BF2S Forums America has lost the war in Afghanistan

the funniest thing is, australia has higher income tax and MUCH higher corporate taxes than the UK. i.e. the exact things i'm proposing and speaking in support of. you're evidently still drawing down handsome dividends from your investment portfolio in australian businesses. those corporate taxes aren't ruining the economy or sending hardworking CEOs into penury.

it's amazing what you accuse me of whilst not examining your own position at all. australia, who glided through the global financial crisis by pulling shit out of the ground, populating the landmass with more cows than people, and proceeding to export it all to asia like a good little client state. the wealth of your nation and health of your society, including state budgets, swelled and kept in the black because of fossil fuels, minerals and cattle. and yet a state which still charges nearly 2x the corporate tax of the UK and does damn well by it.

A comparison of personal tax rates across Europe, Australia and the US by Guardian Money reveals how average earners in Britain on salaries of £25,000, or “middle-class” individuals on £40,000, enjoy among the lowest personal tax rates of the advanced countries, while high earners on £100,000 see less of their income taken in tax than almost anywhere else in Europe.

but this state of affairs? only someone who is selfish would wish to see that change.

your flippant posts are a tell that even you don't believe in the shit you post here.

This is exactly the sort of thing that made facebook researchers such a problem during the anti-vax heights of the pandemic. Their web-researched opinions were "just as valid" as any doctor's.

They're backed up by better reading than wherever you get a lot of your unsupported conspiracy theories.

You can't remember anything though.

Dilbert_X wrote:

You can't remember anything though.

i don't remember the intricacies of your personal life, from things you supposedly said and did in your university and post-student days?

dilbert you are objectively one of the least interesting human beings i have ever encountered, sorry i haven't internalised your biography.

would it be better to take your approach and to obsess over details from my past and still get them wrong? lmao.

i sure as hell read much more widely and take things into more consideration than you. half the time your impatience nearly manifests itself as "i'm tired of experts" rhetoric.

Dilbert_X wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

They're backed up by better reading than wherever you get a lot of your unsupported conspiracy theories.

When you dig into them there's nothing there, like that pro-drug lecturer all of whose 'peer reviews' and citations circle back to him.

except at this point psychedelic research is a burgeoning field across dozens of institutions and hundreds of researchers.

why don't you 'dig into it' and check out some medical journals? like you are absolutely, verifiably wrong on this topic.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_y … as_sdt=0,5
1,580 results of published academic literature on 'psychedelic therapy' ... since 2022.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-27 02:33:10)

nobody but nobody characterises britain's style of government as technocracy or rule by experts. it has literally never been that? how are you so illiterate? once again, the model of a 'technocratic' government is something more like ENA in france and its vast bureaucracy.

you pillory the government for being made up of a near-hereditary eton-oxford toff elite ... erm, that's not government by experts. it's certainly not government by humanities academics and experts in any academic discipline. it's government by birthright and privilege.

"running it now"? the descent into populism and everyone cheering on tv personality boris, literally greeted at the time as our version of trump, was for you the inauguration of an era of so-called 'experts' running the show? where do you get this shit from, seriously? nothing about the post-brexit tory party has presented itself as technocratic or expert (except, possibly, rishi sunak in the last few days). michael gove, the co-leader of the brexit campaign, was the person who coined the fucking phrase "we are tired of experts", ffs. and he's been in and out of the cabinet continuously for the last 4-5 years.

you couldn't hit the broadside of a barn with your polemics sometimes. like, the UK is so easy to stereotype and bemoan about the fact that a caste of oxford hooray henry's have ran the show for almost its entire history. but, no, instead you get angry at *checks notes* history professors and the discipline of classics.

ironically it is the whitehall mandarins and great bulk of the civil service who have done the best job with a terrible and worsening situation in the last 12 years of tory rule. how many major ructions and scandals in the tory leadership were broken by disaffected civil servants or ethics/regulatory ombudsmen? the 'experts' of governance in the UK, such as they do exist, seem to be doing ok.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-27 02:44:11)

you are seriously a crank. shut up man. jesus christ.

it's possible for someone to get a 2:1 history degree and end up as a really bad politician.

it's possible to even get a PhD in chemistry and end up as an incompetent minister who doesn't even understand her portfolio.

but, yes, a field of hundreds of thousands of academics at dozens, if not hundreds, of elite institutions, publishing research across 1000s of journals, convening 100s of symposia and colloquia every year ... thoroughly debunked because 0.5% of oxford's graduates are on a privilege pipeline from Eton to Downing St.

get your head checked.

the most significant event of dilbert's life was getting over his depression or whatever and completing his undergraduate degree. so he assumes that 3 years of reading between ages 18–21 are equally as formative and significant for everyone else. the idea that someone could even study a postgraduate degree and go into a field or discipline unrelated to their undergraduate – which is never the deep, real stuff of any discipline, in the first place – is simply inconceivable to him.

i have friends who graduated in history or literature and went on to become, variously, management consultants or political thinktankers or ad agency gurus; who've spent the majority of their adult lives thinking about business, or politics, or advertising, not history/literature; or people who went to law school after their degree and spent at least as long as their undergraduate years qualifying into the legal profession. they certainly don't define themselves as 'litterateurs' or 'historians': their undergraduate degree was a stepping stone onto their adult vocation, not the thing that determined their views, talents, and personalities for all time.

there's something really too pathetic in a 50-year-old man pointing at other 50-year-old men and ranting at their undergraduate degrees. it looks totally bizarre. most people have fully fledged careers, influential life experiences, shaping events, perhaps even complete changes and reversals in direction/fortune, etc, in those intervening decades. but, no, for dilbert everything is frozen in time: at the moment of him getting a degree from Imperial. it's actually tragic to witness these arguments flopping out of his mouth. dictionary definition of a 'maladjusted' adult.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-27 04:02:59)

no, no, you don't understand. because every country has a tiny elite of poshos who glide through the best education that money can (quite literally) buy, it means that everyone who ever takes these courses is a dunce and the entire discipline is intellectually fraudulent. don't you see!

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-27 04:01:15)

no, it's not. it's called UNDER-graduate for a reason. do you know what that means? an honours degree in traditional academia is considered the minimum requisite before commencing an ACTUAL vocation as a scholar: that's what 'graduate school' is all about. that's why, on most graduate courses, taught or research, a major component is in teaching 'junior scholars' the skills necessary to do individual, self-directed research; and, in short, how to professionalize into 'an academic'.

none of that is taught on undergraduate courses. the business of the university, traditionally understood, is to produce scholars and be centres of learning. and nobody is even close to making an original contribution or doing proper, respected research after 3 years of 'under-'graduate study. it may happen, in the case of the odd savant or precocious student; but it's generally not the idea of undergraduate courses, which are synoptic and broad, not deep and specialized.

an undergraduate history or literature course will survey literally the entire field. undergraduates choose modules from a vast array of periods, areas, and sub-disciplines. the idea that they'll study anything at 'high level' is really laughable. you simply do not know what you are talking about. the entire idea of undergraduate humanities educations is to familiarise potential scholars with the broad sweep of the entire field.

once again you talk about the 'free MA'. it's an honorific title and nobody treats it as a master's degree as such. an MA from oxford or cambridge (or glasgow or any other ancient) doesn't mean diddly squat.

Its very weird and calls into question the standing of the people churning out these 'qualifications', and the other people who also hold them but aren't in government.

why does it? undergraduate education is a tiny part of their activities as scholars. supervising PhD students is a much bigger, and more proactive one. contributing original research and undertaking further study of their own is the chief part of the job. lecturing to rooms of green 18 year olds is not the primary activity of an academic, dilbert. academics' reputations and quality are staked on their own monographs and contributions to the field, not that they once gave a seminar to an undergraduate boris bloody johnson.

you talk such bollocks.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-27 04:43:52)

Dilbert_X wrote:

The point of an honours degree really is to have studied something in depth at a high level, been assessed on that learning to be sure its been understood, then been able to apply and extend that knowledge to produce a thesis competent and rigourous enough to be awarded an honours degree.

isnt honours just a research year after bachelors?