Damn! I need a cigarette after those two! Thank you so much!
You wouldn't hear such an articulate response from a random Canadian, either. North Americans have been dumbed down, and stupefied, by factory outlet shopping, or something.
British people are just more sophisticated than we are. Its the accents.
Eh, I truly believe they might actually be smarter/less dumb. It's not just the charming accents; it's the ability to place current political debates within a wider context.
What makes you think the people on television are random? I would hope that any junior doctor at Addenbookes' would be articulate. That one is very obviously privately educated and full of the (justified) confidence of privilege.
If American TV got its vox pops from the commentariat here people would be saying how clever Americans were. But I promise you a random sampling in this country gets you largely fox pops.
With that said, I am very proud of our local hospital for booing Johnson out. But it is one of the best in the country and also perpetually broke because of his party's policies.
5: Yes. What about the referendum person with the kid? Where would you place her socially and educationally?
It's a good school and not too much of a reach with her SAT scores.
4: Even by that standard, they're both pretty damn great. "Should we never have another general election? ... Should we never play another World Cup? Seriously, that is just no argument whatsoever."
I don't watch enough TV news -- either in the US or UK -- to have a genuinely informed opinion, but my general sense is that UK TV isn't as advanced as US TV. In the US, our media have learned that viewers don't have the attention spans to track sustained commentary like the two-minute (!!!) discussion with the woman in the second clip. I wonder if local stations in the UK lead every day with 10-15 minutes of murder and mayhem the way they do in the US.
And of course, it isn't just people on the street. US pundits are likewise constrained from being too smart. "Jeremy Hunt literally wrote a book about how to privatize the NHS," she said. You can't say things like that on US TV. It's rude. It's ad hominem. It's old news. "Donald Trump literally bragged about grabbing pussies."
10 was more aimed at 5 than 4.
7. I would guess she was one of thhe organisers. Even if not, the organisers would have circulated talking points. She sounds very middle class (sensu Anglice), almost certainly a graduate. The programme would have picked her out because she knew what she was talking about.
It's a good school and not too much of a reach with her SAT scores.
You would think so, but I had some pretty good scores - plus a legacy - that were not enough to get me into Cornell during a demographic through. As it turns out, they also look at grades.
I dunno about people in these clips but I've had a bunch of experience with a slice of the English elite-ish legal/financial/political "public school" class over the last 3 years and IME they are stunningly more bloviating and incompetent than their IME American equivalents. First of all, as a general rule they can't fucking shut up and love to hear themselves talk ad nauseum. Second they can't reach ordinary normal decisions through just basic listening or dealmaking. I know that Americans can't say shit in the age of Trump bit man do I ever feel like our professional class is in better shape, and the morass of Brexit makes total intuitive sense to me now -- they're all morons who love to hear themselves talk for show.
are oral examinations a thing in uk schools? in one of the kid's ucb classes the prof announced last week that the final will be an oral (suspect this prof just doesn't want to read and mark up a bunch of essays, fair dos to him!) and the rest of the class freaked the fuck out bc oral exams are not a thing in us schools, but no prob for kiddo as they are very much definitely a thing in fr schools. anyways, for those who've been through an educ system with oral exams, prompt articulacy is going to be a muscle that can be put into play.
re: 14, i generally find the variation between the individual organizational decision making culture of clients greater than that between groups of clients put into the three buckets i have the most experience working with: 1 - us; 2 - uk; 3 - fr. although i currently have a uk client that does drive me insane by scheduling so so so so so many giant conference calls so that everyone can talk and talk and talk and never make any decisions. i landed once on a small grop of women in one office who were crisp, professional, good-natured, reasonable, decisive, my god those ladies do i miss them. biggest current fr client has hilarious decision making process mostly driven by insanely pyramidal structure of org with extra crazy from both their and my perspective bc i'm in charge of getting them through an extremely us-specific reg process that makes absolutely no fucking sense to them, a viewpoint i don't necessarily disagree with. us clients just a mixed bag, you know? really so much variation in institutional cultures. one client has a legal compliance officer who is originally from ir and terrifies me with her ham-fisted bluntness but the co seems to know this about her and tries to shield the outer world from her wrecking ball approach, but i'm pretty confident that is just her, not ir.
The phrase "ham-fisted" always makes me wonder just what the people who thought of it were eating.
15 - yes, my experience is almost all with fancily-educated men. There must be a group of sensible English women who Get Shit Done while shutting up about it somewhere in the picture or it's hard to see how they'd ever get anything done at all.
ha! that is a persuasive explanatory framework.
12: but not necessarily public school educated, I'm guessing. Maybe the kind of person who used to be Lib-Dem in North Oxford?
I'm sure the oral exams are most of the answer. The only oral exam anyone in the US will have is literally one of the final steps to complete a graduate degree, and we worry about them singlemindedly for months beforehand.
You can get around that by never finishing a dissertation.
21: No. You can complete your orals and then not write your dissertation.
Maybe that was it. It's been a while. I must have passed orals, or "generals" as we called them in Ohio.
I must have passed. My CV says "ABD".
I'm being interviewed tonight by a regional NPR affiliate for some big thing on transracial adoption for national adoption month. (They're actually recording Mara's birthday dinner as background sounds tonight and the interview will be in a few days.) I'm feeling a little bad about this because the accepted line is definitely that adoptive parents are supposed to refuse all interviews (because we already have all the power and control the narrative) and tell people to talk to adoptees instead, but this interviewer is also talking to adoptees and still wants an adoptive parent from my state, so if it weren't me it could very well be some colorblind Jesus-driven person....
I've also been interviewed at U.S. protests and the difference I see is not how articulate and sensible the speakers are but that they're allowed to make their arguments rather than just being edited down into soundbites. In my experience, you stand there in front of the camera and answer a bunch of questions but have no way of knowing which sentence or phrase they'll decide sums up what they want to show you saying.
one client has a legal compliance officer who is originally from ir
Iran? Iraq? Ireland? Investor relations?
I think it very much depends on who you're speaking to. Both of the people in these clips are well-educated, as you can tell from the accents (per the real Brits up thread). While I have no doubt that every fourth football hooligan could hold forth on the state of the world economy, there are just as many inarticulate and ill-educated people in England as anywhere else I've ever lived. (The accents do help, though.)
I liked both of these clips a lot, though. So smart!
12: but not necessarily public school educated, I'm guessing. Maybe the kind of person who used to be Lib-Dem in North Oxford?
My husband thought she was upper middle class and likely public school educated, not that you can always tell.
When we were watching the med student clip, I had him pause it because I thought she sounded exactly like someone else and he went on a five minute rant about how she sounded just like every other public school girl. (As he went to public school, I suppose he should know...) Meanwhile, I'm still annoyed I can't figure out who I was thinking of.
"There must be a group of sensible English women who Get Shit Done while shutting up about it somewhere in the picture or it's hard to see how they'd ever get anything done at all."
See, to me this just sounds like "I have already forgotten who the last UK prime minister was, if indeed I ever knew in the first place." The one great thing about the current Conservative party is that its doors are open to blithering incompetents of any age, class or sex. Sajid Javid and Priti Patel and Andrea Leadsom and Michael Gove and Theresa May and James Cleverley can rise to undeserved high office and smear shit on the walls just as well as David Cameron and George Osborne and Boris Johnson.
This is the best summary of Theresa May's legacy
17 is how Terry Pratchett sets up the witches vs the wizards. It annoys me a bit that he makes the head wizard more competant and less venal by the end of the series -- I think it's a less good reminder of what all-luxury-scant-responsibility actually does to people.
Same thing on a domestic scale in Diana Wynne Jones, especially if I read many of them in a row.
32 & 33; there might still be groups of out-class-members doing the real work, even if some out-class-members have made it into fail-upwards land.
re: 17
Those people exist and there are lots of them, but, since I stopped being an academic, I almost never come across them. I imagine they are much more common in the City or in certain professions.
I still work for universities and cultural heritage institutions, but, given those are massively pink collar institutions,* I spend most of my working life dealing with--in terms of decision makers and people holding the purse strings--smart competent women.
* which has its own problems, both for women and for not-women.**
** the number of times I've heard someone say, "We need to recruit more women into positions of influence" to a room in which (literally, not an exaggeration) 90% of the people in positions of power and influence are women.
The heroes of this 20 second video are Scots, but I wouldn't want to draw any conclusions from that. I must have watched it ten times over now, but still don't want to generalise.
28 - ireland
32-34 all v good points none excludes the others
37: I had heard that your people like to eat toffee apples around a bonfire on the 5th of November, or something like that, but this video clip makes me realize I do not understand your quaint customs at all, at all.
I'm still laughing every time I click on it. "I've got it. I've got it!" he keeps saying in a masterful voice at the beginning. And I swear there is a woman holding up a child to watch Daddy in the background.
37: to make matters worse, it is tipping it down while they're doing it.
|| OT but this is interesting https://www.citymetric.com/transport/birmingham-isn-t-big-city-peak-times-how-poor-public-transport-explains-uk-s-productivity
|>
37. The building they're standing outside of looks as though they're in a commercial area, which is even wierder. Maybe it's a hospital; that would be convenient.
41.2: I find it a bit hard to believe that secondary U.S. cities have better public transit than U.K. ones. Maybe I'm in a tertiary city?
It's very true that the bus is often hung up on traffic, but the total travel time can't get that long because you can just walk home if the roads are too clogged.
|| The headline writers for Slate never cease to amaze me. Their latest masterpiece, An Accordion Toilet Plunger Will Change Your Life.
Gosh! I was going to quit my job, leave my wife and go live off the grid, but ... maybe I'll order this accordion toilet plunger instead.
Why does an accordion need to shit anyway?
I think you are misreading. It's probably a plunger for a toilet that compresses and expands.
...and the octopus said, "Play it?! I'm just trying to get its skirt off!"
One that cinches around your waist, like a pleated skirt, so that you can just explosively shit all over your legs and everything while casually standing up? Weird but sure, if that's your bag.
Anyway, plumbing for musical instruments is tricky.
53: Let me be clear that it will not be changing my life.
Change wheezes along the gusts from the bellows of its expandable/compressible pleats as it is ejected.
Right, but that's too long to embroider on a throw pillow.
Unless it's pleated. Do keep up.
I think music has gotten worse, unless you don't count Ed Sheeran being everywhere.
Wrong thread, but I blame others for confusing me.
The threads are pleated. Do keep up.
You can pleat fabric but not thread.
_I think music has gotten worse, unless you don't count Ed Sheeran being everywhere._
I saw that 'what if no one remembered the Beatles movie', in which Ed Sheeran is a major character playing himself, and got to have the unusually meta experience of never having knowingly heard of or seen him, so I couldn't tell if he was a real rock star or invented for the movie. I think it made the movie much more entertaining.
He's not horrible or anything. Just too much everywhere. I don't know how you avoided him.
65: I saw another film in which he plays himself, Bridget Jones' Baby, and - even more meta - the joke is that the two main characters don't recognise him when they bump into him at Glastonbury and so tell him to get out of their selfie. I didn't recognise him either so the joke fell completely flat.
Hawaii likes him, but I can't remember any of his songs.
One of them is about bestiality. "I'm in Love with the Shape of Ewe."
so I couldn't tell if he was a real rock star or invented for the movie.
This made me laugh. And after all, he might have been invented for the movie: he has that generic, focus-group-tested sort of appeal. To its credit, that movie also has a cameo appearance by Michael Kiwanuka.
And the only reason why I did recognize Ed Sheeran in Yesterday is that I had previously watched Bridget Jones' Baby, and, like ajay, had failed to initially recognize him, so that the joke fell a bit flat for me as well.