I've been having a think and I reckon we need to rebrand illegal immigrants. People don't like them because of the word illegal, it gives a very bad initial impression. Some just refer to them as 'illegals'. What should we call them?
Sort of semi related, I learned the other day that there is an organisation in Septicland for special needs persons and people with learning disabilities, and it is called the ARC. It used to stand for Association for Retarded Citizens. But then it got changed because "retarded" suddenly became a pejorative. Which it obviously is nowadays, but apparently there was a time when people didn't feel the need to soften language at every turn.
The same way, if somebody is coming from elsewhere to your country to live, then they're an immigrant. And if they aren't attempting to enter by legal means, then they are doing it illegally.
Not being a bigot or anything I know you'll tell me that I am. But when is all this softening of language going to end. Just wait till them sensitivity readers get their hands on thar Howly Bahble and decide that kids can no longer be told that Jesus healed a cripple.
>>71924 >IT USED TO STAND FOR ASSOCIATION FOR RETARDED CITIZENS. BUT THEN IT GOT CHANGED BECAUSE "RETARDED" SUDDENLY BECAME A PEJORATIVE. WHICH IT OBVIOUSLY IS NOWADAYS, BUT APPARENTLY THERE WAS A TIME WHEN PEOPLE DIDN'T FEEL THE NEED TO SOFTEN LANGUAGE AT EVERY TURN.
Didn't the charity scope used to be known as the spastic society? Is it ever acceptable to use spastic these days? I know spaz and spacker are obviously derogatory but is being spasticated an actual valid diagnosis?
"Idiot", "simpleton", "moron" and "imbecile" were all accepted scientific terms at one point. "Mental retardation" was a shiny new euphemism back in the 1950s, but the journey from euphemism to slur is almost inevitable if the word becomes widely used.
"Spasticity" is still the accepted medical term to describe muscles that are chronically and abnormally tense, deriving from the same root as "spasm". Some people with cerebral palsy experience spasticity, but the disorder causes a much wider range of movement problems that vary from person to person - problems with balance and coordination, weakness, tremors etc. Rosie Jones has ataxic cerebral palsy, so it'd be scientifically inaccurate to call her a spacker, because she's wobbly rather than spastic.
Google says the medical term that's still used is spasticity for all defects that present with a particular kind of skeletal muscle stiffness and impaired mobility of the affected limbs.
There was a lass at uni who was incredibly hot, but who had a spastic hand. She was fine otherwise, and you didn't really notice unless she reached for a book or a door handle. After a few beers my mate and I used to joke how it must have felt to have her wank you off with that hand, but it turned out that it wasn't her dominant hand, as she was in fact left handed we did not find out by actually having her wank us off.
My parents were friends with a couple who had a mentally disabled young son. My nan was a social worker for the council in her working life and often dealt with people with disabilities, and when their son was barely a month or two old, my nan was able to spot some peculiarities in the boy's behaviour long before everybody else, and one day she said to my parents, "I'm afraid your friends are raising a cretin".
Cretinism is actually an illness that's caused by a lack of thyroid hormones and can cause delayed or reduced intellectual development. But it's another one of those words you can't use anymore nowadays.
Apparently Derby used to be the town with the highest rate of cretinism in the country, because it's the furthest inland, and thus inhabitants had the least fish in their diet. so you could say people from derby are cretins.
In total, yes. In terms of biomass by volume, possibly not. In terms of biomass accessible through non or low-level commercial fishing, definitely not.
So about 96% of water on earth is saline but about 10% of fish caught are from fresh water, that suggests there's more fish by relative volume in rivers than the sea.
We should callthem "Unlawful Immigrants", because it sounds a bit more meek like how it's "unlawful" to smoke a bifter right outside the main entrance of a hospital, but not "ILLEGAL", innit
Look at where the money goes and the CEO of Serco lads. There's also a market for people smugglers based in the UK's lax migration rules also OCGs that take advantage of migrants or on the other hand migrants form crime groups themselves which becomes a bit of a bun fight. Badri 313 are already here, whilst our government is currently at a negotiable detente with the Taliban, all it takes is a school teacher in Batley to show a ramadan bombathon Nanook to his class and wait a minute...
You might as well ask "Why are City Centres being flooded with shitty Student Living tower blocks"? Because it makes money for Landlords. This is also why there's no real desire to stop slavery gangs coming over on boats, because those HMOs what they live in where there are twenty bunk beds squeezed into a kitchen make landlords a fucking fortune.
>>71963 Your graph doesn't show an increase in student numbers. It shows an increase in non-EU students. I'm sure if you try really hard you can think of a reason universities might have accepted more non-EU students in recent years.
A cynical man might say it's being exploited by people who won't go into skilled professions but will hang around in the informal economy for a few years. He might even claim that universities have an incentive to encourage this.
Merseyside akshully, but this points to the prevalence of the problem. No doubt every City is seeing such developments spring up. The title of "Windy City" will no longer belong to Leeds!
The University of Liverpool has more students at its campus in China than in Liverpool. Have we considered the economic possibilities of moving the whole of the UK to a greenfield site in China? Those mad bastards could probably build a 1:1 scale model of Britain for about the same price as HS2.
>>71973 How did the Open University fail to clean up as courses went more online and dispersed? They had a decent enough reputation, everything was already running with a majority distance learning element and summer schools, and - well - nothing?
People don't pay £9,000 a year to learn, they pay £9,000 a year to gain a credential that carries a certain social status. The OU provides a route into higher education for people who might face barriers to accessing traditional universities - mature students, people with children, people with disabilities or mental health problems - but this inevitably carries the stigma of being a second-rate option for second-rate people. An OU degree is a big step up if you're in your mid-thirties and you're stuck in a dead end job because you've got no qualifications, it's a big step up if you're a young single mum, but it's a big step down if you're 18 and you've got a conditional offer from a redbrick.
To invoke the inevitable class war argument, the OU was designed from its inception to serve the needs of the working class, which is why the middle class won't touch it with a bargepole.
I'm also well old for using archaic slang like "innit", but I speak to enough young people to know that they're incredibly stressed and feel like they're walking a tightrope without a safety net. Binge drinking and teenage pregnancies are at record low rates, but anxiety disorders are through the roof.
Until a few years ago, you could spend your time at uni pissing about and finishing with mediocre results, and you would still get a job afterwards. Nowadays, competition is tight on the job market, and you need to have all kinds of stand-out qualifications and experience already by the time you leave uni. It doesn't leave much room for all the lighter sides of being a student which past generations enjoyed.
>>71981 >UNTIL A FEW YEARS AGO, YOU COULD SPEND YOUR TIME AT UNI PISSING ABOUT AND FINISHING WITH MEDIOCRE RESULTS, AND YOU WOULD STILL GET A JOB AFTERWARDS.
As someone who graduated two years after the financial crisis all I'm gonna say to that is ell oh ell.
>>71982 To this day, I don't know where my job went. I think you just need to suck a dick I didn't suck to get one of these jobs. Nobody needed me in 2008. I did, however, get my first entry-level IT job when I was 28 because the company insisted that everyone should have a degree from a Russell Group university, and the fact I had such a degree in Psychology and had spent eight years flitting between factory work, call centres and NEETism was less relevant than where I spent my late teens. So it wasn't a total waste of time.
>>71975 THERE'S A LOT TO BE SAID ON THIS ACTUALLY COMING FROM SOMEONE WHO WENT THE OU>PROPER UNI ROUTE HAVING ALREADY DONE MY FIRST DEGREE-LEVEL COURSES AT OU.
FUNDAMENTALLY INDIVIDUALS STILL DON'T THINK OF THE OU AS AN ACADEMIC OPTION - LIKE QUAKERS THEY'RE AWARE OF IT BUT NOBODY CONSCIOUSLY THINKS THAT IT'S FOR THEM. I ONLY ENDED UP ATTENDING BECAUSE I HEARD ABOUT IT FROM SOMEONE ELSE WHO WAS IN A SIMILAR POSITION OF HAVING MESSED ABOUT IN SCHOOL AND THE FEES WERE BACK THEN LOW-ENOUGH THAT YOU COULD RISK DOING A SHORT-COURSE TO SEE IF YOU LIKED IT.
THE PROBLEM THAT THEN EMERGES ONCE YOU START IS THE SAME YOU GET WITH APPRENTICES WITH 'WELL-MEANING' ADULTS. I DISTINCTLY REMEMBER MY BALANCING ACT OF WORKING A RECEPTION JOB WHERE I WOULD STUDY AT MY DESK, VOLUNTEER IN THE EVENING, DO COURSES IN ADDITION TO MY DEGREE AROUND TERM BREAKS (A NICE SYSTEM OF STUDYING LAW AS MY MAIN WITH FINANCE AND METEOROLOGY), READ PHILOSOPHY AT QUITE AN IMPRESSIVE CLIP AND THINK ABOUT KILLING MYSELF. IT WAS A GOOD LIFE FOR A YOUNG ADULT AND A PHASE IN MY LIFE WHERE I REALLY WAS TURNING THINGS AROUND - BUT EVERYONE AROUND ME FELT THAT THEY NEEDED TO ADVISE ME THAT I 'SHOULD BE IN SCHOOL' AND YOU'VE GOT TO DEAL WITH THE WHIMS OF MANAGERS AND OWNERS WHO ARE MASSIVE CUNTS* WHEN EMPLOYEES DO THINGS THAT THEY DON'T SEE AS AN IMMEDIATE BENEFIT.
I REMEMBER THE MOMENT WHERE I DECIDED TO JACK IN THE OU AND GO TO A PHYSICAL UNIVERSITY WAS SITTING ON THE FLOOR IN THE STAFF MEETING OF A STATIONARY COMPANY - THINKING TO MYSELF THAT I'D SPEND MAYBE 6 YEARS IN TOTAL WORKING THESE EMPTY JOBS WHERE I WAS TREATED LIKE SHIT. I'D BE RECOGNISED A LOT OF THE TIME, ESPECIALLY WHEN I USED WHAT I LEARNED STUDYING FINANCE BUT THERE'D ALWAYS BE AN IMMUTABLE BARRIER I'D HIT WHERE I WOULDN'T BE ALLOWED IN THE CIRCLE. I STILL RECOGNISE IT WHEN I TALK TO APPRENTICES TODAY WHERE NOTHING IS DESIGNED FOR THEM AND THEY'RE TREATED LIKE IDIOTS BY EVERYONE. ALSO, OBVIOUSLY IF YOU GO INTO FULL-TIME EDUCATION YOU CAN LIVE SOMEWHERE NEW RATHER THAN FEELING STUCK IN YOUR HOMETOWN AND THERE ARE YOUNG STUDENT GIRLS.
IT'S A SHAME REALLY AS THE OU DOES OFFER A MODEL FOR HOW SOCIETY SHOULD WORK, ONE WHERE ADULTS CONTINUE TO LEARN ACROSS THEIR LIFETIME WITH COURSES THAT ARE FLEXIBLE ENOUGH THAT YOU CAN STUDY WHATEVER YOU WANT WHILE STILL HAVING THE PATHWAY DRAWN OUT THAT WILL TURN CREDITS INTO A DEGREE. ONE OF THE BEST BITS BEING AS WELL THE CULTURE AROUND IT WHERE YOU'RE TREATED AS AN ADULT THROUGHOUT AND GIVEN A SINK-OR-SWIM RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR STUDIES - SOMETHING THAT REALLY FRUSTRATED ME WHEN I BECAME A GENERIC STUDENT. BUT WE'RE NOT ALLOWED THAT AND THE OU COURSES ARE NOW SO EXPENSIVE THAT THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN OUT OF REACH FOR SOMEONE LIKE ME.
>NAH, BUT WHAT ABOUT CHINA AND THAT INNIT
OH, IN THAT CASE IT'S JUST THAT DISTANCE LEARNING HAS A HORRIBLE INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION OF DEGREE MILLS. THERE ISN'T AN INTERNATIONAL EQUIVALENT TO THE OU. IT'S A UNIQUELY BRITISH SOLUTION AND AS A RESULT IS GOOD IDEA THAT IS HORRIBLY IMPLEMENTED DUE TO A LACK OF RESOURCE.
*I DISTINCTLY REMEMBER LEAVING ONE JOB WHERE THE RICH-KID OWNER TURNED AROUND AND TOLD ME I COULDN'T USE THE INTERNET OR MY LAPTOP AT MY RECEPTION JOB AND A NEW DESK WAS PUT IN WHERE I WOULD STAND ALL DAY. NEEDLESS TO SAY I QUIT ON THE SPOT. FUCKING CUNT, HE WAS IN HIS 40S AND LIVING OFF DADDIES MILLIONS SCREWING WHORES AND CRASHING EXPENSIVE RENTAL CARS. HIS BUSINESS OF COURSE WENT UNDER SHORTLY AFTER.
The student fees in England are a fucking travesty for the open uni. It's £500 a module in NI and I'm just paying for it myself, it's more than it should cost but I can easily budget for it.
I think it's great, but I've already tried and then dropped out of uni before.
>>72003 The same reason we don't call "over there" "here". They are expats to people from their country of origin. We could call them nupats or inpats maybe.
>>72003 Because they're not expatriates of this country. If an aussie moved here then people back in Australia could refer to them an expat, but it wouldn't make sense for us to call them an expat.
>>72002 I get the politics behind how we term... people-who-cross-national-borders-to-some-disquiet, but the concept of the 'undocumented' just make it sound like you're living in a cyberpunk novel to me. Or at least it doesn't mesh at all with historical immigration prior to the imposition of mass bureaucratic surveillance and reeks of the current American political environment.
It's something you'd justifiably use if we had ID cards and a totalitarian state kept the riff-raff contained in slums like in that episode of DS9. And in our current world it comes with many exceptions that point to it being a vague feel good term - if an immigrant loses their passport they don't become undocumented, it's really the norm in the less catalogued borders of the world, like part of the European Union's state lines, pastoralists migrations or the mountain bits of South East Asia etc. You'd be much better off just accepting that really it's a legal aspect at work whether or not you agree with the law itself.
