (Not that I personally will be voting for them again, at least until Labour is back on its feet).
October 31st, 2016 on 16:58
“shouldn’t we be seeing more or less stable global temperatures, as human activity cancels out the cooling effect of the glacial transition?”
Well, let’s ignore the inconvenient “pause” that didn’t appear in any model (which would suggest that may be happening). I’m talking over a longer time period. Just because we’re overdue re-glaciation doesn’t mean it has to start again last Thursday. It could be in 10 years. Or 100 years. Or even 1000. But The fact is, the glaciation patterns of this planet are very clear. So it could be that we’ll over-shoot now, which will prevent the reglaciation cycle to begin. And then we cool a bit, but never reach full glaciation. Or maybe we’ll overshoot so much that we obliterate the glaciation signal. Either way, this’ll be fantastic news for civilisation, if we manage to sort out other problems, like massive soil erosion (unrelated to climate change) and so forth.