Tom Groat

It would be a counter push to what is described here.
Also, rather than nihilism I see in Trump, and Obama before him, the desire to follow a leader, to be part of a bigger movement. To give themselves to a bigger movement.
This is still out there and ready to be tapped into.

A very interesting read. But not one I really agree with. See the motivational slop on FB, the traction characters like Mandani get.
People still want something positive their lives. Lots of Instagram influences push positivity.
I see room for a moral, even spiritual revival.

Get on the mint tea!

While there is some truth in this, the media outside the MSM is not quite a lake of virtue. A lot of what gets allowed in to the MSM begins on the fringes, gains clicks and then has the door opened.
Media reform is a must - but across the board.

I don't know if Motherwell are the team to test out a brand new back line on... but time will tell.

It's Saturday! Post a cartoon TV series you love.

Once you put it an economic structure like this (see the military or prisons etc) it’s almost impossible to remove. It creates its own voting incentives.
It’s the same with universal health care - which is why the right opposes that.

Is that on a boat? Is it some futuristic Japanese thing?

Pirate Pete’s?

I remember this picture… but weren’t they eating flakes?

Planning here in rural Scotland, which has always been a mine field, now is flooded with fake complaints.

It might also be a time for the dems the progressives and the left in general to stain this in the right for a generation.
People still worry about communism and welfare queens.
The right has much more dirt, but so little of it sticks.

A great wee thread, also works for TV detectives.

Very much so.

Ah well, that would be me, then 😅.
Simply there is so little in the way of other avenues and schools being judged on their academic results. That puts pressure on the whole system to fire them, in prepared and unsuited, into an exam system.

That’s very true. My experience was seeing (mainly boys tbf) pushed to preform academically when they would have been happier in a trade, but told that avenue was not open.
Hence disillusionment and anxiety. Though anxiety in boys manifests as aggression or simply dropping out.

Went to FE, rather than on the job training, this is exceptional compared to the national average.
I feel the change to only offering academic progression to young people - along with SM is possibly the biggest driver of anxiety.
That’s based on my 20 years teaching.

That’s cool. My suggestion (and we are dealing with a point in time that you know much better than I do) was the pressure to pass exams to get into any form of FE puts more pressure on pupils than in previous generations.
I would suggest if it was expected at your school that the vast majority …

I take that. The 90s were not stressful on that level - my formative memories are the fall of the Berlin Wall, end of apartheid.
But I would gently push back on the idea that in the 70s 50% or more of pupils were expected to go to uni.
Stats just don’t show that.

And that translated into pressure on kids.
Now, you say at your school everyone was expected to get A levels and go to Uni.
Is this pre ‘97? In which case your school may have been and outlier. A good one, but, perhaps, not the norm?

And none of that was stressful?
Sounds pretty full on to me.
My memory of exams - I did mine mid 90s. Was they were just something that happened and then you worked out what to do after. But they were not the be all and end all.
Then as a teacher 2000-2020s.
Pressure on results became huge…

Your exams were not as stressful as they are now. I suspect there were many options - apprenticeships, large trade workforce with job prospects, available to your cohort. Making college and uni the be all and end all have made exams more stressful.

Recently discovered Heavy Pencil podcast.
It’s fantastic. Why is there not more scripted comedy podcasts?
It’s just all, let’s get some bros together and we’ll shoot the shit and it will be funny because we are funny!
And it’s not. A well crafted, scripted acted piece of comedy is so precious.

That’s a good one - though I’d turn 70 days in to just over two months.
And 190 years to just under two centuries.
The numbers really do boggle the mind.

In million seconds it will roughly the middle of the week after next.
In a billion seconds it will be 2037.

If you walk a million centimetres you’ll be, roughly, on the edge of town, if you walk a billion centimetres you’ll be in Brazil.

Had the feeling even at 2-0 that this was Chelsea v Leeds and they would get at least one scrappy goal. We needed another or to be more wise at 2-0. Would still want someone at the back with real experience.

He’s the most favoured of the current leading republicans. I’d say he’s the most likely to be the next president nominee…

Out of the current batch of senior republicans he’s the most favoured in the polls. He’s most likely to the next Republican president.

People getting enraged over whether or not something is "canon" for FICTIONAL stories will never not be hilarious to me

Most things that are supposed to be popular with young men are in fact wildly popular with men in their 30s and 40s.