The Guardian is very openly pro-Lib Dem, actively participated in the slander campaign against Corbyn including the one where a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was deemed an anti-semite to try and taint Corbyn by association and its columnists very openly say of themselves as being “Opinion Makers”.

These people are the very opposite of a trustworthy and unbiased news source when it comes to left-wing politics in Britain, with the notable exception of Monbiot and Owen Jones.

Sourcing your “information” about internals of left-wing parties from traditionally propagandist hard-neoliberal news media is almost as bad as sourcing it from fascist tabloids.

It could be either way.

In a for profit setting when those who do the work are the very same people/institutions who measure the quality of that work (in this case schools which both teach something and then measure how well that something was taught), it’s not at all uncommon that the measuring methodology gets changed over time to yield better results for the same work rather than the work changing to improve the results in the existing measurement methodology.

This is why independent measuring of results is a thing.

In this case to know for sure we would have to get the opinions of existing medical practicioners who have worked side by side with recent graduates from these and other schools - if they tend to see graduates from these schools as coming in worse prepared than those from other schools, then this outcome we saw is probably due to the kind of situation I described above.

Every accusation [is] a confession

That is indeed something which has been very visibly and very often proven, again and again and again, in the last couple of years.

I reckon it was always so, but we just forgot it during the period after WWII and the ressurging of the far-right.

Relative to the moral pit which is to have one’s military activelly targetting children with snipers in Gaza and intelligence services involved for decades in a massive child-raping ring, “merelly” razing a cemetery containing graves of allied soldiers is pretty much a moral high ground.

What’s a little grave desecration for a nation of child murderers deeply involved in systematic child rape?!

There is very little in the domain of Depravity that Israel could to that’s more shocking than what we already know that they’ve been doing.

The “funny” thing is that anybody thinking that a mere 5 years ago would have been deemed a conspiracy nutter.

So are you disputing the fact that historicallly European Royal families have had a lot of inbreeding due to Royals mainly marrying Royals, or that specific fact is not one you care about?

Why do you care?

Do you know any of them? Are they your mates? Do you get paid for it?

Are you disputing the historical factoid I pointed out, or are you doubling down on being insulted in the name of a person you’ve never personally met in your life?

Well, there used to be a lot of cousins marrying cousins and such in European royal families, because Royals married Royals from other countries and over the generations pretty much everybody in Royal Families in Europe ended up being related in some way to everybody else, but I do hope the modern age with the end of arranged marriages and a much bigger tendency to marry outside the family has lessened if not outright eliminated that situation.

That said, I was making what should be an obvious joke anchored on that little historical factoid about European Royal Families, which you seem to have taken seriously and somehow felt insulted by in the name of a person I doubt very much you have ever met.

That’s two seconds more than I’m willing to spend looking up a member of a royal family, any royal family.

Also used to use the tram like everybody else, back in the day.

Meanwhile in the UK there are actually laws just for the Royal Family, like the one that temporary closes parts of the airspace for the Royal Family Helicopter to pass through.

Mind you, this is far from the only way in which The Netherlands has a far, FAR, FAR more egalitarian spirit at all levels of society and laws than Britain, and I say this as somebody who has lived in both countries.

The criteria of “significant achievement” is basically bollocks: for example Fred Goodwin who led RBS to pretty much bankruptcy (not quite as it was saved by the state) held a knighthood for “Services to Finance” which he got for merelly leading the bank he almost destroyed (though at least it was annuled after he almost destroyed it) and mandarins, politicians and public prosecutors get theirs for nothing more than doing their job without being brazenly incompetent, something which is only a “significant achivement” if one expects extreme incompetence for the vast majority of such people hence doing one’s job without ending up in the press for massive incompetent is a “significant achievement”.

From my point of view (as an immigrant who lived in Britain for a decade, and thus having not started with any respect or lack thereof for the Honors System), after a couple of years I concluded that whilst the folklore surrounding it was all about if being about honor (hence the supposed criteria of “significant achievement” and the very loud giving once in a while of one to a very visible public personality such as an actor for being a famous person who did their job in a competent manner), the reality of it was no such thing and de facto the criteria were highly skewed by the social class a recipient originated from and their level of contribution to “keep the boat steady and stop it from being rocked”.

Certainly when it comes to peerages the Honors System bares no relation to honor or any kind of achievement that goes beyond “having a specific job and not end up in the press for being exceptionally incompetent at it”.

I think that if one would blindly throw a stone in the middle of the Lords it would be far more likely to hit a person who is not good (i.e. with a personal moral better than “personal upside maximization”) than one who is.

More broadly for things like Peerages, outside artists it’s rich people, politicians and public-school attending scions of the upper and upper-middle class (even the Public Servants who get one are public-school educated). Notice how common people who are not in the public eye and committed enormous acts of bravery and self-sacrifice for the good of others (the above-mentioned “firemen and nurses”) never get peerages or above, and instead get at most OBEs.

You’re correct, similarly to Germany it has a President with limited powers which are far less than Parliament or the Govern, not a Presidential System (like the US or France) were the President actually has executive power.

In theory it does make sense to have someone who can veto everything on behalf of the state if the government goes weapons grade guano.

In Democratic countries which have a President but not a Presidential System (so, like Germany and Portugal, and unlike the US and France) that’s basically the entirety of the power of the President.

Personally I vastly prefer a figurehead President who has at most limited to power to dissolve parliament (for when, as you say, “the government goes weapons grade guano”) which gets actually chosen on a vote and kicked out if he or she turns out to be worse than they seemed before getting the position.

From the places I lived in, I above all detested the Constitutional Monarchy in Britain, with the Royal being filthy rich and a cornerstone of a web of patronage that was part of, if not most of, the reason why the country has massive class division and discrimination by European standards. My experience in The Netherlands was nowhere as bad, though.

Does that guy reflect the Norwegian version of having “breeding” or is it more a case of too much inbreeding?

After seeing this picture I’m actually curious how much inbreeding is there in the Norwegian Royal Family.

I lived in Britain for a decade and the impression I got was that, outside people with genuine proven merit like artists and scientists, having a titles of nobility there was a pretty good indicator of the holder of the title being a complete total sociopath, the higher the title the worse the character of the holder.

They do quite a lot of whitewashing of the system by giving things like knighhoods and damehoods to well known and loved actors and actresses, plus a renowned scientist here and there, plus some lesser honors (NEVER a knighthood or damehood) to people like firemen or nurses who went above and beyond their duty in helping others, but the vast majoriyty of types with Peerages and above are either well connected career politicians who made sure the “right” people gained from the system, very wealthy nouveau riche or those from old wealth.

That will be right after they do it to Tony Blair for the war crime of Pillage in Iraq as detailed in the Iraq War Report …

Judging from all the sociopathic shit I’ve seen from New Labour both when I lived in Britain and when I didn’t, I fully expect that Mandelson is but the tip of the iceberg.

And this is without even going into the Tories, who are at least as devoid of empathy as New Labour types, though possibly more open about how they’re superior people for whom there is no need to verify that they obbey the ethical and moral boundaries that are supposed to moderate people’s social behaviors. (IMHO they mainly differ from New Labour types in their level of hypocrisy rather than in personal character).

Consider the possibility that a nation’s “support for Israel” is highly correlated to how many of the elites there were involved in the pedophilic honeypot that Epstein ran together with Mossad.