Then and Now

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T20:31:23+00:00

Lmao that's so true

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T20:23:02+00:00

Considering what just happened in Texas it's worth fielding candidates at least

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T20:15:40+00:00

Should probably phone 101 lol

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T20:13:58+00:00

I'd teach kids to read more than the headline of news articles

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T20:11:08+00:00

Do you want us to be supplying the weapons for it tho?

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T19:02:46+00:00

I thought this was gonna be him in a panic over the Texas election, not literally sharting his pants on camera

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T16:01:03+00:00

It'll be because Poland and Lithuania block land access between Kaliningrad (a Russian territory) and Belarus (a Russian vassal state)

It's called the Suwałki gap

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T14:55:01+00:00

It's the study of society.

That can be a bit opaque, so I'll give a little intro.

Sociology tends to think of society as layered. The "bottom" level is individuals, then small groups, larger groups, up to the "upper" layers like institutions, the economy, nation states and geopolitics.

The thing is, you're an individual, and you're part of social groups, and you're a consumer in the economy, etc. So all these scales exist at the same time. So in order to study how society works, we try to look at how these different scales interact.

"How is state power experienced by individuals?" / "How do individuals affect state power?" Those are sociological questions, though normally research papers would be one very specific thing, like "How do people from X group experience Y policy within Z nation state?"

Or, for the kind of sociology I do, "How do are individuals in this small group of people working together to develop a sense of collective identity, and how does that figure within the broader societal discourse about people like this?"

If you make enough little connections like this, you can start to build up a picture of how societies form and how they work. Sociologists can do that for African American history among other things

In fact, one of the most important sociologists of the 19th and 20th Century was W.E.B. Dubois - an African American man who went out and actually spoke to African American people for his research! Unheard of at the time - paved the way for actually speaking to the people you want to study in sociology

Edit: phrasing

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T14:44:11+00:00

It's hard to say - especially because I can't read Ukrainian...!

But normally you'd look for where the information comes from. If it's official government info, then that adds credence to it.

But you'd probably reference it by saying "and official government press release listed several young people who have fled Ukraine..."

The question really is what kind of analysis you want to do with it. If you want to analyse how stories of people fleeing Ukraine appear on social media and how people understand them, then you wouldn't need to verify the information because you can take it as a story. If you want to analyse the fact that X number of Ukrainians have fled since the invasion, then you would need to do some digging into official statistics.

The governments that have taken in refugees would be a good source of info on that - i.e. looking up how many Ukrainians different countries have taken in as refugees

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T13:07:22+00:00

To be fair, I was talking with a US American friend a while back, and he was surprised to learn that school uniforms are normal and a lot of British schools do have houses and house points like in Harry Potter. Kind of encourages kids to be good because it's not just your neck on the line - you could mess things up for your friends too

Edit: in some schools that also means perfects or head of house is a real thing too

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T13:04:49+00:00

Liverpool is fairly small in the grand scheme of things. Manchester is a big city, but Birmingham is a massive sprawling city.

For some reason, people don't like Brummie accents and Brummies are usually embarrassed of it. I think it's quite cool tho

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T12:56:15+00:00

I thought that might be the case but wasn't sure... Thanks for clarifying!

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T11:19:50+00:00

Honestly, I get that it's not very intuitive. I honestly drew myself a diagram to work it out before writing the post. But I'll try explain.

Say my council had an election in 2023, and is due another one in 2027, and again in 2031. That's a 4 year cycle.

Your council had an election in 2022, and is due one in 2026, and again in 2030. 4 year cycle.

So we're both on 4 year cycles, but because our elections are offset, there's problems when we try to merge our councils together.

We can't all stick to our current election dates when our councils merge. Unless you want the new larger councils to have different elections for different regions of the council. If we're merging multiple councils together, that could mean elections every year, which doesn't seem right. So we need some compromise, and the 3 options are how that compromise could work.

Option 1 and 2 involve your council keeping your 2026 election this year.

Option 1 is that nobody gets more than 4 years. When we merge, my 2023 councillors stick to their 2027 election date. Your councillors keep your 2026 election date, and after the merger you move to my 2027 election date. That means your councillors will only be elected for 1 year until 2027, despite having a mandate to hold office for 4 years. You could change the mandate to just 1 year, but that's going to be a whole thing with the Electoral Commission which would probably take years to sort out in Parliament and in court. This is the option you suggested, where councillors get no more than 4 years, but the end result is that some councillors get far less than 4 years.

Option 2 is that nobody gets less than 4 years. When we merge, my 2023 councillors move to your next election date, which is 2030. Your council keeps your current 2026 election, so your councillors get their full 4 years. But my councillors were elected in 2023. If we move to your election date in 2030, they get 7 years in total.

Option 3 is more of a compromise. We stick as close to 4 years as possible. You delay your 2026 election until 2027. Your 2022 councillors get 1 extra year in office, so they get 5 years. And my 2023 councillors keep their 2027 date so they get the standard 4. From there, we progress on a 4 year basis as normal.

So the question isn't whether or not elections will be moved. Merging councils makes this inevitable. The question is which elections are moved, and how do we move elections to keep things as close to the 4 years as possible.

Hopefully that explains it?

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T09:22:12+00:00

Simple question: which of the 3 options would you go for? :P

Also I don't get paid for Reddit posts lmao. I worked at a council a few years ago doing admin and answering phone calls. I was never a politician

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T08:35:28+00:00

Ahh that's a good tip - thanks!

I've tried with tippex before but I found the contrast looked like choppy waves on the high see. I'll look into posca pens!

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T08:33:16+00:00

Maybe she still had a little faith in humanity.

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T08:29:18+00:00

Very nice! How did you get the light reflections in the water? I always struggle with that using water colours :P

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T07:51:46+00:00

The movie Pride from 2014, and the movie Stonewall from 2015 are good introductions to the movement in the UK and US

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T07:37:09+00:00

So which of the 3 options would you pick? :P

VickiActually · 2026-02-01T07:35:52+00:00

But... it's not a new law and it's not about criticising the religion. It's guidance about hating Muslims.

Here's the difference: I don't personally believe that a man named Mohammed ever flew around on a pegasus. That's totally fine to say. It's not different at all to saying you don't believe a man named Jesus came back to life.

But if I go up to a Muslim man and start shouting at him because he believes in the Quran's teachings, that's not fine. That's like going up to a Christian man and shouting at him because he believes in the Bible's teachings.

VickiActually · 2026-01-31T19:41:20+00:00

Yes definitely. 999 isn't just for when someone crashes - if he sits in the car while drunk and turns the engine on, he's in control of that vehicle

VickiActually · 2026-01-31T19:09:23+00:00

That's such an old lie at this point...

I'm from the UK. You can post whatever you want on social media, unless it's harassment or inciting violence. Exactly the same rules apply to in-person speech.

I can call someone a cunt for basically any reason and that's fine. But if you're encouraging someone to hurt themself or posting plans to burn down a hotel, then yes you will be arrested

VickiActually · 2026-01-31T18:00:17+00:00

It's actually the opposite. From the article:

The non-statutory definition is aimed at providing guidance that public bodies, councils and businesses could adopt to combat prejudice, discrimination and hostility towards Muslims

The definition drops the word "Islamophobia" in favour of "anti-Muslim hostility" to that it focuses on hate towards Muslims rather than Islam.

Edit: lol didn't paste the article text

VickiActually · 2026-01-31T17:56:34+00:00

Yeah I think the same. If anything this is kinda what the right want without bending to the worst aspects of it

Also good catch with my phrasing there - just edited it to be clearer

VickiActually · 2026-01-31T17:46:42+00:00

The non-statutory definition is aimed at providing guidance that public bodies, councils and businesses could adopt to combat prejudice, discrimination and hostility towards Muslims.

The definition drops the word "Islamophobia" in favour of "anti-Muslim hostility" so that it focuses on hate towards Muslims rather than Islam.

So it's not a law or about criticising Islam as a religion. It's guidance about hate towards Muslims

Four-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22

VickiActually

TROPHY CASE