Not necessarily forced. My friend’s mum used to wear a burqa when she lived in Pakistan because she didn’t like being stared at by men when she walked down the street. She doesn’t wear one now she lives in the UK because here people stare at you because you’re wearing a burqa. The fact that she couldn’t walk down the…

Good lord, that’s even worse than in the UK. I didn’t understand the national hysteria at the time (to be fair, I was about 9) and I understand even less why anyone outside the UK cares at all.

She was much younger, very sheltered and naive and essentially manipulated into a marriage to a man she thought she loved at the time, but who did not love her. And was also the crown prince. That’s the popular narrative anyway. Even if it’s not true, the power disparity entering the marriage is obvious.

Yeah, I mean really all you should be trying to do is create districts with roughly the same number of electors in them, disregarding who they are likely to vote for. But there’s so much baggage from previous gerrymandering and malapportionment (the bigger problem in the UK) that trying to sort out the mess now is…

Wouldn’t a fair and democratic system be one in which you don’t take voting patterns into account when creating district boundaries though? The boundary commissions in the UK aren’t allowed to consider them, and are independent. It doesn’t eliminate the problem of gerrymandering, but it does reduce it.

Please forgive an ignorant foreigner, but what justification do they come up with for districts that look like this? I mean, it’s pretty fucking obvious what they’re really doing, but do they even try to deny it?

I dunno. When I was a wee’un a bottle washed up onto beach near my house with a postcard and contact details from some Scottish kid. We sent him a postcard back telling him where his bottle ended up (Northern Ireland). It was quite nice.

Well that’s interesting. In Ireland, Paddy is pretty much just a name. Unless it’s being said by an English person, I suppose.

I assumed it was referencing rounding up Irish drunks, but the New York police connection makes sense. Honestly, I’m not offended by the term. Through googling it I found out that there’s a company running day trips in Ireland called Paddywagon, which is so fucking Irish and makes me proud of my countrymen.

Is the origin of the term “paddy wagon” what I think it is...?

Gravy?

Beware the great Sky Lemming

That’s definitely possible, but this is coming from GOSH’s statement rather than the media.

That’s complete nonsense. The MMR autism scare was started by Andrew Wakefield in the 1990s, and his fabricated data. It’s not based on facts, it’s based on lies. The stuff about vitamin D and autism only came out about a decade later. I dunno where you got the idea about vitamin D antagonists in vaccines. The only…

Definitely. I’ve had discussions with my Christian friends about how the churches in the middle of Cambridge with high student attendance tend to change drastically from year to year.

But it is not a fact that vaccines are linked to autism, many people believe this unconnected to allergic reactions. Belief in iridology or crystal healing is not based on facts. People can have opinions that are firmly rooted in bullshit, not fact.

Huh. Our Christian Union was quite evangelical - they had a bit of a thing about Catholicism, but no cults that I ever encountered.

Holy shit, where was that? The most I had to put up with was a guy from the Christian Union trying to give me a St Mark’s gospel, and one excruciating “open mike night” in the bar.

We can explain it though. It’s due to the functioning of the neural networks in the brain. There’s a wide body of literature on the subject. We use our understanding of consciousness and thought to rehabilitate patients after brain injury. It’s to something we can understand intuitively, because we think from inside…

Mate, if it’s wrong it’s not a fact.