Brendan

My suggestion would be to use private school standards as a benchmark for state schools to bring them up to a point where they compete on equal terms. This can be done but will require actual will from the political class to improve education rather than just use state education as a political battle ground while they send their kids to private school. As for the nepotism and bigotry of the financial elite which is the other barrier to social mobility. Well for that I would recommend swift and decisive violence.

About a gagillion pages back in this thread we were talking evolution and I made the point that our understanding of how evolution works has developed significantly since Darwin and that it is not as completely random as he though. That life has evolved the ability to evolve. I don?t think anyone believed what I was saying, preferring not to threaten the stability of their world views by questioning the definitiveness of 150 year old science. At the time I thought about pulling some research together but couldn?t really be bothered. Now this Oliver Burkeman fellow has written an article on the subject: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/19/evolution-darwin-natural-selection-genes-wrong To quote him, ?But in the culture at large, we may be on the brink of a major shift in perspective, with enormous implications for how most of us think about how life came to be the way it is.? So there!

Call it Eleanor. Or Steve.

See, sex is funny.

Oh yeah and, willy!

You watched Question Time last night and this was the thing that pissed you off the most about it. Seriously? What about the absolutely disgusting, we?re right because we?re right and we can shout louder and we have more money, approach to party funding that the conservatives displayed so proudly or the foul patronising shite Margaret Becket spouted while defending Gordon Brown?s misleading of the Iraq inquiry on defence spending. (Turn the sound down take a look at this woman?s body language and how contrary it is to the sentiment her voice is expressing) The blatant aggression Andrew Lansley showed towards the Green Party as if they don?t even have a right to exist in a world that obviously belongs to him and his. I won?t even get into David Starkey?s bombastic, blithering jingoism. It was just embarrassing. I?m going to need a fucking long wall come the revolution.

Is that a euphemism?

What about that woman?

Dessert Island The Slim - Sugar American Pie ? Don McLean Strawberry Fields - The Beatles Brown Sugar ? The Rolling Stones Candy Rock Store ? Led Zepplin Cherry Pie ? Warrant Tapioca Tundra ? The Monkees Big Cheese ? Nirvana EDIT: Because while copying and pasting directly from steveo is easy I decide on reflection not to deify the Beatles.

That?s probably why he isn?t funny on the wireless. You can?t see his podgy face with it?s tiny caterpillar of facial hair that worms its way around his mouth. Oooh get me giving it all that with the bitchyness.

Yeah I know. People are cunts.

He?s funny ?cause he?s fat.

Yah yah. So they do.

Oh no. Don?t you know that non-conformists are just jealous malcontents, attention seeking exhibitionists or both who only subscribe to their own version of conformity? Suggesting that they may somehow be more insightful than the general masses is an insult to all the good normal people out there who buy what they are told to, think what they are told to, dress how they are told to, listen to what they are told to, vote how they are told to? and torture people when they are told to.

It couldn?t happen in a free market anyway. The point is supply and demand. No matter how important a job is if there are lots of people willing and able to do it, it will be lower paid than one which only a handful of people are capable of doing. The issue people are shouting about in Britain at the moment is the already large and growing gap between the rich and poor. This can be addressed in a properly managed country.

What about remuneration on the grounds of social worth rather than social standing? Although personally I may be shooting myself in the foot with that one.

Ah you see what I was doing there was lampooning the neo-con tendency to brand anything vaguely approaching fair recognition of peoples' worth as communist or socialist whilst hopefully also making the reader question the fact that we immediately treat the term communist as negative without much forethought as to why. I thought just saying, ?Commie!? was far more succinct.

david_carnell Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > if you're > talking about professions and their social > worth/usefulness then refuse collectors come > pretty high in my book. Commie!

On a more practical day to day point though it is also worth acknowledging that a wide wealth gap restricts access to fundamentals. In Britain, a country awash with consumer goods and food, it is manifest in things like education and property. But it?s the same principles that make it difficult for people in India or Brazil to feed their children.

And right there we have the problem.

Jeremy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > It's not all about effort either. Some people have > the ability to do jobs which are more beneficial > to society than others. Should a bin man be > rewarded equally to a heart surgeon? Of course > not. No, of course not. But should their children both have access to the same standard of education?

You guys are kinda talking about the same things. Equality is really about equal access to opportunity (call it social mobility if you like). Trouble is that in the world we have inherited, access to opportunity is reliant almost exclusively on wealth, the distribution of which is grossly unequal.

That cunt? He?s signing along to Fields of Athenry with some Australians in the West End as we speak.

What sort of deposit do you need for a decent donkey these days?

Pope Steve was one of the better popes you know.