frankPodmore

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

Nope. I only buy stuff I need.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

Trail running shoes. Nearly wore them down training for a half marathon, so they might also be the next thing I need!

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

At the very least, it means the Tories will have some serious headaches about which seats to put resources in to. Good news for any opposition party!

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

And this is why Starmer isn’t being ‘bolder’, for those of us who were wondering.

The rapid expansion of ULEZ to the suburbs is a bold policy. Everyone knew it would be controversial but Khan went for it anyway because it has already been shown to be highly effective (London’s air quality has improved faster than anyone thought possible since the earlier expansions of ULEZ).

The result of this unequivocally sensible policy? Of a politician taking bold but effective steps to improve public health and quality of life? Labour lose a winnable seat.

Politics isn’t fair. Starmer knows it.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

No one thinks like that because it makes no sense. Even if someone already thinks Starmer is a ‘low fat Tory’, they would then have to say to themselves:

‘I’m not so sure about the Tories, so I think I’ll go 100% Tory instead of slightly Tory, that makes sense.’

We already know why they didn’t vote Labour: it was ULEZ. We don’t need to come up with these incoherent fan theories which involve people not being able to follow their own thoughts from one end of a sentence to the other.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

I saw some people pointing out that Uxbridge has a big university and all the students have just gone home for the summer. We shouldn’t put too much emphasis on hypotheticals but it genuinely could’ve swung the by-election for Labour if it had been held during term time.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

What they (and Labour) should do is make a purely cosmetic change, push back implementation by six months and scream about it. The ULEZ already won’t affect most of the people who voted against it, we just need to do literally anything that makes them realise that!

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

I know we go on about Keir Starmer being lucky in his opponents, but is any politician in the world luckier than Sadiq Khan?

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

Thanks! I do think Khan’s a drag on Labour’s vote in the city and comparing these two polls suggests I’m right. He’s certainly never outperformed what you’d expect from ‘human with a Labour rosette’ and is arguably now underperforming.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

I’m 100% going to vote for Khan anyway, to be clear!

My issue with him is that I feel like he lacks distinctiveness. Other than the hopper fair, what policies has he really brought to the table? He did manage to eventually get rid of Cressida Dick, which was good. And I’m happy with the expansion of bike lanes and LTNs (I’d like them to go further), but those were pretty much baked in by his predecessor or enforced by the Government. On the negative side, there was Silvertown, a disaster waiting to happen which he could’ve prevented.

Obviously, the mayoral role is pretty powerless, but he could use the soapbox better, IMO.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

I thought she said to release the deuterium from the nacelles (of the Enterprise), but to destroy the mining station (as @cybervseas points out, Pike confirmed the latter order).

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

I like that they did the Kirk/Spock meet as an almost throwaway thing, rather than trying to make it a big deal. We already know it’s a big deal, so any attempt to increase the drama would’ve made it cheesy, IMO. Plus, we’ve had lots of media about their friendship, already: we know it inside out. Instead, we got to focus on Kirk’s relationship with a different legacy character, one that hasn’t already been explored to anywhere near the same extent.

Although, on that note… was anyone else hoping the ‘doctor on the Farragut’ Kirk referred to was going to lead to a cameo from Bones? I don’t remember if they served together pre-Enterprise, so it might not have been strictly canon!

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

I assume that they didn’t always speak that way, but as their language evolved it became gradually more dense with allusions, until they took over entirely.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

If you don’t know how already, learning to read guitar tablature (tabs, for short) or sheet music, will probably be necessary, unless you have an incredibly good ear! There are a lot of good explainers online for how to read tabs. I’m sure ultimate-guitar.com (mentioned elsewhere in this thread as a great source of tabs) has some how-to lessons.

I also find songsterr really helpful for learning songs, especially really getting the timings down precisely.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

Did you let their tyres down?

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

More’s the pity.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

Yes.

I suppose what I’d ask you is: are you an expert in urban or transport infrastructure? Because, if not — and I say this in the politest way possible — the argument you made was probably a fairly basic one that people have heard a thousand times before. Your gloss of it here as ‘trains cannot replace cars’ suggests to me that you’re not really engaged with the issue (nobody thinks ‘trains can replace cars’).

Essentially what you did is the equivalent of me going into a Christian community and saying, ‘But if God exists, why is there evil in the world?’ as though no Christian had ever engaged with that idea, then acting surprised when people started rolling their eyes at me.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

I think anyone who has a confirmed political ‘identity’ has almost by definition put more thought into politics generally and the position in particular than anyone who doesn’t have such an ‘identity’. I mean, I’m not conservative, but I imagine if I went to /r/Conservatives or whatever and posted ‘How come you don’t care about poor people?!?!?!?!?’ I’d get much the same eyerolling response as discussed above!

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

Lol, I hadn’t even noticed that. The pro-car people are uniformly rude and ignorant and all the anti-car people are offering polite corrections.

My faves are all the people going ‘How could I possibly run errands on foot/bike/public transport?’ I do that every day! How weak are these guys? Literally yesterday I ran a half marathon on the other side of the city then went for a meal out and used walking and public transport every step of the way… except for the 21k I did running.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

‘Cities should be better designed so that we don’t have to use cars’ is pretty much the manifesto of fuckCars and that’s exactly how most people have replied to this guy. It’s the pro-car people who are being rude and ignorant about the anti-car position.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

Yeah, we have the same issues with NIMBYism here. Labour have moved to an increasingly YIMBY national policy, but in practice lots of local councillors are scared of losing their seats to NIMBY campaigners from other parties. This is why I hate the Green party!

frankPodmore, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

So, fun fact, St Augustine, who is considered one of the Church Fathers, explicitly argued that if the ‘Antipodes’ (i.e., southern continents not connected to Europe, Asia or Africa) actually existed and had humans living there, that would prove the Gospel was untrue.

The reason for this is as follows: Christians of his era believed that the reason God had allowed the Romans to destroy the Second Temple and push the Jews into exile was to prepare the men of all nations (as understood at the time) for the coming of the Gospel. The idea was that the Jews had taken the Old Testament, and the prophecies of the Messiah therein, across the whole world. Augustine argues that if the Antipodes contained human beings who had never had any kind of contact with Jews, and therefore no contact with the OT, and no contact with Christians, and therefore no contact with the New Testament, either, that must mean the Gospels are false. Why? Because there’s no conceivable reason that a just God would have deprived entire civilisations of the chance of redemption.

Of course, we now know that at the time Augustine was writing (4th-5th century AD), there were literally millions of people who had never had the slightest contact with the Jews or Christians and, furthermore, wouldn’t do so for another millennium. So, per Augustine’s argument, all those millions were condemned to Hell (the concept of Purgatory didn’t exist at this point, but condemning them all to no chance of Heaven, just because they were unfortunate to be born a long way away from Jersualem, is clearly also unjust). Either God is incredibly unjust and unmerciful, which means the Gospels are untrue, OR the Good News wasn’t actually spread to all men, which must also mean that they’re not true.

The upshot of this is that one of the Church Fathers has, in retrospect, irrefutably argued that the Gospels are untrue. The amount of special pleading required to make out that, actually, the Maori or the Easter Islanders or [insert any other uncontacted peoples here] had an opportunity to accept Christ and somehow missed it entirely is far beyond any sane interpretation of the evidence.

Now, as you might have noticed, this hasn’t stopped people from believing in the Gospels. I don’t see why the discovery of life on another world would dislodge people from a belief that is transparently false when nothing else has.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

Fair point. I thought for a long time that the fact that Christianity simply couldn’t have spread over the globe for a millennium and a half after Christ’s death was a slam dunk argument against its core tenets, though. I cited Augustine here because I thought it was quite funny when I found out that one of the Church Fathers inadvertently agreed with me! It proved to me that my argument wasn’t a case of me indulging in special pleading or anything like that: it really is a good argument.

Fact is though that all of us, Christian or not, religious or not, find difficulties when it comes to justifying our core beliefs. We constantly adjust to take in new information without really letting it get at our fundamental ideas. I don’t see why discovering alien life would be any different for most people.

frankPodmore, 10 months ago

Yes, I always kind of respected the Mormons for at least trying to reconcile the existence of the Native Americans with the New Testament, beyond ‘the rocks testify’, but they also inadvertently showed how absurd the whole idea was by stretching every kind of evidence (biblical, linguistic, genetic, archaeological, etc.) so much to make it work! And of course even that didn’t seem to account for the Polynesians and… well, everyone else.

I was always especially fond of the idea that Jesus revealed himself to the Aztecs and they somehow got so confused that they ended up worshipping a giant feathered snake instead.